All Episodes
Previous Next
March 22, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
22:45
Garden of Life, Sunwarrior, Natural News agree to heavy metals limits in protein products
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, this is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger at Natural News, with a groundbreaking announcement, a milestone in the history of food.
This is the first such announcement that has ever been made, and I really want to commend this company, Garden of Life, and also Sun Warrior, which has...
We have a groundbreaking announcement to share with you, actually the first in the history of the food industry.
This is quite remarkable, and these companies are to be commended for taking part in this milestone for food safety and the history of food.
This company, Garden of Life and also Sun Warrior, We have listened to our concerns here at Natural News and all of our amazing grassroots supporters who voiced their concerns about heavy metals in protein products.
And responding to that, Garden of Life, Sun Warrior, Have both agreed to something quite remarkable.
And again, this is a first in the history of the food industry.
They have agreed to this.
They have agreed to limit the concentrations of metals in their final protein products to these concentrations, which are based on suggestions that I made to these companies and that we talked about.
I'll give you more details about this here in a little bit.
But lead, 0.25 parts per million, or 250 parts per billion.
Tungsten, no more than 50 parts per billion.
Tungsten is called an emerging contaminant, and I'm actually the first food scientist to have ever documented this in food products.
Cadmium limit is now 1,000 parts per billion, and the mercury limit is 50 parts per billion.
And this is to be accomplished With the transition period ending July 1, 2015.
In other words, both of these companies have committed that their protein products will meet these or exceed these limits by July 1, 2015.
Now, you may ask, why does it take that long?
That's not actually very long.
Remember that Whole Foods announced they're going to label GMOs by, I think, the year 2018 or something, you know, very far down the road.
And, you know, they're to be commended for that decision, and I did publicly say that that's a great thing for Whole Foods, but, you know, gee, why does it take five years?
Well, anyway, this announcement is 18 months, so it's actually quite rapid as far as food goes.
So the other thing that's very interesting about this and I think very beneficial for consumers is that Garden of Life and Sun Warrior have committed to visiting each farm site where their brown rice material is grown and testing the water feeding each site for the possibility of environmental contaminants.
Why is this a big deal?
Well, to my knowledge, no company ever has committed to doing this before.
But this is important for rice products.
That's because rice is grown in water.
You've seen rice patties, probably.
And rice is a very water-intensive crop.
So it is a scientifically valid concept that if rice is grown in water that contains certain higher concentrations of certain elements, including possibly heavy metals, that the resulting rice will reflect that.
So what's in the water ends up in the rice, and that's well-established and well-known.
We all want that water to be as clean as possible.
And Garden of Life and Sun Warrior both share that concern.
And they share that goal.
They want their products to be as free from these heavy metals as possible.
And I think what's really amazing about this process, what you're seeing unfolding here, and this, you know, we have made history here today.
Is that both of these companies were able to engage with me, Mike Adams, the health ranger, and to respond to the concerns that were voiced by many of our fans and many customers of their products.
And they were able to sit down and have a discussion And really work in the interests of their customers.
And neither of these companies ever threatened me.
Neither of these companies ever tried to buy me off or offer money or anything like that.
And I never asked for money.
That wasn't even part of this entire conversation.
This was really just people who are passionate about clean food.
Having a conversation about how we can achieve those goals to the benefit of the public.
So I have to say that even though I was very frustrated with Garden of Life at first, as you probably saw with some of the stories that I initially posted, I have to say that the result here, I'm very happy to see the way they've responded to this.
And it turns out, by the way, that My frustration was really with one of their employees who was posting on their Facebook page, and that employee was not fully aware of what was actually happening, and they weren't really in the loop.
So there to be forgiven for that, that employee just wasn't informed.
So that was not reflective of what was actually happening at the high levels.
Of the executives of Garden of Life Company.
And so we were able to reach this accord, which is industry-wide in the sense that Garden of Life and Sun Warrior together probably make up about 80% of the current protein market in the United States.
I'm just guessing at that number, but it's something like that.
But now you might ask, well, where do we shift from here?
Well, you see this list right here.
We would like to politely...
But firmly invite these companies and all of these companies are wonderful companies that have been offering many great innovative products to the marketplace.
But we would like to invite these companies to publicly join this effort.
And so I ask for your help again at the grassroots level.
Let's contact Viga and Jaro Formulas and Nutribiotic and LivingFuel.
Actually, I'm already in touch with some of these companies that just talked to LivingFuel.
Casey Krejci over there.
Let's talk to John Barron over at Nutribody.
Ultimate Superfood, Boku Superfood, HealthForce, Jameis Sheridan, Warrior Food, and maybe others that you can think of as well.
Let's talk to all of these companies right now.
And let's ask them to join in meeting these guidelines, these lead limits, tungsten limits, cadmium limits, and mercury limits.
And I can tell you, by the way, that there is tungsten being detected in many, many brown rice protein products.
And this is something that I don't fault these companies for not knowing that the tungsten was in their products.
Because most labs don't test for tungsten.
But this is a heavy metal.
It is being called an emerging contaminant.
It is a metal of considerable concern.
And now these companies are taking very proactive steps that I would call very responsible, in fact, to limit tungsten to 50 parts per billion.
Now, in most foods that I test, And I run an ICP-MS laboratory, the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, the Consumer Wellness Center Forensic Food Lab is where we do a lot of the testing.
I run tungsten tests and I normally see zero for most foods.
You know, I've tested junk foods and fast foods and candy bars, soda pop, tested superfoods, cacao, mesquite powder, goji berries, chia seeds, protein powders, green powders.
I've tested kind of everything you think of.
I mean coconut oil, olive oil, nutritional supplements, lots and lots of things.
And normally I see tungsten at zero.
We want this number to be as low as possible.
Now, some of you might say, well, we want all these numbers to be zero.
Well, that's not possible because we live on a planet that, well, it's the post-industrial age here on planet Earth and the soils, and there is a debate about what you would call naturally occurring versus an environmental contaminant.
So let me explain both of those sides for you here.
These metals do exist in the soils.
And in the water.
Now, let's be realistic about where these come from.
There is some trace level of these elements that would have existed in the soil, let's say, 200 years ago.
You know, lead, for example.
There is some amount of lead in soil, even without contamination from industrial sources.
There is some very small level of mercury in soil and cadmium and so on.
Tungsten is actually more rare.
However, The levels that exist in the soils today are heightened because of environmental contamination from industrial pollution.
So coal-fired power plants, for example, will emit metals into the air.
There are metals that will go into the water supply due to industrial contamination of waterways that is especially well known to exist in China.
And so the levels that you would find in soils today or in the water supply today can be considerably heightened compared to what they were, let's say, 200 years ago.
Nevertheless, I still see some people today arguing that levels that exist in products today are, quote, naturally occurring because they were in the soil.
That's not an answer that is well informed.
There may be a small amount that might have been naturally occurring, but I think most of what we're seeing today across the board, and I'm not talking about just protein products, but many other products, is actually...
Heavy metal levels that I believe are the result of industrial pollution altering the composition of soils, which then alters the composition of the minerals that are taken up by plants and incorporated into those plants.
So I would not personally call that naturally occurring.
And the example that I use is...
All the land around Chernobyl, the nuclear accident there in...
I guess it was the USSR at the time.
What was that?
1986, I believe?
Chernobyl accident?
Well, it polluted the soil around there with cesium-137.
And no one disputes that.
There's lots of cesium-137 in the soil.
Cesium-137 is a radioactive isotope of cesium.
And it has a half-life of approximately 30 years.
And it has, you know, it decays into half of its mass over about 30 years.
Well, if I plant a bunch of carrots, let's say, in those soils that are contaminated with cesium-137, Then those carrots are going to have high levels of cesium in them, and that's not naturally occurring cesium.
So you can't really argue that just because something is in the soil that it's naturally occurring.
It turns out that we really need to be better informed about this.
But the bottom line of this is that everybody wants cleaner food.
So that's what we're really, really working on being able to deliver.
And with this announcement today, both of these companies, Garden of Life and Sun Warrior, have, in essence, made that commitment for cleaner food.
So actually, let me bring up their website.
This is the Sun Warrior Company here, coming up.
There we go.
These are some of the products that they offer.
And then this is, of course, Garden of Life Coming right up.
This is the company.
And both of these companies really are to be quite commended for their action on this.
Now, by the way, even my original announcement did not concern Perfect Food or Garden of Life vitamins or raw meal or those other things.
It was really only focused on their brown rice protein products.
And I will say that I believe that we all need to see the brown rice proteins meet these limits by July 1, 2015.
Because I can tell you right now that virtually every, not every single, but most brown rice protein products that are sold in the United States exceed these limits.
And some of them exceed them by considerable numbers.
Now, in defense of what these companies are saying, they believe that these products are perfectly safe.
And they have arrived at that belief based on scientists that they've consulted with who have told them that they believe it's safe and that they know there are no FDA limits on these heavy metals, which is true.
There are no USDA organic limits on these heavy metals.
That's also true.
There was the person posting Facebook for Garden of Life had said yesterday that the Informed Choice company, let me bring that up here, informed-choice.org, Well, it turns out Informed Choice really just tests products for banned sports chemicals, not heavy metals.
And I have that from this company, Informed Choice.
They actually don't test heavy metals.
That answer was not really appropriate for the question of heavy metals.
Nevertheless, again, that comes down to whatever employee over there was posting information and wasn't fully informed.
So that's not really a concern at this point.
Nevertheless, both of these companies, Garden of Life and Sun Warrior, are saying and they do believe that their products are perfectly safe to consume and that they are well within the range of what people might get in terms of just eating common vegetables and things like that.
They also both informed me that they would never sell products if they believed that they were unsafe to consume.
And I believe that's true.
I've had discussions with both of these companies and I've found that they were very genuine in sitting down to discuss this proposal.
Which ultimately became this agreement.
And to agree to these very specific goals here that will enhance and improve the overall composition of products across this entire industry.
And that's a win for consumers.
That's a win for everybody.
So...
I did just want to say that we have a slight difference of opinion of what levels of metals are considered okay.
I happen to be more stringent about heavy metals than probably most typical scientists.
There's going to be a range of opinion on those factors, just like there's a range of opinion on doctors of whether pharmaceuticals are good or how much is okay or how many vaccines a child should be able to receive safely.
There's a range of opinion.
Or even among toxicologists or chelation experts, there's a wide range of opinion about how much heavy metal is okay to take in in your food.
I happen to think that that level should be very, very low.
And fortunately, when these companies meet these limits, I will be quite satisfied.
With these elements at these concentrations, I would not have a problem personally consuming a product at these concentrations.
Sure, I would like them lower, especially mercury.
I would like it quite a bit lower than 50, but I wouldn't really...
I mean, look, some of the testing that we've done shows that mercury is very easily absorbed by having...
Fiber during digestion.
So the fact that there is fiber in many of these products actually would tend to capture mercury, especially at these low concentrations, so that your body would not absorb that mercury.
So that's some of the metals capturing capacity research that I've already released previously.
Now, as part of this effort to better educate consumers, we're also going to make some changes to our lab's website to actually make it more clear and more simplified what our numbers actually mean.
There have been many people that have given us feedback and, like, here we go.
This is the Proteins page.
Currently, if you go to any lab result product, let me just bring up a junk food here to show you.
Oh boy, here we go.
The thing makes me enter my own email address.
Hopefully the cookies work better for you.
Anyway, you'll see that we show these actual numbers and what we found in showing these numbers is that it would be better if we showed a more simplified, A set of results for consumers because a lot of this comes down to interpretation.
And one of the things that we're learning here is that giving people raw data like this is definitely useful at one level, but it would be beneficial if we could provide additional information and actually That we don't even need to show the numbers themselves.
We just need to have a more simplified indication of, for example, how this serial would compare to other serials in the same category across these elements.
So that's what we're actually going to be doing here shortly, is changing the way that we present this information.
Because our goal is not to be just pushing numbers out there, but actually to provide meaningful answers to people.
So, for example, if someone wanted to shop among seaweeds, like we have here, it would sure be useful if they could see the comparisons among the different seaweeds.
And you can see in this case, this seaweed tested at these numbers of lead and cadmium and so on.
There's probably zero tungsten in this, by the way.
But what does that mean?
What does it really mean?
So we're going to upgrade this and enhance it with additional visual indications and actually not be showing all these specific numbers.
And we think that's going to be more beneficial and helpful to consumers and provide really better context.
And yeah, we've had suggestions about that from many people.
So we're listening to your suggestions just as Garden of Life here has been listening to your suggestions as well.
So again, I want to thank you.
This is, I mean, I know there's not a lot of fanfare here.
But this is a big deal announcement.
This is the first ever in the history of the food industry.
And it's a self-imposed limit.
The FDA was not part of this agreement.
In fact, this would be far more stringent than what the FDA would likely ever do.
So this is a success for consumers.
This is a win.
This is also a success of the grassroots efforts that I know all of you have so diligently engaged in in order to make this happen.
So I thank you for your efforts and for your ongoing support.
And I want to thank Jeffrey Brahms here at Garden of Life and also Russ and Nick and others over at Sun Warrior for this effort.
I also hope to bring you news about other companies that are going to join on to this requirement, this agreement here, these limits, by July 1, 2015.
Every company that does this will be commended for doing so.
And any company that doesn't sign on to this agreement will probably be called out by our own supporters.
Sorry about the background noise here, if you can hear that.
It's the wind out here where I'm recording.
You know I live on a ranch and I grow a lot of my own food, so it's the real deal here.
You're hearing wind.
This is not in a studio or anything.
I'm a real authentic foodie type of person who really cares about food, and that's what led to this.
So I thank you for your support.
And watch Natural News for more updates.
We hope to bring you more details as this all moves forward, and we very much look forward to seeing these goals met.
By Garden of Life, Sun Warrior, and many other companies who wish to take part in this milestone in food history.
This is quite remarkable, and I want to thank all those who have helped make this happen.
My name is Mike Adams.
There's my picture.
I'm the Health Ranger, and I'm really into clean food, as you can probably tell by now.
So I'll let you go here, and I'll update you all later.
▲
Export Selection