March 22, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
13:30
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| So continuing with our discussion of the U.S. Department of Justice announcing criminal charges and civil penalties also against a couple of dietary supplement makers, let's talk about who's actually getting nailed here in the previous segment of this talknetwork.com report. | |
| I described really the targets of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FDA, the FTC, and the DOD. And I also stated, perhaps in a surprising way, that I tend to agree with most of... | |
| What these agencies have done in this case, they really crack down on just the worst criminal scam companies out there that are just completely dishonest. | |
| They're lying about what's in their product. | |
| They're using banned chemicals. | |
| They're calling chemicals natural plant extracts when they aren't. | |
| They are using just crazy, exaggerated, wild claims in their marketing materials. | |
| A lot of them are just really dishonest at every level. | |
| As someone who is an advocate of honest, ethical dietary supplements and superfoods, I've known for a long time, especially since I started running my heavy metals analysis lab two years ago, I've known for a long time that there's a lot of shady practices in the industry, so At one level, I'm very glad to see this crackdown on the worst offenders. | |
| And it really is just targeting the very worst offenders. | |
| Again, this wasn't an attack on the entire industry, not by a long shot. | |
| This was a very targeted, almost a precision, what do you call it in the military, precision munitions. | |
| This was a guided laser munitions. | |
| Bombing attack on just a few companies, maybe 20 or 30 companies that are really kind of the worst offenders out there. | |
| And one of them, according to the Department of Justice, is a company called USP Labs. | |
| And they're actually based in Texas. | |
| And I don't even know where in Texas they are. | |
| I'm on their website right now. | |
| They're somewhere in Texas. | |
| And I'm looking at their homepage, and they have a product called Jack3D. | |
| The Ultimate Pre-Workout Training Matrix. | |
| And it's called New Kick-Ass Flavor. | |
| That's a dragon berry. | |
| Anyway, it's called Jack 3D. That right there, just whenever the word jacked is in a product or stacked, you know, jacked or stacked or whatever, those are kind of red flags that some of their products might be Really exaggerated in their marketing claims. | |
| There's a lot of that. | |
| And their homepage is full of muscle-bound bodybuilders, gym rats, as we sometimes call bodybuilders who just hang out in the gym and pump iron. | |
| But they don't know how to swing an axe and chop wood, by the way. | |
| They don't have any functional strength. | |
| Anyway, USP Labs, if you look at what they have, they have EpiBurn Pro. | |
| They have creatine, amino lift. | |
| They have some protein products, some BCAA, which is probably fine, branched chain amino acids. | |
| Let's see what their EpiBurn Pro product contains. | |
| Okay, here we go. | |
| EpiBurn Pro Supplement Facts. | |
| Let's see, a root extract, another leaf extract that looks like olive leaf, Yohimbe. | |
| Yeah, that doesn't look like any problem in that, except, let's see. | |
| Oh, this product contains caffeine. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Simulants such as caffeine may cause a mild transient increase, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Oh, yeah, here we go. | |
| Caffeine, 100 milligrams per capsule? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay, one capsule. | |
| Here we go. | |
| 100 milligrams per capsule. | |
| Okay, so if someone's slamming six capsules, that's like 600 milligrams of caffeine. | |
| That's a lot of caffeine. | |
| So obviously caffeine is a big issue. | |
| Personally I would never sell anything with added refined caffeine in it. | |
| There might be some natural caffeine obviously in certain coffee products or certain Some herbs have kind of a natural small amount of caffeine, but I would never, ever sell something with refined, isolated caffeine. | |
| I just think there's too much potential for abuse. | |
| Anyway, this company, USP Labs, according to the DOJ, they've handed down criminal indictments to four executives of this company. | |
| And one consultant as well. | |
| I mean, criminal indictments. | |
| Like, these people are going to jail, or I guess they're going to have to hire criminal defense attorneys. | |
| This is going to be very, very expensive and very, you know, perhaps scary for them to go through that. | |
| I guess, at least according to what the DOJ said, That they had sent warning letters, multiple warning letters, and that companies were just ignoring the warning letters. | |
| So, you know, rule number one, if you're a dietary supplement manufacturer and you get a warning letter from the FDA or the FTC or the DOJ for that matter, if you get a warning letter, you know, you should probably pay attention to what the hell that letter says because, you know, warning letters kind of step one. | |
| It's like, we don't like what you're doing. | |
| You know, you're selling, you're mislabeling, you're misbranding, you're making disease claims. | |
| They did mention that they don't like supplement companies claiming to treat cancer or treat Alzheimer's, which, you know, again, I have a problem with that. | |
| There are supplements that prevent cancer. | |
| You know, they really do exist. | |
| But, you know, you can't make those claims under the current regulatory environment. | |
| So we don't make any such claims. | |
| But let's be honest, you know, vitamin D prevents cancer, right? | |
| We know that. | |
| Vitamin D, the scientific literature is very clear on that. | |
| So, you know, it's like you can't even say vitamin C treats scurvy, even though scurvy is a disease of vitamin D, vitamin C deficiency. | |
| And similarly, you can't even say that vitamin D prevents rickets, even though rickets is a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency. | |
| So if you go out there and sell vitamin D and you claim that vitamin D prevents rickets, you are now a criminal in America. | |
| So I have a real problem with that. | |
| You know, it seems like if the if the claim is truthful and it is backed by substantiated evidence, then you should be able to make that claim. | |
| Yet that's just not the environment that we live in. | |
| However, that being said, most of the focus of the FTC and the FDA and the DOJ was on these the real scumbags of the industry. | |
| So I approve of cracking down on the worst criminals. | |
| A con artist, really, is probably a better word. | |
| The real hucksters who are just selling... | |
| You know, truly adulterated products that are intentionally mislabeled and they completely ignore the warnings. | |
| And some of them, in some cases, they said some people were harmed and they had liver failure. | |
| And yet the companies engage in a cover-up. | |
| At least that's what was claimed by the DOJ. I haven't obviously investigated all the claims, and I haven't talked to the other side, you know, the parties that were indicted, so I haven't heard the other side of the story. | |
| But it wouldn't surprise me if there's some scumbags out there that are engaged in total, truly criminal type of behavior and cover-ups and so on, just because, again, that exists in every industry. | |
| There's an element of criminality in every industry, from banking and healthcare to, I mean, you name it. | |
| Even dietary supplements. | |
| Hey, the food industry. | |
| They're crazy criminal people in the food industry that sell hot dogs made out of horse meat or whatever. | |
| So that element exists everywhere. | |
| In any case, the takeaway from this is that you should beware of high-risk supplements. | |
| Which are, again, weight loss with crazy claims, bodybuilding supplements with crazy claims, and doping type of supplements. | |
| In other words, performance enhancing supplements that are made with crazy chemicals or come from companies that make outlandish crazy claims. | |
| Let's talk about quality, quality control and safety. | |
| Just for background, you probably know this about me already, but I am the science lab director of the Natural News Forensic Food Lab. | |
| I'm the first person who ever discovered tungsten contamination in brown rice protein. | |
| I'm the one who went on the Dr. | |
| Oz show and warned about high levels of lead in brown rice protein that's manufactured... | |
| Well, I should say it's grown in China. | |
| It's imported into the United States and sold as organic brown rice protein. | |
| And it's sold in Whole Foods. | |
| And it contains lead. | |
| And I sounded the alarm on that. | |
| Interestingly, the FDA and the FTC, they did not even mention heavy metals in their announcement today. | |
| Apparently, heavy metals is just not the high priority right now because they've got people selling dangerous, isolated, pharmaceutical-grade chemicals and calling them dietary supplements, and that's a real high risk. | |
| So that's really their target right now. | |
| But maybe one day they will crack down on toxic heavy metals in dietary supplements, perhaps. | |
| Even if they don't, I'm going to be publishing more numbers anyway. | |
| I've got a new lab that's just been completed. | |
| We're adding more instrumentation to it. | |
| We're going to be publishing numbers of what we find in off-the-shelf products. | |
| But our focus is not just dietary supplements. | |
| We're also looking at foods. | |
| We're going to be looking at everything from breakfast cereals to canned soups. | |
| We're going to buy some Campbell's soup and take a look at what's in there. | |
| We're going to be buying a lot of popular products off-the-shelf, and we'll be telling you what's in that. | |
| You know, like... | |
| Chocolate bars, candy bars, stuff that children eat. | |
| What's in that? | |
| What's in the infant formula? | |
| We're going to be looking at that just as much as anything in the dietary supplements and superfood industry. | |
| But you've got to realize that in terms of GMP compliance, most of these companies, most dietary supplement companies really do not engage in GMP compliance. | |
| So they're not testing I personally do not trust anything. | |
| And I'm talking about foods, medicines, dietary supplements, and superfoods. | |
| I don't trust anything until I test it in my own lab, period. | |
| I will not go to GNC or even Whole Foods and just blindly buy something off the shelf and swallow it. | |
| I don't trust it. | |
| And that's from experience. | |
| That's because I've done so much testing. | |
| I've seen so much contamination. | |
| I just don't trust everything off the shelf. | |
| There are certain brands that I trust, like Gaia Herbs. | |
| I keep mentioning Gaia Herbs. | |
| I know that they conduct laboratory testing. | |
| Nature's Path Breakfast Cereals. | |
| I love that company. | |
| I don't even know anybody there. | |
| I've never even talked to anybody there. | |
| But I love... | |
| Oh, wait a minute. | |
| Have I at a trade show maybe? | |
| Maybe I met somebody at a trade show or something like that. | |
| But I don't have any connection with them, I'm saying. | |
| I just love the company. | |
| Their products are just consistently clean. | |
| Anyway, I've got to wrap this up for this segment, but I'll continue in part three. | |
| So stay with me here on TalkNetwork.com. | |
| We're talking about dietary supplements and the Department of Justice criminal indictments against some really fringe operators in the industry. | |
| Well, thank you for listening to this episode of the Health Ranger Report. | |
| Please support us by visiting our online store at store.naturalnews.com where you can find the world's cleanest laboratory-validated superfoods, nutritional supplements, personal care products, shampoo, chemical-free products. | |
| Just about everything for your home and body and health that you might want, including supplements for your pets as well. | |
| Everything is laboratory validated in our forensic food lab, and we don't sell something unless it tests clean. | |
| I think we're the only online reseller to do this really extensive testing of everything that we sell. | |
| If we don't like the lab test results, meaning if it's not really, really clean, including with heavy metals, then we don't sell it, period. | |
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