March 22, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
13:26
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| All right, this is a breaking news update on TalkNetwork.com. | |
| This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and this is the Health Ranger Report. | |
| Today, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a number of criminal indictments of certain dietary supplement companies, and that announcement was joined by the FDA, the FTC, even the Department of Defense, if you can believe that. | |
| I'm going to give you the full story of what this was all about and give you my assessment of what's going on. | |
| And you may be surprised by what I say. | |
| Why surprised? | |
| Well... | |
| In short, it's because I largely agree with the actions that were taken by the Department of Justice today. | |
| I don't entirely agree. | |
| There are a few things that I have an issue with, but by and large, I applaud these actions, and here's why. | |
| There is a criminal element, a fringe, really in every industry. | |
| If you look at, let's say, retirement centers, there are criminally run retirement centers that defraud Medicaid. | |
| If you look at the pharmaceutical industry, you know there's a criminal element there. | |
| If you look at... | |
| I don't know, car dealers. | |
| There are some car dealers that are defrauding, committing financial fraud or laundering money or whatever. | |
| They've been arrested by the FBI before. | |
| And even in the dietary supplement industry, which is by and large very, very ethical and honest, you have a fringe element of criminal actors. | |
| And that's who the Department of Justice was targeting today. | |
| There was a lot of talk about that maybe this was going to be some kind of a big crackdown on the entire dietary supplements industry. | |
| It was nothing like that. | |
| In fact, this was not, in my view, a heavy-handed action by any stretch. | |
| And furthermore, none of these actions targeted things like superfoods or legitimate plant extracts, you know, like green tea extracts or resveratrol, let's say, or turmeric or medicinal mushrooms or turmeric or medicinal mushrooms or any of those things. | |
| These actions and this criminal indictment Really only targeted one major company, and that's called USP Labs. | |
| They're a company in Texas that I had never even heard of. | |
| I guess that's because I'm not into... | |
| You know, crazy bodybuilding, performance-enhancing supplements and that whole realm. | |
| And apparently that's what the Department of Justice and the FDA and the FTC have really gone after. | |
| There is this realm of sort of sleazebag, scumbag dietary supplement makers who go after young people like high school-aged kids who want to build muscle and, of course, bodybuilders. | |
| And people who are into sports who want to have performance-enhancing substances, apparently this is a huge, huge market. | |
| Again, I'm not part of this market, so I'm not even that familiar with these products or who they market to. | |
| But apparently, they use very, very aggressive marketing, a lot of online marketing, a lot of bogus claims. | |
| And they have a lot of chemical substances in their products that are totally synthetic, that are laboratory-developed chemicals, even when their products say things like, oh, these are all natural plant extracts. | |
| But they're not. | |
| And so one of the main complaints here by, let's see, Howard Sklamberg, the deputy commissioner of the FDA, and Riley Dolan, the acting deputy director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection and so on, Their main complaint is that these labels are false and fraudulent, that these products contain potentially dangerous substances, in other words, isolated chemicals that are really more like pharmaceuticals. | |
| Some of them are doping chemicals that are banned under international anti-doping regulations and laws and so on. | |
| In fact, they had a spokesperson there from USADA, the US Anti-Doping Agency, the agency that Lance Armstrong is now unfortunately very familiar with. | |
| Across the board, they were targeting really What they called high-risk supplements. | |
| So this is a term that I think you need to get familiar with. | |
| High-risk supplements. | |
| What are high-risk supplements? | |
| They are doping type of supplements that promise crazy, like, you know, get huge muscles, bodybuilding, outrageous biceps, that target sort of people who just want to pack on muscle to look good at the gym. | |
| Which, of course, is ridiculous. | |
| You know, just taking chemicals is not going to give you big muscles, right? | |
| They targeted the second category of so-called high-risk supplements was weight loss supplements. | |
| Now, this is a big one. | |
| And it's difficult because there are some legitimate products that can help you increase metabolism and burn fat, but only when combined with lifestyle changes such as making better food choices, such as exercising, engaging in more exercise, more body movement, getting away from a sedentary lifestyle, and so on. | |
| And the third category, well, but just to finish that thought, then there are also weight loss supplements that are sleazy, scammy, that say, take this pill, you'll lose weight, you'll look athletic, you'll be slim and trim no matter what. | |
| You don't have to eat better, you don't have to even exercise, just take this pill. | |
| That's a scam. | |
| Of course it's a scam. | |
| So, of course, you know, we should probably crack down on those bogus weight loss pills, some of which are really actually quite dangerous with crazy isolated stimulants. | |
| And, you know, I remember when the FDA banned the Chinese medicine herb called ma huang, or at least that's the Chinese name. | |
| Oh, in English it's called ephedra. | |
| And I always had a problem with this because ma huang, they banned this herb from being imported into the country because some... | |
| You know, criminal dietary supplement company isolated the ephedra molecule and then they put it into pills and some people were slamming, you know, a dozen of these pills or 20 pills because they wanted to lose weight fast. | |
| And of course, in isolation... | |
| This overstimulated their cardiovascular system and they died of a heart attack. | |
| You know, it happened to a few people many, many years ago. | |
| And so they banned ephedra. | |
| Well, the problem with that is that ephedra is a chemical that's in a Chinese herb called ma huang that is part of a formula that is a multi-herb, multi-faceted, multi-layered system to boost immunity and overcome influenza, you know, winter colds multi-layered system to boost immunity and overcome influenza, you know, winter colds And it's a very, very effective formula. | |
| But the amount of ephedra in that Chinese medicine formula overall is quite small. | |
| But it makes the other ingredients work so much better. | |
| So when used in a Chinese medicine formula, in my view, ephedra, when it, again, used in conjunction with other herbs in TCM, is very, very safe and very effective. | |
| Yet the FDA banned that because some nutjob isolated it, put it in a pill, and sold it to some crazy people that slammed 20 pills. | |
| So I disagree with that. | |
| But that was many years ago, and unfortunately now we have no mahuang in the United States, which completely sucks. | |
| Anyway, moving on, the other third category of high-risk supplements as identified by these government agencies is bodybuilding. | |
| So we have doping, weight loss, and bodybuilding. | |
| And bodybuilding is... | |
| Obviously, pack on big muscles. | |
| Similar to doping, but I guess doping is more performance-oriented, have more stamina, be able to win the sporting event, cycling with Armstrong or playing football or whatever. | |
| High school students, they want to do well in the football game, they might take a bunch of doping pills, but then they might take a bunch of bodybuilding pills. | |
| Hoping they're going to build muscle. | |
| So these are what are called sport and performance enhancing products. | |
| And these are what is being targeted primarily by the Department of Justice, the FDA, the FTC, and so on. | |
| I'm going to publish most of their speeches to show you what they're really talking about, what they are concerned about. | |
| But these are the big three areas. | |
| They did name some products like Weight Be Gone or Way Be Gone and Quick and Easy as a diet pill. | |
| They specifically talked about the green coffee bean diet fad and they mentioned Dr. | |
| Oz. | |
| They didn't really blame him but they implied that Dr. | |
| Oz was the first one to mention this and then a bunch of other supplement companies came out with green coffee bean diet fad pills. | |
| And they weren't very happy about that. | |
| The FDA guy, Howard Sklamberg, said, I think that was him, that dietary supplement claims must be, quote, truthful, accurate, and supported by solid science. | |
| I'm sorry, that was Riley Dolan, the FTC acting deputy director. | |
| That's what he said. | |
| Claims must be truthful, accurate and supported by solid science. | |
| Well, that's not new. | |
| We know that. | |
| This is why we do lab testing. | |
| This is why we do GMP in our own store, the Natural News Store, of course. | |
| We are GMP compliant. | |
| And in fact, that was even mentioned that a lot of these companies that manufacture these dietary supplements are not GMP, which stands for Good Manufacturing Practices. | |
| It is a system, a methodology for quality control. | |
| For testing ingredients, for clean machines, you know, encapsulation machines and so on. | |
| GMP is a big deal. | |
| We spend a lot of money to be GMP compliant. | |
| And it's a lot of paperwork, too. | |
| And the FDA requires all dietary supplement manufacturers to be GMP compliant. | |
| Well, most of them aren't. | |
| And this is actually something that I've said, too. | |
| A lot of them aren't. | |
| And even I'm kind of appalled when I look out across the industry. | |
| And I know a lot of people in the industry, and I know a lot of manufacturers, and I know some of the shady stuff that's going on out there that really, to me, is a big, big warning sign. | |
| And, you know, obviously I'm always encouraging people, increase your quality control, be GMP compliant, use laboratory testing, and so on. | |
| In fact, we're building a new laboratory. | |
| It's almost, well, I should say the construction's done. | |
| We just haven't moved the instrumentation over there. | |
| And... | |
| We're going to be really, really working hard to up the quality of dietary supplements and superfoods with analytical testing of heavy metals as well as organic molecules with our new organic chemistry section running an Agilent HPLC system where we can look for pesticides, herbicides, even glyphosate, BPA, rocket fuels, you know, perchlorate, things like that. | |
| We're going to do all that, so stay tuned. | |
| I'll continue this in Part 2. | |
| You're listening to TalkNetwork.com. | |
| 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. | |
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