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March 23, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
27:20
Health Ranger laboratory review of Glass Expansion Niagara Plus
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Hello and welcome.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger in the Natural News Forensic Food Lab with a hands-on review of the Niagara Plus sample introduction add-on made by Glass Expansion.
And the Glass Expansion company has asked me to talk to other laboratories to offer, I guess, a testimonial or my experience with the Niagara Plus device.
I thought I'd save time, record this video, and also share with all the Natural News fans what we do here.
What is all this stuff?
What's under the hood of this system?
I'll show you that later, actually.
To start with, though, let me explain what you are looking at.
This is an Agilent 7700X ICP-MS instrument.
It's about a quarter of a million dollars and so one of the things that we do is we take funds from the Natural News store and we reinvest them into technologies that help make your food safer.
This is a university level instrument.
In fact, I think I think a lot of universities would be kind of jealous of this instrument because it's really top of the line.
This is what the FDA uses.
And it can detect heavy metals at parts per billion concentrations.
And we use EPA methodology 200.8 or variations of that, which is environmental assessment of toxic elements such as lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic.
But we expand it.
We look for things also like copper, aluminum, uranium, sometimes strontium, even obviously the non-radioactive isotopes.
We like to look at even iodine when we can, although it's kind of difficult with this sample system.
But we look at a lot more things than a typical laboratory.
They'll look at four elements, we'll look at a dozen or more because this instrument's capable of doing it.
Now getting the sample into this instrument is the tricky part.
And you see all this plumbing behind me?
All these little tubes here, this is part of the sample introduction system.
And what it does is it takes digested food and environmental samples that are turned into a liquid through the digestion using nitric acid, sometimes hydrochloric acid, but usually a nitric acid with DI water, laboratory water solution.
You can digest them under pressure in a closed cell digestion system or an open cell system, whatever.
Once you get them into a liquid form, then they go into the auto sampler, which is over there.
The auto sampler has a sample probe that pulls up the liquid and pumps it through This plumbing to get it into the mass analyzer which is behind me in this system.
Now, there's a lot of other things that happen in the middle.
There's a nebulizer.
I'll show you that later.
There's a plasma torch.
There's a sample cone.
It's a complicated thing, right?
Otherwise, it would be a lot less expensive.
But it works great.
It's amazing.
This instrument from Agilent has been incredibly reliable.
And it was made even better with the sample introduction system from glass expansion called the Niagara Plus.
So let me explain what Niagara Plus does and why I love it so much.
Niagara Plus, well, you see this chart here?
These are the Niagara connections.
And this is a chart that I drew just to know all the connections, where's the waste or the rinse going in, where's the sample going in, the bubbler, the nebulizer, where does the tuning solution go in, the waste pump, and so on.
What the Niagara Plus does, essentially, is it saves you a massive amount of argon gas because there's argon used in this process, a significant amount of argon.
We're using about 16 liters a minute of argon.
The Niagara Plus system allows us to use about half the argon that we used to use.
So we're still using 16 liters a minute, but the number of minutes required to run a sample is now reduced to about half of what it was.
And I think now it's taking about 90 seconds per sample for a full, I'm talking about everything, the probe rinse, the probe uptake, the mass analyzer sequence, which takes I think I have that set at about 20 to 30 seconds.
Then the probe rinses that happen afterwards, and then finally the probe going back to the next sample.
So it's about 90 seconds.
But during this time, you're using up argon, but you're also using up helium.
Now, a lot of people don't realize this, but you have to use helium in this system.
It gives you just incredible enhancements in the detection limits or the detection accuracy of certain elements.
It also helps remove elemental interferences that are very common in ICP-MS systems.
By the way, ICP-MS stands for inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry or just mass spec For short, and I know for those of you who already run labs, this is, you know, why am I going through all this?
I'm trying to explain this also to the natural news audience who may not necessarily be familiar with the technical aspects of running a mass spec laboratory, so I'm trying to explain a little bit of how it works.
Because it's pretty cool.
It's really cool technology.
So, the Niagara Plus then, instead of, well, how does it save you time?
And how does it save you argon?
Well, oh, I should also mention it reduces the wear and tear on your sample cone because it introduces a much smaller quantity of sample uptake liquid to your sample cone.
Now, those of you who run these labs, you know that that's a big deal because you're always cleaning the sample cones, right?
And if you don't clean them, then you don't get accurate results.
And sometimes you have to replace the sample cone.
And that is, what is that, a $300, $600 part, depending on what kind you get, maybe $800?
So, if you can reduce the buildup and the cleaning of your sample cone, then you can save a lot of money and actually keep your lab uptime even higher.
And the Niagara Plus allows you to do that.
Because again, it's introducing less sample onto the sample cones.
Now this became a really big deal here in this lab when I was testing plant fertilizers.
And plant fertilizers, similar to ocean water, have a lot of salts in them.
And those of you who are environmental scientists, you know very well that if you're testing salts or fertilizers, you know, like a magnesium sulfate or a calcium nitrate or an off-the-shelf plant food, You're going to get a massive buildup of salts on your sample cone, right?
You see it all the time, just like I see it.
So if you reduce the sample time on that sample cone, you're going to get a cleaner cone and more uptime.
So that's another great advantage of this.
Now you might be asking, how does it accomplish this?
How does it make this happen?
Well, first to understand that question, you have to understand the normal sample uptake system that comes standard from Agilent.
Again, this is an Agilent 7700X ICP-MS instrument.
And Agilent is an awesome company.
Their instrumentation is just rock solid.
It's amazing.
The sensitivity is amazing.
The ruggedness is amazing.
I love it.
I love the system.
But the sample introduction system that comes with it Could be better.
In fact, the Niagara Plus makes it better, in my opinion.
So when you take up a sample from the auto-sampler, you're filling this long tube with liquid, and that liquid is then getting pushed into the nebulizer, which goes into the plasma torch and the sample cone, the mass analyzer, and eventually the detector.
But the fact that you're having to pull up a long sample size, which can be several milliliters of actual liquid, and then you're having to push all that liquid through the sample cone, or onto the sample cone through the nebulizer, is really unnecessary.
In fact, it's excessive.
You don't need to do that.
And so what the Niagara Plus does, and this is what Glass Expansion came up with, is a rotary valve right here.
And this rotary valve, is that in the shot?
Yeah.
This rotary valve has a one milliliter sample tube, sort of a buffer, not a chemical buffer, but a physical sort of holding location, a temporary holding location.
Actually, this is 0.5 milliliters, this one.
And this is a 0.5 mil loop is what they call it.
Now these loops come in different sizes.
You can have a 1 mil loop or a 0.25 loop or a 1.5 mil loop or whatever you want.
I happen to use 0.5 here.
Works great.
So the sample loads up from your auto sampler and gets pushed into this loop.
Then, after this loop is full of your sample liquid, the Niagara Plus tells your autosampler to go ahead and go through the rinse cycles.
And there's two different rinse locations that it probes into and pulls that liquid up at the same time that it then allows this 0.5 mil sample to be released into the nebulizer to start the mass analysis that this instrument does.
So, in effect, it's doing two things at once.
And the amount of sample that is then exposed to your instrument's sample cone is dramatically reduced.
In this case, it might only be 0.5 mils or it might even be less.
I don't think it feeds this entire 0.5 mil of liquid into the nebulizer.
I think it's really about half that.
So probably about 0.25 milliliters is what's actually going into your system.
And that's great.
Again, it makes it faster.
It makes it more reliable.
It also reduces the sample cone maintenance, as we said.
Let's talk about run accuracy or sometimes what's called drift.
When you're running an ICP-MS laboratory, as I've been doing now for over a year, and I've run thousands and thousands of samples, you get to know this instrument pretty well, just like anything you do.
We use a number of accuracy checks during the run.
And one of those accuracy checks is called a mid-range calibration check.
It's using a multi-element external standard that after every ten samples, we do one sample that contains a known quantity of all the elements that we're looking for.
Lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, aluminum, copper, strontium, zinc, you name it.
All that stuff.
Even uranium, by the way.
We watch the instrument tell us what it thinks it's seeing in that mid-range calibration check.
In my case, I mix these external standards to have about 50 parts per billion of most of those elements.
There are some different concentrations of elements that are required for certain multi-element standards, but for the most part I'm looking at 50 parts per billion.
I'm looking at that instrument to look at that sample and tell me 50, 50, 50, 50, 50.
Once I see that, I know that I've got a very accurate run.
I can continue to let the system run other samples.
And that when I look at the other foods or other environmental samples or beverages, when I see those numbers, I know I can trust them because I'm running blanks, I'm running full-quant blanks, they're sometimes called, and I'm running mid-range calibration checks for every 10 samples.
Now, before I had the Niagara Plus, there were times where for some reason I would start to see drift.
And I would have to cancel the runs.
So instead of seeing 50-50-50, I might start seeing 54, and it would creep up to 56, 58, 60.
So we knew, in that case, that the instrument was off, because we know that that's a known concentration of those elements, and we know it's 50.
Or maybe 51 or 52 in the worst case, but we know it's not 60.
So if we're seeing 60, something's wrong.
The instrument is drifting.
And this can happen for a number of reasons.
They're not the fault of the instrument.
Usually they're environmental problems.
Changes in laboratory humidity or temperature, or sometimes maybe the machine is warmed up better now.
It actually has a warm-up period that's necessary.
So this was causing a lot of problems for us.
We had to stop a lot of runs.
We had to redo a lot.
You know, it was costing argon gas and it was costing electricity, but more importantly, it was spending my time, which I didn't want to keep spending my time in the lab re-running the same samples.
Although I did because I'm really dedicated to accuracy in these samples.
The good news in all of this is that the Niagara Plus solved this problem.
For whatever reason, it has eliminated the drift that we used to see.
Possibly it has to do with the much shorter sample time occupying the nebulizer introduction tubing that's going into the nebulizer.
That tubing now is very, very short, which is great.
You don't want your sample in the tube for very long.
You want to get it in there Clean it through, get it out, and rinse the whole system.
Ever since I've installed this, we're seeing almost no drift whatsoever.
The mid-range calibration checks have been extremely accurate.
Usually plus or minus 4% is typically what we're getting, which is really, really good for any ICP-MS laboratory.
I know the FDA would be thrilled to get those kinds of numbers on a consistent basis.
The other thing worth mentioning is that the The Niagara Plus system, the one drawback we found at first, and now we have a solution for it, was that it was somewhat sensitive to being clogged with small particulate matter in the samples that were not 100% digested.
Now there are certain types of foods that when you digest them, they don't completely go into solution.
Things like sometimes even cereals and grains, certain types of oils are especially difficult.
There are cases where you're getting a digestion that is not complete.
And so there are methods to use a pre-filter, which is a manual in-vial filtration system that I also use when I can see that there are particles in the sample.
So I'll use a filter plunger and a filter element, a cartridge really, that fits the vial.
And we'll filter that out and then pour off the liquid into a new vial.
This is all done under the chemical, the fume hood.
Because you're dealing with nitric acid.
But, even in that case, sometimes there were samples that had particulate matter that I was not able to detect.
And it would get into the Niagara Plus and it would jam it up.
When I say jammed up, I really mean it would clog it up and it would cause the rotary valve to get jammed with some particles.
And it would not allow samples to go into the nebulizer.
When that happens, you know that that's happening because you start to see really erratic results in the software that's monitoring all your, you know, the mass of everything that you're seeing.
So you'd start to see just crazy numbers or sometimes zeros where there shouldn't be zeros.
You know, by now, I've done this so many times, I know that if I If I digest, let's say, somebody's protein product, I know I'm going to see high zinc.
I'm going to see high magnesium.
I'm going to see some level of aluminum, maybe 30,000 parts per billion.
I know I'm going to see these numbers.
Even if it's perfectly clean and doesn't have lead and mercury, I know I'm going to see these other numbers because they're nutritive elements.
So if I'm watching a sample and I see like zero, zero, zero, And that's a protein, then I know something's wrong.
And what had happened before was that the Niagara Plus rotary valve had become jammed or clogged.
So, the great news and the solution is that the glass expansion company came out with an inline filter that has been working great.
And it's right here.
It's almost too small to see, but this is it.
And this inline filter To install it was super easy.
All you have to do is cut this line with a pair of scissors and install this filter.
You can clean it out by using a backfiltration wash with one of the nebulizer cleaning instruments that also backwashes your nebulizer.
It's the same instrument we already have.
Actually, it's right here.
But you use this adapter on it when you're cleaning out your nebulizer and then you use this adapter that's attached right now when you're backwashing the inline filter.
So the inline filter has been great for us because it has caught all the particulate matter before it ever made it into the rotary valve.
And so far it has eliminated any kind of clogs.
We're all clogging.
So that's a great success as far as I'm concerned because it saves me time as the lab director here.
I'm the one that has to troubleshoot these instruments.
You know, I'm the one that has to change the oil mist filter on the vacuum pump for this ICP-MS instrument.
I'm the one that does the EM tuning.
I'm the one that does the plumbing changes on this.
Sometimes these tubes have to be changed out.
You know, there's a peri-pump right here.
There's a peristaltic pump.
And it has tubing that has to be swapped out from time to time.
So, you know, I'm the mechanic around here in addition to the lab director.
So anything that can save me time to not have to, you know, clean the sample cones or not have to especially take this apart and clean out that rotary valve, which I hate to do it because lining it back up to reassemble it is not the easiest thing in the world.
So if I can avoid that, then I'm a happy camper.
All this is really important because here we are testing raw materials for the Natural News store.
So materials come in, we bring them here to test them for heavy metals.
And we reject a lot of raw materials and ship them back because they don't meet our requirements.
Products get delayed if the lab is down.
It's very simple.
We won't promote or sell or ship a product out of our store unless we have tested it here first and we know that it meets our very strict requirements of very, very low heavy metals.
So if I'm here running a lab sample and I've got a clogged up Niagara system, then we can't sell the products.
And we don't.
They sit there, they wait until I actually produce the lab, the good, solid results that then either give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
And that's what we act on.
Now, so keeping this lab up and running is not just a good scientific practice, but it's also, of course, there's money on the line when we've invested in raw materials, and we are hoping to be able to offer those to the public as super clean super foods.
If we can't get the lab test done, then we're losing money every day that those products are just sitting there.
And that's That's a fast way to go out of business if you do that.
Most companies don't test raw materials at all, ever.
And I know that because, well, number one, they've told me, and number two, I test their products, and I'm shocked at what I find in their products.
They don't test anything at all.
So there are a lot of companies in all the food industries, including some organics and some superfoods, that just They just feel like if someone will buy it, they'll sell it.
They don't care what's in it.
To me, I find that totally unacceptable and to be an unethical practice.
Those of you who are my fans, you know my philosophy.
I'm pro-free markets.
I believe in entrepreneurism.
I believe in innovation.
I believe in fundamental Free market and free market economies, but I believe that businesses need to do a far better job of operating with ethics.
And that's where the free market fails right now.
Businesses operate completely without ethics.
They make a lot of money, but they harm a lot of people in the process.
And to me, that's completely unacceptable.
So, I won't sell something that I wouldn't eat myself.
And I won't allow something to be sold unless I test it thoroughly here in this laboratory for toxic heavy metals.
And the other good news is that we are expanding this lab.
So we're bringing in more instrumentation to be able to conduct more testing to look for more things that might be of concern, such as pesticides, for example.
Right now we have to do that testing outside with other labs, but we'd love to be able to do it here in our own laboratory.
So that's coming online soon and that's very exciting for me to be able to learn that process and put it to use and have another You know, another wonderful layer of scrutiny for super safe, ultra clean foods that we are offering to the public.
And by the way, lastly, I'll wrap this up.
You know, the FDA requires this now.
It's called GMP, Good Manufacturing Practices.
And the FDA says that all food manufacturers, or especially nutritional supplement manufacturers, must be following this process that I'm describing here.
And yet most of them don't.
So the FDA is currently conducting surprise visits.
to manufacturing facilities all across America.
In fact, we've already been visited twice in surprise visits and passed with flying colors.
They love the operation.
They love what they saw in our operation.
It was a knock-knock, here we are, let's take a look.
And they love what they saw because we are doing the right thing, because we're following good manufacturing practices.
We have that procedure in place.
And I know many other companies do out there as well, but a lot don't.
And the truth is that the FDA is going to shut down the companies that don't have that system in place.
I can see this argument from both sides, by the way.
On one side, the small businesses say, well, the FDA is putting us out of business because this hurdle of being compliant is so high and it's so expensive.
Like I said, this is a quarter of a million dollars for this one machine.
And if you send these tests out, you'll spend $150 to $250 per test, per sample.
It's very, very expensive to be compliant.
So small businesses will often say that this is too much of a burden.
How can we stay in business when the FDA needs us or requires us to do these things?
On the other side, which I also understand, there are companies out there selling products that are heavily contaminated that, in my opinion, are extremely dangerous.
This is what I went on Dr.
Oz talking about.
You know, I'm the one who found many of these things on the shelves at Whole Foods, being sold as organic superfood supplements or proteins or what have you.
I'm the one who actually did the research and found those products and made it sort of national news.
Those companies, I think, I agree with the surprise visits.
Because if they're not held to the mat and in essence shown that they need to comply with basic safety of their food products, then many of those companies will utterly fail to do anything in the realm of safety.
Many companies will not operate with ethics on their own.
So they have to have an outside entity that shows them, hey, you have to stop poisoning the public.
Simple as that.
So, I can see this argument from both sides.
You know I'm a pro-liberty person, I'm pro-entrepreneur, I believe in the free market, I believe that regulation is way too heavy in some areas, and I completely disagree with punitive targeted regulation, like the IRS did with the conservative non-profit groups, sort of punishing them for teaching the Bible and things like that.
That's crazy.
That's insane.
So I don't support any of that stuff.
But I do support sort of the basic, common sense, you know, safety for the food and supplement industry.
And because I support that, I practice it.
I practice it, I enforce it in the natural news store, and I follow it here in the laboratory myself.
And that's why I went to all of this effort to spend the money, to build the lab, to become proficient in this process, to learn this, which is not easy either, And to use it almost every day.
We're running some kind of samples in here to make sure that you, the public, get really safe foods when you purchase from the Natural News store.
So anyway, I'll wrap it up, but I wanted to give you that background information so you know where all this is coming from and why this Niagara Plus is such a really great add-on to the instrument that is helping us save time and money and get you healthy, ethical foods and superfoods more quickly.
That also comply with the FDA's GMP regulations.
So, there you go.
I hope you found this interesting.
I find it fascinating.
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