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July 5, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
47:03
Bone Broth Protein products found to contain INSECT repellent chemicals
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Welcome to this press announcement of our investigation into bone broth products.
This is conducted by the nonprofit Consumer Wellness Center at consumerwellness.org.
I'm the executive director of the CWC. I'm also the founder and lab science director of CWC Labs, which is an ISO accredited mass spec and chromatography laboratory.
Now we have some I believe rather astonishing results to share with you today about the composition of what we have found in various popular bone broth products, including bone broth protein.
Here's an example of one.
This is Bone broth protein meal from Ancient Nutrition.
Here's another one, similar product from Left Coast Bone broth protein powder, a natural powder.
We have tested eight products and I'm here to give you a statement about what we found and to share the information with you so that you can see our results.
A little bit of Introductory information to set the stage here.
We, as part of our non-profit, we conduct forensic analyses of off-the-shelf dietary supplements, foods, junk foods, and superfoods.
So we purchase these products off the shelf.
These are not sent to us by these manufacturers.
We buy them at retail.
We do not charge these companies any money.
We don't have any financial ties to these companies.
So there is no potential for corruption or anything of that kind.
We are an ISO accredited laboratory, which means we are audited, inspected, and certified by the International Standards Organization.
And we posted that documentation at cwclabs.com to show that our accreditation is, of course, current.
As far as my background, in addition to being the executive director of the CWC nonprofit, I'm also a published scientist.
I'm published as a co-author of a paper in LCGC, which is a peer-reviewed science journal.
We have developed some very innovative quantitation methods for cannabidiol analysis in hemp extracts.
Those have been published also in multiple posters.
I'm the author of a book called Food Forensics, which at one point was the number one selling science book on Amazon.com.
We have received many, many requests from readers and users to test this category of products, these bone broth products, and that's why we chose these products.
But this is just one category in many categories of products that we are going to be testing.
One of our next categories to test will be meal replacement products, including A common product you might find at Walmart or a pharmacy.
We'll be testing those and we conduct pesticide analysis, chemical solvent analysis, and we've licensed a series of databases that give us access to the spectra profile as well as ion fragmentation data, accurate mass and retention time data for over 40,000 chemicals.
So we have the ability to scan just about any substance, such as these bone broth products, for over 40,000 chemicals.
Finally, if you want to get the exact results of this, we are sharing these data by email through our new email system that is called Good Gopher Mail.
We've set up our own email system because of censorship of our emails from Google.
As well as Yahoo and Microsoft.
There's a lot of censorship on the Internet these days, including scientific censorship by Google.
So we have set up our own mail system.
It's called Good Gopher Mail.
You can find it at goodgopher.com, which is also a search engine for the independent media and independent science organizations such as my own.
So if you sign up there, it's a free account.
You will have uncensored email.
You'll be able to receive our email announcements that analyze these products and many other products.
We're going to be releasing details almost every week about other products that we are testing.
Now getting back to the bone broth products, let me first tell you which brands that we did test in this initial roundup here.
We tested the most popular brands on Amazon.com.
That's how we chose these brands.
They were Ancient Nutrition, Jaro Formulas, Sports Research, Precision Naturals, Left Coast, and Lono Life.
Now, Lono Life, their product is positioned not as a protein supplement, but rather as a chicken soup-based broth.
Not coincidentally, we also were able to detect extracts of black pepper and parsley and other things in that product.
Our results summary is as follows, and I'll get to the science here in a minute.
For those of you who are watching who are scientists or you want to have another scientist review this, I'll explain all the science here in a couple of minutes.
This was conducted via LC-MSTOF, which is liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry via time-of-flight detection systems.
We have confirmed the presence of the following things.
Not each of these things is found in every product.
These are the things that we found in the aggregate across all the products we tested.
But we will release information about what we found in each product via GoodGo for Mail.
But here's what we found.
Antibiotics and antimicrobial chemicals.
We found multiple insecticides, including organophosphate chemicals.
We found multiple prescription drugs in these products.
We found parabens and also steroids.
These things are not things that many consumers would expect to find in products that might be positioned or labeled as being natural or all natural.
Many of these things are not natural, such as synthetic insecticides, for example, or synthetic prescription drugs.
Thus, we call into question whether you can consider these products truly natural.
Now, for the record, none of these products were labeled organic.
I'm not yet aware of any organic bone broth products on the market.
However, if they do exist, they would very likely not show all of these chemicals.
If they do exist, we will acquire them and we will test them because, of course, we are interested in organic products versus non-organic products.
As a general rule, we recommend that you always buy organic.
However, organic does not guarantee a lack of heavy metals.
Organic does not require the end result testing of products.
It is a certification of an agricultural process, not an agricultural outcome.
So it's very important that if you buy organic, you also pay attention to this analytical testing so that you are getting clean foods and clean supplements.
Now, in terms of what we found, I gave you the list of some of the chemicals that we found in these products.
These have been confirmed through five different scientific analysis vectors, which I will describe shortly.
They include accurate mass retention time, sodium adducts, and so on.
Our analysis also confirmed various marker chemicals, such as black pepper extracts in the soup-based bone broth, which also confirms that our method is working as expected.
You can view a summary of these lab results at consumerwellness.org.
So we're posting these at our nonprofit websites.
We were able to find lot numbers on each product, and so we're also publishing the lot numbers.
Now, let's talk about legality and safety of our findings and then we'll get to the science and we'll get to some action recommendations.
In terms of the legality, it is not our position as analytical forensic food scientists to make a determination based on these data of whether these products are unsafe versus safe.
That is a determination that should be made by a regulatory body such as the FDA. So we are not asserting that these products pose an acute or extreme danger to consumers.
They may very well be in compliance with current FDA law and regulations which allow rather astonishing amounts of certain chemicals in non-organic products.
So we're not saying that these violate law and we're not saying that these pose an acute danger to consumers.
What we're saying is that consumers should be aware of the actual composition of what they're buying and consuming.
Especially given that people are consuming many of these products in very large daily quantities.
So we're talking about an ongoing day-to-day exposure to the chemicals that they contain.
Consumers have a right to know.
We believe in food transparency.
The food label or the supplement label does not tell you everything that it contains.
So that's what we are doing as independent scientists and clean food advocates.
We are doing the analysis, doing the science, and then sharing these results with the public so that they can make better informed decisions about what they wish to avoid or consume.
This is science conducted in the public interest.
This is science conducted with full transparency.
This is science that we hope will empower consumers with knowledge that they can use to make better informed decisions about what they consume or what they avoid.
Action recommendations for this include, if you are a consumer and you are currently purchasing these products, you should be aware of how they are made.
Bone broth products are, from one perspective, a byproduct of the conventional chicken factory processing industry.
The bone scraps of chicken or poultry is essentially placed into a large vat, which is filled with water.
It's boiled so that the bone broth is extracted into the water.
This is a common extraction technique known as decoction.
From there, that liquid is strained to remove particulate matter.
It is then dried into a powder form.
What this means is that many of the chemical constituents that are found in the bones of non-organic chicken may very well find their way into the water and into the powder.
In fact, our analyses confirm that that's exactly what's happening.
When you're eating these products, you are consuming a concentration of a bone broth extract from non-organic chicken.
Now, if you know anything about agriculture and the way chickens are treated, you know that, depending on the country, chickens may be injected with growth hormones.
Chickens may be treated with pesticides or insecticides.
There may be arsenic drugs used on chickens.
That was legal in the United States until just recently, by the way.
For example, one drug called Roxarsane contains arsenic and that's what is used.
Arsenic is what kills the pests.
So you can find arsenic in chicken bone broth products if they are from non-US origins.
We don't know the exact origin of these products, but we have good reason to believe that many of these products are using chicken meat and chicken scraps that are coming from non-US countries that do not have the same limits or even standards of US companies.
In fact, one of the chemicals that we're finding very consistently across many of these products is known as pyrocyde, or at least that's one of the brand names of it, and it is a chemical that is a food service insecticide.
It seems to be saturating many of these products.
We found it in almost everything, and we found it at quite what I would consider to be astonishing levels, not mere trace levels, but what I would consider to be high levels, and we'll share the chromatography with you so you can see for yourself.
Now, action items, getting back to that, of course, choose organic whatever you can.
If you are purchasing these products based on the assumption that they are clean, you may wish to rethink that.
You may wish to choose organic.
You may wish to change brands.
You may wish to not use an animal-derived product.
There are much, much cleaner sources of protein.
For example, hemp protein.
We have tested For years in our laboratory and we found hemp protein to be consistently very, very clean.
One company that makes hemp protein, they didn't pay me to say this, but they're known as Nutiva.
They are a reputable source of hemp protein and there are many others.
Other protein sources that tend to be clean include pea protein.
I would say, if you want cleaner supplements, then do not get your protein from animal-derived sources when it's concentrated into a powder, such as what we're seeing in these products.
The plant-based powders tend to be a lot cleaner, except for rice.
Rice has a heavy metals problem, which we have exposed a couple of years ago.
In 2013, we went public with heavy metals findings of rice protein products and we found lead, mercury, cadmium, and tungsten in rice protein, which was being imported from China and sold by companies in the United States such as Garden of Life.
Garden of Life has since changed their formulation and they have switched over to mostly pea protein or other plant-based proteins as a direct result of our investigation.
So avoid rice protein because of heavy metals.
Any competent lab can reproduce the results that we're about to share with you.
So this is not something that is unique to CWC labs.
We are using a standard pesticide method.
It's a 20-minute method.
It uses a C18 column.
We're using very common chromatography gradients, water and methanol, for example.
This is all off-the-shelf science that can be done by any competent person who has access to a laboratory.
You will need a time-of-flight instrument, or if you're using a single-quad or a triple-quad mass spec, you'll need a sim on the specific masses that you're looking for.
However, the time-of-flight instrument has accurate mass, and we scan for all masses simultaneously, so we're able to detect all of these chemicals at the same time.
If you don't have a time-of-flight system in your lab, you're going to have a more difficult time conducting this research, but you still can.
It'll just take you a lot longer.
There are five different ways that these chemicals are confirmed, and this is very important for you to understand the integrity of the science behind this.
Chromatography alone is not itself a reliable way to identify chemicals that are found in extracts of food products or supplements.
Chromatography produces a chromatogram with peaks, but the peaks They don't give you mass data.
They don't give you ion fragmentation data.
They're just peaks based on time.
So many labs are running liquid chromatography systems.
It's very popular in the cannabis industry, for example.
But through LC alone, you cannot accurately verify and validate the masses that you are seeing.
So we combine liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry and, as I mentioned, time-of-flight systems that can look at what's called accurate mass, which goes to four decimal places in terms of Daltons.
So, for example, if we're looking at CBD, we are looking at 315.2319 as the M plus H mass.
Which is the mass of the molecule plus the extra hydrogen for positive mode ionization and detection.
Without that, obviously it would be 314.
But a typical single quad system will only be able to detect 315.2.
We can detect 315.2319, so we have very, very accurate mass discrimination.
So mass is the first way that we use to make sure we're looking at the appropriate molecules.
Then we have a massive database as well, you know, 40,000 chemicals in our database, so we have the mass numbers for all of those chemicals plus other properties that I'm going to share with you here.
The second thing after mass is retention time.
So in chromatography, different chemicals do come out at different times based on the column that you're using.
A C18 column with a specific gradient of your organic solvent versus water will have a very well-defined retention time versus elution time.
For the chemicals.
So the time at which these chemicals elute is a second identifier, and this is part of the database as well.
The third way that we verify all of this is through isotopic ratios.
So isotopic ratios help you confirm the number of carbon atoms that are in the original molecule that you're looking at, typically called the analyte.
Now about 1% of naturally occurring carbon is carbon-13, whereas about 99% is carbon-12.
Carbon-13 obviously has an extra, you know, a plus-one mass, and so when you're looking at your analyte in the spectra that comes off of a mass spec system, you'll be able to see that you have some at, let's say, 315, and then you have a smaller peak at 316, and a much smaller peak at 317.
These ratios are called isotopic ratios, and they confirm the carbon composition of your analyte molecule.
I don't mean to get too geeky with you here, but I do want to be on the record with the exact method that we are using, the five different ways that we're validating these molecules, because this is not guesswork.
This is near absolute certainty.
This is a molecular fingerprint from five different ways that we know the identity of these molecules that we are naming, you know, the antibiotics and so on.
The fourth way is the isotopic spacing.
So in addition to the ratios, you have isotopic spacing, which helps you eliminate what could be doubly charged masses.
Mass spec systems don't directly detect mass, they actually detect mass over charge ratios, or what's called m over z.
And if you have a doubly charged mass, you could have a twice as heavy molecule with a double charge that looks like it's only half the mass, but the way you can eliminate that is by looking at the isotopic spacing.
Instead of having The normal plus 1, plus 1, plus 1 spacing, you would have plus 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, and you'd be able to eliminate that.
The fifth method that we use is called ion fragmentation.
And not a lot of labs use this.
Most analytical lab technicians are not even familiar with this method because it's relatively new.
At CWC Labs, we are truly on the cutting edge of forensic food analysis.
So we use ion fragmentation sequences.
What this does is it applies a sequence of voltages to the ion stream of the analytes as they're being introduced into the mass spec system.
This ion stream causes fragmentation of molecules at predictable Ionic bond weak points, basically, within the molecule causing fragments of certain sizes and masses to be produced as a result.
It's kind of like, let's say if you had a Lego Millennium Falcon And you blew it up into pieces.
You can analyze the pieces and you can say, ah, that used to be a Millennium Falcon.
That's a pretty good metaphor.
That's what we do at the molecular level with ion fragmentation.
This is also part of the chemical database, so we have ion fragmentation confirmation of most of the analytes that we're looking at as well.
Finally, one more additional method that we use to confirm the authenticity of the analyte we're looking for is sodium adduct detection.
When we're looking at the spectra of the analytes as they're coming out of the mass spec system, we're doing an EIC, or what is an extracted ion chromatograph, as well as looking at the spectral analysis of masses, we can see sodium adducts at plus 23.
So sodium adducts are just sort of the sodium combination of these molecules.
We see the sodium adducts and in fact we're including some screenshots of the sodium adducts in the science posting of this so that you can see for yourself that we know what we're looking at.
The bottom line is When we first ran these scans, they identified literally hundreds of potential chemicals that were found in these products.
We eliminated most of those hundreds because they did not qualify on ion fragmentation or retention time or isotopic spacing or mass, of course.
We narrowed it down to the chemicals that are confirmed through at least four of the five methods, which means this is as close to a 100% match.
Now, how will these manufacturers react to this news?
Experience has taught me that first, when I go public with lab analyses of The first thing that happens is these companies issue denials to their customers.
I'm not saying that these companies in particular are going to do that, but that's what has happened in the past.
First, they issue denials.
And secondly, they then attack the messenger.
So you're going to see smear attempts against myself, against CWC Labs, against the Consumer Wellness Center.
They're going to go on the attack to try to destroy the messenger in order to avoid talking about the chemicals that are in their products.
There's no question in my mind that this is going to happen.
So you should be ready for that.
I'm certainly ready for it.
It doesn't faze me a bit, because if they send their own products to laboratories, they will reproduce the same findings that we have shared with you today.
Again, all of these results are easily reproducible by any competent laboratory.
The next thing that these companies will likely do is say that their products meet FDA regulations.
And that is very likely true.
Again, we are not asserting that these are illegal.
We are not asserting that they pose acute, imminent danger to someone consuming them.
We're not even asserting that they violate current FDA regulations.
This is being done in the name of transparency.
So these companies will typically say their products meet FDA regulations, which just shows you How loose the FDA regulations really are.
Did you know that the FDA has no limit of the concentration of lead that can be found in a product?
There's no limit on how much mercury, arsenic, or even pesticides that can be found in a product.
You see, the FDA has no limits.
And this is very unusual in the world because Canada has limits, the European Union has limits, Japan has strict limits.
Most countries around the world have limits on these things, but the United States does not have limits.
Or very few limits.
They have limits for lead in children's candy, for example.
Very narrowly defined limits.
But they don't have an overall limit of how much lead can be in a product or how much of a pesticide can be in a product.
These are not enforced limits at all.
They may be written down somewhere in a regulation, but they're not enforced.
So almost anything can pass FDA regulations if it's not labeled organic.
And organic, of course, is run by the USDA, not the FDA. So even something that violates organic rules would not violate FDA rules because the FDA doesn't run the organic program.
So a lot of people will use, this has happened in the past when I've exposed other companies, they will use very deceptive language.
And they will know that their products maybe have very high lead, And they're labeled USDA organic, and they'll say, oh, they're in full compliance with the FDA. Well, they are, but they still contain a lot of lead.
So that's, you know, that's just doublespeak, if you ask me.
The other thing that companies can do, and we see this very frequently throughout the analytical science industry, and let me just say that in forensic science, the law enforcement industry is in a horrific state of junk science.
We have seen labs shut down here in Austin, Texas, for example.
And I believe in Boston, labs shut down because they were fabricating forensic data for prosecutions on behalf of law enforcement.
The FBI's hair analysis program, which convicted hundreds of people spanning several decades, has turned out to be complete quackery and a total joke.
It is not good science.
It is junk science.
Many labs do not know what they're doing.
And this is also true in food science.
We have corrected other labs.
We have sent them corrections.
When we have sought to confirm, for example, heavy metals analyses of food products, and they would send us results back that sometimes differ as much as an order of magnitude from our own results, we would tell them, you're wrong, your calibration is off, or your math is off, you have something wrong, And then we would tell them, check your instruments, and they would come back after checking their instruments and say, you're correct, we'll refund you, we'll redo it, we'll get it right.
And there are a lot of labs that are not accredited.
So ISO accreditation, which is what we have, is an internationally recognized accreditation system.
It requires us to be on-site inspected.
It requires us to participate in tests, blind tests, where we have to produce accurate results in order to get approved.
It requires proof of competency of the lab technicians, including myself.
And this is a very rigorous program.
To be ISO accredited takes about two years and a tremendous amount of auditing, inspection and paperwork and proof of work.
So it's not something to be taken lightly and most labs out there do not have ISO accreditation which would make me perhaps question the results that they are claiming.
Now, any food manufacturer can send a sample to anyone of what I call Black Hat Labs.
That's just my term.
It's not a common term.
I call them Black Hat Labs because They are in the business of testing foods and supplements using old, outdated instruments that have almost no detection capability.
And they will produce results that the manufacturers want to see, which is usually a sheet of paper that says, not detected, not detected, not detected, not detected.
The reason it wasn't detected is because they're using old, outdated instruments.
And there are certain labs in this industry that their whole business model is to not detect anything.
And most people don't know about that, but I'm very much aware that those operators are out there because how many times I have taken that same sample and we've detected all kinds of things with confirmation.
We sent them over to good labs and the good labs also confirm our detection.
So there are labs that exist in this industry for the sole purpose of not detecting things and then issuing a kind of document that says your product has no pesticides, or your product has no antibiotics, or your product has no lead.
A lot of instruments, for example, that are being used in heavy metals analysis are ICP-OES instruments instead of ICP-MS. Well, optical emissions doesn't have anywhere close to the detection capabilities of a mass spec ICP system.
So, our current mass spec system has a range of nine orders of magnitude.
We can detect mercury at 20 parts per trillion.
A lot of companies out there can't detect mercury below one part per million.
So we're talking, you know, many, many orders of magnitude difference in detection capability and equipment sensitivity.
So I, as a rule, I do not trust companies with their own selected laboratory testing because I know that there are black hat labs in existence that are, again, in the business of not detecting things.
I'm going to offer some comments on the lack of ethics in the supplements industry.
Now, I have been a longtime supporter of the dietary supplements industry and I continue to be a supporter of companies that are engaged in ethical and honest product marketing, but there are many companies out there that are very dishonest and that lack ethics.
And they know that their products are contaminated in some cases.
They refuse to do their own laboratory testing.
And then they will often package these products as organic or all natural or even superfoods or high vibration sort of new age labeling.
And then they will claim that their products are incredibly clean and that people should buy them without any cause for concern.
But in truth, sometimes these products can be heavily contaminated.
I'll give you some examples.
There's a product category called zeolites.
Zeolites we have extensively tested in our lab for heavy metals.
Zeolites have been promoted as a daily supplement by companies such as Health Force, whose founder died last year due to kidney complications that may have stemmed from his own products.
Well, his zeolite product, by the way, was absolutely over 50 parts per million lead.
Probably much higher.
I'll have to look at the numbers.
Most zeolite products range between 50 to 100 parts per million lead.
And zeolites being mined out of the ground, they contain very high levels of aluminum and lead.
They are alumino structures in terms of their crystalline structure.
And so when they're ground up into the powders and put into the bottles to be sold to the public, It frees up the aluminum and the lead, making it very easy for your body to digest and absorb those toxic metals.
So people have been taking zeolites year after year, not realizing that they are ingesting enormous amounts of lead and enormous amounts of aluminum.
Lead, of course, is strongly associated with lowered IQ, neurological damage, bone damage, bone disorders, and so on.
Aluminum is linked to Alzheimer's and dementia.
Among other things.
And you know how the country rightfully went a little bit crazy over the Flint, Michigan lead contamination issue in the water supply, which was justified alarm because the water that was being consumed by many of the children in Flint, Michigan contained, guess what, from about 50 to 100 parts per million lead.
That's the same thing that I found in zeolites.
And yet, zeolites continue to be sold on Amazon.com.
The FDA has not banned zeolites as a dietary supplement.
So what I see as an independent scientist and an advocate of the natural products industry is a tremendous amount of deception, a tremendous amount of just flat-out lying.
I see companies packaging and marketing products that I consider to be dangerous, such as products containing high levels of mercury or lead.
I have great concern over the health of consumers who are blindly consuming daily doses of some of these products from unscrupulous companies that refuse to engage in laboratory testing of their own products.
Does that mean I support increased FDA regulation?
Well, my take on all of this, again, as a scientist, as a lab director, as an author of the book Food Forensics, and a forensic food scientist, is that the FDA should set limits The FDA should set limits, like Canada has, like the European Union has, like Japan has, even Australia has limits.
We need published federal limits of lead concentrations in food and dietary supplements, and not just the California Prop 65 limit system, which is very heavily distorted, and frankly the lead limits in that system are not scientifically valid.
Prop 65 was a clean water act and it's being misapplied to supplements.
We need a new federal act that sets limits for foods and supplements.
So that's number one.
Secondly, we need transparency, which is why I'm doing this.
The Food and Drug Administration, you would think, would test the food.
You would think they would publish the results, that they would share with the public the laboratory analysis of heavy metals or pesticides or glyphosate or other Chemicals of concern.
Antibiotics and so on.
And yet the FDA absolutely refuses to do that.
Makes you wonder what they're doing with all that money, doesn't it?
What are they doing?
You know, aside from promoting the pharmaceutical industry.
What are they doing in the name of science in the public interest?
The answer is very little.
The FDA is mostly concerned about E. coli, or microbiological contaminants in foods, because those tend to make people sick and kill people very quickly.
But what about the high lead content of certain foods or supplements that kills people slowly over time?
The FDA seems to have no concern for those contaminants, and that's very sad.
So I want the FDA to do what we are doing.
Buy products off the shelf, test them, share the results with the public.
And since the FDA so far refuses to do that, we are going to do it.
At the non-profit consumer wellness center, consumerwellness.org, we're going to do this testing.
We're going to do it in the public interest, we're going to test more and more product categories, and we're going to share these numbers with the public in the interest of public safety, science, and transparency.
There will be extreme attempts to try to silence us and shut us down.
Google will probably try to censor us again, because they are anti-science.
There will likely be lawsuits that will be thrown my direction to try to sue us into silence.
Those lawsuits will be unsuccessful, because we have a very strong legal team of our own, and we know what we're doing.
All of our results are validated, accurate, and accredited.
So, these attempts will fail, and we're going to continue to expand our efforts.
Now, you as a consumer, if you want to be informed of all of this, just join Good Go for Mail.
Go to goodgopher.com, get an email account, it's free, and we will send you the details of what we are finding in these various products.
So one of the big problems in the supplement industry is that a lot of manufacturers, most, refuse to test their own products.
And they do that because testing is expensive.
It costs money.
The laboratory that I built has cost us over two million dollars.
And the upkeep is, you know, $20,000 a month, probably, to run it.
It's expensive.
So a lot of companies, they cut corners, they don't do the testing, and sometimes they will rely on the testing provided to them by their raw materials provider.
Well, raw materials providers are notorious for faking the science, counterfeiting documents, counterfeiting organic certification, and so on, especially if they're from China.
So a lot of these US companies that are selling products that they claim are made in the USA are actually using China-based raw materials that are fraudulently claimed to be organic or claimed to be certified free of pesticides or certified low heavy metals when that's actually not the case at all.
So we have a real crisis in this country right now in the natural products industry.
The industry has largely decided to avoid Engaging in real science.
Most companies avoid testing their own products.
Now, there are exceptions to this.
I happen to know that Now Foods, for example, has a very competent in-house laboratory.
I happen to know that Walmart actually does heavy metals testing of all the products that it sells.
It has a very large laboratory in Arkansas.
Amazon.com does not do testing for these substances, for all the products they sell.
And most nutritional supplement companies don't do testing as well.
Whole Foods does not test the products they sell in the ways that we test them.
Whole Foods is not pulling products off the shelf because they contain high lead or high mercury or high pesticides.
They don't even do that kind of in-house testing.
So what you have is an industry that's selling a lot of products that claim to be natural, that claim to be organic, that claim to be healthful, or even health enhancing or preventing disease.
And yet, unbeknownst to most consumers, many products in the industry are contaminated.
With pesticides, with heavy metals, with antibiotic drugs, with steroids, with many other chemicals that pose very real and very serious safety questions.
And when I started to do the science in my own laboratory and testing off-the-shelf foods, I was astonished at what I am seeing.
Look at the storable foods industry.
You wouldn't believe the chemicals that I'm finding in non-organic survival food products.
We're going to cover that too, by the way.
That's another category we're covering.
Many of these products are just saturated with a huge array of chemicals that probably most people wouldn't want to eat if they knew they were in there.
So we have a real crisis.
The answer is not FDA regulation, but rather FDA transparency.
Let's have transparency so that people know what they're buying and know what they're eating and they can make a choice.
And companies that sell cleaner products should be rewarded in the free market versus companies that sell less clean products or contaminated products.
Our role in this as the Consumer Wellness Center, nonprofit, is to contribute to that free market economic decision making so that consumers have a choice based on good information.
I believe in free markets.
I believe in limited government regulation, but I also believe in transparency of what people are buying and eating.
You can't have a free market if consumers don't know what they're buying because you don't have a choice if you don't know what's in there.
Does that make sense?
So I'm all about combining free markets with decentralized science, full transparency, and non-profit organizations like the one that I work for, Consumer Wellness Center, in order to empower consumers.
Now I'm going to highlight some of the chemicals that we found in some of the products.
This isn't the full list, okay?
And this does not include the quantitative data.
We have signal response or area response, as it's called in mass spec analysis.
We have that information available for you at GoodGo for Mail, so sign up for an account there.
We'll be sending this out shortly.
But some of the chemicals that we found, some of the highlights, Again, the categories include antibiotics, antimicrobials, prescription drugs, insecticides, parabens, and steroids.
I'm going to go over just some of what we found in some of the products.
One of the most common substances we found is called MGK repellent, also known as a brand name of pyrocyde.
So let's just go through the list.
In ancient nutrition, bone broth protein meal, we're finding cyclandylate, Which is a vasodilator drug.
We're finding butylparaben.
Parabens are used in the cosmetic industry as antimicrobial preservatives.
We are also finding sinitopride, a gastrointestinal drug, doxoprost, as well as the MGK insecticide that we already mentioned.
In another ancient nutrition bone broth product, their coffee flavor, their coffee protein, we also found the MGK-326.
Again, We found cyclandylate again, a vasodilator drug, and builparabens yet again.
Now, in Jaro formulas, we tested their product called Beyond Bone Broth, and we found a little different mixture of chemicals, but some overlap.
We found the MGK-326, We also found an interesting marker, chavacine, which is an alkaloid from black pepper.
They actually do flavor their product more as a broth for soups.
So that's actually a positive thing.
That's not a negative thing.
We have found cyclandylate.
And a couple other chemicals that we'll put in the email, but those are the highlights from Jaros.
In sports research, we also found dipropyl isosynchromarinate, the MGK326. Again, shows up in nearly all these samples.
We found cyclandylate and we found butylparaben.
And that's in sports research.
Now, if you're seeing a pattern, you're probably realizing that a lot of these companies source their bone broth from the same place.
And that's a very reasonable conclusion from what we're seeing here.
Precision Naturals is another company that we tested their bone broth protein powder.
We found dalbraminol, which is a beta blocker drug, We found thalofine, which is an anti-parasitic drug, and we found an antibiotic known as actinobolin in their products.
So that may indicate they're sourcing their product from a different place, or maybe they have a different production lot.
So that's interesting.
In the Left Coast branded bone broth products we found netlomycin, which is of course a very powerful antibiotic that's often used to treat urinary tract infections.
And this is important because of the rise of superbugs and antimicrobial resistance that is now plaguing our medical system.
The fact that many of these, some of these bone broth products contain Antibiotic chemicals should raise some red flags and get people asking some questions.
In Left Coast product, we also found the same MGK326 dipropyl isosynchromarinate.
We also found the vasodilator drug, cyclandylate, Delbraminol as well.
We also found butylparabens there.
Plus we found a steroidal pheromone known as 5-alpha-andros-16-EN3 and so on and so forth.
You can see that in the email.
Now, the last product we tested was from Lono Life, which is a savory chicken bone broth labeled as part of the Paleo diet.
In that product, we were able to confirm Apial from parsley oil, so we know they're using real parsley.
That's a positive indication.
But we also then found Aspoxicillin, which is an antibacterial drug.
We found butoxycane, we found chavacine from black pepper, that's good, but we also found cyclandylate and again dipropyl isosynchromarinate.
In conclusion, I thank you for your time.
I know this has been a very technical talk.
I want to thank all of those natural product companies that are engaged in good science, that are doing laboratory analysis, Checking for heavy metals, testing for pesticides, and so on.
I want to celebrate you because we have entered a new era of the democratization of science.
We have entered a new era where individual laboratories like my own, CWC Labs, are now buying products off the shelf, testing them with very high competence and confidence with ISO accreditation, and we are going public with what we are finding.
We are doing the job the FDA refuses to do.
And it's sad.
It's sad that citizens have to take up this task in the name of science and food safety and food transparency, but our federal government, at least the FDA and the USDA, are just incompetent.
They are industry shills.
The USDA works for the pesticide industry, essentially.
The FDA works for the drug industry.
Neither agency is...
and the EPA works for the pesticide industry as well.
None of these agencies, USDA, EPA, or FDA, put consumer safety and consumer transparency first.
They are prostitutes for the food and agricultural and pesticide industries.
Have no illusions.
And our science proves it day after day, again and again.
And we are here to do the job that they refuse to do.
And more importantly, for those of you who are libertarians out there, we don't ask, we don't coerce anybody to pay us money to do this job.
We don't take a dime from the government.
We don't require taxes from people for us to do this work.
We're doing this because it's important work.
We have the financial capability to fund this work, and we're doing it in the public interest.
We should have more Americans like this.
We should have more independent science like this.
We don't need the FDA, the USDA, and the EPA on these issues because they aren't doing the job anyway.
President Trump slashed their budgets.
Mike Adams will do it for you.
Consumer Wellness Center will do it for you.
We can do this research.
We've just proven it.
And we're going to continue to do it.
Now we hope these companies, these bone broth companies, we hope that they will work to clean up their product sourcing as much as possible.
We hope that they will choose organic.
We hope that they will pay attention to this.
We don't hope for them to go out of business.
We want them to stay in business producing clean products.
We want the nutritional products industry to succeed.
We want innovation and entrepreneurship in America to succeed.
But we want the American people to have access to clean foods and to honest foods and to transparency of the composition of those foods and supplements that they're consuming.
That's not an unreasonable thing to wish for.
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