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July 16, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
10:49
Science DECEPTION: Can foods test "positive" for arsenic?
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All right, this is a preview announcement about what I have come to decide is a real deception in science, and I need to go public with this.
I'm going to do a full video about it, but this is just kind of a preview podcast, and it concerns the issue of an independent nonprofit laboratory out there reporting that certain foods are testing, quote, positive for arsenic.
And I don't remember the name of this group.
It's like the food clean labels or food labels or green labels or something.
And I understand they're trying to do a good thing by raising awareness about arsenic.
But to say that a food test positive for arsenic, I've thought about this a lot.
And I've talked with my colleagues in my laboratory.
And we all agree that such a statement is extremely deceptive and total quack science.
Why is that?
Well, the word positive means that it contains at least one element of that when you're talking about an element or one atom of it.
And the word positive is deceptive in that context because positive is usually used for testing athletes for drugs, for example, or other similar uses where there is a specific compound drug that is often a synthetic molecule.
It's not an element.
It's a molecule.
So it's made up of many elements, and it's a synthetic molecule with a very specific pharmacological purpose.
And you can say that an athlete tests positive for a, let's say, a performance-enhancing drug.
That makes sense in that context.
But to say that a food tests positive for arsenic does not make sense because there is at least one atom of arsenic in every piece of food everywhere.
And thus, everything tests positive for arsenic.
In other words, it's total junk science to claim that, in their case, baby food tests positive for arsenic.
Well, of course baby food tests positive for arsenic.
So do watermelons.
So do grapes.
So do oranges.
So does your hair, by the way.
There's arsenic in your hair, I guarantee you.
And if you have a sensitive enough heavy metals instrument, you can see it.
And we do run heavy metals analysis using ICP-MS, and I can detect arsenic below a part per billion, by the way.
And as a result, I can find arsenic in almost everything.
Does that mean everything tests positive for arsenic?
Well, technically, yes, but that's why that term is scientific quackery when used with elements.
That's very important for those of you who maybe aren't highly experienced in laboratory analysis, just to make sure you understand the difference between an element and a molecule.
An element is something from the table of elements.
It is atomic.
It's an atomic unit of matter.
It's the very basic building block Of matter until you get down to the subatomic particles, you know, quarks and all that.
We're talking elements are things like aluminum or gold, silver, zinc, selenium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen.
Hydrogen is an element.
Now, you wouldn't say that, oh, this food tests positive for carbon.
That would sound stupid because there's carbon in everything.
You know, I mean, everything that's food.
I guess you might say salt doesn't have carbon.
And you might say salt is a food.
So I guess there could be a few exceptions for inorganic crystalline lattice structures such as sodium chloride.
But for common foods, you know, fruits and vegetables and things, everything has carbon in it.
Almost everything that's a food has oxygen in it.
Because oxygen is part of water.
So water, you know, you wouldn't say, oh, we tested water and all this water tested positive for oxygen.
No, because oxygen is part of water.
So it doesn't make any sense to say that it tests positive for oxygen.
You see what I'm saying?
H2O, the O is oxygen.
So when these labs, it's very important for all these science labs to To be accurate in what they are asserting here.
And this is why when we have reported heavy metals results in the past, we have always, in every case, talked about the quantitation.
In other words, the concentration of lead or mercury or arsenic or cadmium that's found in food because it's the concentration that determines the safety versus toxicity.
Concentration is everything.
And very high arsenic, yeah, can be dangerous to your health, especially depending on the form of arsenic, such as organic versus inorganic.
However, a couple of atoms of arsenic, or a few molecules that contain arsenic as one of their atomic compounds, is of no concern whatsoever.
Just like a few molecules of something containing lead, a very small number of molecules, parts per trillion concentrations of lead, or even low, low parts per billion, is not really a concern for food.
Now, if you're injecting it, that's different.
If you're injecting yourself with a vaccine that contains 50,000 parts per billion mercury, that's a problem.
And that's what flu shots do contain, by the way, but that's a different discussion.
That's vaccines.
That's something you're practically mainlining in your tissues.
We're talking about foods that contain trace amounts of arsenic or lead or cadmium or what have you.
And again, it's just...
You know, look, I'm a scientist.
I run an ISO-accredited laboratory.
There are very high demands on our accuracy and our honesty and scientific integrity in reporting what we report.
And when I saw this other group reporting that baby foods test positive for arsenic, I immediately thought, you know, that's...
I'm not gonna...
That's BS. That's total BS. That's not a scientific statement.
And, of course, the media bought it hook, line, and sinker because most journalists are, of course, scientifically illiterate.
They don't know the difference.
So they report, oh, this baby food is all testing positive for arsenic.
Yeah, but how much arsenic?
There's arsenic in everything.
A little bit.
You know, at least a few atoms.
I can find arsenic in almost anything with a sensitive enough instrument.
Even your breath.
What you exhale, I guarantee you there are arsenic atoms in your exhalation.
No question about it.
Every breath you take, as the police used to sing, has arsenic in it.
So does that mean you test positive for arsenic?
Should you ban yourself because you test positive for it?
No, it doesn't mean anything.
Now, if you're going to eat something that is, you know, five parts per million arsenic, that could be a concern.
But five parts per trillion is one billion times less.
And so that's not a concern.
So we have to be aware of these concentration differences.
And I've always made it a point to report this And I made a mistake on reporting some findings for bone broth, which I quickly corrected because I reported that we had found some amounts of antibiotics and pesticides and so on, and then I saw the public overreacted to it.
And very quickly, within a few days, I corrected that and put out a chart that said, no, these are trace levels because I don't want to give the wrong impression about foods or supplements or anything.
I don't want people to mistakenly think that there are massive amounts of these things when it's really only a very trace amount that was actually detected.
And I just hope that other labs would be as honest.
You know, they can get a lot of press by raising a false flag alarm, basically.
They could take any food off the shelf and say, oh, it tested positive for lead.
But that doesn't mean anything, because lead is an element, not a chemical compound.
There is a huge difference.
And I guess it's because most of the public doesn't have a very good science education.
So most people are not, you know, well-informed about the differences between an atom or an element versus a molecule or a chemical compound, let's say.
So people don't know.
What does testing positive for something mean?
And maybe I should just do like a science lesson or something.
I don't know.
Maybe I should just do like sort of science 101.
The physical stuff in your world is made out of this other stuff.
Like everything that you know that's physical is made out of these elements.
And mostly it's just, you know, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen.
You know, just, it's not even usually that many elements.
It's just all the same basic elements.
It's like a handful of elements make up everything that you know.
You know, from the clothes you wear, to your teeth, to your brain matter, the lipids coursing through your body, your blood, all these things.
It's all made of the same basic stuff, about 20 elements.
It's mostly about it.
And yet, people, I don't know, people are confused about this subject, so I don't know.
You know, I try to be accurate, I try to educate people about real science, and I try to report findings in food that are legitimately alarming.
You know, when I see high mercury in some, you know, rice protein product, you know, I sound the alarm because mercury is very toxic at very low levels.
But arsenic, to have like one atom of arsenic in some baby food, that's nothing.
Or even to have parts per trillion in baby food, that's nothing.
So, I don't know.
I'll try to put out the most accurate information I can, but the public doesn't seem to have a good grasp on this yet.
Maybe I'll keep educating people and see how this goes.
Thanks for listening.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, for naturalnews.com.
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