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Nov. 27, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
10:00
Glyphosate testing EXPLAINED: Here's what "zero" means
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So the public feedback on our glyphosate testing has been tremendous.
Thank you for all your comments.
We're now testing all HealthRanger branded products for glyphosate, and we are certifying them as being glyphosate tested with zero detectable residues.
And in this podcast, oh, by the way, you can find all those products at healthrangersstore.com.
We're the first online store and superfood manufacturer in the world to To do our own in-house laboratory, mass spec, certification of glyphosate-free products.
And it took us two years to get to this point.
I hoped to get this done a year ago.
Actually, like 18 months ago, but it took two years.
These things are ridiculously complex.
Nevertheless, in this podcast, I'm going to explain what we mean by glyphosate-tested or glyphosate-free.
And by the way, we have a website called glyphosate.news where you can, of course, read up on all the latest research and the lawsuits.
You know, Bayer is facing now, I think, almost 10,000 lawsuits based on glyphosate poisoning and glyphosate cancer.
You know, all these issues.
So it's a big deal.
This is an herbicide.
It's known as Roundup, of course, when sold by Monsanto.
Monsanto was acquired by Bayer.
And this herbicide is used on many crops that are not GMO crops.
It's used as a desiccant to dry out the crops in the field to make harvesting quicker and easier, more economical for farmers.
So a lot of wheat crops and oat crops, for example, are heavily sprayed with glyphosate as a desiccant.
Glyphosate is a very small molecule.
It has a molecular mass of 169.
And because it's so tiny, it tends to go through almost everything.
For example, it'll go through most water filters.
We're actually going to test that, by the way.
We're going to test glyphosate capabilities in water filters to see which filters actually remove glyphosate.
We haven't done that test yet, but it's something that's on my list.
But knowing what I know about the chemistry of glyphosate, and especially its water solubility, It is highly likely, in fact, I'm going to say 99% chance that there's no water filter in the world that removes glyphosate.
That's what I'm going to say.
That's my best guess as kind of a novice chemist, just knowing, again, the water solubility, the polarity of glyphosate, the small molecular mass, the molecular structure.
All these things.
I bet you glyphosate goes right through nearly all water filters.
But we'll see.
We'll see.
I can't wait to run that test and share the results with you.
And the reason I know this, by the way, is because just to trap glyphosate in any kind of material is so difficult that the chromatography is nearly impossible to achieve.
There's a common chromatography column media material called C18. C stands for carbon, as you might have guessed, 18 carbons.
Basically, it's just called C18. Now, C18 will trap pesticides.
It'll trap all kinds of organic and volatile chemicals.
It'll trap most plant nutrients.
It'll trap vitamins and things.
It will not trap glyphosate.
Glyphosate goes right through it.
So we test for glyphosate, but we obviously don't use a C18 column for the testing because you would not get any retention.
So we have to use other types of chemistry in order to test glyphosate.
In any case, back to the point here.
When we say that our foods or our products are glyphosate tested, what we mean is that they are below 10 parts per billion and most of them are zero.
In fact, so far as we've been testing all of our products, I have yet to see any product that contains any glyphosate.
And our instrument can detect one part per billion with accurate quantitation with a validated in-house method.
And the instrument itself can actually detect glyphosate below one part per billion.
So we're talking hundreds of parts per trillion.
That's the sensitivity of the instrument.
In any case...
The FDA and most people in the food industry consider anything below 10 parts per billion as being negligible because you can have that much show up as just carryover in your instrument.
So there's a needle that goes down into a sample.
And then the needle pulls up, let's say, a microliter of your sample and then injects it into the chromatography flow, the stream of your what's called mobile phase solvents that start to carry out the chromatography.
And this needle can become, you know, contaminated.
And if you're not careful...
You can have what's called carryover from one sample to another.
Now, we use very high-end LC systems that have a needle wash and we have a flow-through needle injection system.
In fact, I have...
I tested this, and I have seen some carryover.
For example, if I'm injecting a load of, let's see, what was I doing?
I think it was 1,000 picograms of glyphosate onto the column.
And then after 1,000 picograms, when I would run a blank, I would see somewhere around 4 picograms still on the needle coming through the next blank.
But then after that blank, it was back to zero.
So there is a slight carryover.
That would be, you know, 0.4%, basically, which is why when you're testing products that have glyphosate, you usually want to put blanks in between them.
And that's a practice that we do as well.
But the point is, there's carryover.
And in order to test glyphosate, you have to run glyphosate standards.
So we are putting glyphosate into the system.
So it's not unusual.
Sometimes you might see, you know, one to five parts per billion of carryover if you just ran a strong sample.
I mean, a standard.
You know, glyphosate standard that you purchase as standards in order to do this kind of science.
So anyway, maybe I'm getting too down in the weeds on this, but anything under 10 parts per billion is just generally considered that that doesn't really contain glyphosate.
And the other thing to factor in here is that when glyphosate is present, it's usually huge.
So if you've got a wheat sample or oats or rye or barley or something that's been grown and sprayed with glyphosate, it's going to be parts per million, which means, you know, a thousand parts per billion.
It's not going to be 10 parts per billion.
It's going to be huge.
You're going to get a big peak.
You're going to see it.
You're going to get the confirmation ions, everything.
And when you look at the chromatography on the screen, you're going to know, oh, yeah, heck, there we go.
That's glyphosate screaming at us.
It's not a question of, oh, is it 9 parts per billion or is it 12?
No.
It's usually zero or screaming huge glyphosate.
That's actually the reality of the situation.
So for most, again, so far everything that we've tested, it's been zero.
I expect, though, that we're going to hit some...
We haven't gone out and tested grains yet, off-the-shelf grains at Whole Foods, which, by the way, a little side note, I'm going shopping at Whole Foods soon to test their organic products for glyphosate.
Don't tell them.
Don't tell anybody at Whole Foods that I'm doing that.
Actually, it's not going to be me.
I'm going to send a spy to go in and test.
Oh, it's so hilarious.
I'm going to have a spy go into Whole Foods and buy their products and bring them back to our lab and test them.
But hey, maybe they're free of glyphosate.
And if so, I'm going to do an article on that and say, yeah, hey, we tested Whole Foods products and they're all free of glyphosate.
Amazing.
But I strongly suspect that's not the case.
In any case, we'll let the science actually tell the story on that one, rather than my prediction.
You know, actual lab results beat predictions.
Because, like, whatever your prediction is doesn't really matter anymore when the results come in from the instruments.
Oh, here's what it is, actually.
Boom.
Here are the numbers.
You either have glyphosate or you don't.
And it's probably going to be a big-ass peak or no peak at all.
That's the truth.
In any case, I'm going to bring you that information.
But when we say glyphosate tested for our products, what we mean is it can't possibly exceed 10 parts per billion.
And so far, everything has been zero, flatline.
And when we see glyphosate, we expect to see it in big amounts.
So this is not, again, this is not something where it's wishy-washy or somewhere in the middle.
It's usually going to be big or nothing.
In any case, I appreciate all your support.
You can shop for glyphosate-tested products now at healthrangerstore.com.
You can read my main website, naturalnews.com.
Or you can read glyphosate.news for news specifically about glyphosate herbicide.
And if you want your products glyphosate tested, we are not currently offering that service because we're kind of busy with our own stuff.
But maybe we will one day.
I don't know.
Probably not.
I think we're going to be too busy.
I think we have so much testing to do ourselves, I don't think we can offer it to the public.
In any case, there are other labs out there that will offer it as well if you want to pay a few hundred dollars a sample.
That's what it costs.
It's not easy.
But thanks for listening.
This is Mike Adams.
Take care.
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