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May 15, 2019 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

14:01

Will TARIFFS on China affect the pricing of FOOD and supplements?

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	Alright, welcome.
	This podcast is about food and clean food and clean supplements and China.
	But we're going to start off by talking about the tariffs, the tariff situation, the trade war.
	Now, Trump is doing the right thing by temporarily using these tariffs to try to force China to play fair.
	China is a bully nation, a bunch of communists, and they bully everybody in the world.
	And they've put all these big tariffs on all of our products, American products, for many years so that American producers have been hurt economically while China is stealing our intellectual property and pushing their cheap, contaminated products, including their cheap, contaminated foods and herbs and spices including their cheap, contaminated foods and herbs and spices and everything, into the American marketplace.
	And Trump is the first president who has, dare I say, the balls to stand up to China and actually demand just fair and free trade.
	Okay, so that's an important analysis.
	China's trade policies are not fair.
	And Trump is simply trying to force them to engage in some basic fairness.
	But as a result, there are massive tariffs temporarily being placed on all kinds of things from China.
	Now, I'm not yet, I haven't confirmed whether these tariffs are going to apply to food and herbs and spices or supplement raw materials.
	It seems very likely that they are.
	But just note that I haven't 100% confirmed that yet.
	Nevertheless, if they do apply, this would make China-derived products a lot more expensive to U.S. consumers, perhaps 50% more expensive, just as a rough estimate.
	Or maybe it's only 25% more expensive, but it's going to be something, some big chunk like that.
	Fortunately, our store, healthrangerstore.com, you may already know, we use almost nothing from China.
	There are a few cases where we've had goji berries from China and maybe a few other things that we subject to extensive lab testing and things that are typically not grown in the outdoors.
	You know, like goji berries are grown in high altitude, sort of Himalayan regions where they're not nearly as...
	Subjected to the pollution of the cities and the pollution of the rivers and the lowlands and everything.
	Like rice from China is one of the most polluted things you can buy because rice is grown with wastewater that is basically toxic runoff from the industrial cities.
	Rice is always grown in lowlands.
	If you understand the physical elevation of where crops are grown, that also helps you understand what's likely to be cleaner or dirtier.
	So rice can be very dirty in a polluted country, while goji berries grow at high altitude, typically.
	And so they tend to be a lot cleaner.
	Anyway, just an interesting note about clean food.
	Nevertheless, we are not going to be raising any prices due to China tariffs.
	Now, isn't that interesting?
	That's good news.
	It also shows you that we do not rely on China for raw materials except in just a few small circumstances which are subjected to our lab testing.
	And the reason that we don't use so much China-based ingredients is because we do the lab testing.
	And our lab testing has already shown us year after year that raw materials from China are routinely contaminated with not just toxic heavy metals like cadmium and lead and arsenic, sometimes even mercury, but also a lot of other chemicals.
	There are hormone disruptors and there are more pesticides and herbicides and even in some cases banned agricultural chemicals that are outlawed in the United States, but they're still legal to use in China.
	And you will find those in many products that come from China.
	So the upshot of all this is, well, two things.
	On the big picture economic scale, you're going to see a lot of companies out there that are currently sourcing from China try to branch out and source from other countries.
	The immediate replacement for China for many products is India.
	India has a very big agricultural industry.
	India, in many cases, sadly, is just as dirty as China.
	In fact, if you were to ask me which are the two countries in the world that produce the most polluted ingredients for superfoods and smoothie mixes and nutritional supplements and all kinds of things, health products, it's China and India.
	They are the two most polluted.
	Now, other countries are much cleaner even though they're in Asia.
	For example, Japan tends to have very high quality control.
	Taiwan is much cleaner than China.
	That's why we source some of our spirulina from Taiwan.
	Korea actually is much cleaner than China across the board.
	And we have some of our chlorella comes out of Korea, by the way.
	Even Mexico is cleaner than China because Mexico, it has agricultural areas that are much farther geographically in terms of their distance, much farther away from the cities than in China where a lot of the farms are actually fed from the water runoff created by the cities.
	It's an interesting thing about the population density differences between Mexico and China.
	So Mexico tends to have actually cleaner food than China.
	Europe is a very clean producer of most agricultural products.
	This is due to the very stringent limitations on agricultural pesticides and herbicides that the EU has successfully enforced.
	In fact, EU standards are much more stringent than the United States standards.
	And this is why, when it comes to things like glyphosate, which is a cancer-causing weed killer, we actually use a standard that is More strict than the European standard.
	Isn't that interesting?
	So, for us, for example, in our lab, we can detect glyphosate down below five parts per billion.
	We can detect, actually, our detection, our limit of detection, what's called the LOD, is 0.3 parts per billion, which is 300 parts per trillion.
	And For us, we don't accept food items that have glyphosate above 10 parts per billion.
	The EU standard for many food items, not all of them, but most of them, is 50 parts per billion.
	And the current EPA slash FDA standard in the United States, depending on the item, is as much as 100 parts per million.
	That's 2,000 times bigger than, greater than the EU standard.
	So keep your units straight here when you're thinking about this.
	Again, the FDA allows 100 parts per million glyphosate in the food.
	At least that's the last number that I saw.
	Maybe they've updated it, but I doubt it.
	The EU is one two thousandth of that.
	Their limit is 50 parts per billion.
	Our limit is one-fifth of the EU limit.
	In other words, our limit is one ten-thousandth the amount of glyphosate that the FDA allows in U.S. foods.
	This is crucial.
	In other words, you could eat something that the FDA approves and the EPA approves in the United States that we haven't tested.
	Somebody else's supplement that they bought from China, the raw materials.
	You could get 10,000 times more glyphosate than what you would get from us And in most of our products, it's just flat out zero anyway.
	Sometimes we see a slight trace, maybe a fraction of a part per billion from time to time, but it's almost always zero.
	But this is huge.
	This is huge to understand because America is the dumping ground for the world's most contaminated nutritional products that fail European standards.
	So get this.
	If you're a producer in China, if you're a producer in India, you're producing, I don't know, broccoli sprouts powder or something that, you know, pumpkin seed protein, whatever, any kind of a protein product, a plant product, an agricultural product, you're producing this in China and India.
	Let's say you send it off to the lab, the glyphosate comes back, oh my God, it's 10 parts per million, let's say.
	Well, guess what?
	It's going to fail the EU standards.
	But it's going to pass the United States standards, isn't it?
	So that shipment will be flagged as only suitable for consumption by Americans.
	Because America is the dumping ground for the world's most contaminated food products.
	You didn't know that, did you?
	Yeah, this is one of those things that you only get to when you're kind of a food science nerd like I am.
	You have a lab, you start looking at what's going on out there, and you're sourcing ingredients all the time.
	You're manufacturing as we are.
	We're a certified organic industry.
	And we find that America is the dumping ground for the world's most contaminated food ingredients, supplement ingredients, herb ingredients, spices, and basically everything else in the food supply that you can imagine.
	Oh, don't even get me started on pet food products and pet, you know, pet ingredients and pet snacks.
	This is like, it's the toxic waste of China.
	Like, whatever they can't sell to Africa, they put it into the pet products and it's sold to Americans, and that's why your pets are always dying from kidney disease because of the contaminated, you know, pet treats made in China.
	That's not a joke.
	I mean, that's sad, and that's happening, and that's real.
	In any case, with all that said, personally, I don't trust anything that I don't test.
	I mean, yeah, sure, I eat out in restaurants every once in a while, and I go eat other things, but I will protect myself with nutritional supplements, and I'll take vitamin C, I'll take fiber, I drink superfoods all day, every day.
	So I have defenses against what's out there on the rare times that I go eat something outside.
	The rest of the time, I'm making my own food, making sure it's clean, and I'm using materials that we have tested in our lab.
	So, for example, I'll make like a bean, a mixed bean soup, and I'll use our lentils and our pinto beans and our black beans.
	I use our instant black beans all the time.
	I'll make like a really nice, I'll do like a Like a flour tortilla with the black beans that are reconstituted in just a few minutes on the stove and a pot of water.
	Then do fresh organic shredded coleslaw, like purple cabbage and green cabbage.
	And then I'll put this tangy organic sauce on it.
	And man, that is awesome.
	It's like a fresh veggie taco.
	You can put a slice of avocado in there if you want, whatever.
	I eat a lot of the food that I test myself because that's the food I trust.
	That's what I know is clean.
	And so if you want clean food, it's important to understand international trade.
	It's important to understand international standards of food cleanliness, of heavy metals, of pesticide exposure, and even to understand how tariffs work and what's happening in the world because food comes to you from all over the world and most of the world is polluted.
	And almost nobody tests their products.
	But we do, as you know.
	And so, you want the world's cleanest products?
	You know where to get it, healthrangerstore.com.
	We're testing every day.
	Heavy metals, microbiology, glyphosate, we're adding atrazine shortly.
	And we'll be adding more pesticides shortly as well.
	Our lab is ISO accredited.
	It's inspected and audited every year.
	We pass proficiency tests every year.
	We're the real deal.
	You want clean food?
	HealthRangerStore.com.
	And don't eat the shrimp, by the way.
	You'll notice we don't sell shrimp and we don't sell animal products.
	There's a reason for that.
	Because I can't find...
	Well, I mean, a couple of reasons.
	There's, like, an ethical and moral reason, but there's also the reason that I can't find anything that would be clean enough to sell, certainly not shrimp.
	We might have to, like...
	We might have to buy new parts for the heavy metals machine if we test shrimp, because it'll probably blow, like, the mercury off the charts or something.
	Who knows?
	I don't want to hurt the instrument by running toxic shrimp through it.
	You know what I mean?
	In any case, healthrangerstore.com.
	That's where you get clean food and clean supplements.
	Thanks for listening.
	Mike Adams here, the Health Ranger.
	Be safe.
	Take care.
	Learn about the benefits of cacao.
	Cacao nibs.
	Learn about astaxanthin.
	Learn about resveratrol or sulforaphane from broccoli sprouts or cruciferous vegetables.
	All of these nutrients and superfoods and much more are available now at healthrangerstore.com.
	But most importantly, we are the only online retailer in the world with an in-house ISO accredited laboratory.
	We test what we sell.
	We test for heavy metals.
	We test for bacteria.
	We test for glyphosate herbicide and increasingly pesticides.
	We have clean nutrition.
	HealthRangerStore.com.
	If you want clean supplements and incredibly potent superfoods that can enhance and protect your health, HealthRangerStore.com is where you find it.
	Thank you for watching.
	If you want to support our mission, visit us at healthrangerstore.com for the world's largest selection of lab-verified superfood and nutritional products for healthy living.

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