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May 15, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
29:28
Yogi Herbal Tea RECALLED by the FDA after discovery of unsafe levels of PESTICIDES...
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A million bags of organic tea from a company called Yogi, which has this echinacea immune support tea.
It's an herbal blend, caffeine-free.
One million bags recalled because it contains, quote, pesticide residues detected above action levels.
The recall number is F as in Frank-1237-2024.
It's a class 3 recall listed on the FDA website and covered across various media.
Pesticide residues above action levels.
Now, by the way, the FDA's action levels are pretty high, especially compared to the EU or Canada or Japan.
In fact, the U.S. allows more pesticides in its food products than almost any country anywhere in the world, in some cases by orders of magnitude.
So the fact that this product, which is certified organic and also certified non-GMO project, Or verified non-GMO project.
The fact that it has pesticide residues above action levels is pretty alarming.
And so it's a massive recall.
Nearly a million bags actually.
It's 877,000 bags of organic Yogi Echinacea immune support tea.
I do want to commend the company for issuing the recall.
I am curious how they found out about the pesticide levels.
Because most companies aren't even testing for pesticides.
Maybe the FDA tested it.
Probably this is what happened.
The FDA does surprise inspections of manufacturers, including us, by the way.
The FDA shows up every once in a while and they say, surprise!
We're from the FDA. And just hold on while we take samples of everything.
And then they run around and they take samples.
And then they say, okay, these are quarantined until we get back to you.
And then that's the time usually when we explain to them, hey, we have our own mass spec lab, and we're doing pesticide testing.
We're testing for herbicides in particular, like glyphosate and atrazine, and we're testing for heavy metals, and we're also testing for microbiology.
And here, here's our test results, and the FDA says, Sometimes they say, well, is your lab ISO 17025 accredited?
And we're like, yep, here it is.
Here's the accreditation certificates.
Here's the inspection audits and the proficiency testing.
It's called PT testing to prove that we know what we're doing.
And then they say, okay, that's awesome, but we're going to test it anyway.
Okay.
So then we freeze these products for two weeks.
The FDA does their own tests.
And then two weeks later, They either send us an email or a call and they say, okay, you're good to go.
Go ahead.
You can now sell those products.
Okay?
So this has happened to us many times.
Never had a problem.
Why?
Because we test our products first.
That's why.
And very few companies do that.
So occasionally, the FDA, in this kind of spot inspection, they will find crazy stuff out there.
They'll find high mercury in usually cosmetics, or they'll discover E. coli in somebody's peanut butter products.
Or in this case, they found high pesticide levels So what's the takeaway from this?
So number one, USDA organic, even though I support organic foods, did you know that the organic certification does not require pesticide testing of the final product?
Whoa, there's a Shazam moment for everybody.
What do you mean?
You mean if it's certified organic, you don't have to test it for pesticides?
Nope, you don't.
Because organic certification is an auditing and a certification of a process, not an end product.
The process prohibits synthetic pesticides from being sprayed on crops.
But the end product is never tested, not required to be tested in order to qualify for USDA organic.
And that's how this tea product was able to slip through with high pesticide levels.
They don't even say how high it is, by the way.
It's probably crazy high.
To be recalled by the FDA for high pesticide levels, it's got to be like super crazy high.
I don't know which pesticide they're even talking about here.
They don't say.
Maybe it's a combination of pesticides.
Maybe they really mean an herbicide.
Because some people use those terms interchangeably.
Maybe it's some organophosphate pesticide or who knows what.
But it's apparently there at crazy levels.
So USDA organic, even though it's a valuable program in some ways, it's not enough.
And that's why we, at our online store, healthrangerstore.com, we don't trust Something that's just organic.
We test it on top of that.
We test everything.
We test all the raw materials, we test our products, and we even test third-party products, and we just don't offer anything that fails our tests, which are very stringent.
And of course, we also test for heavy metals.
Now, the other thing to realize is that this product is certified, non-GMO project, well, verified.
Non-GMO project is also, I think, a positive project out there, but you should also know that it does not require any kind of testing for herbicides that are used on GMOs, such as glyphosate.
So you notice that it doesn't claim that it's glyphosate-free or atrazine-free or even that it's been tested for anything like that.
It just says it's caffeine-free.
Okay, but what about the other stuff?
So USDA Organic and Non-GMO Project Verified, these are very popular labels on a lot of food items, but they do not guarantee that those items are safe.
In fact, this FDA recall would not have been initiated unless the product was considered unsafe for human consumption.
This is exactly what the recall means, is that the FDA considers it to be unsafe for human consumption.
And by the way, this company is known as EastWest Tea Company out of Eugene, Oregon, with its brand Yogi Echinacea Immune Support.
Now, again, I'm not casting blame upon this company, Although perhaps this would be a great time for the company to begin testing its products before it puts them on the shelf, right?
I mean, this is kind of a wake-up call, isn't it?
Because when you buy raw tea, you know, dried tea leaves...
You're usually buying them from places like India or China or sometimes Mexico or Turkey or places like that.
But most of it comes from India and China.
I would say the vast majority.
How do you know that it's really organic if it's coming out of China or even India?
But China is sort of infamous for counterfeit organic documentation.
The stories I could tell you would blow your mind.
And this is why we don't trust any suppliers, even in North America or Europe, although the European suppliers tend to be the most trustworthy, by the way, even cleaner than North America.
But I don't trust anything coming out of China because I've seen too many cases of counterfeit documentation.
Well, if you're a company selling a product...
And you trust your suppliers because they sent you a PDF that looks good.
Oh, look, it's all organic.
Oh, look, we tested this pesticide and that pesticide.
Look, it's all not detected, not detected, not detected, row after row after row, not detected.
And you're like, oh, that's good.
We'll just trust them.
Let's just ship a million teabags to customers all across America.
If you do that, you're going to get burned sooner or later, just like this Yogi brand just got burned.
Because sooner or later, there's going to be something that shows up in your product because you didn't do the testing.
And by the way, even if you do test, as we test, there's always some possibility of something else in there that you didn't test for.
Because you can't test for everything.
You know, how many molecules are there?
This is billions of different molecules.
So you can't test for all billions of molecules.
So you try to test for the most common things and then you develop trust relationships with suppliers, but you always verify that with more testing.
That's what we do.
Doesn't mean that everything's going to be 100% perfect all the time.
But we have that layer of defense that we do the testing and our suppliers know that we do the testing so our suppliers do not try to pull the wool over our eyes because they know we're going to reject a lot and we've done that before.
We've had them send us a lot That we put on the PO, it has to pass these stringent test requirements in order for us to accept the lot.
And then they'll send us a lot, like a dirty, polluted lot of turmeric powder, for example.
And then we test it, oh, high lead, guess what?
It's out of spec.
Do you want us to ship it back?
You know, you want us to dispose of this?
What do you want us to do?
We're not paying for it.
That's the way we work with vendors, which is also why some vendors won't sell us their product because they sell contaminated products to everybody else.
I mean, seriously, there's a lot of dirty laundry in this industry as well as many other industries.
But if you're not doing the testing, you're going to get burnt.
And this company, the Yogi brand, just got burned.
So they're eating massive distribution losses.
And, you know, who knows what else?
I don't know.
They could face lawsuits from consumers who say, you know, oh my God, I thought your tea was super clean and it's USDA organic, but it was contaminated with pesticides.
They could absolutely face lawsuits for that.
And then the question is going to be, well, where's your documentation?
Start tracing origins of this and show me all your certificates and all the way back through the supply chain.
And if you can't show that documentation that you engaged in due diligence as a manufacturer, you're screwed in a court of law.
You're screwed.
You might as well just start offering settlements at that point because you have to be rigorous about this process.
I'm not saying that that brand wasn't rigorous.
Perhaps they were.
I don't know.
But across the board in the food industry, if you're not rigorous and if you're not doing testing, you're going to get burned sooner or later.
This is why we test also for things like aflatoxins for all the nuts and seeds.
And we test atrazine levels for certain products, and we're also about to roll out dioxin testing for any animal-derived products such as cream powder, cheese powder, whey protein, things like that.
And let me tell you, Nobody in the industry that I've ever heard of does dioxin testing.
And almost nobody even does pesticide testing.
A few companies will do heavy metals testing.
But aflatoxin testing is not very common either.
Nobody's doing dioxin testing.
And now I know why, because it's incredibly difficult.
We're having to buy a lot of special, well, sample prep cleanup equipment.
And one of the things is lipid removal in the sample cleanup.
And did you know that one lipid removal cartridge for one sample, and you can only use it one time, costs $70?
So you're going to burn up a $70 cartridge to clean up one sample.
That doesn't even count the instrument, which in this case we use a gas chromatography triple quad mass spec.
So you've got to have the GC instrument, which is a few hundred thousand dollars, and then you've got to have all the nitrogen supply and the helium supply and the electrical supply, and then you've got to do your sample prep.
So you have to have a pressurized heat extraction system, a sample cleanup system, an evaporator system, and all the other equipment, the pipettes and the fume hoods and everything that goes with it.
And you also have to know what you're doing.
You have to know how to use the software, how to read the peaks, how to discern, you know, all the different versions of so-called dioxins, because it's not just one molecule.
It's a bunch of them.
It's a whole spectrum of dioxins.
I mean, no wonder nobody does it.
It's expensive and it's difficult.
But I mean, I like to take on difficult challenges, and I'm a big fan of clean food and clean supplements.
So if you want the most heavily scrutinized, cleanest food supplements and personal care products in the world, bar none, that's our online store, healthrangerstore.com.
I guarantee that there's nobody on this planet that does as much rigorous mass spec testing on their products as we do on ours.
Nobody even comes close.
In fact, vendors even freak out when they hear about what we do sometimes.
Sometimes we're about to carry a third-party product, and we explain to them.
In fact, recently I had Daniel Vitalis on as a guest.
He's from the Surthrival company, and we carry their Elk Antler product, which I think is out of stock at the moment, by the way.
Probably is.
And he told me in the interview, you may have seen it, he said...
So your team, I couldn't believe all the detailed questions they asked me and all the documents they required and then all the testing that you did and how it caused this delay during all the testing and everything.
But you could hear it straight from Daniel Vitalis that we do more rigorous testing and scrutinizing of the supply chain than anybody else that anybody knows in this industry.
At least that I've ever heard of.
If anybody's doing more testing than we are, tell me about them, because I would love to have a conversation with them.
Maybe we could share some notes on some methods or something.
But I've never heard of anybody doing anything even close to what we do.
Anyway, the bottom line is, USDA organic is not enough.
A product that's certified organic can still be heavily contaminated with pesticides and herbicides.
Exactly what just happened here.
And also, non-GMO project verified...
Although valuable is not enough either, it doesn't guarantee that the product is clean.
And that's, most consumers, they look at these labels, especially USDA Organic, they think, oh, it's organic, it must be clean.
No, no, no, no, no, nothing of the kind.
It's certified without any testing.
Most organic products are never tested for heavy metals or pesticides or herbicides or anything of the kind.
So, important knowledge when you're shopping for food.
Just because it says organic doesn't necessarily mean it's clean.
But then again, it is better than buying non-organic because if it's non-organic, you can be certain it's not clean.
You are absolutely eating pesticides and probably herbicide residue and who knows what else.
So if you're buying conventional food, yeah, you're getting poisoned with every bite.
No question about it.
If you're buying organic, you're probably better off in most cases, but not all cases.
And then if you buy organic and laboratory tested, well, that's the best that you can get.
Still not 100%, by the way.
There could be sneaky molecules that That aren't tested, right?
But it's better than organic and it's better than conventional by far.
And one other point here, there's also deliberate sabotage happening in the food industry.
Do you recall the FDA recall a couple months back that they said that this cinnamon applesauce packs for children were being sold at these dollar type stores.
And they found crazy levels of lead.
I'm remembering it was either 5000 parts per million or I think they said 8000 parts per million in one of the samples of lead in a children's applesauce product with cinnamon in it.
Now, that's beyond insane.
We wouldn't sell a product that even had one part per million lead in it.
That's too much.
These had 5,000 parts per million lead to be consumed by children who of course suffer neurological developmental retardation in the presence of lead.
So lead causes mental retardation in children, right?
And to some degree in adults as well, but especially in developing young brains, lead is incredibly toxic.
And this is one of the reasons that lead paint was phased out over the years, because children would eat the paint flex.
And by the way, you know why children would eat paint?
Because the paint tasted good to them because they were mineral deficient, by the way.
A lot of people don't even realize that.
You're like, why would kids eat paint?
Because they're missing key minerals because they're living on processed food, by the way.
And the body may be missing very important macro minerals like magnesium or even some trace minerals like, I don't know, chromium or maybe a little bit of copper or zinc.
The child brain tells the child, run around and sample everything with your tongue instrument, a little mass speck in your mouth, and see if you can find something that tastes good.
And so kids, they eat everything.
They sample everything.
They put it in their mouths, right?
And so they're eating paint because it actually tastes good to them.
Again, that's what happens when you raise babies on infant formula that's made mostly with high fructose corn syrup and milk protein and just sugars and milk protein.
That's mostly infant formula, by the way.
I don't mean to get off on a tangent, but if you feed your kid correctly, your kid won't eat paint, it turns out.
But anyway, they phased out lead paint because the kids were snacking on it and was causing mental retardation.
Which explains most of the United States Senate today.
No, on a serious note.
Or the President at the moment.
No, on a serious note, there is food sabotage taking place.
Somebody is running around dumping lead into products that are being sold to children across America.
I don't know who's doing it.
Might be an overseas operation.
I don't know where those cinnamon applesauce packages came from, but I do know that turmeric comes from countries, many of them in Southeast Asia, where they use a form of lead during the peeling of the skin off the turmeric root.
There's some kind of like a lead powder that helps with the peeling somehow in this sort of manual machine that they use because this happens in a lot of poorly developed countries.
They grow a lot of turmeric.
They toss some lead powder into this giant hand-cranked spinning vat machine and it takes the peeling off the turmeric and it leaves a more orange-colored turmeric root because lead has kind of a It has kind of a reddish, orangish color in certain chemistry.
So it makes the turmeric look more orange.
And then they dry that and they powder that and it makes a really nice orange turmeric root powder that's crazy high in lead.
Yes, this is true.
And then that gets imported into the United States and nobody tests it.
And also it gets exported to countries in the Middle East and everywhere, because people eat turmeric everywhere.
Everybody likes curry, it seems.
So people are sucking down lead like crazy, not realizing that it's being added to the food processing steps for drying the turmeric.
Like, seriously.
But then on top of that, somebody's dropping lead into the cinnamon applesauce.
Now, lead is easy to spot.
I mean, if you have the right instruments, it's not a tricky thing to see.
I would say that the heavy metals or elemental analysis mass spec instruments that we have, the ICP-MS, those are actually the easiest methods that we run.
They're very precise.
Whereas liquid chromatography mass spec and gas chromatography, it's a little more wishy-washy.
It's like plus or minus 30%, 40%.
And the peaks shift around, you know, it's hard to nail down, but lead is easy to see, easy to get accurate numbers, easy to nail down, and it's a pretty short run.
I think we have our instrument set up, it's like two and a half minutes per sample for a full spectrum analysis of many different elements, not just lead.
But also nutritive elements as well.
We test for zinc and copper and magnesium and others.
But also toxic elements such as cadmium and of course mercury and arsenic as well.
So all that takes only like two and a half minutes per sample.
Once you get it set up and running, you've completed your calibration runs.
So I don't know why more people don't test for heavy metals.
It's relatively easy to do.
I mean, yeah, you do need to work with nitric acid, which is nasty stuff.
You do need a fume hood.
You do need safety precautions.
You need to vent your fume hood, obviously.
But it can be done.
I just think...
I wish more companies did this, because who knows what's slipping through the cracks here.
You know, the FDA issues these alerts.
Like, whoa, crazy lead in children's applesauce, or crazy pesticides in the yogi tea...
Or, you know, E. coli in the peanut butter.
And what do they not catch?
See, there's a question for you, because I would imagine there's all kinds of things they don't catch.
So wherever you get your food, your herbs, your supplements, get it from trustworthy sources.
Not sketchy, super sketchy sources.
Like, where is this from?
It could be China.
It could be Bangladesh.
It could be...
We don't know.
Well, is it real?
Is this real turmeric root?
Oh, it's real!
Look how orange it is!
Yeah, see?
All right.
Anyway, thank you for all your support over the years, enabling us to run our mass spec laboratory, which we have been running now for...
I think it's over...
I think it's 11 years now since we acquired our first mass spec.
Yeah, it is 11 years.
I think we started it in 2013 because...
One of the mass spec instruments that we bought, the very first one, is no longer serviceable by the manufacturer because they phase it out.
But don't worry, we have a newer version of it anyway.
And we just have the old one as a backup.
But yeah, it's been over 10 years.
So thank you for all your support.
When you shop with us at HealthRangerStore.com, not only do you get laboratory tested, ultra clean food and supplements, personal care products, we even have laundry detergent back in stock.
Not very much, by the way.
But we've got body soap.
Everything is completely free of artificial fragrances.
We don't use any of that garbage.
We don't use crazy toxic solvents or whitening agents or anything like that.
We have environmentally friendly In everything that we have, including automatic dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent, body soap, and we're trying to get our toothpaste back online, having some supply chain problems there, but I'll let you know when we have things that are back in stock.
In fact, I did film in the studio today an update on what is back in stock right now.
So check out this ad that I filmed earlier, and it'll tell you what we have in stock right now.
Or just go online at healthbrangerstore.com, and you can shop there.
And know that when you shop with us, we reinvest into expanding our lab, more testing, such as dioxins.
And we're also using it to build the infrastructure of human freedom, such as our brighteon.ai project, which is a free, non-commercial, downloadable language model that you can use as a local chatbot to ask questions about food and nutrition and gardening and permaculture and things like that.
So check that out at brighteon.ai.
I'm Mike Adams.
Thank you for listening.
Take care.
We've got several high-demand products that are finally back in stock at our online store, healthrangerstore.com.
Let me show a few of these.
We've got pea protein back in stock.
That's the only protein that we have in stock currently.
It's very difficult in the supply chain right now, but we've got pea protein back in stock, all laboratory tested, of course, certified organic.
We have our golden milk drink mix, which has turmeric and ginger.
It's absolutely delicious, has amazing support for your health.
Check that out, golden milk.
The blueberry vanilla pancake mix is back in stock with, of course, real blueberries, not artificial.
We have the pine needle nasal spray back in stock and Manuka honey.
And on top of that, and by the way, that Manuka honey is laboratory certified and it's from Australia.
We've also got laundry detergent back in stock.
And that's not going to last very long because, of course, we have laundry detergent that has no synthetic fragrances, no harsh chemicals, and yet it still works.
It's very clean.
It's good for the environment as well as good for your own health, and it's good to have it on your skin in terms of washing your clothes in it.
So it won't last long.
I think we only have fewer than 1,000 units in stock.
I'm telling you, the supply chains are difficult to work with these days.
So when we get these products back in stock, we usually don't have the quantity that we want, and they sell out pretty quickly.
So check all this out at healthrangerstore.com, plus many other products that will benefit your health and your life.
If you go to healthrangerstore.com, you'll see some of what we have, like this collagen peptide chocolate coconut drink mix.
It's very delicious.
We're getting a lot of rave reviews about that.
We have organic bee pollen, as you can see, the mini bucket of organic blueberry vanilla pancake mix, it's excellent storable food, and many other items here.
Just go to our store, healthrangerstore.com, check them out, and remember that every purchase helps support our efforts To bring you intriguing interviews and information as well as helping us build the infrastructure of human freedom through the free tools like Brighteon.ai and Brighteon.io.
Free tools that we're giving back to you in order to exercise your free speech and preserve human knowledge through our AI language model projects that are non-commercial, free of charge, open source.
Those are available at Brighteon.ai.
And all of it is funded by your support of our store, healthrangerstore.com.
I'm Mike Adams of Health Ranger.
Thank you for your support.
Take care.
A global reset is coming.
And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audio book.
It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide.
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