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March 4, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
25:09
There's no such thing as foods "TESTING POSITIVE" for heavy metals
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Welcome to the Health Ranger Report with Mike Adams, the Health Ranger!
A special report here, kind of pushing back against some of the clean foods activism that I've seen.
And I'm not going to name names.
I'm not here to embarrass anybody.
But there's some really bad science that's being done.
Very click-baity.
Very much not honest.
And it appears like you'll see a tweet or a headline that says, This food product, you know, tested positive for lead.
It tested positive for glyphosate.
It tested positive for aluminum.
It tested positive for cadmium.
And then, you know, the average person's like, oh my god!
That's crazy!
It must be so dirty.
Alright.
So I'm here to tell you, as a published food scientist and owner of a massive mass-spec laboratory that conducts tens of thousands of food science tests every year, I'm here to tell you...
That those headlines are complete BS. And I'm also here to tell you that literally every food, every, every, every food, without exception, tests positive for toxic elements, toxic metals.
Every food contains at least one atom of lead.
Every food item contains at least one atom of aluminum.
Every food item also contains at least one molecule of glyphosate.
So in other words, everything, including all organic foods, all herbs, everything will test positive for lead and aluminum and cadmium and glyphosate.
And why is that?
Well, because today's instruments are very sensitive.
You know, I've got multiple mass spec instruments in my laboratory.
And they're capable of, you know, sub parts per billion concentration detection.
In some cases, just a semi-quant when you get below one part per billion.
So we're talking like high parts per trillion detection.
In fact, there's something in analytical science when you are an ISO-credited laboratory, you have to determine what's called the LOD or limit of detection for your target analyte, which would be, let's say, lead or mercury or whatever.
So you have to determine an LOD and you have to determine an LOQ. LOQ is a limit of quantitation, and LOD is limit of detection, and limit of detection is always smaller than the LOQ. And for limit of detection, you can go down really low, and you can say, hey, we've detected it, but we can't tell you with a lot of accuracy exactly how much.
That's called detection, or a non-quantitative answer.
And that answer, again, can be parts per trillion.
And typically, by the way, in instruments like, let's say, triple-quad LC-MS instruments, you can do that with a signal-to-noise ratio of about 3 to 1, which is not much of a signal.
It's like the background noise is all there, like imagine zigzags up and down on the screen because that's what they look like.
And then there's one peak that's just three times higher than the noise zigzags, okay?
And that might be like 50 parts per trillion of something.
But you don't know for sure because you can detect it, but you can't quant it.
It's just too small.
However, I could put out a press release and I could say, oh, you know, Rice Krispies cereal tests positive for glyphosate.
And such a statement is meaningless.
It doesn't mean anything.
Because everything tests positive for glyphosate if you have a sensitive enough instrument.
So I want to say to...
The people who are doing this, the grassroots activist groups or individuals that are doing this, I want to say, look, I honor your activism, I honor your passion about clean food, but please stop doing this.
You are misleading people, and it's clickbaity, and from a scientific perspective, it doesn't hold any water at all.
And this should not represent the clean foods movement, in my opinion, and I'm one of the...
Old guard pioneers of the clean food movement.
And I'm here telling you, don't believe those claims.
Because, again, they don't mean anything.
Alright?
So, what does mean something?
Well, quantitation levels or concentrations.
So, if you know how many, and typically that's described as parts per million, PPM, or parts per billion, PPB, and remember that one part per billion is one one-thousandth of a part per million, And then if you get smaller than that, it's a part per trillion, which is one one-thousandth of a part per billion, right?
Because, you know, it's the metric system, and we're dealing with orders of magnitude of threes here, like 10 to, you know, the minus 3, minus 6, minus 9, minus 12, minus 15, right?
That's how you go through it.
You go micrograms, nanograms, picograms, femtograms, etc.
You get into the femtogram range, and I can...
If I have an instrument that's sensitive enough, I can say that everything tests positive for everything.
Like, literally, everything tests positive for everything.
Because there's a little bit of everything in everything else, it turns out.
It's not even new-agey to say that.
It's actually science.
Because molecules, they have a way of, you know, dispersing.
So somebody's glyphosate over in that field ends up over in this field, and, you know, somebody's dioxins from a house fire.
Got spread by the wind and ends up over there, and then there was a forest fire where mercury went into the atmosphere, and so there are mercury atoms in the lettuce, you know, or in the cheese, because the cows ate the mercury-laced grass that had a part per billion, and now it got bioaccumulated.
Now it's a part per million, maybe, or maybe it started at a part per trillion.
Who knows?
But whatever.
Yeah, there's a little bit.
I mean, there's mercury in fish.
You can't find fish without mercury in it.
I don't care if you're talking about wild-caught fish.
All wild-caught fish has some level of mercury in it.
Is that a problem?
No!
It's not a problem.
I mean, here I am.
I'm the health ranger.
I'm telling you, you do not need to freak out over trace, like, really tiny, crazy low levels of all these things.
I've had people flip out over, like, one part per billion glyphosate in beer.
Now, I'm not a beer drinker, so I don't drink glyphosate in the form of beer.
But I'm sure I get some level of glyphosate, part per billion, probably, yeah, in other things.
Legumes in particular.
Sometimes oats.
Sometimes wheat.
Depends on the season and the crop and the farmer, etc.
There's a certain amount of glyphosate that I've got in my body and I eat clean.
There's a certain amount of lead in herbs.
I use cinnamon herbs.
I take traditional Chinese medicine.
And believe me, all the Chinese medicine has lead in it.
I'm not saying crazy levels, but there's a trace of lead.
Like, every Chinese medicine formula, frankly, every moringa herb, every cacao herb, every chocolate bar, like, everything has got a little bit of lead in it.
Do I freak out?
No.
What's the answer to this?
Is detox.
Like, just detox as an everyday practice of drinking clean water, you know?
And sweating.
A little bit.
Exercising and sweating and eating fiber, eating fresh fruit.
So you've got natural fruit fiber, which is a natural detoxification of your digestive tract, etc.
And just drinking clean water and urinating out the water, that's a detox.
And exhaling is a natural detox.
So just breathing is a detox.
And sweating is a detox.
So I don't use antiperspirants, you know?
I use a natural deodorant that actually I formulated that we sell at...
HealthRangerStore.com if you want to check out our deodorants, like baking soda based, you know, sodium bicarbonate and magnesium.
That's what it's based on.
But it doesn't stop you from sweating because sweating is a natural detox.
So I don't try to stop sweating.
You see what I'm saying?
I don't fret over trace levels of everything in everything because, number one, you can't control it.
You can't stop it.
There's no such thing as absolutely clean food.
It does not exist.
What we do in our lab is we test to make sure that all the items have lower, the most strict limits.
That's what we have.
We have more strict limits than the EU, than Canada, than Japan, and certainly than the FDA, which doesn't really have very good limits.
And the USDA doesn't have limits on organic foods either, in terms of heavy metals, let's say.
Actually, the USDA doesn't even require testing for pesticides.
Did you know that?
USDA organic, it does mean something, but it doesn't cover everything, and it doesn't require testing.
So how do you know that organic food is actually clean?
Well, you don't.
You really don't, actually, unless you have it tested.
So we test everything, and we have very strict in-house limits, and those limits are the most strict that I've ever seen published in the industry for any kind of food or supplements or superfoods or personal care products.
I mean, in fact, just the other day, There was a big nutritional supplement manufacturer that approached us, and they said, hey, we'd like to take over your nutritional supplements manufacturing.
Just take it off your hands.
We can make everything for you cheaper, and we'll do all the paperwork for you, all the FDA compliance and all this other stuff, and all the lab testing compliance and everything.
And so we're like, well, that's interesting.
We manufacture everything ourselves because we like end-to-end control.
Because we found that outsourcing things leads to shortcuts in quality and problems.
So we decided to at least just have a conversation and find out what they're offering.
So we said, okay, look, here's the way we roll.
These are our limits on metals.
We started with this conversation.
These are our metals limits, and we don't sell anything that is over these limits.
And there's different limits for lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury.
And they immediately came back and said, well, We can't do that.
Nobody has limits that strict in this whole industry.
Nobody does that.
And, you know, my team said, well, but we do that.
That's what we do, and that's what's required to even think about working with you.
You would have to adhere to these limits.
And they said, we can't do that because we can't guarantee that the raw materials that we get will meet your strict requirements.
We just can't do it.
And we're like, okay.
Nice talking to you, you know?
Let me tell you, folks.
Nobody can do what we do.
Or I should say nobody's willing to.
Nobody's willing to have the strict limits that we have.
Which means that almost everything that you buy, especially on Amazon or at Walmart or whatever, just common retailers, that stuff has way more lead in it and cadmium and arsenic and...
Pesticides and glyphosate.
Way more of that stuff on average compared to anything that we sell because we do the testing and we reject lots that are high in these substances, obviously.
We reject the lots.
Well, somebody else buys those same lots and then they make a bottle of supplements that's sold on Amazon.
Amazon doesn't care.
They don't have the strict limits that we have.
Do they have any limits at all?
I don't know that they have any limits.
Do you know that the industry standard For heavy metals limits is 10 parts per million total metals, which means that you could have like 9 parts per million mercury, which would be insanely toxic, like red alert time, like brain damage.
Seriously.
If you ate something that was 9 parts per million mercury, you would be poisoned.
But that's legal under the FDA and under the USDA and under Amazon.com.
Did you know that?
Totally legal.
So, look.
Here's my wisdom and experience in this space.
You should be not freaked out about trace levels or somebody saying, oh, it tested positive for lead.
Again, that's deceptive.
It's just deceptive.
It doesn't mean anything.
Don't be concerned about that.
Your question should be, if somebody says, oh, it tested positive for lead, you should ask, well, how much lead?
Oh, well, well, you know, this and that.
Oh, 0.5 parts per billion.
Oh, so basically nothing.
It's like, so nothing.
Like, how much lead?
How much lead is a problem, in my view?
Well, I wouldn't want to eat anything over one part per million lead.
That's a thousand parts per billion.
But some of these groups are freaking out over one part per billion lead.
Thousand times lower.
That's just crazy.
I don't fret about a few parts per billion of lead or cadmium or arsenic or whatever because the body can get rid of that and the body does get rid of that.
But I'm not licking lead pipes, you see what I'm saying?
Because those are like 80% lead or something, you know?
That's like, what would that be?
800,000 parts per million, you know?
It's like, no!
Let's not...
Lick, Dad.
Let's not eat lead paint.
Let's not just lick and swallow lead.
But a couple parts per billion, don't freak out.
Don't lose your mind over it.
Don't panic.
There are way more important things to freak out about if you want to have a freakout.
Freak out over 10 parts per million mercury.
Freak out over crazy high glyphosate levels in things that do exist from time to time.
But the rule of thumb here is that processed food Heavily processed food, and trust me, I've tested tens of thousands of samples, heavily processed food, like cookies and crackers and cereals and whatever, they never have heavy metals in them at any level that's concerning.
You know why?
Because they've been stripped of everything, all minerals.
They also don't have much magnesium, they don't have much, you know, copper and zinc and selenium, whatever, trace minerals of any kind.
So they lack heavy metals and they lack nutritive minerals, both.
They're just empty carbohydrates.
So if you show me, hey Mike, here's a bag of flour.
You know, white flour.
White bleached flour.
I want you to take this to your lab and test it.
I can tell you.
I don't even have to test it.
I can tell you it doesn't have lead in it.
Because I've tested that like a thousand times.
And unless somebody like dropped lead nuggets into the bag, there's no lead in there.
I mean, not enough to be worried about.
Probably wouldn't even find one part per billion.
Why?
Because it's so heavily processed.
I mean, look, the bottom line is we all have a certain amount of freak-out bandwidth that we can handle.
You can freak out about some things, but not everything.
If you freak out about everything, you just lose your mind.
You need to preserve your freak-outs where it's justifying.
So don't waste a freak-out on crazy low levels of lead in cookies or something.
That's a wasted freak-out.
You should save your freak-outs for something more freak-out-worthy.
See what I'm saying?
You can only handle a certain amount of this.
You know, your neurology has a certain freak-out bandwidth.
So use your freak-outs wisely.
Save them up for legit freak-outs.
It's like, what?
That's grown in sewage?
You know, like, that's happening.
And if you knew what was in the bio-sludge sewage, like, did you know, for example, that all the animal carcass processing facilities, you know, they're like washing all the animal blood and...
And all the viruses, bacteria, whatever, they're washing all that down the drain, right?
And feces and everything, right?
That goes down the drain.
It goes into the municipal water system of the city.
And then that gets collected.
And then that gets dumped on farms as free fertilizer.
It's called biosludge.
Or, no, what do they call it?
Biosolids, yeah.
But it's also human feces.
And everything that people flush down the toilet, hygiene, products, and after whatever, and just every nasty thing that you can think of that people flush, plus all the animal parts and everything, and the blood and guts and poop goes down the drain.
That gets put on farms and orchards.
Yeah.
Now, you can't legally do that on organic farms.
So there's a reason to buy organic.
Like, hey, I don't want my broccoli grown in shit.
Yeah, that's a good reason.
See, save your freakouts for things that count.
And in some cities, by the way, they can liquefy human bodies.
This is actually legal in, I think, 21 states now.
You can liquefy dead humans, and they use a very alkaline, like a lye mixture.
They have a vat, and they liquefy the human, the dead person, and then they flush them down the drain, okay?
And then that, again, gets collected, goes into the dump trucks, and gets spread on the orchards and the farms.
And food gets grown in dead human sludge!
That's true!
That's freak-out worthy.
You should be freaking out about that.
Don't freak out about one part per billion lead in your crackers or whatever.
You should freak out about the fact that, I don't know, your pear orchard is grown in, like...
Recycled human skin sludge, or whatever that stuff is.
What was the name I came up with for the liquefied humans that they flushed down?
Oh, it was like skin goo or something.
I forgot the name.
It's sick.
So save your freakouts for things that matter.
And don't eat food grown in feces, by the way.
I mean, especially I'm saying like municipal feces, like if you want to scrape up your own local goat poo and, you know, shovel that into the grass around the orchard, whatever, that's perfectly clean.
I mean, relatively speaking, I'm talking about don't use the city's sewage sludge with the biomass, you know, human goo that they put in there.
You should freak out about that.
So there you go.
Save your freakouts for where it matters.
And if you want really clean food, by the way, shop at our store, healthrangerstore.com.
I just described all the testing that we go through.
It's extensive and it's expensive.
And our lab is ISO 17025 accredited, which means it's inspected and audited.
And our facility is FDA inspected.
And they just did another surprise inspection not long ago.
And they were just totally impressed with all the...
All the documentation that we have.
It's like, wow.
I think the FDA has given us a lot of special attention.
In fact, I may tell a more detailed story later about some of the interesting things that happened before Trump got elected.
But it's clear we've been on their radar, but they just can't find any reason to shut us down.
Every time they show up, they're just blown away by all the records we have and everything.
And it's like, wow, you guys really run a clean operation.
Like, yep, because we're all about clean foods and stuff.
I mean, you know, what are you going to say?
I mean, and it is expensive.
I mean, just in the new lab that we're building, I would probably spend $40,000 to $50,000 just on epoxy for the floor.
Just to have epoxy flooring that is non-porous and that resists.
Everything from scuffing and acids and food spills and stains and everything.
Imagine spending like 50 grand on just a coating for the floor.
But that's what it costs.
That's what it costs to run a lab where every instrument costs as much as a house.
Like, for real.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars per instrument.
That's what it is.
Anyway, shop with us at healthrangerstore.com and please...
All of you listening who are in the clean foods movement, please just join me and just if anybody out there says, oh, it tested positive for lead, please tell them.
That doesn't mean anything.
That's not really honest.
It's misleading people.
It's clickbait.
It doesn't mean anything.
If you're going to talk about lead in foods, talk about the concentrations and know what those concentrations mean because a couple of parts per billion doesn't mean anything.
Not for lead.
Now, for dioxins, it would mean.
That's a big deal for dioxins, by the way.
See, there's different levels of toxicity for different substances, obviously.
And also, mercury is way more toxic than lead, so mercury becomes toxic at much smaller concentrations than does lead.
But anyway, it'd take me hours to go through all the science of all of it and all the different factors.
Just generally, for metals, a few parts per billion doesn't mean anything.
Nothing at all.
So don't freak out about it.
All right, thank you for listening.
Again, Mike Adams here, the Health Ranger.
You can follow my news and articles at naturalnews.com or shop with us at healthrangerstore.com.
Take care.
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I'm Mike Adams, The Health Ranger.
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