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Nov. 14, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
58:03
Élan M. Sudberg on Botanical Truth: Inside the World of Authentic Supplements & Lab Testing
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Oh, it's mind-blowing.
You know, I think cannabis and a lot of other plants should be legal.
I'll just give an example.
It's a product that is sold every day that is known to cause cancer.
It's called cigarettes.
But even like modern cigarettes are not tobacco.
You take a modern cigarette, you chop it up, you put it under the microscope, that is not a plant powder.
That is not a tobacco leaf.
That is a chemical slurry that's been dried and sliced thin, yet it's still sold.
Meanwhile, they're trying to take cannabis away at the same time.
It's not political.
I don't know what it is.
It's not about health and safety.
Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Micah Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And as you know, I'm very passionate about clean food.
It's really, it's been a 25-year passion of mine to study clean food.
And that's why we built a laboratory.
And we're actually about to move into our new lab.
I've shown you videos of that.
And, you know, we believe in testing for food and finding out who's selling actual clean lots.
And we've made a lot of friends in the industry.
We've made some enemies in the industry by calling out their garbage.
But one of the friends that we've made over the years is our guest today.
It's just an extraordinary man.
It's Elon from Alchemist Labs.
And Elon Sudberg is his name.
Did I get your last name correct there?
Perfect.
Okay.
All right.
Because I've just known you all these years as just Elon.
I've never formally introduced you, but Elon, welcome to the show today.
It's great to have you on.
Thank you so much for the opportunity.
I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
It's just so important to have you here.
Let me give out your website here right now.
It's Alchemist Labs, but Alchemist is spelled with a K. If we can show that on screen here at some point, that'd be awesome.
And Alchemist Labs is the leader in Western civilization for botanical identification, among other things.
Can you give us just a quick background of what Alchemist offers?
Sure.
So we are a plant-fungal identity potency and contamination lab.
So we can make sure your nutraceutical products that contain any botanical or any mushroom that's grown under the sun or in the ocean is what you think it is, has the quantity of things in it and is safe and free from improper or illegal levels of contaminants like heavy metals, pestites, residuals, microbiology.
That's great.
Wow.
That's a very compact explanation.
And so just to our audience, what we do, we do all of our own in-house testing on things like heavy metals and glyphosate and many, many other things, microbiology as well.
And then we work with your company for many additional tests, such as botanical identification testing.
And so I love the fact that you're willing to work with us hand in hand.
We do what we do and then you do what you do.
And the result is clean, honest food and botanical products.
But tell us, Elon, why is this even necessary?
Because there isn't anybody in the world that would fake a botanical, is there?
No, we started almost 30 years ago and we were self-described.
Our industry was subscribed to the Wild, Wild West.
Alternative medicine was really the original medicine.
It became alternative when allopathic showed up.
But the fact is, plants are complicated and nuanced, even promiscuous, and it is possible to adulterate things.
And that's been going on for a long, long time throughout the history of this industry.
I will state that it's getting better every single day with every single test that we do and with brands like yourselves who do it internally so that bad products, bad forms, adulterated products, aren't allowed to seep into the industry for consumers.
That's well said.
And what a lot of people don't realize is that often the cheapest, lowest price product that you might find on even on Amazon until recently, we'll talk about what Amazon has done differently now, but especially leading up until the recent times, you know, a lot of it was just counterfeit stuff, wasn't it?
They had very little guardrails in the past, and those guardos are being constantly upgraded and made better.
I believe still work to do, though.
Are you aware of what Amazon has announced in the last six months?
Do you want to comment on that?
Because I actually like what they're doing.
But what are your thoughts?
I hope I'm accurate.
I know that they've really focused in on several categories, you know, categories in trouble with sports supplements, supplements, weight loss, sexual enhancements.
I know they're either looking into the fish oil category or have already and basically diving deep into those categories and requiring, finally, requiring them to be tested by a series of outside labs.
And I think that they're constantly evolving.
You know, if your contacts is someone at Amazon today, they won't be the same person in three years.
Unfortunately, they do move people around quite often.
So it's a little hard to keep up, but the program is constantly evolving for the better.
And I'm impressed.
I know it's a very complicated situation.
It's so big, perhaps too big to fail in a sense, but they're doing a great job of moving the increasing the bar for quality.
But as I said, I think there's still a lot of work to do.
It is still possible to buy products at Amazon that, well, we would test and probably fail very quickly because it's easy to get things on the platform.
And they are not policing every single category.
Most likely because it's such a massive, massive store.
And that's a big, big job.
Yeah.
In the past, this is a few years ago, we were purchasing products off Amazon and testing them in our lab.
And I remember one in particular that was sold as a probiotic.
It was actually an agricultural product that was just laced with high levels of lead that was repackaged as a human probiotic.
It was actually like a soil probiotic.
It was unbelievably toxic.
And we did a story on it and nobody cared.
Amazon didn't pull it.
Yeah, it's a tough position to be in.
You're an early adopter of the truth, as you know I am.
And we get a lot of things thrown at us as a result, unfortunately.
But like I said, I think they're doing a better job these days than they were in the past to improve that platform.
In fact, when it first started, you can just self anything you wanted.
And it still blows my mind.
I've been doing this for more than 30 years, blows my mind with the kind of stuff that we will occasionally see that so easy to avoid by very simple testing.
And it's still out for sale.
Yeah, absolutely.
I can show your website now.
It's Alchemist, A-L-K-E-M-I-S-T, and that's Alchemist Labs.
Here it is.
Here's the site for those of you out there who want to use Alchemist and Analytical Testing Lab and so on.
And you use, I think, I know you use multiple methods, but one of them is thin film chromatography, I believe, for identification of the phyto constituents, correct?
Correct.
So HPTLC is basically looking at a fingerprint of phytochemicals to decipher the identity of a plant and differentiate from species.
And also important is plant parts.
Genetics testing showed up.
It's not new technology, but it showed up as a new platform in our industry pretty recently, but it fails to identify plant parts, which is pretty critical.
What it also fails to do is identify the quality.
Quality can be inferred by the bands we find in these bands as in the phytochemical profile in these plants and fungus and extracts from four crop forms.
Genetics is purely identity.
So I use the example: you can buy peach right now out of season.
It is genetically still peach.
It will not taste terrific.
You can go to Augusta, Georgia, and go to farmers market in August and buy a peach, and that'll be almost a religious experience.
Still peach.
One has a taste profile that you seek, the other one does not.
So when you're only looking for identity based off on gene expression, I believe it's a misstep.
So Alcomes believes in sort of the orthogonal testing approach, HPTLC for identity, HPLC for phytochemical or fungal chemical constituent levels.
And then, of course, the contaminants that you've mentioned, making sure you're within the limits of heavy metals, pesticides, microbes, residual solvents, aflatoxins, things like that.
Aflatoxins, glyphosate, yeah, all the list continues.
Yeah.
Well, and we've known each other, I think, for maybe going on 20 years or close to that.
And I want to talk about the science literacy of the health freedom movement, because I remember when I first spoke with you many years ago, I did not know how to convert micrograms into other units.
I didn't even have a lab.
I didn't know how to work within the metric system at that time.
My, how much we've learned since then.
And, you know, both of us, right?
I mean, you're spearheading all this, but there's something that I've seen across the health freedom movement that smacks up of a lack of scientific understanding, which is I see a lot of people saying that, oh, this food tests positive for glyphosate.
And a lot of alarmist type of headlines like that test positive.
And as I've pointed out, that's scientifically meaningless.
It means there's just one molecule detected.
It could be at parts per trillion that is irrelevant.
What do you make of that?
How can we help people have a better understanding of why concentrations matter?
I identify as a marketing guy with a chemistry degree.
So my degree in chemistry was because I wanted to run this lab and that was necessary.
But I've always been a marketing guy.
So I think this industry and probably a lot of industries does an absolute terrible job at marketing the quality story.
And so to your question, how can we raise the bar of awareness or education to the consumers is we talk about quality.
We share our quality stories.
I think lab testing is sexy.
Not a lot of people share that sentiment as I do, but I think the people are noticing the consumers are reading labels more than ever before.
They are being influenced by headlines in the mainstream media, which I don't think many people trust anymore, but also influencers on social media, which maybe people don't trust anymore.
And it's up to the brands to do a better job at having information about what goes into the product, where it was grown.
But don't stop there with your agricultural practices of regenerative agriculture.
Talk about the testing, the lab testing, share results.
Why not?
You spent the money.
I mean, I know you have internal labs doing your work for your brands.
And I know you know how expensive that is.
A lot of brands don't talk about that spend.
And in that communication, they have the opportunity to explain why they have levels of what they do and what's acceptable, what's not.
Headlines might like to make excitement over things like, oh, they found glyphosate, but like you said, how much?
And I think that's an opportunity for education of the consumers by talking about it at the brand level.
Yeah, absolutely.
I completely agree with what you just said.
But part of the challenge in that is that, you know, in America, we don't typically use the metric system.
And right.
And so, but in the lab world, that's all we do, right?
Because otherwise you'd go insane trying to run math all day.
Right.
But the typical consumer, you say, oh, a part per million, part per billion, part per trillion, you know, micrograms per milliliters or whatever.
But none of it sticks.
It's just like, is it in it or is it not in it?
You know, is it in there?
And it's just like, well, there's more to this story because nothing is completely clean, right?
Can we both confirm, like nothing is completely free of contaminants?
We don't use the word nothing in the lab.
We say limits of detection per the equipment and the methods deployed.
So it's not, we'll never say zero discovered.
It's always, you know, we didn't discover any per the limit of detection or limit of quantitation by the by instrumentation and the method.
Right.
The consumers don't understand that.
And they may never, and that's, that's okay.
But I think that same issue goes to formulation.
There's a phrase that is used in our industry called fairy dusting.
So a lot of brands will just throw in the hot ingredient at low, low doses just because they want it on the label.
But is it clinically effective or is it clinically at a clinical, I'm missing a word here, but is it at a dose level that actually is meaningful?
And there's brands out there that don't care about that.
They're basically marketing brands that sell a thing.
And that's another thing that companies can do a better job at in our industry to talk about why their formula is formulated as such and why it doesn't have, you know, raspberry ketones showed up on the market and everyone threw that in their product at levels that were not discoverable by labs like us.
One, maybe they weren't there.
And two, if they were, they were in such levels that were undetectable by normal limits of detection.
I think that's also an issue and or an opportunity to expand awareness and education at the consumer level.
Absolutely.
Elon, you're also aware that manufacturers like us, we will receive certifications from vendors or growers.
And of course, we learned early on that you can't trust any of those certifications, right?
Yeah.
I will see things on certificates that are just blatantly not true, or they'll have a certificate from three years ago that they're still using on recently grown crops.
What are some of the problems that you have seen in the supply chain that requires and demands more scrutiny and testing?
Well, it's funny you mentioned that because this goes back to your and my origin story.
You and I met over an ingredient called Houdia, which was a South African succulent.
It takes about six years to grow to maturity.
And it's an endangered species, only grows in South Africa.
And to make it worse, it was said to be a key ingredient in weight loss.
So hot category, endangered species, grows only one spot.
And when we were started testing there, people were selling C of A certificates of analysis showing the quantity of a thing called p57.
It was named that.
I don't even know why.
These phytochemical names usually mean something.
But on top of that, at this point, I'm mid-chemistry degree and I bring a certificate of analysis to my professor.
And the scammers were calling it isoberbar and alkaloid.
Those are three phrases that mean something in organic chemistry, none of which pointed towards the actual molecule of p57, which was a steroidal glycoside.
So to your question and to your point, the C of A's can be sort of defrauded.
And if people aren't asking questions deeper.
So you and I met around Houdia.
We were doing testing just identity and then we were doing phytochemical analysis to measure the p57 and failing so many samples.
And at that point, I actually received two separate death threats.
And the only two I've received my career of almost 30 years doing this, but two separate death threats from vendors who were displeased upon our results for the million dollar of powdered garbage that they were sending and selling customers.
That's fascinating because I did not know that because I also received threats probably from the very same people because we were exposing that they were selling basically ground up leaves.
It was leaves.
It was maltodextrin.
It was, you know, good news is here's the thing.
Our industry is not known for killing people.
We have one of the best safety records of all the FDA categories, including pharma, medical devices, veterinary, cosmetics, and food.
Our little sliver of the pie chart of recalls and serious adverse events is so tiny, it's inconsequential.
But so a lot of the stuff that when we're talking about in this conversation are not things generally that are going to be hurting you.
It's more like fraud.
Now, there's always the cases of the pesticides and heavy metals that are more on the toxic side that I know that you're particularly interested in and care about, which is greatly appreciated.
But for the most part, our industry is very safe.
That's true.
And when we do get defrauded, it's because people dilute things with maltodextrin or they have the wrong plant species or the wrong plant part, usually discovered after being tested with inferior methods by inferior labs.
Well, and to your point, a lot of it is good faith manufacturers who trust the vendors, which is a gullibility that is not justified in this industry.
You have to automatically distrust all the certificates.
Did you want to?
Did you want to?
Yeah, so yeah.
So, yeah.
So, I say what we do as at Authmiz Labs and what I've really put my career on is really transparency in lab testing.
So, when we sell a certificate of analysis, we give the method, we give the chromatograms, we give almost all the information you need to reproduce that test.
And the reason people don't is because they're either doing a bad job and they don't want to expose it, or they're fearful that someone's going to basically replace them and/or their lab.
Like, if we have customers that test with us for about a year or two, they technically have all the methods they need to deploy on their own to do the testing.
And, you know, to date, we've only lost a handful of clients because of that.
So, to your point, these garbage C of A's, you know, I think certificates analysis should contain data.
They should contain chromatographs.
They should contain mobile phases, stationary phases, all these parameters that are necessary in the scientific world to show how did you come to this conclusion, not just method 6538 adapted by Joe Schmo and Checkmark.
It should show all the data and why shouldn't it?
Then you should be able to reproduce that periodically.
Lastly, I think folks should audit more.
We are going through a two and a half day audit right now by a big customer.
They couldn't fly here because of the flights, but so I did a virtual lab tour.
They were grilling me on that.
They've been grilling my lab director and my quality manager all day, as they should, because our lab is producing reports that they're relying on.
They're putting green buttons on conveyor belts that's putting products on shelves and capsules in people's stomachs based upon our results.
They should be up in our business as much as possible and asking questions.
And if you run into a situation where someone does not want to answer those questions, you find a new vendor, you find a new contract manufacturer, you find a new lab.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And that's great.
That scrutiny level is very important.
And I was mentioning to you before we started, you know, we're moving our lab right now.
So we have to then go through recertification of ISO certification at the new facility, which involves a massive on-site audit, demonstration of skills, you know, blind tests, everything.
And all of that costs a tremendous amount of money.
And by the way, you mentioned, I love the fact that you have such transparency with your methods.
I love to see the reports that your company produces.
And I got to say, even though, you know, in our lab, I'm sure that we could attempt to take on some of those tests.
The truth is that this is about specialization.
You know, we focus on MassSpec, ICPMS, heavy metals, glyphosate, et cetera.
And your lab, and you, you know, you're going to all the events, all the seminars, staying up to date on all the botanicals.
Like you know botanicals better than anybody that I've ever met.
And that's a passion.
Yeah.
And that's really part of our warning story.
The company was formed by my father, Sidney Sutberg, who is by training chemist, then an acupuncturist, an herbalist, and then a chiropractor.
And our quick story was basically he was making tinctures for his clients, for his patients in our garage.
So I grew up with a garage smelling like OSHA root and chaparral leaf and herb presses, not auto parts, like most of my friends.
And so we actually did some testing for ourselves for his tincture and we failed something.
We returned the product.
The vendor asked us how we failed it.
We gave them this very transparent report that we did for our own internal work.
You know, at this point, I'm in college chemistry, and the only thing I knew was transparency.
You don't give your professor in college a report that says, Trust me, or redacted, or confidential methodology.
You give them everything.
That's how we form the lab.
So, the point is, we believe as a family, the suburb family, that herbs work and mushrooms work.
And we've always that's how it was raised.
And so, we stayed with plants and mushrooms.
That's that's that was our original passion.
At that time, there were no labs other than these big humongous ones, which basically are banks owned that own labs.
Uh, they test tilapia, space parts, textiles, leather dye, you name it.
It's just a big generalist lab.
No one was a specialist in plants and fungus like we were.
And so, we really carved out a niche and have stayed there.
And now, basically, known throughout the world as the plant and mushroom identity potency and purity experts.
We only expanded into, for example, HPLC for quantification of phytochemicals because our clients begged us to.
They were sending us their ginger powder, saying, Is this ginger?
We said, Yes, here's the report.
They said, Can you measure the ginger alls in our ginger?
And they said, Well, if you do, we'll get you all this work because we'd love to not use the big labs.
So, we brought in HPLCs.
And as you know, those are extremely expensive.
They're like race cars that need to be cleaned and taken apart after a run around the track.
Yep.
And our additional growth, which is what you've mentioned, into the contaminant level, was again, the customers said, Please, we send you the ginger for ginger identity.
We send you to ginger for ginger alls.
Can you test the leads, you know, heavy metals in there?
Can you test the pesticides and residuals?
So, that was really never a specialty and/or even a fascination of ours, but it was sort of complimentary to the tests we already have in-house for the products we already have in-house.
So, but our specialty is still plants, fungus, identity, potency, and contamination was the most recent growth for sure.
Yeah, I appreciate what you're going through with all the growth curves on that.
And as you know, ginger can with some frequency be contaminated with lead, such as turmeric.
Ginger, a lot of the root crops can have lead in them.
But as you know, once you go into lead testing with ICPMS, now you have to have acid handling capabilities for sample prep, like lots of nitric acid and then fume hoods and safety protocols, emergency showers, uh, training because you can't have people just walking around with vials of acetal all over the lab, right?
Right, you have to have like acid cleanup protocols, like it's a big thing, it's a lot, yeah, yeah.
And often, the public, you know, and unless this is why I want to give a tour of our new lab, too.
I want to walk people through this because it's a whole universe that people often don't see.
Well, and I'll speak to that, you know, brands like yourselves that do this type of work at the level you're talking about have to charge more because you just spent a bunch of money to do the testing.
And this speaks to kind of my point about why wouldn't you share quality?
You're spending, we've got customers spend millions of dollars a year testing with us and they say very little about it on their marketing.
Uh, it to me, it's an it's a marketing campaign that never got launched.
It's like you get these CVAs and they go in a drawer, those are marketing gold, in my opinion.
The brands, the customers, the consumers go to the store shelves, and it's just or on the websites, and there's a lot of better sameness.
What differentiates a brand from others, other than the influencer, you know, shaking it on a, on a, on a social media post?
Um, it's it's a lot of it's a sea of better sameness.
And so, I think the ones that are going to stand out, the ones with the transparency, the ones that show the depth that goes into making their product worthwhile to take, but also all the work that goes into making sure that's safe and effective.
Uh, and a lot of that is lab testing that, as you know, uh, costs a lot of money and is very complicated.
Uh, and employees get paid a lot, and the equipment's expensive, and it drinks expensive solvents, uh, and you've got to take care of those solvents the right way.
And there's a truck just outside right now, probably taking our chemical waste away the right way, which is also very expensive.
And so to do things the right way and pay people the right amount, our customers pay top dollar to test with us because they know they're getting accurate results and we're doing it the right way.
And it's no joke what you said earlier.
Your company is, in my experience and just being in this industry, your company is the standard for botanical testing for the Western world.
Maybe there's a totally different leader in China or Russia for those countries, but as far as the Western world, it's Alchemist.
Okay.
Yeah.
And anybody that I ask, you know, certifiers, FDA, USDA, they always say Alchemist.
Yeah, it's the little brand that has can and will.
And, you know, father-son started.
My girlfriend at the time, now my wife worked for us.
My best friend, my hairdresser's neighbor, that was basically the team number one.
Now we've got 56 people.
I take every single one of them to lunch throughout the year.
I try to at least get to know the staff.
We've got a culture here that is hard to beat.
We're in Orange County.
There's a lot of biotech.
You can exit the colleges nearby with a degree in chemistry and get paid a lot more.
In fact, you're going to be basically a slave in a dungeon of a lab with very little culture.
And if those are the values you don't care about, then have a blast.
But I think the industry knows that the culture of the company too is, like they say, happy cows make good cheese or whatever that phrase is.
And I think happy chemists make accurate and reproducible results.
And that's what we try to pride ourselves on.
Good point.
Good point.
Let me talk about, you mentioned maltodextrin earlier, and I want to bring in a fact and get your response to it.
So we've seen where, for example, pomegranate powder that's currently sold on Amazon.
I'm not going to mention brand names, but I know as a fact that some pomegranate powders are over 50% maltodextrin, but it's not listed on the bag.
Right.
So is there pomegranate in there?
Yes.
Is it all pomegranate powder?
No.
Is the labeling on the bag fraudulent?
Yes.
Yeah.
And that's the key.
That's a key phrase.
Like if it's, it's okay as long as you say it's in there.
And, you know, a lot of companies will use Maltodextrin as kind of a flow agent because, you know, you can imagine pomegranate could be a sticky extract or sticky reduction in powder.
And so you need a flow agent.
But that's a great way to dilute a product.
It's like making a cup of coffee for yourself and then running water through the beans again for your spouse and then doing it again one more time for your spouse.
And the maltodextrin is not listed on ingredients.
That's straight up illegal.
I mean, if it's not on the, if it's not listed and it's in there, you have a, you have a very serious label violation.
The FTC can come after you, FDA can come after you.
Again, good news, maltodection is not going to hurt anyone.
It's going to hurt your pocketbook.
You're going to buy something that's about half as good as you thought it was.
And that was the issue with Houdia.
People were basically diluting it to the extent of it was barely there.
Almost all maltodectrin.
Here's the beautiful part.
We have all this expensive equipment and the instrumentation that discovered the maltodection in Houdia was a very simple light microscope.
Literally something you do in eighth grade.
You look through it, you prep your slide, you see the maltodectrin just melting away like an ice cube.
Hoodia and no plant matter melts.
It doesn't melt.
Extracts will go into solution, but Malto looks really specific to Malto and the way it melts away.
And it doesn't cost anything to do that quick test.
So, I mean, people can do it at home.
If they get a very simple microscope from Amazon, while they're buying their pomegranate from Amazon, they can look to see if there's Malto in there and determine very easily.
But again, good news, it's not going to hurt you.
Bad news, it's not going to work because you're basically taking a corn sugar product instead of the indebted years ago.
This was over 10 years ago, maybe 15.
And again, I'm not going to mention a brand, but there was a whey protein product that turned out to be nothing but maltodextrin.
And the creator, this is my memory of it, the creator of the whey protein product claimed that they somehow, I don't know, they prayed over it or something.
Whatever they did.
And then that made it.
They turned the maltodextrin into whey protein.
And it was very popular among vegans.
I remember vegans were like, this is the best tasting whey protein I've ever had.
Yeah.
Because it's corn sugar, you know.
But that guy, actually, I think he was prosecuted ultimately.
I think he went to prison.
But do you remember that incident?
I am amazingly did not hear about that one.
But we've had our share of crazy stories similarly.
I have not heard the praying over.
Or maybe it wasn't praying.
Maybe it was like he had an electric plate or something.
I was going to say there's like, I've seen like there's plates or surfaces that have certain type of properties that may make things different.
I, you know, I'm a chemist at heart.
I'm a skeptic at heart.
I like to measure things that are measurable.
And I kind of stay away from that category.
But it's interesting that the vegans were interested.
Maybe they need more protein in their diet for brain process to not believe in things like that.
No, seriously, it was a bunch of vegans.
I mean, they were otherwise they were vegans, but they were drinking what they thought was whey protein, but it wasn't.
Right.
It was maltodextrin.
But so you and I, I mean, we're both, we, we understand that healing and that natural medicine is more than just the chemical constituents.
There, there are synergistic properties.
And we understand there's, there's alchemy in traditional Chinese medicine, Western herbal medicine, Amazonian medicine, Tibetan medicine, right?
And that's your, the name of your company is Alchemist.
You know, you understand the alchemy.
But we also, you and I both, we believe in the existence of molecules.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
It's a tough one.
You know, I use the example to that point.
You know, when you make a cup of coffee, you've got a bean from a plant.
It's been dried a certain way.
So you already have an opportunity to mess up in the process.
But let's say it's not messed up.
It's ground and you pour hot water through it and you can mess that up too.
You can pour hot water too fast.
You can do a two day long percolation.
The variables expand exponentially.
But when your final product is a brown liquid with a number of chemicals in it and it is not, it is not caffeine.
That is not coffee.
And so sometimes we will get a coffee bean extract.
And when you run it on an HPTLC chromatograph plate, and just for the listeners, the viewers, what's happening basically is the chromatography separates chemicals into bands, kind of like genetics or a DNA profile on a crime show.
You see those little bands and it matches the killer or the father or maybe both.
Instead of proteins, these are plant chemicals and every plant has a bunch of them.
When we see sometimes these fraudulent green coffee bean or just coffee bean products, we see one band.
A single band is generally indicative of a single chemical and that same chemical matches up the caffeine band on the other side of the plate.
So if you run caffeine on the same experiment, it stops here.
The bad product stops here.
And then you can say that's caffeine.
The good product has a number of bands that go all the way through.
There's a bunch of chemicals, phytochemicals that are in coffee.
And so it's imagine like snorting caffeine powder on your desk versus having a nice cup of coffee.
I guarantee the experience will be different.
Or even the cannabis world, you know, smoking cannabis flour, you get the synergistic effect of all of the terpenes, all the cannabinoids.
There's a bunch.
Nowadays, people are into these vape pens and or edibles, and those are curated.
Those are extracts.
So you're losing data, data in the form of chemicals, phytochemicals.
And sometimes they're even just admixtures of six or seven.
And in my own personal experience, those do not feel as enjoyable as a freshly burned flower of cannabis.
That's just a great example because that industry has taken it so far so far that it's almost like pharmaceuticalized, if that's a word.
You know, when you take a pharmaceutical, it's generally one compound for a particular reason.
That's because it's been clinically tested to have that effect and they can make those claims.
But herbs and mushrooms have hundreds or sometimes thousands of chemicals in them that work together.
And the basic philosophy of herbal medicine that my father once practiced and still believes in and that we sort of deploy in our testing is that caffeine is not one chemical and rosemary is not one chemical and echinacea is not one chemical.
And we'll see sometimes, as an example, ginkgo, people will fortify.
They'll actually add a particular chemical to ginkgo extract to make it amplify that one particular chemical.
And we'll see all these bands and then one's overblown because it's just they added so much to it because that's the thing that they think works.
But fortification is fine as long as you steak that has been fortified.
But it is certainly not a natural version, almost like a Frankenstein version of the plant's original form.
So I think caffeine from coffee is not coffee.
Caffeine from caffeine can come from lots of plants too.
It could be synthetic.
It could be from yerba mate, various teas.
There's a bunch of different plants that produce caffeine.
And so, you know, sort of even speaks to some of these four strengths, which are a lot of interesting synthetic ingredients combined into a thing.
My favorite big rug out drink is espresso.
I just, I take it from the original bean and just have a shot of espresso before I do jiu-jitsu in the morning.
And that seems to be very effective.
That's me.
Here in Texas, we have Yopan Holly, which is a that's one of the only caffeinated plant growing in America.
And I've been enjoying it midday around three o'clock.
That's amazing.
I have it all over my ranch.
I can just harvest it and then I just pan, kind of pan cook it, kind of brown it, I guess, roasting it in a pan and then just steep it.
And you have Yopan Holly tea.
I bet that tastes amazing.
No, it's great.
It's great.
Yeah.
But wow, what an incredible world that we are living in right now.
Now, let me bring up the hemp issue that's happening politically right now.
And it's incredibly frustrating to me that currently the GOP in the Senate and the House, they are trying to ban hemp all across the country, yet again, because it was illegal.
And we fought for hemp freedom.
And now we can sell hemp seeds and hemp proteins and, of course, cannabinoids as CBD extracts, CBDA, et cetera.
And they're incredibly beneficial to people.
What is your take on this whole hemp issue that I think in the Senate, only Senator Rand Paul is actually standing up for hemp right now?
What's your take?
Oh, it's mind-blowing.
You know, I'll go, I'll take a different direction.
Well, let me first say, I think it should be legal.
I think cannabis and a lot of other plants should be legal.
I think this is a function of the grand puppeteers of big pharma, not wanting us to miss out on their drugs.
I'll just give an example.
There's a product that is sold every day that is known to cause cancer.
Fact.
It is known to cause heart disease.
Fact.
We're known as disputing that.
And it is not a natural product.
They add those chemicals into it with intention to fortify flavor and effect.
And those chemicals are known to cause cancer.
And it's called cigarettes.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not one to take things away.
But tobacco products, you know, if you smoke tobacco, that's on you.
Great, good job.
But even like modern cigarettes are not tobacco.
If you take a modern cigarette and you chop it up and you put it in the microscope, that is not a plant powder.
That is not a tobacco leaf.
That is a chemical slurry that's been dried and sliced thin.
And if I get assassinated or another death threat, it's probably from Big Tobacco Now.
But it is not a, you know, like maybe some of the more authentic brands I won't mention are tobacco leaves chopped up, but some of the mainstream bands are a chemical slurry chopped up to make it look like loose leaf.
You smoke it, and they are fortifying it with chemicals, nicotine specifically, that we know causes cancer and we know causes all sorts of problems, yet it's still sold.
Meanwhile, they're trying to take cannabis away at the same time.
It just blows my mind.
If it's not, if it's not political, I don't know what it is.
It's not about health and safety.
We have grandfathered in one of the most toxic things ever is on the list of leading causes of death in America, still for sale legally all over the place.
Yet cannabis is now being retracted.
And for what?
I just, you know, this, these kinds of things make me just go crazy when I start to deep dive in it.
And, you know, we suddenly become conspiracy theorists, but we're not.
We're just truth tellers.
We see the future and we talked about it.
Well, and cannabis, again, cannabis extracts.
And I'm not talking about THC.
Sure.
I'm not a consumer.
But even if you do, I know it's a psychotropic chemical.
You know, you be careful if you use it.
But even that one of the worst ones of cannabis are not even remotely close to that of legally sold tobacco.
Grandfather.
Yeah, good point.
Like you can't, if you found a plant on your land in Texas and you brought it to market and it was similar to tobacco, you wouldn't be able to sell it.
Like they would be like, that's a dangerous drug.
No, thank you.
It does not get to be sold.
You're going to jail if you do.
Yet tobacco and/or cigarette products are sold every day, knowingly causing cancer.
Yeah.
I mean, in fact, old issues of the Journal of the American Medical Association used to feature full-page ads that said doctors smoke more camels than any other cigarette.
Exactly.
And for decades, doctors were paid to say that smoking cigarettes would boost your cognition, boost your health, boost your energy.
Well, now doctors are paid to sell other things.
But back to cannabis.
I think it's a political puppeteering.
Why is it not fully legal?
Even if you want to stop at THC containing hemp or cannabis, hemp is such an amazing plant with so many benefits, you know, industrial and commercial and medicinal that it just blows my mind that they're trying to take it away again.
Well, and also think about just over-the-counter Tylenol, acetaminophen, which causes permanent liver damage in many people, especially when combined with alcohol.
You can buy that at every corner store.
Yep.
Prescribed all the time.
People damage their livers every day.
We can go further on that one and sort of uncharted territory, but what you just mentioned is on the label.
I mean, they know it.
There are many choices to use to choose from analgesics.
And this one, you know, I'll say there's a whole list of pharmaceutical, clinically tested, proven safe and effective pharmaceuticals that are no longer in the market and they come off the market all the time.
There's a huge list.
Viox is one of my favorites to talk about.
All good to go.
And once it hit, I think 60,000 people died.
They're like, 58,436 was not a big deal, but we hit 60, and that's too much.
So let's take it off.
If your loved one was one of those people who died, they wouldn't be just a number.
Exactly.
A drug that you were sold safe and effective by medical doctors you're supposed to trust.
So let's, yeah.
Let's pivot back to the good news of the herbal industry and botanicals.
Although what we just talked about, I think, is very important.
But tell us, what are the trends that you're seeing in the industry in terms of the popularity of various herbs?
Is there anything coming back, like ashwagandha or whatever?
What are you saying?
Great news.
Just, you know, we hired a COO in our company and she's just doing some research for us for marketing purposes.
And she, just in the small time that she's been here, the Nutrition Business Journal has put out a great report showing the growth in botanicals has gone, I think, in the 30s percent of consumers, U.S. consumers using to 60%.
Wow.
Some variation of the numbers.
So, you know, and that's only in the last few years.
I think COVID was partially responsible.
That debacle that may or may not be still happening, it made people fear their lives and they reached for everything they could.
They reached for whether they took the COVID shot or not, they also looked into how else can I help my immune system and what's been around for a long time is herbal and mushroom products.
So growth in herbal supplements in the U.S. market has gone up significantly.
I think it's wonderful.
I think it's obviously wonderful for our business, but it's wonderful because the folks are relying and leaning on products that are safe and time tested, thousands of years of use.
And very few of them have been pulled from market.
And those that have been overmarket are generally, you know, questionably why, you know, whether it's Ephedra or other plants that probably should have stayed.
So to your question, yeah, herbs are growing.
Mushrooms are growing.
Yes.
Categories are more popular than ever.
And people are reading labels and people are noticing and they're reaching for things that have been time tested for thousands of years rather than experimental showed up a few years ago.
And even just like you mentioned, Ephedra, in Chinese medicine, that herb is known as Mahuang.
And it's part of a formula that is the most anti-plague formula that's been used for the history of Chinese medicine.
I will very quickly go down the rabbit hole on that and say I think they pulled ephedra off the market in the U.S. because they didn't want people to have access to natural anti-plague cures.
That's my take.
I agree with you.
That plant particularly has a number of benefits from respiratory to, as you've just mentioned, and it was a very effective medicinal plant that we had access to when it was pulled.
And it was really, it's really tragic.
It's probably the worst offense we've seen recently.
I mean, cannabis, I would say, is also a great plant that should have been legalized, but Ephedra or Phydra is one of those that's pulled recently and should not have been.
And we should have as an industry try to fight harder.
I know a lot of the folks in my industry who did try very hard to keep that went on there.
But again, back to the puppeteers of our government.
They're very strong, very powerful.
And unfortunately, the money talks.
But to spin this a good way, the American consumers are relying on botanicals more now than ever before.
And I think that's a really great trend for positive movements in health.
Even in the Maha movement is, I know RFK has not made humongous movements in the dietary supplement or nuceutical industry yet.
That's because he's so busy with the ones that are super broken and health, food and drugs.
He's got a lot to do there.
And I forgive him for not saying much about dietary supplements yet.
I'm playing.
But the fact is our industry is wonderful and people are using it.
And we have a great safety record and we have a great time tested track record.
I'm just very pleased that Americans are leaning on it more than ever.
We helped fund a lawsuit filed by Attorney Jonathan E. Mord with Alliance for Natural Health against the FDA to allow government approved claims.
It's like hundreds of claims, including many botanicals and certain vitamins and nutrients and so on.
So, I mean, we're one of the plaintiffs, I guess you could say, or the funders of that lawsuit.
So we're also fighting for truth about herbs and nutrition.
But you mentioned that 60% of people are now using some form of botanicals, which is fantastic.
And you also mentioned COVID earlier.
One of the things that I learned during COVID that really blew my mind, and since then, I have started growing large numbers of loblolly pine trees, but that is that the pine needles of these pine trees, which are native to Texas, or they were brought here centuries ago, but they're in Texas now.
And they contain so much shikimic acid in the pine needles, along with vitamin C and other things, that we made a mistake in our lab.
We developed a method for shikimic acid quantitation using a single quad mass spec, and then we accidentally contaminated the entire instrument with shikimic acid because the levels were so high it was off the charts.
So for me, that was good.
I'm like, okay, these definitely contain shikimic acid, but you can just go out, you can just pick pine needles, make a tea, drink a tea, and that molecule is what's used in Tamaflu, prescription drug.
But I don't need a prescription.
I just grow pine trees.
You know what I'm saying?
Right.
Well, I agree with you.
And someday I hope to have access to the same land to be able to do that as well.
What's unfortunate is most people don't.
And, you know, I'll take this subject to one of the other directions: this is why we are hoping that RFK and the Maho movement can give better access to safe and effective supplements to everyone.
So as you probably know, SNAP and HSA, so SNAP does not allow access to supplements like what you just mentioned because it considers it medicine and not food.
While Health Savings Accounts doesn't allow access to supplements because they consider it food and not a medicine.
These are levers in the tax laws somewhere that someone could just click and click and then the people will have access to all of our supplements in this industry, which are clearly safe and effective.
Well, maybe I'll say safe.
I'll say clearly safe.
I know we can't really say effective without getting in trouble, but time tested.
And as you just indicated, very clearly ancillary to a lot of the pharmaceutical drugs out there being used to treat and or prevent illness.
These are, you know, it's really, it's an access issue.
Access through health savings accounts and SNAP and access to those who don't have the land to grow their own herbal medicine cabinets.
Well, I'm going to take this one step further.
And you may or may not want to follow me down this rabbit hole, but I think that Western medicine is collapsing and it is a failed institution.
It's rooted in fraud and money laundering, payola, paying off the medical journal to push fake studies.
The Landset has been busted.
You can go to Retraction Watch and just laugh all day long at all the so-called science studies that have been retracted because they're all fake and fraudulent.
So, and the science journals are paid off by big pharma.
You know, it's a joke, right?
So there's definitely a movement of a lack of trust.
And I think the pandemic was sort of the tipping point for a lot of folks.
We were all very scared.
I don't know if you were scared at first.
I know I was very scared at first.
I had an elderly father-in-law with respiratory challenges and I didn't want to get him sick.
I also didn't trust the products that were coming out.
And I think a lot of people either felt so scared they just jumped into taking an experimental product or they had to for work.
And at the end of the day, it didn't do what it was supposed to do.
And they still got COVID.
And, you know, it was an eye-opening experience.
You know, a lot of people are not in the position of parents that have to abide by the vaccine schedules for school.
And look, I'm not going to go into this too much, but no one cares if you don't want to give your kid all of the shots because they're older and don't have to worry about that.
And the amount of shots that the kids have to get nowadays is way more than they had to take themselves or had to give their kids.
But when COVID showed up, everyone was almost forced to take a shot.
And so it opened up the eyes to people like, wait, wait, what are we actually being forced to take and why?
And to your point, I think the Western medicine arena lost a lot of trust.
I think people started to look further and deeper into why and how.
And, you know, there's campaigns on don't do your own research.
No, do your own research.
I can't even believe they said that and they published it.
Know, do your research, talk to medical professionals, get online, do your research, talk to friends and family.
You know, be careful.
Uh, I don't believe in practicing medicine on myself or or, or pretending to be a doctor but at the same time, ask questions, doing research, and that that was a product of the pandemic and i'm grateful for it.
You know, if we had to get through that to open up the eyes, like you said, of of allopathic medicine, western medicine look, don't get me wrong.
If I ever get cancer, i'm going to take all the things.
I'm going to take the pine needles, i'm going to do acupuncture, i'm going to take herbs, i'm going to take the drugs.
Uh, I believe there is a place and time for allopathic medicine and I have friends and family who've been saved from cancer uh, by the drugs uh, and i'm i'm grateful for them.
But uh, you know, but look into things is my.
My personal message is to challenge, ask the questions, and I don't trust anything.
I I look into everything at the at the nth degree uh, to the, almost the point of paralyzation, you know, paralysis by analysis, paralysis by analysis uh sometimes um, but to your point yeah, I think there is a lot lack of trust of government.
There's a lack of trust of of western medicine as a result of what just occurred to us in the pandemic.
You know um, I would just add to what you you just said there that cancer is not random and like every day, for 20 years i've been drinking probably at least 50 anti-cancer nutrients in my smoothie, and you know it's about having a lifestyle and making choices, about consuming botanicals on a regular basis that are known to help your body naturally stay healthy and prevent, you know, bad conditions from happening to you, right?
And the the beautiful thing about Ai, right now i'm gonna, i'm gonna plug our engine.
You'll love this Elon, if you haven't used it, if you go to Brightu.ai and here it is, ask Enoch anything, and that we have a wellness coach here.
We're the only engine in the world that we've trained our Ai engine on thousands of books on phytochemistry botanicals, natural and alternative medicine.
So I guarantee you you can ask our engine about any nutrient, any molecule that you work with.
You can even ask it like, okay, I just I grew rosemary herb in my garden, how do I make an extract of rosemary?
And it will tell you.
It'll walk you through step by step, how to make like a water alcohol extract for your own use.
So now we have all this knowledge that's decentralized and now the, the powers that be, can't control our access to information.
So things are changing and they've tried.
Uh, and you know, thank you for Alon Musk for spending his money on opening up uh, Twitter AND X.
I think it was brilliant.
That was, we were going the wrong way very fast and it was very scary.
You know, one of the things I was really upset about is that our industry had a lot of interesting products that you know we've been talking about immunity for a long time and they were censored and we couldn't even say say things.
I I, I think I posted on Facebook, you know, gargle with saltwater during the pandemic.
It was taken down for two weeks.
My account was just taken down for two weeks, you know.
Not long, not long ago, Washington POST put those exact words uh, and it was fine.
So just a little too soon to say gargle with saltwater.
I wasn't saying it was going to cure anything.
I just said to a friend you know who had a sore throat during the pandemic, oh saltwater, that's, that's a trick we've known for years.
Great grandmas, Grandmas have been practicing that.
But, you know, so I'm pleased and grateful that your AI engine is available for the people to learn how to take care of a lot of the things on their own because it's been accessible to us for thousands of years and only in the recent times when allopathic medicine showed up to sort of take control.
And again, I'm appreciative of Western medicine when it's necessary.
I feel it should never be required or mandated.
We should always have the choice to smoke cigarettes or to take a vaccine or not, and to grow pine trees in our backyards and use them medicinally.
Yeah, I agree with you that I agree with the liberty of personal choice.
And if people want to choose Western medicine, that's fine.
But I think that it's the lack of information and the censorship that has caused people to not understand the benefits of botanicals or cannabinoids or what have you, or even pine needles.
Very few.
What's funny is very few Americans today know about the benefits of pine needles, but most of the Native Americans who were here before us, they would use pine needles all the time.
This is old news.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just been suppressed for a few centuries.
But anyway, about to wrap this up.
And I want to thank you for your time and your expertise and your passion for this.
I really share your passion about botanicals.
Is there anything you want to say just to wrap this up?
Yeah, I'd say do your own research.
Never just accept things that you're curious about and don't let anyone ever tell you to not look into something.
You know, not everyone has a degree in chemistry or biology or pharmacognosy, but the data is more accessible now than ever before.
And look at the things before you buy them and ask questions.
Okay, well said.
And yeah, pharmacognosy is another topic that many of those books are in our engine in terms of the training also.
So what a fascinating subject.
So thank you, Elon.
It's been a great honor knowing you all these years.
I really honor what you do.
And I thank you and thank you for making your company so successful in setting new standards in botanical identification and purity.
So thank you very much.
I'm grateful to be on this podcast and so grateful everything you've been doing as well.
We're working hard.
All right, Elon, have a great rest of your day.
And again, folks, for those of you watching, the website is alchemist.com.
That's A-L-K-E-M-I-S-T.
If you are in the food business or botanical business, you will want to know about Alchemist.
And of course, you can repost this interview on other platforms and channels.
And if you want to use our AI engine that knows all, pretty much has all of human knowledge about botanicals.
That's at brightu.ai.
You can ask it anything.
You can click on the wellness coach right here, and then you can ask it any question about wellness, health.
There's some questions we've asked before.
Go for it.
It's free, by the way.
It's completely free.
So the world's botanical knowledge at your fingertips at no cost.
Wow, that's never happened before in human history.
So here we are.
Thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com and all the Brighteon platforms, including the AI stuff that we're rolling out now.
So thank you for watching and take care.
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