Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode #180: Mike Adams Unmasked: What’s Really Lurking in Your Food and Supplements?

Transcript

Episode #180: Mike Adams Unmasked: What’s Really Lurking in Your Food and Supplements? · Beyond Labels Premium

0:00
SPEAKER_02: A lot of people they tend to focus on only the toxins.
0:03
SPEAKER_02: Like, oh, I want to avoid, you know, uh MSG or I want to avoid glyphosate.
0:08
SPEAKER_02: And what I've tried to explain to people over time, and even my own position has matured on this over time.
0:14
SPEAKER_02: I used to be actually a lot more panicked about it than I am now.
0:17
SPEAKER_02: But what I realize now is that when you have good nutrition and you have the the trace minerals and the macro minerals and the phytonutrients that God intended for us to eat, your body can naturally defend against a lot of toxic load.
0:30
SPEAKER_02: And since we live in a toxic world, there's no way to avoid some level of dioxins or even glyphosate.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: Hi, welcome to another episode of Beyond Labels.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: Cena McCullough, and of course, I'm here with our favorite farmer, Joel Salatin.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: But today we have a very special guest.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: His name is Mike Adams.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: You may have known him as the Health Ranger.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: He is a globally recognized scientific research special researcher specializing in forensic food analysis, and he is widely considered the natural product industry's most authoritative expert on heavy metal contamination.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: He is the founding editor of naturalnews.com and he is the lab science director of an internationally accredited analytical lab known as CWC Labs.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: He also founded Brighton.com, and that was basically to promote our right to free speech.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: He also authored the world's first book that published ICP MS heavy metal analysis from results from foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices, and fast food.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: That book is one of my personal favorites, and it's entitled Food Forensics.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: Now, beyond his scientific interest, Mike Adam lives on a ranch in Texas.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: He cares for Nigerian dwarf goats, rescued donkeys, and free-range chickens.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: He practices permaculture and self-reliant home gardening.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: He's a strong advocate of personal preparedness, ecological protection, and self-reliance.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: And his resume goes on and on.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: We're going to dive into that today.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: But first, welcome to the program.
2:19
SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you for having me on.
2:20
SPEAKER_02: It's an honor to join you both today.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: Great.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: Okay, we have so much to cover.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to jump right in.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: So my first question is about your book, Food Forensics.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: This was groundbreaking in publishing results of heavy metals, as I said, in our food and supplements and so forth.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: What were some of the most surprising findings in the research that you conducted for that book?
2:43
SPEAKER_02: Well, first of all, it's very surprising, I think, for a lot of people to realize that the USDA organic program does not require any standards for heavy metals and no testing whatsoever.
2:56
SPEAKER_02: So, and I know Joel knows very well about the process of the USDA.
3:03
SPEAKER_02: Organic certification is a process, not a result.
3:07
SPEAKER_02: So you can actually have heavy metals contaminated foods that come out as certified organic, and the USDA is currently okay with that.
3:16
SPEAKER_02: Now, fortunately, they don't allow organic foods to be grown in biosludge.
3:19
SPEAKER_02: I did a full documentary on biosludge, which is human waste that's dumped on farms.
3:25
SPEAKER_02: But that's allowed in conventional foods.
3:28
SPEAKER_02: And some farmers are tricked into dumping biosludge on their farms because the, well, the, you know, the cities that produce the sludge, um, they say, hey, it's free fertilizer.
3:38
SPEAKER_02: It's filled with nitrogen, which it is.
3:40
SPEAKER_02: And uh, and a lot of other things that you don't want on your food, by the way.
3:45
SPEAKER_02: So uh that film is available for free.
3:47
SPEAKER_02: People can watch it at biosludged.com.
3:49
SPEAKER_02: That ends with ED biosludged.
3:52
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I interviewed uh Dr.
3:53
SPEAKER_02: David Lewis for that film.
3:56
SPEAKER_02: He was featured in it.
3:57
SPEAKER_02: Dr.
3:57
SPEAKER_02: David Lewis is a former EPA whistleblower about the contamination of soils with all kinds of horrible things that are found in biosludge, including heavy metals.
4:08
SPEAKER_02: Um, so I know I might be going deeper down the rabbit hole than you intended with that with that question, but the the critical thing for people to begin to understand is that if you want clean food, it it's not about your relationship with government.
4:26
SPEAKER_02: It's not about USDA certification, FDA, EPA, because the EPA is mostly in bed, you know, with the pesticide industries and so on.
4:34
SPEAKER_02: It's about your relationship with your local farmer, really.
4:37
SPEAKER_02: It's about your relationship with the people who grow your food, people at the CSA, people at the farmer co-op, or growing your own food, because certifications and qualifications do not mean your food is clean.
4:51
SPEAKER_02: That's the takeaway from our years of research that I put into that book.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: Well, it sounds, it sounds like you're actually going beyond labels.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it does indeed.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I couldn't I couldn't help that.
5:03
SPEAKER_01: I couldn't help that.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, I I have a I have a question on that point.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: Uh in your research, uh is there something that organic production does that uh that that actually stimulates heavy metals more than what conventional agriculture does.
5:27
SPEAKER_02: No, I don't I don't think so.
5:29
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
5:29
SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.
5:30
SPEAKER_02: Um the crops that we tend to find heavy metals on the most are either crops that are grown in the soil, such as turmeric or ginger, you know, those kinds of herbs that actually grow in, you know, under the soil.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: And you would think maybe potatoes, but we don't typically find heavy metals in potatoes.
5:49
SPEAKER_02: Uh and the other place that we find heavy metals is foods that come in from China, uh, because China uses for its irrigation a lot of water sources that are not necessarily very clean.
6:03
SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of industrial runoff from the very strong industry in China.
6:07
SPEAKER_02: And then certain crops such as rice that are grown in a lot of water-intensive fields, well, they will tend to take up those metals.
6:15
SPEAKER_02: And then even in things like rice protein from China, we will tend to find much higher levels of cadmium as well as lead than from foods grown in other countries.
6:26
SPEAKER_02: For example, rice grown in Texas is very, very clean, and rice grown in California is very clean, and rice grown almost everywhere else, but rice out of China uh can be highly questionable.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: And now you you also found like radioactivity, right, in the soil, like radioactive compounds.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: Is that true?
6:49
SPEAKER_02: Like for instance, yeah, I mean very trace levels, yes.
6:56
SPEAKER_02: Um our mass spec instruments can scan for any atomic mass, including radioisotopes.
7:03
SPEAKER_02: And so uh even though we don't we don't handle radioisotopes as standards, in the lab, we can get uh what's called uh uh a quick scan or a semi-quant scan on radioisotopes.
7:15
SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that we can see, by the way, is fallout from nuclear testing from the 1950s.
7:20
SPEAKER_02: It's there.
7:21
SPEAKER_02: Uh, I'm not saying that that it's a danger to your health.
7:24
SPEAKER_02: It's it's it's not, it's at such a low level, but we can we can see it.
7:28
SPEAKER_02: It's there.
7:28
SPEAKER_02: The whole the whole planet has been, in effect, contaminated with nuclear fallout at some level.
7:35
SPEAKER_02: That's true.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: And do you think are we still seeing that from like the fallout in Japan, like in the fish or like any aquatic species that we might eat?
7:47
SPEAKER_02: Well, yes, at some level, but I wouldn't say it's at a level that's high enough to be of a concern for human health.
7:55
SPEAKER_02: I would say that for ocean species, the far greater concern would be mercury.
8:01
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, we see very high mercury uptake in certain types of you know, ocean fish right now, and also in certain types of uh ocean plants and certain types of seaweeds.
8:11
SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of benefits from seaweeds and you know, different types of like brown seaweed and so on.
8:19
SPEAKER_02: A lot of benefits.
8:20
SPEAKER_02: Uh, they are known to be high in uh arsenic, although there's a form of arsenic that's a lot less harmful that is typically found in the seaweed.
8:29
SPEAKER_02: So I'm not saying don't eat seaweed.
8:30
SPEAKER_02: Seaweed can be very, very uh healthy and very, very good for you, but balance that.
8:34
SPEAKER_02: You know, don't have your whole diet focused on just like swordfish and seaweed, because you will overdo the mercury and arsenic uptake if you do that.
8:44
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's good.
8:45
SPEAKER_01: You can add some uh some chicken and beef along there sometimes.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
8:49
SPEAKER_01: Uh exactly.
8:50
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the the land-based meats typically do not have high heavy metals.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: Uh we rarely find that.
8:59
SPEAKER_02: Really, when it comes to heavy metals and meat, it's all ocean-based.
9:04
SPEAKER_02: Uh, land-based meats do not have heavy metals.
9:06
SPEAKER_02: The the risk factor for land-based meats is really more of dioxin accumulation in the fats.
9:14
SPEAKER_02: And that is something that we're just bringing online in our lab with the triple quad mass spec gas chromatography instrument to do trace level dioxin testing.
9:25
SPEAKER_02: And the thing to note about dioxins is it's it's unavoidable because they're produced from house fires, or when people burn household trash and they burn PVC materials, such as you know, old, old PVC water pipes, that produces dioxins that that fall on the grasslands.
9:42
SPEAKER_02: It just falls on grasslands everywhere.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: And then those dioxins are taken up and they bioaccumulate in the the fats of you know chickens or cattle or what have you.
9:53
SPEAKER_02: And so there's a certain level of dioxins that are found in meats.
9:57
SPEAKER_02: But is it you know a cause for alarm?
10:01
SPEAKER_02: Uh I I don't think so.
10:03
SPEAKER_02: There are lots of other things that you can do to protect yourself from dioxins, but there might be certain areas, such as uh in the aftermath of the East Palestine, Ohio train burning accident where you had a lot of uh polyvinyl chloride material that was combusted that probably dropped a lot of dioxins on certain parts of Pennsylvania.
10:24
SPEAKER_02: Uh the EPA was reluctant to do any testing there, and it's going to be up to private labs like us to actually ultimately do that.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: Sounds like um it's like a lot of things, there's more uh there's more difference, there's more difference within things like uh than there is in one thing.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm gonna say that better.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Uh well uh in breeding, and we have livestock.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: So people are always, well, what what breed do you use?
10:57
SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean they're always looking for the magic breed, all right.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: I hear you've got um Nigerian dwarf goats.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: Bless your heart.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: So uh we don't have goats here because I I don't want to have something that's smarter than I am, so so we don't have goats, but um anyway, people always ask for the for the breed.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: And what we've found is that there's more difference within breeds than there is from breed to breed.
11:23
SPEAKER_01: You take a you take a Hereford cow, some of them are happy in the cold, some of them aren't.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: Some of them are happy in hot, some of them aren't.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh, some of them are tall, some of them are short, some in other words, and and so so when it comes to uh geographical locale for contamination, if you know, if you're next to some you know, industrial landfill site, yeah you might not want to get your food from there.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: Um and so like your rice example of you know, well, don't get it from China, get it from California or Texas.
11:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's not it's not rice is bad.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: It's it's the it's the locale of provenance, which brings us back to know your farmer, you know, uh have a have a relationship or know something about where it comes from.
12:08
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's that's exactly right.
12:10
SPEAKER_02: And there's also, I also I want to say that as a food scientist, I've seen a lot of undue alarm about things in the food from people who don't necessarily know the difference between parts per billion and parts per million.
12:28
SPEAKER_02: And I've seen a lot of alarm over aluminum in food.
12:32
SPEAKER_02: And uh even as I've become more educated about that, you know, aluminum is very, very, it's a common element in soil, very common.
12:42
SPEAKER_02: And uh plants, all plants naturally take up aluminum.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: You're not going to find a plant without aluminum in it.
12:48
SPEAKER_02: Now, aluminum has no biological function in the human body, and it is toxic at some level.
12:55
SPEAKER_02: If it bioaccumulates, it can affect uh neurology.
12:58
SPEAKER_02: However, your body has a natural process to eliminate aluminum.
13:02
SPEAKER_02: And so do all cows and so do all chickens.
13:07
SPEAKER_02: And there are natural substances that you take in certain uh mineral complexes, for example, that help your body bind with free aluminum and eliminate it through normal kidney function.
13:19
SPEAKER_02: So I've seen people sound alarm over, oh, I took green beans and I sent them to a lab and it came back with aluminum.
13:27
SPEAKER_02: Oh my God.
13:28
SPEAKER_02: You know, and my reaction is oh, we see that in everything we test.
13:32
SPEAKER_02: There's there because aluminum is always there.
13:35
SPEAKER_02: So don't freak out over aluminum.
13:37
SPEAKER_02: What the answer is to that is you know, drink clean water, right?
13:42
SPEAKER_02: And have a lifestyle where you sweat, because sweating is a way of your body eliminating these toxins.
13:48
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes I hear people in the sort of the purging detox industry that are talking about how you really have to suffer, you know, you need to be vomiting and you need to have diarrhea, and that's how you know you're healing.
14:00
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, I don't think so.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: That really all you need to do is you have a lot of clean water, have a lifestyle.
14:06
SPEAKER_02: You you should be sweating anyway.
14:09
SPEAKER_02: You should be working physically, you should be moving your body, and sweat is normal, you know, and you're that's your body's eliminating toxins, even through respiration.
14:18
SPEAKER_02: Your body's eliminating toxins.
14:19
SPEAKER_02: And then if you're eating food that's on the cleaner side and you're you're getting a variety, you know, you're getting clean meats and and you know, your clean proteins, but also your clean fruits and vegetables.
14:33
SPEAKER_02: And fruits, I can't say enough about fruit fibers.
14:36
SPEAKER_02: Fruit fibers are nature's heavy metals vacuum or broomstick.
14:41
SPEAKER_02: When you eat fruit fibers, like for example, did you know that strawberries, all the seeds on a strawberry are on the outside, you know, the perimeter of the berry.
14:50
SPEAKER_02: And each seed, and they're tiny, but each seed has a little strand that connects it to the center of the strawberry.
14:56
SPEAKER_02: Those strands are completely resistant to nitric acid and hydrochloric acid.
15:02
SPEAKER_02: You can't dissolve them in your stomach.
15:04
SPEAKER_02: So what happens is those strands become little brooms that actually sweep through your digestive tract, eliminating any built-up toxins, and they bind to heavy metals.
15:14
SPEAKER_02: So just by eating strawberries, you're actually eating a detox mechanism.
15:20
SPEAKER_02: So that's why I say people ask me, well, I want to go have uh brisket barbecue.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: And but I don't want maybe some of the toxins from the burnt edges of the brisket.
15:30
SPEAKER_02: And like, do you eat brisket?
15:31
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, yeah, I love to eat brisket.
15:33
SPEAKER_02: I just eat coleslaw and strawberries with it.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you you can't you can't be from Texas and not like brisket.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we have the best barbecue in the world.
15:42
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't get me better than that.
15:44
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
15:45
SPEAKER_02: I I I spent uh uh a weekend going to the best barbecue places in Texas in order to determine what's the best one.
15:53
SPEAKER_02: And uh I just have my fresh fruit and my fresh smoothies with me.
15:56
SPEAKER_02: See, like I have my smoothies, so I'm not afraid to eat barbecue.
16:01
SPEAKER_02: I just make sure I balance it with all the other uh nutrition that keeps it clean.
16:07
SPEAKER_02: That's that's my strategy.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and and I love this because Joel and I like I think I can speak for Joel possibly here when I say that you're speaking our love language, Mr.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: Adams, because this is how we are.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: Our philosophy is faith over fear.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: So don't walk through in in fear, you know, like God's got this, it's gonna be okay.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: So when you're speaking, and I can just feel my whole body calm down.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Like I was a little bit concerned about oh, is he gonna rumble us up and I'm gonna get really paranoid to eat anything now?
16:38
SPEAKER_02: No.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: So this is great.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: So if you could maybe let's take a few steps back and give us like a like a food consumption one-on-one for dummies, you know, like when so when you're sending the clean foods, the clean meat, the clean fish, the clean fruits, the clean vegetables, what are you talking about?
16:57
SPEAKER_00: Like, give us examples, like because obviously we we go beyond the label too.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: So we've talked a lot on this program about how even when something's organic, they still will sometimes find traces of sometimes adulterance on it, like glyphosate, for instance.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of fear of how do you know what you're actually eating in the first place?
17:17
SPEAKER_00: So, how do you, even as an individual, you know, with all this scientific background that you bring to the table, how do you decide what is clean for you to eat?
17:29
SPEAKER_02: Okay, well, well, that's a great question.
17:30
SPEAKER_02: And it's a two-part answer.
17:32
SPEAKER_02: And let me address the nutritional deficiency part first, because a lot of people, they tend to focus on only the toxins.
17:40
SPEAKER_02: Like, oh, I want to avoid, you know, uh MSG or I want to avoid glyphosate.
17:46
SPEAKER_02: And what I've tried to explain to people over time, and even my own position has matured on this over time.
17:52
SPEAKER_02: I used to be actually a lot more panicked about it than I am now.
17:54
SPEAKER_02: But what I realize now is that when you have good nutrition and you have the trace minerals and the macro minerals and the phytonutrients that God intended for us to eat, your body can naturally defend against a lot of toxic load.
18:07
SPEAKER_02: And since we live in a toxic world, there's no way to avoid some level of dioxins or even glyphosate.
18:16
SPEAKER_02: I did a study in our lab.
18:18
SPEAKER_02: I bought, I don't know, 20 brands of beer and tested them for glyphosate.
18:24
SPEAKER_02: I think it was just like popular beer brands.
18:27
SPEAKER_02: And then I put out the results and I didn't find any of them that had alarming levels of glyphosate, even though we detected some level of glyphosate in every beer.
18:37
SPEAKER_02: But the levels were very small, like in some cases, single-digit parts per billion.
18:42
SPEAKER_02: And I explained to people you would have to drink like a swimming pool filled with beer to have a toxic load of glyphosate from this beer.
18:51
SPEAKER_02: Uh, I got a little bit of pushback from some people who said, well, even one part per billion, you know, could give you cancer.
18:57
SPEAKER_02: And my reaction is, I don't actually think that's true.
19:01
SPEAKER_02: Unless you're in crazy nutritionally deficient and you're weak and you're fragile, you have no immune system functioning, then toxins can have a big effect on you.
19:09
SPEAKER_02: But the way to get your nutrition is to eat wholesome real foods, like you know, what what Joel does there, when you're raising real beef on, you know, real grass and real food and some supplementation, I'm sure is that there's mineral supplementation that you know cattle ranchers typically use.
19:29
SPEAKER_02: And that's actually really important.
19:30
SPEAKER_02: Isn't it interesting that doctors never tell humans to supplement with minerals?
19:35
SPEAKER_02: But every cattle rancher knows to supplement with minerals, right?
19:38
SPEAKER_02: And my granddad raised cattle, and I grew up around a cattle farm, by the way.
19:43
SPEAKER_02: So I I I you know I'm very familiar with that.
19:46
SPEAKER_02: But that's because that keeps the cattle healthy.
19:48
SPEAKER_02: It prevents disease, it prevents toxins from overcoming the body's defenses.
19:55
SPEAKER_02: Well, the same thing's true with humans.
19:57
SPEAKER_02: So if you're if you're eating, uh the other part of your of the question is if you're eating heavily, heavily processed factory foods, you know, like cookies and crackers and cake and whatever, refined everything, refined white bread.
20:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, of course, you're gonna lack minerals, and then you're vulnerable to the toxins.
20:15
SPEAKER_02: So my takeaway from all of this is don't panic about the trace levels of toxins that are in the food, but take in high nutrient density foods, including superfoods and where necessary, possibly supplements if you're lacking in a certain area.
20:32
SPEAKER_02: That's and then and then don't freak out about it.
20:35
SPEAKER_02: Just be okay.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, have that faith over fear.
20:39
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: So, um, so even though the label is not perfect, as Joel and I can attest to with like the USDA organic label, for example, do you still choose organic produce over conventional produce in part because of the biosludge?
20:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you do.
20:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I do.
20:56
SPEAKER_02: Well, and also specifically, I really want to avoid the organophosphates, the the pesticides, even more than the herbicides.
21:06
SPEAKER_02: The pesticides really interfere with neurology.
21:09
SPEAKER_02: And although I consume a lot of neuroprotective substances like turmeric on a regular basis, uh, I also don't want to damage my brain with pesticides.
21:20
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I choose organic whenever possible, but I also understand that it's not enough by itself.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah, exactly.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: Wow, Joel, I think he's our third P in the pod.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: Right?
21:34
SPEAKER_00: He sounds like us.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
21:36
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, that's for sure.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: And uh and you know, I I see that seeing that I we we banter back and forth about my my 80 20.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: Um and seeing I'll I'll I'll put you on the spot a little bit here, you know.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: But but you know, one one is I'm saying 80 20 lets me go to a three year old's birthday party and eat Walmart chocolate.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: The cake and not and not whatever uh that's right, not not beat myself up over it, or not make a scene, you know, in the family get together, whatever.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: And and and so um sometimes I wonder if our if our purest paranoia to be a hundred percent perfect uh causes more stress than if we just 80 20, 80, 80 do it right, and 20 gives you a little bit of wiggle room to be whatever, you know, to be a nice guest.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: I travel a lot.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: People are always, you know, what they're they're paranoid about what they're gonna feed me.
22:36
SPEAKER_01: I've experienced that.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: So, so you know, just uh, you know, just just but then from what you just said, uh just think about the latest uh whatever research.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: 77% of all food that Americans consume, 70, I might be wrong on one percentage, but basically 77% of all food Americans consume is ultra-processed.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: So so that's gonna make you vulnerable to all these things.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: So suddenly, suddenly their ability to hurt you elevates through the roof compared to somebody like the three of us who are at least, let's say, 80-20.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: Seen as probably 95, 95, 5.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: Um, but but uh 8020 is is good enough to make a big change.
23:28
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think that's a very wise posture.
23:32
SPEAKER_02: And also as a food scientist myself, as someone who's you know lectured about food and and studied it, we have to realize there's a very strong cultural orbit around food, just as you were alluding to there, Joel, which is that people use food during celebrations at weddings and birthday parties and get-togethers.
23:50
SPEAKER_02: And it's often very discourteous to reject uh people's food.
23:56
SPEAKER_02: Uh on the other hand, uh there are many of us like myself who are very sensitive to things like MSG.
24:03
SPEAKER_02: And since MSG or free glutamate is very common in many prepared foods or processed foods, uh, sometimes I do have to kind of query someone who, let's say, cooked a meal.
24:16
SPEAKER_02: They created a meal, oh, it's biscuits and gravy.
24:18
SPEAKER_02: And I have to ask them, well, how did you make the gravy?
24:22
SPEAKER_02: Oh, well, it's from a gravy mix.
24:23
SPEAKER_02: Well, immediately I know I can't eat that because that's MSG.
24:27
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes I'll say, Well, you know, what my grandmother used to do was, you know, take the take the sausage.
24:34
SPEAKER_02: She would cook the sausage in the pan and then take the grease.
24:37
SPEAKER_02: And then the grease makes the gravy, and then you add the flour and the salt and pepper.
24:41
SPEAKER_02: That's real gravy.
24:41
SPEAKER_02: Like if you have that, I'm happy to eat that.
24:44
SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna eat this this pre-mixed MSG gravy, right?
24:48
SPEAKER_02: So there are they are gonna hear that from me, but I'm I'm not gonna make them feel stupid, but I'm just gonna say, I'll I'll need to choose something different.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
24:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you'll you'll you'll love it.
24:57
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we back when we first started our commercial egg part of our uh sale enterprise, uh, we were taking our eggs down to a down to an actual um uh a chicken, an egg factory uh about 20 miles away.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: And they would it would we we would collect them all for a week and then we'd take all these eggs down there, they'd run them through their um, you know, washer, candler, and and grater and sorter, you know, and box them up.
25:22
SPEAKER_01: And um and and so when we first went down there, and so what what they do is they would run ours through um and then and then they would run theirs through because they um because they we we we didn't want their contamination on our eggs.
25:41
SPEAKER_01: Oh so so any anyway, we we didn't we didn't do that very long.
25:45
SPEAKER_01: We only did that for I don't know what, four or five months, and then we started doing all everything ourselves.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: But anyway, um but the lady in the tent that was candling the eggs for for cracks and blood spots, things like that.
25:57
SPEAKER_01: Um I asked her, you know, she's in she's over this candling, and uh, I said, What do you do with all the cracks and stuff?
26:02
SPEAKER_01: So you know, she's putting the cracks in a separate in a separate uh uh carton there.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: She said, Oh, they go down the road here and they they they put them in a great big chamber with a big piston that squeezes them.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: So I want you to realize these are eggs, they have chicken manure on them.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: They're, you know, they're just okay.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: So they just dump all these eggs in a great big cylinder, a hydraulic cylinder that presses the eggs through a screen and um and and keeps the shells on one side and all the liquid on the other side, along with some chicken manure and you know, things like that.
26:38
SPEAKER_01: And and I said, What are those sold for?
26:41
SPEAKER_01: Said, oh, those go to Duncan Heinz and stuff.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: So when you get a cake mix and they use them in in cake mixes because they're gonna be cooked, you know they're gonna be baked.
26:50
SPEAKER_01: So it's very low risk to have a little bit of poop and stuff in there, you know, if you're gonna actually cook it and bake it.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so ever since that day, we always tell people with a big smile, hey, if you're gonna use a cake mix, get it without eggs, you know.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: Um add eggs.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: Because if you don't have to add eggs, uh it it might be a little bit dicey.
27:11
SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow.
27:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, but I will tell you, my dogs don't mind chicken eggs with little chicken poop on them either.
27:17
SPEAKER_02: They they sure they go right for them.
27:20
SPEAKER_02: But you're right, we don't want to be eating that.
27:22
SPEAKER_02: But it just it goes to show you sort of the the factory food model, what that entails.
27:28
SPEAKER_02: And you know, a lot of people would be horrified about what's actually what ends up in their food.
27:33
SPEAKER_02: But I I think we should be a lot more concerned about what's not in the food.
27:37
SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, the mineral depletion is really, really critical.
27:40
SPEAKER_02: And I think as your viewers are well informed, they know that minerals cannot be synthesized by plants.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: So this, you know, it seems like a really basic thing for a lot of us who have been in this business for a long time.
27:51
SPEAKER_02: But the typical food consumer does not realize this that plants synthesize vitamins and phytonutrients like vitamin C or sulforophane from broccoli or curcumin in turmeric.
28:05
SPEAKER_02: These are synthesized mostly from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
28:08
SPEAKER_02: But minerals, obviously being on the table of elements, cannot be synthesized except through fusion and fission, which does not happen in plants.
28:16
SPEAKER_02: It happens in exploding stars, right?
28:18
SPEAKER_02: So when the soils are depleted of minerals because of continued farming, which is a mineral extraction process, if those minerals are not replaced back into the soils, then you know, subsequent generations of crops are, of course, mineral deficient.
28:34
SPEAKER_02: And most people are living on mineral deficient foods.
28:38
SPEAKER_02: And when you are mineral deficient, then your body cannot function as it was intended to function.
28:44
SPEAKER_02: Your cells can't function, the cellular energy, the mitochondria, all of it.
28:48
SPEAKER_02: You need trace copper, you need trace selenium, you need, you know, macro amounts of magnesium and calcium.
28:54
SPEAKER_02: It's so funny to me.
28:55
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes people ask me, like, what should I take as a calcium supplement?
28:58
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, plants.
29:01
SPEAKER_02: They're all loaded with calcium.
29:03
SPEAKER_02: You know, eat broccoli.
29:04
SPEAKER_02: You need calcium, eat broccoli.
29:06
SPEAKER_02: You need calcium, just just drink smoothies, man.
29:09
SPEAKER_02: They're loaded with calcium.
29:11
SPEAKER_02: Plants won't grow without calcium.
29:13
SPEAKER_02: But people are lacking trace minerals.
29:16
SPEAKER_02: And that that is a that that's a big cause of degenerative disease, in in my view.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: And when you're lacking these minerals, it can also inhibit your ability to detoxify your body, correct?
29:29
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
29:30
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
29:31
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
29:32
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
29:33
SPEAKER_02: Minerals are the catalyst for so many enzymatic processes in in the body.
29:38
SPEAKER_02: And you know what's interesting is uh ocean water contains every element at some level.
29:43
SPEAKER_02: And you know, when when there's a tidal wave and the ocean waters flood like an agricultural area, like what happened a few years ago in the Indian Ocean with that big tsunami.
29:53
SPEAKER_02: Uh, yes, it was devastating to the real estate, but then in subsequent years, the crops are so much better.
29:59
SPEAKER_02: Why?
29:59
SPEAKER_02: Because it deposited minerals.
30:02
SPEAKER_02: Uh, same thing, you know, like think about the history of agriculture, the flooding of the river Nile, right?
30:08
SPEAKER_02: Uh the flooding would do what?
30:10
SPEAKER_02: It would restore nutrients to the croplands.
30:12
SPEAKER_02: So flooding, which is halted by modern day dams, you know, dams stop the floods.
30:19
SPEAKER_02: And so it stopped the replenishment of the agricultural lands, and it led like damming rivers, which of course generated clean hydroelectric energy, but it also resulted in depleted food supplies for the populations.
30:32
SPEAKER_02: Like people don't normally think about these kinds of you know, synergistic effects.
30:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, one of the most uh interesting ones that we know is the role in in exactly this same uh theme is the role of fire uh throughout history to release the minerals through ash.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: Um and and and you know, Disney has done a great disservice uh with Bambi and fire.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: And actually uh the the Native Americans lit fire.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they didn't have chainsaws, okay?
31:07
SPEAKER_01: So they their management tool was fire, and it was to attract the wildlife who would come to a burn to lick the charcoal and lick the ashes to get the minerals.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: And so the Indians would do a fire, you know, two or three, four or five acres.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: Here come the wildlife.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: The Indians, you know, can harvest the wildlife because the wildlife is attracted even even before the before the smoke was away, you know, while it was still kind of smoldering, the the wildlife would come in to lick and and and and um and get those minerals.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: Uh so you know that's a that's a critical element on our farm.
31:39
SPEAKER_01: You know, we we have a big commercial chipper and we view the forest as a carbon and mineral sink that we that we we chip and then we compost all that, put that on the fields.
31:53
SPEAKER_01: Oak trees, oak trees have more calcium per um you know per volume of material than any other living substance except bone.
32:03
SPEAKER_01: And we have a lot of oak trees.
32:06
SPEAKER_02: So see, that's that's wonderful.
32:08
SPEAKER_02: I love I love that you're saying that because I think composting should be viewed also as a mineral management task.
32:15
SPEAKER_02: Right.
32:15
SPEAKER_02: You think about you're concentrating minerals in the compost and then you're redistributing that and with the right soil pH, then this is really critical.
32:23
SPEAKER_02: I know you're both aware of this, but just in case your audience needs a review, you know, the pH determines the range of minerals that can be absorbed by the plants, right?
32:33
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, too acidic and you start to lose uptake of certain minerals and too alkaline, you know, you have the same problem, but with with a different, different set of minerals.
32:43
SPEAKER_02: So uh acidic, you know, rainwater is slightly acidic.
32:49
SPEAKER_02: So rainwater is critical for freeing up, typically for the slight acidity, frees up minerals, making them more available to plants.
32:57
SPEAKER_02: And that's why if you've ever tried to grow plants on well water, you know, versus rainwater, it's like night and day, right?
33:04
SPEAKER_02: But that's probably why it's the acidity of the rainwater, which is freeing.
33:08
SPEAKER_02: I remember it's so funny.
33:09
SPEAKER_02: Remember years ago, Joel, when when in the 1980s and they were trying to scare us about acid rain.
33:15
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
33:16
SPEAKER_02: Like all rain is acid.
33:17
SPEAKER_02: I mean, a little bit.
33:18
SPEAKER_02: It's a little, you know, and if you don't have a little bit of acidity, you're not going to free up the minerals in the soil.
33:23
SPEAKER_02: So, and it turns out that was just another media scare story.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's another it's another example of where it was only one part of the issue.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, acid rain on low humus, low organic matter soils can can create problems really, really fast.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: But acid rain on high organic matter, uh, you know, uh uh six, seven, eight percent organic matter soil that's that's got all that uh humus and and spongy absorptive in it, and and biology, it it it's actually an asset.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: So uh depending on, and of course, what's the number one way to eliminate uh eliminate organic matter is monocrop tillage.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: That's the number one way to eliminate um soil organic matter.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, so isn't that true?
34:10
SPEAKER_01: Toy.
34:11
SPEAKER_02: We we're coming up on the I think the end of a chapter of an experiment in uh food production that has failed.
34:22
SPEAKER_02: And that's why I love what you do, Joel, because I think you're you're showing the way forward.
34:26
SPEAKER_02: You're showing how we can actually produce food, feed people in a wholesome and nutritious way, but also in a sustainable way that actually builds soil, builds the resource, you know, regenerative agriculture.
34:38
SPEAKER_02: You're you're you are regenerating.
34:40
SPEAKER_02: Whereas I think the era that we are coming out of, which I would say, you know, post-World War II era, it's an era of extraction, of an era of soil loss, of mineral loss, a loss of the great treasure of North America, which is the food basket, the soils, the fossil water supplies, the the root systems that hold together the soils rather than allowing them to vanish through erosion or wind or what have you.
35:11
SPEAKER_02: That era is a disaster.
35:15
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but there is a way forward, and you're you're doing it, Joel.
35:21
SPEAKER_01: Go ahead, Cena.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: Uh, Cena, I know you're you're dying with some more.
35:24
SPEAKER_01: We've got we've got another 15 minutes or so.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: I know you've got other stuff on your plate.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it just goes by too fast.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what I'd like to do then, we talked a lot about food.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: Can we switch over to supplements?
35:36
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: And the first question I have to piggyback on the food is do you consume a mineral supplement yourself?
35:44
SPEAKER_00: And if you do, which one is it?
35:47
SPEAKER_02: Uh there's only one mineral that I supplement, and that's zinc.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
35:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, only one.
35:53
SPEAKER_02: And I use zinc drops and I put it in my smoothie.
35:56
SPEAKER_02: I just drink it, even though it can taste a little funky.
35:58
SPEAKER_02: You don't need very much.
35:59
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, your zinc requirements are very, very low.
36:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, when it comes to mineral supplementation, I noticed that the store-bought multivitamins and multi-minerals, they always contain way too much copper.
36:14
SPEAKER_02: Uh, copper is one of those trace minerals that has a very narrow range of efficacy.
36:19
SPEAKER_02: And for adults, I think two milligrams to four milligrams per day is really the max that you want to get.
36:26
SPEAKER_02: And those are milligrams, right?
36:28
SPEAKER_02: So we're talking really, really small amounts.
36:30
SPEAKER_02: Well, what a lot of people are doing is they're getting four milligrams in their multi-mineral supplement, plus they're getting all the extra copper from their normal consumption of meats or foods or even elemental copper from old water pipes, things like that.
36:45
SPEAKER_02: As a result, they're getting into long-term chronic uh overexposure to copper, which can lead to psychiatric disorders, believe it or not.
36:55
SPEAKER_02: So a lot of psychiatric disorders, mental illness problems in people who live around copper mines because of a lot of extra copper that falls and ends up in the soils and in the food.
37:05
SPEAKER_02: So I would just encourage people to be very careful with daily supplementation of trace minerals that have a narrow range of efficacy.
37:16
SPEAKER_02: Now, zinc isn't a different ballpark altogether.
37:19
SPEAKER_02: You can you can do a lot of extra zinc without problems.
37:22
SPEAKER_02: And of course, calcium and magnesium, you can, you know, you're you're typically not going to overdose on those.
37:30
SPEAKER_02: Uh it would be hard to, I should say.
37:32
SPEAKER_02: I guess it's possible.
37:34
SPEAKER_02: But, you know, selenium is also a pretty narrow range in selenium.
37:39
SPEAKER_02: And uh just trying to think about like what are some minerals that you want to know about?
37:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that zinc and copper were two of the big ones, you know, based on what we just went through with COVID and so many people supplementing uh with, you know, particularly with zinc.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: So um now what is your opinion on vitamin D supplementation?
38:03
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I do supplement vitamin D, uh, even though I do spend a fair amount of time outside.
38:08
SPEAKER_02: And so I know I know my body's making it.
38:11
SPEAKER_02: I I do tend to supplement it anyway, because I know that vitamin D deficiency, especially in the winter months, is extremely common and very costly.
38:19
SPEAKER_02: So vitamin D deficiency not only leads to more cancer growth, you know, the tumors that people have in their bodies tend to grow in the winters because that's when they're vitamin D deficient.
38:31
SPEAKER_02: But also immune system function and kidney function, among other things.
38:35
SPEAKER_02: You know, vitamin D is uh, you know, it's a it's a essentially it's a hormone and it's involved in metabolism and blood sugar metabolism, even to some extent cognitive function as well.
38:44
SPEAKER_02: So I don't want to be deficient in vitamin D at all.
38:48
SPEAKER_02: Um you that there is a toxic level of that uh that you can get into, so don't go crazy with it, but have it tested, you know.
38:58
SPEAKER_02: I mean, have your blood tested and get it get a readout.
39:02
SPEAKER_02: You know, one of the things that we've done in our lab, by the way, is we've tested people's hair.
39:06
SPEAKER_02: We don't offer this currently, but we used to do a lot of testing of hair for minerals, obviously not not vitamin D, but for trace minerals and toxic minerals.
39:15
SPEAKER_02: And even when testing my own hair, and we found this across the samples that we tested, people's hair is far more toxic than any hair that I would get from a wild animal.
39:30
SPEAKER_02: So my dogs would occasionally, you know, catch a rabbit, and so, or they'd bring in part of a deer or whatever that had already died.
39:39
SPEAKER_02: And so I would harvest some fur and test it as, you know, as a scientist.
39:44
SPEAKER_02: I'm curious, like, what's what's the mineral composition of this hair?
39:47
SPEAKER_02: Turns out that rabbit hair shows that rabbits have a very, very clean diet compared to humans.
39:54
SPEAKER_02: Same thing with deer.
39:55
SPEAKER_02: And I've also tested wild hog hair because we have those too here in Texas.
40:00
SPEAKER_02: And so uh all the wild animals are so much cleaner than we are.
40:05
SPEAKER_02: Even myself, and I tend to have a very clean diet.
40:08
SPEAKER_02: My hair had more mercury, more cadmium, more lead, more arsenic than any of the wild animal hair.
40:14
SPEAKER_02: Isn't that interesting?
40:15
SPEAKER_00: Wow, that is interesting.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: So presumably from the food, the the water that we're consuming, or maybe even supplements that might be uh adulterated.
40:27
SPEAKER_02: I think it's mostly from uh yeah, certain foods and supplements is is my guess.
40:33
SPEAKER_02: And I'm very careful.
40:34
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I mostly only take supplements from my own company for this very reason because I know we've tested them.
40:41
SPEAKER_02: And but you can get you can get metals in food, that's for sure.
40:45
SPEAKER_02: It's just look, people get heavy metals from sources that they they're sometimes gullible about them.
40:54
SPEAKER_02: Let me give you a story, the a true story.
40:57
SPEAKER_02: There was uh a man, I'm not gonna give his name, but there was a man, I think he lived in India, and he would tour around the United States, and he would give these seminars on like miraculous spiritual healing, and he would invite people to come to the seminars for free, get large crowds there.
41:15
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if it was New Agey or what.
41:18
SPEAKER_02: I really don't know.
41:19
SPEAKER_02: But he would sell, his profit model was to sell these mysterious spherical supplements, and people would get incredibly sick on these supplements.
41:30
SPEAKER_02: And the way I know this is that one of these people said that they got incredibly sick and they they sent us one of these supplements to test.
41:39
SPEAKER_02: Well, we tested the supplement, and the mercury was off the charts.
41:44
SPEAKER_02: It contaminated our ICP instrument, and it actually went OR, which is out of range on mercury, which we had never seen before.
41:52
SPEAKER_02: It was so alarming to me that we actually have a duty under ISO accreditation to alert the FDA.
41:59
SPEAKER_02: And so we did.
42:00
SPEAKER_02: We filed a report with the FDA that we came across this crazy toxic mercury.
42:06
SPEAKER_02: Wasn't from fish, wasn't from food, it was from this guru guy that's running around selling this as a miracle cure in seminars.
42:15
SPEAKER_02: And the FDA responded and they said, Well, you should give it to this other team, and we gave it to that team.
42:20
SPEAKER_02: We never heard anything more.
42:22
SPEAKER_02: They probably didn't do anything with it.
42:24
SPEAKER_02: People, we we eventually found out that it was get this, Joel, 800 parts per million mercury.
42:30
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
42:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like if you swallow this pill, you're doing brain damage, you're doing serious damage.
42:39
SPEAKER_02: And it again didn't come from food, came from some, you know, sales guru person.
42:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, so so the the the snake oil, the snake oil is still with us.
42:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, except it's I mean, I wouldn't mind drinking snake oil, but this guy's selling mercury pills, you know?
42:56
SPEAKER_02: It's like, wow.
42:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that that's still here.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, one of the other things about uh about wild animals is that they don't see any television ads.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
43:08
unknown: Right.
43:08
SPEAKER_01: And they and and they don't do any screen time, and and they're just they're just doing their thing.
43:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they don't they don't have that nobody'll they don't have to worry about about being sued, about uh filing government reports.
43:22
SPEAKER_01: I mean you start you start looking at the human uh you know what what occupies our our minds and our time today compared to a you know a possum out there or a rabbit or a deer or a or a wild pig.
43:37
SPEAKER_01: Um just they're just they're just doing their thing, man.
43:41
SPEAKER_02: You know, just um well and a lot of times what when people get toxins, it's something that they've chosen with a sense of gullibility.
43:50
SPEAKER_02: For example, in the in the Latina culture, uh uh in the cosmetics industry in Mexico and Central and South America, it is.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: Highly desirable by a lot of Latino women to have their skin appear more white and less brown.
44:05
SPEAKER_02: It's just a cultural uh preference because you know the people with brown skin were those mostly lower income status that worked outside more, whatever.
44:13
SPEAKER_02: I'm not judging them, I'm just saying that they they would buy a lot of cosmetics that are skin whitening creams.
44:19
SPEAKER_02: Well, guess what whitens skin really effectively?
44:22
SPEAKER_02: Mercury.
44:23
SPEAKER_02: So if you go out and you buy in Mexico skin whitening creams, they will very often contain crazy levels of mercury.
44:31
SPEAKER_02: And of course, mercury is associated with mental instability, which is where the term, you know, mad hatter came from, because the hat makers would use mercury with the felt to form the brim of the hat.
44:43
SPEAKER_02: And that's why the hatters went crazy.
44:45
SPEAKER_02: That's that's where that comes from.
44:46
SPEAKER_02: And also in dentistry, of course, if you're drilling mercury fillings all day as a dentist and you're inhaling that, you're gonna go mad at some point.
44:54
SPEAKER_02: You know, it's just it's just physics, it's chemistry.
44:57
SPEAKER_02: Well, same thing is true with cosmetics in and also in Asia.
45:01
SPEAKER_02: A lot of Asian cultures, also, the women in particular want to have wider skin.
45:05
SPEAKER_02: And so you will find in China, you'll find skin creams that are loaded with mercury.
45:09
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, sometimes people come to me and they're like, oh, I'm so concerned about one part per million of glyphosate in my food, but I can smell on them that they're loaded with fragrance and toxins and laundry detergents and stuff.
45:20
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, uh, your priorities could use a little reconfiguration.
45:25
SPEAKER_02: You're killing yourself every day with what you put on your skin.
45:28
SPEAKER_02: Don't worry about one part per billion of this or that.
45:31
SPEAKER_02: Uh, change your laundry detergent.
45:33
SPEAKER_02: You know, it's like that's I mean, often that's my message.
45:37
SPEAKER_02: If people ask me, they want the honest truth, that's what I tell them.
45:39
SPEAKER_02: Like, I can smell you from here, you know.
45:43
SPEAKER_02: It's like you you want you you want my advice?
45:46
SPEAKER_02: There it is.
45:47
SPEAKER_02: Like, clean up your your laundry, clean up your personal care products, clean up your shampoo, clean up your deodorants and all that stuff.
45:54
SPEAKER_02: You want to be healthy, start with the start with eliminating the poisons that you put on your body every day.
46:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there you go.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:03
SPEAKER_00: And I feel the same way.
46:04
SPEAKER_00: And one follow-up to that, with um, because I know you have this entire company where you have like supplement lines and you guys do testing, uh third-party testing for like glyphosate, heavy metals, and in-house.
46:18
SPEAKER_00: We do that in-house.
46:19
SPEAKER_00: Yes, in-house.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so my question is you know, as I have been perusing the literature for like a decade now, um, I stumbled upon a lot of studies that are indicating that there's quite a bit of adulteration in the supplement industry.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, for example, there's a 2023 2023 review that said that 60% of all the elderberry samples that they tested, and there were hundreds of them, 60% were adulterated with things like black rice or purple carrot.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, there was another 2023 study that said that almost a third of the hundreds of turmeric samples that they tested contained um the Sudan dyes, which you know are these illegal additives that have been linked with um as carcinogens and you know, it's like linked to cancer, for instance.
47:07
SPEAKER_00: So I'm finding these things in the literature, but now you have a lab where you test these things in-house.
47:14
SPEAKER_00: So what are you seeing, or and what have you seen across the supplement industry?
47:19
SPEAKER_00: Are you seeing a lot of adulteration?
47:21
SPEAKER_00: And did that play a role in why you created this third-party lab?
47:26
SPEAKER_02: Well, uh, yes, there's a lot of adulteration, absolutely, especially botanical.
47:31
SPEAKER_02: Uh, that's not why we created our lab, but it is testing that we do and that we are required to do by the FDA.
47:38
SPEAKER_02: So the FDA is currently cracking down specifically on the performance, libido, and sports supplements categories.
47:46
SPEAKER_02: And it's actually in those three categories where you find the most adulteration with illegal pharmaceutical type molecules or hormones, things like that.
47:57
SPEAKER_02: So if you're out there buying, you know, like a get big muscles, you know, supplement, it's probably got illegal molecules in it and it's you know, questionable safety.
48:08
SPEAKER_02: So that's a high risk category.
48:10
SPEAKER_02: And Amazon is cracking down on that.
48:13
SPEAKER_02: When you're buying botanical supplements, it's much lower risk of contamination.
48:19
SPEAKER_02: But there are species adulterations that are very common.
48:23
SPEAKER_02: And this can happen in any area.
48:26
SPEAKER_02: Uh, there is a company known as Alchemist, uh, A-L-K-E-M-I-S-T, I believe, uh, that we have known and worked with for years for outside botanical reference uh confirmations.
48:42
SPEAKER_02: And they use a variety of methods such as uh uh high performance thin film liquid chromatography.
48:49
SPEAKER_02: That's one way to do it.
48:50
SPEAKER_02: Uh we have mass spec instruments in-house where we can also look for uh certain biomarkers, such as the curcumin molecule, or if we're testing uh for cannabinoids, we can look for cannabidiolic acid, CBDA, in a hemp extract, and we can quantitate that.
49:07
SPEAKER_02: So there are a number of methods.
49:08
SPEAKER_02: There's also microscopy and so on.
49:10
SPEAKER_02: Uh that is a that's an ongoing challenge.
49:14
SPEAKER_02: And everybody that's in the supplements industry sooner or later gets burned by a vendor.
49:21
SPEAKER_02: 100%.
49:22
SPEAKER_02: And you will you'll you'll find there there are companies out there that are exporters, not only from China, but from Mexico or elsewhere around the world, even from India or even from Turkey, there are companies that will try to cheat and they'll try to sell you fake stuff.
49:38
SPEAKER_02: And if you're not checking for it, you're gonna get duped 100%.
49:43
SPEAKER_01: Just to make sure I understand, Mike, as the layman here in this discussion, um, when you say 100% they're gonna be burned by a vendor somewhere, that is a vendor with a completed product, or a vendor that's is is it the unprocessed sourcing, the leaves, the you know, the plant material, or is it the actual finished product?
50:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, usually it's raw, I'm referring to raw materials.
50:06
SPEAKER_01: Okay, raw materials.
50:07
SPEAKER_01: But okay, so so it's it's a it's a certain field, it's a certain place.
50:13
SPEAKER_02: Well, there are there are vendors that buy from growers, but then they can adulterate them and cut them with you know ground up leaves or whatever.
50:22
SPEAKER_02: And then they sell that to the manufacturers that then make supplements out of it or make tinctures out of it or do the extracts or you know, make capsules, what have you.
50:31
SPEAKER_02: So through this entire chain, what we've learned over all these years is that if there's a supplement manufacturer that is selling supplements on Amazon, until recently, most of them did not do identity testing.
50:45
SPEAKER_02: Now, there are companies such as now uh that do, they they're very stringent about their testing.
50:51
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I know this because some of the people that have worked in my lab have, they also have contacts with the the the labs of now foods.
50:58
SPEAKER_02: It used to be called now foods.
50:59
SPEAKER_02: They do very stringent testing.
51:01
SPEAKER_02: I also happen to know, by the way, that Walmart has a massive mass spec laboratory facility in Arkansas, and they test everything they sell for heavy metals: children's clothing, mugs, everything.
51:12
SPEAKER_02: Because they don't want a kid to buy a like a Mickey Mouse shirt and the red paint on the shirt has lead in it because that's happened before.
51:19
SPEAKER_02: Or you buy a coffee mug and it's usually the red paint on the coffee mug that's loaded with lead.
51:24
SPEAKER_02: And Walmart does not want to get burned by that.
51:26
SPEAKER_02: So they they actually they disassemble bicycles and test bicycles for lead.
51:30
SPEAKER_02: Like Walmart does more heavy metals testing than any retailer in the world, believe it or not.
51:36
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's that's surprising.
51:38
SPEAKER_01: That's amazing because we just had uh uh you're probably familiar with the work of Dan Kittridge at the uh by the Food Bionutrient Bionutrient Food Association, um, headquartered in Massachusetts.
51:51
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not familiar with him, but go ahead.
51:53
SPEAKER_01: So that they're using mass spectrometry to uh to determine to measure about 150 nutrient levels in foods, trying to create try trying to create an actual uh a database that's big enough that it can give you a a green light, red uh yellow light, red light on um on is this broccoli where it is.
52:14
SPEAKER_01: And so they they, for example, the first thing they tested was carrots, tested for about 150 nutrients.
52:19
SPEAKER_01: They found that you would have to eat almost a hundred of the poorest carrots to get the same nutrition as the as the one of the best carrots.
52:26
SPEAKER_01: There's not surprised.
52:27
SPEAKER_01: There's that much difference.
52:28
SPEAKER_01: So then they tested broccoli, then they then they wanted to make sure make sure this is not an outlier.
52:33
SPEAKER_01: So they tested broccoli, found basically the same thing.
52:36
SPEAKER_01: So now they're on to their first really serious thing, which is beef.
52:40
SPEAKER_01: They're looking at beef, and and interestingly, what they've found in their preliminary uh studies with the carrots, the broccoli and stuff, is that um that the foods in uh in Walmart uh in in those kind of places actually beat the nutritional value of the foods at Whole Foods.
53:05
SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
53:07
SPEAKER_01: Um in general.
53:09
SPEAKER_01: And uh and it just it just kind of so they're they're I think they're kind of on a cutting edge of some of this really um you know uh breakthrough testing.
53:17
SPEAKER_01: And what they're trying to do is create an instrument that you can go and actually, you know, using light frequency um wand, you know, wand a produce counter, and you know, and pick the best potato.
53:30
SPEAKER_02: Well, that's that's a very tricky technology to get quantitation data from a spectroscopy type of approach.
53:37
SPEAKER_02: It it that typically tells you uh it's a glimpse of identity, but not typically the the quantitation.
53:44
SPEAKER_02: But I what you said is really it's great to hear that.
53:47
SPEAKER_02: It's really fascinating to me because food, you know, you can you can find a chart from the USDA of what's in green beans.
53:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that you you throw you should throw it away because it it doesn't tell you anything about your green beans that you got at the farmer's market or that you grew, because your green beans can have, like you said, a hundred to one variability.
54:05
SPEAKER_02: And there's also, of course, seasonal variability, there's weather variability, you know, temperature, humidity, and acidity of soils drastically affects nutrient uptake and nutrient synthesis.
54:18
SPEAKER_02: There was one time, for example, like we sell uh freeze-dried broccoli in number 10 cans.
54:24
SPEAKER_02: And one of the reasons I love broccoli is because it has sulforophane in it, which is a neuroprotective phytonutrient that's synthesized by broccoli plants.
54:33
SPEAKER_02: Well, we received this shipment from this vendor, and it like, wait a minute, this is nothing but broccoli stalks.
54:41
SPEAKER_02: Where are the florets?
54:43
SPEAKER_02: And they said, Well, there's been a shortage, and all we have is stalks.
54:47
SPEAKER_02: It's still broccoli.
54:48
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, well, now wait a second, because what I want are the florets.
54:52
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I want the whole broccoli because that's where the nutrients are in the florets, right?
54:57
SPEAKER_02: I don't want you you sold me broccoli stalks.
55:00
SPEAKER_02: I can't go to my audience and say, hey, buy a bunch of broccoli stocks, you know, it's still broccoli.
55:06
SPEAKER_01: It's like that doesn't fly.
55:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
55:08
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine going to the store to buy sweet corn and and all they have in there are are corn stalks?
55:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
55:14
SPEAKER_01: It's corn.
55:15
SPEAKER_02: Or it's cobs, like, oh, okay, whatever.
55:18
SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, you know, so there's all kinds of things that are happening like that in the in the supply chain.
55:24
SPEAKER_02: And if if you don't think about these issues, like where is the nutrition?
55:29
SPEAKER_02: You're gonna get burned again and again and again.
55:32
SPEAKER_02: And even like what you do on your farm, Joel, I know you're always thinking about like where does the nutrition actually come from?
55:37
SPEAKER_02: What are the inputs that create this?
55:40
SPEAKER_02: And that's how you produce a superior product.
55:43
SPEAKER_02: But for somebody who just doesn't care or doesn't know about nutrition and doesn't know about minerals and and how plants produce nutrients and so on.
55:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know or or somebody that's just that's just trying to produce volume, which which exactly that that's that's all the that's that's what our culture, our agri, our agriculture in the US uh really doesn't ask about nutrition, it just asks how many bristles, how many pounds, how many it's all about the the production numbers.
56:14
SPEAKER_01: Fill the boxes, yeah.
56:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
56:18
SPEAKER_00: And you know, so I may have got this stat wrong, but I think I read in one of your newsletters that you reject about 80% of the raw ingredients coming into your facility.
56:30
SPEAKER_00: Is that true?
56:30
SPEAKER_02: Well, certain materials, yes, like turmeric is is a great example of that.
56:35
SPEAKER_02: And so did you know that in the EU there are very, very strict limits on heavy metals in root vegetables or root spices like turmeric.
56:46
SPEAKER_02: But in the US, there are no legal limits on heavy metals in turmeric.
56:51
SPEAKER_02: And so what happens is international producers from China or India or Mexico or wherever, or Thailand, often a lot of turmeric comes out of Thailand, they produce turmeric.
57:01
SPEAKER_02: They can do an initial assessment themselves.
57:04
SPEAKER_02: If it's heavily contaminated, they sell it to America.
57:07
SPEAKER_02: If it's clean, they sell it to the EU or Canada or Japan, where the rules are more strict.
57:12
SPEAKER_02: So what happens is the United States becomes this dumping ground of the most contaminated foods that are grown in other countries.
57:19
SPEAKER_02: And that's because the FDA and the USDA don't have limits on heavy metals.
57:25
SPEAKER_02: That's why.
57:26
SPEAKER_02: I mean, you read the rules in the EU, they are very strict and they're broken down by type of food, like green beans can only have this much, potatoes can only have this much, and or milk, you know, it is very strict.
57:41
SPEAKER_02: And our but our our own internal requirements are more strict than the EU, by the way.
57:48
SPEAKER_02: But there are some people who conflate this with uh what is it in California?
57:53
SPEAKER_02: Is it Prop 65 that that was really a water law that has very, very strict limitations on lead, but it's been misapplied to foods.
58:03
SPEAKER_02: And there have been a lot of lawsuits in California, and you can get fined as a supplement provider if you have more than I think 0.5 micrograms of lead intake per day based on the serving size on your on your supplement label.
58:15
SPEAKER_02: And so California misapplied a water rule to food and supplements to just try to extract money from a lot of supplement providers.
58:25
SPEAKER_02: That's been a big scam for years out of California.
58:29
SPEAKER_02: But the reason that limit was put on water is because people consume a lot more water than they eat turmeric.
58:35
SPEAKER_02: You know, so so 0.5 micrograms of lead per day in the water supply makes a lot of sense.
58:41
SPEAKER_02: But it it's not realistic in certain types of foods like spices.
58:46
SPEAKER_02: So if you sell spices, you know, like cinnamon always has lead in it.
58:50
SPEAKER_02: You can't get cinnamon without lead at some level.
58:53
SPEAKER_02: Does it mean you should stop eating cinnamon?
58:55
SPEAKER_02: No, cinnamon's awesome.
58:57
SPEAKER_02: You know, cinnamon's great for blood sugar control and and neuroprotective, it's part of Chinese medicine too.
59:03
SPEAKER_02: You know, cinnamon's awesome.
59:04
SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna stop eating cinnamon, but I don't eat gallons of cinnamon.
59:08
SPEAKER_02: Right.
59:08
SPEAKER_02: You know, so it's wild.
59:11
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
59:12
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's pretty crazy.
59:13
SPEAKER_00: I know, I know we're about out of time, but I know you have something special that you want to announce that's coming out pretty soon.
59:21
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
59:21
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
59:22
SPEAKER_02: I forgot.
59:23
SPEAKER_02: Um, so we are building the the world's best open source, free, downloadable AI language model on herbs, nutrition, permaculture, off-grid living, sustainability, natural medicine, alternative medicine, you name it.
59:38
SPEAKER_02: And it's currently codenamed Enoch, which refers to one of the lost uh, you know, lost scriptures, hidden knowledge is what that's all about.
59:47
SPEAKER_02: And it's being released for free March 1st on Brighton.ai.
59:51
SPEAKER_02: Now we did release some language models last year that were so-so.
59:56
SPEAKER_02: And but since then, we've curated the largest collection of knowledge on all these subjects, nutrition, herbs, you name it.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_02: And then we've been able to, well, spend a lot of money and build this into a uh a language model that's being released for free to the public.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_02: So you'll be able to download that, run it for free on your local computer.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_02: You it doesn't operate in the cloud.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_02: You don't need to pay anything.
1:00:18
SPEAKER_02: There's no advertising, it's non-commercial, free to use.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_02: Just go to brightown.ai and sign up with your email address there, and we'll alert you when it's ready.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_00: That's incredible.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's really a gift that you're giving to our society, especially in a time when many of us, including uh Joel and I, are being censored.
1:00:39
SPEAKER_00: So we're having a hard time getting this great information out there.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_00: So I really applaud you for the time, the effort, the thought that went into this, and the fact that you're handing it to us for free.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_00: That's incredible.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you for uh recognizing that.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_02: And let me just say, I mean, yes, we this is this is I think this is the most important thing I've ever done in my lifetime to give this tool to humanity.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_02: But let me just state quickly a couple of things that people can do with it.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_02: So once you have this model running on your local computer, you can type in the ingredients from a food product that you just bought, and you can ask the model, tell me about each of these ingredients, which ones are beneficial, which ones are harmful.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_02: And it'll it'll give you a full report on all the ingredients.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_02: You can even ask it, you can use it as a wellness coach.
1:01:27
SPEAKER_02: You can ask it questions like how can I improve my intake of zinc?
1:01:31
SPEAKER_02: How can I grow foods better?
1:01:32
SPEAKER_02: What kind of soils are best for blueberries?
1:01:35
SPEAKER_02: What are the safest places to get food?
1:01:37
SPEAKER_02: Or you can even ask it, how do I connect solar panels to uh uh an inverter or a charger?
1:01:43
SPEAKER_02: And it'll it'll give you uh uh advice on that.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_02: And it and and plus natural medicine, you know, tell me about sound healing, tell me about uh, you know, nutrition, tell me about uh uh infrared light therapy.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_02: How does that work?
1:02:00
SPEAKER_02: It's a massive knowledge base, it's kind of the Noah's arc of information that's being censored.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_02: And this is the kind of thing that we need as humanity to be able to rebuild our civilization with knowledge that's being, frankly, it's being wiped off uh uh of Google and Facebook and YouTube.
1:02:20
SPEAKER_02: They're banning everything that we need because they just they just want to favor, you know, all the big corporate interests.
1:02:25
SPEAKER_02: They don't want humans to have the knowledge that got us to this point.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_02: So and it's trained on a lot of Native American herbal knowledge, traditional Chinese medicine knowledge, uh Amazonian medicine, Tibetan medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, every system of medicine around the world it's trained on as well.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_00: Wow, that's incredible.
1:02:43
SPEAKER_00: And what a great way because Joel and I have talked about this before, where, you know, like you said, they're trying to get rid of all this knowledge and like one way or the other.
1:02:52
SPEAKER_00: And so we may have to go back to us educating ourselves and passing down this knowledge through oral tradition.
1:02:58
SPEAKER_00: And so this would be fantastic to use this device that you've created, this platform, to educate ourselves so we can continue passing on this great wisdom that's long been forgotten.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_02: It's it's designed to even function if we lose the entire internet and if the power grid goes down.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_02: But if you have a laptop computer and a solar panel and you can boot up that laptop, you can ask it anything you want, and it'll have all this knowledge built in.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_02: So it's decentralization.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_02: I believe in decentralizing the food supply, decentralizing medicine, decentralizing knowledge.
1:03:29
SPEAKER_02: And this is how we're working to achieve that.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_02: That's great.
1:03:33
SPEAKER_00: Like I said, Joel, our third P in the pod.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what a what a what a wonderful, uh, uh, wonderful interview and and uh just a great a great way to think about this first year and the opportunities that are coming down.
1:03:49
SPEAKER_01: It's just uh it's just wonderful.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: So at the end of our podcast, we always ask our audience a question, and um uh usually Cena lets me uh come up with it.
1:03:59
SPEAKER_01: So uh so my question is uh have you ever had a complete blood analysis done at an alternative lab, not the hospital, but but on some sort of this, you know, a quack, a quack lab, okay?
1:04:14
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever had a blood a complete blood analysis done at a quack lab?
1:04:18
SPEAKER_01: And if you have, what was your biggest surprise?
1:04:22
SPEAKER_02: No, I I have not, but the closest I've come to that is what I mentioned earlier when I tested my own hair and found that my hair was more contaminated than rabbit hair.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
1:04:32
SPEAKER_01: That that's that's pretty that's pretty phenomenal.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:04:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:04:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:04:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm sure folks in our audience have had some of these um alternative lab blood samples done.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_01: You know, you know, like a complete spectrum.
1:04:44
SPEAKER_01: And um, and uh, you know, a lot of times they do present some some surprises, uh both and negative.
1:04:52
SPEAKER_01: Things that a lot of times, I mean, I think I think one of the takeaways from this uh conversation is some of the things we're most worried about we shouldn't be, and some of the things we're not worried about, we probably should be.
1:05:03
SPEAKER_01: And uh and so those kinds of analyses and and lab work can help us to to figure out which ones merit our concern and which ones don't.
1:05:13
SPEAKER_02: Can can I can I add something along those lines here before we close this out?
1:05:18
SPEAKER_02: This this will prevent people from living in fear or panic about these findings.
1:05:23
SPEAKER_02: The thing to watch out for, the big red flag, is when somebody says that this food tested positive for a heavy metal.
1:05:32
SPEAKER_02: That language is meaningless.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't mean anything other than one atom of a metal was found in it.
1:05:40
SPEAKER_02: Or if they say, well, we tested this food, it tested positive for glyphosate.
1:05:44
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't mean anything.
1:05:45
SPEAKER_02: As a food scientist, I would I would say that that means zero because it's the quantity that matters or the concentration that matters.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_02: We are all eating some amount of mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, whatever, every day, all the time.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_02: You're eating some level of glyphosate.
1:06:02
SPEAKER_02: Is it toxic at at parts per trillion or femtograms?
1:06:07
SPEAKER_02: No, no, not at all.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_02: You'll you'll do more damage over the stress of it than the substance itself.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's that's that's word to the wise.
1:06:16
SPEAKER_01: Word to the wise.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for for being uh with us, Mike.
1:06:21
SPEAKER_01: We look forward to more uh more communique uh in the future and and blessings on on you and your work.
1:06:27
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for being um such a leader in this space.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_01: We really appreciate it.
1:06:31
SPEAKER_02: Blessings to both of you.
1:06:32
SPEAKER_02: It's been a real pleasure to be able to speak with you.
1:06:35
SPEAKER_02: And uh I love to join you again.
1:06:38
SPEAKER_02: Love the work that both of you are doing.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_02: Blessings to you all.
1:06:41
SPEAKER_01: Thank you all for joining us on another Beyond Labels podcast, and we look forward to being with you again next week.