Food Forensics. Mike Adams
Читать онлайн книгу.
of Flint, Michigan, called for the criminal prosecution of those responsible.
Moving toward a low heavy metals industry standard
Until the USDA and FDA come around to establishing heavy metals limits for foods, superfoods, and dietary supplements, we’ve created our own limits, which have been published online and embraced by several companies.
The website lowheavymetalsverified.org provides a voluntary heavy metals guide for manufacturers of foods, superfoods, and dietary supplements. The site describes a letter-grade self-certification system ranging from A+++ on the super clean side down to F for foods that are more heavily contaminated with heavy metals. (This grading system is printed in full on page 212 of Part 3: The Data near the end of this book.)
Because these standards may be revised from time to time as more information is learned about the impact of heavy metals on human health, please refer to lowheavymetalsverified.org to view the latest numbers. In particular, we hope to begin the speciation of arsenic so that we can distinguish organic arsenic from inorganic. Once that is accomplished, we plan to alter this standard to consider solely inorganic arsenic (the dangerous variety).
Most food products available in the marketplace today fall between A and D on the grading scale. This scale sets a voluntary standard by which food products can be easily compared on their heavy metals composition. It also allows consumers to more easily shop for products that are cleaner than others. For example, almost every health-conscious consumer would prefer to eat grade-A chocolate rather than grade-B chocolate, assuming all other properties of the chocolate are equal.
The downside of this system is that it is purely voluntary and, as you might have already guessed, many companies will flat-out lie to their customers and claim lower heavy metals concentrations than really exist in their products.
For this reason, Natural News will be policing the industry by randomly purchasing products from companies who claim these heavy metals limits and testing those products for compliance. Products that do not comply with the claims levels will be published on naturalnews.com.
Our hope is that both the USDA and FDA will eventually take over this function and establish their own procedures for heavy metals limits and industry spot-checking. Until that day comes, Natural News is the only organization on the planet that will be fulfilling this important role in the interests of public safety.
Some observers find it quite curious—perhaps even bizarre—that a private sector company is doing a better job of policing the U.S. food supply for heavy metals than the entire federal government, with a seemingly infinite budget.
I find it bizarre, too.
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TOXIC ELEMENTS
The next section of this book is scientific in structure as it discusses the origins of toxic heavy metals and other chemical contaminants such as pesticides, fertilizers, and preservatives. It also explains the way in which humans absorb these contaminants and the resulting health effects.
If you’re really only interested in the heavy metals test results for your favorite foods and superfoods, you can skip ahead to the charts section of this book, beginning on page 214.
But for those who want more in-depth research and explanations about how heavy metals and other contaminants harm biology and why they are so difficult to get rid of, this section documents the harm of heavy metals with a considerable amount of scientific explanation and research citations.
Just a warning, though: This section can get a bit technical. (Doctors, scientists, and biologists, however, will find it familiar reading.)
Where do heavy metals come from?
Life on Earth in its rawest natural form is fraught with countless dangers and immediate threats to your existence. Numerous toxic metals and compounds are found almost everywhere on this planet in some concentration. However, potentially poisonous forms of mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, copper, tin, tungsten, chromium, beryllium, and other elements are increasingly found in our post-industrial environment.
As elements, they can be transmuted through nuclear fusion in exploding stars, but they are not destroyed in mundane Earthly environments. Until the industrial revolution accelerated mining and pollution operations across the planet, most toxic heavy metals were buried deep underground, far from the concerns of simple human civilizations. As human industry expanded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, toxic heavy metals were mined, smelted, and added to any number of products that released those metals directly into the environment. Leaded gasoline, for example, released lead directly into the air with every stroke of the combustion engine. Mercury fillings resulted in thousands of tons of mercury being expelled into the atmosphere as the bodies of those who passed away were cremated. Lead arsenate was also widely used as a pesticide on orchards and food crops across North America for much of the nineteenth century.
Once expelled into the open environment, heavy metals may be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed into humans, animals, plants, and fungi, or they may be transformed and combined with other substances to create new compounds . . . but they cannot simply vanish. They persist.
It is the industrial exploitation and expelling of these elements—which were originally sparse and spread out at relatively low levels—that has turned vague primordial threats into everyday dangers. As by-products of smelting, ore extraction, energy production, and commercial goods, heavy metals and refined chemical compounds have poured into our air, water, soils, foods, ecosystems, and bodies.
In September 2013, the CDC issued its updated fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, detailing more than 201 chemical substances that have been identified in blood serum and urine levels throughout the U.S. population.8 These can be ingested, absorbed, stored, excreted, metabolized, or bound to other compounds—potentially interacting with, blocking, or amplifying reactions within the body.
While many elements, including trace levels of certain minerals, are essential nutrients for catalytic conversions and biological functions, alarming concentrations of toxic forms of these elements have found their way into our lives at a pace that’s wildly out of balance with nature and hazardous to our health and longevity.
A few dozen key contaminants may be taking a crucial but yet uncalculated toll on the well-being of everyone around the world—with increased levels of toxins in everyday foods contributing to a general rise in inflammation, immunological and digestive disorders, neurological damage, organ failure, heart and lung ailments, cancer, and other serious diseases and conditions.
When most people think of being poisoned, they typically imagine ingesting a large, concentrated dose that quickly induces acute toxicity, often followed by a swift and horrible death. In reality, the real danger to health comes from long-term exposure to low-level doses of toxins over time, including heavy metals.
Science now recognizes that these detrimental health effects are triggered by gradually accumulating, minuscule concentrations of toxins through repeated dietary or environmental exposure.
The tidal wash of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, rodenticides, fertilizers, preservatives, emulsifiers, and additives across the agricultural practices of the entire Western world—and increasingly the developing world—has contributed to the introduction of known toxins into the environment at apocalyptic levels. They interact with and are absorbed by soils, bodies of water, vegetation, fish, and wildlife. They are absorbed and integrated into plant and animal tissues. As humans, we breathe in these compounds, eat them, drink them, and accumulate them in our bodies. We also excrete