Here’s a truly hilarious piece of drama from the world of organic products. In posting a recent article about Amazon.com buying Whole Foods, I mentioned three turmeric products sold by Amazon.com that contained lead, a heavy metal that can be extremely toxic when consumed in high concentrations. This wasn’t some all-out attack on the brands mentioned, by the way; it was just a demonstration that Amazon.com doesn’t test the products it sells. As a result, Amazon ends up selling a lot of food, supplements and dietary products that contain rather concerning levels of lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other metals or elements.

One of the brands I mentioned in the story was Indus Organics, whose turmeric powder tested at over 225 ppb lead for Lead-206 (Pb-206).

In response to the article, someone claiming to be from Indus Organics threatened to sue Natural News if we didn’t immediately remove that assertion, claiming that the product contained no lead at all. Here’s where the laughable scientifically illiteracy really comes out, by the way: Almost nothing is 100% free of all lead. Anyone who thinks their products contain “no lead” whatsoever isn’t very well informed on matters of food composition. (Then again, some other companies use labs that actually try to find no lead by relying on outdated equipment incapable of detecting lead at ppb concentrations.)

In any case, in all the years that Natural News has been conducting independent science and publishing the ICP-MS test results for various brand names, not once have we ever been proven wrong. Not once have we been successfully sued. Not once have we had to retract even a single published heavy metals concentration number, including across the 800+ products tested and listed in my top-selling science book Food Forensics.

Why is that? Because our lab — CWCLabs.com — is an ISO-accredited laboratory specializing in analytical excellence for food and environmental samples. The accreditation means we are tested by third-party independent organizations and audited with on-site inspectors. Not only do we know exactly what we are doing when it comes to heavy metals, some of the leading food organizations in the industry are now coming to us to help validate new metals analysis methods because our reputation is that we’re the most dedicated and accurate food science lab in the industry. (I just spent four months scripting our new liquid handling robot, by the way, which adds even more automation and accuracy to all our sample prep and external standards preparation processes.)

With that in mind, I’ve decided to release the full ICP-MS elemental analysis results for the Indus Organics turmeric, so you can see not just the lead it contains but also the other elements it contains such as cadmium, zinc and so on. I’m also reaching out to Indus Organics to see if they would like us to help them with their science and even possibly carry their products in our store (once they meet our strict requirements). So this isn’t some sort of “attack” on Indus.

By the way, neither the cadmium nor lead levels in their turmeric product are in the “red alert” level at all. These are nowhere near the highest numbers we’ve seen in turmeric products, for example. But for someone to say this product contains “no lead” is factually false and scientifically ignorant. (All turmeric contains lead. It’s just a question of how high the concentration is. That’s why I stock up on “clean” turmeric whenever I find a clean batch, which is becoming increasingly difficult…)

Source:
courtesy of NATURALNEWS

by Mike Adams

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