Organic

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Immediately after Natural News shocked the natural products industry by revealing significant levels of heavy metals in rice protein products, several of the smaller manufacturers got together to try to figure out how to counter scientific facts with public relations spin.

Three nights ago, a secret phone meeting was held among several of these smaller companies, and in that meeting they decided to counter my scientific research and laboratory results with a public relations campaign. The tactic of the campaign would be to convince customers that all heavy metals in rice protein products were “naturally occurring” and therefore don’t count. If it’s “natural,” after all, what could be bad about it? (Monsanto, of course, makes the same claim about GMOs.)

So I decided to put that claim to the test. Does all rice show high heavy metals concentrations because these metals are “naturally occurring” in all soils?

California rice put to the test

To determine this, I acquired and tested the following rice products grown in California by Lundberg Family Farms:

California Sushi Rice California white Jasmine Rice California Brown Jasmine Rice Brown Short Grain Rice

All four of these rice products were certified USDA Organic and Non-GMO Project Verified.

If all rice “naturally” contains high levels of heavy metals, then we would expect to see these rice tests showing at least 100 ppb of lead and possibly 400 ppb cadmium, which is still far lower than the levels we found in rice protein (which is somewhat more concentrated than raw rice). After all, the rice proteins we tested are derived and concentrated from rice, and if the metals are present in the final protein then they must also be present in the rice at substantial concentrations.   

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In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.

Hayes continued studying atrazine on his own, and soon he became convinced that Syngenta representatives were following him to conferences around the world. He worried that the company was orchestrating a campaign to destroy his reputation. He complained that whenever he gave public talks there was a stranger in the back of the room, taking notes. On a trip to Washington, D.C., in 2003, he stayed at a different hotel each night. He was still in touch with a few Syngenta scientists and, after noticing that they knew many details about his work and his schedule, he suspected that they were reading his e-mails. To confuse them, he asked a student to write misleading e-mails from his office computer while he was travelling. He sent backup copies of his data and notes to his parents in sealed boxes. In an e-mail to one Syngenta scientist, he wrote that he had “risked my reputation, my name . . . some say even my life, for what I thought (and now know) is right.” A few scientists had previously done experiments that anticipated Hayes’s work, but no one had observed such extreme effects. In another e-mail to Syngenta, he acknowledged that it might appear that he was suffering from a “Napoleon complex” or “delusions of grandeur.”

For years, despite his achievements, Hayes had felt like an interloper. In academic settings, it seemed to him that his colleagues were operating according to a frivolous code of manners: they spoke so formally, fashioning themselves as detached authorities, and rarely admitted what they didn’t know. He had grown up in Columbia, South Carolina, in a neighborhood where fewer than forty per cent of residents finish high school. Until sixth grade, when he was accepted into a program for the gifted, in a different neighborhood, he had never had a conversation with a white person his age. He and his friends used to tell one another how “white people do this, and white people do that,” pretending that they knew. After he switched schools and took advanced courses, the black kids made fun of him, saying, “Oh, he thinks he’s white.”     

He was fascinated by the idea of metamorphosis, and spent much of his adolescence collecting tadpoles and frogs and crossbreeding different species of grasshoppers. He raised frog larvae on his parents’ front porch, and examined how lizards respond to changes in temperature (by using a blow-dryer) and light (by placing them in a doghouse). His father, a carpet layer, used to look at his experiments, shake his head, and say, “There’s a fine line between a genius and a fool.”