How we test for radiation across all products at the Natural News Store

Tuesday, August 13, 2013 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: radiation testing, Natural News Store, Fukushima

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(NaturalNews) Because of the worsening situation in Fukushima, we've received a lot of questions from customers concerned about the possibility of residual radiation in nutritional products we sell at the Natural News Store. We're way ahead of ya!

Since the opening of the store last year, we have routinely taken steps to make sure that the foods and superfoods we offer are tested to emit no radiation whatsoever. We accomplish this in two ways:

1) We demand that our suppliers of certain high-risk materials conduct their own radiation testing and send us confirmations that their products are radiation-free. But we also don't take their word for it, so we also perform step #2 as follows:

2) We use a Radiation Alert "Inspector" device (the same technology used by the FBI) to run radiation scans against all raw materials we receive at our warehouse. This device measures Alpha, Beta and Gamma radiation, and through a timing test, it can differentiate between normal "background" radiation vs. extra radiation coming from any tested source. To date, we have not found even a single batch of raw materials that showed excess radiation. (See below for why...)

Why it's hard to make most foods radioactive

It turns out that foods do not easily "hold" radiation except in rare circumstances. For plants to become radioactive, they would have to absorb radioactive elements such as cesium and iodine isotopes which are not normally found in nature. The mere act of exposing food to radiation does not automatically make that food "radioactive" in the same way that microwaving your food does not turn your food into a microwave emitter.

Another way to explain this is that even though sunlight is a form of radiation, holding foods under sunlight does not make them emit sunlight themselves. (They don't turn into powerful light sources.)

I have seen some people post videos where they are waving a dosimeter (Geiger counter) over some foods and freaking out when they get audible "hits," but what they aren't telling you is that they are detecting normal background radiation that you're getting 24/7, everywhere on the planet. For example, as I'm writing this, I've got my Radiation Alert Inspector device clicking away, showing 0.008 microsieverts per hour, which is completely normal. Sometimes it even just up to 0.015. Scientifically speaking, the only way to know whether a food material is actually emitting radiation is to compare it to background radiation which requires a "timer" function, as radioactive decay is a truly random subatomic event.

The mere act of taking a flight on an airplane would cause my dosimeter to seemingly go crazy with audible hits due to the vastly increased level of radiation experienced at high altitude.

Foods can only become radioactive if they absorb radioactive elements

Some foods, such as bananas, may naturally absorb a higher level of cesium isotopes (such as Cs137) but only if radioactive cesium is readily available in the soil. This is only because cesium tends to mimic the biological pathways of potassium. It has nothing inherent to bananas themselves. Any food that absorbs potassium (including sweet potatoes) would absorb radioactive cesium if it were present in the soil.

The funny thing about all this is that I have been trying to find an example of a high-radiation food so that we could demonstrate it on an upcoming episode that I'm filming with GAIAM TV, but I have been having a very difficult time even finding radioactive food. Perhaps I need to broaden my search, but so far nothing is showing up as radioactive beyond normal background levels.

From my research, the far greater threat from Fukushima is from inhaling radioactive dust particles that get lodged in your lungs and irradiate you from inside your own body... for life! The respiratory tract is a far greater threat that the digestive tract for another reason, too: the digestive tract is designed to eliminate all substances within 2-3 days. But the respiratory tract can easily trap particles where they may never come out. (This is why even healthy human lungs actually turn brown over the years. They are collecting large amounts of particulate matter and storing them.)

Rest assured that if I actually manage to find a batch of radioactive material, I will be so excited about it that I'll film and post a video showing what we found. In the mean time, I'm actually kind of disappointed that nothing we've tested yet has turned out to be radioactive. I thought about visiting the hardware store and trying to find some radioactive hardware parts made with radioactive waste, but I haven't had a chance to do that yet.

Overall, it turns out that locating radioactive material in the consumer market in the USA is a lot more difficult than you might think... and that's a GOOD thing, because we don't want radioactive material to be easily acquired by psychopaths and criminals.

Also, rest easy knowing that we test everything at the Natural News Store, and in fact our store is the same source where my friends and family members get all their superfoods, so believe me when I say that I test everything for a multitude of reasons, both personal and professional.

By the way, chest X-Rays, mammograms and CAT scans expose you to thousands of times the dose of normal background radiation. Furthermore, the No. 1 source of "background" ionizing radiation in the USA is RADON, a radioactive gas that often seeps into basements of homes.