STOP THE LEAD POISONING: Health Ranger advises natural products retailers to pull all Shilajit products delivering over 1 microgram of lead per day

Wednesday, September 21, 2016
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: Shilajit, heavy metals, lead exposure

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(NaturalNews) Following the publishing of accredited heavy metals test results showing the majority of Shilajit products containing concerning levels of lead, a toxic heavy metal, today I am officially urging health product retailers nationwide to pull all Shilajit products delivering over 1 microgram of lead per day.

Lead is a toxic heavy metal with a range of debilitating health effects in adults and children. According to The Mayo Clinic, lead intake can cause:

High blood pressure
Abdominal pain
Constipation
Joint pains
Muscle pain
Declines in mental functioning
Pain, numbness or tingling of the extremities
Headache
Memory loss
Mood disorders
Reduced sperm count, abnormal sperm
Miscarriage or premature birth in pregnant women

A Consumer Wellness Center laboratory analysis found that many Shilajit brands sold today contain concerning high levels of lead, with one brand (HealthForce) containing over 2800 ppb of lead. With a recommended serving size of 0.94g, this means a single day's consumption of HealthForce Shilajit exposes a consumer to a whopping 2.65 micrograms of lead per day.

The California Proposition 65 limit for daily lead exposure from any one dietary supplement is 0.5 micrograms, meaning that this one dietary supplement delivers over 500% of the daily lead limit set by Prop 65.

As most informed people will readily agree, this is an unacceptable level of lead exposure from a dietary supplement.

How to calculate lead exposure

Take the lead ppm and multiply by the grams of daily intake. This provides micrograms per day.

My Heavy Metals Calculator does the math for you.

Simply enter the ppm of lead and the serving size per day in grams. Remember that 1 grams = 1000 mg if you need to convert between the two.

By using the calculator, you can see that Dragon Herbs Shilajit, for example, delivers 0.7571 micrograms of lead per day, while HealthForce Shilajit delivers 2.65 micrograms of lead per day. Under my current recommendation, Dragon Herbs Shilajit would be comfortably beneath the 1 microgram per day limit, if consumed as directed on the label.

Some products, such as Pure Himalayan Shilajit, have a far more appropriate serving size of just 100 mg per day, meaning the total lead exposure from that product is only 0.1134 micrograms per day, which is well under the Prop 65 limit of 0.5 micrograms of lead per day.

The VitaJing company, in contrast, is recommending a far larger consumption of Shilajit per day. Their package recommends 2-3 times per day of 1/2 - 1 teaspoon of their Shilajit powder. At the high end of this recommendation, that comes out to at least 10 grams of Shilajit powder. Because their powder tested at 141 ppb in lead, this means the total daily lead consumption from this product could easily exceed 1.4 micrograms, meaning it more than doubles the Prop 65 limit for lead consumption.

As you can see, the issue with Shilajit is not just the elemental composition, but also the recommended serving sizes. Toxicity of heavy metals is, obviously, increases with the total number of micrograms of exposure during any given time window (each day, for example).

Retailers who sell high-lead Shilajit are exposing themselves to legal risk and reputation risk

As the industry knows, I am a long-time supporter of clean, honest nutritional supplements and superfoods. I don't want retailers to wind up in lawsuits over Shilajit, where customers may potentially claim damage from lead exposure.

Because of this, I am now recommending that retailers pull all Shilajit products delivering over 1 microgram of lead per day. Such high levels of lead are, in my professional view as a scientist, researcher and author, a very real risk to the long-term health of consumers.

Because consumers are encouraged by manufacturers to consume generous quantities of Shilajit on a daily basis, they may experience long-term lead accumulation, leading to the symptoms of lead poisoning listed above.

Health product retailers have an ethical and legal responsibility to make sure their products do not pose a heightened risk of heavy metals exposure to their customers. For this reason, all retailers should immediately remove high-lead Shilajit products from their shelves while demanding lot-by-lot lead testing from product suppliers to ensure product safety from here forward.

I am working diligently to protect the safety of consumers and the reputation of the natural products industry

For those wondering why I am taking such assertive action today, I already have industry insider information about the FDA's aggressive actions against zeolite manufacturers. Shilajit supplements are next on the FDA's target list due to the very high lead content they contain. If we do not police our own industry, the FDA will gladly do it for us. Thus, my efforts to warn about high lead Shilajit supplements is a critical step in the natural product industry's self-policing to establish sensible heavy metals limits in the interests of protecting the health of consumers.

Let's all get real: If the natural products industry does not stand for the health of its consumers, then it doesn't stand for anything at all. Health and safety must be a priority across this industry, which is constantly under regulatory attack by the FDA, FTC and other government entities. The FDA has all the same lab equipment I'm running, which means they can just as easily find lead in Shilajit and start seizing inventory, fining companies or even seeking criminal charges against those companies making dishonest label claims on such products.

The very survival of the natural products industry depends on manufacturers getting serious about heavy metals limits. This means that retailers should refuse to sell high lead products to the public and force manufacturers to clean up their product lines.

If we hope for the natural products industry to survive, routine lead testing of dietary supplements must become a standard operating procedure of the industry. I don't just say this because my lab (CWClabs.com) offers heavy metals testing services, but because the heavy metals testing I've already conducted has revealed to me the shocking scale of the heavy metals problem across the industry. Personally, I don't care where manufacturers get their heavy metals testing done as long as they do it!

Heavy metals denialism and industry deception

While most dietary supplement products are very clean in terms of heavy metals, there exist several worrisome categories of products that consistently test very high in lead, cadmium, arsenic and even aluminum. It is these products, I believe, that substantially contribute to the toxicity and mental dysfunction of many health product consumers who blindly trust product manufacturers and retailers to test their own products for heavy metals safety limits.

That testing, sadly, is largely imaginary... it simply isn't being done by at least 90% of the manufacturers in the marketplace, by my estimate. (For the record, I do know that both NOW Foods and Life Extension engage in comprehensive testing of their raw materials and finished products.) Most nutritional supplement manufacturers are woefully ignorant of the elemental composition of their own products, and they package and retail a large number of "health" products containing very alarming concentrations of toxic heavy metals.

Yet instead of cleaning up their products, when faced with the irrefutable scientific truth about their own lead problem, many of these companies revert to tactics of denialism and personal attacks against me, hoping to divert attention away from the fact that they are poisoning their own customers with lead and other toxic metals.

What's most disturbing about all this is the willingness of some dietary products companies to keep selling high lead products to their own customers while feverishly working to deceive and misinform those customers about the relatively high heavy metals in their own products. Instead of meeting this issue with a sense of responsibility and safety for their own customers, in other words, many companies wage propaganda wars to try to claim absurd things like "naturally occurring heavy metals don't count," as if the laws of biochemistry are somehow suspended for products that were grown in heavily contaminated soils.

What ultimately emerges from all this is a rather sobering realization that a few of these dietary supplement companies pose a genuine danger to public safety. I would not have said such a thing five years ago, but after three years of running an accredited, analytical laboratory that has examined thousands of off-the-shelf products for heavy metals, I cannot deny this inevitable conclusion.

Again, I must emphasize that most dietary supplements are very safe, affordable and effective. The continued availability of nutritional products is an absolute necessary for any free society, and the far greater danger to the American public is posed by dangerous pharmaceutical medications which kill hundreds of thousands every year. See PharmaDeathClock.com for a running total.

Yet, if natural products are claimed to exist in contrast to the dangers of pharmaceuticals, then we must clean up our own industry and make sure natural products do not expose consumers to unwarranted health risks stemming from unnecessary heavy metals exposure.

For my role, I have decided to continue testing off-the-shelf products and issuing warnings about the categories and brands that reveal the highest heavy metals numbers. This is my responsibility as a journalist, a forensic food scientist and an advocate of the natural products industry who genuinely cares about the safety of the people we serve.

Remember: If high lead isn't okay in the water of Flint, Michigan, it shouldn't be okay in "detox" supplements, either.