For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s All About Organics page.
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.