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

“Dear Mr. Adams, there are things we don’t talk about in the natural products industry…” Such began a message sent to me by the founder of a nutritional products company. It was sent in reaction to my posting of my “organic China fraud” article that questioned the legitimacy of organic certification for foods and superfoods grown in China.

This article has sent shockwaves through the natural products industry, an industry that has its own “dirty little secrets” that no one dare talk about.

For over a decade, I passionately promoted this industry, advocating superfoods like chlorella and spirulina, all while companies selling the products raked in hundreds of millions dollars in profit off the publicity we helped generate here at Natural News. I helped educate tens of millions of people about superfoods, micro-algae, nutritional supplements and natural cures, and all the while, I never made a single dollar on this editorial promotion of the industry. (And I was happy with that. This was never about profit.)

Natural News helped make millionaires by promoting their products and publicizing their names. We helped publicize companies that were later sold off for tens of millions of dollars. And we did it gladly, happily, believing that we were advocating the healthiest, cleanest foods on Earth for our readers.

And then something appeared on my radar. In late 2012, I oversaw the process of getting organically certified for packing and handling organic food. I helped source organic raw materials to be offered in the Natural News Store. And in this process, I was shocked to discover that organic standards utterly lack any limits on heavy metals contamination of “organic” products.