Laboratory Testing Reveals Substantial Amounts of Glyphosate in Foods and Population
As food has become increasingly adulterated, contaminated and genetically engineered, the need for laboratory testing has exponentially grown. John Fagan, president of Health Research Institute Labs (HRI Labs), is an expert in this area.
October 29, 2017 | Source: Mercola.com | by Dr. Joseph Mercola
As food has become increasingly adulterated, contaminated and genetically engineered, the need for laboratory testing has exponentially grown. John Fagan, president of Health Research Institute Labs (HRI Labs), is an expert in this area. As explained by Fagan, HRI Labs “makes the invisible, visible, giving you the ability to see what is in your food and your environment.”
Fagan studied biochemistry and molecular biology at Cornell University, where he also got his Ph.D. After doing research for eight years at the National Institutes of Health, he went into academia and conducted cancer research using genetic engineering as a research tool. This experience is ultimately what raised his concerns about genetic engineering, especially as it pertains to food.
As a result, he created the first lab for GMO testing in the U.S., followed by labs in Europe and Japan. He’s also trained laboratories in 17 other countries in GMO testing. “What this did was make GMOs visible. Before that testing was there, nobody could tell whether those soybeans, or that corn was genetically engineered or not,” Fagan says. “After GMO testing was available, people had a choice.”
HRI Labs tests both micronutrients and toxins — the good and the bad. “We feel that the kind of testing we’re doing can open a window for you in each of those areas, so you can make better choices about the food you eat, and that you share with your family,” he says.
Testing Techniques and Equipment
There are several types of tests that can be done on a GMO food. Antigens are one type of test. DNA testing is another. Since DNA is far more stable than proteins, genetically engineered foods, even when highly processed, can be easily identified with DNA testing. A test commonly used to check DNA is the polymerase chain reaction or PCR test. Because it amplifies the DNA signal, it can detect even a single genetically engineered corn kernel in a bag containing 10,000 or more corn kernels.
The chromatograph linked to a mass spectrometer is another central piece of equipment that HRI uses. It allows you to test for a wide variety of things at very high sensitivity. Unfortunately, the cost and complexity involved prevents many labs from having this tool.
“Liquid chromatography is capable of taking a sample of food … or whatever you’re interested in, and fractionating it into hundreds of compounds, separating them out. That is then fed into a mass spectrometer; a machine that measures, ultimately, molecular weight of whatever it’s looking at.
With that you can detect — at extremely low levels and identify very specifically — almost any natural or unnatural compound … down to the parts per trillion in many cases. To give you a sense of what that means, 40 parts per trillion, which is [the limit of] detection that we have for some materials, is like if you were to take a single drop of that chemical and dilute it into 20 Olympic swimming pools full of water.
That’s the extent of dilution required to achieve 40 parts per trillion. This is extreme sensitivity. These [instruments] are like the Teslas of analytical chemistry.
[Liquid chromatography linked to a mass spectrometer] is what we use for measuring glyphosate. Because these machines are very expensive, many of the analytical labs out there don’t have access to them. Also, because it is very specialized equipment, you need somebody with a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry, or equivalent, to do this kind of testing. What we’re doing is … unique in that way.”