Acai Berries

In episode #33 of the second season of Crime Scene Investigator a woman poisons her husband with the chemical sodium selenite. Strange as it may sound this exotic murder weapon is found listed as a “nutrient” on the labels of most mass market vitamins. In fact, most mass market vitamins contain chemicals which the Environmental Protection Agency does not allow in our public drinking water above 50 parts per billion. According to the EPA’s -Maximum Contaminant Level standards (MCL) the highest allowable level of selenium in public drinking water is 50 parts per billion. To get a sense of how small an allowable limit this is, 50 part per billion is equivalent to a tablespoon of water in an olympic-size swimming pool or 25 seconds of time in approximately 16 years.

How can vitamin manufacturers advertise something as being a “nutrient” when the EPA – out of concern for our health – has barred it from our drinking water at all but infinitesimal levels? Has sodium selenite really been shown to be toxic? A brief perusal of toxicology reports from the Hazardous Substances Databank (toxnet.nlm.nih.gov) and PUBMED (pubmed.gov) shows that sodium selenite can be carcinogenic, genotoxic and may cause reproductive and developmental problems in animals and humans.

A word should be said here about the differences that exist between inorganic minerals and biologically active ones.

The selenium which exists in foods like brazil nuts, mustard seeds, and fresh produce grown in selenium rich soil, is infinitely different from this biologically inert forms being put in some multivitamins. In fact the difference can be as great as that which exists between life and death: i.e. sodium selenite can cause cancer, whereas the selenium found within food, or chelated forms like selenomethionine have all been shown to prevent and combat cancer. The basic principle which explains this difference is that when you isolate a “nutrient” or “vitamin” out of the food complex within which it is naturally found, and whereby it is inseparably bound to thousands of known and unknown food factors (e.g. enzymes, amino acids, etc.), it becomes a chemical isolate and therefore no longer beneficial to life (especially vertebrate mammals who are equipped to get their minerals from plants who do the job of biological transmutation from baser forms to living ones for us).

The primary reason why sodium selenite is preferred by some vitamin manufacturers over safer, more beneficial forms like chelated or yeast-grown selenium is because it is less costly to use lower quality raw materials, and therefore much MORE PROFITABLE to the manufacturer.

“You Get What You Pay For,” is a saying which almost always rings true for dietary supplements. Buying industrial waste products, or chemicals which are considered hazardous waste and repackaging them as “dietary supplements” can be extremely profitable.

Indeed, this is not the first time in American history that such a hoax has been perpetuated on the public. The FDA approved uses of flouride in our drinking water and nuclear waste as a means of “cold pasteurization” of conventional food illustrates how industrial waste products with known toxicity are eventually converted into commodities or technologies “beneficial to health. Whereas initially these substances have very high disposal costs that take away from the bottom line of the industries that ultimately excrete them into our environment, through the right combination of lobbying, miseducation and “checkbook science,” the liability is converted back into a commodity, with the environment and consumer suffering health and finances losses as a result.

Unfortunately Sodium Selenite is not the only problem with mass market vitamins. Take the multivitamin Centrum, for instance, whose manufacturer Wyeth is one of the 10 most powerful pharmaceutical companies on the planet. This vitamin contains the following chemicals:

Chemical: amount found in Centrum/ EPA Maximum Allowed Limit in Drinking Water

1) Sodium Selenite: 25 mcg/ 50 parts per billion

2) Nickelous Sulfate: 5 mcg/ 100 parts per billion

3) Chromic Chloride: 150 mcg/ 100 parts per billion

4) Sodium borate (borax): 150 mcg/ 600 parts per billion

5) Stannous Chloride: 10 mcg/ 4 parts per million

6) Ferrous Fumurate: 18 mg/ 300 parts per billion

7) Manganese Sulfate: 2 mg/ 50 parts per billion

Cupric Oxide: 2 mg/ 1.3 parts per million

So, if these chemicals are actually toxic, how can they be marketed as beneficial to our health?

The actual reason why a company can get away with using potentially harmful chemicals as “nutrients” has to do with the FDA’s “Weight of Evidence” standard for determining the toxicity of a given substance. Within this paradigm inorganic, synthetic and biologically unprecedented substances are considered safe until proven guilty. Throwing out the “precautionary principle” it places the burden of proof on those who challenge the use of substance by direct laboratory tests, from not one but from many epidemiological studies. The substance must be shown to not only cause disease, but that it will cause that disease in its allowed dosages. The inherent insanity of this approach hinges on the fact that proving toxicity in humans requires that we perform very costly and potentially dangerous tests on humans in order to prove that the substance we are testing isn’t toxic! This borders on immoral behavior, and is at the least, incredibly impractical. Moreover, since so much of the research done on synthetic chemicals is funded by the companies and industries whose interests are to find the substance safe, the likelihood of finding this toxicity is very small – that is, until, after years and years of use in the marketplace the chemicals are eventual shown to contribute to disease. Because the toxicities may be low, and take many years, even decades to manifest in a clinically discerned symptom, it may be impossible to separate out any particular chemical as dangerous.

Ultimately, we need to use common sense in our purchasing decisions and realize that sometimes companies will intentionally mislead the public – with the complicity of regulatory bodies like the FDA – and will advertise a product that has no health benefits; or worse, may actually detract from our health. The fact that Centrum may or may not be “the #1 doctor recommended brand of vitamin” is irrelevant considering that one does not go to a doctor to seek wise counsel on nutrition. It is simply not their specialty.

The irony is that billions of dollars in health care costs – and the suffering these costs represent – could be saved every year if Americans took the simply step of taking a good multivitamin every day. There are many excellent whole food supplement manufacturers who use ingredients which have high quality and which contribute significantly to filling the void in our diet, e.g. New Chapter, Garden of Life, and MegaFood.



By: Sayer Ji

The Acai berry has some extraordinary properties and because of this it is rapidly becoming the most popular dietary supplement on the market however this popularity has attracted some unscrupulous people who are keen to exploit the little Acai berry’s success.

There is a small minority of suppliers out there who are preying upon people’s desire to experience the innumerable health benefits that the Acai offers.

This small group of amoral con artists have set up Acai distribution companies that deal in shoddy, inferior produce. The Acai supplements that these companies provide have none of the potency that quality Acai products have and what’s more, because they are likely to be adulterated with other substances there is a chance that some of these products could cause side effects. This is something that people who purchase genuine Acai need not worry about as the fruit itself does not cause a single side effect.

Some disreputable companies have even used the appeal of the Acai to set up reprehensible credit card fraud schemes. These work by offering you a free trial only to charge you for shipping costs not just for the period of ostensibly ‘free’ trial but ad nauseum. These payments are notoriously difficult to cancel and have robbed people of thousands in the past.

So how do you avoid falling victim to this scam? Simple, you just ensure that you consult impartial, reliable Acai information from the Acai blog. The Acai blog has loads of informative articles that cover everything from consumer experience to the scientific research currently been conducted on the Acai



By: Dana Hawkes

First and foremost PLEASE DO NOT respond to this question if you are going to tell me about how diet pills do not work and to just work out! Thank you…Okay my question is about the free trials do they just charge you the shipping prices on both products or are there hidden fees after the trial? My other question is does it REALLY work? Give me your stories and experiences please? But I mainly want to know about the free trails and how it works from your experience!!!!! Thank you