Robin Daly: Hello! Welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, the regular host for the show and founder of Yes to Life – the UK charity that supports the adoption of integrative medicine in cancer care in the UK. The subject of today’s show is an extremely important one for all of us, but particularly those with cancer: toxins in our food and other consumer products. Many valiant organisations have been battling to slow the contamination and degradation of our food by industry.
And today I’m talking to representatives of two of those: the Organic Consumers Association and the

Clean Label Project. We’ve teamed up to produce a report on the previously undocumented contamination of health food products with heavy metals.

Robin Daly: I’m speaking over the internet to Katherine Paul, associate director of the Organic Consumers Association. She’s on the east coast of the US and Jackie Bowen for the Clean Label Project who is further west in the US. Hello to Jackie and Katherine! So, Jackie it’s seriously early for you – thanks for making the effort to make this time zone thing work.

Jackie Bowen: I appreciate the opportunity.

Robin Daly: It’s great to be able to talk to you both together about this extremely important topic of toxins in our food. It’s something that preoccupies more and more people with cancer, and quite rightly so, and should really preoccupy more people before they get cancer if we’re to make any impression on the exponential rise in cases. I don’t feel that the Yes to Life show has really given it as much attention as it merits. I’m really delighted to be talking to you both today to start to put that right.

You’re from two separate organisations; Katherine you’re from the Organic Consumers Association. I’ve been aware of that organisation for a long time putting up a strong resistance to the march of agribusiness. Jackie, you’re from the Clean Label Project, an organisation I’m not familiar with yet, but one that looks to be doing some fantastic work. I wonder if you’d start off by just introducing your own organisation, the story behind it, and then yourself and what led you to be doing this work.

Katherine Paul: Sure! I can go first. This is Katherine with Organic Consumers Association. Our organisation has been around for about 20-22 years and we were originally founded around issues having to do with the formation of the organic standards rules in the US. At the time, the US Department of Agriculture, when they were writing those rules, wanted to include things like GMOs and sewage sludge and radiation. So we built a movement to oppose that and have been on that track ever since, focusing on issues around product quality and accurate labelling of products.

Robin Daly: How did you become involved?

Katherine Paul: Myself personally, prior to working with Organic Consumers Association, I worked for another nonprofit, but it was in the progressive media world where we covered a wide range of issues of interest to progressives that didn’t always get a lot of coverage by mainstream media. I became familiar with the work of Organic Consumers Association and then just sort of gravitated towards those issues and then became involved with the organisation.

Robin Daly: Okay. And how long have you been involved now?

Katherine Paul: I’ve been with the Organic Consumers Association now for about seven and a half years.

Robin Daly: Okay, great. And Jackie, do you want to introduce the Clean Label Project?
Jackie Bowen: We’re a national nonprofit and a consumer advocacy organisation focused on bringing truth and transparency to consumer product labelling.

To be honest, food and consumer product marketing departments can do a really effective job at selling comfort and security on product packaging. So for us at Clean Label Project, in data and science, we trust. What we believe is that by using analytical chemistry and revealing the true contents of bestselling products, what we’re able to do is shift the definition of food and consumer product safety.

Much of food safety in America is focused on E. coli, salmonella, listeria, packages, microbiological contamination, but not enough conversations are taking place about the real public and environmental health risks associated with heavy metal pesticide and plasticiser exposure.

Robin Daly: And how did you become involved in this work?

Jackie Bowen: By training, I’m a food safety and quality systems engineers. I’ve actually been working within the organic and non-GMO, gluten free space for nearly 20 years now. And so, when the opportunity presented itself to become more involved with Clean Label Project, which at the time was just a little fledgling NGO about five years ago, it seemed like a great opportunity.

There’s been kind of a shifting tide over the past several years. You see this proliferation of on-package label claims, but at the same time, you see an increase in consumer media, regulatory, and academic attention being paid to industrial environmental contaminants and toxins, and chemicals of concern.
It was a matter of jumping from looking just at the certifications into actually looking at what is it that consumers are concerned with. There’s a growing divide between the court of law and the court of public opinion of what the definition of safety means. For Clean Label Project to get more involved on the consumer side is what was really interesting to me.

Robin Daly: Sounds great. All right. Well up to now, over here in the UK, we’re sheltered behind some robust European regulation that’s successfully fended off some undesirable US products. Stepping out into a post-Brexit world, we have now more reason to be a lot more concerned about the arrival of less-regulated American products here in the UK.

The success of organisations like yours in turning the tide on toxins in food suddenly becomes a greater cause for interest here. Uh, in terms of the movement towards natural, healthy, uncontaminated food. How would you say things stand at present in the US?

Katherine Paul: Well, I’m not sure how, exactly, how to respond to that. From the consumer perspective, I think there is increased interest in, concern about, as Jackie said, what’s in our food. What’s the relationship between our food and our health and the health of our environment, the water we drink, etc. But unfortunately, under our current regulatory environment, it is pretty much an uphill battle right now.

We don’t have, I would say, strong support from the agencies here in the US: the US Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration. Their regulatory efforts are not mirroring consumer trends and consumer concerns. There is a lot of conflict I think, and that opens the door for organisations like ours to continue to educate, to do the work that Jackie’s organisation does with the testing, and to really continue to draw attention to that relationship between contaminants in our food and our own health and hope that through consumer education, we can influence consumer buying decisions so that even if we don’t get the support we need right now at the regulatory level, we can influence the marketplace and force corporations to clean up their products to meet consumer demand.

Robin Daly: Right, so it’s a grassroots thing.

Jackie Bowen: To add to that – it’s interesting that because of societal choices around mining, fracking, industrial agriculture, coal burning, these different types of contaminants that end up in the air, they end up in the water and they ended up in the soil. And unless brands shifted their true north to align with the consumer expectation of safety, different ingredients that have been contaminated with elevated levels of these different types of industrial environmental contaminants will ultimately end up in the finished product. The good news is that there’s an increase in consumer literacy and understanding around label claims.

Consumers are increasingly concerned about what they put in their bodies, what they provide for their families. They’re reading labels, they’re doing research. And so it’s an exciting time to be a consumer right now in this age of transparency. Using social media, you’re able to demand answers from brands and that kind of brings much more power to consumers.

Robin Daly: Good! And great for your organisations to be driving that along. I find it’s interesting on the one hand, the takeover of food production by business in the US seems far more devastating than here, most notably in regard to GMOs. But my own experience of visiting California recently is that the reaction to that is also greater, as actually the availability of organic produce in California was way greater than in Surrey, where I live, where it’s actually quite hard to find. I’m guessing California, they might be a bit of an organic bubble.

Katherine Paul: That may be true to some extent. I don’t know. I think overall, if you look at the sales trends in demand for organic produce, and also pasture-raised meat products, we’re seeing consistent growing demand.

It’s still a very small percentage of the marketplace. But interestingly, one of the silver linings to this COVID-19 pandemic has been a real burst in demand and a real support of local producers of organic and pasture-raised produce and meat products. We are really seeing quite a jump right now, quite a surge in demand as the pandemic reveals a lot of the flaws in our industrial food supply here.

Robin Daly: Well, that’s a silver lining! It’s great to hear. What I want to move on to is what has led me to talk to you both today: the fact that you’ve teamed up to create a report. Now it’s a pretty shocking one that concerns the ingredients of supplements actually touted as health products. Maybe you could start off by giving us the headlines in broad terms; What did you investigate and what did you find?

Jackie Bowen: What Organic Consumers Association and Clean Label Project were looking to do is bring attention to the growing public and environmental health threats that are associated with confined animal farming operations.

Confined animal farming operations are obviously high-density farming operations, where the animals may be treated with antibiotics as well as growth hormones, as well as being high density areas and therefore being surrounded, not being able to move. It’s about it the animal welfare, but not just the animal welfare.

It’s also about where exactly do these products come from? A product category that largely touts itself as being a natural health product. Do those expectations behind food safety and those expectations on animal welfare, align themselves with the consumer expectation of a natural product?

Clean Label Project got involved, based on the invitation for Organic Consumers Association, to kind of look at the collagen category, the collagen categories in high growth, industry within the whole protein powder sector. You have so many consumers that are reaching for collagen and protein powder to supplement their already healthy lifestyle.

We wanted to actually see what’s in America’s bestselling collagen products. The way that Organic Consumers Association ended up pulling the samples for testing was based on the amazon.com best sellers list, as well as the Clean Label Project 2018 protein powder study. And what was evaluated was looking at the heavy metal content.

Obviously, we’re limited based on what’s disclosed in product packaging. So we have no way to necessarily know. Are these products the by-products of unsafe farming? What we did is we evaluated the products based on heavy metal testing. One thing that’s so important to note is that both Organic Consumers Association, as well as Clean Label Project sees the role of collagen as critical within the sustainability story. In other words, if there’s going to be an animal that is created and ultimately used in the food supply, utilising all added components is absolutely essential. The major takeaway here is that the numbers of conventional livestock versus organic livestock, organic is just so much lower. The supply of organic collagen is also so much lower, and we see this taking place in the marketplace. And what we’re looking to do is really inspire that consumer expectation, that consumer demand for all of the qualities and characteristics that go along with organic farming and raising organic livestock, which includes animal welfare.

Robin Daly: Maybe you could just tell us the main findings.

Jackie Bowen: Sure. When we evaluated the products, testing both Organic Consumers Association and the Clean Label Project, which have a few different laboratories in order to complete that testing. The main take away is that you see a significant quality gradient when it comes to the heavy metal content.
What we look at with newer evaluating is total arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury. We tested the product and reported the results based on per serving. Where this becomes important is that it’s great that consumers are buying collagen, but if consumers are buying collagen based on health reasons, the test results reveal a different story. There are some products that have variable levels. In some cases, there were no detectable heavy metals on a per serving basis. And then the other side, you have a handful of products that had exceeded different state regulations here in the US. What you see is a different quality gradient between some top- and bottom-performing products, at least when it relates to the heavy metal content

Katherine Paul: Building on that, what Jackie articulated about the fact that consumers don’t go out and buy a collagen product for any other reason than health and fitness. Right? If you’re dedicated to that and you’re consuming this on a daily basis, not just here and there, like you would some other food, there’s the issue of accumulation. We know that heavy metals accumulate in the body’s tissues. That’s one of the big problems with them. If you’re taking a collagen supplement every day, you may think, ‘oh, well it’s just a little bit of heavy metals’, but you have a problem with the accumulation of those heavy metals.

Robin Daly: Yeah. You’re stockpiling them. Absolutely. Is there any way of broadly categorising the products in relation to this gradient? Were the cheap ones, the worst ones or anything like that?

Jackie Bowen: Katherine, what do you think? I don’t feel like I got anything like that.

Katherine Paul: No, I don’t think we noticed that trend either. That’s an interesting question that you raised and maybe something we should go back and look into, a little more carefully, but off the top of my head that’s not a trend that stood out.

Robin Daly: It looks a little bit like sort of greenwashing, where something’s touted being very healthy, but actually when you look into it, it’s not really.

How much of it do you think is a deliberate misleading of the public and how much is it just plain sloppiness by the manufacturers?

Jackie Bowen: I’ll take that one, Katherine. I guess from my perspective, I look at it this way: at the end of the day, Clean Label Project views compliance with federal regulations as table stakes. That’s the minimum expectation. But for brands that voluntarily choose to make marketing claims, to have packaging showing animals running and bounding through fields and things like that. For brands that tout themselves to be a natural product, there’s a different level of expectation from consumers when it comes to the true content of that product.

It’s not just about the product packaging. It’s also about what’s inside. It’s just a matter of making sure that if brands are going to create a perception that it’s better for you, it’s making it a matter of making sure that they deliver on that promise and expectations for consumers.

Robin Daly: Absolutely. One of the ways obviously the consumer relies on for judging that kind of thing are the standards that are being set up. The organic standard is a complete godsend to people in terms of having a pretty good idea of what they’re buying, which would be so hard without it.

I just wonder whether you think the standards we have are still working for us? Or has a scope creep eroded them over time.

Katherine Paul: Clearly there are issues within the organic standards at the regulatory level, right up to the National Organic Standards Board and that’s across all product segments right now. And so I do believe that despite the influence of large corporations that have bought up a lot of the organic brands here and are now influencing organic standards, not necessarily in a good way. I think despite that, as Jackie’s pointed out, consumers are becoming more and more literate, more and more aware and therefore more and more demanding.

The hope is that we can counter those negative influences over organic standards by continuing to educate consumers through reports such as this one. And I wanted to go back to one thing that Jackie pointed out quite accurately, that when it comes to sourcing collagen, because so much of the meat in this country is produced industrially, it’s difficult to source from organic and grass-fed raised animals. But there’s an additional layer of complication there, in that often when after an animal has been processed and then you get to the rendering part of things, which is where the collagen comes from, there’s comingling of the organic grass-fed and industrial.

To be a little bit fair to this industry, it is very difficult to source the collagen from the grass-fed and organic if those are not kept separate at the processing level. We hope to, in addition to educating consumers, perhaps educate the industry and push them in the direction of themselves demanding this differentiation at the processing level.

Robin Daly: Well, that’s the way it happens isn’t it. I can remember 30 or 40 years ago, the standards for timber and how it’s sourced, gradually creeping from the waste right back to the sources where they’re actually being chopped out of the jungle. You know? So eventually they’re able to say, yes, actually you’re getting one that’s been farmed properly.

It’s a slow process but the pressure has to come from the consumer end, really.

Katherine Paul: Exactly. If we can educate the consumers and raise demand for this level of transparency and separation in the supply chain, then we hope that that will then force the industry to push in that direction as well.

Robin Daly: Just nipping back to what you were saying about corporations buying up health companies, it’s a kind of double-edged sword isn’t it? On the one hand we like to see corporations doing some good stuff and not just doing whatever makes the most money, but inevitably there comes along this pressure for the high standards that maybe the company they bought, that they originally started out with, to start to erode this and think in the way that corporations do towards profit rather than the motive of making the finest foods.

Katherine Paul: You’ve framed that exactly correctly. It is an issue, very much so here in the US. We’ve seen huge consolidation in the organic and natural health industries and it’s a double-edged sword. It’s because these corporations see the consumer demand and so they want to get in on that game, so to speak. But that comes with a lot of lobbying power from those corporations, and they have unfortunately more influence than they should over organic standards.

Robin Daly: Mm Hmm. Yeah, it’s a problem. It’s certainly one that’s going to only grow as we move forward and as the sector of organic food grows, of course the corporations are going to want to be in on it. They won’t want to miss out on the act if there’s money to be made there. I think we’re going to have to find ways to respond to that as time goes on, more and more.

Okay. So, while we’re talking about standards, Jackie, I think Clean Label are seeking to introduce new ones. Am I right?

Jackie Bowen: Yes! At Clean Label Project, we have a variety of different standards that we’ve created with the idea of trying to create a catalyst for market change and reform.

The way Clean Label Project’s standards work, is we actually use benchmark testing. In other words, the way we look at it is in the absence of federal regulation setting clear guidelines over heavy metals, pesticide residues and plasticisers. What we use is we use benchmark data. When you’re talking about something like, for example lead exposure, there’s different federal maximum levels of lead in food products, but at the same time, there’s a difference between regulatory limits and public health limits. From a public health limit perspective, the World Health Organisation, the Centre of Disease Control, the American Academy of Paediatrics, American Medical Association, FDA, the EPA all say there’s no safe level of lead.

From a public health perspective, if you use Euro and your ultimate goal, then you can shift standards into saying, if we take an overall data set and you benchmark, then you’re able to look at it that because of societal choice in the mining, fracking industry, industrial agriculture, we know we want zero, but we know that this stuff exists in the environment.

With that, how can we shift ingredients supply chains so that in addition to caring about taste, in addition to caring about price, in addition to caring about microbiological and industrial contaminants. What we’re able to do is set maximum tolerance levels over levels of heavy metals, pesticide residues and plasticisers.

Once we can get brands to voluntarily start incorporating those into their ingredient-sourcing policies, that’s where are we’re starting to shift what ends up in that finished product, what ends up on a dinner plate every evening. Because what we’re doing is looking to inspire consumers to think about food safety differently.

It’s not just a matter of looking at E. coli, salmonella and listeria, it’s a matter of looking at our brand voluntarily, choosing to think about food safety differently, and therefore sourcing ingredients while thinking about these other types of contaminants that consumers are concerned about. And that’s the foundation of Clean Label Project’s standards.

Robin Daly: Right. And you’re approaching businesses with this suggestion – how are they receiving it?

Jackie Bowen: It’s interesting. I would say the industry that is most receptive, and it makes sense, is infant formula and baby foods. Anything that’s focused on infants, children and pregnant moms.
Think about it. The first thousand days of life are critically important to long-term health and wellness. The World Health Organisation says that the first thousand days is when optimal brain and immune system development take place. So with that it’s one where obviously avoiding heavy metals, pesticide, residues, and plasticisers is important for everyone, but especially for America’s most vulnerable populations.

Robin Daly: All right. That’s a good place to start without a doubt. And it hasn’t always been the case has it? We know that some of the largest corporations have produced their delightfully pink products for babies that actually been labelled with carcinogens. So it’s definitely a move in the right direction.
Talking about the metals, just in case there’s any doubt in anybody listening, could you just go through the reasons we should be concerned about the presence of these metals in food products?

Jackie Bowen: Sure. When it comes to heavy metals, there’s been many studies linking heavy metals to cancer carcinogen. There’s links between pesticides, and it seems, many cancers as well as reproductive harm.

It’s interesting because for me, it’s one where, from a regulatory perspective, so much of the food safety regulatory fabric is focused on E. coli, salmonella, listeria – things that can cause acute illness in a very short period of time from vomiting to diarrhoea, and in some cases worse. But what’s interesting is that when it comes to exposures like pesticide residues, as well as heavy metals – these are things that won’t manifest themselves as illness for some cases 10, 15, 20, 25 years from now. These low-level exposures are able to contribute to chronic disease that you may not know about until a long period of time from now. For us, it’s a matter of making sure to standardise that exposure where possible.

Robin Daly: That is a problem with the industry, where your health is being affected minimally, but over a long period of time. Pointing the finger and actually blaming an industry for it is pretty damn hard. And so of course they can get away with murder in a way. It may catch up with them in the end, but it might take decades.

Jackie Bowen: That’s exactly right.

Katherine Paul: You know, I was just going to say traceability is so important and if you don’t know what’s in your food, what kind of contaminates you were being exposed to over that period of time that Jackie talked about 10, 15 years, then it’s impossible to trace that chronic illness or cancer or whatever you develop later on back to the foods you ate.

That’s just another reason for people to understand and know early on what what’s in their food and what they’re consuming.

Robin Daly: Yes, definitely. I presume that it’s the case that the majority of the public believe that the regulatory agencies are working away to keep us safe. They’ve got things under control. They’ve got the science to understand what the safe levels of toxins are. They’re doing a great job protecting consumers from corporate greed and profiteering. Are they right to have this confidence that these agencies, which are usually some arm of government, are actually looking after their wellbeing?

Katherine Paul: I think consumers are becoming increasingly sceptical that that’s what happening at the regulatory level. And I think a large part of that has to do with education around pesticides and in this country, particularly Monsanto’s Roundup and glyphosate, the government has set levels saying it’s safe to consume this much glyphosate in your Cheerios because they set these standards. Actually we’ve seen the regulatory agencies increase those minimum so-called safe levels under industry pressure. When the industry says, ‘we’ve got to use more of this pesticide so we have to tell consumers now that it’s safe at an even higher level.’

Jackie Bowen: The thing that’s exciting about consumers is that the good work of organisations like Organic Consumers, as well as Clean Label Project, is that by using consumer education, you’re able to pull through industrial reform. Given the current regulatory climate that we’re in, we’re playing regulatory complaint catch-up.

It’s always interesting for me to think that it wasn’t until the late 80s that cigarette smoking was actually banned on airplanes. In the 1950s cigarette smoking was encouraged for pregnant women because it reduced weight gain and it reduced anxiety. But then you start seeing these different reports are coming out in academia on the dangers of cigarette smoking to different things like low birth weight. You start seeing the links. There’s a correlation between leaded gasoline and reduced IQ and children. And so over time, public policy was established. But right now we can see that there are different reports that have linked pesticides to endocrine disruption, different types of heavy metals to cancer.

It doesn’t have to make its way into formal food safety regulatory policy for us from a societal food industry perspective to voluntarily change. The unfortunate reality is that we’ve made a choice and we have to live with the choices we’ve made because of fracking, industrial agriculture, coal burning. Because of that, these types of contaminants are in the air, the water and the soil. But through proactive and vigilant ingredient sourcing policies and procedures, brands can think of the way they source ingredients differently in order to minimise that consumer exposure, at least the dietary exposure to these different types of heavy metals.

Robin Daly: Well, we love to see corporations, food businesses and any kind of consumer products that are actually putting their necks on the block and saying that they don’t include some of the common carcinogens and things.

That’s actually something to attract the public to buy their wares. That’s the right direction for sure. And then they have to be made to live up to their claims of course. Curiously, I was standing patiently in the socially-distanced queue in my local store the other day, right opposite the shelf where the Roundup was.
I was amused to see that it said no glyphosate on it. First of all, the reason that exists is because of glyphosate has got such a bad name and the fact that the manufacturer hasn’t put something positive on their message, but says their last and greatest ingredient is not in this product is quite a testament to a turnaround in its fortune.

They’re claiming this naturally breaks down in soil. It all looks lovely, but I don’t begin to believe that until somebody gives me the science. Nonetheless, it is quite a change in the way that they’re having to portray themselves. And it must be a result of consumer pressure.

Jackie Bowen: That’s exactly right. It’s really a matter of consumers viewing their dollars as a vote for all of the food systems that they believe in, or the systems that they don’t. Over time, consumer expectation can pull through industry change. At the end of the day, the way we look at it at Clean Label Project is that there’s a growing consumer concern and demand therefore around products that are thinking of food safety differently. Making sure to minimise that exposure to heavy metals, pesticide residues, plasticisers, and other chemicals of concern. There will be progressive innovators and entrepreneurs that look to satisfy that consumer expectation. But it’s also a matter of any of those legacy brands that have been around to recognise that this is an emerging consumer demographic and concern that are looking to purchase products with these ideals in mind, and making sure to recognise that it’s an opportunity: an opportunity or improve public health, environmental health, as well as innovations within.

Robin Daly: Well, it’s got a way to go, but it’s definitely a good direction. I mean, one of the seminal moments in this whole journey was the one where Michelle Obama put herself out as digging the garden and growing good, healthy, organic veg for her family and was described as being un-American for doing so. I thought that certainly exposed something about the thinking and hopefully things have got better since then.

Katherine Paul: They haven’t gotten better in terms of political discourse, but I think at the consumer level they actually have. This piece that Jackie just talked about so well; consumer education is so critical. But we do also as an organisation sometimes take this to the courts and in fact have sued multiple companies over false fraudulent labelling claims, claiming to be natural or sustainably produced.

We have had at least had some success in forcing companies to remove certain wording from their labels that is misleading to consumers. In some cases, we got them to commit – whether sincerely or not – to trying to clean up their supply chain to eliminate the contaminants rather than just change their labels.
In one of those lawsuits, involved Roundup which made claims on its consumer packaging that the ingredients in there didn’t affect humans and animals – only plants. And we have successfully forced them to stop making that claim as well.

Robin Daly: You’re part of the pressure that’s driven the development of this new, no-glyphosate Roundup, probably. Good on you! I wonder if you’d just like to summarise now what sort of impact you’re hoping for from your report?

Katherine Paul: I can start with that. I think there are multiple audiences here that we want to have an impact on. We want obviously to have an impact on consumers, both in terms of their paying closer attention to marketing claims, to labelling claims and to how products are sourced – in this case from factory farms. As Jackie pointed out, we think most consumers had no idea that these collagen health food products were coming from factory farms. And we also hope to influence the industry itself and persuade them to put more pressure at the supply level to segregate at slaughterhouse and processing plants so that they can source more responsibility.

Robin Daly: Can I just ask, have you approached any of the companies whose products you tested to get their response?

Jackie Bowen: I haven’t approached any of the companies. I actually did hear from a company the other day that had mentioned that they saw our white paper as an interesting opportunity to innovate and come out with a new product line. They see it as an unfilled market demand. Hopefully we’ll see some good coming out of this. Some brands are looking at this as a call to action, that there’s a concern that there are consumers that are looking to buy these types of products.

If consumers set their expectations and buy and vote with their dollars then I think that we can reward innovation. So hopefully we’ll see some new changes coming out from this study.

Robin Daly: Well, that would be great. Wouldn’t it? That was a good response. Maybe they weren’t aware of what you’ve found in their products before. I don’t know whether they would ever have tested to the level that you’ve applied to them done before. Is that true?

Jackie Bowen: Well, that’s the thing that’s interesting is it’s one where, and Katherine you can speak to it too, that it’s one where doing heavy metal testing isn’t expensive. It’s like $150 a sample. So it was something that shouldn’t take little nonprofits in order to go out there and evaluate these. Routine heavy metal testing is something that’s pretty commonplace.

The only thing that we try to do is look at heavy metals through the lens of animal welfare, and use of animals in collagen natural products. For us, it may not be required to do this type of testing from the court of law, but the court of public opinion – that’s a different story.

Consumers have different expectations based on marketing and the product sector that you’re selling your product in. It’s a matter of making sure you actually fulfil and deliver on those consumer expectations.

Katherine Paul: Jackie’s exactly right about that. We don’t know, but we can surmise certainly that many of the people, the health-conscious consumers who purchase a collagen product, are possibly never buying meat from factory farms because they know that’s not a healthy product.

It’s not good for them or good for the environment. We assume that’s fairly surprising to some of those consumers to find out that while they’re avoiding factory farm meat, chicken, etc, they’re actually daily consuming a health food supplement that did come from a factory farm.

Robin Daly: It’s true. Yes, you’re right. Very health-conscious people might’ve had no idea at all. It just goes to show how really these days as consumers, we have to become more and more savvy. If we really want to be sure about what we’re eating. But on the plus side, the new standards that you’re pressurising for should be enormous help to everybody with that.

So brilliant, what you’re doing.

All right, we’ll end it there. Thanks so much for coming on the show and telling us all about your great work to improve the safety of our food.

Katherine Paul: Thank you!

Jackie Bowen: Thanks, bye!

Robin Daly: Well, that was bit of an eye-opener and demonstrates clearly just how difficult it is to buy manufactured foods that really are trustworthy.

Another reminder to check out wigwam.org.uk, the new website set up by Yes to Life, to underpin a network of support groups for people who are interested in integrative medicine for cancer, as well as to act as a resource centre. Wigwam is running a series of online forums which is an opportunity for people with cancer to interact directly with experts from integrative medicine online. And they’re free! Do take a look.

Thanks for listening today. I’ll be back next week with another Yes to Life show, here on UK Health Radio. Bye.

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Kindly written by Literary & Transcript Editor Maria Mellor