California Law and the Purity of Herbal Medicines
Wherever you go in California, you'll be warned.
The grocery, the garage, every restaurant, in your doctor's office. These stickers show up everywhere, warning us of unnamed poisons in our midst. Unfortunately these warnings have become so ubiquitous that only out-of-state residents, who've never seen them before, actually pay attention to them. Who would even care when the offending substances aren't even named in the warning.
Since many herbal medicines wear prop. 65 labels in California, we decided to shed some light on what this means.
Seeing a warning on a natural or organic product can be a shock. We understand your concerns about these warnings, but you should know at the outset, that the herbal medicines that we offer have been used for generations and have never posed any harm.
Prop. 65 Warnings are about trace amounts of lead found in virtually all plants, soil, and water everywhere on Earth. Since herbal medicines are natural and grown in soil with water, they will contain trace minerals. This, in itself is not a problem. The issue is plainly, how much is safe, and how much is problematic.
Various countries have set their own standards for lead levels in herbal medicines - Japan allows 20 ppm, the World Health Organization allows 10 ppm, Australia and Germany allow 5 ppm, and the US Pharmacopoeia has a limit of 3 ppm for drugs (though none for herbs).
We can assure you that our products meet these internationally recognized standards for purity and potency.
They test at an average of 1-3 ppm for trace lead and 0 ppm for other trace minerals. This is considered absolutely safe and incidental by all international standards for herbal medicine.
However, to the US FDA and the California Department of Agriculture, herbs are never medicines. They are always food. And California Proposition 65 requires a lead warning at only .5 ppm in food or water, an amount so low, that few medicinal herbs can meet this standard.
According to studies, the normal healthy American diet contains 15 – 25 micrograms of lead daily, mainly originating in fruits and vegetables. Other environmental exposures can result in up to 200 micrograms consumed daily.
Using herbal medicines adds no more than 3-15 micrograms per day.
These numbers should not alarm you, as our bodies likely have less lead now than at anytime in recorded history. When lead was in gasoline, plumbing, and paint, we absorbed five to ten times as much lead as we do today.
Be assured that our products remain, as always, the purist and most potent herbal medicines you can buy.
