They are killing you with Cereal

Video Transcript:

Hello, I'm Dr. Levy. We have a video clip that's going to follow that's going to demonstrate very dramatically that some of the nutrients and additives that go in enriched foods might not be everything you think that they are. If you did not reach this video clip by seeing issue number four of healthy bites, you might want to check out that issue as well and we'll help explain what you're going to see. We're going to look at an enriched cereal that says it has 100% of the daily requirements of items and minerals and demonstrate through magnetism that the form of iron inside this cereal is actually metallic filings. It should be clear then that this is not really a bioavailable form of iron and in fact may well represent a toxic form of iron. Extrapolate this to all the other enriched foods and then you can see that you might be getting a number of quote, nutrients, unquote that you might not want to take in on a daily basis. Okay, we have here a box of cereal that supposedly has 100% of the minimum daily requirements of items and minerals including of course iron. So let's go ahead and open it up. We have our flakes. Let's see. Okay, now we're going to take a few flakes out. Put them on top of the water and we'll be able to show with this strong magnet that says there's enough metallic iron in here to steer this flake around the water. And if you think this isn't unusual, take a magnet and float anything else on water, the magnet will have no effect on it. Okay, having done that, we're going to go ahead and take this bowl of water, put it out of the way. Our next step, I'm now going to show you a demonstration in which we're actually going to pull these metallic iron filings out of the cereal and you'll be able to see them very dramatically. We have a baggy here, regular ordinary baggy and we have taped to the side of the baggy, another one of these magnets just like this one here. So that when we put together corn flakes and water and they're all mixed and crunched up together and we slosh it all around, you will eventually see black iron filings collect on top of this magnet. What we'll do first is we'll put the corn flakes or the wheat flakes as the case may be in the mixer, with water and puree it fine so that all the iron filings that are contained in there can be easily pulled out of the solution by the magnet. Take the box out the way. We'll try to use most of the flakes so that we can get a maximum concentration of iron for you to see, although you'll be able to see them on just half the bag. Okay, we're not going to transfer this cereal dissolved in the water into the bag. We might put a little bit more water in to make it a little more fluid and then we're going to slosh it around so that as much of the volume of this passes across the top of this magnet and you'll see that these iron metallic filings will then gather. We'll try to be delicate and not too messy. Okay, we slosh this around. Our magnet is right here. It's the same as this magnet. We see this green. Here's the green side of this magnet and you see this enormous amount of metallic filings here. After this I'm going to cut this out of the bag and you'll be able to see these filings in even greater detail after I dry them. All right, now we're going to take an empty bowl and put this in here so that we don't make an enormous mess when I just take my scissors and cut this area out so we can look at these iron filings in a little greater detail. Okay, now I'm going to put a little water on this. Now the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take a hairdryer and dry these out completely and then pull the magnet off and drop them on a sheet of paper so we can see them in the final detail. Okay, take the magnet away. Okay, now we have now we have the filings on the paper. I'm going to take a magnet underneath the table and see how the filings stand up. We push them over from one side to the other. These are clearly metallic filings attracted by magnetism by deduction. They're iron. So that concludes our demonstration. I think you'll agree this is a pretty dramatic demonstration that you can pull with magnetism metallic iron filings out of supposedly enriched cereal. Our metallic iron filings, something you want to eat either in cereal or in pastas or in other flowers or other enriched foods, I don't think so. So buy or be aware or maybe buy or be aware. Bon Appetit.