It is a lot of fun hootin and hollerin endlessly debating this topic!! What a colossal, tired, debate! "organic" vs "chemical"... Surely if we could harness the ten million stoner man hours (myself included) have been spent on this "no clear winner" debate we could have (as a collective) engineered ourselves a UFO LED panel to fly all us growers to the moon.... or something meaningful.
Instead, as growers we could be focusing our efforts on something
positive, with a clear goal. Like simply getting the nutrient companies to start doing better QUALITY CONTROL so that each batch of ferts they put on the market stays uniform does not vary batch to batch. Or at least a primitive "reputation" system to rank nute companies on QC.
A simple goal, every nute batch should go thru QC and test the same as the previous batch.
Why are we as a community wasting time on this never ending argument/battle? Quality control at nutes companies is notoriously horrendous and simply hurts our end product.
Of course this Quality Control will never happen, we can't even get stores selling herbal supplements to QC correctly lol.... Well, at least our Department of Agriculture has a worldwide program to ensure our beef is high quality! lol
GNC, Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens accused of selling adulterated ‘herbals’
A warning to herbal supplement users: Those store-brand ginkgo biloba tablets you bought may contain mustard, wheat, radish and other substances decidedly non-herbal in nature, but they’re not likely to contain any actual ginkgo biloba.
That’s according to an investigation by the New York State attorney general’s office into store-brand supplements at four national retailers — GNC, Target, Walgreens and Wal-Mart. All four have received cease-and-desist letters demanding that they stop selling a number of their dietary supplements, few of which were found to contain the herbs shown on their labels and many of which included potential allergens not identified in the ingredients list.
“Contamination, substitution and falsely labeling herbal products constitute deceptive business practices and, more importantly, present considerable health risks for consumers,” said the letters, first reported today by the New York Times.
The tests were conducted using a process called DNA barcoding, which identifies individual ingredients through a kind of “genetic fingerprinting.” The investigators tested 24 products claiming to be seven different types of herb — echinacea, garlic, gingko biloba, ginseng, saw palmetto, St. John’s wort and valerian root. All but five of the products contained DNA that was either unrecognizable or from a plant other than what the product claimed to be.
In a press release, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said DNA tests were run on supplements claiming to contain ginko bilboa, St. John's wort, ginseng and echinacea. Samples of the supplements were purchased from various locations around New York, and each sample was tested five times. In four out of five cases, the tests showed that the pills contained nothing more than fillers such as asparagus, rice, wheat or houseplants lol.
