Hundreds of thousands of people have consumed Simplexity Health products, many thousands of those for over ten years, without adverse effects. We believe this to be one of the most important indicators of the safety of our products.

No study has ever indicated that Aphanizomenon flos-aquae (Aph. flos-aquae) harvested from Upper Klamath Lake has ever produced any kind of toxin. The toxin microcystin is produced by certain species of cyanobacteria, which may be present, along with other species, in bodies of fresh water. The strain of Aph. flos-aquae that grows in Upper Klamath Lake has never been documented to produce this, or any other, toxin.

Simplexity Health has worked cooperatively with state and federal agencies, as well as leading algologists, to establish prudent safety precautions for the manufacture of Simplexity Health products. In order to maintain a spotless record of product safety, Simplexity Health and an independent lab test each batch of algae for microcystin levels before releasing it for production. The Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) also randomly tests samples of algae, and has never found the microcystin levels to be unsatisfactory.

In addition, we believe that the ODA limit for microcystin in algae products is quite conservative. The present legal limit is based on the "no adverse effects limit" observed in a 1994 study, and then reduced by a "safety factor" of 1000 by the ODA. It is important to understand that this limit was determined using a procedure in which mice were tube-fed with pure microcystin in water, the method used for determining the toxicity of microcystis in public water supplies.

A study published in the September 1999 issue of Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety re-examined the toxicity issue, but instead of pure microcystin in water, researchers used a diet of ordinary rodent food combined with algae (Aph. flos-aquae and other naturally-occurring species). This mixture of algae and ordinary food more closely approximates the way humans consume algae. The algae used in the test diet contained twenty times the legal limit of microcystin, and the mice tested at the highest consumption rate were fed a quantity of algae that corresponds to a human eating over half a pound (4600 capsules/tablets) each day. No adverse effects were observed at this level.