By Dr. Mercola

Hypothyroidism is far more prevalent than once thought. The latest estimates are that 20 million Americans have hypothyroidism, but the actual numbers are probably higher.

Some experts claim that 10 to 40 percent of Americans have suboptimal thyroid function.

Thyroid hormones are used by every cell of your body to regulate metabolism and body weight by controlling the burning of fat for energy and heat. Thyroid hormones are also required for growth and development in children.

Iodine is Key for Thyroid Health

Iodine is the key to a healthy thyroid and efficient metabolism, and even comprises a large part of the thyroid hormone molecule itself.

Even the names of the different forms of thyroid hormone reflect the number of iodine molecules attached — T4 has four attached iodine molecules, and T3 (the biologically active form of the hormone) has three — showing what an important part iodine plays in thyroid biochemistry.

Iodine deficiency is one of the three most common nutritional deficiencies, along with magnesium and vitamin D.

Since iodine is so important for thyroid function, wouldn’t you expect to see an increase in hypothyroidism with insufficient iodine levels?

Yes, and that is exactly what we have seen.

This means that your thyroid problem could actually be an iodine deficiency problem.

If you feel sluggish and tired, have difficulty losing weight, have dry skin, hair loss, constipation or cold sensitivity, it could all be related to hypothyroidism.

More than 100 years ago, iodine was shown to reverse and prevent goiter (swelling of your thyroid gland) and to correct hypothyroidism. But we now understand that iodine’s effects are much farther reaching.

Iodine has four important functions in your body:

1. Stabilization of metabolism and body weight
2. Brain development in children
3. Fertility
4. Optimization of your immune system (iodine is a potent anti-bacterial, anti-parasitic, anti-viral and anti- cancer agent)

While iodine levels have fallen, there have been simultaneous increases in rates of thyroid disease, breast cancer, fibrocystic breast disease, prostate cancer, and obesity in American adults, and an increase in mental retardation and developmental delays in American children.

Why are Iodine Levels Dropping?

Iodine deficiency is on the rise in the United States. Simple supplementation may not be the answer as the following issues also need to be addressed.

Recent national survey data suggest that just over 11 percent of the total U.S. population, and over 7 percent of pregnant women, and nearly 17 percent of all reproductive-aged women, are deficient in iodine.

The Total Diet Study, performed by the FDA, reported an iodine intake of 621 µg for 2 year-olds between 1974 and 1982, compared with 373 µg between 1982 and 1991. During this same time period, the baking industry replaced iodine-based anti-caking agents with bromine-based agents.

In addition to iodine’s disappearance from our food supply, exposure to toxic competing halogens (bromine, fluorine, chlorine and perchlorate) has dramatically increased.

You absorb these halogens through your food, water, medications and environment, and they selectively occupy your iodine receptors, further deepening your iodine deficit.

Fluoridation of water is a major contributor to iodine deficiency, besides being very damaging to your health in many other ways.

Additional factors contributing to falling iodine levels are:

• Diets low in fish, shellfish and seaweed
• Vegan and vegetarian diets
• Decreased use of iodized salt
• Less use of iodide in the food and agricultural industry
• Use of radioactive iodine in many medical procedures, which competes with natural iodine

Crying Wolff

A huge reason why iodine fell out of favor is the “Wolff-Chaikoff Effect,” which has been a disaster for public health.

An experiment was done that resulted in a case of hypothyroidism, which researchers misinterpreted as being caused by excessive iodine intake. However, the individual was given intravenous radioactive iodine — which is toxic. It had nothing to do with food or supplement iodine intake, and the two are completely different.

Yet, tales of this experiment quickly spread, creating a fear of iodine that caused it to be removed from the American food supply for the last three decades.

Iodine deficiency is particularly profound in the Midwest and Great Lakes region of the United States because iodine is typically found only in soils close to the oceans, whereas soils of inland areas are iodine deficient. In fact, that region used to be called the “goiter belt” because of its extremely high incidence of people with goiters.

The Toxic Halides — Iodine’s Fiercest Competitors

Iodine is a member of a class of related elements called “halogens” that includes bromine, fluorine, and chlorine. When they are chemically reduced, they become “halides”: iodide, bromide, fluoride, and chloride. These are the forms you usually encounter in your foods, medications and environment.

Iodide and chloride are beneficial in small amounts, but bromide and fluoride are toxic. They grab onto your iodine receptors, blocking the action of iodide and thyroid hormones, resulting in, or at least contributing to many serious diseases.

One of the main problems is that the toxic halides become stuck in your body.

There is no known detoxification pathway for bromine and fluorine — your body simply cannot break them down. So, they build up in your tissues and wreak havoc on your health.

Bromides

Bromides are a menace to your endocrine system and are present all around you.

Despite a ban on the use of potassium bromate in flour by the World Health Organization, bromides can still be found in some over-the-counter medications, foods, and personal care products.

The use of potassium bromate as an additive to commercial breads and baked goods has been a huge contributor to bromide overload in Western cultures.

Sodium bromate can be found in products such as permanent waves, hair dyes, and textile dyes.

Benzylkonium is used as a preservative in some cosmetics. Even trace amounts of bromine can trigger severe acne in sensitive individuals. And who needs skin care products that cause acne?

Bromine is also found in fire retardants used in carpets, mattresses, upholstery, and furniture and some medical equipment.

Based on animal research, bromides have been linked to behavioral changes and neurodevelopmental disorders, including Attention Deficit Disorders, in children.

The United States is quite behind in putting an end to the egregious practice of allowing bromine chemicals in your foods and products whereas other nations have taken the bull by the horns:

• In 1990, the United Kingdom banned bromate in bread
• In 1994, Canada did the same
• Brazil recently outlawed bromide in flour products
• The European Union has banned some PBDE compounds (polybrominated diphenyl ethers)

What’s taking us so long?

Again, corporate profits trump health concerns when it comes to doing what is best for the public.

Great Resource for Learning More

Author and patient advocate Mary Shomon is one of the leading educators on thyroid health in the U.S. and has led the most popular consumer forum, the About.com thyroid guide. Mary cautions thyroid patients not to run out to the health food store and load up on iodine or iodine-rich supplements like kelp and bladderwrack.

According to Mary, in someone who is not iodine-deficient, excessive iodine supplementation can actually worsen a pre-existing thyroid condition, or trigger further thyroid dysfunction. The key is in getting the right amount of iodine — not too much, not too little.

The way to evaluate your iodine intake is a test that measures how much iodine you are excreting in your urine.

The general protocol requires you to take a dose of iodine, collect your urine for 24 hours, and then send the sample off to a lab where they calculate your iodine level based on how much iodine you are spilling into your urine. If you are interested in being tested for iodine deficiency, this urine iodine challenge test is the most accurate way to assess your iodine status.

Getting Your Iodine Levels Up

If you are iodine deficient, I recommend adding sea vegetables to your diet.

The best source of organically bound iodine that I know of is non-commercially harvested seaweeds. The dose is about 5 grams a day or about one ounce per week, so a pound would last about two months.

It is typically better to obtain a nutrient from a natural food whenever possible than from a supplement, so use supplements only as a last resort.

Some patients also report that they respond better to food-based forms of iodine — like seaweeds — than the supplement forms. However, if you are going to use a supplement I would strongly advise using supersaturated iodine (SSKI) which is available as an inexpensive prescription. Typically 1-3 drops a day are all that are required.

Please avoid using Lugol’s solution or iodine, as that can actually worsen your thyroid condition.

The fact that your thyroid only transports iodine in its ionized form (i.e. iodide) is straight out of the textbooks.  Your thyroid reduces iodide (I-) into iodine (I₂) for use in formation of thyroglobulin.  Your body doesn’t utilize iodine directly. It has to split the I₂ into two I- ions, which is an oxidative reaction that causes oxidative stress.

Iodide transporters are located in other areas of your body besides the thyroid gland, including your breasts and colon. One family of iodide transporters is called the sodium-iodide symporter, and the other is called pendren.  Dr. David Brownstein (see below) discusses the sodium-iodide symporter but doesn’t mention pendren.  However like all ion transporters they too require a charge in order to move a molecule across the membrane, which means iodine must be in its ionized form.

It’s possible that some may see good results using Lugol’s for some afflictions, but according to autism expert Catherine Tamara,  in her experience it is very clear that children with autism, and their mothers, do fine with iodide, but not necessarily with iodine.

For more information about the research that makes me question the recommendation for iodine and Lugol’s solution, please see these studies:

• Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health 1992, 37:535-548 “Evidence of Thyroxine Formation Following Iodine Administration in Sprague-Dawley Rats”

• Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health 1991, 32:89-101 “Comparison of Toxicity Induced by Iodine and Iodide in Male and Female Rats”
• Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health 1998, 55:93-106 “Comparison of the Effects of Iodine and Iodide on Thyroid Function in Humans”
• Biological Trace Element Research 2006, 110:193-209 “Analyses of Toxic Metals and Essential Minerals in the Hair of Arizona Children with Autism and Associated Conditions, and Their Mothers”

 

 

Keeping your iodine levels optimal is particularly important if you are a women that is contemplating pregnancy, or are already pregnant Make sure you are taking seaweed or a prenatal vitamin with the right amount and form of iodide, not iodine, to help protect your baby.

Tips for Optimizing Thyroid Function

David Brownstein, M.D., has written several books on thyroid and iodine, which are a valuable resource for those of you who want more information.

Also, Dr. Hyman has made some good recommendations if you have a sluggish thyroid:

• Identify and treat underlying causes (e.g., iodine deficiency, hormone imbalance, environmental toxicity, inflammation)
• Adjust your diet and understand the role of nutrition (iodine, as well as tyrosine, selenium, vitamins A and D, zinc, B vitamins, and omega-3 fats), food allergies, gluten intolerance, and foods that contain goitrogens, such as soy, which interfere with the utilization of iodine
• Get plenty of exercise
• Reduce your stress
• Enjoy saunas and hot soaks for detoxification,
• Use supplements, if necessary for nutritional support
• If you are on thyroid hormones for less than five years, most people find that they respond far better to natural thyroid hormone supplementation that has both T1, T2, T3 and T4, not just T4 like Synthroid. Armour Thyroid and Nature-Thyroid are the best known, but compounding pharmacists can also produce natural thyroid hormone prescriptions.

The more you can rid your body of the toxic halides, the more iodine your body will be able to hang onto, and the better your thyroid will function.

Laura Power, MS, PhD, LDN, offers these suggestions for increasing secretion of fluorine and bromine::

• High-dose iodine
• High-dose vitamin C
• Unrefined sea salt
• Epsom salts baths
• Sweating in a far infrared sauna

The Future of Natural Thyroid Drugs

This is a surprising and shocking injustice that is occurring in the U.S. right now.

The FDA has shut down natural desiccated thyroid drug production and distribution by three major firms, and is now calling the century-old natural remedy an “unapproved drug.”

One of the ways you can typically differentiate a natural physician from a conventional one is by the type of thyroid hormone replacement therapy they prescribe. Natural physicians will almost exclusively used desiccated thyroid hormone products like Armour Thyroid.

I have put thousands of patients on this and it was my consistent experience that most did far better on these than the synthetic versions. About the only exception were people that were taking synthetics for longer than 10 years. Seems like their body had a tough time adjusting back.

Taking desiccated thyroid hormone off the market will cause harm, danger and damage to hundreds of thousands and perhaps more than that, unless they are allowed access to this safe and superior thyroid replacement.

Two other major manufacturers/distributors now have long-term backorders for their bioidentical hormone products, which include Armour, Nature-Throid, and Westroid.

The uncertainty about the future of natural thyroid drug options has many patients and practitioners concerned, and the Save Natural Thyroid Coalition has been formed in response.

Along with recently holding its first kickoff teleconference to discuss the future of natural desiccated thyroid (NDT) drugs, the Save Thyroid Coalition has also created the Save Natural Thyroid YouTube channel, where patients and practitioners can create and post videos supporting natural thyroid.

I am actually serving on this committee and going to support it with as much media exposure is required to prevent this travesty of justice. It is depriving patients of a valid and natural way to support their thyroid function that has typically been damaged by toxins and stress.

They’ve also formed a Save Natural Thyroid Facebook Group to strategize and help keep thyroid patients informed. If you or anyone you love uses bioidentical hormones, you may want to join this group to keep up on the latest updates.

If you’re newly diagnosed with hypothyroidism, or have not been on synthetic hormones for very long, I strongly recommend Armour Thyroid — a natural porcine thyroid extract, which provides not only T3 and T4, but also T1 and T2, which will help normalize your hormone response.

The fact that the FDA may now severely limit, or eliminate, this option is distressing, as it is clearly the best option for many people.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/10/20/signs-symptoms-and-solutions-for-poor-thyroid-function.aspx

Major Pharmaceuticals has put out a press release saying that they’ve been forced to shut down production of all natural desiccated thyroid drugs, a treatment for hypothyroidism that has been in use for over a century. Major received notice from the FDA that their complete line of desiccated thyroid drugs can no longer be manufactured, and that the FDA is pulling the designation that allowed them to sell these drugs.

Major is also saying that the FDA is requiring that all manufacturers that wish to continue manufacturing submit an NDA or ANDA (New Drug Application or Abbreviated New Drug Application) for approval. Desiccated thyroid drugs were in use in the early 1900’s, and already on the market when the government regulatory groups to oversee medications were formed, so they never went through the new drug application process.

Biotech, Time Cap Labs, and Major are no longer manufacturing natural desiccated thyroid drugs. RLC and Forest are now the last makers of natural desiccated thyroid drugs in the U.S., and their products are unavailable or in short supply in throughout the nation.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/09/19/is-the-fda-poised-to-ban-a-century-old-natural-remedy.aspx

After looking at a database of 850 patients diagnosed with lymphatic and bone marrow cancers between 1972 and 1980, researchers from the University of Tasmania and Britain‘s Bristol University found that living near high-voltage power lines might increase the risk of leukemia, lymphoma, and related conditions later in life.

People who lived within 328 yards of a power line up to the age of five were five times more likely to develop cancer. Those who lived within the same range to a power line at any point during their first 15 years were three times more likely to develop cancer as an adult.

Internal Medicine Journal September 2007; 37(9):614-9

Physorg.com August 24, 2007

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/09/18/report-links-power-lines-to-cancer.aspx

With many focusing on tomorrow’s Cyber Polygon exercise, less attention has been paid to the World Economic Forum’s real ambitions in cybersecurity — to create a global organization aimed at gutting even the possibility of anonymity online. With the governments of the US, UK and Israel on board, along with some of the world’s most powerful corporations, it is important to pay attention to their endgame, not just the simulations.

Amid a series of warnings and simulations in the past year regarding a massive cyber attack that could soon bring down the global financial system, the “information sharing group” of the largest banks and private financial organizations in the United States warned earlier this year that banks “will encounter growing danger” from “converging” nation-state and criminal hackers over the course of 2021 and in the years that follow.

The organization, called the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), made the claim in its 2021 “Navigating Cyber” report, which assesses the events of 2020 and provides a forecast for the current year. That forecast, which casts a devastating cyber attack on the financial system through third parties as practically inevitable, also makes the case for a “global fincyber [financial-cyber] utility” as the main solution to the catastrophic scenarios it predicts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, an organization close to top FS-ISAC members has recently been involved in laying the groundwork for that very “global fincyber utility” — the World Economic Forum, which recently produced the model for such a utility through its Partnership against Cybercrime (WEF-PAC) project.

Not only are top individuals at FS-ISAC involved in WEF cybersecurity projects like Cyber Polygon, but FS-ISAC’s CEO was also an adviser to the WEF-Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report that warned that the global financial system was increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks and was the subject of the first article in this 2-part series.

Another article, published earlier this year at Unlimited Hangout, also explored the WEF’s Cyber Polygon 2020 simulation of a cyber attack targeting the global financial system. Another iteration of Cyber Polygon is due to take place tomorrow July 9th and will focus on simulating a supply chain cyber attack.

A major theme in these efforts has not only been an emphasis on global cooperation, but also a merging of private banks and/or corporations with the State, specifically intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

In addition, many of the banks, institutions and individuals involved in the creation of these reports and simulations are either actively involved in WEF-related efforts to usher in a new global economic model of “stakeholder capitalism” or are seeking to imminently introduce, or are actively developing, central bank-backed digital currencies, or CBDCs.

In addition, and as mentioned in the first article in this series, a cyber attack like those described in these reports and simulations would also provide the perfect scenario for dismantling the current failing financial system, as it would absolve central banks and corrupt financial institutions of any responsibility.

The convergence of several concerning factors in the financial world, including the end of LIBOR at the end of year and the imminent hyperinflation of globally important currencies, suggests that the time is ripe for an event that would not only allow the global economy to “reset”, but also absolve the fundamentally corrupt financial institutions around the world from any wrongdoing.

Instead, faceless hackers can be blamed and, given recent precedents in the US and elsewhere, any group or nation state can be blamed with minimal evidence as politically convenient. This report will closely examine both FS-ISAC’s recent predictions and the WEF Partnership against Cybercrime, specifically the WEF-PAC’s efforts to position itself as the cybersecurity alliance of choice if and when such a catastrophic cyber attack cripples the current financial system.

Of particular interest is the call by both FS-ISAC and the WEF Partnership against Cybercrime to specifically target cryptocurrencies, particularly those that favor transactional anonymity, as well as the infrastructure on which those cryptocurrencies run. Though framed as a way to combat “cybercrime”, it is obvious that cryptocurrencies are to be unwanted competitors for the soon-to-be-launched central bank digital currencies.

In addition, as this report will show, there is a related push by WEF partners to “tackle cybercrime” that seeks to end privacy and the potential for anonymity on the internet in general, by linking government-issued IDs to internet access. Such a policy would allow governments to surveil every piece of online content accessed as well as every post or comment authored by each citizen, supposedly to ensure that no citizen can engage in “criminal” activity online.

Notably, the WEF Partnership against Cybercrime employs a very broad definition of what constitutes a “cybercriminal” as they apply this label readily to those who post or host content deemed to be “disinformation” that represents a threat to “democratic” governments.

The WEF’s interest in criminalizing and censoring online content has been made evident by its recent creation of a new Global Coalition for Digital Safety to facilitate the increased regulation of online speech by both the public and private sectors.

FS-ISAC, Its Influence and Its Doomsday “Predictions” for 2021

FS-ISAC officially exists to “help ensure the resilience and continuity of the global financial services infrastructure and individual firms against acts that could significantly impact the sector’s ability to provide services critical to the orderly function of the global economy.”

In other words, FS-ISAC allows the private financial services industry to decide on and coordinate sector-wide responses regarding how financial services are provided during and after a given crisis, including a cyber attack. It was tellingly created in 1999, the same year that the Glass-Steagall Act, which regulated banks after the onset of the Great Depression, was repealed.

Though FS-ISAC’s members are not publicly listed on the group’s website, they do acknowledge that their membership includes some of the world’s largest banks, Fintech companies, insurance firms and payment processors.

On their board of directors, the companies and organizations represented include CitiGroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley, among others, strongly suggesting that FS-ISAC is largely a Wall Street-dominated entity. SWIFT, the society that manages inter-bank communication and dominates it globally, is also represented on FS-ISAC’s board.

Collectively, FS-ISAC members represent $35 trillion in assets under management in more than 70 countries. FS-ISAC also has ties to the World Economic Forum due to the direct involvement of its then-CEO Steve Silberstein in the WEF-Carnegie initiative and FS-ISAC’s participation in the initiative’s “stakeholder engagements.”

There is also the fact that some prominent FS-ISAC members, like Bank of America and SWIFT, are also members of the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, which houses the WEF Partnership against Cybercrime project. At the individual level, the founding director of FS-ISAC, Charles Blauner, is now an agenda contributor to the WEF who previously held top posts at JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and CitiGroup.

He currently is a partner and CISO-in-residence of Team8, a controversial start-up incubator that operates as a front for Israeli military intelligence in tech-related ventures that is part of the WEF Partnership against Cybersecurity. Team8’s CEO and co-founder and the former commander of Israeli intelligence outfit Unit 8200, Nadav Zafrir, has contributed to WEF Centre for Cybersecurity policy documents and WEF panels on the “Great Reset“.

In addition, current FS-ISAC board member Laura Deaner, CISO of Northwestern Mutual, served as the co-chair for the WEF’s Global Futures Council on Cybersecurity. Teresa Walsh, the current global head of intelligence for FS-ISAC, will be a speaker at the WEF’s Cyber Polygon 2021 regarding how to develop an international response to ransomware attacks. Walsh previously worked as an intelligence analyst for Citibank, JP Morgan Chase and the US Navy.

The FS-ISAC’s recent report is worth looking at in detail for several reasons, with the main one being the sheer power and influence that its members, both known and unknown, hold over the current fiat-based financial system. The full report is exclusive to FS-ISAC members, but a “thematic summary” is publicly available.

The FS-ISAC’s recent report on “Navigating Cyber” in 2021 is “based on the contributions of our members and the resulting trend analysis by FS-ISAC’s Global Intelligence Office (GIO)” and includes several “predictions” for the current calendar year.

The group’s GIO, led by Teresa Walsh, soon-to-be speaker at Cyber Polygon 2021, also “coordinates with other cybersecurity organizations, companies and agencies around the world” in addition to its intelligence gathering from FS-ISAC members.

At the beginning of 2020, when the COVID-19 crisis resulted in an overt push towards digitization, FS-ISAC launched a “new secure chat and intelligence sharing platform” that “provided a new way for members to discuss threats and security trends.” It is fair to assume that the private discussions on this platform directly informed this report.

According to the recent FS-ISAC report, the main trends and threats discussed by its members through this service over the past year were “third party risks”, such as the risk presented by major hacks of third party service providers, like the SolarWinds hack, and “geopolitical tensions.”

The report contains several “predictions for 2021 and beyond.” The first of these predictions is that adversarial nation-states will team up with “the cybercriminal underworld” in order to “obfuscate their activity and complication attribution.”

FS-ISAC does not provide evidence of this having happened, but supporting this claim makes it easier to blame state governments for the activities of cybercriminals when politically convenient without concrete evidence. This has happened on several occasions with recent high-profile hacks, most recently with SolarWinds.

As noted in previous reporting, prominent companies that contract for the US government and military, like Microsoft, and intelligence-linked cybersecurity companies, are often the sole sources for such narratives in the past and, in those cases, do not provide evidence, instead qualifying such assertions as “likely” or “probable.”

Even mainstream outlets reporting on FS-ISAC’s “predictions” noted that “FS-ISAC did not point to specific examples of spies relying on such tradecraft in the past,” openly suggesting that there is little factual basis to support this claim.

Other predictions focus on how third party service providers, such as SolarWinds and the more recently targeted Kaseya, will dominate, affecting potentially many thousands of companies across multiple sectors at once.

However, the SolarWinds hack was not properly investigated, merely labeled by US intelligence as having “likely” ties to “Russian” state-linked actors despite no publicly available evidence to support that claim. Instead, the SolarWinds hack appears to have been related to its acquisition of an Israeli company funded by intelligence-linked firms, as discussed in this report from earlier this year.

SolarWinds acquired the company, called Samanage, and integrated its software fully into its platform around the same time that the backdoor used to execute the hack was placed into the SolarWinds platform that was later compromised.

FS-ISAC also predicts that attacks will cross borders, continents, and verticals, with increasing speed. More specifically, it states that the cyber pandemic will begin with cyber criminals that “test attacks in one country and quickly scale up to multiple targets in other parts of the world.” FS-ISAC argues that it is therefore “critical to have a global view on cyber threats facing the sector in order to prepare and defend against them.”

Since FS-ISAC made this prediction, cyber attacks and especially ransomware have been occurring throughout the world and targeting different sectors at a much more rapid pace than has ever been seen before. For instance, following the Colonial Pipeline hack in early May, Japan, New Zealand, and Ireland all experienced major cyber attacks, followed by the JBS hack on June 1.

The hack of Kaseya, believed by some to be just as consequential and damaging as SolarWinds, took place about a month later on July 2, affecting thousands of companies around the world. The final, and perhaps the most important, of these predictions is that “economic drivers towards cybercrime will increase.”

FS-ISAC claims that the current economic situation created by COVID-related lockdowns will “make cybercrime an ever more attractive alternative,” noting immediately afterwards that “dramatic increases in cryptocurrency valuation may drive threat actors to conduct campaigns capitalising on this market, including extortion campaigns against financial institutions and their customers.”

In other words, FS-ISAC views the increase in the value of cryptocurrency as a direct driver of cybercrime, implying that the value of cryptocurrency must be dealt with to reduce such criminal activities. However, the data does not fit these assertions as the use of cryptocurrency by cybercriminals is low and getting lower.

For instance, one recent study found that only 0.34% of cryptocurrency transactions in 2020 were tied to criminal activity, down from 2% the year prior. Though the decrease may be due to a jump in cryptocurrency adoption, the overall percentage of crime-linked crypto transactions is incredibly low, a fact obviously known to FS-ISAC and its members.

However, cryptocurrency does present a threat to the plans by FS-ISAC members and its partners to begin producing digital currencies controlled either by approved private entities (like Russia’s Sbercoin) or central banks themselves (like China’s digital yuan).

The success of that project depends on neutering the competition, which is likely why FS-ISAC subtitled its 2021 report as “the case for a global fincyber utility,” with such a utility framed as necessary to defend the financial services industry against cyber threats.

The WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime

Conveniently for FS-ISAC, there is already a project that hopes to soon become this very global fincyber utility – the WEF Partnership Against Cybercrime (WEF-PAC). Partners in WEF-PAC include some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions, such as Bank of America, Banco Santander, Sberbank, UBS, Credit Suisse and the World Bank, as well as major payment processors such as Mastercard and PayPal.

Also very significant is the presence of all of the “Big Four” global accounting firms: Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Think tanks/non-profits, including the Council of Europe, Third Way and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as well as the WEF itself, are also among its members as are several national government agencies, like the US Department of Justice, FBI and Secret Service, the UK’s National Crime Agency and Israel’s National Cyber Directorate.

International and regional law enforcement agencies, such as INTERPOL and EUROPOL, both of which are repeat participants in the WEF’s Cyber Polygon, are also involved.

Silicon Valley is also well represented with the presence of Amazon, Microsoft, and Cisco, all three of which are also major US military and intelligence contractors. Cybersecurity companies founded by alumni and former commanders of Israeli intelligence services, such as Palo Alto Networks, Team8 and Check Point, are also prominent members.

The Israeli intelligence angle is especially important when examining WEF-PAC, as one of its architects and the WEF’s current Head of Strategy for Cybersecurity is Tal Goldstein, though his biography on the WEF website seems to claim that he is Head of Strategy for the WEF as a whole.

Goldstein is a veteran of Israeli military intelligence, having been recruited through Israel’s Talpiot program, which feeds high IQ teenagers in Israel into the upper echelons of elite Israeli military intelligence units with a focus on technology.

It is sometimes referred to as the IDF’s “MENSA” and was originally created by notorious Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan. Eitan is best known as Jonathan Pollard’s handler and the mastermind behind the PROMIS software scandal, the most infamous Israeli intelligence operation conducted against Israel’s supposed “ally”, the United States.

Due to its focus on technological ability, many Talpiot recruits subsequently serve in Israel’s Unit 8200, the signals intelligence unit of Israeli military intelligence that is often described as equivalent to the US’ NSA or the UK’s GCHQ, before moving into the private tech sector, including major Silicon Valley companies.

Other Talpiot-Unit 8200 figures of note are one of the co-founders of Check Point, Marius Nacht, and Assaf Rappaport, who designed major aspects of Microsoft’s cloud services and later managed that division. Rappaport later came to manage much of Microsoft’s research and development until his abrupt departure early last year.

In addition to his past as a Talpiot recruit and 8 years in Israeli military intelligence, the WEF’s Tal Goldstein had played a key role in establishing Israel’s National Cyber Bureau, now part of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, now a WEF-PAC partner. The National Cyber Bureau was established in 2013 with the explicit purpose “to build and maintain the State of Israel’s national strength as an international leader in the field” of cybersecurity.

According to Goldstein’s WEF biography, Goldstein led the formation of Israel’s entire national cybersecurity strategy with a focus on technology, international cooperation, and economic growth.

Goldstein was thus also one of the key architects of the Israeli cybersecurity policy shift which took place in 2012, whereby intelligence operations formerly conducted “in house” by Mossad, Unit 8200 and other Israeli intelligence agencies would instead be conducted through private companies that act as fronts for those intelligence agencies. One admitted example of such a front company is Black Cube, which was created by the Mossad to act explicitly as its “private sector” branch.

In 2019, Israeli officials involved in drafting and executing that policy openly yet anonymously admitted to the policy’s existence in Israeli media reports. One of the supposed goals of the policy was to prevent countries like the US from ever boycotting Israel in any meaningful way for violations of human rights and international law by seeding prominent multinational tech companies, such as those based in Silicon Valley, with Israeli intelligence front companies.

This effort was directly facilitated by American billionaire Paul Singer, who set up Start Up Nation Central with Benjamin Netanyahu’s main economic adviser and a top AIPAC official in 2012 to facilitate the incorporation of Israeli start-ups into American companies.

Goldstein’s selection by the WEF as head of strategy for its cybersecurity efforts suggests that Israeli intelligence agencies, as well as Israeli military agencies focused on cybersecurity, will likely play an outsized role in WEF-PAC’s efforts, particularly its ambition to create a new global governance structure for the internet.

In addition, Goldstein’s past in developing a policy whereby private companies acted as conduits for intelligence operations is of obvious concern given the WEF’s interest in simulating and promoting an imminent “cyber pandemic” in the wake of the COVID crisis.

Given that the WEF had simulated a scenario much like COVID prior to its onset through Event 201, having someone like Goldstein as the WEF’s head of strategy for all things cyber ahead of an alleged “cyber pandemic” is cause for concern.

A Global Threat to Justify a Global “Solution”

Last November, around the same time the WEF-Carnegie report was released, the WEF-PAC produced its own “insight report” aimed at “shaping the future of cybersecurity and digital trust.” Chiefly written by the WEF’s Tal Goldstein alongside executives from Microsoft, the Cyber Threat Alliance, and Fortinet, the report offers “a first step towards establishing a global architecture for cooperation” as part of a global “paradigm shift” in how cybercrime is addressed.

The foreword was authored by Jürgen Stock, the Secretary-General of INTERPOL, who had participated in last year’s Cyber Polygon exercise and will also participate in this year’s Cyber Polygon as well. Stock claims in the report that “a public-private partnership against cybercrime is the only way to gain an edge over cybercriminals” (emphasis added).

Not unlike the WEF-Carnegie report, Stock asserts that only by ensuring that large corporations work hand in glove with law enforcement agencies “can we effectively respond to the cybercrime threat.” The report first seeks to define the threat and focuses specifically on the alleged connection between cryptocurrencies, privacy enhancing technology, and cybercrime.

It asserts that “cybercriminals abuse encryption, cryptocurrencies, anonymity services and other technologies”, even though their use is hardly exclusive to criminals. The report then states that, in addition to financially motivated cybercriminals, cybercriminals also include those who use those technologies to “uphold terrorism” and “spread disinformation to destabilize governments and democracies”.

While the majority of the report’s discussion on the cybercrime threat focuses on ransomware, the WEF-PAC’s inclusion of “disinformation” highlights the fact that the WEF and their partners view cybercriminals through a much broader lens.

This, of course, also means that the methods to combat cybercrime contained within the report could be used to target those who “spread disinformation”, not just ransomware and related attacks, meaning that such “disinformation” spreaders could see their use of cryptocurrency, encryption, etc. restricted by the rules and regulations WEF-PAC seeks to promote.

However, the report promotes the use of privacy-enhancing technologies for WEF-PAC members, a clear double standard that reveals that this group sees privacy as something for the powerful and not for the general public.

This broad definition of “cybercriminal” conveniently dovetails with the Biden administration’s recent “domestic terror” strategy, which similarly has a very broad definition of who is a “domestic terrorist.”

The Biden administration’s strategy is also not exclusive to the US, but a multinational framework that is poised to be used to censor and criminalize critics of the WEF stakeholder capitalism model as well as those deemed to hold “anti-government” and “anti-authority” viewpoints.

The WEF-PAC report, which was published several months before the US strategy, has other parallels with the new Biden administration policy, such as its call to crack down on the use of anonymity software by those deemed “cybercriminals” and calling for “international information sharing and cross-border operational cooperation,” even if that cooperation is “not always aligned with existing legislative and operational frameworks.”

In addition, the Biden administration’s strategy concludes by noting that it is part of a broader US government effort to “restore faith” in public institutions. Similarly, the WEF-PAC report frames combatting all types of activities they define as cybercrime necessary to improving “digital trust”, the lack of which is “greatly undermining the benefits of cyberspace and hindering international cyber stability efforts.”

In discussing “solutions”, the WEF-PAC calls for the global targeting of “infrastructures and assets” deemed to facilitate cybercrime, including those which enable ransomware “revenue streams”, i.e. privacy-minded cryptocurrencies, and enable “the promotion of illegal sites and the hosting of criminal content.”

In another section, it discusses seizing websites of “cybercriminals” as an attractive possibility. Given that this document includes online “disinformation” as cybercrime, this could potentially see independent media websites and the infrastructure that allows them to operate (i.e. video sharing platforms that do not censor, etc.) emerge as targets.

The report continues, stating that “in order to reduce the global impact of cybercrime and to systematically restrain cybercriminals, cybercrime must be confronted at its source by raising the cost of conducting cybercrimes, cutting the activities’ profitability and deterring criminals by increasing the direct risk they face.”

It then argues, unsurprisingly, that because the cybercrime threat is global in scope, it’s “solution must also be a globally coordinated effort” and says the main way to achieve this involves “harnessing the private sector to work side by side with law enforcement officials.”

This is very similar to the conclusions of the WEF-Carnegie report, released around the same time as the WEF-PAC report, which called for private banks to work alongside law enforcement and intelligence agencies as well as their regulators to “protect” the global financial system from cybercriminals.

The Framework for a Global Cyber Utility

This global coordination, per the WEF-PAC, should be based around a new global system uniting law enforcement agencies from around the world with cybersecurity companies, large corporations such as banks, and other “stakeholders.”

The stakeholders that will make up this new entity, the structure of which will be discussed shortly, is based around 6 founding principles, several of which are significant. For example, the first principle is to “embrace a shared narrative for collective action against cybercrime.”

Per the report, this principle involves the stakeholders comprising this organization having “joint ownership of a shared narrative and objective for the greater good of reducing cybercrime across all industries and globally.”

The second principle involves the stakeholders basing their cooperation on “long-term strategic alignment.” The fifth principle involves “ensuring value for participating in the cooperation”, with such that “value” or benefit being “aligned with the public and private sectors’ strategic interests.”

In other words, the stakeholders of this global cyber utility will be united in their commitment to a common, public-facing “narrative” that serves their organizations’ “strategic interests” over the long term.

The decision to emphasize the term “shared narrative” is important as a narrative is merely a story that does not necessarily need to reflect the truth of the situation, thus suggesting that stakeholders merely be consistent in their public statements so they all fit the agreed upon narrative.

Many organizations that are related to or are formally part of WEF-PAC are deeply invested in Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as well as efforts to digitalize and thus more easily control nearly every sector of the global economy and to regulate the internet.

Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that many of these groups may look to justify regulations and other measures that will advance these agendas in which they have long-term “strategic interests” through the promotion of a “shared narrative” that is deemed most palatable to the general public, but not necessarily based in fact.

Business is business, after all. The WEF-PAC report concludes with its three-tier model for “a global architecture for public-private cooperation against cybercrime.”

The top level of this system is referred to as the “global partnership”, which will build on the existing WEF-PAC and will “bring together international stakeholders to provide an overarching narrative and commitment to cooperate; foster interaction within a global network of entities that drive efforts to fight cybercrime; and facilitate strategic dialogues and processes aiming to support cooperation and overcome barriers in the long term.”

Elsewhere in the report it notes that chief among these “barriers” are existing pieces of legislation in many countries that prohibit law enforcement agencies and government regulators from essentially fusing their operations with private sector entities, particularly those they are meant to either oversee or prosecute for wrongdoing.

In addition, the report states that this “global partnership” would focus on fostering “a shared narrative to increase commitment and affiliation”, amplifying “operational cooperation” between the public and private sectors and improving “stakeholders’ understanding of respective interests, needs, goals, priorities and constraints.”

The second level of this system is called “permanent nodes” in the report. These are defined as “a global network of existing organizations that strive to facilitate public-private cooperation over time.” The main candidates to occupy the role of “permanent nodes” are “non-profit organizations that are already spurring cooperation between private companies and law enforcement agencies,” specifically the Cyber Threat Alliance and the Global Cyber Alliance.

Both are discussed in detail in the next section. Other potential “permanent nodes” mentioned in the report are INTERPOL, EURPOL and, of course, FS-ISAC. While the top level “global partnership” represents the “strategic level” of the organization, the “permanent node” level represents the “coordination level” as the nodes would supply necessary infrastructure, operational rules, and management, as well as “strategic dialogue” among member organizations.

The permanent nodes would directly enable the third level of the organization, which are referred to as “Threat Focus Cells” and are defined as representing the organization’s “operational level.” The WEF-PAC defines these cells as “temporary trust groups consisting of both public- and private-sector organizations and they would focus on discreet cybercrime targets or issues.”

Per the report, each cell “would be led jointly by a private-sector participant, a law enforcement participant and a designated representative” of the permanent node that is sponsoring the cell.

Ideally, it states that cells should have between 10 to 15 participants and that “private-sector participants would typically represent organizations that can act to enhance cybersecurity on behalf of large constituencies, that have unique access to relevant cybersecurity information and threat intelligence, or that can contribute on an ecosystem-wide basis.”

Thus, only massive corporations need apply. In addition, it states that law enforcement members of threat cells should “represent national-level agencies” or hail from “network defence or sector-specific agencies” at the national, regional or international level. Cell activities would range from “scouting a new threat” to “an infrastructure takedown” to “arrests.”

The WEF-PAC concludes by stating that “in the coming months, the Partnership against Cybercrime Working Group will continue to prepare the implementation of these concepts and widen the scope of the initiative’s efforts”, including by inviting “leading companies and law enforcement agencies” to pledge their commitment to the WEF-PAC’s efforts.

It then states that “the suggested architecture could eventually evolve into a newly envisioned, independent Alliance to Combat Global Cybercrime.” “In the interim,” it continues, “the World Economic Forum and key stakeholders will work together to promote the desired processes and assess the validity of the concept.”

Meet the “Nodes”

Among the organizations that the WEF-PAC highlights as shoo-in candidates for “permanent nodes” in their proposal for a global cyber utility, there are two that stand out and are worth examining in detail. They are the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA) and the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), both of which are formal members of the WEF-PAC.

The Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA) was initially founded by the companies Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks in May 2014, before McAfee and Symantec joined CTA as co-founders that September. Today, Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks are charter members alongside Check Point and Cisco, while Symantec and McAfee are affiliate members alongside Verizon, Sophos and Avast, among several others.

The mission of CTA is to allow for information sharing among its many partners, members, and affiliates in order to “allow the sharing of threat intelligence to better protect their customers against cyberattacks and to make the defense ecosystem more effective,” according to CTA’s current chief executive. CTA, per their website, also focuses on “advocacy” aimed at informing policy initiatives of governments around the world.

CTA is directly partnered with FS-ISAC and the WEF-PAC as well as the hawkish, US-based think tank the Aspen Institute, which is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

Other partners include: MITRE Engenuity, the “tech foundation for public good” of the secretive US intelligence and military contractor MITRE; the Cyber Peace Institute, a think tank seeking “peace and justice in cyberspace” that is largely funded by Microsoft and Mastercard (both of which are WEF partners and key players in ID2020); the Cybersecurity Coalition, whose members include Palo Alto Networks, Israeli intelligence front company Cybereason, intelligence and military operative Amit Yoran’s Tenable, Intel, AT&T, Google, McAfee, Microsoft, Avast and Cisco, among others; the Cybercrime Support Network, a non-profit funded by AT&T, Verizon, Google, Cisco, Comcast, Google and Microsoft, among others; and the Global Cyber Alliance, to be discussed shortly.

Another key partner is the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), which has numerous ties to the US military, particularly DARPA, and the US National Security State, including the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. The CEO of the Cyber Peace Institute, Stéphane Duguin, was a participant in Cyber Polygon 2020, and the CEO of the Cybercrime Support Network, Kristin Judge, contributed to the WEF-PAC report. Some of the CTA’s partners are listed in the WEF-PAC report as other potential “permanent nodes.”

The CTA is led by Michael Daniel, who co-wrote the WEF-PAC report with Tal Goldstein. Daniel, immediately prior to joining CTA as its top executive in early 2017, was a Special Assistant to former President Obama and the Cybersecurity coordinator of Obama’s National Security Council.

In that capacity, Daniel developed the foundations for the US government’s current national cybersecurity strategy, which includes partnerships with the private sector, NGOs and foreign governments.

Daniel has stated that some of his cybersecurity views at CTA are drawn “in part on the wisdom of Henry Kissinger” and he has been an agenda contributor to the WEF since his time in the Obama administration. Daniel is one of Cyber Polygon 2021’s experts and will be speaking alongside Teresa Walsh of FS-ISAC and Craig Jones of INTERPOL on how to develop an international response to ransomware attacks.

The fact that CTA was founded by Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks is notable as both companies are intimately related. Fortinet’s founder Ken Xie, who sits on CTA’s board and is a founding member and advisor to the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, previously founded and then ran NetScreen Technologies, where Palo Alto Network’s founder, Nir Zuk, worked after his earlier company OneSecure was acquired by NetScreen in 2002.

Zuk is an alumni of Israeli intelligence’s Unit 8200 and was recruited directly out of that unit in 1994 by Check Point, a CTA charter member, WEF-PAC member and tech company founded by Unit 8200 alumni. Zuk has been open about maintaining close ties to the Israeli government while operating the California-based Palo Alto Networks. Fortinet, for its part, is known for hiring former US intelligence officials, including former top NSA officials.

Fortinet is a US government and US military contractor and came under scrutinyin 2016 after a whistleblower filed suit against the company for illegally selling the US military technological products that had been disguised in order to appear as American-made, but were actually made in China. Fortinet’s Derek Manky is one of the co-authors of the WEF-PAC report.

Check Point’s co-founder and current CEO, Gil Shwed, currently sits on CTA’s board of directors and is also a WEF “Global Leader for Tomorrow”, in addition to his longstanding ties to the Israeli National Security State and his past work for Unit 8200. Another Check Point top executive, Dorit Dor, is a member of the WEF Centre for Cybersecurity and a speaker at Cyber Polygon 2021, where she will speak on protecting supply chains.

Gil Shwed, over the past few weeks, has been making numerous appearances on US cable television news to warn that a “cyber pandemic” is imminent. In addition to those appearances, Shwed produced a video on June 23rd asking “Is a Cyber Pandemic Coming?“, in which Shwed answers with a resounding yes.

The term “cyber pandemic” first emerged on the scene last year during WEF chairman Klaus Schwab’s opening speech at the first WEF Cyber Polygon simulation and it is notable that the WEF-connected Shwed uses the same terminology.

Schwab also stated in that speech that the comprehensive cyber attacks that would comprise this “cyber pandemic” would make the COVID-19 crisis appear to be “a small disturbance in comparison.”

In addition to CTA, another international alliance named by the WEF-PAC as a “permanent node” candidate is the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA). The GCA was reportedly the idea of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. who “knew that there had to be a better way to confront the cybercrime epidemic” back in 2015.

GCA was born through discussions Vance held with William Pelgrin, former President and CEO of the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and one of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s top cyber advisors. Pelgrin and Vance later approached Adrian Leppard, the then- police commissioner of the City of London, the controversial financial center of the UK. Unsurprisingly, CityUK, the City of London’s main financial lobby group, is a member of the GCA.

If one is familiar with Cyrus Vance’s time as Manhattan DA, his interest in meaningfully pursuing crime, particularly if committed by the wealthy and powerful, is laughable. Vance infamously dropped cases against and/or declined to prosecute powerful New York figures, including Donald Trump’s children and Harvey Weinstein, subsequently receiving massive donations to his re-election campaigns from Trump family and Weinstein lawyers.

His office also once lobbied a New York court on behalf of intelligence-linked pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who was seeking at the time to have his registered sex offender status downgraded.

Vance’s office later U-turned in regards to Weinstein and Epstein after more and more accusers came forward and after considerable press attention was paid to their misdeeds. Vance also came under scrutiny after dropping charges against former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for the sexual assault of a hotel maid.

Vance used $25 million in criminal asset forfeiture funds to create GCA, in addition to funding from Pelgrin’s CIS and the Leppard-run City of London police. Its official yet opaque purpose is “to reduce cyber risk” on a global scale in order to create “a secure, trustworthy internet.” Their means of accomplishing this purpose is equally vague as they claim to “approach this challenge by building partnerships and creating a global community that stands strong together.”

For all intents and purposes, GCA is a massive organization whose members seek to create a more regulated, less anonymous internet. The role of the Center for Internet Security (CIS) in the GCA is highly significant, as CIS is the non-profit that manages key bodies involved in the maintenance of critical US infrastructure, including for US state and local governments and for federal, state and local elections.

CIS, which is also partnered with CTA, also works closely with the main groups responsible for protecting the US power grid and water supply systems and is also directly partnered with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Its board of directors, in addition to William Pelgrin, includes former high-ranking military and intelligence operatives (i.e. the aforementioned Amit Yoran), former top officials at the DHS and the National Security Agency (NSA) and one of the main architects of US cyber policy under the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

CIS was created through private meetings between “a small group of business and government leaders” who were members of the Cosmos Club, the “private social club” of the US political and scientific elite whose members have included three presidents, a dozen Supreme Court justices and numerous Nobel Prize winners.

GCA’s main funders are the founders listed above as well as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the foundation of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard (HP), a tech giant with deep ties to US intelligence; Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the “philanthropic” arm of the Craigslist founder’s influence empire; and Bloomberg, the media outlet owned by billionaire and former Mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg.

GCA’s premium partners, which also fund GCA and secure a seat on GCA’s Strategic Advisory Committee, include Facebook, Mastercard, Microsoft, Intel, and PayPal as well as C. Hoare & Co., the UK’s oldest privately owned bank and the fifth oldest bank in the world.

Other significant premium partners include the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .org domain for websites, and ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), that manages much of the Internet’s global Domain Name System (DNS).

Those two organizations together represent a significant portion of website domain name management globally. Notably, the founding chairwoman of ICANN was Esther Dyson, whose connections to Jeffrey Epstein and the Edge Foundation were discussed in a recent Unlimited Hangout investigation.

In terms of partners, GCA is much larger than CTA and other such alliances, most of which are themselves partners of GCA. Indeed, nearly every partner of CTA, including the CTA itself are part of the GCA as is CTA co-founder Palo Alto Networks.

GCA’s partners include several international law enforcement agencies including: the National Police, National Gendarmerie and Ministry of Justice of France, the Ministry of Justice of Lagos, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the UK Met Police, and the US Secret Service. The state governments of Michigan and New York are also partners.

Several institutions and companies deeply tied to the US National Security State, such as Michael Chertoff’s the Chertoff Group, the National Security Institute, and MITRE, are part of GCA as are some of the most controversial and intelligence-connected cybersecurity companies, such as Crowdstrike and Sepio Systems, another Unit 8200 alumni-founded company whose chairman of the board is former Mossad director Tamir Pardo.

The Israeli intelligence-linked initiative CyberNYC is also a member. Major telecommunication companies like Verizon and Virgin are represented alongside some of the world’s largest banks, including Bank of America and Barclays, as well as FS-ISAC and the UK’s “most powerful financial lobby”, the CityUK. Also crucial is the presence of several media organizations as partners, chief among them Bloomberg.

Aside from Bloomberg and Craig Newmark Philanthropies (which funds several mainstream news outlets and “anti-fake news” initiatives), media outlets and organizations partnered with GCA include Free Press Unlimited (funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the European Union, and the US, Dutch, Belgian and UK governments), the Institute for Nonprofit News (funded by Craig Newmark, Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, among others), and Report for America (funded byCraig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook, Google and Bloomberg).

PEN America, the well-known non-profit and literary society focused on press freedom, is also a member. PEN has become much more closely aligned with US government policy and particularly the Democratic Party in recent years, likely owing to its current CEO being Suzanne Nossel, a former deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations at the Hillary Clinton-run State Department. The many other members of GCA can all be found here.

The End of Anonymity

The considerable involvement of some of the most powerful corporations in the world from some of the most critical sectors that underpin the current economy, as well as non-profits that manage key internet, government and utility infrastructure in these organizations that comprise WEF-PAC is highly significant and also concerning for more than a few reasons.

Indeed, if all were to follow the call to form a “shared narrative”, whether it is true or not, in pursuit of long-term “strategic interests”, which the WEF and many of its partners directly relate to the rapid implementation of the 4th Industrial Revolution via the “Great Reset”, the WEF-PAC global cyber utility could emerge sooner rather than later.

As evidenced by the architecture put forth by WEF-PAC, the power that organization would have over the public and private sectors is considerable. Such an organization, once established, could usher in long-standing efforts to both require a digital ID to access and use the internet as well as eliminate the ability to conduct anonymous financial transactions.

Both policies would advance the overarching goal of both the WEF and many corporations and governments to usher in a new age of unprecedented surveillance of ordinary citizens.

The effort to eliminate anonymous transactions in digital currency has become very overt in some countries in recent weeks, particularly in the US. For instance, Anne Neuberger, current Deputy National Security Adviser who has deep ties to the US-Israel lobby, stated on June 29 that the Biden administration was considering obtaining more “visibility” into ransomware groups’ activities, particularly anonymous cryptocurrency transactions.

Such efforts could easily cross the line into state surveillance of any and all Americans’ online crypto transactions, especially given the US government’s history of habitually engaging in surveillance overreach in the post-9/11 era. One specific possibility mentioned by Neuberger was to prohibit companies from keeping crypto payments of concern secret, suggesting possible, imminent regulation of cryptocurrency exchanges.

Current efforts, per Neuberger, also include an effort to build “an international coalition” against ransomware, which will likely tie into WEF-PAC given that the FBI, DOJ and US Secret Service are already members.

Neuberger also stated that the recent public-private partnership that took down the Trickbot botnet “should be the kind of operation used to tackle ransomware gangs in the future.” However, that effort, led by WEF partner Microsoft, preemptively took down a network of computers “out of fear that hackers could deploy [that network] to launch ransomware attacks to inhibit election-supporting IT systems” ahead of the US election.

Using Trickbot as the model for future ransomware operations means opening the door to companies like Microsoft taking preemptive action against infrastructure used by people that the government and private sector “fear” may engage in “cybercrime” at some point in the future.

Notably, on the same day as Neuberger’s statements, Congressional representative Bill Foster (D-IL) told Axios that “there’s significant sentiment in Congress that if you’re participating in an anonymous crypto transaction that you are a de facto participant in a criminal conspiracy.” Coming from Rep. Foster, this is quite significant as he is a member of the Financial Services Committee, the Blockchain Caucus and a recently formed Congressional working group on cryptocurrency.

His decision to use the phrase “anonymous crypto transaction” as opposed to a transaction linked to ransomware or criminal activity is also significant, as it suggests that the possibility that complete anonymity is seen to be the target of coming efforts to regulate the crypto space by the US Congress.

While Foster claims to oppose a “completely surveilled environment” for crypto, he qualifies that by stating that “you have to be able to unmask and potentially reverse those [crypto] transactions.”

However, if this becomes government policy, it will mean the only group allowed to have complete anonymity in online financial transactions will be the State and will open the door to the government’s abuse of “unmasking”, which the US government has done in numerous instances over the years through the systematic abuse of FISA warrants.

It is also important to mention that the US is hardly alone in its effort to wipe out online financial anonymity in the crypto world, as several governments that are supporting Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) projects, which includes the US, are either moving towards or have already cracked down on the crypto space.

For example, soon after China introduced the “digital yuan”, it cracked down on bitcoin miners and companies that provide services, including ads and marketing, to crypto-related entities.

This had major implications for the crypto market and resulted in a considerable reduction in bitcoin’s value, which it has yet to fully recover. It is reasonable to assume that other governments will work to aggressively regulate or even ban crypto markets following the introduction of their CBDC projects in order to force widespread adoption of the digital currency favored by the State.

It is also worth highlighting the additional fact that, as China introduced the digital yuan, it also sought to crackdown on cash, stating that the anonymity offered by cash – much like anonymous crypto transactions – could also be used for “illicit activity.” However, there are some obvious holes in the WEF-PAC’s narratives and justifications for its “solutions.”

For example, even if cryptocurrencies are banned or heavily regulated, it is unlikely that this will end cyber attacks, with hackers likely finding a new way to conduct operations that provide them with some sort of financial benefit. Cyber attacks and cybercrime precede the creation of crypto considerably and would continue even if crypto were somehow magically removed from the equation.

In addition, there has been speculation about the nature of the 3 big hacks that took place over the past year: SolarWinds, Colonial and JBS. In the case of SolarWinds, attribution of blame to “Russian hackers” came down to CIA-linkedcybersecurity firm FireEye claiming that the “disciplined” methodology of the hackers could only possibly have been individuals tied to Russia’s government and because FireEye’s CEO received a postcard he “suspects” was Russian in origin.

Left uninvestigated was the firm Samanage, which is linked to the same intelligence networks in which the WEF’s current head of cyber strategy worked for years. Regarding the Colonial pipeline hack, there is the fact that the original narrative was later proven false, as the pipeline itself remained functional, but services were halted due to the company’s concerns about their ability to bill customers properly.

In addition, the US Department of Justice managed to seize the vast majority of the bitcoin ransomware payment Colonial had made, suggesting that extreme regulation of the crypto market may not actually be necessary to deter cybercriminals or recuperate ransomware payments. Surely, WEF-PAC is aware of this because the US Department of Justice is one of its members.

With the JBS hack, there is the fact that the company, the world’s largest meats processor, had partnered with the WEF just months before regarding the need to reduce meat consumption and had begun to heavily invest and acquire non-animal-based alternatives. Blackrock, a major WEF partner, is the 3rd largest shareholder in JBS.

Notably, after the hack, the situation was quickly used to warn of upcoming, widespread meat shortages, even though the disruption of the hack paused operations for just one day. In addition, the JBS hack was supposedly executed by “Russian hackers” being given “safe haven” by Russia’s government.

However, JBS somehow has no problem partnering the WEF, which co-hosts Cyber Polygon alongside the cybersecurity subsidiary of Sberbank, which is majority owned by the same Russian government supposedly enabling JBS’ hackers.

In addition to the effort to regulate crypto, there is also a push by WEF-partnered governments to end privacy and the potential for anonymity on the internet in general, by linking government-issued IDs to internet access. This would allow every piece of online content accessed to be surveilled, as well as every post or comment authored by each citizen, supposedly to ensure that no citizen can engage in “criminal” activity online.

This policy is part of an older effort, particularly in the US, where creating a nationwide “Driver’s License for the Internet” was proposed and then piloted by the Obama administration. The European Union made a similar effort to require government-issued IDs for social media access a few years later.

The UK also launched its Verify digital ID program around the same time, something which former UK Prime Minister and WEF associate Tony Blair has been pushing aggressively to have expanded into a compulsory requirement in recent months. Then, just last month, the EU implemented a sweeping, new digital ID service that could easily be expanded to fit with the Union’s past efforts to link such IDs to access to online services.

As Unlimited Hangout noted earlier this year, the infrastructure for many of these digital IDs, as well as vaccine passports, have been set up so that they are also eventually linked to financial activity and potentially online activity as well.

Ultimately, what WEF-PAC represents is a global organization that aims to neuter anonymity online, whether for financial purposes or for browsing and other activities. It is a global effort combining powerful governments and corporations that seeks to usher in a new age of surveillance that makes such surveillance a requirement to participate in the online world or use online services.

It is being sold to the public as the only way to stop a coming “pandemic” of cybercrime, a crisis taking place largely in murky parts of the internet that few understand or have any direct experience with.

Having to rely on State intelligence agencies and intelligence-linked cybersecurity firms for attribution of these crimes, it has never been easier for corrupt actors in those agencies or their partners to either manufacture or manipulate a crisis that could upend online freedom as we have known it, something these very groups have sought to implement for years.

All of this should serve as a poignant reminder that, as much as our lives have become interconnected with the internet and online activity, the fight to protect human freedom, dignity and liberty against a predatory, global oligarchy is fundamentally one that must take place in the real world, not only online. May the coming “cyber war”, whatever form it takes, remind many that online activism must be accompanied by real world actions and organizing.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/31/ending-online-anonymity.aspx

Is America spiraling into totalitarianism? All the signs are there, suggesting we’re well on our way. Naomi Wolf, a former adviser to the Clinton administration, has been warning us about this for well over a decade.

In May 2021, I interviewed her about the 10 steps of tyranny, described in her 2007 book, “The End of America.” While we’ve been inching our way toward tyranny for many years, Wolf warns we are now at Step 10. Soon, there will be no turning back — unless we break free, assert our rights starting with our freedom of speech, and put a stop to this transformation.

As noted by Benjamin Franklin, “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” Similarly, Samuel Adams stated, “For true patriots to be silent, is dangerous.”¹

In the video above, Yeonmi Park, a human rights activist and author of “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom,” talks about the clear parallels she sees between the United States and North Korea, one of the most repressive countries in the world.

Although she’s been presented in a critical light by an Asia-Pacific owned publication,² I am a huge fan of Park as she is such an inspiration to warn us of what will happen if we neglect to preserve our hard-won freedoms. Please be sure and watch the much longer second video below. I suspect you too will be moved by what she and millions of others have suffered and are enduring in North Korea.

Park fortunately was able to defect from North Korea to China in 2007 at the age of 13, eventually settling in South Korea two years later, but only after first falling into the hands of human traffickers and being sold into sex slavery for less than $200. Her mother was sold for $65. Park and her mother were eventually able to escape to South Korea through Mongolia.

In 2016, she transferred from a South Korean university to Columbia University in New York. In a June 14, 2021, interview with Fox News,³ Park stated she believes “America’s future may be as bleak as North Korea,” adding that “even North Korea was not this nuts.”

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” she told Fox News.“I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

Not Having Problems Is a Problem

In the video above, Park explains why she told her story to Fox News rather than a more mainstream media outlet. The answer? They were the only one that asked her to share her views.

While the Fox News interview went viral both in the U.S. and South Korea, not a single legacy news outlet picked up the story. This makes sense, considering corporate media are part of the tyrannical network responsible for the implementation of this brainwashing.

In North Korea, the day-to-day problems are life and death problems. The daily threat of starvation, torture, imprisonment without cause, and knowing that the utterance of one wrong political statement will get three generations of your family killed.

“I would rather die a free person than live as a slave,” Park says at the end of her video. “You cannot even fathom what it’s like when you don’t have freedom … America is falling into tyranny … Let us stop this before it is too late.”

Real-World Socialism

In the video above,⁴ Park is interviewed by Valuetainment host Patrick Bet-David. I know 90 minutes is a long video, but trust me, your life could change if you watch the entire video. If you don’t have time now, just watch it instead of some movie or TV series. I suspect very few of you have any idea that this type of tyrannical oppression and unethical human behavior is rampant in North Korea.

In this hour-and-a-half interview, she delves a lot deeper into what life is like in one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, and what it really means to lose your freedoms. Even certain words have been censored from the North Korean language.

There are no words for “depression” or “stress” for example. The absence of such emotions is further indoctrinated through the one and only available TV channel, where every program highlights the rightness, beauty and benefit of the socialist system, and how wrong capitalist Western systems are. Here are some other examples in real life:

Every single thing about your life is dictated by the regime. You have no individuality. You have no “personal choices.” Guaranteed, you can say goodbye to gender pronoun preferences. That’s just being pushed right now to lure you into this false idea that the socialist system actually provides you with more of everything — including individuality and individual rights — rather than less.

But if you think about it logically, how can we create an “equitable” society unless all individuality is removed? How can you and I end up in the same place and be treated exactly the same unless everything that separates us — our individual characteristics — are eliminated? The end result is the oppression of everyone and the wasting of everyone’s natural talents.

Corruption is also guaranteed. Regardless of your profession, your salary will not be able to feed you, let alone pay for anything else. As a result, corruption is the norm. Food is also always scarce. Park routinely caught and ate grasshoppers. That was her primary source of protein growing up.

In fact, Park admits that it was hunger that drove her to risk death to escape North Korea with her mother. “I didn’t know I wasn’t free,” she says. “I didn’t know what freedom was. I risked my life for a bowl of rice.”

Reject the ‘New Normal’

The good news is, the would-be tyrants have not won. That said, we have no time to spare. Time is of the essence and we have no time to remain idle, hoping it will all just go back to normal on its own. I can confidently assure you it will not, and you will need to take action. I believe one of the answers is peaceful civil disobedience.

In the U.S., we do have the Second Amendment, which allows citizens to own and bear arms. That said, peaceful disobedience is still the primary and preferred strategy. We must also rally behind legislation that prevents the alteration of laws that safeguard our freedoms.

I believe that we will ultimately stop the globalists’ drive toward global tyranny. It’s not going to be easy. It may take years, and it may get far worse before it gets better.

The founders of the U.S. fled repressive societies or were children or grandchildren of those who did. They had to personally reckon with criminalized speech, arbitrary arrests and state sanctioned torture and even murder. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence knew that if they lost the war, they would be executed for treason.

The forefathers of the United States were radicals, fighting for liberty and personal freedoms. They had a vision of reality that was an absolute slap in the face of what the rest of the world tolerated. They were willing to sacrifice their lives to turn that vision into a reality.

Park discusses this in the featured video at the top of this article. How the story of our Founding Fathers — who cared enough about equality and human rights to sacrifice everything to achieve it — has been twisted.

It requires an illogical mindset to get our history so backwards. But each of us, individually, must also accept our share of the blame, for as Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”⁵

We must also realize that the current cancel culture trend is not about tossing a dusty past into the trash bin and highlighting more pleasant aspects of our history. Far from it. As noted by The Most Important News:⁶

“A huge national debate about our most important national symbols has erupted, and it is rapidly becoming one of our hottest political issues. But what most people don’t realize is that this isn’t really a debate about our past.

Rather, it is a debate about what our future is going to look like. Those that are demonizing the American flag, the national anthem, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are not doing so for the purpose of winning a historical debate.

Their true goal is to ‘cancel’ those symbols and replace them with new ones, because our existing national symbols represent values and principles that are diametrically opposed to the values and principles that they wish to impose upon society.

If they ultimately get their way, the United States will eventually become an extremely repressive high tech dystopian society where absolutely no dissent is tolerated.”

Focus on Taking Action Locally

Get involved in your child’s school, and make sure that what is being taught is in line with your values which, hopefully, if you’re reading this, this includes personal freedom, which is what the United States was indeed founded upon. Remember, the American system of governance places the bulk of the power at the local level, not at the federal level.

Government is currently fighting to centralize power at the top, but they can only do that if we let them. In the United States, local action can eventually have national impact, and that is how we peacefully take our power back and ensure our freedom. We’ve had this power all along. We may have just forgotten how to use it.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/31/dictatorship-totalitarianism-socialism.aspx

By Dr. Mercola

In its latest move against small farmers who dare to operate outside the umbrella of CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) and Monsanto-dominated crops, the U.S. government has seized $70,000 from a small dairy farmer in Maryland. The feds did this under the “Bank Secrecy Act,” which requires that paperwork be filled out for any cash deposit in excess of $10,000.

The farmers, Randy Sowers and his wife Karen, made deposits totaling more than $295,000 from May 2011 to February 2012, but each transaction was less than $10,000.

Now they are being accused of “structuring,” a violation of federal currency reporting requirements, as the feds are accusing them of deliberately depositing money in increments of less than $10,000 in an attempt to evade Currency Transaction Reporting requirements.

Government Seizes $70,000 On What Grounds?

The dairy farmer’s “crime” stems from his weekly sales at local farmers’ markets. The sales averaged about the same amount each week and, dutifully, the Sowers deposited them. They’d reportedly never even heard of the Bank Secrecy Act or “structuring,” but that was of no interest to the feds—the consistency of the amount the Sowers deposited, always less than $10,000, raised red flags to the feds, who claimed that this was indicative of a crime.

The government promptly seized about $70,000 from the bank account, then issued a warrant for the seizures. As reported by Food Freedom News:¹

“The Dept. of Justice has since sued to keep $63,000 of the Sowers’ money, though they committed no crime other than maintaining their privacy. Without funds, they will be unable to make purchases for the spring planting. When a similar action was taken against Taylor’s Produce Stand last year, the feds seized $90,000, dropped the charges, and kept $45,000 of Taylor’s money.

Knowing that most farms operate on a very thin margin, such abuse of power wipes out a family’s income, and for a bonus, the feds enhance the monopoly power of Monsanto, Big Dairy and their supply chain.… Former Maryland assistant U.S. attorney Steven Levin told the paper [City Paper], “The emphasis is on basically seizing money, whether it is legally or illegally earned. It can lead to financial ruin for business owners, and there’s a potential for abuse here by the government.””

The raid on the Sowers was conducted by an agency created in 2009 to go after money-laundering criminals. The agency started out with a bang by seizing $1.2 billion from a real money launderer, but it appears that what it’s interested in now is making criminals out of small business persons, including small farmers.

Why Are Family Farms Under Attack?

 

 

If they’re not seizing bank accounts, it seems the government will find other ways to attack small farmers. A family farm in rural Michigan—and possibly others—may be shut down by a new state law that designates certain breeds of hogs as a threat to neighboring hog breeders and croplands.

Basically, the fight is over the definition of feral hogs vs. domestic hogs. The dictionary definition of “feral” refers to an animal running wild. But Michigan authorities have taken it a step further and extended the definition to include enclosed private hunting preserves and small farms that house what authorities call an “invasive species” of hogs.

There is no genetic test to determine whether the species on these farms are truly invasive, so authorities are basing their cases against these farmers solely on visual observations. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) uses this vague description to describe the prohibited hogs, and makes it clear that this does notapply to the domestic hogs raised on CAFOs:²

“Wild boar, wild hog, wild swine, feral pig, feral hog, feral swine, Old world swine, razorback, eurasian wild boar, Russian wild boar (Sus scrofa Linnaeus). This subsection does not and is not intended to affect sus domestica involved in domestic hog production.”

Other descriptions supplied by the MDNR include such a wide variety of characteristics that virtually any pig other than the familiar pink domestic breed raised on CAFOs could potentially be deemed “feral”:

• Erect or folded/floppy ear structure
• Straight or curly tail
• Solid black, wild/grizzled, solid red/brown, black and white spotted, or black and red/brown spotted coat colorations
• “Other characteristics” not currently known to the MDNR

Interestingly, the Big Pork industry has been planning this anti-feral pig campaign for years, and even bragged about it in a 2010 newsletter.³ It was the same newsletter where they declared a win against the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) in Ohio, where HSUS was seeking legislation to end the practice of sow gestation stalls (cages so small the sow can’t turn around or move).

What this means for residents of Michigan is that soon they will be unable to purchase sustainably and humanely grown meat from the Mangalitsa “wooly” hogs raised on Baker’s Green Acres farm. This particular breed is being raised by only a handful of small farms across the country; whereas more than 2 million pigs are slaughtered each week in the United States, only about 50 of them are Mangalitsas (which have been called the “it” pig by the New York Times, as several high-end restaurants and specialty markets have featured the rich, naturally raised meat⁴).

But, of course, this issue is about much more than pasture-raised pork from a heritage breed … it’s about your ability, your right, to purchase and consume pure, unadulterated food – a right that continues to be threated for those living in the United States.

FDA Also Threatens Your Right to Food Choice …

Another glaring example of government going out of its way to prohibit your access to pure, unprocessed food is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) war against raw milk. When the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) filed a lawsuit against the FDA over their raw milk ban, stating that banning raw milk in interstate commerce is unconstitutional, the FDA rebutted with the following extremely concerning and outrageous statements:

• “There is no absolute right to consume or feed children any particular food.”
• “There is no ‘deeply rooted’ historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds.”
• “Plaintiffs’ assertion of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.”
• FDA’s brief goes on to state that “even if such a right did exist, it would not render FDA’s regulations unconstitutional because prohibiting the interstate sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk promotes bodily and physical health.”
• “There is no fundamental right to freedom of contract.”

Since when did the FDA have authority to tell you what you can and cannot eat and feed your children? Apparently they believe they’ve had it all along. If you go by these assertions, it means the FDA has the authority to prohibit any food of their choosing and make it a crime for you to seek it out. If, one day, the FDA deems tomatoes, broccoli or cashews capable of causing you harm (which is just as ludicrous as their assertions that raw milk is harmful), they could therefore enact such a ban and legally enforce it.

What this means is that freedom of food choice is a myth if you live in the United States, and this simply is not acceptable. No one, and certainly not any government agency, should be able to restrict your access to pure, unadulterated food, but the dairy industry and other industrial farmers that depend on CAFOs employ powerful lobbyists will stop at nothing to persuade government to remove the small farmers from the market entirely. The truth is, if enough people start demanding naturally, sustainably and humanely raised meat, dairy and produce, the giant farming monopolies that currently dominate the market would not be able to compete.

Their businesses depend on pesticides, CAFOs, genetically modified seeds, growth hormones and the like … so when they see all-natural creameries like the one operated by Randy Sowers and his wife Karen, or natural farms like Bakers Green Acres gaining loyal and growing customer bases, they get nervous – and they get the government involved in any way they can.

Please Support Your Local Small Farms

The healthiest food choices are nearly always those that come from responsible, high-quality, sustainable sources.

This is why I encourage you to support the small family farms in your area. This includes not only visiting the farm directly, if you have one nearby, but also taking part in farmer’s markets and community-supported agriculture programs. Now that summer is almost here in the United States, fresh produce and other wonderful whole foods are available in abundance. Not only is the food so much tastier and healthier when you get it from sustainable, non-CAFO sources, but there is something about shopping for fresh foods in an open-air, social environment that just feels right. An artificially lit, dreary supermarket — home to virtually every CAFO food made — just can’t compete.

If you want to experience some of these benefits first-hand, here are some great resources to obtain wholesome food that supports not only you but also the environment:

1. Alternative Farming Systems Information Center, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
2. Farmers’ Markets — A national listing of farmers’ markets
3. Local Harvest — This Web site will help you find farmers’ markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area where you can buy produce, grass-fed meats, and many other goodies.
4. Eat Well Guide: Wholesome Food from Healthy Animals — The Eat Well Guide is a free online directory of sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs from farms, stores, restaurants, inns, and hotels, and online outlets in the United States and Canada.
5. Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture(CISA) — CISA is dedicated to sustaining agriculture and promoting the products of small farms.
6. FoodRoutes — The FoodRoutes “Find Good Food” map can help you connect with local farmers to find the freshest, tastiest food possible. On their interactive map, you can find a listing for local farmers, CSA’s, and markets near you.

Finally, for more information on the ongoing attacks against small family farms in the United States consider watching Farmageddon: The Unseen War on American Family Farms, a documentary by Kristin Canty. But I warn you … the injustices it contains may just make your blood boil.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/05/15/raw-milk-farmers-on-money-laundering-crimes.aspx

The American Journal of Health Behavior¹ published a special May/June 2021 edition dedicated solely to Juul. In essence, Juul Labs sponsored the entire issue of this national journal and devoted it to research funded or written by the company.

Juul began as a Silicon Valley darling in 2007.² But the history of Juul Labs started two years before that when Stanford graduates James Monsees and Adam Bowen conceived “The Rational Future of Smoking,” which was their graduate thesis and prediction of the future.³

After graduation the two founded Ploom Inc. and in 2012,⁴ the company introduced Pax, which became a popular way of consuming cannabis. By 2015 the company was renamed Pax Labs and they introduced the Juul e-cigarette. In 2017, Pax labs separated from Juul Labs to focus on other products, leaving Juul Labs to manufacture and distribute nicotine e-cigarettes.

By 2018 they were under investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for sales to underaged users. In 2019, experts across the country recognized a unique lung infection and injury associated with vaping.⁵ By February 18, 2020, there were 2,807 people who had been hospitalized and 68 confirmed deaths.

Investigations for underage sales, lung injuries and the sale of contaminated Juul pods⁶ prompted the company to spend 2020 in what The New York Times reported as a “reset” mode.⁷ As the FDA considers the future of the company, Juul is trying prove the product has public health benefit.

JUUL Paid This Journal to Publish Their ‘Science’

The FDA has set September 9, 2021, as a deadline for deciding whether products offered by Juul Labs have enough public health benefit to stay on the market.⁸ Juul has recorded a loss of sales of $500 million and cut their workforce by 75% since 2019.⁹ The company that was once valued at $38 billion, is now valued under $5 billion.

While waiting for the FDA to deliberate, the company teamed with Piney Associates and the Centre for Substance Use Research (CSUR) to develop documentation that purportedly demonstrates the vaping device is a safer alternative to cigarettes.¹⁰

Once the papers were completed, Juul spent $51,000 with the American Journal of Health Behavior to publish 11 studies they funded or helped write in a special edition publication.¹¹ The company paid an additional $6,500 so the information would have open access on the internet.

The published works are meant to support the company’s premarket tobacco product application, which the company has not made public. Once the Juul issue was published, the journal’s editor-in-chief, Elbert D Glover, Ph.D., retired, without announcing his plans.

Before leaving, he said the journal had followed their standard protocol before publishing the studies — but three editorial board members still resigned in protest. The journal published conflict of interest disclosures¹² which showed that all the studies were either written by scientists employed by Juul Labs or the research was funded by the company.¹³

The Company Pays to Squash Bad Press

The company is intent on creating positive press and squashing negative press as they wait for the FDA to make its decision. According to The New York Times,¹⁴ if the company survives the end of 2021, they are facing thousands of lawsuits.

Fourteen states and the District of Columbia are seeking money to combat what has become a vaping crisis in the youth. The Justice Department has the company under criminal investigation and there is multidistrict litigation in the California Federal Court.

The company’s first hurdle was to address the lawsuit in North Carolina filed by the North Carolina attorney general. According to Business Insider, Juul Labs agreed to pay $40 million and change their business practices to avoid a jury trial over questions of whether the company allegedly marketed their product to teens.¹⁵

In addition to the financial award, CNN reported some of the stipulations that the company must follow as stated by North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein. These include:¹⁶

CNN reported Juul stated restrictions are in line with their desire to curb underage smoking. A company spokesperson from Juul Labs spoke with a CNN reporter about how the award would be distributed, saying:¹⁷

“We look forward to working with Attorney General Stein and other manufacturers on the development of potential industry-wide marketing practices based on science and evidence. In addition, we support the Attorney General’s desire to deploy funds to generate appropriate science to support North Carolina’s public health interventions to reduce underage use.”

As the company publicly agrees with the restrictions to their marketing and sales, their federal lobbying has remained robust. According to the Center for Responsive Politics,¹⁸ which tracks giving in the political arena, Juul spent $3.9 million in 2020, down $400,000 from 2019. Altria, the tobacco company that bought 35% of Juul in 2018¹⁹ spent $10.6 million in 2020, which is $150,000 more than they spent in 2019.²⁰

The Marlboro Man Wants the FDA to Trust JUUL

In September 2019, the CEO of Juul Labs stepped down and KC Crosthwaite, longtime tobacco executive, stepped into the role.²¹ Once installed, Crosthwaite stopped some of the controversial lobbying campaigns, closed many of Juul’s foreign markets, took mint flavored pods off the market and suspended U.S. advertising.²²

In a company email he alluded to the fact that Juul must place earning the trust of the consumer at the center of what they do. However, as The New York Times²³ points out, each of these changes was made at gunpoint. And the gun was pointed by the FDA, which threatened to shut down their business.

Matthew L Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, characterized the business relationship between Altria and Juul Labs this way: “The Marlboro man rode into Juul and now wants us to trust them.”²⁴

At the end of Monsees’ and Bowen’s thesis presentation at Stanford, they played a video during which a user of the new product said, “This product is the greatest thing I have ever encountered in my life. I will smoke this with enthusiasm and develop a nicotine habit that will follow me to my grave.”²⁵

A journalist from the Verge summarized the situation after an interview with the author of “The Devil’s Playbook: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of a New Generation,” writing that the podcast listeners would recognize other industry themes:²⁶

“There’s a big industry that’s slow to adapt, there’s a startup that’s moving fast and breaking things, there are regulators around the world who don’t quite know what to do, and at the center of it all, there’s a big question about our society’s relationship with a product that might be bad for people — and that people still want.”

JUUL Purposely Sold Tainted Product and Marketed It to Kids

Siddharth Breja, formerly Juul’s senior vice president for global finance, claims in a lawsuit he filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that he was fired in 2019 in retaliation for criticizing the sale of at least 1 million contaminated and expired mint-flavored nicotine pods by Juul.²⁷

The type of contamination or its source was not revealed in the lawsuit. Breja was quoted in The New York Times saying Juul “has jeopardized and continues to jeopardize public health and safety and the lives of millions of consumers, many of them children and teens.”²⁸ The reporter wrote:²⁹

“Mr. Breja detailed a culture of indifference to safety and quality-control issues among top executives at the company and quoted the then-chief executive Kevin Burns saying at a meeting in February: ‘Half our customers are drunk and vaping’ and wouldnʼt ‘notice the quality of our pods.’”

Breja’s lawsuit alleged the contaminated mint-flavored pods were the result of decisions at Juul Labs to fill a huge demand for that flavor. This happened after the FDA pulled all other flavored pods in retail stores but continued to allow Juul to sell mint and menthol.

It wasn’t long before the demand outstripped the supply. In the complaint, Breja said then-chief executive Kevin Burns told employees, “You need to have an IQ of 5 to know that when customers don’t find mango, they buy mint.”³⁰

Once Breja learned of the contaminated pods, and that they could not be recovered, he urged the company to issue a recall or a warning. One week later, Breja was fired. Despite the proximate action, Juul spokesperson Ted Kwong dismissed the claims and said he was fired “because [Breja] failed to demonstrate the leadership qualities needed in his role.”³¹

Can Super-Addictive Nicotine Reduce Your Desire to Smoke?

David Kessler was head of the FDA from 1990 to 1997 during the tobacco investigation. The Los Angeles Times quotes him saying, “Addiction is central to the business model. With their nicotine salts, Juul has found the Holy Grail.”³²

The Los Angeles Times reviewed more than 3,000 pages of internal company records released through the Freedom of Information Act showing Juul used research done by Reynolds Laboratories more than four decades before the release of JuulSalts.

Myers told the Los Angeles Times reporter, “Reynolds succeeded in developing the technology, but never really succeeded in turning it into a transformative breakthrough. Juul did that.”³³

The data from the Freedom of Information Act release also showed Juul collected information on how to maximize nicotine delivery and literature collected by Reynold’s laboratory on how the drug impacts adolescent brains. The idea was to develop a new generation of nicotine addicts. Robert Jackler, Stanford University researcher, focused on teen e-cig use, commenting:³⁴

“Reynolds successfully engineered this formula, but it was Juul that ultimately vaporized it — and achieved what Big Tobacco never could. They studied Reynold’s literature, took advantage of it, and addicted a new generation of American youth.”

At a 2018 tech startup conference, Monsees said on stage, “Certainly, the nicotine salt chemistry was one of the big breakthroughs.”³⁵

The premise behind any good business model is to acquire and then keep customers. The food processed industry does this by ascertaining the “bliss point” in their product, which is the exact amount of sugar, salt and fat to optimize taste and make the product so perfectly engineered that you want more and more.³⁶

Despite Juul Labs’ public assertion that their product is designed to be self-limited as a means of getting people to stop smoking combustible cigarettes, this model would soon put them out of business. Instead, you only have to look at the product itself and the history of the company’s push toward addiction to know the objective is to garner more customers and make more money — not to lose customers.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/30/health-studies-on-juul.aspx

Have you heard of the MATH+ protocol to treat COVID-19? One of its creators, Dr. Joseph Varon, who leads the COVID-19 unit at United Memorial Medical Center (UMMC) in Houston, has been trying to get the word out about it since the start of the pandemic. “We have options for patients now. We just need to make those options available,” he said, speaking with broadcast journalist Ivory Hecker.¹

Hecker has a story in her own right, as she was fired from FOX 26 Houston in June 2021 after she interrupted a live news segment to tell viewers the station had prohibited her from sharing certain information, adding that she’s “not the only reporter being subjected to this.”²

Censorship is an ongoing problem that’s reached unprecedented levels during the pandemic, and is the reason why you probably haven’t heard of the MATH+ protocol, despite its immense success in saving lives over the last year. Varon has been at the frontlines throughout, marking his 366th consecutive day treating COVID-19 patients on March 20, 2021.³

From March 20, 2021, to May 21, 2021, there were 1,293 hospitalized COVID-19 patients at United Memorial Medical Center. Eighty-six of them died, resulting in a 6.7% death rate. That’s about half the 12.5% death rate for hospitalized COVID-19 patients reported by the National Center for Health Statistics over the same period.⁴

MATH+ Protocol Saves Lives, but Media Is Ignoring It

Early on in the pandemic, five critical care physicians formed the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Working Group (FLCCC), which developed the highly effective COVID-19 treatment protocol known as MATH+. Varon was among them, as was Dr. Paul Marik, a critical care doctor at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in East Virginia. The protocol for hospitalized patients was initially based on the following:

• Intravenous Methylprednisolone
• High-dose intravenous Ascorbic acid (vitamin C)
• Plus optional treatments Thiamine, zinc and vitamin D
• Full dose low molecular weight Heparin

In the beginning, only supportive care was offered to COVID-19 patients. Even today, people with COVID-19 are told to stay home and isolate until they’re lacking oxygen, a recommendation that Marik believes is costing lives, since early treatment with MATH+ is so effective:⁵

“While we may not have the best answers, we do have some answers and to tell people to stay at home and isolate so they go blue is an absurdity that’s actually causing lots of damage because we are now waiting for the virus to, in some people, cause the cytokine storm. And when they arrive with that state it is very difficult to reverse it and stop it and bring them back.”

The MATH+ protocol led to high survival rates. Out of more than 100 hospitalized COVID-19 patients treated with the MATH+ protocol as of mid-April 2020, only two died. Both were in their 80s and had advanced chronic medical conditions.⁶ But according to Varon, despite their unusual successes, reporters weren’t interested in why the patients at his hospital were more likely to survive.⁷

The physicians behind MATH+ are clear that their protocols are fluid and change in response to the data. As such, there have been two major changes since MATH+ was first released, one involving ivermectin and another involving hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).

Ivermectin Added to MATH+

Ivermectin was added as a core medication in FLCCC’s protocols for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 in October 2020.⁸ Ivermectin — a broad-spectrum antiparasitic that also has anti-inflammatory activity — has been found to reduce COVID-19 mortality by 81%.⁹ The drug is also safe, inexpensive and widely available, with decades of clinical usage suggesting it has a “high margin of safety.”¹⁰

By December 2020, FLCCC, noting the extreme success of the drug, called for widespread adoption of ivermectin, both as a prophylactic and for the treatment of all phases of COVID-19.^11,12 In one prevention trial, 58 volunteers took 12 milligrams of ivermectin once per month for four months.

Only four (6.96%) came down with mild COVID-19 symptoms during the May through August 2020 trial period.¹³ In comparison, 44 of 60 health care workers (73.3%) who had declined the medication were diagnosed with COVID-19. In June 2021, Varon and colleagues published a review in the American Journal of Therapeutics, which included meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19.¹⁴ The results were impressive, showing:¹⁵

• Large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery and time to viral clearance when used for treatment
• Significantly reduced risks of contractive COVID-19 with regular ivermectin use

The data are so strong that, at the India Institute of Medical Sciences, all health care workers now take two 0.3 mg/kg doses of ivermectin 72 hours apart, then repeat the dose monthly to prevent COVID-19.¹⁶ And in regions that have implemented ivermectin distribution campaigns, associated reductions in case fatality rates results.¹⁷ According to the review:¹⁸

“Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”

Marik believes that a mass distribution program of ivermectin, together with melatonin, vitamin D and aspirin, could end the pandemic. By assuming everyone is infected and treating with this safe combination of inexpensive compounds, Marik says, “We’ll eliminate SARS-CoV-2. It will be gone.”¹⁹ This isn’t likely to happen, though, due to “economic and political factors that benefit from the ongoing pandemic.”²⁰

HCQ Replaced With Quercetin

HCQ, a zinc ionophore, was part of the MATH+ protocol for the first six months of the pandemic. (They have recently swapped quercetin for HCQ.) At this time, the death rate for COVID-19 patients at Varon’s UMMC was 4.4%, compared to a death rate of about 20% at other hospitals.²¹

Hecker first spoke with Varon about HCQ in August 2020, and he spoke favorably about using the controversial drug, noting that out of more than 300 COVID-19 patients treated at UMMC, they had a 95% success rate.²²

Misinformation and outright lies were spun about HCQ, including fabricated research, in an apparent effort to suppress and prevent its widespread use. Other physicians, including Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a practicing physician in a Jewish community in Monroe, New York, have had great success using HCQ for COVID-19.²³

However, in June 2020, the National Institutes of Health halted a clinical trial of HCQ after stating that, while the drug wasn’t harmful, it also wasn’t beneficial to hospitalized patients.²⁴

Backlash ensued following the NIH announcement, and FLCCC phased out the use of HCQ in its protocols. Their latest I-MASK+ protocol, updated June 30, 2021,²⁵ recommends quercetin instead. Quercetin, also a zinc ionophore, is an over-the-counter alternative to HCQ and works much like HCQ does. According to Marik:²⁶

“Experimental and early clinical data (published in high impact journals) suggests that this compound has broad antiviral properties (including against coronavirus) and acting at various steps in the viral life cycle. It also appears to be a potent inhibitor of heat shock proteins (HSP 40 and 70) which are required for viral assembly.”

Ivermectin Continues To Be Censored, US on ‘Media Lockdown’

In the video above, Hecker speaks with several recovered COVID-19 patients who received the MATH+ protocol. One, Manuel Espinoza, a urologist from Texas, was on a slow decline using the conventional COVID protocols. Then his wife found out about the MATH+ protocol online, and Espinoza was emergency airlifted to UMMC. “Within hours” of the treatment his health had turned around, he said, and “within days, just immense improvement.”²⁷

Yet, Varon said that every time he mentioned ivermectin on social media, “he went to Facebook jail.” Reporters also told him, multiple times, that they were banned from reporting on certain COVID-19 drug treatments.²⁸ Similar censorship was experienced by Dr. Pierre Kory, who was also a part of the group that formed FLCCC.

On December 8, 2020, Kory testified to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which held a hearing on “Early Outpatient Treatment: An Essential Part of a COVID-19 Solution.” He called on the NIH, CDC and FDA to review the expansive data on ivermectin to prevent COVID-19, keep those with early symptoms from progressing and help critically ill patients recover:^29,30

Despite his impassioned pleas and astonishing science to back them up, the treatment was not only ignored by the committee but promptly eviscerated.³¹Meanwhile, media reports claimed ivermectin was unproven and the World Health Organization also refused to endorse it.

YouTube removed Kory’s testimony, which had nearly 9 million views, calling it a danger to the community.³² Kory says that while his research on ivermectin has gotten lots of attention worldwide, it’s gotten zero in the U.S. — “U.S. is on a media lockdown,” he said.³³ Varon agreed, telling Hecker that “no one” is asking about the MATH+ protocol. “Right now everyone is interested in vaccination.”³⁴

MATH+ Protocol Is Available in 23 Languages

FLCCC’s I-MASK+ protocol can be downloaded in full,³⁵ giving you step-by-step instructions on how to prevent and treat the early symptoms of COVID-19. FLCCC also has protocols for at-home prevention and early treatment, called I-MASS, which involves ivermectin, vitamin D3, a multivitamin and a digital thermometer to watch your body temperature in the prevention phase and ivermectin, melatonin, aspirin and antiseptic mouthwash for early at-home treatment.

Household or close contacts of COVID-19 patients may take ivermectin (18 milligrams, then repeat the dose in 48 hours) for post-exposure prevention.³⁶FLCCC also has a management protocol — I-RECOVER³⁷ — for long haul COVID-19 syndrome. The protocols are translated into 23 different languages to provide widespread, free access to this lifesaving information, including how to get ivermectin.³⁸

FLCCC remains hopeful that ivermectin will be formally adopted into national or international COVID-19 treatment guidelines in the near future. But, as Hecker noted, the inexpensive medication faces a major hurdle:³⁹

“Had there been an existing known, safe and effective treatment for COVID-19, Emergency Use Authorization of a vaccine for the virus would be prohibited by law. Could that have been part of the motivation for the strange censorship of certain COVID-19 treatments that we witnessed over the past year at news and social media corporations?”

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/30/math-plus-protocol.aspx

We’ve known from the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that children were at exceptionally low risk for hospitalization and death from this infection. Despite that, massive efforts are underway to get a needle in the arm of every child.

At present, COVID-19 injections are authorized for emergency use in children as young as 12 in the U.S.,¹ and vaccine makers are moving forward with plans to get authorization for children as young as 6 months.

Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope, here and there. In the U.K., children will not be eligible to receive a COVID shot unless they have underlying conditions that make them more vulnerable to infection or live with a high-risk person. As reported by The Guardian, July 19, 2021:²

“The opinion of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) expands the eligibility for children, after a previous decision that vulnerable 16- and 17-year-olds could get vaccinated … [T]he advisory body said:

‘The health benefits in this population are small, and the benefits to the wider population are highly uncertain. At this time, JCVI is of the view that the health benefits of universal vaccination in children and young people below the age of 18 years do not outweigh the potential risks.’”

Vulnerabilities that would make children over the age of 12 eligible for COVID injection include severe neuro-disabilities, Down’s syndrome, immunosuppression and multiple or severe learning disabilities.

If you ask me, this is a rather curious list, seeing how neurodevelopmental problems are unlikely to make you more prone to viral infection. We already know the high-risk factors for COVID-19 are things like obesity and multiple chronic diseases — not neurological problems and intellectual deficiencies.

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, this list is uncomfortably similar to that of Hitler’s T4 program. This was an involuntary euthanasia campaign where the incurably sick, physically and mentally handicapped, psychologically ill and elderly were selectively murdered by the medical establishment.

COVID-19 Deaths in Children Extremely Rare

Overall, the risk of COVID-19 to children of all ages is so small as to be inconsequential, learning disabilities and chromosomal irregularities or not. A study³ posted July 7, 2021, which looked at deaths occurring in children in the U.K. during the first 12 months of the pandemic, found 99.995% of children diagnosed with COVID-19 survived.

In all, between March 2020 and February 2021, only 25 children under the age of 18 died directly as a result of SARS-CoV-2 infection. (An additional 61 children had positive test results when they died, but their death was attributed to other causes.) This gives us an absolute mortality rate for children of 2 per 1 million. As noted by the authors:⁴

“SARS-CoV-2 is very rarely fatal in CYP [children and young people], even among those with underlying comorbidities. These findings are important to guide families, clinicians and policy makers about future shielding and vaccination.”

Childhood Vaccination Push Built on Flimsy Evidence

In the United States, a total of 335 children under 18 have died with a COVID-19 diagnosis on their death certificate.⁵ The CDC estimates the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 among children zero to 17 years old is 20 per 1 million.⁶ This is likely a significant overestimation, however.

In the British study above, they specifically differentiated between those who actually died from COVID-19, meaning there was no other underlying condition that contributed to their death, and those who simply tested positive at the time of death but died from other causes.

This has not been done in the U.S., so we don’t know how many of those 335 children had underlying conditions that contributed or directly caused their death. As noted by Marty Makary in a Wall Street Journal Opinion piece dated July 19, 2021:⁷

“Without these data, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices [ACIP] decided in May that the benefits of two-dose vaccination outweigh the risks for all kids 12 to 15.

I’ve written hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies, and I can think of no journal editor who would accept the claim that 335 deaths resulted from a virus without data to indicate if the virus was incidental or causal, and without an analysis of relevant risk factors such as obesity.”

To remedy this shortcoming, Makary and colleagues at Johns Hopkins teamed up with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze the health insurance data of approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with COVID-19 between April and August 2020.

As it turns out, none of the children who died were free of preexisting medical conditions such as cancer. “If that trend holds, it has significant implications for healthy kids and whether they need two vaccine doses,” Makary says.⁸

Overall, children appear naturally immune against COVID-19⁹ and are not significant vectors of transmission either.¹⁰ So, there’s really no need to place draconian COVID restrictions on children out of fear for their own safety or anyone else’s.

Death Statistics Were Illegally Inflated From the Start

Makary also points out that we’ve already established that COVID-19 mortalitystatistics have been vastly overinflated in the U.S.¹¹ In early June 2021, Alameda County in California lowered its reported death toll from COVID-19 by 25%, after state health officials insisted that deaths only be attributed to COVID-19 if SARS-CoV-2 infection was a direct or contributing factor.¹²

As detailed in “CDC Violated Law to Inflate COVID Cases and Fatalities,” investigation has revealed the CDC inflated fatalities by as much as 96%. They did this by illegally altering the way deaths are reported. Had the old guidelines remained in place, the COVID-19 death toll as of August 23, 2020, in the U.S. would have been 9,684.

As you may recall, in late August 2020, the CDC admitted that only 6% of the total death count had COVID-19 listed as the sole cause of death. The remaining 94% had had an average of 2.6 comorbidities or preexisting health conditions that contributed to their deaths.¹³ As of August 23, 2021, the CDC reported 161,392 COVID-related fatalities. Multiplied by 6%, you get an actual death toll of 9,684.

It’s hard to believe anyone would be willing to shut down commerce in an entire state over such a number. It’s also hard to believe people would line up to take an unproved and dangerous experimental gene modification injection based on a mortality risk this low.

Unfortunately, we’ve been lied to for so long, many are still effectively brainwashed with the continuous propaganda from mainstream news and public health officials that have long since abandoned their commitment to integrity.

Parents Clamor to Enroll Their Children in COVID Trials

Mainstream media have since the very beginning ignored and hidden data showing COVID-19 isn’t as bad as initially feared. And now they’re ignoring and hiding data showing the COVID shots are worse than suspected. Wired Magazine, for example, blames parents’ apprehension to have their children injected with experimental gene therapy on right-wing politics rather than actual data.¹⁴

Wired also reports that more parents have volunteered their children for clinical COVID-19 trials than trial sites have spaces for which, to me, suggests many are still clueless about the risks of these injections, as well as the risk posed by SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Fauci Blasted for Latest Mask Recommendation

In related news, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently faced backlash after saying children aged 2 and older should continue to wear masks.¹⁵ During an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Fauci said:

“Unvaccinated children of a certain age greater than 2 years old should be wearing masks. No doubt about that. That’s the way to protect them from getting infected, because if they do, they can then spread the infection to someone else.”

It’s tiring, all of these outrageous and health damaging lies — no doubt about that. Another thing there’s no doubt about is that Fauci has changed his mind on the usefulness of masks more times than some of us have actually donned said masks.

In response to Fauci’s declaration that children need to be forced to wear masks to protect adults, New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz tweeted, “I can’t believe it’s July 2021 and this man is still spouting nonsense on our televisions without any serious follow-up questions. What an embarrassment.”¹⁶

Children Are Not at Risk

Getting back to the issue of COVID jabs, all available data suggest COVID-19 is of no significant concern for children. Their risk of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19 is actually lower than their risk of being hospitalized or dying from the flu.¹⁷

For comparison, more than 2,000 American children and teens died in car crashes in 2019,¹⁸ and accidental drowning claims the lives of nearly 1,000 children each year.¹⁹ Even unintentional drug overdoses claim more lives than COVID-19 in this age group. In 2016, unintentional drug poisoning killed 761 children.²⁰

Why isn’t there a national outrage about these drug-related deaths, seeing how the 2016 statistics show that more than TWICE the number of children most likely have died from overdoses during the pandemic than supposedly died from COVID-19?

There’s also no solid evidence to assume children pose a transmission risk to adults. Besides, 90% of American seniors have now received their COVID shots,²¹ so by the logic of the official narrative, the most vulnerable adults now have the best herd immunity available and are individually protected with the best modern medicine supposedly has to offer.

Importantly, since children’s risk is so minuscule, there’s really no legal framework for an emergency use authorization of COVID injections for children. Still, the Food and Drug Administration and vaccine makers push forward with that exact plan. Hopefully, they’ll be stopped.

July 19, 2021, America’s Frontline Doctors filed a motion to stop the emergency use authorization of COVID injections for children under 18, anyone with natural immunity and anyone who has not been given proper informed consent.^22,23

In their motion, the group points out that the prerequisite health emergency no longer exists, that COVID shots do not prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection, that adequate treatment alternatives exist, and that the known risks of COVID gene modifying injections outweigh any potential benefit for these groups.

They also include a sworn statement by a CDC whistleblower, a computer programmer, who claims the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) under-reports deaths by a factor of five or more. The whistleblower estimates the number of deaths actually may have been around 45,000 as of July 9, 2021.

Vaccinating Children to Benefit Adults Is Unethical

An opinion piece in The BMJ²⁴ by Peter Doshi, Elia Abi-Jaoude and Claudina Michal-Teitelbaum also highlights why we must not force children to take the COVID shot simply because it might help vulnerable adults. They write:²⁵

“While there is wide recognition that children’s risk of severe covid-19 is low, many believe that mass vaccination of children may … also prevent onward transmission, indirectly protecting vulnerable adults and helping end the pandemic. However, there are multiple assumptions that need to be examined when judging calls to vaccinate children against covid-19 …

Even if one assumes protection against severe covid-19, given its very low incidence in children, an extremely high number would need to be vaccinated in order to prevent one severe case. Meanwhile, a large number of children with very low risk for severe disease would be exposed to vaccine risks, known and unknown.

Thus far, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine has been judged by Israel’s government as likely linked to symptomatic myocarditis, with an estimated incidence between 1 in 3000 to 1 in 6000 in men ages 16 to 24. Furthermore, the long term effects of gene-based vaccines, which involve novel vaccine platforms, remain essentially unknown …

Given all these considerations, the assertion that vaccinating children against SARS-CoV-2 will protect adults remains hypothetical.

Even if we were to assume this protection does exist, the number of children that would need to be vaccinated to protect just one adult from a bout of severe covid-19 — considering the low transmission rates, the high proportion of children already being post-covid, and most adults being vaccinated or post-covid — would be extraordinarily high.

Moreover, this number would likely compare unfavorably to the number of children that would be harmed, including for rare serious events. A separate, but crucial question is one of ethics. Should society be considering vaccinating children, subjecting them to any risk, not for the purpose of benefiting them but in order to protect adults? We believe the onus is on adults to protect themselves.”

Doshi was even more blunt in his June 10, 2021, public comment²⁶ to the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. There, he pointed out that the FDA can only authorize the use of a medical product in a given population if the benefit outweighs the risk in that same population.

This means that even if adults were to benefit, the COVID shots cannot be authorized for children unless children will actually benefit from it themselves. Since when, in the history of public health, have children been sacrificed to protect the sick and elderly? Public health authorities have completely reversed the conventional risk/reward analysis.

In the case of COVID-19 injections, children cannot benefit, seeing how they only have a 0.005% risk of death in the first place. Meanwhile, healthy children have died shortly after the jabs, dozens of cases of heart inflammation have been reported, and Pfizer’s biodistribution study^27,28 raises serious questions about the shot’s potential to cause infertility.

Since demonstrated risks far outweigh demonstrated benefits in children, the vaccines also fail to meet the biologics license application required for ultimate market approval. Last but not least, since there’s no “unmet need,” there’s no need to rush the approval of these injections for children.

CDC Is Deliberating Lowering the COVID Injection Death Toll

While the exact number of deaths from these COVID shots remains uncertain — VAERS reports 12,313 deaths²⁹ as of July 13, 2021, and the CDC whistleblower estimates the death toll at 45,000 or higher — we can unequivocally state that the number is record-breaking high. There’s no vaccine in modern medical history that even comes close. The risk is extraordinary, which is precisely why we must protect our children from it.

Speaking of the CDC, I just discovered it slashed the number of deaths reported to VAERS from 12,313 as of July 13, 2021, to 6,079. In what appears to be a deliberate attempt at deception, the CDC “rolled back” its July 19, 2021, adverse events report to statistics from the previous week. I’ll explain. Take note of the specific dates and death totals in each of the following excerpts. The July 13 report reads as follows:³⁰

“Reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination are rare.More than 334 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through July 12, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 6,079 reports of death (0.0018%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.”

The original July 19 report (saved on Wayback) initially read as follows:³¹

“Reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination are rare.More than 338 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through July 19, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 12,313 reports of death (0.0036%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.”

Please note, the death toll more than doubled in a single week. That original July 19 report was then changed to this. The date on the report is still July 19:³²

“Reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination are rare.More than 334 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through July 13, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 6,079 reports of death (0.0018%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.”

At a time when accuracy and transparency is of such critical importance for informed consent, it’s beyond shocking to see the CDC engage in this kind of deception. Parents everywhere need to realize that the CDC and other agencies and their officials are deliberately downplaying and hiding the enormity of the danger their children will face if they take this injection.

I implore you. Please spend ample time looking at all the evidence before you allow your child to participate in this heinous experiment. I understand that the inclination to trust our “gold standard” health agencies is great, but trust must be continuously earned. It’s not a one-time done deal.

At this point, having a skeptical eye and double-checking every claim is of paramount importance. Your child’s health and life may depend on you not being gullible.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/29/covid-19-in-children.aspx

Every totalitarian system in history has used the power of visual propaganda to generate a new “reality,” one that reifies its official ideology, remaking the world in its own paranoid image. New Normal totalitarianism is no exception. For example, take a look at this panel copied from the landing page of The Guardian — one of the global-capitalist ruling classes’ primary propaganda organs — on July 17, 2021 …

This isn’t just “biased” or “sensationalist” journalism. It is systematic official propaganda, no different than that disseminated by every other totalitarian system throughout history. Here’s the one from the following day …

Forget about the content of the articles for a moment and just take in the cumulative visual effect. Official propaganda isn’t just information, misinformation, and disinformation.

It is actually less about getting us to believe things than it is about creating an official reality, and imposing it on society by force. When you’re setting out to conjure up a new “reality,” images are extremely powerful tools, just as powerful, if not more powerful, than words. Here are a few more that you might recall …

Again, the goal of this type of propaganda is not simply to deceive or terrorize the public. That is part of it, of course, but the more important part is forcing people to look at these images, over and over, hour after hour, day after day, at home, at work, on the streets, on television, on the Internet, everywhere.

This is how we create “reality.” We represent our beliefs and values to ourselves, and to each other, with images, words, rituals, and other symbols and social behaviors. Essentially, we conjure our “reality” into being like actors rehearsing and performing a play … the more we all believe it, the more convincing it is.

This is also why mandatory masks have been essential to the roll-out of the New Normal ideology. Forcing the masses to wear medical-looking masks in public was a propaganda masterstroke.

Simply put, if you can force people to dress up like they’re going to work in the infectious disease ward of a hospital every day for 17 months … presto! You’ve got yourself a new “reality” … a new, pathologized-totalitarian “reality,” a paranoid-psychotic, cult-like “reality” in which formerly semi-rational people have been reduced to nonsense-babbling lackeys who are afraid to go outside without permission from “the authorities,” and are injecting their children with experimental “vaccines.”

The sheer power of the visual image of those masks, and being forced to repeat the ritual behavior of putting them on, has been nearly irresistible. Yes, I know that you have been resisting. So have I. But we are the minority. Denying the power of what we are up against might make you feel better, but it will get us nowhere, or, in any event, nowhere good.

The fact is, the vast majority of the public — except for people in Sweden, Florida, and assorted other officially non-existent places — have been robotically performing this theatrical ritual, and harassing those who refuse to do so, and thus collectively simulating an “apocalyptic plague.”

The New Normals — i.e., those still wearing masks outdoors, shrieking over meaningless “cases,” bullying everyone to get “vaccinated,” and collaborating with the segregation of the “Unvaccinated” — are not behaving the way they’re behaving because they are stupid.

They are behaving that way because they’re living in a new “reality” that has been created for them over the course of the last 17 months by a massive official propaganda campaign, the most extensive and effective in the history of propaganda.

In other words, to put it bluntly, we are in a propaganda war, and we’re losing. We can’t match the propaganda power of the corporate media and New Normal governments, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back. We can, and must, at every opportunity. Recently, readers have been asking me how to do that. So, OK, here are a few simple suggestions.

The vast majority of obedient New Normals are not fanatical totalitarians. They’re scared, and weak, so they are following orders, adjusting their minds to the new official “reality.”

Most of them do not perceive themselves as adherents of a totalitarian system or as segregationists, although that is what they are. They perceive themselves as “responsible” people following sensible “health directives” to “protect” themselves and others from the virus, and its ever-multiplying mutant “variants.” They perceive the “Unvaccinated” as a minority of dangerous, irrational “conspiracy theorist” extremists, who want to kill them and their families.

When we tell them that we simply want our constitutional rights back, and to not be forced into being “vaccinated,” and censored and persecuted for expressing our views, they do not believe us. They think we’re lying. They perceive us as threats, as aggressors, as monsters, as strangers among them, who need to be dealt with … which is exactly how the authorities want them to perceive us.

We need to try to change this perception, not by complying or being “polite” to them. On the contrary, we need to become more confrontational. No, not violent. Confrontational. There is actually a difference, though the “woke” will deny it.

To begin with, we need to call things what they are. The “vaccination pass” system is a segregation system. It is segregationism. Call it what it is. Those cooperating with it are segregationists. They’re not “helping” or “protecting” anybody from anything. They are segregationists, pure and simple. Refer to them as “segregationists.” Don’t let them hide behind their terminology. Confront them with the fact of what they are.

Same goes for the rest of CovidSpeak. COVID “cases,” “deaths,” and “vaccines” get scare quotes. Healthy people are not medical cases. If COVID didn’t kill someone, they are not a COVID death, period. “Vaccines” that do not behave like vaccines, and that are killing and crippling tens of thousands of people, and that have not been adequately tested for safety, and that are being indiscriminatelyforced on everyone, do not get to be called vaccines.

OK, here comes the big idea, which will only work if enough people do it. You probably won’t like it, but what the hell, here goes …

This is the red inverted triangle the Nazis used in the concentration camps to designate their political opponents and members of the anti-Nazi resistance. Make one. Make it out of fabric, paper, or whatever material you have at hand. Put a big, black “U” in the center of it to signify “Unvaccinated.” Wear it in public, conspicuously.

When people ask you what it means and why you are wearing it in public, tell them. Encourage them to do the same, assuming they’re not New Normal segregationists, in which case … well, that will be a different conversation, but go ahead and tell them too.

That’s it. That’s the whole big idea. That, and whatever else you are already doing. The triangle is not meant to replace that. It’s just one simple way for people to express their opposition to the totalitarian, pseudo-medical segregation system that is currently being implemented … despite all that other stuff you’ve been doing, and that I have been doing, for 17 months.

All right, I can already feel your disappointment. You thought I was going to propose a frontal assault on Klaus Schwab’s secret castle, or a guerilla naval attack on Bill Gates’ yacht. Cathartic as either of those endeavors might be, they would be (a) futile, and (b) suicidal. Frustrating as it has been for all of us, this is still a battle for hearts and minds. Essentially, it is a War on Reality (or between two “realities” if you prefer). It is being fought in people’s heads, not in the streets.

So, let me try to sell you on this red triangle thing. The point of a visual protest like this is to force the New Normals to confront a different representation of what they, and we, are. A representation that accurately reflects reality.

No, of course we are not in concentration camps — so, please, spare me the irate literalist emails — but we are being segregated, scapegoated, censored, humiliated, and otherwise abused, not for any legitimate public health reasons, but because of our political dissent, because we refuse to mindlessly follow orders and conform to their new official ideology.

The New Normals need to be forced to perceive their beliefs and actions in that context, even if only for a few fleeting moments at the mall, or in the grocery store, or wherever.

Think of it this way … as I explained above, they are basically performing a theatrical event, conjuring up a “pandemic reality” with words, actions, and pseudo-medical stage props. What we need to become is that asshole in the audience who destroys the suspension of disbelief and reminds everyone that they’re sitting in a theater, and not in 15th Century Denmark, by loudly taking a call on his phone right in the middle of Hamlet’s soliloquy.

Seriously, we need to become that asshole as conspicuously as possible, as often as possible, to disrupt the show the New Normals are performing … and to remind them what they are actually doing, and who they are actually doing it to.

Look at the white people in the tweet above tormenting that girl who is just trying to go to school like any other student. The New Normals do not want to perceive themselves that way, as a pack of fanatical, hate-drunk segregationists, but that is what they are, because it is what they are doing … but it is not what most of them are by nature.

Yes, some people are congenitally sociopathic, but no one is inherently totalitarian. We are not born fascists or segregationists. We have to be programmed to be that way. That’s what the propaganda is for, not to mention all the other authoritarian conditioning we are subjected to from the time we are children.

Or that’s the gamble, or the leap of faith, behind the inverted red triangle thing. It is a basic non-violent civil-disobedience tactic, which works on people who still have a conscience and haven’t gone full totalitarian yet.

Granted, it might not work this time — we are already at the stage where they are going to imprison restaurant owners for serving the “Unvaccinated” — but it might, and what have we got to lose?

About the Author

C.J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/29/propaganda-war-and-how-to-fight-it.aspx

A new study helps to explain how leptin, a hormone produced by fat tissue, influences your motivation to eat.

The researchers described for the first time a collection of leptin-responsive neurons in the brain’s lateral hypothalamic area (LHA). Those LHA neurons feed directly into the mesolimbic dopamine system, which controls the rewarding properties assigned to things.

The study therefore adds to growing evidence that leptin doesn’t turn your appetite on and off just by controlling whether you feel hungry or full. It can also make you want food more or less regardless of hunger.
Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/08/29/fat-hormone-influences-your-motivation-to-eat.aspx

By Ron Rosedale, M.D.

It is amazing how the little twists and turns of researchers can have such a profound impact on what we generally come to realize as “scientific truth.” Let me share a recent fascinating example of how this impacted one of the most powerful hormones in your body.

The Ob mouse is a strain of mouse that has a genetic mutation that makes it obese and unhealthy. It has been used for many years as a model of obesity to do research on, though the reason that it was obese had eluded scientists.

This changed when, in 1994, Jeffrey Friedman discovered that this mouse lacked a previously unknown hormone called leptin, and when it was injected with leptin it became thin, vibrant, and very healthy within weeks. This made headlines around the world, “the cure for obesity found” and pharmaceutical companies started tripping over themselves with trillion dollar signs in their eyes to be the first to genetically manufacture leptin on a large-scale.

This did not last long. When people were tested for leptin, it was found that, unlike the Ob mouse, they did not lack leptin; on the contrary almost all overweight and obese people have excess leptin.

These people were ^“leptin resistant^“ and giving extra leptin did little good.

The financial disappointment was extreme and scientists working for pharmaceutical companies said that leptin wasn’t important anymore since they could not find a drug to control it, and therefore the industry couldn’t make money on it. To make big money in medicine one needs a patent and this generally means remedies which are not commonly or easily available — that are not natural.

This illustrates two extremely unfortunate principles in modern medicine; only those therapies that will make lots of money (generally for the pharmaceutical industry or hospitals), ever get pursued and then taught to physicians (since most of medical education after medical school takes place by drug reps), and these therapies, almost by definition, will be unnatural.

This inhibition of extremely important knowledge is not only unfortunate, it is deadly, and is exemplified by how few people, including doctors, know anything about leptin, though I would consider it to be the most important chemical in your body that will determine your health and lifespan.

Two Hormones that are Vital for Optimal Health

Each and every one of us is a combination of lives within lives. We are made up of trillions of individual living cells that each must maintain itself. Even more significantly, the cells must communicate and interact with each other to form a republic of cells that we call our individual self.

Our health and life depends on how accurately instructions are conveyed to our cells so that they can act in harmony. It is the communication among the individual cells that will determine our health and our life.

The communication takes place by hormones. Arguably therefore, the most important molecules in your body that ultimately will decide your health and life are hormones.

Many would say that genes and chromosomes are the most important molecules, however once born your genes pretty much just sit there; hormones tell them what to do. Certainly, the most important message that our cells receive is how and what to do with energy, and therefore life cannot take place without that.

The two most important hormones that deliver messages about energy and metabolism are insulin and leptin.

Metabolism can roughly be defined as the chemistry that turns food into life, and therefore insulin and leptin are critical to health and disease. Both insulin and leptin work together to control the quality of your metabolism (and, to a significant extent, the rate of metabolism).

Insulin works mostly at the individual cell level, telling the vast majority of cells whether to burn or store fat or sugar and whether to utilize that energy for maintenance and repair or reproduction. This is extremely important as we shall see, for on an individual cell level turning on maintenance and repair equates to increased longevity, and turning up cellular reproduction can increase your risk of cancer.

Leptin, on the other hand, controls the energy storage and utilization of the entire republic of cells allowing the body to communicate with the brain about how much energy (fat) the republic has stored, and whether it needs more, or should burn some off, and whether it is an advantageous time nutritionally-speaking for the republic –you– to reproduce or not.

What Exactly is Leptin?

Leptin is a very powerful and influential hormone produced by fat cells that has totally changed the way that science (real science, outside of medicine) looks at fat, nutrition, and metabolism in general.

Prior to leptin^‘s discovery, fat was viewed as strictly an ugly energy storage depot that most everyone was trying to get rid of. After it was discovered that fat produced the hormone leptin (and subsequently it was discovered that fat produced other very significant hormones), fat became an endocrine organ like the ovaries, pancreas and pituitary, influencing the rest of the body and, in particular, the brain.

Leptin, as far  as science currently knows, is the most powerful regulator that tells your brain what to do about life’s two main biological goals: eating and reproduction. Your fat, by way of leptin, tells your brain whether you should be hungry, eat and make more fat, whether you should reproduce and make babies, or (partly by controlling insulin) whether to “hunker down” and work overtime to maintain and repair yourself.

I believe I could now make a very convincing and scientifically accurate statement that that rather than your brain being in control of the rest of your body, your brain is, in fact, subservient to your fat — and leptin.

In short, leptin is the way that your fat stores speak to your brain to let your brain know how much energy is available and, very importantly, what to do with it. Therefore, leptin may be “on top of the food chain^“ in metabolic importance and relevance to disease.

How Leptin Regulates Your Weight

It has been known for many years that fat stores are highly regulated. It appeared that when one tried to lose weight the body would try to gain it back. This commonly results in “yo-yo” dieting and in scientific circles one talks about the “set point” of weight. It has long been theorized that there must be a hormone that determines this.

Science points now to leptin as being that hormone.

In our ancestral history, it was advantageous to store some fat to call upon during times of famine. However, it was equally disadvantageous to be too fat. For most of our evolutionary history, it was necessary to run, to obtain prey and perhaps most importantly, to avoid being prey. If a lion was chasing a group of people it would most likely catch and eliminate from the gene pool the slowest runner and the one who could not make it up the tree — the fattest one.

Thus, fat storage had to be highly regulated and this is done, as is any regulation, through hormones, the most significant being leptin.

If a person is getting too fat, the extra fat produces more leptin which is supposed to tell the brain that there is too much fat stored, more should not be stored, and the excess should be burned.

Signals are therefore sent to an area of the brain in the hypothalamus (the arcuate nucleus) to stop being hungry, to stop eating, to stop storing fat and to start burning some extra fat off.

Controlling hunger is a major (though not the only) way that leptin controls energy storage. Hunger is a very powerful, ancient, and deep-seated drive that, if stimulated long enough, will make you eat and store more energy. Asking somebody to not eat, to voluntarily restrict calories even though they are hungry, is asking the near impossible. The only way to eat less in the long-term is to not be hungry, and the only way to do this is to control the hormones that regulate hunger, the primary one being leptin.

How Leptin Resistance Leads to Disease

More recently, it has been found that leptin not only changes brain chemistry, but can also ^“rewire^“ the very important areas of the brain that control hunger and metabolism. I’m not aware of any other chemical in the body that has been shown to accomplish this “mind bending” event.

This has really caught the attention of the scientific community. Further studies have now shown that leptin, or more correctly the inability of the body to properly hear leptin^’s signals, in other words leptin resistance, plays significant if not primary roles in heart disease, obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, reproductive disorders, and perhaps the rate of aging itself.

It helps to control the brain areas that regulate thyroid levels and the sympathetic nervous system which also has huge impacts on blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and aging. Leptin’s stimulatory effect on the sympathetic nervous system also helps determine the adrenal stress response including cortisol levels.

Leptin May Be Even More Critical Than Insulin

The importance of insulin in health and disease is becoming well-known. Aside from its obvious role in diabetes, it plays a very significant role in hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

I was one of the first to speak publicly to doctors about insulin’s critical role in health well over a decade ago (see the transcribed talk Insulin and its Metabolic Effects) and I am even more convinced now.

However leptin may even supersede insulin in importance, for new research is revealing that in the long run glucose and therefore insulin levels may be largely determined by leptin.

It had been previously believed that the insulin sensitivity of muscle and fat tissues were the most important factor in determining whether one would become diabetic or not. Elegant new studies are showing that the brain and liver are most important in regulating a person’s blood sugar levels especially in type 2 or insulin resistant diabetes.

It should be noted again that leptin plays a vital role in regulating your brain^’s hypothalamic activity which in turn regulates much of a person’s ^“autonomic^“ functions; those functions that you don’t necessarily think about but which determines much of your life (and health) such as body temperature, heart rate, hunger, the stress response, fat burning or storage, reproductive behavior, and newly discovered roles in bone growth and blood sugar levels.

Another very recent study reveals leptin’s importance in directly regulating how much sugar that the liver manufactures via gluconeogenesis.

Many chronic diseases are now linked to excess inflammation such as heart disease and diabetes. High leptin levels are very pro-inflammatory, and leptin also helps to mediate the manufacture of other very potent inflammatory chemicals from fat cells that also play a significant role in the progression of heart disease and diabetes. It has long been known that obesity greatly increased risk for many chronic diseases including heart disease and diabetes, but no one really knew why.

Leptin appears to be the missing link.

Could Leptin Also Affect  How Fast You Age?

Leptin will not only determine how much fat you have, but also where that fat is put. When you are leptin resistant you put that fat mostly in your belly, your viscera, causing the so-called “apple shape” that is linked to much disease. Some of that fat permeates the liver, impeding the liver’s ability to listen to insulin, and further hastening diabetes.

 

Leptin plays a far more important role in your health than, for instance, cholesterol, yet how many doctors measure leptin levels in their patients, know their own level, even know that it can be easily measured, or even what it would mean?

Leptin appears to play a significant role in obesity, heart disease, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, inflammatory diseases and cancer. These are the so-called ^“chronic diseases of aging^“.

Could it perhaps affect the rate of aging itself?

The Biology of Aging

Scientists who study the biology of aging are beginning to look at that question. There are two endeavors, two drives that life has been programmed, since its inception, to succeed at and to succumb to. These are to eat and to reproduce.

If every one of our ancestors had not succeeded in eating and reproducing we would not be here, and this paper would be moot. All of your morphological characteristics from your hair to your toenails are designed to help you succeed at those two activities. That is what nature wants us to do. Nature’s purpose is not necessarily to have you live a long and healthy life, but to perpetuate the instructions, the genes that tell how to perpetuate life.

Even so-called “paleolithic” diets, though undoubtedly far better than what is generally eaten today, were not necessarily designed by nature to help us live a long and healthy life but, at best, to maximize reproduction. Nature appears to not care much about what happens to us after we have had a sufficient chance to reproduce. That is why we die.

But there are clues as to how to live a long and healthy life. And that brings us once again to fat–and leptin.

It takes energy to make babies; lots of it. Energy was and always will be a coveted commodity. Nature, and evolution, hates wasting it. It makes no sense to try and make babies when it appears that there’s not enough energy available to successfully accomplish that goal.

Instead, it seems that virtually all living forms can ^“switch gears^“ and direct energy away from reproduction and towards mechanism that will allow it to “hunker down” for the long haul and thus be able to reproduce at a future more nutritionally opportune time. In other words nature will then let you live longer to accomplish its primary directive of reproduction.

It does this by up regulating maintenance and repair genes that increase production of intracellular antioxidant systems, heat shock proteins (that help maintain protein shape), and DNA repair enzymes. This is what happens when you restrict calories (without starvation) in animals, and that has been shown convincingly for 70 years to greatly extend the life span of many dozens of species. Thus, there is a powerful link between reproduction, energy stores, and longevity.

Genetic studies in simple organisms have shown that that link is at least partially mediated by insulin (which in simple organisms also functions as a growth hormone), and that when insulin signals are kept low, indicating scarce energy availability, maximal lifespan can be extended— a lot; several hundred percent in worms and flies.

Glucose is an ancient fuel used even before there was oxygen in the atmosphere, for life can burn glucose without oxygen; it is an anaerobic fuel. The use of fat as fuel came later, after life in the form of plants soaked the earth in oxygen, for you cannot burn fat without oxygen.

The primary source of energy stores in people by far is fat, as many unfortunately are all too aware of. The primary signal that indicates how much fat is stored is leptin, and it is also leptin that allows for reproduction, or not.

It has long been known that women with very little body fat, such as marathon runners, stop ovulating. There is not enough leptin being produced to permit it. Paradoxically, the first pharmaceutical use of leptin was recently approved to give to skinny women to allow them to reproduce.

Leptin’s Role in Improving Your Metabolism

Leptin also is instrumental in regulating body temperature, partly by controlling the rate of metabolism via its regulation of the thyroid.

 

Metabolic rate and temperature has long been connected with longevity. Almost all mechanisms that extend lifespan in many different organisms result in lower temperature. Flowers are refrigerated at the florist to extend their lifespan. Restricting calories in animals also results in lower temperature, reduced thyroid levels, and longer life.

 

It should be noted that reduced thyroid levels in this case are not synonymous with hypothyroidism. Here, the body is choosing to lower thyroid hormones because the increased efficiency of energy use and hormonal signaling (including perhaps thyroid) is allowing this to happen.

Anything will dissolve faster in hot water than cold water. Extra heat will dissolve, disrupt and disorganize. This is not what I try to do to make someone healthy. It is commonly advised to “increase metabolism” and increase “thermogenesis” for health and weight loss.

Yet how many of you would put a brand of gasoline in your car that advertised that it would make your engine run hotter? What would that do to the life of your car? It is not an increase in metabolism that I am after; it is improved metabolic quality.

That will be determined at the quality of your leptin signaling.

If it is poor, if you are insulin and leptin resistant, your metabolism is unhealthy and high in what I call “metabolic friction”. If you then increase its rate you will likely accelerate your demise. To increase the quality of your metabolism you must be able to properly listen to insulin and especially to leptin.

If your fasting blood serum level of leptin is elevated you are likely leptin resistant and you will not be healthy unless you correct it.

How Do You Become Leptin Resistant?

This is the subject of much research. I believe people become leptin-resistant by the same general mechanism that people become insulin-resistant; by overexposure to high levels of the hormone.

High blood glucose levels cause repeated surges in insulin, and this causes one’s cells to become “insulin-resistant^“ which leads to further high levels of insulin and diabetes. It is much the same as being in a smelly room for a period of time. Soon, you stop being able to smell it, because the signal no longer gets through.

I believe the same happens with leptin. It has been shown that as sugar gets metabolized in fat cells, fat releases surges in leptin, and I believe that those surges result in leptin-resistance just as it results in insulin-resistance.

The only known way to reestablish proper leptin (and insulin) signaling is to prevent those surges, and the only known way to do that is via diet and supplements.

As such, these can have a more profound effect on your health than any other known modality of medical treatment.

When leptin signaling is restored, your brain can finally hear the message that perhaps should have been delivered decades ago; high leptin levels can now scream to your brain that you have too much fat and that you better start burning some off for your life is in danger.

Your brain will finally allow you access into your pantry that you have been storing your fat in. Your cells will be fed the food from that fat and they will be satisfied. They will not know whether that food came from your belly fat or from your mouth; nor will they care. They will be receiving energy that they need and will not have to ask for more. You will not be hungry.

This also makes counting calories irrelevant, for the calories that you put into your mouth today are not necessarily what your cells will be eating; that will be determined primarily by leptin. Whether or not you put food into your mouth, your cells will be eating, and if they cannot eat fat they must eat sugar.

Since little sugar is stored, that sugar will be had by making you crave it, or by turning the protein in your muscle and bone into sugar. This contributes in a major way to weakness and osteoporosis. Whether or not this lean tissue wasting happens is determined by your capacity, or incapacity, to burn fat, and that is determined by your ability to listen to leptin.

A strategic diet that emphasizes good fats and avoids blood sugar spikes coupled with targeted supplements (as recommended in my Rosedale Diet and Dr. Mercola’s Take Control of Your Health), will enhance insulin and leptin sensitivity so that you can once again hear their music, allowing your life to be the symphony it was meant to be.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/06/20/this-hormone-makes-counting-calories-irrelevant.aspx

By Dr. Mercola

Reaching puberty is a rite of passage that we’ve all been through, but children are now reaching it earlier than ever before, and while precocious puberty in girls has received most of the attention, we now know the trend applies to boys as well.

In the 19th century, the onset of menstruation in girls occurred around the age of 15. Now the average age of the first period is around 12. Some girls develop breasts as early as age seven¹ .

According to a recent study in the journal Pediatrics², boys are now beginning sexual development anywhere from six months to two years earlier than the medically accepted standard based on previous studies.

African-American boys were found to hit the onset of puberty the soonest, starting around the age of nine. Caucasian and Hispanic boys begin developing around the age of 10.

“The causes and public health implications of this apparent shift in US boys to a lower age of onset for the development of secondary sexual characteristics in US boys needs further exploration,” the authors write.

Indeed, while some may shrug off the trend of earlier maturation, it’s actually pretty significant, as it can affect both physical and psychological health in a number of ways, including raising the future risk for hormone-related cancers. Girls who enter puberty earlier are at an increased risk of breast cancer, for example, due to the early rise in estrogen.

The trend also raises serious questions about environmental factors spurring this development. Lead researcher Marcia Herman-Giddens told CNN Health³:

“The changes are too fast. Genetics take maybe hundreds, thousands of years. You have to look at something in the environment. That would include everything from (a lack of) exercise to junk food to TV to chemicals.”

Environmental Chemicals a Likely Factor

Scientists have brought forth a number of potential explanations for the rising rates of early puberty, but one that deserves special attention is environmental chemicals, and particularly xeno-estrogens, i.e. estrogen-mimicking chemicals. These compounds behave like steroid hormones and can alter the timing of puberty, and affect disease risk throughout life.

In adults, xeno-estrogens have been linked to decreased sperm quality, stimulation of mammary gland development in men, disrupted reproductive cycles and ovarian dysfunction, obesity, cancer and heart disease, among numerous other health problems.

We’re surrounded by hormone-disrupting chemicals these days, many of which are plasticizers. Bisphenol A (BPA) for example, is an industrial petrochemical that acts as a synthetic estrogen, and can be found plastics and tin can linings, in dental sealants, and on cash-register receipts. Three years ago, laboratory tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) detected BPA in the umbilical cord blood of 90 percent of newborn infants tested — along with more than 230 other chemicals!

In September 2010, Canada declared BPA a toxic substance, but to date no other country has followed suit, although BPA has been banned in baby bottles in Canada, Europe and the United States. Frustratingly, the US FDA has denied the request to ban BPA, however many American companies have voluntarily removed the chemical from their products, in response to consumer demand. So, if you check around, you can find a lot of BPA-free products.

However, buyer beware, as it recently came to light that some companies are simply replacing the offending BPA with another less known but equally toxic chemical called bisphenol-S (BPS)! Not only does BPS appear to have similar hormone-mimicking characteristics to BPA, but research suggests it is actually significantly less biodegradable, and more heat-stable and photo-resistant, than BPA.

10 Top Offenders that Can Disrupt Your Hormones

Beside BPA and BPS, other top offenders you should be aware of, and watch out for, include:

Phthalates, a group of industrial chemicals used to make plastics like polyvinyl chloride (PVC) more flexible and resilient. They’re also one of the most pervasive of the endocrine disrupters, found in everything from processed food packaging and shower curtains to detergents, toys and beauty products like nail polish, hair spray, shampoo, deodorants, and fragrances. Exposure to phthalates can lead to incomplete testicular descent in fetuses, reduced sperm counts, testicular atrophy or structural abnormality and inflammation in newborns.	Fluoride, which is added to the majority of public water supplies in the United States. Research has shown that animals treated with fluoridehad lower levels of circulating melatonin, as reflected by reduced levels of melatonin metabolites in the animals’ urine. This reduced level of circulating melatonin was accompanied — as might be expected — by an earlier onset of puberty in the fluoride-treated female animals.
Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a likely carcinogen found in grease- and water-resistant coatings and non-stick cookware.	Methoxychlor and Vinclozin, an insecticide and a fungicide respectively, have been found to cause changes to male mice born for as many as four subsequent generations after the initial exposure.
Nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs). Known to be potent endocrine disrupters, these chemicals affect gene expression by turning on or off certain genes, and interfere with the way your glandular system works.	Bovine growth hormones (rBGH) commonly added to commercial dairy have been implicated as a contributor to premature adolescence.
MSG, a food additive that’s been linked to reduced fertility.	Non-fermented soy products, which are loaded with hormone-like substances.
DDE (a breakdown product of the pesticide DDT)	PCBs

New Concern: Metalloestrogens

Recent research has also confirmed the existence of a previously unknown class of cancer-causing estrogen-mimicking compounds: “metalloestrogens.” The following metals, which are added to thousands of consumer products, including vaccines, have been identified as being capable of binding to cellular estrogen receptors and then mimicking the actions of physiological estrogens:⁴

Aluminum	Antimony	Arsenite	Barium	Cadmium	Chromium	Cobalt
Copper	Lead	Mercury	Nickel	Selenite	Tin	Vanadate

Tips to Reduce Exposure to Hormone-Disrupting Substances

While young girls and boys may show obvious signs of exposure to hormone-disrupting substances via early puberty, other signals are more insidious and may not show up until a disease is already present. You can cut back on your family’s exposure to these dangerous chemicals by following these 12 guidelines. Pregnant women and women who may become pregnant should pay particular attention to reducing their exposure as much as possible to protect the health of their unborn baby:

1. Eat whole, preferably organic, produce and free-range, organic meats to reduce your exposure to added hormones, pesticides and fertilizers. Also avoid milk and other dairy products that contain the genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH or rBST)
2. Eat mostly raw, fresh foods. Processed, prepackaged foods (of all kinds) are a major source of soy and chemicals such as BPA and phthalates.
3. Store your food and beverages in glass rather than plastic, and avoid using plastic wrap and canned foods (which are often lined with BPA-containing liners).
4. Use glass baby bottles and BPA-free sippy cups for your little ones.
5. Make sure your baby’s toys are BPA-free, such as pacifiers, teething rings and anything your child may be prone to suck on.
6. Only use natural cleaning products in your home to avoid phthalates.
7. Switch over to natural brands of toiletries such as shampoo, toothpaste, antiperspirants and cosmetics. The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Database⁵ is a great resource for finding personal care products that are free of phthalates, parabens and other potentially dangerous chemicals.
8. Avoid using artificial air fresheners, dryer sheets, fabric softeners or other synthetic fragrances.
9. Replace your non-stick pots and pans with ceramic or glass cookware.
10. When redoing your home, look for “green,” toxin-free alternatives in lieu of regular paint and vinyl floor coverings.
11. Replace your vinyl shower curtain with one made of fabric.
12. Avoid non-fermented soy, especially if you’re pregnant. Also, never use soy-based infant formula.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/12/19/precocious-puberty.aspx

By Dr. Mercola

Reaching puberty is a rite of passage that we’ve all been through, but children nowadays are reaching it earlier than ever before — a trend that has both health experts and parents alarmed.

Precocious puberty, which is the appearance of secondary sex characteristics like pubic hair or breast growth before age 8, or the onset of menarche before age 9, impacts at least 1 in 5,000 U.S. children, and the rate is on the rise.¹

Even in the last three decades, children (particularly girls) are maturing at younger and younger ages (precocious puberty is 10 times more common in girls than in boys).

Puberty, Once the Norm at Age 15, Now Occurring in 7-, 8- and 9-Year-Olds

In the 19th century the onset of menstruation occurred around the age of 15. Now the average age of the first period, or menarche, is around 12. The time during and before puberty is one of rapid development and change, which is why even months matter when it comes to first menstruation. Before menstruation, girls will show beginning signs of development, such as breast “budding” and growth of pubic hair.

These signs are now becoming unsettlingly common among 7-, 8- and 9-year-old girls, to the extent that many health care providers, rather than labeling these children with a diagnosis that something is wrong, have simply changed the definition of what’s normal… but is it really “normal” for girls to mature at such a young age?

There are more questions than answers in the case of precocious puberty, but what is certain is that girls are developing earlier than they have even 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

One study in the journal Pediatrics revealed that by age 7, 10 percent of white girls, 23 percent of black girls, 15 percent of Hispanic girls and 2 percent of Asian girls had started developing breasts, with researchers noting:²

“The proportion of girls who had breast development at ages 7 and 8 years, particularly among white girls, is greater than that reported from studies of girls who were born 10 to 30 years earlier.”

Early puberty can set the stage for emotional and behavioral problems, and is linked to lower self-esteem, depression, eating disorders, alcohol use, earlier loss of virginity, more sexual partners and increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases. There is also evidence that suggests these girls are at increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and other cardiovascular diseases, as well as cancer, later in life.

Environmental Chemicals a Likely Factor

Scientists have brought forth a number of potential explanations for the rising rates of early puberty, but one that deserves special attention is environmental chemicals, and particularly estrogen-mimicking, “gender-bending” chemicals that easily leach out of the products that contain them, contaminating everything they touch, including food and beverages.

As the featured New York Times article reported:

” …animal studies show that the exposure to some environmental chemicals can cause bodies to mature early. Of particular concern are endocrine-disrupters, like “xeno-estrogens” or estrogen mimics. These compounds behave like steroid hormones and can alter puberty timing.

For obvious ethical reasons, scientists cannot perform controlled studies proving the direct impact of these chemicals on children, so researchers instead look for so-called “natural experiments,” one of which occurred in 1973 in Michigan, when cattle were accidentally fed grain contaminated with an estrogen-mimicking chemical, the flame retardant PBB.

The daughters born to the pregnant women who ate the PBB-laced meat and drank the PBB-laced milk started menstruating significantly earlier than their peers.”

This is an extreme case, but the truth is we are all part of a “secret experiment” of sorts, because hormone-disrupting chemicals are all around us. Bisphenol A (BPA), an industrial petrochemical that acts as a synthetic estrogen, is found in our plastics and our tin can linings, in dental sealants and on cash-register receipts. Laboratory tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) detected BPA in the umbilical cord blood of 90 percent of newborn infants tested — along with more than 230 other chemicals. As written in the New York Times:

“One concern, among parents and researchers, is the effect of simultaneous exposures to many estrogen-mimics, including the compound BPA, which is ubiquitous.”

No one knows what happens when a developing fetus or young child is exposed to hundreds of chemicals, many of which mimic your body’s natural hormones and can trigger major changes in your body even as an adult, let along during the most rapid and vulnerable periods of development (in utero and as a young child).

BPA is, unfortunately, but one example. Others include phthalates, a group of industrial chemicals used to make plastics like polyvinyl chloride (PVC) more flexible and resilient. They’re also one of the most pervasive of the endocrine disrupters, found in everything from processed food packaging and shower curtains to detergents, toys and beauty products like nail polish, hair spray, shampoo, deodorants, and fragrances.

Other environmental chemicals like PCBs and DDE (a breakdown product of the pesticide DDT) may also be associated with early sexual development in girls. Both DDE and PCBs are known to mimic, or interfere with, sex hormones.

Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), found in non-stick cookware, also falls into this dangerous category, as does fluoride, which is added to the majority of public water supplies in the United States. Research showed that animals treated with fluoride had lower levels of circulating melatonin, as reflected by reduced levels of melatonin metabolites in the animals’ urine. This reduced level of circulating melatonin was accompanied — as might be expected — by an earlier onset of puberty in the fluoride-treated female animals.

These Chemicals Also Increase Your Risk of Cancer and Heart Disease

If a chemical is capable of influencing the rate of your reproductive development, it stands to reason that it would be capable of influencing other hormone-sensitive growth processes as well, and this is indeed the case.

For instance, new research has detected the presence of paraben esters in 99 percent of breast cancer tissues sampled.³ Parabens are chemicals with estrogen-like properties, and estrogen is one of the hormones involved in not only puberty but also the development of breast cancer. They are widely used in household products such as:

Recent research has also confirmed the existence of a previously unknown class of cancer-causing estrogen-mimicking compounds: metals. Yes, a broad range of metals have been shown to act as “metalloestrogens” with the potential to add to the estrogenic burden of the human body, thereby increasing the risk of breast cancer and also possibly early puberty. The following metals, which are added to thousands of consumer products, including vaccines, have been identified as being capable of binding to cellular estrogen receptors and then mimicking the actions of physiological estrogens:⁴

Data from a long-running British health survey, meanwhile, has shown that if you have high levels of the chemical BPA in your urine, you may be at an increased risk of heart disease. Some of the greatest concern surrounds early-life, in utero exposure to BPA, which can lead to chromosomal errors in your developing fetus, causing spontaneous miscarriages and genetic damage. But evidence is also very strong showing these chemicals are influencing adults and children, too, and leading to decreased sperm quality, early puberty, stimulation of mammary gland development, disrupted reproductive cycles and ovarian dysfunction, obesity, cancer and heart disease, among numerous other health problems.

Avoiding Hormone-Disrupting Substances is Crucial for Children and Adults Alike

While young girls may show obvious signs of exposure to hormone-disrupting substances via early puberty, other signals are more insidious and may not show up until a disease is already present. Here are 11 measures you can implement right away to help protect yourself and your children from common toxic substances that could cause precocious puberty and other long-term health problems:

1. As much as possible, buy and eat organic produce and free-range, organic meats to reduce your exposure to added hormones, pesticides and fertilizers. Also avoid milk and other dairy products that contain the genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH or rBST)
2. Eat mostly raw, fresh foods. Processed, prepackaged foods (of all kinds) are a major source of soy and chemicals such as BPA and phthalates.
3. Store your food and beverages in glass rather than plastic, and avoid using plastic wrap and canned foods (which are often lined with BPA-containing liners).
4. Use glass baby bottles and BPA-free sippy cups for your little ones.
5. Make sure your baby’s toys are BPA-free, such as pacifiers, teething rings and anything your child may be prone to suck on.
6. Only use natural cleaning products in your home to avoid phthalates.
7. Switch over to natural brands of toiletries such as shampoo, toothpaste, antiperspirants and cosmetics. The Environmental Working Group has a great safety guide to help you find personal care products that are free of phthalates, parabens and other potentially dangerous chemicals.
8. Avoid using artificial air fresheners, dryer sheets, fabric softeners or other synthetic fragrances, many of which can also disrupt your hormone balance.
9. Replace your non-stick pots and pans with ceramic or glass cookware.
10. When redoing your home, look for “green,” toxin-free alternatives in lieu of regular paint and vinyl floor coverings.
11. Replace your vinyl shower curtain with one made of fabric.
12. Avoid non-fermented soy, especially if you’re pregnant and in infant formula.

Theo Colburn’s book Our Stolen Future is a great source for further investigation as it identifies the numerous ways in which environmental pollutants are disrupting human reproductive patterns. I believe it is one of the best resources on this topic and highly recommend it.

Vitamin D Also Linked to Early Puberty

It has been suggested that girls who live closer to the equator start puberty at a later age than girls who live in Northern regions. Since this indicates a potential connection with sun exposure, researchers decided to investigate whether vitamin D was, in fact, related. Upon measuring vitamin D levels in 242 girls aged 5-12, researchers from the University of Michigan School of Public Health found that those who were deficient were twice as likely to start menstruation during the study period as those with higher levels.⁵

Specifically, among the vitamin-D-deficient girls, 57 percent started their period during the study, compared to 23 percent with adequate vitamin D. However, researchers defined adequate vitamin D as ≥ 30 ng/mL, which is actually still a deficiency state! For optimal health, vitamin D levels should be a minimum of 50 ng/mL, which means the number of vitamin-D-deficient girls with early puberty was probably much higher than the study reported.

The earlier you enter puberty, the longer you’re exposed to elevated levels of the female hormone estrogen, which is a risk factor for certain cancers such as breast cancer. This has been the primary “link” between early puberty and cancer that has been explored, but it’s important to understand that vitamin D deficiency is also a major risk factor for cancer, heart disease and many other diseases. So it could be that some of the increased risks that come from early puberty are linked to low vitamin D levels.

What You Should Know About Obesity, Stress and Exercise

Obesity (which exposes girls to more estrogen because estrogen is both stored and produced in fat tissue) is another likely factor in early puberty. The New York Times reported:

“As Robert Lustig, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Children’s Hospital, explains, fatter girls have higher levels of the hormone leptin, which can lead to early puberty, which leads to higher estrogen levels, which leads to greater insulin resistance, causing girls to have yet more fat tissue, more leptin and more estrogen, the cycle feeding on itself, until their bodies physically mature.”

As for stress, this, too, has been linked to early puberty, with girls whose parents divorced when they were between 3- and 8-years-old significantly more likely to experience precocious puberty. “Evolutionary psychology offers a theory,” the New York Times reports. “A stressful childhood inclines a body toward early reproduction; if life is hard, best to mature young. But such theories are tough to prove.” Interestingly, in addition to avoiding environmental chemicals, obesity and stress, and optimizing your vitamin D, regular exercise appears to be one of the best known ways to help prevent early puberty.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/04/16/early-precocious-puberty.aspx

As plastic ages or is exposed to heat or stress, it can release trace amounts of some of its ingredients. Of particular concern are bisphenol-a (BPA), used to strengthen some plastics, and phthalates, used to soften others.

These chemicals are used in hundreds of household items; BPA is in everything from baby bottles to can linings, while phthalates are found in children‘s toys as well as vinyl shower curtains. They enter your body through the food, water and bits of dust you consume, or are simply absorbed through your skin.

BPA and phthalates are endocrine disrupters, which mimic hormones. Estrogen and other hormones in relatively tiny amounts can cause vast changes, so researchers worry that BPA and phthalates could do the same, especially in young children.

To cut down on your exposure, avoid plastic bottles and toys labeled with the numbers 3 or 7, which often contain BPA or phthalates, and canned foods, especially those with acidic contents like tomatoes. You should also avoid heating plastic in microwaves.
Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/07/31/the-terrible-truth-about-plastic-you-never-knew.aspx

More than three decades of scientific research suggests that repeatedly telling children that they are especially smart or talented leaves them vulnerable to failure, and fearful of challenges.

Children raised this way develop an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem less important than seeming smart; challenges, mistakes, and effort become threats to their ego rather than opportunities to improve.

However, teaching children to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life. This results in “mastery-oriented” children who tend to think that intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work.

This can be done by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work. Talking about math geniuses who were born that way puts students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great mathematicians who developed amazing skills over time creates a growth mind-set.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/12/22/the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids.aspx

More than 80 percent of schools in America use toxic pesticides as a preventative measure, whether it‘s needed or not.

Mark Lame, an entomologist and professor at Indiana University‘s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, believes this is an entirely unnecessary practice that carries more risks than benefits to students and faculty.

The most widely used pesticides are, in fact, nerve poisons. They cause uncontrolled nerve firing, and disrupt the delicate hormone systems.

The link between pesticide exposure and health problems in children is already well established. Research has connected these endocrine-disrupting pesticides to health problems such as ADHD, autism, and infertility — all of which are on the rise.

Professor Lame says pest problems are better managed through an integrated approach — by preventing the conditions that attract pests into school facilities in the first place.

Lame serves as a consultant for schools around the country, helping them reduce the toxic load by implementing his Integrated Pest Management (IPM) process.

Science Daily July 21, 2007

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/08/16/80-percent-of-schools-are-applying-pesticides.aspx

The tendency is to lose muscle as you age, a condition known as sarcopenia. If you don’t do anything to stop it you can expect to lose about 15% of your muscle mass between your 30s and your 80s.¹ An estimated 10% to 25% of seniors under the age of 70 have sarcopenia and as many as half those over the age of 80 are impaired with it.²

Enforced bedrest, due to hospitalization, for example, can also have a dramatic impact on your muscle mass, even if you’re younger. According to a 2015 review³ in Extreme Physiology & Medicine, you can lose 5.2% of your muscle mass in the first two weeks of bedrest. By Day 23, you can have lost up to 10% of your quadriceps muscle mass.

Not only are strong muscles a requirement for mobility, balance and the ability to live independently, but having reserve muscle mass will also increase your chances of survival⁴ when sick or hospitalized. Since muscle is lost far more easily and quicker than it’s built, finding ways to continuously promote and maintain your muscle mass is of utmost importance.

The Crucial Role of NAD+

As reported by Science Daily,⁵ scientists recently discovered that Alzheimer’s-like protein aggregates underlie the muscle deterioration commonly seen in aging, and that nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is essential for combating this condition.

Their study,⁶ published in the journal Cell Reports, showed that protein aggregates (amyloid) could be blocked by boosting the levels of NAD+, a biomolecule that is also essential for maintaining mitochondrial function.

Higher levels of NAD+ were found to turn on the defense systems of the mitochondria and restore muscle function. Aggregated proteins have long been thought to be a contributor to brain aging, and this study proves aggregated proteins also contribute to muscle aging.

“The most prominent component of these protein aggregates is beta-amyloid, just like in the amyloid plaques in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease,” said Johan Auwerx at EPFL’s School of Life Sciences. “These abnormal proteotoxic aggregates could serve as novel biomarkers for the aging process, beyond the brain and muscle.”

The study points out that NAD+ homeostasis is required to maintain proteostasis, i.e., the regulation of protein creation, folding, trafficking and degradation. It turns out that boosting NAD+ in later life will reduce amyloidosis (the buildup of amyloid) and mitochondrial dysfunction.

The importance of NAD+ for healthy muscle function is also reviewed in “Sarcopenia and Muscle Aging: A Brief Overview,”⁷ published in the journal Endocrinology and Metabolism. The paper highlights:

“… recent findings that describe key pathophysiological phenotypes of this condition, including alterations in muscle fiber types, mitochondrial function, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) metabolism, myokines, and gut microbiota, in aged muscle compared to young muscle or healthy aged muscle.”

As indicated by the Cell Report study, this Endocrinology and Metabolism paper highlights the connection between sarcopenia and mitochondrial dysfunction in both skeletal muscle and motor neurons.

People with sarcopenia have been found to have both reduced mitochondrial oxidative capacity and inhibited NAD+ biosynthesis, and several studies have proposed that mitochondrial dysfunction in your neurons actually drive the development of sarcopenia.⁸

What Is NAD+?

NAD+ is a substrate for a number of important enzymes, including poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) and sirtuin 1 (SIRT1), which is known as a classic longevity protein. NAD+ is also essential in metabolic processes such as creating ATP in your mitochondria. It accepts and donates electrons and is used in oxidation-reduction reactions in the mitochondrial electron transport chain.

Interestingly, what scientists have observed is that NAD+ levels decline in most tissues over time, and is associated with aging in general and is therefore thought to play an important role in many age-related diseases.

According to the Endocrinology and Metabolism paper,⁹ researchers have shown that when the NAD+ salvage pathways in muscle are impaired, mitochondrial dysfunction and decreased muscle mass ensues.

NAD+ boosting molecules such as nicotinamide riboside (NR), nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), nicotinamide (a form of vitamin B3 or niacin) and nicotinic acid (niacin) have all been shown to protect against age-related muscle disease.

How to Boost NAD+

Of those four, NMN is my personal favorite as it activates the NAD+ salvage pathway. As explained by Siim Land in a recent interview, featured in “Simple Strategies That Will Improve Your Immunity,” which also reviews the importance of NAD+ in COVID-19:

“A lot of the NAD that your body produces is recycled through the salvage pathway. Very little (less than 1%) of it is going to come from food, especially tryptophan or niacin. The easiest way to prevent losing your NAD as you get older or as you get immunocompromised is to promote the salvage pathway.”

I’ve previously recommended the use of NR over NMN but have since changed my stance. NR used to be considered superior because no NMN transporter — required to get it into cells — had been detected. We now know there is such a transporter, which gives NMN the advantage as it’s also a more direct NAD+ precursor.

Most of the NAD+ precursor research is done with NR and that used to be my primary choice. However, as you can see from the image above, NMN converts to NAD+ whereas NR must first be converted into NMN before it can be converted into NAD+,¹⁰ so it makes more sense to use NMN for NAD+ augmentation.

The image above also shows how niacin (NA) also finds its way to become NAD+. Niacin is also a useful supplement to use in increasing NAD+ levels. You just need to limit the dose to about 25 mg, which most is a dose low enough not to cause any flushing. Higher doses are not likely as effective as NMN and exercise in producing NAD+.

The NMN transporter was discovered^11,12 shortly before my interview with David Sinclair, Ph.D., a professor of genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School. Interestingly, NMN is also Sinclair’s favorite NAD+ precursor.

Sinclair is generally acknowledged for bringing the importance of NAD+ to the world with his experiments at MIT in the late ‘90s which connected NAD+ to sirtuin activation. We discuss these issues in “The Revolutionary Science of Aging and Longevity,” the interview from which is embedded above for your convenience.

I believe one of the most effective ways of boosting your NAD+ level is to use NMN in suppository form, as this allows you to avoid most of the methylation of the supplement. Other alternatives include subcutaneous or intranasal administration, all of which are more effective than oral supplements.

Unfortunately, NMN is not sold in suppository form, so you would need to get silicone candy molds and use coconut oil to serve as binder for the NMN. The suppositories would need to be refrigerated as coconut oil tends to melt at 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Additionally, NMN is quite perishable, which is another reason to refrigerate it.

As for the other NAD+ boosters, I do not recommend using high-dose niacinamide because in high doses it inhibits Sirt1, an important longevity protein. As mentioned above, low-dose niacin (vitamin B3) of 25 mg can be used.

Low doses of niacin, along with NMN in suppository form — both of which are precursors to NAD+ — are typically sufficient. As an added boon, raising your NAD+ also appears protective against severe COVID-19, as detailed in “Is Niacin a Missing Piece of the COVID Puzzle?” There are also NAD+ supplements available, but their price tags can be prohibitive.

Lifestyle Strategies Can Address Underlying Cause of Low NAD+

While supplements such as NMN can certainly be helpful, if your NAD is low, your best bet is really to address the underlying cause. The good news is that this can be done through simple lifestyle strategies such as exercise, sauna bathing, fasting, realigning your circadian rhythm and minimizing electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure.

One of the reasons exercise, heat exposure and fasting work to address low NAD+ levels is because they are catabolic stressors that activate AMP protein kinase (AMPK). AMPK, in turn, activates an enzyme called NAMPT, which governs the NAD+ salvage pathway.

Blood flow restriction (BFR) training can be particularly beneficial in terms of exercise. It has been shown to naturally increase your NAD level and is very safe for the elderly. You can learn more about this in “BFR Training for Muscle Mass Maintenance.”

Your circadian rhythm, meanwhile, plays a role because it is controlled by longevity genes called sirtuins, SIRT1 in particular. If your circadian rhythm is misaligned, then sirtuins are not expressed, which in turn inhibits NAMPT, thereby shutting down your NAD+ salvage pathway.

Oxidative stress and inflammation also use up and deplete NAD+, and exercise, sauna and fasting all help to reduce these. As a result, less NAD+ is depleted. So, these strategies not only improve your NAD+ production, but also reduce your body’s NAD+ consumption. The end result is a higher NAD+ baseline.

EMF exposure, which is the topic of my book “EMF*D,” is one common source of oxidative stress, so it too increases your NAD+ consumption. It does this by activating PARP, a DNA repairing enzyme. Each time PARP is activated, it uses up 150 molecules of NAD+. Hence, reducing your EMF exposure can also be an important strategy to preserve and protect your NAD+ level.

Your body also uses up NAD+ to detoxify alcohol, so if nightly drinking is part of your routine, consider giving it up. To learn more about how healthy lifestyle strategies such as the ones mentioned here can improve your NAD+ level, consider reading through the paper “Healthy Lifestyle Recommendations: Do the Beneficial Effects Originate from NAD+ Amount at the Cellular Level?”¹³

NAD+ Is a Crucial Antiaging Component

So, to summarize, raising your NAD+ level and keeping it high has many important health benefits, from supporting mitochondrial function, which is crucial for general health and longevity, to protecting against severe COVID-19 and age-related muscle loss.

The great news is that this can easily be done by implementing the healthy lifestyle strategies reviewed above — exercise, sauna, fasting and recalibrating your circadian rhythm — while simultaneously avoiding things that deplete your body of NAD+, such as EMF exposure and excessive alcohol consumption. On top of that, supplements such as NMN together with normal doses of niacin can help boost your NAD+ in the short term.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/15/nicotinamide-adenine-dinucleotide-benefits.aspx

Hyperbaric oxygen treatment may be a practical method for slowing down the hands of time. At its foundation, aging represents a progressive loss of physiological capacity, researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Shamir Medical Center in Israel explained in the journal Aging.¹

The biological deterioration leads to impaired functions and increased vulnerability to diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and others.

Hyperbaric oxygen treatment (HBOT), the Aging study suggests, may target two cellular hallmarks of aging — shortening of telomeres and cellular senescence, or the loss of a cell’s ability to divide and grow — thereby reversing signs of the aging process in humans.²

Sixty Hyperbaric Oxygen Sessions Slow Down Aging

The research team has been exploring the benefits of exposure to high-pressure oxygen at different concentrations inside a pressure chamber for years, with studies showing such treatments improved stroke, brain injury and brain function that was damaged by aging.³

The current study looked at hyperbaric oxygen treatment on healthy adults aged 64 and over to determine its effects on the normal aging process at a cellular level.

Thirty-five subjects were exposed to a series of 60 hyperbaric oxygen sessions over a 90-day period. Blood samples, which were analyzed for immune cells, were collected before, during and after the treatments. Two exciting results were found:⁴

• Telomeres at the end of chromosomes grew longer instead of shorter, at a rate of 20% to 38% depending on the type of cell
• Senescent cells decreased significantly, by 11% to 37% depending on cell type

In a Tel Aviv University news release, study author Dr. Shai Efrati of the university’s Sackler School of Medicine, explained:

“Today telomere shortening is considered the ‘Holy Grail’ of the biology of aging. Researchers around the world are trying to develop pharmacological and environmental interventions that enable telomere elongation. Our HBOT protocol was able to achieve this, proving that the aging process can in fact be reversed at the basic cellular-molecular level.”

Telomeres and Cellular Senescence: Keys to Aging?

Telomeres are repetitive nucleotide sequences at the end of each chromosome. Sometimes compared to the plastic tip on a shoelace, telomeres help protect DNA, preserving chromosome stability and preventing “molecular contact with neighboring chromosomes.”⁵

Evidence suggests telomere length may predict morbidity and mortality, with shorter telomeres linked to an increased risk of premature death,⁶ but the link is controversial.

“This uncertainty is actually due to a kaleidoscope of biological and technical factors, including preanalytical issues (e.g., sample matrix), poor standardization of techniques used for their assessment, and dependence of telomere structure upon genetics, epigenetics, environment and behavioral attitudes, which may be present at a variable extent in various physiological or pathological conditions,” researchers wrote in the Annals of Translational Medicine.⁷

Still, despite the controversy, telomere shortening has been associated with a 23% higher risk of all-cause death, along with increased risk of certain cancers, including glioma, neuroblastoma, ovarian, endometrial, lung, kidney, bladder, skin and testicular.⁸

Telomere shortening is also said to represent a “major measurable molecular characteristic of aging of cells in vitro and in vivo,” which may have developed as a mechanism to protect against tumors in long-lived species.⁹

Dr. Amir Hadanny, chief medical research officer of the Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research at the Shamir Medical Center, an author of the featured study, added that lifestyle modifications and intense exercise have previously been found to slow telomere shortening, but HBOT appears to be another viable option:¹⁰

“In our study, only three months of HBOT were able to elongate telomeres at rates far beyond any currently available interventions or lifestyle modifications. With this pioneering study, we have opened a door for further research on the cellular impact of HBOT and its potential for reversing the aging process.”

Cellular senescence is also known to play a role in cellular aging, and the accumulation of senescent cells is believed to be an integral part of the aging process, even potentially acting as a causal factor in age-related disease.¹¹

Research is underway to develop therapeutic strategies to interfere with cellular senescence, including eliminating senescent cells,¹² and HBOT has emerged as one potential strategy.

Not Necessarily a Clear-Cut Fountain of Youth

It’s important to take the study’s limitations into account when evaluating whether HBOT is truly a fountain of youth, as the researchers imply. It was a small study, which means the results should be replicated in a larger sample of subjects.

Also, as mentioned, the use of telomere length as a marker for aging is in itself controversial. The study also measured telomere length on immune cells called T cells, which may fluctuate depending on a number of environmental conditions, such as exercise.

It’s a positive sign that HBOT also decreased cellular senescence in T cells, but as noted by Steve Hill, who serves on the board of directors for LEAF, a nonprofit promoting increased healthy human lifespan:¹³

“The problem with interpreting these results as rejuvenation or age reversal is that T cells are a poor choice of cell type to use for this kind of thing due to their highly dynamic nature. Unfortunately, they are a popular cell type to use in these sorts of studies, due to the ease of collection from the bloodstream.

These particular immune cells can have large variance in their telomere length based on the demand for cellular replication at that particular time.

T cell populations replicate rapidly in the face of pathogens, and with each replication, the telomeres shorten, meaning that telomere lengths can vary in these cell populations from day to day. Infection and other environmental factors can play a key role in the status of T cell telomeres, and this is why they are not overly useful as aging biomarkers.”

This isn’t to say that HBOT isn’t useful, as other experts agree HBOT can have significant benefits for longevity. One of the reasons I’m fascinated by HBOT, in particular, is because of its ability to improve mitochondrial function.¹⁴However, it should be viewed as one component of healthy aging, not necessarily a magic bullet that will stop it in its tracks.

How Does Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Work?

HBOT has long been used as a treatment for decompression sickness that can occur among scuba divers. When you sit in a hyperbaric oxygen therapychamber, you breathe air that has two to three times greater air pressure than normal, which allows your lungs to absorb more oxygen.

This, in turn, increases the amount of oxygen in your blood, which is transported throughout your body, fighting pathogenic bacteria and stimulating the release of healing growth factors and stem cells.¹⁵

In my interview in the video above with Dr. Jason Sonners, a chiropractor who has worked with HBOT for over 12 years, he explains that oxygen can be viewed as a nutrient. Your body needs it to carry out its regular functions and, when tissue is injured, it needs even more oxygen for healing.¹⁶

Most healthy individuals have somewhere between 96% and 98% oxygen in their hemoglobin, which means your capacity to increase your oxygen level is between 2% and 4%, were you to breathe medical-grade oxygen, for instance. However, you can increase your oxygen level far beyond that if your body is under pressure. According to Sonners:

“Two main laws govern how that works: Boyle’s Law and Henry’s Law. Basically, as you take a gas and exert pressure on it, you make the size of that gas take up less space. As a result of that pressure, you can then dissolve that gas into a liquid.

An easy example is a can of seltzer. They’re using carbon dioxide and water. But basically, you can pressurize that can, so you can put carbon dioxide into that can. As a result of that pressurization, you can dissolve molecules of carbon dioxide into the water.

In the hyperbaric version of that, we’re using oxygen, and the can is the chamber. But as a result of dumping excess oxygen inside that chamber, you can dissolve that into the liquid of your body … directly into the tissue and the plasma of your blood.

The oxygen in your blood is carried by hemoglobin. The plasma that carries your red blood cells that holds the hemoglobin normally does not carry oxygen. We rely wholly on red blood cell oxygen-carrying capacity. But inside the chamber, you could literally bypass the red blood cell oxygen-carrying capacity altogether, and you can absorb oxygen directly into the plasma and tissue of the body.”

HBOT Fights Mitochondrial and Oxidative Stresses, COVID-19

HBOT can be used to help speed healing of any inflammatory condition, and it’s known to facilitate wound healing and cell survival.

A small study involving 10 healthy men also revealed that a single 45-minute HBOT session reduced levels of metabolic stress-related biomarkers, including attenuating mitochondrial and oxidative stresses and relieving metabolic burdens, which suggests it may be useful for treating metabolic diseases.¹⁷

The fact that HBOT protects against mitochondrial dysfunction¹⁸ is a major benefit, considering most chronic and degenerative diseases involve mitochondrial dysfunction. Unfortunately, conventional medicine still reserves HBOT for a limited number of conditions, such as certain brain injuries and serious wounds, as well as the following:¹⁹

In the U.S., there are only 14 conditions for which insurance will pay for HBOT, whereas there are up to 100 approved indications for HBOT internationally, according to Sonners.

From my perspective, it’s medically reprehensible and inexcusable for a doctor to not treat patients with diabetic neuropathy, infections in the distal extremities or peripheral vascular disease with HBOT, as it will in most cases prevent the need for amputation. Other conditions that may benefit from HBOT include:

HBOT is also showing promise for treating COVID-19 via a number of beneficial effects, including reversing hypoxia, reducing inflammation in the lungs, increasing viricidal reactive oxygen species, upregulating HIF-increasing host defense peptides and reducing proinflammatory cytokines such as IL-6.²⁰

Typically, hospitals will only provide HBOT if you have one of the 14 approved indications. If you’re interested in HBOT for other medical or longevity purposes, you’ll need to look into the private sector for treatment. The International Hyperbaric Association²¹ (IHA) and Hyperbaric Medical International²² (HMI) are two organizations that may direct you to more local centers.

You can also learn more on HBOTusa.com, which is Sonner’s primary education website where you can find a list of treated conditions, research, the benefits of HBOT in athletics, testimonials and much more.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/12/14/hyperbaric-oxygen-treatment-reverses-signs-of-aging.aspx

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), or heart disease, is a term that refers to several types of heart conditions. Many of the problems associated with heart disease are related to atherosclerosis. This term refers to a condition in which there’s a buildup of plaque along the walls of the artery, making it more difficult for blood to flow and for oxygen to reach the muscles, including the heart.

This can be the underlying problem in cases of heart attack, stroke and heart failure. Other types of CVD happen when the valves in the heart are affected or there’s an abnormal heart rhythm.¹

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. and it contributes to other leading causes including stroke, diabetes and kidney disease.² It also ranks as the No. 1 cause of death around the world: Four out of five deaths are from heart attack or stroke.³

Heart disease accounts for 25% of deaths in the U.S. with a $219 billion price tag, based on data from 2014 to 2015.⁴ Scientists believe some of the key contributing factors are high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes, physical inactivity and excessive alcohol use.

Cholesterol Levels in People Who Had Heart Attacks

There is ongoing disagreement over the levels at which cholesterol presents a risk for heart disease and stroke. Added to this, many doctors and scientists continue to recommend lowering fat consumption and using medications to lower cholesterol levels.

A national study from the University of California Los Angeles showed that 72.1% of the people who had a heart attack did not have low-density (LDL) cholesterol levels, which would have indicated they were at risk for CVD. Their LDL cholesterol was within national guidelines and nearly half were within optimal levels.⁵

In fact, half the patients admitted with a heart attack who had CVD had LDL levels lower than 100 milligrams (mg), which is considered optimal; 17.6% had levels below 70 mg, which is the level recommended for people with moderate risk for heart disease.⁶

However, more than half the patients who were hospitalized with a heart attackhad high-density lipoproteins (HDL) in the poor range, based on a comparison to national guidelines.

The team used a national database with information on 136,905 people who received services from 541 hospitals across the U.S. They were admitted between 2000 and 2006 and, while they had their blood drawn upon arrival, only 59% had their lipid levels checked at that time.

Of those who were checked, out of everyone who was admitted with a heart attack but didn’t have CVD or Type 2 diabetes, 72.1% had LDL levels less than 130 mg/dL, which was the recommended level at the time of the study (2009).

In addition to this, researchers found the levels of HDL cholesterol (the “good” kind) had dropped compared to statistics from earlier years, with 54.6% having levels below 40 mg/dL.⁷ The desirable level for HDL is 60 mg/dL or higher.⁸

The findings led researchers to suggest that the guidelines for prescribing cholesterol medication should be adjusted — to lower the number at which drugs should be administered. In other words, they are suggesting that more people be put on cholesterol drugs. As explained by Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, lead investigator:⁹

“Almost 75 percent of heart attack patients fell within recommended targets for LDL cholesterol, demonstrating that the current guidelines may not be low enough to cut heart attack risk in most who could benefit.”

The study was sponsored by the Get with the Guidelines program that’s supported by the American Heart Association, which promotes the use of statins for lowering LDL cholesterol.¹⁰ Fonarow has done research for GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, and has consulted for, and received honoraria from Merck, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Abbott — all of which manufacture cholesterol drugs, including statins.

Cholesterol Myth May Be Kept Alive by Big Pharma

While scientists and physicians continue to investigate the level of cholesterol that may affect heart attack risk, the theory that dietary cholesterol is a contributor has long been proven false. In the 1960s it may have been a conclusion that researchers made based on the available science, but decades later the evidence does not support the hypothesis.¹¹

Yet, as some researchers have pointed out, the move toward removing dietary cholesterol limits has been slow. In the past 10 years, some have modified recommendations to address certain negative consequences of limiting dietary cholesterol, such as the risk of having inadequate levels of choline. Unfortunately, others have continued to promote low-fat diets and that could have hazardous results.

Whether discussing cholesterol intake or serum cholesterol levels, the data do not support the hypothesis that it relates to heart disease. I believe it appears that the evidence supporting the use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs is likely little more than the manufactured work of pharmaceutical companies.

This also appears to be the conclusion of the authors of a scientific review published in the Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology.¹² The team identified significant flaws in three recent studies: “… large reviews recently published by statin advocates have attempted to validate the current dogma. This article delineates the serious errors in these three reviews as well as other obvious falsifications of the cholesterol hypothesis.”

The authors present substantial evidence that total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol are not indicators of heart disease risk. In addition, statin treatment is doubtful as a form of primary prevention. In their analysis, they point out that if high cholesterol levels were a major cause of atherosclerosis, patients with high total cholesterol whose levels were lowered the most by statin drugs should see the greatest benefit. However, evidence does not show that to be the case.

In another review of statin trials and other studies in which cholesterol was linked to heart disease, researchers could not find a correlation between cholesterol and the degree of coronary atherosclerosis, coronary calcification or peripheral atherosclerosis. They found no exposure response in which those with the highest level of cholesterol enjoyed the greatest benefit from reduction.¹³

These researchers propose the link between high LDL or total cholesterol and heart disease may be secondary to other factors that promote CVD, such as:¹⁴

“… lack of physical activity, mental stress, smoking, and obesity. It is generally assumed that their effect on cardiovascular disease is mediated through the high cholesterol, but this may be a secondary phenomenon.

Physical activity may benefit the cardiovascular system by improving endothelial function, or by stimulating the formation of collateral vessels; mental stress may have a harmful influence on adrenal hormone secretion, smoking increases the oxidant burden; in these all situations the high cholesterol may be an epiphenomenal indicator that something is wrong.”

Saturated Fat Is Crucial but Vegetable Oil Is Deadly

One of the reasons so many people are sick is that we’re constantly told that animal fats are unhealthy and industrial vegetable oils are not, and people believe it. The authors of a recent paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology admits the long-standing nutritional guideline to limit saturated fat is incorrect.

This is a tremendous step forward in righting a dietary wrong that started with Ancel Keys’ flawed hypothesis¹⁵ and has since had a significant impact on health and wellness. As the researchers note in the abstract:¹⁶

“The recommendation to limit dietary saturated fatty acid (SFA) intake has persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Most recent meta-analyses of randomized trials and observational studies found no beneficial effects of reducing SFA intake on cardiovascular disease (CVD) and total mortality, and instead found protective effects against stroke.

Although SFAs increase low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, in most individuals, this is not due to increasing levels of small, dense LDL particles, but rather larger LDL particles, which are much less strongly related to CVD risk. It is also apparent that the health effects of foods cannot be predicted by their content in any nutrient group without considering the overall macronutrient distribution.

Whole-fat dairy, unprocessed meat, and dark chocolate are SFA-rich foods with a complex matrix that are not associated with increased risk of CVD. The totality of available evidence does not support further limiting the intake of such foods.”

In a recent speech at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, titled “Diseases of Civilization: Are Seed Oil Excesses the Unifying Mechanism?” Dr. Chris Knobbe revealed evidence that seed oils, so prevalent in modern diets, are the reason for most of today’s chronic diseases.¹⁷

His research charges the high consumption of omega-6 seed oil in everyday diets as the major unifying driver of the chronic degenerative diseases so prevalent in modern civilization.

He calls the inundation of Western diets with harmful seeds oils “a global human experiment … without informed consent.” You’ll find more, including a video of his presentation in “Are Seed Oils Behind the Majority of Diseases This Century?”

Your Omega-3 Index Is More Predictive Than Cholesterol

The combination of a diet high in omega-6 fats commonly found in vegetable oils and low in omega-3 fats, commonly found in fatty fish, is yet another risk factor for coronary heart disease. As the National Institutes of Health describes:¹⁸

“The three main omega-3 fatty acids are alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). ALA is found mainly in plant oils such as flaxseed, soybean and canola oils. DHA and EPA are found in fish and other seafood.”

Each of the three fats plays a unique role in cellular health. The authors of one study analyzed the risk of a cardiovascular event while taking icosapent ethyl.¹⁹The medication is a “highly purified omega-3 fatty acid” that is “a synthetic derivative of the omega-3 fatty acid eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA).”²⁰

Those who took the medication had a significantly lower number of ischemic events than those taking the placebo. An omega-3 deficiency leaves you vulnerable to chronic disease and lifelong challenges. The best way to determine if you’re getting enough is to be tested, as it’s a good predictor of all-cause mortality.²¹

The omega-3 index is a measure of the amount of EPA and DHA in red blood cell membranes. This has been validated as a stable and long-term marker because it reflects your tissue levels. An index greater than 8% is associated with the lowest risk of death, while an index lower than 4% places you at the highest risk of heart disease-related mortality.²²

Your best sources of fatty fish are wild-caught Alaskan salmon, herring, mackerel and anchovies. The larger predatory fish, such as tuna, have much higher amounts of mercury and other toxins. It’s important to realize your body can’t convert enough plant-based omega-3 to meet your needs. That means that if you’re a vegan, you must figure out a way to compensate for the lack of marine or grass fed animal products in your diet.

If your test results are low, and you are considering a supplement, compare the advantages and disadvantages of fish oil and krill oil. Krill are wild-caught and sustainable, more potent than fish oil and less prone to oxidation. You’ll find more about the benefits of maintaining adequate levels of omega-3 fats in “Omega-3 Index More Predictive Than Cholesterol Levels.”

Know Your Cholesterol Ratios

The cholesterol myth has been a boon to the pharmaceutical industry since cholesterol-lowering statins have become some of the more frequently prescribed and used drugs. In a report by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force published in JAMA, evidence showed that 250 people need to take a statin drug for one to six years to prevent one death from any cause.²³

When measuring cardiovascular death specifically, 500 would have to take a statin drug for two to six years to prevent even one death. As the evidence mounts that statin drugs are not the answer and simple cholesterol levels may not help you understand your risk of heart disease, it’s time to use other risk assessments.

In addition to an omega-3 index, you can get a more accurate idea of your risk of heart disease using an HDL/total cholesterol ratio, triglyceride/HDL ratio, fasting insulin level, fasting blood sugar level and iron level. You’ll find a discussion of the tests and measurements in “Cholesterol Does Not Cause Heart Disease.”

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/08/26/cholesterol-levels-in-people-who-had-heart-attacks.aspx

I’ve previously discussed the synergy between magnesium and vitamin D, and the importance of vitamin D for optimal immune function and overall health — especially as it pertains to lowering your risk of COVID-19. Previous studies have also highlighted the role this duo plays in cognitive function among older adults, as well as overall mortality.

Vitamin D and Magnesium Protect Cognitive Health

One such study,¹ “Association of Vitamin D and Magnesium Status with Cognitive Function in Older Adults: Results from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2011 to 2014,” points out that vitamin D not only protects neuronal structures and plays a role in neuronal calcium regulation, but also appears to impact your risk for neurodegeneration as you grow older.

Magnesium, meanwhile, aside from being required for converting vitamin D to its active form,^2,3,4 also plays a role in cognitive health, and magnesium deficiency has been implicated in several neurological disorders.

Using NHANES data from 2,984 participants over the age of 60, the researchers compared serum vitamin D status and dietary magnesium intake against cognitive function scores.

After adjusting for confounding factors, including total calorie consumption and magnesium intake, higher blood levels of vitamin D positively correlated with decreased odds of having a low cognitive function score on the Digit Symbol Substitution Test.

The same trend was found when they looked at vitamin D intake, rather than blood level. The correlation of higher vitamin D levels and better cognitive function was particularly strong among those whose magnesium intake was equal to or greater than 375 mg per day. According to the authors:⁵

“We found that higher serum 25(OH)D levels were associated with reduced risk of low cognitive function in older adults, and this association appeared to be modified by the intake level of magnesium.”

Magnesium Improves Brain Plasticity

While magnesium intake by itself did not appear to have an impact on cognitive function in the study above, other research has highlighted its role in healthy cognition.

Memory impairment occurs when the connections (synapses) between brain cells diminish. While many factors can come into play, magnesium is an important one. As noted by Dr. David Perlmutter, a neurologist and fellow of the American College of Nutrition:⁶

“It has now been discovered that magnesium is a critical player in the activation of nerve channels that are involved in synaptic plasticity. That means that magnesium is critical for the physiological events that are fundamental to the processes of learning and memory.”

A specific form of magnesium called magnesium threonate was in 2010 found to enhance “learning abilities, working memory, and short- and long-term memory in rats.”⁷ According to the authors, “Our findings suggest that an increase in brain magnesium enhances both short-term synaptic facilitation and long-term potentiation and improves learning and memory functions.”

COVID-19 Can Deprive Brain of Oxygen

While we’re on the topic of the brain, a July 1, 2020, article⁸ in The Washington Post reviewed findings from autopsies of COVID-19 patients. Surprisingly, Chinese researchers have reported⁹ that COVID-19 patients can exhibit a range of neurological manifestations.

A June 12, 2020, letter to the editor¹⁰ published in The New England Journal of Medicine also discusses the neuropathological features of COVID-19. As reported by The Washington Post:¹¹

“Patients have reported a host of neurological impairments, including reduced ability to smell or taste, altered mental status, stroke, seizures — even delirium … In June, researchers in France reported that 84% of patients in intensive care had neurological problems, and a third were confused or disoriented at discharge.

… Also this month, those in the United Kingdom found that 57 of 125 coronavirus patients with a new neurological or psychiatric diagnosis had experienced a stroke due to a blood clot in the brain, and 39 had an altered mental state.

Based on such data and anecdotal reports, Isaac Solomon, a neuropathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, set out to systematically investigate where the virus might be embedding itself in the brain.

He conducted autopsies of 18 consecutive deaths, taking slices of key areas: the cerebral cortex (the gray matter responsible for information processing), thalamus (modulates sensory inputs), basal ganglia (responsible for motor control) and others …”

Interestingly, while doctors and researchers initially suspected that brain inflammation was causing the neurological problems seen in some patients, Solomon’s autopsies found very little inflammation. Instead, these neurological manifestations appear to be the result of brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation.

Signs of oxygen deprivation were present both in patients who had spent a significant amount of time in intensive care, and those who died suddenly after a short but severe bout of illness. I believe this is likely due to increases in clotting in the brain microvasculature.

Solomon told The Washington Post he was “very surprised,” by the finding. It makes sense, though, considering COVID-19 patients have been found to be starved for oxygen. As reported by The Washington Post:¹²

“When the brain does not get enough oxygen, individual neurons die … To a certain extent, people’s brains can compensate, but at some point, the damage is so extensive that different functions start to degrade … The findings underscore the importance of getting people on supplementary oxygen quickly to prevent irreversible damage.”

Magnesium and Vitamin D Impact Mortality

Getting back to magnesium and vitamin D, previous research¹³ using NHANES data from 2001 through 2006 found the duo has a positive impact on overall mortality rates. This study also pointed out that magnesium “substantially reversed the resistance to vitamin D treatment in patients with magnesium-dependent vitamin-D-resistant rickets.”

The researchers hypothesized that magnesium supplementation increases your vitamin D level by activating more of it, and that your mortality risk might therefore be lowered by increasing magnesium intake. That is indeed what they found. According to the authors:

“High intake of total, dietary or supplemental magnesium was independently associated with significantly reduced risks of vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency respectively. Intake of magnesium significantly interacted with intake of vitamin D in relation to risk of both vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency.

Additionally, the inverse association between total magnesium intake and vitamin D insufficiency primarily appeared among populations at high risk of vitamin insufficiency.

Furthermore, the associations of serum 25(OH)D with mortality, particularly due to cardiovascular disease (CVD) and colorectal cancer, were modified by magnesium intake, and the inverse associations were primarily present among those with magnesium intake above the median.

Our preliminary findings indicate it is possible that magnesium intake alone or its interaction with vitamin D intake may contribute to vitamin D status. The associations between serum 25(OH)D and risk of mortality may be modified by the intake level of magnesium.”

Magnesium Lowers Vitamin D Requirement by 146%

According to a scientific review^14,15 published in 2018, as many as 50% of Americans taking vitamin D supplements may not get significant benefit as the vitamin D simply gets stored in its inactive form, and the reason for this is because they have insufficient magnesium levels.

Research published in 2013 also highlighted this issue, concluding that higher magnesium intake helps reduce your risk of vitamin D deficiency by activating more of it. As noted by the authors:¹⁶

“High intake of total, dietary or supplemental magnesium was independently associated with significantly reduced risks of vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency respectively.

Intake of magnesium significantly interacted with intake of vitamin D in relation to risk of both vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency … Our preliminary findings indicate it is possible that magnesium intake alone or its interaction with vitamin D intake may contribute to vitamin D status.”

More recently, GrassrootsHealth concluded¹⁷ you need 146% more vitamin D to achieve a blood level of 40 ng/ml (100 nmol/L) if you do not take supplemental magnesium, compared to taking your vitamin D with at least 400 mg of magnesium per day.

The interplay between magnesium and vitamin D isn’t a one-way street, though. It goes both ways. Interestingly, while vitamin D improves magnesium absorption,¹⁸ taking large doses of vitamin D can also deplete magnesium.¹⁹Again, the reason for that is because magnesium is required in the conversion of vitamin D into its active form.

Magnesium + Vitamin K Lowers Vitamin D Requirement Even More

Magnesium isn’t the only nutrient that can have a significant impact on your vitamin D status. GrassrootsHealth data further reveal you can lower your oral vitamin D requirement by a whopping 244% simply by adding magnesium and vitamin K2. As reported by GrassrootsHealth:²⁰

“… 244% more supplemental vitamin D was needed for 50% of the population to achieve 40 ng/ml (100 nmol/L) for those not taking supplemental magnesium or vitamin K2 compared to those who usually took both supplemental magnesium and vitamin K2.”

How to Boost Your Magnesium Level

The recommended daily allowance for magnesium is around 310 mg to 420 mg per day depending on your age and sex,²¹ but many experts believe you may need anywhere from 600 mg to 900 mg per day.²²

Personally, I believe many may benefit from amounts as high as 1 to 2 grams (1,000 to 2,000 mg) of elemental magnesium per day, as most of us have EMF exposures that simply cannot be mitigated, and the extra magnesium may help lower the damage from that exposure.

My personal recommendation is that unless you have kidney disease and are on dialysis, continually increase your magnesium dose until you have loose stools and then cut it back. You want the highest dose you can tolerate and still have normal bowel movements.

When it comes to oral supplementation, my personal preference is magnesium threonate, as it appears to be the most efficient at penetrating cell membranes, including your mitochondria and blood-brain barrier. But I am also fond of magnesium malate, magnesium citrate, and ionic magnesium from molecular hydrogen as each tablet has 80 mg of elemental magnesium.

Eat More Magnesium-Rich Foods

Last but not least, while you may still need magnesium supplementation (due to denatured soils), it would certainly be wise to try to get as much magnesium from your diet as possible. Dark-green leafy vegetables lead the pack when it comes to magnesium content, and juicing your greens is an excellent way to boost your intake. Foods with high magnesium levels include:²³

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/07/16/magnesium-cognitive-function.aspx

The older you get, the more important your muscle mass becomes. Not only are strong muscles a requirement for mobility, balance and the ability to live independently, but having reserve muscle mass will also increase your chances of survival¹ when sick or hospitalized.

Muscle is lost far more easily and quicker than it’s built, so finding ways to continuously promote and maintain your muscle mass is really crucial, especially as you get older.

Age-related loss of muscle mass is known as sarcopenia, and if you don’t do anything to stop it you can expect to lose about 15% of your muscle mass between your 30s and your 80s.² An estimated 10% to 25% of seniors under the age of 70 have sarcopenia and as many as half those over the age of 80 are impaired with it.³

In the lecture above, Brendan Egan, Ph.D., associate professor of sport and exercise physiology at the School of Health and Human Performance and the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology at Dublin City University in Ireland, reviews the latest research on exercise training for aging adults, which places a significant focus on building and maintaining muscle, and the nutritional components that can help optimize training results.

Muscle Strength and Function in Relation to Muscle Size

While it’s true that larger muscle is indicative of stronger, more functional muscle, it’s not a true 1-to-1 relationship. As noted by Egan, “you can have situations where you can gain back function without necessarily gaining muscle size.” To illustrate this point, Egan presents data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which looked at leg strength and lean muscle mass.

While declines in muscle mass and strength are relatively well-synchronized in the 35- to 40-year-old group, strength dramatically drops off as you get into the 75-year-old and over groups, with 85-year-olds seeing dramatic declines in strength and function relative to the decline in muscles size.

Speed as a Measure of Functional Muscle Capacity

One way to measure functional capacity in older adults is gait (walking) speed, which is a strong predictor of life expectancy. Data suggest that if you have a walking speed of 1.6 meters (about 5.2 feet) per second (approximately 3.5 mph) at the age of 65, your life expectancy is another 32 years, meaning you may live into your late 90s.

Having a walking speed at or below the cutoff for sarcopenia, which is 0.8 meters (about 2.6 feet) per second, your life expectancy would be another 15 years, which means you’d be predicted to live to 80. At this speed, you would not be able to make it safely across a typical pedestrian crossing before the light changes to red.

Strength as a Predictor of Survival

Strength can also tell us a lot about an individual’s chances of survival. Egan presents data from a study in which people’s chest and leg press strength were measured to arrive at a composite score of whole body strength. The pattern is quite revealing, showing the strongest one-third of the population over 60 had a 50% lower death rate than the weakest.

Exercise guidelines recommend getting 150 minutes of aerobics exercise and two strength training sessions per week. As noted by Egan, you need both. It’s not just one or the other.

Research shows aerobic exercise in isolation reduces your all-cause mortality by 16% and strength training-only reduces it by 21%, whereas if you do both, you reduce your all-cause mortality by 29%.⁴ Disturbingly, U.K. data suggest only 36.2% of adults over the age of 30 meet aerobic guidelines, and a minuscule 3.4% meet strength training guidelines.

Part of the problem may be that many don’t want to go to the gym. But there’s little difference between doing gym-based strength training and doing bodyweight resistance training at home.

The Danger of Bedrest and Disuse Atrophy

As noted by Egan, enforced bedrest, such as acute hospitalization, can have a dramatic impact on your muscle mass. For example, a 2015 review⁵ in Extreme Physiology & Medicine notes you can lose 2.5% of your muscle mass in the first two weeks of bedrest. By Day 23, you can have lost up to 10% of your quadriceps muscle mass. As explained in this review:⁶

“Skeletal muscle mass is regulated by a balance between MPS [muscle protein synthesis] and MPB [muscle protein breakdown]. In a 70-kg human, approximately 280 g of protein is synthesized and degraded each day.

The two processes are linked … as facilitative or adaptive processes, whereby MPS facilitates (allows modulation of muscle mass) and MPB adapts (limiting said modulation).

When exposed to an anabolic stimulus, MPS rises. MPB rises too, but to a lesser amount, resulting in a net synthetic balance. In response to an anti-anabolic stimulus, MPS decreases and MPB decreases to a lesser degree, resulting in a net breakdown.

The interaction between critical illness and bed rest may result in greater muscle loss compared to bed rest alone. The musculoskeletal system is a highly plastic and adaptive system, responding quickly to changing demands. Relatively short periods of immobilization decrease MPS, with no effect on MPB.

Furthermore, this altered balance is relatively resistant to high dose amino acid delivery … Immobilization has significant effects on peripheral muscle aerobic capacity, contractility, insulin resistance and architecture.

Microvascular dysfunction occurring in severe sepsis is associated with immobilization and may have an additive effect on reducing MPS. In critically ill patients, MPS is reduced even with nutritional delivery, with increased MPB seen, leading to a net catabolic state and thus muscle wasting.”

Research⁷ has shown even healthy young subjects in their 20s can lose 3.1 pounds of muscle mass in a single week of bedrest. This is why it is so important to have a reserve in case you wind up in the hospital and lose this much muscle mass. It may take you the better part of a year to regain that muscle, as gaining muscle mass is hard work and many elderly fail to do so.

The loss of muscle mass also significantly decreases your insulin sensitivity. One of the reasons for this has to do with the fact that muscle tissue is a significant reservoir for the disposal of glucose. Your muscle tissue also produces cytokines and anti-inflammatory myokines that play an important role in health.

Concurrent Exercise Training

While three to five sessions of aerobic exercise and two or more strength sessions per week may sound like a lot, for many, the lack of time is a restricting factor. However, some of these sessions can be done together. “That’s called concurrent exercise training,” Egan says.

He goes on to cite research looking at time matched concurrent exercise in the elderly, 65 and older, where an aerobic training group and a strength training group were compared to a group that spent half of their session doing aerobic exercise and the other half doing resistance training. All groups spent the same overall time exercising (30 minutes, three times a week for 12 weeks).

In terms of leg strength, the concurrent training group had better responses to training than aerobic or strength training alone. There was little difference in lean body mass, meaning they didn’t necessarily bulk up, but they had a 50% increase in strength nonetheless. They also lost more body fat around the trunk area. In short, concurrent training appears to give you more bang for your buck.

Blood Flow Restriction Training

One of the reasons I’m so passionate about blood flow restriction (BFR) training is because it has the ability to prevent and widely treat sarcopenia like no other type of training.

There are several reasons why BFR is far superior to conventional types of resistance training in the elderly. Importantly, it allows you to use very light weights, which makes it suitable for the elderly and those who are already frail or recovering from an injury. And, since you’re using very light weights, you don’t damage the muscle and therefore don’t need to recover as long.

While most elderly cannot engage in high-intensity exercise or heavy weightlifting, even extraordinarily fit individuals in their 60s, 70s and 80s who can do conventional training will be limited in terms of the benefits they can achieve, thanks to decreased microcirculation. This is because your microcirculation tends to decrease with age.

With age, your capillary growth diminishes, and capillary blood flow is essential to supply blood to your muscle stem cells, specifically the fast twitch Type II muscle fiber stem cells. If they don’t have enough blood flow — even though they’re getting the signal from the conventional strength training — they’re not going to grow and you’re not going to get muscle hypertrophy and strength.

BFR, because of the local hypoxia that is created, stimulates hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF1a) and, secondarily, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which acts as “fertilizer” for your blood vessels. VEGF allows your stem cells to function the way they were designed to when they were younger.

What’s more, the hypoxia also triggers vascular endothelial growth factor, which enhances the capillarization of the muscle and likely the veins in the arteries as well. Building muscle and improving blood vessel function are related, which is why BFR offers such powerful stimulus for reversing sarcopenia.

In short, BFR has a systemic or crossover training effect. While you’re only restricting blood flow to your extremities, once you release the bands, the metabolic variables created by the hypoxia flow into your blood — lactate and VEGF being two of them — thereby spreading this “metabolic magic” throughout your entire system. To learn more, please see my special report, “What You Need to Know About BFR,” and “BFR Training for Muscle Mass Maintenance.”

Nutrition for Muscle Maintenance

It should come as no surprise that there is an important synergy between nutrition and exercise. When it comes to muscle building and maintenance, amino acids, the building blocks of protein, are of particular importance.

In the podcast above, Megan Hall, scientific director at Nourish Balance Thrive delves into this topic at greater depth and reviews the current recommended daily allowances of protein compared to the optimal levels needed to support muscle mass and strength in at various life stages.⁸

Research⁹ looking at post-prandial protein handling and amino acid absorption shows 55.3% of the dietary protein of a given meal is in circulation within five hours after eating, which significantly increases muscle protein synthesis.

Research¹⁰ suggests healthy young adult men “max out the protein synthesis signal from a given meal” at a dose of 0.24 grams of protein per kilogram of total bodyweight, or 0.25 grams of protein per kilogram of lean body mass.

The current U.S.-Canadian recommended dietary protein allowance is 0.8 g/kg/d (0,36/grams/pound/day), but healthy older adults may actually require about 1.20 g/kg/d or .55 grams/pound/day. According to this study:¹¹

“Our data suggest that healthy older men are less sensitive to low protein intakes and require a greater relative protein intake, in a single meal, than young men to maximally stimulate postprandial rates of MPS [myofibrillar protein synthesis].

These results should be considered when developing nutritional solutions to maximize MPS for the maintenance or enhancement of muscle mass with advancing age.”

Amino acids also act as signaling molecules that trigger muscle growth. Leucineis a particularly potent signaling agent, although all of the amino acids are required to actually build the muscle. The richest source of leucine (which helps regulate the turnover of protein in your muscle), by far, is whey protein. In fact, it can be difficult to obtain sufficient amounts of leucine from other sources.

The typical requirement for leucine to maintain body protein is 1 to 3 grams daily. However, to optimize its anabolic pathway, research shows¹² you need somewhere between 8 and 16 grams of leucine per day, in divided doses.^13,14

To reach the 8-gram minimum, you’d have to eat nearly 15 eggs.¹⁵ Whey, on the other hand, contains about 10% leucine (10 grams of leucine per 100 grams of protein).¹⁶ So, 80 grams of whey protein will give you 8 grams of leucine.

Time-Restricted Eating Adds Benefits

One of the problems with Egan is that he’s not very literate on time-restricted eating. During the question and answer portion, an audience member asks him about it and he admits he hasn’t studied it.

This is important because restricting your eating window to six to eight hours, which means you’re fasting 14 to 18 hours each day, would make it far easier for each of the meals to be over the leucine threshold. It will also activate autophagy, which is another factor essential for optimal muscle growth.

Autophagy is a self-cleaning process in which your body digests damaged cells, which in turn encourages the proliferation of new, healthy cells. The harder your workout, the more autophagy you will activate.

So, I recommend fasting for as long as you can before your morning workout, and then, shortly thereafter, have your largest meal of the day with plenty of high-quality protein, making sure you get several grams of leucine and arginine, both of which are potent mTOR stimulators.

The mTOR pathway is an important key for protein synthesis and muscle building. As explained in David Sabatini’s excellent review paper “mTOR at the Nexus of Nutrition, Growth, Ageing and Disease,” published in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology:¹⁷

“Over the past two and a half decades, mapping of the mTOR signaling landscape has revealed that mTOR controls biomass accumulation and metabolism by modulating key cellular processes, including protein synthesis and autophagy.

Given the pathway’s central role in maintaining cellular and physiological homeostasis, dysregulation of mTOR signaling has been implicated in metabolic disorders, neurodegeneration, cancer and ageing.”

In summary, fasting activates autophagy, allowing your body to clean out damaged subcellular parts. Exercising while fasted maximizes autophagy even further. In fact, exercising while you are fasting for more than 14 to 18 hours likely activates as much autophagy as if you were fasting for two to three days. It does this by increasing AMPK, increasing NAD+ and inhibiting mTOR.

Refeeding with protein after your fasted workout then activates mTOR, thus shutting down autophagy and starting the rebuilding process. These two processes need to be cyclically activated to optimize your health and avoid problems.

Muscle Health Is Central to an Active Lifestyle

As noted by Egan, “Hopefully I’ve convinced you that muscle health is central to active lifestyles. There’s been this increased awareness of muscle size, but I think we need to emphasize the idea about strength and function. These are the things that are easiest to change with the right type of training.”

In short, if you want to increase muscle size and strength, then there’s no getting around resistance training. It simply must be part of your exercise prescription, and concurrent training, where you’re combining aerobic and strength training in a given session is a time-efficient model.

BFR is also a particularly excellent way to ensure you’re getting effective strength training without the risks of conventional strength training using heavy weights, and is easy to combine with exercises such as walking and swimming. You simply wear the BFR bands while walking or exercising as normal.

Defy Aging by Improving Your Muscle Mass

In my February 2020 interview with Ben Greenfield, author of “Boundless: Upgrade Your Brain, Optimize Your Body & Defy Aging,” we discuss the importance of strength training and getting the appropriate amount of protein to build and maintain your muscle mass and optimize mitochondrial density and biogenesis.

In summary, Greenfield recommends a fitness program that includes the following types of exercise in order to target the main pathways involved in health and aging:

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/03/14/skeletal-muscle-aging.aspx

The ketogenic diet is beneficial for many people as it helps with weight control and management and offers protection against a number of health ailments. Approached incorrectly, however, it can actually be harmful.

In this short video Dr. Eric Berg warns, “The last thing you want to do is get the benefits of the ketogenic diet but then have deficiencies of omega-3 fatty acids.” If you’re following a standard ketogenic nutrition plan I recommend you focus on eating healthy fats and 1 gram of protein for every kilogram of body mass. You should also keep your net carbohydrates to not more than 10% of your daily calories.

However, if you’re not getting enough omega-3 fat it can be detrimental to your health. As Berg describes, your body uses fat for many reasons, including the lining and protection of cell membranes, the processing of fat soluble vitamins, the catalyzation of chemical reactions, and the production of hormones and bile. Without enough healthy fat, and the right kinds of fat, you may increase your risk for negative health conditions.

Omega-3 fats are one type of polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) you must get from your food since your body doesn’t make them.¹ The second type of PUFAs are omega-6 fats. Your body needs both in a balanced ratio for optimal health.

As the National Institutes of Health describes,² “The three main omega-3 fatty acids are alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). ALA is found mainly in plant oils such as flaxseed, soybean and canola oils. DHA and EPA are found in fish and other seafood.”

Omega-3 Fats Are Crucial to Heart Health

EPA, DHA and ALA each have unique functions. DHA is particularly important for your brain,³ as about 90 percent of the fat in your brain is DHA, while EPA appears to be of particular importance for heart health.⁴ ALA, found in plants, is the “parent fatty acid” and is used as a source of energy.

However, while some may be converted to EPA and DHA in the body, conversion to EPA is restricted and unreliable, and conversion to DHA is severely restricted.⁵ Making lifestyle changes, such as exercising, stopping smoking and improving your diet, have a significant impact on your heart health.

The authors of one study published in the New England Journal of Medicine⁶analyzed the risk of a cardiovascular event while taking icosapent ethyl. The medication is a “highly purified eicosapentaenoic acid ethyl ester” that is “a synthetic derivative of omega-3 fatty acid.”⁷

The data⁸ were based on information gathered from 8,179 participants who were followed over a period of 4.9 years. The researchers identified end points of the study as death from a cardiac event, or a nonfatal heart attack or stroke.

The participants either had heart disease or risk factors for it and were taking statins. They were given either a placebo or 2 grams of icosapent ethyl twice a day. Those who took the medication had a significantly lower number of ischemic events than those taking the placebo.

Although the drug had previously been approved in 2012 for people with high triglycerides, in December 2019 the FDA approved it for use alongside statins.⁹Its mechanism of action has not been completely identified, but the American Heart Association lists the following reasons natural omega-3 may have an impact on lowering the risk of heart disease:¹⁰

As explained in a meta-analysis published in Circulation,¹¹ scientists concluded there was a growing body of evidence that omega-3 fats can prevent sudden cardiac death by “modulating ion channels so as to stabilize the cardiomyocytes electrically.”

EPA and DHA Lowers Inflammation, Pain and Depression

EPA and DHA have been shown to improve blood pressure,¹² reduce overall inflammation, reduce the effects of rheumatoid arthritis¹³ and depression¹⁴and help to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.¹⁵

Other conditions linked to inflammation that are positively affected by omega-3 fatty acids are Hashimoto’s disease and inflammatory bowel disease. Nutritionist Steph Lowe spoke with Starts at 60 about omega-3 fats, saying:¹⁶

“Fish oil is a natural alternative to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID), without the side effects but with the potential to reduce the inflammatory response and thereby reduces joint stiffness and pain.”

Your Body Needs Cholesterol for Vital Functions

For decades you’ve been told that high cholesterol levels will increase your risk for heart disease. In fact, some in the health community continue to stress your level of cholesterol as a biomarker for heart risk, when in fact it’s smarter to take a global view of cholesterol — how it affects your body and what you can do to reduce your risk of heart disease beyond the simple narrative which focuses on cholesterol as some kind of culprit.

Cholesterol is vital to your overall health, as it helps with the manufacturing of hormones and vitamin D. About 80% of the cholesterol in your body is made in your liver and intestines, while the rest has to come from your food.¹⁷

There are two categories of cholesterol: The first is high density lipoprotein (HDL), which many know as the “good” type that moves cholesterol out of your arteries.¹⁸

The second is low-density lipoprotein (LDL) or what many know as the “bad” type that may build up and form plaque in the arteries. The American Heart Association focuses on your total cholesterol number, which they recommend you keep at 150 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL).¹⁹

In the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, it’s noted that the Institute of Medicine recommends²⁰ “… individuals should eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible while consuming a healthy eating pattern.” However, in the Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, it was acknowledged that “… cholesterol is not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.”²¹

It’s troubling to know that the public hears one thing and something completely different is discussed at a medical advisory meeting.

Using cholesterol as a sole marker for the risk of heart disease is inaccurate because, like most things related to your body, its mechanisms are complex and interrelated. Increasing amounts of evidence show that people with higher levels of cholesterol live longer lives.²² As summarized by the authors of one study:

“Overall, an inverse trend is found between all-cause mortality and total (or low density lipoprotein [LDL]) cholesterol levels: mortality is highest in the lowest cholesterol group without exception … elderly people with the highest cholesterol levels have the highest survival rates irrespective of where they live in the world.”

While evaluating your heart disease risk, consider your fasting insulin and blood sugar levels, waist circumference and iron levels. I discuss the relationships of these factors to your heart health and the importance of differentiating the types of LDL in “Important Facts About Cholesterol and Heart Disease.”

There are a number of ways higher levels of cholesterol may have a protective effect on your health; these are discussed in “Higher Cholesterol is Associated With Longer Life.” Instead of looking at simple levels, there are two indicators that are important: your HDL/total cholesterol ratio and your triglyceride/HDL ratio.

Why Testing Your Omega-3 Level Is so Important

An omega-3 deficiency leaves you vulnerable to several chronic diseases and lifelong challenges. Optimizing your levels is truly a foundational strategy to attaining and maintaining good health. The best way to determine if you’re eating enough food with omega-3 is to get tested.

In fact, research²³ supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests that an omega-3 test is a good predictor of overall health and all-cause mortality.²⁴

Leaders of the study measured the omega-3 index in 2,500 participants; they found that those with the highest omega-3 index had lower risks of heart problems. The omega-3 Index is a measure of the amount of EPA and DHA in the membranes of your red blood cells (RBCs). As Berg mentioned, fat is a component of cell membranes.

Your index is expressed as a percent of your total RBC fatty acids. The omega-3 index has been validated as a stable, long-term marker of your omega-3 status, and it reflects your tissue levels of EPA and DHA. I just had my omega-3 index done last week from GrassrootsHealth and it was 11.1% and my 6:3 ratio was 2.7.

An omega-3 index over 8% is associated with the lowest risk of death from heart disease, while an index below 4% places you at the highest risk of heart disease-related mortality. Given its importance to your health, it is absolutely worth your time to complete the simple blood test required to determine your omega-3 index.

I firmly believe an omega-3 index test is one of the most important annual health screens that everyone needs. Please note I make no profit from these tests. I merely supply them as a convenience for my readers. It’s the same price whether you buy it from me or directly from GrassrootsHealth.²⁵

Protect Your Heart and Brain With Animal-Based Omega-3

You can get all three types of omega-3 fats from your food, but EPA and DHA come mostly from fatty fish, seafood and grass fed beef and dairy products. Grass fed beef and dairy products, incidentally, offer a nearly 1-to-1 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids.²⁶ Lowe points out the importance of where you source your fish:²⁷

“As a nutritionist, my preference is always food, but one of the biggest challenges we face at the moment is that most of our oily fish is farmed and grain-fed.”

Your best sources of fatty fish are wild-caught Alaskan salmon, herring, mackerel and anchovies. The larger predatory fish, such as tuna, have much higher amounts of toxins such as mercury. As Berg stated in the video, steer clear of grain-finished beef as the omega-3 fatty acids are significantly reduced.

As I touched on above, it’s important to realize your body doesn’t convert enough plant-based omega-3 to meet your needs. This means that if you’re vegan, you must figure out a way to compensate for the lack of marine or grass fed animal products in your diet.

While the authors of some studies²⁸ suggest that algae products may be an effective alternative, the only way to know if you’re on the right track is to test. If you are pregnant I urge you to check your vitamin D and omega-3 levels, as these two nutrients are vital for healthy fetal development and can dramatically reduce your risk of complications during pregnancy and delivery.

If your test results are low, and you are considering a supplement, compare the advantages and disadvantages of fish oil and krill oil as you’ll see in the infographic below. Krill are wild-caught and sustainable; krill oil is also more potent than fish oil and is less prone to oxidation.

Click Here

Embed this infographic on your website:

<img src=”https://media.mercola.com/assets/images/infographic/krill-oil-vs-fish-oil.jpg&#8221; alt=”krill oil vs fish oil infographics” border=”0″ style=”max-width:100%; min-width:300px; margin: 0 auto 20px auto; display:block;” /><p style=”max-width:800px; min-width:300px; margin:0 auto; text-align:center;”>Learn why krill oil is a safer and smarter choice than fish oil through the <a href=”https://www.mercola.com/infographics/fish-oil-vs-krill-oil.htm”><strong>Fish Oil versus Krill Oil: The Cold, Hard Facts</strong></a> infographic. Use the embed code to share it on your website or visit our infographic page for the high-res version.</p> <pre style=”max-width:800px; min-width:300px; margin: 20px auto 0 auto; padding:10px; border:solid 1px #999999; background: #ffffff; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap:break-word;”><code>&lt;img src=”https://media.mercola.com/assets/images/infographic/krill-oil-vs-fish-oil.jpg&#8221; alt=”krill oil vs fish oil infographics” border=”0″ style=”max-width:100%; min-width:300px; margin: 0 auto 20px auto; display:block;”&gt;&lt;p style=”max-width:800px; min-width:300px; margin:0 auto; text-align:center;”&gt;Learn why krill oil is a safer and smarter choice than fish oil through the &lt;a href=”https://www.mercola.com/infographics/fish-oil-vs-krill-oil.htm”&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fish Oil versus Krill Oil: The Cold, Hard Facts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; infographic. Visit our infographic page for the high-res version.&lt;/p&gt;</code></pre>

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Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/02/24/omega-3-index-more-predictive-than-cholesterol-levels.aspx

Youthfulness, vitality and a long, prosperous life have been sought after throughout human history. And now, it seems scientists may have discovered one of the keys to turning back the hands of time.

Researchers from Arizona State University and Texas A&M University have made a breakthrough discovery in plant DNA that could lead to stopping cancer cold and slowing the aging process, ABC affiliate News 15 Arizona reports.¹

The research involves telomerase, an enzyme that produces the DNA of telomeres, which have been shown to play a role in the aging process. As your telomeres lengthen, they protect your cells from aging.

Take It From the Experts: Centenarians Share Their Secrets

While direct applications from the study to human health are distant, there are a number of things you can do now to improve your health span, according to one of the co-authors. In interviews and surveys with centenarians, certain themes came up time and time again when they explained why they’ve lived so long. The 10 most common reasons they gave for their long lives were:

Centenarians are the fastest growing segment of the U.S population, with numbers doubling every decade; by the year 2050, the number of people who will have reached the century mark is expected to pass 1 million.

Centenarians have 60% lower rates of heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure, yet scientific explanations for their health and longevity remain elusive. As a group, they are happy and optimistic and have extremely low rates of depression and other psychiatric problems, suggesting you may live longer by maintaining the right attitude.

Hopefulness and Positivity Affect the Heart

There are compelling links between cardiac health and mental health. For example, having untreated depression or anxiety disorder increases your odds of having a heart attack or developing heart disease. Stress hormones are again a primary culprit.

According to Julia Boehm, author of earlier Harvard studies looking at optimism and cardiovascular disease (CVD):²

“The absence of the negative is not the same thing as the presence of the positive. We found that factors such as optimism, life satisfaction and happiness are associated with reduced risk of CVD regardless of such factors as a person’s age, socioeconomic status, smoking status or body weight.”

With a later study,³ author Eric Kim told The Harvard Gazette:

“While most medical and public health efforts today focus on reducing risk factors for diseases, evidence has been mounting that enhancing psychological resilience may also make a difference.

Our new findings suggest that we should make efforts to boost optimism, which has been shown to be associated with healthier behaviors and healthier ways of coping with life challenges.”

The Significance of Sound Sleep

Getting adequate sleep is an important part of both mental and physical health. Too much or too little can lead to metabolic issues, as well as changes in mood and your ability to focus. Your circadian rhythm, which affects your sleep/wake cycle, holds implications for your brain, body temperature, hormones and cell regeneration among other things.⁴

“Irregular rhythms have been linked to various chronic health conditions, such as sleep disorders, obesity, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder,” say scientists from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.⁵

Italian researchers found that deletion of a specific gene related to aging also affects glucose homeostasis. According to their article, published in the journal Glia, “Disruption of the circadian cycle is strongly associated with metabolic imbalance and reduced longevity in humans.”⁶

Telomeres and telomerase activity are also controlled by your circadian rhythm,⁷ making proper sleep an important part of longevity. In a 2007 study involving 21,268 adult twins, Finnish researchers found that adults who slept more than eight hours per night, or less than seven, showed increased risk of death.⁸

Of course, the quality of your sleep is also important, not just the quantity. Good quality sleep, in the appropriate amount, can improve how you think and adapt to the demands on your time and changes throughout your day. There is evidence suggesting that a calm mind and active body are two important ingredients for longevity.

The meditative technique known as “mindfulness” has even been shown to have a beneficial effect on genetic expression. According to a 2018 article in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity,⁹ meditation has also been found to affect the enzyme telomerase, which some researchers believe is actively involved with the process of aging.

After Resting, Be Sure to Refuel

Additionally, there are many other strategies you can implement to improve your health and extend your life span. To live longer, you need to counteract the progressive loss of muscle mass by increasing your protein intake as you age. The elderly, bodybuilders and endurance athletes typically have higher than normal protein requirements for their age group.

It’s also important to cycle high and low protein intake. Ideally, combine protein restriction with time-restricted eating, followed by increased protein intake on strength training days.

Fasting 16 to 20 hours each day is likely ideal, as this allows your body to more thoroughly deplete the glycogen stores in your liver. Benefits of fasting include the suppression of mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) and the activation of autophagy, both of which play decisive roles in disease prevention and longevity.

You’d also be wise to avoid eating two to three hours before bed, as late-night eating will decrease your nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) level, which is crucial for health and longevity. Late-night eating will also make you pack on unwanted pounds, as the excess calories will not be burned but stored as fat.

Preventing Cognitive Decline

Naturally, if you’re going to live longer, you’ll want to be healthy for the remainder, and that includes maintaining your cognitive function. Specific nutrients that can help prevent dementia and cognitive decline include vitamin D, DHA, folate and magnesium. Additional nutrients of notable interest, which are readily available in supplement form, include:

• Astaxanthin — Commonly called “king of the carotenoids,” is a potent anti-inflammatory from specific types of microalgae and may be useful for treating joint and muscle pain. It also supports healthy vision and can be used as an “internal sunscreen.”
• Ergothioneine — Found in porcini mushrooms, ergothioneine appears to play a specific role in protecting your DNA from oxidative damage. Along with glutathione, it may offer protection against age-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and heart disease.
• PQQ — Particularly important for the health and protection of your mitochondria, PQQ has been shown to help protect against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. It also works synergistically with CoQ10, producing better results than when either one is used alone. Celery, parsley and kiwi are dietary sources of PQQ.

Kick the Chemicals to the Curb

Naturally, there’s also the issue of toxic exposures, which can take a toll on your health, so avoiding toxins is a given, right along with eating a wholesome diet of organic, unprocessed foods.

This includes tossing out your toxic household cleaners, soaps, personal hygiene products, air fresheners, bug sprays, lawn pesticides and insecticides, just to name a few, and replacing them with nontoxic alternatives.

A group of scientists from Southeast University and Changzhou No. 7 People’s Hospital in China recently published a study¹⁰ about the role of plastics in our environment and how long-term exposure affects our health. They found that high concentrations of nanoplastic particles reduced the life span of roundworms.

They believe that different levels of exposure may have effects on locomotion and immune response, indicating that nanopolystyrene is likely toxic to all types of organisms.

“Our results highlight the potential of long-term nanopolystyrene exposure in reducing longevity and in affecting health state during the aging process in environmental organisms,” they wrote. Next week I will post my interview with leading researcher James Clement on his book, “The Switch,” that will go into far more fascinating details on this topic.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/12/24/10-ways-to-live-longer.aspx

The celery juice phenomenon is often attributed to Anthony William, who considers himself the originator of the Global Celery Juice Movement.¹ The movement has received both social media and major media attention in The New York Times² and LA Times³ among others.

You can easily grow your own organic celery at home when you keep it cool, give it an unfailing supply of water and plant it in good soil.⁴ It’s important to choose organically grown celery as it’s one of the more contaminated vegetables available at the grocery store.

Choose Organic Celery for Your Table

Each year the Environmental Working Group (EWG),⁵ a nonprofit organization aimed at protecting health and the environment, publishes a guide to pesticides in produce. This document is called “The Dirty Dozen;” celery usually makes an appearance on the list.

In 2012, it was No. 2 on the list and the one most likely to contain multiple pesticides, with 96% of the samples testing positive and nearly 90% retaining more than one pesticide.⁶ By 2019, celery had dropped to number 11, having been overtaken by strawberries, spinach and kale.⁷

Before testing the fruits and vegetables, the produce was washed and peeled as consumers may be expected to at home.⁸ The Shopper’s Guide, which the EWG has published since 2004, ranks contamination in 47 fruits and vegetables based on more than 40,900 samples.⁹ Carla Burns, EWG Research Analyst, commented:¹⁰

“The main route of pesticide exposure for most Americans who do not live or work on or near farms is through their diet. Studies have shown that eating fruits and vegetables free of pesticides benefits health, and this is especially important for pregnant women and children.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics¹¹ emphasizes children’s exposure should be limited. Pesticide exposure is linked with poor mental development, pervasive developmental disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Their data also suggest an association with physical birth defects, fetal death and neurodevelopmental effects.

The EWG evaluated the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s tests, which found 225 different pesticides on fruits and vegetables.¹² Dr. Philip Landrigan is director of the Global Public Health Initiative at Boston College and one of the writers of the 1993 National Academy of Sciences study, “Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children.”¹³

He underscores the implications of pesticide exposure and stresses that when possible, steps should be taken to lower a child’s exposure while continuing to offer a diet full of fresh produce.¹⁴

The dangers of pesticide exposure continue into adulthood. The Pesticide Action Network reports long-term toxicity at low doses has been associated with Parkinson’s disease, depression, anxiety, asthma and certain cancers.¹⁵

Celery Juice Trending: Rising Cost Is a Perfect Storm

Michael Karsch is the CEO of a New York chain of juice bars, Juice Press,^16,17and he tracks juice trends. In 2018 he noticed a rise in celery juice interest and decided to offer a 12-ounce, one ingredient drink for $7. Karsch spoke to The New York Times about the shortage and his take on the future, saying:¹⁸

“Within a few days, it was our third best selling beverage, which is astonishing for a one-ingredient offering. I have been historically unimpressed by celery. It’s not vibrant. It’s got a ton of water and a ton of a fiber … Three months ago where we couldn’t provide enough celery juice for about 4 days … Five years ago it was organic almonds, there was kale maybe 7 years ago. Usually what happens is it corrects.”

Vandana Sheth,¹⁹ spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, finds these trends are often driven by social media and may be enticing because she believes many people are looking for a quick fix for their health.

She noted moving back and forth between different trending eating plans may be dangerous, and said:²⁰ “I’m seeing a lot more of a disordered way of eating in my practice. It’s not sustainable long-term.”

Sammy Duda,²¹ senior vice president of Duda Farm Fresh Foods, one of the largest celery growers in the world, spoke to The New York Times about his family’s familiarity with the supply and demand issue when celebrities endorse a specific type of vegetable juice. Out of 10 items listed on their products page, three of those are packaged celery and one is fresh celery.²²

The cost not only is affected by demand from the juice trend, but also by the weather. The New York Times²³ reports a warm, dry fall in Palm Beach, Florida, where some of the crop is grown, and a cold, wet winter on the west coast where other fields are located, have affected growth and harvest.

The crop on Duda Farm was also impacted by a soil-borne disease, which together added up to a shorter than normal supply in an environment with a greater than normal demand.

Phytonutrients Promote Health Benefits

Although there’s been a push to promote celery as a cure for many different health conditions, scientific evidence supports a more limited number. One cup of raw celery contains 40% of your daily value of vitamin K.²⁴ In addition to this it contains 11% of your daily value of molybdenum,²⁵ a trace mineral your body uses for the detoxification of heavy metals.

Some of the larger threats from heavy metal are associated with cadmium, mercury, arsenic and lead.²⁶ Long-term exposure may result in neurological damage, skin cancers, kidney damage and bone fractures.

Toxicity will depend on several factors including the route of exposure and duration.²⁷ You can read more about how molybdenum functions in heavy metal detoxification in my past article, “The Three Pillars of Heavy Metal Detoxification.”

Celery also contains measurable amounts of folate, potassium and vitamin B2. Celery stalks are a great source of antioxidants, phytosterols, flavanols and flavones, many of which provide anti-inflammatory benefits.²⁸ But, one of the more advantageous compounds found in celery may be apigenin, gaining interest for its potential to fight cancer.²⁹

Apigenin is a flavonoid found in several fruits and vegetables and some Chinese medicinal herbs. It has strong anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and antiviral properties and is now being reported as subduing different forms of cancer. This has been found in vitro and in vivo by initiating apoptosis and autophagy, as well as stimulating an immune response.³⁰

Apigenin is associated with stimulating the growth of nerve cells. One animal study demonstrated learning and memory improvements when apigenin was injected or taken orally.³¹ Studies have also linked apigenin with activating AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) in human skin cells.

The results suggest that “one of the mechanisms by which apigenin exerts its chemoprotective action may be through activation of AMPK and induction of autophagy in human keratinocytes.”³² In another published study, scientists looked at the anticarcinogenic properties on the regulation of oxidative stress and DNA damage. They wrote:³³

“One of the most well-recognized mechanisms of apigenin is the capability to promote cell cycle arrest and induction of apoptosis through the p53-related pathway. A further role of apigenin in chemoprevention is the induction of autophagy in several human cancer cell lines.”

Large Amounts May Interfere With Kidney Function

Although not high in oxalates, celery has between 11 and 20 mg for every 3 1/2 ounces of the vegetable. Oxalates are found in plant and animal foods with some of the more concentrated sources including spinach, almonds and beet greens.³⁴ Oxalates are related to kidney stone formation and calcium absorption.

Your gut bacteria play a role in how available oxalate will be for absorption. A combination of oxalate and nonoxalate-containing foods will also impact how much soluble oxalate gets absorbed from the digestive tract.³⁵

Calcium oxalate kidney stones are among the more common types of stones. However, it’s not high amounts of calcium that cause the stones but, rather, oxalate.³⁶ Oxalates are compounds that protect plants from predators.³⁷ The oxalic acid binds with calcium to make it less bioavailable and insoluble, increasing the risk of kidney stones.

Oxalates are broken down by gut bacteria, but when your microbiota are compromised the compounds enter the bloodstream and get stored in the kidneys. While 11 to 20 mg of oxalate in one 3 1/2-ounce serving of celery is minor, drinking 16 ounces of celery juice each day may not be.

One 16-ounce glass of celery juice requires one large bunch of celery,³⁸ which often contains 10 stalks³⁹ and weighs about 16 ounces or more.⁴⁰ Drinking this much celery juice is roughly equivalent to 90 mg of oxalates every day. In addition to other foods, including chocolate, berries, nuts, legumes and grains,⁴¹this may increase your risk for kidney stones.

Soothing Chamomile Tea — An Option With Similar Benefits

Herbal teas are a rich source of polyphenols and flavonoids with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. One of the most soothing is chamomile tea, belonging to the Asteraceae family⁴² containing a large number of herbs, shrubs and trees.⁴³

In addition to being used as a tea, chamomile has been praised for many health benefits, including those in the volatile oils found in the flowers. One of the major constituents in the flower is apigenin, primarily found as a glycoside.⁴⁴

Adults can use the volatile oils from the flower in a bath, as a cream for flaky skin, as an inhalant or tincture to relieve menstrual cramps and to improve sleep. For more information about the benefits of chamomile and how to make a tincture at home, see my past article, “What Are the Benefits of Chamomile?”

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/09/23/celery-juice-benefits.aspx

For the past six decades, the U.S. dietary advice has warned against eating cholesterol-rich foods, claiming dietary cholesterol promotes arterial plaque formation that leads to heart disease. We now have overwhelming evidence to the contrary, yet dogmatic thinking can be persistent, to say the least.

After decades’ worth of research failed to demonstrate a correlation between dietary cholesterol and heart disease, the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans^1,2 finally addressed this scientific shortcoming, announcing “cholesterol is not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.”

To this day, the evidence keeps mounting, showing there’s no link between the two. Similarly, the evidence supporting the use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to lower your risk of heart disease is slim to none, and is likely little more than the manufactured work of statin makers — at least that’s the implied conclusion of a scientific review³ published in the Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology in 2018.

Cholesterol myth kept alive by statin advocates?

The 2018 review⁴ identified significant flaws in three recent studies “published by statin advocates” attempting “to validate the current dogma.” The paper presents substantial evidence that total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels are not an indication of heart disease risk, and that statin treatment is of “doubtful benefit” as a form of primary prevention for this reason. According to the authors:⁵

“According to the British-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be shown to be false. If it cannot be falsified, it is not a scientific hypothesis. In the following, we have followed Popper’s principle to see whether it is possible to falsify the cholesterol hypothesis.

We have also assessed whether the conclusions from three recent reviews by its supporters are based on an accurate and comprehensive review of the research on lipids and cardiovascular disease (CVD) …

Our search for falsifications of the cholesterol hypothesis confirms that it is unable to satisfy any of the Bradford Hill criteria for causality and that the conclusions of the authors of the three reviews are based on misleading statistics, exclusion of unsuccessful trials and by ignoring numerous contradictory observations.”

As reported by Reason.com:⁶

“A comprehensive new study on cholesterol, based on results from more than a million patients, could help upend decades of government advice about diet, nutrition, health, prevention, and medication …

The study … centers on statins, a class of drugs used to lower levels of LDL-C, the so-called ‘bad’ cholesterol, in the human body. According to the study, statins are pointless for most people …

The study also reports that ‘heart attack patients were shown to have lower than normal cholesterol levels of LDL-C’ and that older people with higher levels of bad cholesterol tend to live longer than those with lower levels.”

No evidence cholesterol influences heart disease risk

Indeed, the authors of the Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology analysis point out that were high total cholesterol in fact a major cause of atherosclerosis, “there should be exposure-response in cholesterol-lowering drug trials.”⁷ In other words, patients whose total cholesterol is lowered the most should also see the greatest benefit. Alas, that’s not the case.

A review of 16 relevant cholesterol-lowering trials (studies in which exposure-response was actually calculated), showed this kind of exposure-response was not detected in 15 of them. What’s more, the researchers point out that the only study⁸ showing a positive exposure-response to lowered cholesterol used exercise-only as the treatment.

Patients with high total cholesterol should also be at increased risk of death from CVD, but the researchers found no evidence of this either, not-so-subtly pointing out that this is “an idea supported by fraudulent reviews of the literature.” They provide the following example of how research has been misrepresented:⁹

“The hypothesis that high TC [total cholesterol] causes CVD was introduced in the 1960s by the authors of the Framingham Heart Study. However, in their 30-year follow-up study published in 1987, the authors reported that ‘For each 1 mg/dl drop in TC per year, there was an eleven percent increase in coronary and total mortality’.

Three years later, the American Heart Association and the U.S. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute published a joint summary concluding, ‘a one percent reduction in an individual’s TC results in an approximate two percent reduction in CHD risk’. The authors fraudulently referred to the Framingham publication to support this widely quoted false conclusion.”

Contradictory findings routinely ignored or misrepresented

To determine whether the three reviews under analysis had misrepresented previous findings, they scoured the three papers for quotations from 12 studies reporting results “discordant with the cholesterol hypothesis.” Only one of the three reviews had quoted articles correctly, and even then, only two of the dozen studies were quoted correctly.¹⁰

“About half of the contradictory articles were ignored. In the rest, statistically nonsignificant findings in favor of the cholesterol hypothesis were inflated, and unsupportive results were quoted as if they were supportive. Only one of the six randomized cholesterol-lowering trials with a negative outcome was cited and only in one of the reviews.”

The researchers also highlight a large meta-analysis that simply ignored “at least a dozen studies” in which no or inverse association was shown. Overall, the Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology analysis found that “the association between total cholesterol and CVD is weak, absent or inverse in many studies.”

No link between LDL and heart disease either

The Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology paper¹¹ also tears apart claims that high LDL causes atherosclerosis and/or CVD. Just as with total cholesterol, if high LDL was in fact responsible for atherosclerosis, then patients with high LDL would be diagnosed with atherosclerosis more frequently, yet they’re not, and those with the highest levels would have the greatest severity of atherosclerosis, yet they don’t.

The researchers cite studies showing “no association” between LDL and coronary calcification or degree of atherosclerosis. Ditto for LDL and CVD. In fact, a study looking at nearly 140,000 patients with acute myocardial infarctionfound them to have lower than normal LDL at the time of admission.

Even more telling, another study, which had originally reported similar findings, still went ahead and lowered the patients’ LDL even more. At follow-up three years later, they discovered that patients with an LDL level below 105 mg/dl (2 mmol/L) had double the mortality rate of those with higher LDL.¹²

Interestingly, the authors suggest this inverse relationship may be due to low LDL increasing your risk for infectious diseases and cancer, both of which are common killers.

They also review evidence showing older people with high LDL do not die prematurely — they actually live the longest, outliving both those with untreated low LDL and those on statin treatment. One such study^13,14 — a meta-analysis of 19 studies — found 92% of individuals with high cholesterol lived longer.

Benefits of statin treatment are overblown

Lastly, the Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology paper analyzes statin claims, showing how studies exaggerate benefits through a variety of different tactics. Again, in some cases, by simply excluding unsuccessful trials.

“Furthermore, the most important outcome — an increase of life expectancy — has never been mentioned in any cholesterol-lowering trial, but as calculated recently by Kristensen et al.,¹⁵ statin treatment does not prolong lifespan by more than an average of a few days,” the authors state.¹⁶

Indeed, the study they’re referring to, published in BMJ Open in 2015, which looked at 11 studies with a follow-up between two and 6.1 years, found “Death was postponed between -5 and 19 days in primary prevention trials and between -10 and 27 days in secondary prevention trials.” The median postponement of death in primary prevention trials was 3.2 days, and in secondary prevention trials 4.1 days!

Considering the well-documented health risks associated with statins, this is a mind-bending finding that really should upend the dogma. And yet, the dogma remains, and may even strengthen in coming days.

JAMA editorial calls for end to ‘fake news’ about statins

The cholesterol myth has been a boon to the pharmaceutical industry, as cholesterol-lowering statins — often prescribed as a primary prevention against heart attack and stroke — have become one of the most frequently used drugs on the market. In 2012-2013, 27.8% of American adults over the age of 40 reported using a statin, up from 17.9% a decade earlier.^17,18 But that was six years ago, I suspect over a third of adults over the age of 40 are now using statins.

In addition to the BMJ Open study cited above, an evidence report¹⁹ by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, published November 2016 in JAMA, found 250 people need to take a statin for one to six years to prevent a single death from any cause; 233 had to take a statin for two to six years to prevent a single cardiovascular death specifically. To prevent a single cardiovascular event in people younger than 70, 94 individuals would have to take a statin.

As noted in a 2015 report,²⁰ “statistical deception created the appearance that statins are safe and effective in primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease.” The paper points out that by using a statistical tool known as relative risk reduction, the trivial benefits of statins appear greatly amplified.

Scientific findings such as these are the core reason why statins are given negative press. However, we may soon see a reversal in the news cycle, with negative statin articles being tagged as “fake news.”

According to a June 2019 editorial²¹ in JAMA Cardiology, written by cardiologist Ann Marie Navar,²² statins are the victim of “fear-based medical information,” just like vaccines, and this is what’s driving patient nonadherence. Cardiovascular Business reported:²³

“We know that what people read influences their actions, Navar said, and indeed, one 2016 study in the European Heart Journal found that on a population level, statin discontinuation increased after negative news stories about statins surfaced in those communities.

In another study, more than one in three heart patients said they declined a statin prescription solely for fears of adverse effects. ‘Measles outbreaks are highly visible: a rash appears, public health agencies respond, headlines are made and the medical community responds vocally,’ Navar wrote.

‘In contrast, when a patient who has refused a statin because of concerns stoked by false information has an MI, the result is less visible. Nevertheless, cardiologists and primary care physicians observe the smoldering outbreak of statin refusal daily.’”

Cardiovascular Business summarizes Navar’s suggestions for how doctors can fight back against false information about statins and build adherence, such as handing out yearlong prescriptions with automatic refills.²⁴

When I first wrote about the censorship of anti-vaccine material occurring on every single online platform, I warned that this censorship would not stop at vaccines. And here we’re already seeing the call for censoring anti-statin information by glibly labeling it all “fake news.”

Chances are, the censoring of anti-statin information is already underway. A quick Google search for “statin side effects” garnered pages worth of links talking about minor risks, the benefits of statins, comparison articles, looking at two different brands — in other words, mostly positive news.

The scientific fact is, aside from being a “waste of time” and not doing anything to reduce mortality, statins also come with a long list of potential side effects and clinical challenges, including:

How to assess your heart disease risk

>>>>> Click Here <<<<<

As a general rule, cholesterol-lowering drugs are not required or prudent for the majority of people — especially if both high cholesterol and longevity run in your family. Remember, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests your overall cholesterol level has little to nothing to do with your risk for heart disease.

For more information about cholesterol and what the different levels mean, take a look at the infographic above. You can also learn more about the benefits of cholesterol, and why you don’t want your level to be too low, in “Cholesterol Plays Key Role in Cell Signaling.” As for evaluating your heart disease risk, the following tests will provide you with a more accurate picture of your risk:

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/07/24/cholesterol-myth-what-really-causes-heart-disease.aspx

By Dr. Mercola

Over the years, I’ve written a number of articles outing industry front groups¹such as the Genetic Literacy Project, the American Council for Science and Health (ACSH),² Science 2.0, GMO Answers, Independent Women’s Forum, Science Codex, Center for Consumer Freedom and the Center for Inquiry.

Once you start to investigate these front groups, you’ll find the same names appearing again and again, cowriting articles, interviewing each other and referring to each other’s work in a closed loop.

I’ve also written about academics and journalists who, while presenting themselves as independent experts, are actually shills for industry. This is a fairly close-knit group of individuals, so the worst actors are not hard to identify based on their associations.

Well-established actors include Forbes contributor Kavin Senapathy,³ Henry Miller, Steven Salzberg,⁴ Bruce Chassy, Jon Entine,^5,6 Kevin Folta, Keith Kloor⁷and Mark Lynas.

Learn to Recognize Astroturfing When You See It

In the TED Talk above, award-winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson discusses strategies used by industry to manipulate public opinion and steer online discussion.

A strategy that has become phenomenally popular with the advent of social media is astroturfing, which is when a special interests group creates a fake grassroots campaign for or against a particular agenda. You might think it’s a group of moms devoted to children’s health that is touting the benefits of GMOs or vaccines, for example, when in fact the campaign is run by industry.

Increasingly over the past year or so you may have seen a number of articles simultaneously criticizing both the “anti-vaxxers” and “anti-GMO movement,” making contemptuous and sometimes wildly insulting comments about people who question the safety of either of these industries and their wares.

While GMOs and vaccines may seem like strange bedfellows, the cross-linking of these two industries in propaganda material is neither accidental nor haphazard.

Industry Messaging Example

In a May 18, 2017 Forbes article,⁸ Senapathy (one well-known mouthpiece for the GMO industry) took aim at the “anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements,” saying they’re “inextricably linked and cause preventable suffering.”

“The thoroughly answered question of whether vaccines cause autism isn’t really a question outside of conspiracy-theorist circles,” Senapathy writes.

“The body of evidence shows that vaccination has … vastly reduced suffering and death … and that vaccines don’t cause autism, cancer, dementia or long term health problems, and that any minute risk is vastly outweighed by benefits to individuals and society.

Yet with the backing of prominent leaders like Robert DeNiro and Robert Kennedy Jr., anti-vaccine groups fuel common narratives that keep herd immunity down, directly leading to suffering and death.

Now with Donald Trump embracing vaccine skeptics, the anti-vaccine movement has earned a hallowed place on the shelf next to other tinfoil hat clad schools of thought.

The question of the safety of genetically engineered crops (GMOs) has been answered just as thoroughly, and the anti-GMO movement deserves its own place on the same shelf, not just for being wrong but for its role in unconscionable suffering …

She goes on to point out how similar the communication tactics are between vaccine and GMO detractors. Ironically, her article reveals just as much if not more about the biotech and vaccine industries’ messaging tactics. You can go through her article and check off numerous boxes for how to spot a piece of industry propaganda.

That includes the claim that the science is settled (which automatically precludes the need for further discussion), citing a fellow industry shill (in this case Kloor), using strong, derogatory language when describing those who disagree with industry talking points, making ample references to “conspiracy theories” and “other tinfoil hat clad schools of thought.”

Seven Classic Propaganda Techniques

Whenever you hear or read that someone is a “quack,” and that “the science has been settled,” or that something is “science-based,” it’s probably a smear campaign created by an astroturf group, industry front group or paid shill. In fact, the seven techniques of propaganda have been clearly delineated and are used without exception by most industries. As noted by writer Morgan Crouch in his article, “What Are the Seven Techniques of Propaganda?” these include:⁹

1. Name calling — Derogatory terms or discriminatory words used to arouse suspicion and prejudice
2. Glittering generalities — Slogans, catchphrases and highly generalized statements that sound good but mean little and prove nothing (such as “the science is settled”)
3. Transfer — The linking of a company/industry idea with a revered symbol
4. Testimonial — Testimony by a respected authority, similar to celebrity endorsement
5. Plain folks — Corporate material presented by someone who appears to be “just like you” — someone who shares your concerns and ideals
6. Bandwagon — Creating the illusion that there’s a consensus, which capitalizes on people’s inherent desire to be on the “right” side
7. Card stacking — Using only those facts that support the company’s/industry’s ideas, with the aim of making you assume these facts are conclusive. As noted by Crouch, “By ‘stacking cards against the truth,’ propagandists can control the beliefs of their audience”

Pesticide and Vaccine Partnerships Revealed

While Senapathy tries to show how those who question the safety of either GMOs or vaccines are all alike — that is, tinfoil hat-wearing lunatics who follow flat earth theories in their spare time — what she ultimately achieves is a perfect example of industry PR.

This systematic messaging strategy has been carefully developed, and is known to have a penetrating psychological effect. Both the vaccine and biotechnology industries use the same terminology and the same psychological assault strategies to make you feel like you’re in the wrong — or worse.

In her article, Senapathy basically accuses all vaccine and GMO safety advocates of being killers, merely for asking questions and not settling for non-answers, and doing what they think is right for their own health and that of their children.

Another article¹⁰ that connects the vaccine and chemical technology industries was recently published by The Feed.

In it, Ashleigh Morse, Ph.D., whose training centers on psychology and the influence of environmental cues on decision-making, and who says she works as a consultant to “a range of clients” in the field of science communication and public health,¹¹ argues that juries are incapable of assessing the validity of scientific evidence presented in court, or the validity of the scientific methods used.

Specifically, Morse — whose professional credits include a single published research paper listed on her LinkedIN bio on the role of opioid processes in reward and decision-making — is referring to the recent jury verdict against Monsanto, but she goes on to link that to vaccine science. “When juries decide on the science, we get autism linked to vaccines and the Monsanto verdict,” she writes.

When In Doubt, Blame the Russians

Then there’s the curious claim that the Russians are to blame for Americans’ lack of faith in vaccine safety.¹² According to a recent paper¹³ published in the American Journal of Public Health, Russian trolls and Soviet-directed Twitter bots promoted anti-vaccine information on social media to “amplify the vaccine debate” and create dissent in the U.S.

According to the authors, “Accounts masquerading as legitimate users create false equivalency, eroding public consensus on vaccination,” and “Directly confronting vaccine skeptics enables bots to legitimize the vaccine debate.” Those two sentences are interesting and revealing indeed.

In a nutshell, they’re saying that by providing anti-vaccine content, these bots made it seem as though there was actually something to discuss when, in the opinion of the authors, no discussion about vaccine safety should occur at all.

Apparently, it is their view that the vaccine debate is “illegitimate,” since there’s “public consensus” on vaccines (refer back to the bandwagon strategy, No. 6 in the propaganda list above).

In other words, everyone knows vaccines are safe; the science is settled, so there’s no valid reason to question it. Summing up the alleged Russian bots’ efforts to sway public opinion against vaccination, the authors referred to it as “weaponized health communication.”

The Russians Did It Again

Coincidentally, the vaccine paper above was submitted for publication shortly after news stories began circulating claiming the Russians were behind anti-GMO rhetoric.¹⁴ Minnesota Farm Living writes:¹⁵

“Researchers from Iowa State University (Shawn Dorius and Carolyn Lawrence-Dill) wanted to better understand the controversy around genetically engineered food.¹⁶ The issue is with the overwhelming belief in the science community is that GMOs are safe, consumers still question their safety. Dorius and Lawrence-Dill wanted to find out why.

What they found was surprising. The ISU researchers looked at not only how U.S. publications portrayed GMOs but also looked at the American versions of RT and Sputknik, two Russian publications. They counted how many times the term ‘GMO’ was used in different publications …

They went a step further and analyzed the tone of each article. What they found is the Russian publications were overwhelming anti-GMO. The articles talked negatively about environmental risks, nutrition concerns, and health risks of GMOs.”

Here, the author links to the “Are GMOs Safe?” page on the Genetic Literacy Project’s website as evidence to support GMO safety. But, the Genetic Literacy Project is a well-known front group for the GMO industry and hardly a reliable source of impartial information.

As for why the Russians would want to spread anti-GMO rhetoric in the U.S., the study authors note Russia has an interest in creating division among the American people to weaken the country as a whole, and to promote their own agricultural exports, as Russia banned GMOs in 2016 and is trying to increase its exports of organic food.

Claim of Scientific Consensus on GMO Safety Is Patently False

In the Minnesota Farm Living article cited above, you can see the telltale industry rhetoric in the sentence, “the overwhelming belief in the science community is that GMOs are safe, [yet] consumers still question their safety.” The reality is there is no scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs.

That is in fact the title of a scientific statement¹⁷ published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe, January 24, 2015. The statement, aptly titled “No Scientific Consensus on GMO Safety,” was signed by 300 scientists, researchers, physicians and scholars.

What’s more, the paper states that the claim of scientific consensus on GMO safety is in actuality “an artificial construct that has been falsely perpetuated,” and that such a claim “is misleading and misrepresents or outright ignores the currently available scientific evidence and the broad diversity of scientific opinions among scientists on this issue.”

In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration still does not possess any evidence demonstrating safety because they do not do scientific reviews. And even if they did, hundreds of scientists say there’s no evidence demonstrating that genetically engineered foods are safe, and a number of independent studies have raised serious health concerns.

To learn more about how GMOs were introduced into the food supply without safety testing, see my two-part interview with attorney Steven Druker, author of “Altered Genes, Twisted Truth.” (Part 1, Part 2.)

GMO-Vaccine Convergence

The reason for the joining of PR forces between the vaccine and biotech industries becomes clearer when you take into account the fact that GMOs are moving into the vaccine industry. The 2016 article,¹⁸ “GMOs Lead the Fight Against Zika, Ebola and the Next Unknown Pandemic,” published in The Conversation, asserts that GMOs play a “vital role” in medicine, adding:

“Most modern biomedical advances, especially the vaccines used to eradicate disease and protect against pandemics … rely on the same molecular biology tools that are used to create genetically modified organisms.

To protect the public, scientists have embraced GMO technology to quickly study new health threats, manufacture enough protective vaccines, and monitor and even predict new outbreaks.”

Additionally, scientists are also exploring the possibility of vaccinating plants against pests as an alternative to using pesticides.¹⁹ In other words, it’s really quite crucial for these two bedfellows, strange as their joining may seem at first, to get people to embrace both genetic engineering and vaccines.

That’s why we’re now seeing more and more articles deriding both vaccine and GMO safety advocates in the same piece, whether it necessarily makes sense to do so or not.

Both of these industries are using the exact same messaging strategies — because so far they have worked — to achieve the same aim: Shame those who dare question the safety of either, and make them feel like ignorant outcasts and social misfits, thereby shutting down the conversation.

Preempting Your Rights

In my five-part “Ghost in the Machine” series, I discuss the many ways in which big industries manipulate science, and how they’ve captured our regulatory agencies and manipulate our political system. Here’s a listing of the series, in case you missed any of them:

A feature common to both the vaccine industry and the biotech industry is the use of legislation to preempt your rights and force you to use their products whether you want to or not, and without regard for the health consequences.

In recent years, I’ve written extensively about the vaccine industry’s attempts to mandate vaccines and eliminate personal belief exemptions across the U.S. In some cases, they’ve succeeded. In others, they’ve lost, but efforts to strip every American of their right to informed consent and medical freedom is ongoing.

The chemical technology industry is following the same agenda. One of the latest infringements on your rights is a provision in the Farm Bill that would block local governments from regulating pesticide use. The U.S. House committee approved the draft back in April. As noted by Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides:²⁰

“This is really a backdoor attempt to interfere with state governments and local governments. I think the trend is for local governments to engage on this issue. This would undermine that.”

Monsanto Ghostwriting Shill Attempts to Tie USRTK to Russian Troll Efforts

A common corporate tactic is to use “third-party experts” to bring the industry’s message to the public under the cloak of independent opinion or expertise (No. 4, “Testimonial”). The idea is that academic types are far more credible than industry employees when it comes to defending the industry’s position.

A well-known spokesperson for the GMO industry is Henry Miller, who was thoroughly outed as a Monsanto shill during the 2012 Proposition 37 GMO labeling campaign in California. A “No on 37” advertisement had to be pulled off the air because Miller was fraudulently identified as being part of the Stanford University faculty.

Last year, Miller was outed yet again — this time as a ghostwriter for Monsanto. Forbes fired Miller when it became clear he had submitted ghostwritten material. On a relevant side note, Senapathy has cowritten articles with Miller, which is why some of her Forbes articles ended up being deleted as well,²¹ and the foreword for her book “Fear Babe” was written by Folta, a University of Florida professor who hid his financial ties to Monsanto.

The Freedom of Information Act Request (FOIA) discovery against Monsanto was led by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK). Proving he’s still working on Monsanto’s behalf, Miller penned a two-part article^22,23 for Investor’s Business Daily this past summer, in which he tries — quite unsuccessfully — to tie USRTK to the alleged Russian GMO disinformation campaign.

The fact that they’re still turning to Miller is probably a sign of just how desperate Monsanto (now Bayer) has become. Other discovery documents obtained by USRTK included email correspondence revealing Monsanto has been quite desperate for a number of years already.

In an email dated February 26, 2015, Daniel Goldstein, senior science lead of medical sciences and outreach for Monsanto, tells Monsanto’s food safety scientific affairs lead, John Vicini, Ph.D.:²⁴

In this email, Goldstein admits two pearls: First, the list of supporters willing to do their dirty work is short — which is why we keep seeing the same names pop up in pro-GMO propaganda pieces — and ACSH is a most valuable front group for the biotech industry.

Another Undercover Ambassador for GMO Industry Wants You to Think the Russians Are Responsible for ‘Anti-Vaccine Myths’

So, who else wants you to think that “the Russians did it”? Mark Lynas, a long-term shill for the GMO industry, just published: “Opinion: Russian Campaign to Spread Anti-Vaccine Myths Part of a Wider War on Science and Truth”²⁵ on the Alliance for Science website.

As the other examples cited above, Lynas — normally a pro-GMO advocate — is now cross-linking GMOs and vaccines, closely mimicking the core message of Senapathy’s article, which is that “Many anti-GMO groups and anti-vaxxers are closely linked.”

Again, what we’re seeing is a crossover or merging of the GMO and vaccine industries in terms of messaging and propaganda angles. Rather than fighting public doubt separately, the shills for these industries are now putting out a single joint message that anyone who doubts the science presented by either of them is an anti-science nut job.

The take-home message here is that these tactics are nothing but a PR ploy. Yes, they’re trying to make you feel like an outsider, an outcast. They’re trying to make you feel ashamed of your “ignorance,” or worse, as if you’ve fallen for false propaganda propagated by evil Russians in an effort to divide and conquer.

But all you really need to do is look for the hallmarks of astroturfing, and you’ll quickly see through their ruse. You are not wrong for questioning flawed and biased science. You are not ignorant for questioning whether vaccines and GMOs might be unsafe when there’s a clear lack of evidence to support safety claims.

You are not a danger to the public for looking at the evidence and making your own decisions about whether or not you want your family to receive a particular vaccine or eat a certain food. Your inquiries and thought processes are only dangerous to the industries in question which, by the way, are willing to go to just about any lengths to hide the dangers of their products in order to maintain their profits. Stand your ground. It’s solid.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/09/18/gmo-and-vaccine-partnerships.aspx

By Dr. Mercola

Goats are being genetically engineered to become “pharm animals” that carry vaccines in their milk.

Current experiments being conducted by researchers from Texas A&M are geared toward producing an “edible” malaria vaccine, with the ultimate goal being that children drinking the milk will become vaccinated in the process.

While claiming that bioengineered animals could be “life-savers” for people in third-world countries, the researchers ignore the glaring issue that such biotechnology often produces unknown, and unintended, health consequences that prove tragic for individuals and the environment.

Vaccines in Your Milk?

Transmogrifying farm animals into “pharm” animals to act as living and breathing pharmaceutical factories is not new.

In 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first drug produced by livestock that had been bioengineered to express a human gene.

In that case, the protein was extracted from the milk of genetically engineered (GE) goats.

In the latest instance, researchers introduced DNA coding for the malaria parasite into the goat genome linked to milk production.

The DNA is supposed to “switch on” only in the mammary gland when the goat produces milk.

As we’ve seen in the past with genetically modified plants, genetically engineered vaccine-producing animals might enter the food supply unexpectedly — exposing unintended recipients to the vaccine. Or the animals might escape and breed with others, passing these bioengineered genes on with unpredictable consequences. Even the technology itself is risky at best, because when animals are exposed to foreign DNA, literally anything can happen.

Take, for instance, milk from cows treated with a synthetic, genetically engineered growth hormone called rBGH. rBGH milk differs from natural milk nutritionally, pharmacologically, immunologically, and hormonally, and along with causing health problems in the cows, it is linked to cancer in humans. What does ingesting the DNA from the malaria parasite in your milk cause? No one knows.

Vaccine Makers See Dollar Signs When They See Third-World Countries

Malaria is caused by a parasite of the species Plasmodium, which is spread from person to person by infected mosquitoes. Every year, it results in about 1 million deaths, the majority of which are in third-world countries. We are certainly in need of a solution, and while it sounds good in theory that a child could be protected from malaria just by drinking a glass of milk, remember that vaccines often weaken and confuse children’s immune systems, which ultimately increases their susceptibility to the very infectious diseases vaccines are designed to prevent.

The most vulnerable of the world’s children are those in the poorest countries where death and disease is often a result of malnutrition, and where children are often battling some sort of infection 200 days out of the year. Vaccines can be devastating to these already immunosuppressed children, as well as to adults.

However, emerging vaccine markets like third-world countries will soon outgrow developed markets by hundreds of billions of dollars. Emerging markets are areas of the world that are beginning to show promise as a profitable venture for many products, including vaccines. And emerging markets – primarily in developing countries in Southeast and Central Asia, and Africa – have been on vaccine makers’ radar for quite some time.

Giving Immune-Compromised Children Vaccines May Create Illness, Not Cure It

One reason that vaccine makers are interested in these parts of the world is that that’s where most of the world’s deaths from major infectious diseases occur. The only problem has been that, until recently, making vaccines for undeveloped countries with no money to pay for them, was not exactly a profitable goal for vaccine makers.

Concerned that developed countries would have little or no resources for addressing serious infectious diseases if vaccine makers continued their pull-out, the World Health Organization and the G8 – the top developed countries in the world – responded with a plan for inducing vaccine companies to stay in the business.

That plan was called Advance Market Commitments (AMCs). Under AMCs, developed countries make legal, binding agreements to purchase vaccines that are needed in low-income countries. The purchase guarantees a bottom line for the manufacturers. In return, the manufacturers promise to sell those vaccines at reduced prices in the countries where they are most needed.

Unfortunately, legally binding, advance market commitments to purchase vaccines that are mostly needed in third world countries could backfire on developed countries that don’t need – or want – certain vaccines. Malaria is one of the top neglected diseases that world health leaders want to address with AMCs, so the GM vaccine-producing goat milk might already be on their radar.

The ability to resist diseases like malaria requires a strong immune system, and for that, you require good nutrition, clean drinking water, and sanitation. If we want to help people in other countries to lower their malaria rates, it would be wise to focus on these basics first. In order to eradicate infectious disease from a nation, you have to first address compromised immune systems. If you hit immune suppressed children with a potent, adjuvant-loaded vaccine, you’re far more likely to create new disease, not eradicate it.

It’s similar to the corporations seeking to plant genetically modified golden rice in the developing world to purportedly alleviate vitamin A deficiency. What people in the developing world need to receive ample dietary vitamin A are the basics like access to a diverse range of nutritious foods — including animal products like eggs, cheese and meat and vegetables such as dark leafy greens and sweet potatoes. This is the type of diet that is attained from biodiverse farming — the opposite of what will occur if golden rice is planted on a large scale. So in the end it appears the golden rice will do little to improve vitamin A levels in the poor — and may actually make vitamin A deficiency worse.

Fertility Problems, DNA Damage Among the Serious Health Problems Linked to GM Foods

The vaccine-producing GM goats are a double-edged sword because while no one knows for sure what consuming GM vaccine-containing milk will do to humans, there’s very convincing evidence that genetically modified foods spell nothing but trouble for your health.

In one review of genetically modified organisms (GMO) — an analysis of 19 animal studies — it was revealed that nearly 10 percent of blood, urine, organ and other parameters tested were significantly influenced by GMOs, with the liver and kidneys faring the worst.

In the only human feeding study ever published on genetically modified foods, seven volunteers ate Roundup-ready soybeans. These are soybeans that have herbicide-resistant genes inserted into them in order to survive being sprayed with otherwise deadly doses of Roundup herbicide. In three of the seven volunteers, the gene inserted into the soy transferred into the DNA of their intestinal bacteria, and continued to function long after they stopped eating the GM soy!

So, exposing children in third world countries to these potential risks needs to be carefully considered before a malaria vaccine is distributed in GM milk especially when there are other innovative ways of fighting malaria available. In addition, Jeffrey Smith, founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology, has documented at least 65 serious health risks from GM products of all kinds. Among them:

• Offspring of rats fed GM soy showed a five-fold increase in mortality, lower birth weights, and the inability to reproduce
• Male mice fed GM soy had damaged young sperm cells
• The embryo offspring of GM soy-fed mice had altered DNA functioning
• Several US farmers reported sterility or fertility problems among pigs and cows fed on GM corn varieties
• Investigators in India have documented fertility problems, abortions, premature births, and other serious health issues, including deaths, among buffaloes fed GM cottonseed products

Why We MUST Insist on Mandatory Labeling of GM Foods

Mandatory labeling may be the only way to stop the proliferation of GM foods in the US because while GM seeds are banned in several European countries, in the U.S., certain states are actually passing legislation that protects the use of GM seeds and allows for unabated expansion! At present, no less than 14 states have passed such legislation. Michigan’s Senate Bill 777¹, if passed, would make that 15. The Michigan bill would prevent anti-GMO laws, and would remove “any authority local governments may have to adopt and enforce ordinances that prohibit or regulate the labeling, sale, storage, transportation, distribution, use, or planting of agricultural, vegetable, flower or forest tree seeds.”

While legislation like this sounds like crazy nonsense to most people, such bills are essentially bought and paid for through the millions of dollars Monsanto and other biotech companies spend lobbying the US government each year. In the first quarter of 2011 alone, Monsanto spent $1.4 million on lobbying the federal government — a drop from a year earlier, when they spent $2.5 million during the same quarter.

Their efforts of persuasion are also made infinitely easier by the fact that an ever growing list of former Monsanto employees are now in positions of power within the federal government.

Proof Positive that GMO Labeling WILL Change the Food Industry

Many don’t fully appreciate the strategy of seeking to have genetically engineered foods labeled in California. The belief is that large companies would refuse to have dual labeling; one for California and another for the rest of the country. It would be very expensive and a logistical nightmare. So rather than have two labels, they would simply not carry the product, especially if the new label would be the equivalent of a skull and crossbones. This is why we are so committed to this initiative as victory here will likely eliminate genetically engineered foods from the US.

Powerful confirmation of this belief occurred in early 2012 when both Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo Inc. chose to alter one of their soda ingredients as a result of California’s labeling requirements for carcinogens²:

“Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. are changing the way they make the caramel coloring used in their sodas as a result of a California law that mandates drinks containing a certain level of carcinogens bear a cancer warning label. The companies said the changes will be expanded nationally to streamline their manufacturing processes. They’ve already been made for drinks sold in California.”

This is a PERFECT example of the national impact a California GMO labeling mandate can, and no doubt WILL, have. While California is the only state requiring the label to state that the product contains the offending ingredient, these companies are switching their formula for the entire US market, rather than have two different labels. According to USA Today:

“A representative for Coca-Cola, Diana Garza Ciarlante, said the company directed its caramel suppliers to modify their manufacturing processes to reduce the levels of the chemical 4-methylimidazole, which can be formed during the cooking process and as a result may be found in trace amounts in many foods. “While we believe that there is no public health risk that justifies any such change, we did ask our caramel suppliers to take this step so that our products would not be subject to the requirement of a scientifically unfounded warning,” Garza-Giarlante said in an email.”

Learn More about Genetically Modified (GM) Foods

Due to lack of labeling, many Americans are still unfamiliar with what GM foods are. We have a plan to change that, and I urge you to participate and to continue learning more about GM foods and helping your friends and family do the same.

To start, please print out and use the Non-GMO Shopping Guide, created by the Institute for Responsible Technology. Share it with your friends and family, and post it to your social networks. You can also download a free iPhone application, available in the iTunes store. You can find it by searching for ShopNoGMO in the applications.

Your BEST strategy, however, is to simply buy USDA 100% Organic products whenever possible, (as these do not permit GM ingredients) or buy whole fresh produce and meat from local farmers. The majority of the GMO’s you’re exposed to are via processed foods, so by cooking from scratch with whole foods, you can be sure you’re not inadvertently consuming something laced with GM ingredients. When you do purchase processed food, avoid products containing anything related to corn or soy that are not 100 percent organic, as any foods containing these two non-organic ingredients are virtually guaranteed to contain genetically engineered ingredients, as well as toxic herbicide residues.

To learn more about GM foods, I highly recommend the following films and lectures:

• Hidden Dangers in Kid’s Meals
• Your Milk on Drugs – Just Say No!
• Everything You Have to Know About Dangerous Genetically Modified Foods

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/20/genetically-engineered-goats-produce-vaccine.aspx

By Dr. Mercola

In its latest move against small farmers who dare to operate outside the umbrella of CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) and Monsanto-dominated crops, the U.S. government has seized $70,000 from a small dairy farmer in Maryland. The feds did this under the “Bank Secrecy Act,” which requires that paperwork be filled out for any cash deposit in excess of $10,000.

The farmers, Randy Sowers and his wife Karen, made deposits totaling more than $295,000 from May 2011 to February 2012, but each transaction was less than $10,000.

Now they are being accused of “structuring,” a violation of federal currency reporting requirements, as the feds are accusing them of deliberately depositing money in increments of less than $10,000 in an attempt to evade Currency Transaction Reporting requirements.

Government Seizes $70,000 On What Grounds?

The dairy farmer’s “crime” stems from his weekly sales at local farmers’ markets. The sales averaged about the same amount each week and, dutifully, the Sowers deposited them. They’d reportedly never even heard of the Bank Secrecy Act or “structuring,” but that was of no interest to the feds—the consistency of the amount the Sowers deposited, always less than $10,000, raised red flags to the feds, who claimed that this was indicative of a crime.

The government promptly seized about $70,000 from the bank account, then issued a warrant for the seizures. As reported by Food Freedom News:¹

“The Dept. of Justice has since sued to keep $63,000 of the Sowers’ money, though they committed no crime other than maintaining their privacy. Without funds, they will be unable to make purchases for the spring planting. When a similar action was taken against Taylor’s Produce Stand last year, the feds seized $90,000, dropped the charges, and kept $45,000 of Taylor’s money.

Knowing that most farms operate on a very thin margin, such abuse of power wipes out a family’s income, and for a bonus, the feds enhance the monopoly power of Monsanto, Big Dairy and their supply chain.… Former Maryland assistant U.S. attorney Steven Levin told the paper [City Paper], “The emphasis is on basically seizing money, whether it is legally or illegally earned. It can lead to financial ruin for business owners, and there’s a potential for abuse here by the government.””

The raid on the Sowers was conducted by an agency created in 2009 to go after money-laundering criminals. The agency started out with a bang by seizing $1.2 billion from a real money launderer, but it appears that what it’s interested in now is making criminals out of small business persons, including small farmers.

Why Are Family Farms Under Attack?

 

 

If they’re not seizing bank accounts, it seems the government will find other ways to attack small farmers. A family farm in rural Michigan—and possibly others—may be shut down by a new state law that designates certain breeds of hogs as a threat to neighboring hog breeders and croplands.

Basically, the fight is over the definition of feral hogs vs. domestic hogs. The dictionary definition of “feral” refers to an animal running wild. But Michigan authorities have taken it a step further and extended the definition to include enclosed private hunting preserves and small farms that house what authorities call an “invasive species” of hogs.

There is no genetic test to determine whether the species on these farms are truly invasive, so authorities are basing their cases against these farmers solely on visual observations. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) uses this vague description to describe the prohibited hogs, and makes it clear that this does notapply to the domestic hogs raised on CAFOs:²

“Wild boar, wild hog, wild swine, feral pig, feral hog, feral swine, Old world swine, razorback, eurasian wild boar, Russian wild boar (Sus scrofa Linnaeus). This subsection does not and is not intended to affect sus domestica involved in domestic hog production.”

Other descriptions supplied by the MDNR include such a wide variety of characteristics that virtually any pig other than the familiar pink domestic breed raised on CAFOs could potentially be deemed “feral”:

• Erect or folded/floppy ear structure
• Straight or curly tail
• Solid black, wild/grizzled, solid red/brown, black and white spotted, or black and red/brown spotted coat colorations
• “Other characteristics” not currently known to the MDNR

Interestingly, the Big Pork industry has been planning this anti-feral pig campaign for years, and even bragged about it in a 2010 newsletter.³ It was the same newsletter where they declared a win against the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) in Ohio, where HSUS was seeking legislation to end the practice of sow gestation stalls (cages so small the sow can’t turn around or move).

What this means for residents of Michigan is that soon they will be unable to purchase sustainably and humanely grown meat from the Mangalitsa “wooly” hogs raised on Baker’s Green Acres farm. This particular breed is being raised by only a handful of small farms across the country; whereas more than 2 million pigs are slaughtered each week in the United States, only about 50 of them are Mangalitsas (which have been called the “it” pig by the New York Times, as several high-end restaurants and specialty markets have featured the rich, naturally raised meat⁴).

But, of course, this issue is about much more than pasture-raised pork from a heritage breed … it’s about your ability, your right, to purchase and consume pure, unadulterated food – a right that continues to be threated for those living in the United States.

FDA Also Threatens Your Right to Food Choice …

Another glaring example of government going out of its way to prohibit your access to pure, unprocessed food is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) war against raw milk. When the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) filed a lawsuit against the FDA over their raw milk ban, stating that banning raw milk in interstate commerce is unconstitutional, the FDA rebutted with the following extremely concerning and outrageous statements:

• “There is no absolute right to consume or feed children any particular food.”
• “There is no ‘deeply rooted’ historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds.”
• “Plaintiffs’ assertion of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.”
• FDA’s brief goes on to state that “even if such a right did exist, it would not render FDA’s regulations unconstitutional because prohibiting the interstate sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk promotes bodily and physical health.”
• “There is no fundamental right to freedom of contract.”

Since when did the FDA have authority to tell you what you can and cannot eat and feed your children? Apparently they believe they’ve had it all along. If you go by these assertions, it means the FDA has the authority to prohibit any food of their choosing and make it a crime for you to seek it out. If, one day, the FDA deems tomatoes, broccoli or cashews capable of causing you harm (which is just as ludicrous as their assertions that raw milk is harmful), they could therefore enact such a ban and legally enforce it.

What this means is that freedom of food choice is a myth if you live in the United States, and this simply is not acceptable. No one, and certainly not any government agency, should be able to restrict your access to pure, unadulterated food, but the dairy industry and other industrial farmers that depend on CAFOs employ powerful lobbyists will stop at nothing to persuade government to remove the small farmers from the market entirely. The truth is, if enough people start demanding naturally, sustainably and humanely raised meat, dairy and produce, the giant farming monopolies that currently dominate the market would not be able to compete.

Their businesses depend on pesticides, CAFOs, genetically modified seeds, growth hormones and the like … so when they see all-natural creameries like the one operated by Randy Sowers and his wife Karen, or natural farms like Bakers Green Acres gaining loyal and growing customer bases, they get nervous – and they get the government involved in any way they can.

Please Support Your Local Small Farms

The healthiest food choices are nearly always those that come from responsible, high-quality, sustainable sources.

This is why I encourage you to support the small family farms in your area. This includes not only visiting the farm directly, if you have one nearby, but also taking part in farmer’s markets and community-supported agriculture programs. Now that summer is almost here in the United States, fresh produce and other wonderful whole foods are available in abundance. Not only is the food so much tastier and healthier when you get it from sustainable, non-CAFO sources, but there is something about shopping for fresh foods in an open-air, social environment that just feels right. An artificially lit, dreary supermarket — home to virtually every CAFO food made — just can’t compete.

If you want to experience some of these benefits first-hand, here are some great resources to obtain wholesome food that supports not only you but also the environment:

1. Alternative Farming Systems Information Center, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
2. Farmers’ Markets — A national listing of farmers’ markets
3. Local Harvest — This Web site will help you find farmers’ markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area where you can buy produce, grass-fed meats, and many other goodies.
4. Eat Well Guide: Wholesome Food from Healthy Animals — The Eat Well Guide is a free online directory of sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs from farms, stores, restaurants, inns, and hotels, and online outlets in the United States and Canada.
5. Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture(CISA) — CISA is dedicated to sustaining agriculture and promoting the products of small farms.
6. FoodRoutes — The FoodRoutes “Find Good Food” map can help you connect with local farmers to find the freshest, tastiest food possible. On their interactive map, you can find a listing for local farmers, CSA’s, and markets near you.

Finally, for more information on the ongoing attacks against small family farms in the United States consider watching Farmageddon: The Unseen War on American Family Farms, a documentary by Kristin Canty. But I warn you … the injustices it contains may just make your blood boil.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/05/15/raw-milk-farmers-on-money-laundering-crimes.aspx

Omega-3 fats are essential polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). Your body uses these fats for a variety of functions, such as blood clotting, brain and eye health, digestion and muscle activity.^1,2,3

Humans evolved on a diet of omega-6 to omega 3 fats in a ratio of close to 1-to-1.⁴ However, in the past several decades, the ratio in the stand Western diet measured between 15-to-1 and 16.7-to-1 in 2006⁵ and 10 years later measured at 20-to-1 or greater.⁶ This shift began during the Industrial Revolution when people began eating foods rich in vegetable oils and cereal grains were fed to livestock, raising the levels of omega-6 fats in meat.⁷

Omega-3 fats can be broken down into three main categories — alpha linoleic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA).⁸ ALA is a precursor to EPA and DHA, but it can only be converted in amounts less than 5%.⁹ DHA and EPA are long-chain omega-3 fats.

You must get each form of omega-3 fat from foods or dietary supplements. ALA is plant-based and found mostly in flaxseed, walnuts, chia seeds and hemp seeds.¹⁰ Bioavailable DHA and EPA are found in fish and other marine-based foods.¹¹

There is mounting research that drives home the importance of animal-based omega-3 fats for heart health.¹² Deficiency can leave you vulnerable to chronic disease and may increase your risk of poor outcomes in COVID-19.

As I mentioned, the objective is to bring your ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids as close to 1-to-1 as possible. Many foods have omega-3 fats, but the ratio of omega-6 to omega 3 is high, so foods other than marine-based fish cannot effectively raise your omega-3 levels.

Omega 3-to-6 Levels in Conventional Eggs Have Plummeted

Farmers used to harvest their eggs from chickens that were free ranging and allowed to forage for their food. For the most part, consumers today have the option of buying four different types of eggs at the grocery store.^13,14 They are:

• Conventional — These eggs are produced by cage-raised or cage-free chickens that are grain-fed. Cage-free means the chickens are not in cages, but still are packed into a large room with little space.
• Organic — Hens that produce certified organic eggs receive organic feed and are not treated with hormones. The certification does not necessarily mean they are allowed to forage.
• Pastured or free-range — Hens have some access to the outdoors where they may also have access to their natural food such as plants and insects. The pasture-raised claim¹⁵ can be made if there is just a small, bare dirt area, and the free-range claim¹⁶ can be made if there is a door that the farm could at some point open. This designation does not indicate what the hens are fed.
• Omega-3 enriched — The hens are raised like conventional chickens and the feed is supplemented with an omega-3 source like flax seeds.

Analysis and comparison of fatty acid composition in conventionally raised and outdoor chickens allowed to forage for insects and plants is vastly different.¹⁷One study published by Cambridge University¹⁸ analyzed the difference in the eggs of hens allowed to forage for insects and plants against those fed a commercial diet and kept in cages.

The researchers controlled for the differences in chicken breeds by using sister hens and splitting them into groups. The hens were fed over six weeks before the eggs were analyzed. The researchers split the hens allowed to forage into three groups where one group had access to alfalfa, the second to red-and-white clover and the third to a mix of cool-season grasses.

At the end of the study, they found the concentrations of fatty acids and vitamin A did not differ in the three pastured groups, but those that foraged on grass had 23% more vitamin E then those that foraged on clover.

When they compared the eggs from the caged hens against the pastured eggs they found the hens allowed to forage had “twice as much vitamin E and long-chain omega-3 fats, 2.5-fold more total omega-3 fatty acids, and less than half the ratio of omega-6:omega-3 fatty acids.”¹⁹

A later study²⁰ also demonstrated that hens allowed to forage outdoors laid eggs with vitamin D content that was up to four times higher than those who were kept indoors. They compared vitamin D content from the hens exposed to sunlight against free-range eggs purchased at the supermarket and found those from the grocer had relatively low vitamin D content.

Consequences of the Dramatic Shift in Omega Fats

Scientific evidence shows that there have been significant consequences as humans began to eat a diet rich in omega-6 fats and low in omega-3s. The majority of omega-6 fats used to come from nuts and seeds. However current intake comes from processed foods and oxidized vegetable oils.²¹

This imbalance in omega fats is one route to inflammatory disease, including heart disease, diabetes and cancer. One primary source of omega-6 fats in the American diet is soybean oil, which accounts for 60% of all vegetable oils found in processed foods, salad dressings, snacks and margarine.²²

Researchers have linked diets high in soybean oil with Type 2 diabetes and obesity.²³ Both of these health conditions are associated with heart disease, impaired cognition, neuropathy and early death.

In recent years it has become increasingly clear that one of the most damaging components in the modern diet is processed vegetable oils, including soybean oil. The biological damage they cause may be even worse than that triggered by refined sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, researchers say.²⁴

The reason is because the oils trigger mitochondrial dysfunction that drives disease processes and several studies^25,26,27 have provided scientific evidence of this. The good news is that replacing dangerous oils with healthy saturated fats can go a long way towards boosting your health and reducing your risk of chronic disease.

Unfortunately, many health authority authorities insist that omega-6 rich oils like soybean, corn and canola oil are healthier than saturated animal fats such as pasture-raised butter and lard. This myth has been a tough one to dismantle, despite the evidence against it. To learn more about how processed vegetable oils can harm your health see, “The Case Against Processed Vegetable Oils.”

Many Benefits of Balancing Omega-3 and Omega-6 Ratio

There are significant benefits to balancing your omega-6 and omega-3 ratio. For example, research²⁸ published in 2018 confirmed omega-3 fat can reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease and all-cause mortality. Participants with an omega-3 index in the highest quintile had a total mortality 34% lower than those in the lowest quintile, and a 39% lower risk for cardiovascular disease.

As detailed in “More Data Support Heart Healthy Benefits of Omega-3s,” research has found fish oil consumption lowered the risk of all-cause mortality by 13% and cardiovascular mortality by 16%.

DHA is crucial for your brain health. Without enough, your nerve cells become stiff and more prone to inflammation as omega-3 fats are substituted with omega-6. Nerve cells that are rigid and inflamed have lower levels of proper neurotransmission and cells become compromised.²⁹

Low levels of DHA have been linked to memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease,³⁰and some studies suggest degenerative brain diseases may potentially be reversible with sufficient DHA.^31,32 Other health benefits include:

Importance of Omega-3 Testing

Like with most other biomarkers, it’s impossible to know your omega-3 fatty acid index without testing. The omega-3 index provides the most accurate measurement in the body and should ideally be above 8%.⁵¹ The test measures the amount of omega-3 in the red blood cells as a reflection of how much is found in the rest of the body.

Basically, the test measures the average of your intake based on the lifespan of a red blood cell over 120 days. This means it is not influenced by recent meals, but rather an average of the past months. Researchers have used it as an index to analyze data, including that of the Framingham study⁵² and the Women’s Health Initiative.⁵³

Maintaining a level in the range that is associated with low risk can reduce your potential chance of heart disease. An index below 4% has a high risk of heart disease, those with an index from 4% to 8% have an intermediate risk and those with an index greater than 8% have the lowest risk for coronary heart disease.⁵⁴

Another study⁵⁵ used randomized control trial results to assess the effects of supplementation on telomere length and oxidative stress. The data suggested that telomere length increases with a decreasing ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. The researchers concluded that even over a short time, a change in the ratio has an impact on cell aging, inflammation and oxidative stress.

Safely Raise Your Omega-3 Intake

If you discover you need more omega-3 after getting tested, consider the different ways you can raise your level without adding toxins. Strategies include reducing or eliminating processed foods as they are high in omega-6 fats and switching to foods that have a lower ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats, such as locally raised, outdoor eggs. These are also great sources of omega-3:

While the following sources may be tempting because they are readily available and cost less than the ones mentioned above, I strongly advise avoiding:

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/28/how-eggs-have-become-a-disaster.aspx

The use of statin cholesterol-lowering medications has been on the rise for decades¹ and they are among the most widely used drugs in the world. In the U.S., close to 50% of U.S. adults over 75 years old take a statin² to lower their cholesterol in the misguided hope of preventing heart disease, heart attacks and stroke.

Not only is there strong evidence suggesting that statins are a colossal waste of money, but their use may also harm your brain health — more than doubling your risk of dementia in some cases.³

The benefit must clearly outweigh the risk when it comes to any drug treatment, but this is rarely the case with statins, which do not protect against cardiovascular disease and are linked to a number of health conditions^4,5including dementia, diabetes⁶ and even increased risk of death from COVID-19.⁷

Statins Doubled Risk of Developing Dementia

Statins’ effects on cognitive performance have previously been called into question, since lower levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol are linked to a higher risk of dementia.⁸ The featured study, published in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine,⁹ involved people with mild cognitive impairment and looked into the effects of two types of statins: hydrophilic and lipophilic.

Hydrophilic statins, which include pravastatin (Pravachol) and rosuvastatin (Crestor), dissolve more readily in water, while lipophilic statins, such as atorvastatin (Lipitor), simvastatin (Zocor), Fluvastatin (Lescol), and lovastatin (Altoprev), dissolve more readily in fats.¹⁰ Lipophilic statins can easily enter cells¹¹ and be distributed throughout your body, whereas hydrophilic statins focus on the liver.¹²

According to study author Prasanna Padmanabham of the University of California, Los Angeles, “There have been many conflicting studies on the effects of statin drugs on cognition. While some claim that statins protect users against dementia, others assert that they accelerate the development of dementia. Our study aimed to clarify the relationship between statin use and subject’s long-term cognitive trajectory.”¹³

Subjects were divided into groups based on cognitive status, cholesterol levels and type of statin used, and followed for eight years. Those with early mild cognitive impairment and low to moderate cholesterol levels at the start of the study who used lipophilic statins had more than double the risk of dementia compared to those who did not use statins.¹⁴

Further, this group also had significant decline in metabolism of the brain’s posterior cingulate cortex, which is the brain region that declines most significantly in early Alzheimer’s disease.¹⁵

Your Brain Needs Cholesterol

About 25% to 30% of your body’s total cholesterol is found in your brain, where it is an essential part of neurons. In your brain, cholesterol helps develop and maintain the plasticity and function of your neurons,¹⁶ and data from the Shanghai Aging Study revealed that high levels of LDL cholesterol are inversely associated with dementia in those aged 50 years and over.

“High level of LDL-C may be considered as a potential protective factor against cognition decline,” the researchers noted.¹⁷ They compiled a number of mechanisms on why lower cholesterol may be damaging for brain health, including the fact that lower cholesterol is linked with higher mortality in the elderly and may occur alongside malnutrition and chronic diseases, including cancer. As it specifically relates to brain health, however, they suggested:¹⁸

• Decreasing cholesterol levels in the elderly may be associated with cerebral atrophy, which occurs with dementia
• High LDL cholesterol may be beneficial by reducing neurons’ impairments or helping repair injured neurons
• Acceleration of neurodegeneration has occurred when neurons were short on cellular cholesterol or cholesterol supply
• Cholesterol plays an important role in the synthesis, transportation and metabolism of steroid hormones and lipid-soluble vitamins, and both of these are important to synaptic integrity and neurotransmission

Lower cholesterol levels were also associated with worse cognitive function among South Korean study participants aged 65 and over, and were considered to be a “state marker for AD [Alzheimer’s disease].”¹⁹

A U.S. study of more than 4,300 Medicare recipients aged 65 and over also revealed that higher levels of total cholesterol were associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, even after adjusting for cardiovascular risk factors and other related variables.²⁰

Statins Increase Death Risk From COVID-19

The risks to brain health are only one red flag tied to statins. A concerning link was also uncovered among statins, diabetes and an increased risk of severe disease from COVID-19.²¹ Among patients with Type 2 diabetes admitted to a hospital for COVID-19, those taking statins had significantly higher mortality rates from COVID-19 within seven days and 28 days compared to those not taking the drugs.

The researchers acknowledged those taking statins were older, more frequently male and often had more comorbidities, including high blood pressure, heart failure and complications of diabetes. However, despite the limitations, the researchers found enough evidence in the over 2,400 participants to conclude:²²

“… our present results do not support the hypothesis of a protective role of routine statin use against COVID-19, at least not in hospitalized patients with T2DM (Type 2 diabetes mellitus).

Indeed, the potentially deleterious effects of routine statin treatment on COVID-19-related mortality demands further investigation and, as recently highlighted, only appropriately designed and powered randomized controlled trials will be able to properly address this important issue.”

Statins Double — or Triple — Diabetes Risk

A connection already exists between statins and diabetes, to the extent that people who take statins are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than those who do not, and those who take the drugs for longer than two years have more than triple the risk.^23,24

“The fact that increased duration of statin use was associated with an increased risk of diabetes — something we call a dose-dependent relationship — makes us think that this is likely a causal relationship,” study author Victoria Zigmont, a graduate researcher in public health at The Ohio State University in Columbus, said in a news release.²⁵

The data also indicated that individuals taking statin medications had a 6.5% increased risk of high blood sugar as measured by hemoglobin A1c value,²⁶which is an average level of blood sugar measuring the past 60 to 90 days.

Researchers with the Erasmus Medical Center in The Netherlands also analyzed data from more than 9,500 patients, finding those who had ever used statins had a 38% higher risk of Type 2 diabetes, with the risk being higher in those with impaired glucose homeostasis and those who were overweight or obese.²⁷

The researchers concluded, “Individuals using statins may be at higher risk for hyperglycemia, insulin resistance and eventually Type 2 diabetes. Rigorous preventive strategies such as glucose control and weight reduction in patients when initiating statin therapy might help minimize the risk of diabetes.”

But a far better strategy may be preventing insulin resistance in the first place, by avoiding statin drugs and eating a healthy diet. According to Dr. Aseem Malhotra, an interventional cardiologist consultant in London, U.K. — who has been attacked for being a “statin denier” after calling out the drugs’ side effects²⁸ — and a colleague:²⁹

“In young adults, preventing insulin resistance could prevent 42% of myocardial infarctions, a larger reduction than correcting hypertension (36 %), low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) (31 %), body mass index (BMI) (21 %) or LDL-C (16 %).³⁰

It is plausible that the small benefits of statins in the prevention of CVD come from pleiotropic effects which are independent of LDL-lowering. The focus in primary prevention should therefore be on foods and food groups that have a proven benefit in reducing hard endpoints and mortality.”

The Statin Scam

Even as saturated fats and cholesterol have been vilified, and statin drugs have become among the most widely prescribed medications worldwide, heart disease remains a top killer.³¹ Today, statin drugs to reduce cholesterol levels are recommended for four broad patient populations:³²

1. Those who have already had a cardiovascular event
2. Adults with diabetes
3. Individuals with LDL cholesterol levels ≥190 mg/dL
4. Individuals with an estimated 10-year cardiovascular risk ≥7.5% (based on an algorithm that uses your age, gender, blood pressure, total cholesterol, high density lipoproteins (HDL), race and history of diabetes to predict the likelihood you’ll experience a heart attack in the coming 10 years)

Despite statins being prescribed for these sizable groups, and “target” cholesterol levels being achieved, a systematic review of 35 randomized, controlled trials found that no additional benefits were gained. According to an analysis in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine:³³

“Recommending cholesterol lowering treatment based on estimated cardiovascular risk fails to identify many high-risk patients and may lead to unnecessary treatment of low-risk individuals. The negative results of numerous cholesterol lowering randomized controlled trials call into question the validity of using low density lipoprotein cholesterol as a surrogate target for the prevention of cardiovascular disease.”

Even in the case of recurrent cardiovascular events, despite the increase in statin use from 1999 to 2013, researchers writing in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders noted, “there was only a small decrease in the incidence of recurrent CVD, and this occurred mainly in older patients without statins prescribed.”³⁴

Statins Won’t Protect Your Heart Health

Statins are effective at lowering cholesterol, but whether this is the panacea for helping you avoid heart disease and extend your lifespan is a topic of heated debate. Again in 2018, a scientific review presented substantial evidence that high LDL and total cholesterol are not an indication of heart disease risk, and that statin treatment is of doubtful benefit as a form of primary prevention for this reason.³⁵

In short, these drugs have done nothing to derail the rising trend of heart disease, while putting users at increased risk of health conditions like diabetes, dementia and others, such as:

• Cancer³⁶
• Cataracts³⁷
• Triple risk of coronary artery and aortic artery calcification³⁸
• Musculoskeletal disorders, including myalgia, muscle weakness, muscle cramps, rhabdomyolysis and autoimmune muscle disease³⁹
• Depression⁴⁰

In the event you’re taking statins, be aware that they deplete your body of coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) and inhibit the synthesis of vitamin K2. The risks of CoQ10 depletion can be somewhat offset by taking a Coenzyme Q10 supplement or, if you’re over 40, its reduced form ubiquinol. But ultimately, if you’re looking to protect both your brain and heart health, avoiding statin drugs and instead optimizing your diet may be the answer.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/28/statins-double-risk-of-dementia.aspx

By Dr. Mercola

You may be aware, and possibly have experienced firsthand, that antibiotics can cause diarrhea.

This is because antibiotics, by design, disrupt the balance of good and bad bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract, often killing off both beneficial and harmful microorganisms without distinction.

It is through this same mechanism that antibiotics may also be causing you to pack on extra pounds.

In fact, Dr. Martin Blaser, a professor of microbiology at New York University Langone Medical Center, suggests that antibiotics may permanently alter your gut bacteria and interfere with important hunger hormones secreted by your stomach, leading to increased appetite and body mass index (BMI).

Antibiotics Lead to Increases in Body Fat and Hunger Hormones

Research by Dr. Blaser has shown that 18 months after antibiotics are used to eradicate H. pylori bacteria, there is a:

• 6-fold increase in the release of ghrelin (the “hunger hormone”) after a meal
• 20 percent increase in leptin levels (leptin is a hormone produced by fat tissue)
• 5 percent increase in BMI

Levels of ghrelin should ordinarily fall after a meal to signal your brain that you’re full and ready to stop eating; an increase would therefore essentially tell your brain to continue eating, leading to weight gain. Further, the increase in leptin levels is concerning because overexposure to high levels of the hormone can lead to leptin resistance, which means your body is unable to properly hear leptin’s signals.

The way your body stores fat is a highly regulated process that is controlled, primarily, by leptin. If you gain excess weight, the additional fat produces extra leptin that should alert your brain that your body is storing too much fat and needs to burn off the excess.

To do this, signals are sent to your brain to stop being hungry and to stop eating. When you become leptin-resistant, your body can no longer hear these messages — so it remains hungry and stores more fat.

Interestingly, you can easily become leptin resistant by eating the typical American diet full of sugar (particularly fructose), refined grains and processed foods … which, like antibiotics, will upset the balance of bacteria in your gut.

Farmers Use Antibiotics to Fatten Up Livestock Quickly

About 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced are used in agriculture — not necessarily to fight disease, but rather to promote weight gain.

As stated by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs:

“Continuous, low-dose administration of an antibiotic can increase the rate and efficiency of weight gain in healthy livestock. The presence of antibiotics likely changes the composition of the gut flora to favor growth. Debate is ongoing as to how gut flora are changed; change may simply be a reduction in numbers, a change in species composition or a combination of the two.

… Some antibiotics may also enhance feed consumption and growth by stimulating metabolic processes within the animal.”

Unfortunately, this practice is also contributing to the alarming spread of antibiotic-resistant disease. As it pertains to your weight, there’s ample reason to believe that this same phenomenon occurs in humans as well, figuratively turning Americans into fatted calves.

Your Gut Bacteria and Your Waistline Go Hand-in-Hand

Research by Dr. Blaser, for instance, found that mice fed antibiotics (in dosages similar to those given to children for throat or ear infections) had significant increases in body fat despite their diets remaining unchanged.

Multiple studies have actually shown that obese people have different intestinal bacteria than slim people, and that altering the microbial balance in your gut can influence your weight. Here are six such studies:

1. When rats were given lactic acid bacteria while in utero through adulthood, they put on significantly less weight than other rats eating the same high-calorie diet. They also had lower levels of minor inflammation, which has been associated with obesity.
2. Babies with high numbers of Bifidobacteria and low numbers of Staphylococcus aureus — which may cause low-grade inflammation in your body, contributing to obesity — appeared to be protected from excess weight gain. This may be one reason why breast-fed babies have a lower risk of obesity, as Bifidobacteria flourish in the guts of breast-fed babies.
3. Two studies found that obese individuals had about 20 percent more of a family of bacteria known as Firmicutes, and almost 90 percent less of a bacteria called Bacteroidetes than lean people. Firmicutes help your body to extract calories from complex sugars and deposit those calories in fat. When these microbes were transplanted into normal-weight mice, those mice started to gain twice as much fat.
4. Obese people were able to reduce their abdominal fat by nearly 5 percent, and their subcutaneous fat by over 3 percent, just be drinking a probiotic-rich fermented milk beverage for 12 weeks.
5. Probiotics (good bacteria) have been found to benefit metabolic syndrome, which often goes hand-in-hand with obesity.
6. Probiotics may also be beneficial in helping women lose weight after childbirth when taken from the first trimester through breastfeeding.

Healthy Gut Bacteria Cannot Coexist With Antibiotics

Antibiotics can save your life if you develop a serious bacterial infection, but it’s important that you resist the urge to ask your physician for a prescription for every ear, nose, or throat infection you come down with. Likewise for a cold or the flu. Antibiotics are useless against viral infections like these, and when used for this purpose will only harm your health by wiping out the good bacteria in your gut.

Antibiotic use has become so routine in the United States that one round of the drugs may seem like no big deal, but remember that using them drastically alters the makeup of bacteria in your gut, which will need to be rebuilt in order for you to stay in good health. Whenever you use an antibiotic, you’re also increasing your susceptibility to developing infections with resistance to that antibiotic — and you can become the carrier of this resistant bug and even spread it to others.

Ultimately the problem of antibiotic-overuse needs to be stemmed through public policy on a nationwide level, especially in the agricultural community, but I urge you to also take personal responsibility and evaluate your own use of antibiotics, and avoid taking them — or giving them to your children — unless absolutely necessary.

Remember that the foods you eat are also a major source of exposure to antibiotics, so to protect your gut bacteria you should buy primarily antibiotic-free, organically raised meat and produce. Keep in mind that conventionally farmed food is often grown in fertilizer derived from factory-farmed animal waste and human sewage, which may be a source of contamination with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The Recipe for Healthy Gut Bacteria

Your gut bacteria are vulnerable to your lifestyle. If you eat a lot of processed foods, for instance, your gut bacteria are going to be compromised because processed foods in general will destroy healthy microflora and feed bad bacteria and yeast.

In addition to antibiotics, your gut bacteria are also very sensitive to:

• Chlorinated water
• Antibacterial soap
• Agricultural chemicals
• Pollution

Because virtually all of us are exposed to these at least occasionally, ensuring your gut bacteria remain balanced should be considered an ongoing process, and consuming fermented foods is one of the best ways to do this.

One of the reasons why fermented foods are so beneficial is because they contain lactic acid bacteria — a type of beneficial gut bacteria that research shows can help you stay slim.

I have long stated that it’s generally a wise choice to “reseed” your body with good bacteria from time to time by taking a high-quality probiotic supplement or eating non-pasteurized, traditionally fermented foods such as:

• Lassi (an Indian yoghurt drink, traditionally enjoyed before dinner)
• Fermented  organic grass-fed raw milk, such as kefir
• Various pickled fermentations of cabbage, turnips, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, squash and carrots
• Natto (fermented soy)

If you do not eat fermented foods on a regular basis, a high-quality probiotic supplement can be incredibly useful to help maintain healthy gut bacteria when you stray from your healthy diet and consume excess grains or sugar, or if you have to take antibiotics.

Also please remember that it is vital to eliminate ALL sugars. They will sabotage any beneficial effects of the fermented foods, as they will act as nutrients for the pathogenic yeast, fungi and bacteria that are in your gut.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/11/24/antibiotics-promote-obesity.aspx

In January of this year, Oprah Winfrey invited Suzanne Somers on her show to talk about health tips. The 62-year-old actress uses bio-identical estrogen cream and progesterone on her other arm two weeks a month.

According to Somers, the bio-identical hormones are identical to the ones created by the human body, unlike conventional hormones, which are made from mare’s urine.

The result has been a media firestorm condemning both Somers and Oprah, including the hit piece in Newsweek linked below. The authors of the piece, Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert, argue that bio-identical hormones are just as synthetic as conventional hormones — although they don’t much discuss the fact that conventional hormones are actually different from the 17-beta-estradiol made by your body, while the bio-identical hormones are 17-beta-estradiol itself.

The real reason for the attacks on bio-identical hormones?

As Somers points out, many doctors, scientists and media figures make a good deal of money off of the pharmaceutical industry.

And one thing you won’t see mentioned in the Newsweek article is the fact that Pat Wingert is the co-author of a pharmaceutically biased book on hormones and menopause, and that  Newsweek is heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies.

This resembles an incident a few years ago when the cattle industry actually sued Oprah Winfrey just for talking about Mad Cow Disease.

Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/06/18/media-blast-oprah-for-supporting-alternative-medicine.aspx

The contraceptive pill may disrupt women’s natural ability to choose a partner genetically dissimilar to themselves. This could result in difficulties when trying to conceive, an increased risk of miscarriage and long intervals between pregnancies. Passing on a lack of diverse genes to children could also weaken their immune systems.

Humans tend to be attracted to those with a dissimilar genetic make-up to themselves, maintaining genetic diversity, which is signaled by subtle odors. A research team analyzed how the contraceptive pill affects odor preferences, and found that the preferences of women who began using the contraceptive pill shifted towards men with genetically similar odors.

Not only could genetic similarity in couples lead to fertility problems, but it could ultimately lead to the breakdown of relationships when women stop using the contraceptive pill, as odor perception plays a significant role in maintaining attraction to partners, researchers said.
Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/08/26/how-contraceptive-pill-influences-partner-choice.aspx

Fibromyalgia, characterized by chronic, widespread pain is an often-debilitating condition that primarily affects women. While as many as 10 million Americans have fibromyalgia, its cause remains a mystery.

Brain scans of fibromyalgia patients have offered hard evidence that the pain they experience is indeed real — mainly because their threshold for tolerating pain impulses is substantially lower than that of most individuals. But the mechanism causing this lowered pain threshold is still unknown.

Some experts, such as Dr. Frederick Wolfe, the director of the National Databank for Rheumatic Diseases and the lead author of the 1990 paper that first defined fibromyalgia’s diagnostic guidelines, believe fibromyalgia is mainly a physical response to mental and emotional stress.

But while stress and emotions may indeed play an important role, more recent research shows fibromyalgia patients tend to have severe inflammation in their body, including their nervous system and brain.

Signs and Symptoms of Fibromyalgia

Diagnosis can be a challenge, but the updated case definitions of fibromyalgia, issued in 2010 and later simplified in 2012, claim to correctly diagnose about 83 percent of cases.¹ Originally, the condition was thought to be a peripheral musculoskeletal disease. Today, fibromyalgia has become increasingly recognized as a neurobiological problem causing central pain sensitization.

Unfortunately, there are currently no laboratory tests available for diagnosing fibromyalgia, so physicians primarily depend on patient histories, reported symptoms and physical exam findings. Classic symptoms of this condition include:

Conventional treatment typically involves some form of pain medication, and perhaps psychotropic drugs like antidepressants. I don’t recommend either as they fail to address the cause of your problem. Many fibromyalgia sufferers also do not respond to conventional painkillers, which can set in motion a vicious circle of overmedicating on these dangerous drugs.

Brain Inflammation — Another Hallmark of Fibromyalgia

Using PET imaging, a recent investigation² by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden revealed the presence of widespread brain inflammation in patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia.^3,4

Earlier research⁵ conducted at Karolinska Institutet also discovered high concentrations of cytokines (inflammatory proteins) in the cerebrospinal fluid, suggesting fibromyalgia patients have inflammation in their nervous system as well.⁶

The team at Massachusetts General Hospital, meanwhile, has previously shown that neural inflammation, and glial cell (immune cells) activation specifically, plays a role in chronic back pain. Animal studies have also offered evidence for the hypothesis that glial cell activation can be a cause of chronic pain in general.⁷

Here, they found that when glial cells in the cerebral cortex were activated, the more aggressive the activation, the greater the fatigue experienced by the patient. As reported by Medical Life Sciences:⁸

“The current study first assessed fibromyalgia symptoms in patients using a questionnaire. A PET tracer was then used, that is, a radioactive marker which binds a specific protein called translocator protein (TSPO) that is expressed at levels much above the normal in activated glial cells, namely, astrocytes and microglia …

[G]lial activation was found to be present at significantly higher levels in multiple brain areas in patients who had fibromyalgia than in controls. Glial cell activation causes inflammatory chemicals to be released, which cause the pain pathways to be more sensitive to pain, and promote fatigue …

One area showing higher TSPO binding in direct proportion to the self-reported level of fatigue was the cingulate gyrus, an area of the brain linked to emotional processing. Previous research has reported that this area is inflamed in chronic fatigue syndrome.”

Brain Inflammation Linked to Loss of Brain Cells

In related news, German researchers investigating inflammation mechanisms in the brain have found that as mice get older and regulation of inflammatory responses become increasingly impaired, they start losing brain cells.⁹

Interestingly, the cannabinoid receptor type 1 (CB1), which produces the “high” in response to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in marijuana, also helps regulate inflammatory reactions in your brain. In short, chronic brain inflammation is in part driven by the CB1 receptors’ failure to respond. To understand how this works, you need to know a little bit about how microglial cells work.

Microglial cells are specialized immune cells found in your central nervous system, including your spinal cord and brain. These immune cells respond to bacteria and are responsible for clearing out malfunctioning nerve cells. They also signal and recruit other immune cells when needed and trigger the inflammatory response when necessary.

Problems arise when the inflammatory response becomes dysregulated and overactive. In the brain, the inflammation can easily damage healthy brain tissue. The “brake signal” that instructs glial cells to stop their inflammatory activity is endocannabinoids, and the endocannabinoids work by binding to certain receptors, including CB1 and cannabinoid receptor type 2 (CB2).

Immune Cells Communicate and Influence Inflammatory Response Using Endocannabinoids

Curiously, microglial cells have virtually no CB1 and very few CB2 receptors, yet they still react to endocannabinoids. The present study was designed to investigate this puzzling riddle. As it turns out, there’s a type of neuron that does contain a large number of CB1 receptors, and it appears that it is the CB1 receptors on these specific neurons that control microglial cell activity.

In other words, it appears microglial cells do not communicate with nerve cells directly; rather, they release endocannabinoids, which then bind to CB1 receptors found in nearby neurons. These neurons in turn communicate directly with other nerve cells. So, the brain’s immune response is regulated in an indirect manner rather than a direct one.

Now, what happens with age is that your natural production of endocannabinoids decreases, which then leads to impaired immune response regulation and chronic inflammation. As noted by coauthor Dr. Andras Bilkei-Gorzo:¹⁰

“Since the neuronal CB1 receptors are no longer sufficiently activated, the glial cells are almost constantly in inflammatory mode. More regulatory neurons die as a result, so the immune response is less regulated and may become free-running.”

Earlier research¹¹ by this same team found that THC can help restore cognitive function in older brains, and the current study also hints at THC-containing cannabis may have valuable neuroprotective benefits in older people by quelling brain inflammation and preventing loss of brain cells. As the study was done on mice, further research is needed to confirm that the same mechanisms apply to humans, but it’s compelling nonetheless.

Are You Living an Inflammatory Lifestyle?

Your diet can either promote or decrease inflammation. For example, foods that increase the inflammatory response in your body include:

• Sugar, especially processed corn syrup
• Synthetically produced trans fats
• Processed vegetable and seed oils, high in oxidized omega-6 fat
• Processed meats
• Refined carbohydrates

Meanwhile, marine-based omega-3 fats have powerful anti-inflammatory effects, and are crucial for healthy brain function in general. Antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables are also important for controlling inflammation, as is optimizing your vitamin D to a level of 60 to 80 ng/mL, ideally through sensible sun exposure.

In addition to anti-inflammatory and immune-boosting properties, vitamin D receptors appear in a wide variety of brain tissue, and researchers believe optimal vitamin D levels may enhance important chemicals in your brain and protect brain cells by increasing the effectiveness of glial cells that help nurse damaged neurons back to health.

A number of ubiquitous chemicals have also been implicated in inflammation, so if you struggle with fibromyalgia you’d be wise to take a close look at your choice of foods, household and personal care products. As mentioned earlier, getting enough high-quality sleep is another key treatment component for fibromyalgia.

Ketogenic Diet Massively Decreases Brain Inflammation

Research¹² published last year suggests ketogenic diets — which are high in healthy fats and low in net carbs — are a particularly powerful ally for suppressing brain inflammation, as ketones are powerful HDAC (histone deacetylase inhibitors) that suppress the primary NF-κB inflammatory pathway.

As explained by Medical Xpress,¹³ the defining moment of the study¹⁴ came when the team “identified a pivotal protein that links the diet to inflammatory genes, which, if blocked, could mirror the anti-inflammatory effects of ketogenic diets.”

A ketogenic diet changes the way your body uses energy, converting your body from burning carbohydrates for energy to burning fat as your primary source of fuel. When your body is able to burn fat, your liver creates ketones, which burn more efficiently than carbs, thus creating far less reactive oxygen species and secondary free radicals that can damage your cellular and mitochondrial cell membranes, proteins and DNA.

Animals (rats) used in this study were found to have reduced inflammation when the researchers used a molecule called 2-deoxyglucose (2DG) to block glucose metabolism and induce a ketogenic state, similar to what would occur if you followed a ketogenic diet. By doing this, inflammation was brought down to levels near those found in controls.

Suppressing Inflammation Improves Pain

Senior study author Dr. Raymond Swanson, a professor of neurology at UCSF and chief of the neurology service at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, commented on the results, saying:

“I was most surprised by the magnitude of this effect, because I thought ketogenic diets might help just a little bit. But when we got these big effects with 2DG, I thought wow, there’s really something here.

The team further found that reduced glucose metabolism lowered a key barometer of energy metabolism — the NADH/NAD+ ratio — which in turn activated a protein called CtBP that acts to suppress activity of inflammatory genes.”

The study also pointed out that a ketogenic diet may relieve pain via several mechanisms, similar to the ways it’s known to help epilepsy.

“Like seizures, chronic pain is thought to involve increased excitability of neurons; for pain, this can involve peripheral and/or central neurons. Thus, there is some similarity of the underlying biology,” the authors stated, adding:

“A major research focus should be on how metabolic interventions such as a ketogenic diet can ameliorate common, comorbid and difficult-to-treat conditions such as pain and inflammation.”¹⁵

Cyclical Ketosis for Optimal Health