Health & Fitness

Australian actress and model Olympia Valance shares her diet, wellness, exercise and beauty rituals with body+ soul, along with an insight into how she's coping during isolation. 

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Working from home has meant Australians are buying, and wearing, more activewear than ever before. But is it just more of the same? From new labels like Sōlo the Staple and Nagnata, to Jennifer Lopez's go-to studio style, here are six clever upgrades that combine function with form. 

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Even under “normal” circumstances, 75% of Americans reported experiencing stress in the past month that resulted in sleepless nights at least once.¹

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, stress levels are peaking for many, with 88% of workers surveyed by Human Resource Executive reporting moderate to extreme stress in the last four to six weeks,² and 69% saying the coronavirus pandemic is the most stressful time of their professional career, even more so than 9/11 and the 2008 Great Recession.

This stress takes a toll on mental health and physical health alike. Prescriptions filled per week for antidepressant, antianxiety and anti-insomnia medications rose by 21% from February 16 to March 15, 2020, and 78% of the prescriptions for such drugs filled during the week ending March 15, when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, were for new prescriptions, which suggests they’re a direct result of COVID-19-related anxiety.³

Sleep has emerged as one of the latest casualties of the pandemic, with Donn Posner, president of Sleepwell Associates and an adjunct clinical associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, calling the COVID-19 crisis a “perfect storm of sleep problems.”⁴

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Threatening Sleep

With people around the globe facing unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety, ranging from financial worries and anxiety to loneliness amid social distancing, sleep quality suffers.

The link between stress and poor sleep quality is strong,⁵ and as noted in the Journal of Sleep Research, “In the current global home confinement situation due to the COVID-19 outbreak, most individuals are exposed to an unprecedented stressful situation of unknown duration. This not only may increase daytime stress, anxiety and depression levels, but also can disrupt sleep.”⁶

Stress, however, is just one outcome of the COVID-19 lockdown that’s affecting sleep. Being largely confined to your home influences many factors that affect sleep quality, including disruptions to daily routine. If you’re furloughed, unemployed or working from home, you may sleep later than usual, go to bed later or be more likely to have an alcoholic beverage in the evening, all of which can potentially disrupt your sleep.

On a deeper level, many people are experiencing drastic changes in their work life, combined with homeschooling children, and without the ability to engage in rewarding activities such as visits with friends or family, sporting events or other entertainment venues as an outlet.

“For those required to work from home, there may also be disruption to established daily routines and working schedules, leading to a deterioration of positive associations between the home, relaxation and sleep,” the researchers noted.⁷

Stay-Home Orders Disturb Light Exposure and Social Ties

For others, social distancing measures may mean spending more time indoors and getting less exposure to daylight, another important factor in sleep quality. This is especially true for those living in homes with small windows or no access to an outdoor area.

Light intensity is measured in lux units, and on any given day, the outdoor lux units will be around 100,000 at noon. Indoors, the typical average is somewhere between 100 to 2,000 lux units — some two orders of magnitude less. So, when you spend all or a majority of your day indoors, you essentially enter a state of "light deficiency."

The reason why light intensity is important is because it serves as the major synchronizer of your master body clock, which is composed of a group of cells in your brain called the suprachiasmatic nuclei. These nuclei synchronize to the light-dark cycle of your environment when certain wavelengths of light enter your eyes. You also have other biological clocks throughout your body, and those clocks in turn synchronize to your master clock.

So, if you want to get good sleep, you have to have properly aligned circadian rhythms, and step No. 1 is to make sure you get a sufficient dose of bright light exposure during the daytime — something that’s difficult to do if you don’t go outside.

Further, your pineal gland produces melatonin roughly in approximation to the contrast of bright sun exposure in the day and complete darkness at night. If you're in darkness all day long, your body can't appreciate the difference and will not optimize melatonin production. People living alone, particularly seniors, may also struggle with social isolation and loneliness that makes sleeping difficult.

“In fact,” according to the report, “a very recent study reporting on citizens’ well-being during the COVID-19 outbreak in China showed that those who scored higher on a measure of social participation and a sense of belonging also reported better sleep quality.⁸ A lack of regular social interaction can indeed enhance stress and negatively affect sleep quality …”⁹ Further, COVID-19 combined with stay-at-home orders interferes with sleep by:¹⁰

• Keeping your mind racing, especially if you’re watching a lot of news, elevating your body’s arousal system response and triggering insomnia
• Exposing you to blue light from screens, emitted by cellphones and tablets as you check the news one last time; the blue light interferes with the production of the hormone melatonin, causing further sleep troubles
• Making you susceptible to depression, low energy and long daytime naps which may make it difficult to fall asleep at night

As noted by University of Chicago Medicine, “It's not easy to function at our best without easy access to our usual coping skills (e.g., social support, exercise, etc.) while sheltering in place.”¹¹

Strange Dreams and Risks of Sleep Problems During a Pandemic

Sleep is essential for life, and lack of sleep takes a heavy toll, raising the risk of chronic diseases, obesity and premature death. Sleep is also intricately related to immune function, with immune system activation altering sleep, and sleep altering the innate and adaptive arms of the immune system. When you feel sleepy during infection, it’s thought that sleep bolsters the immune system to defend against the pathogen.

Further, sleep is associated with a reduced risk of infection and can improve the outcome of infections if you’re ill.¹² In short, sleep may help your immune system to prevent and fight COVID-19. According to University of Chicago Medicine:¹³

“Ample sleep supports the immune system, which reduces the risk of infection and can improve outcomes for people fighting a virus. On the other hand, sleep deprivation weakens the body’s defense system and makes people more vulnerable to contracting a virus.”

Mood disturbances are also likely and can lead to snowballing anxiety. If you’re anxious, it can make sleep difficult by activating your “fight or flight” response that keeps you on edge. Lack of sleep, in turn, can worsen anxious feelings.

Even modest, night-to-night reductions in sleep lead to increases in anxiety the next day.¹⁴ Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the book "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams,” told WBUR:¹⁵

“When you wake up in the middle of the night, typically we have this sort of Rolodex of anxiety that starts to flood back into our mind and we start to ruminate or catastrophize. Unfortunately, we know that it's a two-way street as well, that if you're not getting sufficient sleep or good quality sleep, you're more likely to feel anxious the next day, and it develops this vicious cycle.”

Walker also states that coronavirus stress could be triggering strange dreams, particularly as people sleep in later in the morning, increasing the amount of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, during which dreams occur.

“REM sleep essentially provides the brain a form of overnight therapy [in which] dreaming helps process difficult emotional experiences. And we can think of that dream sleep like a nocturnal, soothing balm that takes the sharp edges off the emotional concerns and experiences that we're having whilst we're awake,” he said.¹⁶

That being said, if you’re having trouble sleeping, your ability to concentrate and be productive will also suffer. In one animal study, sleep-deprived mice lost 30% of the neurons located in their locus ceruleus, a nucleus in the brainstem associated with wakefulness and cognitive processes.¹⁷

According to one study, lack of sleep costs the U.S. economy up to $411 billion a year in lost productivity alone — and that’s during regular times, not a pandemic.¹⁸

Dealing With Sleep Problems During a Pandemic

Adults need an average of seven to nine hours of sleep a night, with most doing well with about eight. If you have trouble achieving this duration, or you wake frequently during the night, it’s time to take steps to improve your sleep. My 33 healthy sleep secrets details a comprehensive list of strategies for a better night’s rest.

For additional tips that can be applied specifically in terms of dealing with sleep problems during home confinement amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers writing in the Journal of Sleep Research suggested the following, some of which mirror my own:¹⁹

Keep a regular bedtime and wakeup time; this will bring some structure to your day, especially for children

Schedule brief 15-minute times during the day to reflect about current events; use stress-relief tactics like journaling or the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to process and reflect so you’re less likely to face racing thoughts at bedtime

Use your bed only for sleep; if you’re working from home, avoid working on your bed

Use the current situation to follow your natural sleep rhythm; if you’re a night owl, for instance, you may naturally prefer to stay up later and sleep later

Avoid screen time close to bedtime; turn off your cellphone and do not bring it into your bedroom

Limit your exposure to news about COVID-19

Exercise regularly, preferably in daylight

Get exposure to daylight each day and keep light dim in the evening, transitioning to pitch black at bedtime

Engage in activities that you enjoy doing during the day, and choose relaxing activities, such as yoga or reading a book, in the evening

Make your bedroom a quiet, dark, cool and relaxing environment that’s conducive to sleep

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If you think Bill Gates' grandiose plan to force vaccinate over 7 billion people against COVID-19 is delusional, think again. The Microsoft billionaire — who has no public health education (he didn't even finish college) — has proposed plans that go far beyond the mandating of a vaccine.

They also include a global dragnet of digital surveillance to track and monitor all people, and trace the contacts of anyone testing positive for COVID-19. Of course, COVID-19 is just the initial excuse.

There's no reason in the world to believe this gigantic global disease surveillance system would be dismantled once the pandemic is declared over. Naturally, it will simply transition into other surveillance functions. Who knows just how many diseases it might track and trace?

Of course, this system will also be used to make sure everyone has been vaccinated with any and all vaccines deemed necessary for domestic and international travel, education, work and social activities involving other people. I wrote about this in "Rockefeller Foundation's Plan to Track Americans."

The Grand Plan Is a Totalitarian Surveillance Regime

We also have every reason to believe this disease tracking system will be combined with a digital identification and economic system to enforce compliance.

Signs that an all-encompassing global totalitarian plan is being quietly put together, piece by piece, are all around us. May 6, 2020, Techxplore reported¹ a "new nonprofit charity" called The Mojaloop Foundation will "promote digital payments for people outside the financial system, with support from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

Fortune magazine reported² the same story on the same day, adding that other founding sponsors of The Mojaloop Foundation include "the Rockefeller Foundation, the philanthropy and investing group Omidyar Network, and the financial technology startups Coil and ModusBox."

So, right there we have Google, the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, all in one little nonprofit with a heart set on giving poor people access to affordable digital banking using their cellphones. At the same time:

• The Rockefeller Foundation's white paper,³ "National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities," released April 21, 2020, calls for the use of a digital "patient identification number" to track all Americans after testing them for COVID-19, and
• Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, set up with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has partnered with the ID2020 Alliance to launch a digital identity program called ID2020 in Bangladesh,⁴ and
• Gates funded the creation of EarthNow, a project involving 500 satellites equipped with machine learning technology to surveil the entire planet with real-time video.⁵ Another funder of this project is Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, which owns Fortress Investment Group, the private equity firm that manages America's largest news network, Gannett, which has more than 260 dailies under its umbrella.^6,7

Give me a break. Enough already. You'd have to be both blind and mentally impaired to not be able to piece together the grand plan, it's so blatantly obvious once you spend just a few minutes to evaluate the evidence.

How Gates Monopolized Global Health

The featured video above contains Parts 1 and 2 of The Corbett Report on Bill Gates, where in his usual fashion, investigative journalist James Corbett strings together a cohesive narrative at a rapid clip.

Part 1 reviews how Gates ended up in a position to monopolize global health, despite his complete and utter lack of health or medical education. In Part 2, he lays out Gates' plan to vaccinate the global population.

As noted by Corbett, Gates' rise to influence on global health matters is founded not on expertise but on money. Just like John D. Rockefeller before him, Gates gained public adoration by donating money to "humanitarian causes" — and purchasing good publicity. As noted by Corbett:⁸

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spends tens of millions of dollars per year on media partnerships, sponsoring coverage of its program areas across the board. Gates funds The Guardian's Global Development website. Gates funds NPR's global health coverage.

Gates funds the Our World in Data website that is tracking the latest statistics and research on the coronavirus pandemic. Gates funds BBC coverage of global health and development issues, both through its BBC Media Action organization and the BBC itself. Gates funds world health coverage on ABC News.

When the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer was given a $3.5 million Gates foundation grant to set up a special unit to report on global health issues, NewsHour communications chief Rob Flynn was asked about the potential conflict of interest that such a unit would have in reporting on issues that the Gates Foundation is itself involved in.

'In some regards I guess you might say that there are not a heck of a lot of things you could touch in global health these days that would not have some kind of Gates tentacle,' Flynn responded. Indeed, it would be almost impossible to find any area of global health that has been left untouched by the tentacles of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

As noted by Corbett, "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's fingerprints can be seen on every major global health initiative of the past two decades." This includes:

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance	The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
The private and public partnership to combat 10 neglected tropical diseases9 (a partnership involving 13 drug companies, the U.S., the U.K. and United Arab Emirate governments, and the World Bank)	Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations	Hundreds of grants to small countries and specific regions

Gates Has (Not so Secretly) Led Global Pandemic Response

Importantly, Corbett points out that Gates' $250 million pledge to fight COVID-19, "every aspect of the current coronavirus pandemic involves organizations, groups and individuals with direct ties to Gates funding."

This includes the World Health Organization, of course, but also the two research groups responsible for shaping the decision to lock down the U.K. and U.S. — the Imperial College COVID-19 Research Team and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — as well as the National Institutes of Health, and the NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been leading the White House pandemic response team.

Fauci has direct ties to Gates, via both collaborative projects and funding. For example, Fauci is part of Gates' Decade of Vaccine leadership council, which has tasked itself with implementing the Global Vaccine Action Plan. Gates has committed a staggering $10 billion to this plan. Lo and behold, despite the fact that Fauci is the one with a medical science background, he's parroting Gates' statements that nothing can go back to normal until or unless we have a vaccine.

Then, of course, there's Event 201, a tabletop exercise staged in October 2019 in which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security got together to gauge "the economic and societal impact of a globally-spreading coronavirus pandemic," Corbett says, adding:

"Given the incredible reach that the tentacles of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have into every corner of the global health markets, it should not be surprising that the foundation has been intimately involved with every stage of the current pandemic crisis, either.

In effect, Gates has merely used the wealth from his domination of the software market to leverage himself into a similar position in the world of global health. The whole process has been cloaked in the mantle of selfless philanthropy, but the foundation is not structured as a charitable endeavor.

Instead, it maintains a dual structure: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation distributes money to grantees, but a separate entity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, manages the endowment assets. These two entities often have overlapping interests, and, as has been noted many times in the past, grants given by the foundation often directly benefit the value of the trust's assets."

Indeed, I wrote about this illegal setup in "Bill Gates — Most Dangerous Philanthropist in Modern History?" As noted by Corbett, despite giving away billions of dollars, Gates' "Decade of Vaccines" has been profitable in the extreme, doubling his worth from $54 billion to $103.1 billion. Somehow, by giving money away, he makes even more in return.

Vaccinating the World Could Have Catastrophic Consequences

In Part 2, Corbett reviews Gates' plan to vaccinate over 7 billion people. He has repeatedly said life cannot and will not go back to normal until we have enough vaccines to inoculate the global population. A timeframe of 18 months was originally given by Gates, and this has since been dutifully regurgitated by various heads of state, health officials and media.

Sadly, they absolutely demolished this original, highly aggressive and unsafe timeline and human trials were actually started in March 2020. They are now anticipating to roll out the vaccine THIS FALL.¹⁰ As if their super rushed non-safety tested vaccine launch wasn't bad enough, the GSK and Sanofi COVID-19 vaccine will be produced in insect cells with the dangerous squalene adjuvant.¹¹

The media has also ignored, downplayed or censored as fake news recommendations to boost your immune system. Hydroxychloroquine, a decades' old drug with a long safety record and a small price tag has been systematically pushed under the rug as being experimental, unproven and potentially unsafe — this, despite countless reports from doctors in the field saying it's the thing that seems to work the best, most of the time.

Could money be involved? What do you think? If an inexpensive ancient drug works, then vaccine development might be a waste of time and money. If people can safeguard themselves against COVID-19 by reversing insulin resistance, then the death toll might not warrant a global vaccination scheme. Of course it's about money.

The problem we're facing if we go forward with Gates' and Rockefeller's plan — which fit together like hand in glove — is that the history of coronavirus vaccine development is rife with problems, and those problems could turn into a global catastrophe if everyone gets vaccinated with a fast-tracked vaccine that hasn't gone through appropriate safety testing.

In my recent interview with Robert Kennedy Jr. above, he summarized the history of coronavirus vaccine development, which began after three SARS epidemics had broken out, starting in early 2002.

"The first [coronavirus outbreak] was a natural epidemic that had moved from bats to human beings. The second two were lab-created organisms where people were experimenting with the coronavirus … That's noncontroversial. Everybody accepts that. The Chinese, the Americans, the Europeans all got together and said, 'We need to develop a vaccine against coronavirus.'

Around 2012, they had about 30 vaccines that looked promising. They took the four best of those and … manufactured the vaccines. They gave those vaccines to ferrets, which are the closest analogy when you're looking at lung infections in human beings.

The ferrets had an extraordinarily good antibody response, and that is the metric by which FDA licenses vaccines. Vaccines, as you know, are never tested in the field. They never give 5,000 people the vaccine, 5,000 people a placebo vaccine, and then tell them to go out and live life and watch what happens to those people. That never happens.

The way that vaccines get licensed is that FDA gives people a vaccine or the industry gives them the vaccines, and then they do a serological response [test to] see 'Did you develop in your blood antibodies to that target virus?' The ferrets developed very strong antibodies, so they thought, 'We hit the jackpot.' All four of these vaccines ... worked like a charm.

Then something terrible happened. Those ferrets were then exposed to the wild virus, and they all died. [They developed] inflammation in all their organs, their lungs stopped functioning and they died."

It's worth repeating in case you missed it. The vaccines worked great, based on vaccine theory, but when the vaccinated animals were exposed to the wild virus, they died. This is as bad an outcome as one could possibly get. Kennedy continued:

"Then those scientists remembered that the same thing had happened in the 1960s when they tried to develop an RSV vaccine, which is an upper respiratory illness very similar to coronavirus. At the time, they did not test it on animals. They went right to human testing.

They tested it on I think about 35 children, and the same thing happened. The children developed a champion antibody response — robust, durable. It looked perfect [but when] the children were exposed to the wild virus, they all became sick. Two of them died. They abandoned the vaccine. It was a big embarrassment to FDA and NIH …

Those scientists in 2012 remembered that, and they said, 'This is the same thing that happened [back then].' So, they look closer and they realize that there are two kinds of antibodies that were being produced by the coronavirus. There are neutralizing antibodies, which are the kind you want, which fight the disease, and then there are binding antibodies.

The binding antibodies actually create a pathway for the disease in your body, and they trigger something called … a paradoxical immune response or paradoxical immune enhancement. What that means is that it looks good until you get the disease, and then it makes the disease much, much worse …

Coronavirus vaccines can be very dangerous, and that's why even our enemies, people who hate you and me — Peter Hotez, Paul Offit, Ian Lipkin — are all saying, 'You got to be really, really careful with this vaccine.'"

So, are all current COVID-19 vaccine developers aware of this research? They should be. Just what kind of plan do they have to circumvent this paradoxical immune enhancement that coronaviruses trigger? Needless to say, COVID-19 vaccine makers will be indemnified from financial liability no matter how many casualties a fast-tracked vaccine might cause.

In fact, Gates has suggested that if just 1 in 10,000 persons has serious side effects, then that means 700,000 people will suffer from the vaccine's administration, and that's why "governments will have to be involved because there will be some risk and indemnification needed before that can be decided on."¹²

Meanwhile, Gates and the various companies and organizations involved in this global disease and vaccination surveillance plan all stand to make an unfathomable amount of money, not just from vaccines but from all the tracking, tracing and surveillance infrastructure that surrounds it.

This is clearly a decisive moment in time. What will you choose — Totalitarianism, or a life of liberty, even if it involves a degree of risk? Remember, government cannot keep you safe from disease. Only you can do that. Government really should safeguard public freedom, not public health at the expense of human liberty.

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A team of researchers has uncovered key molecular step stones in ALD that may provide targets for drug therapy development.

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A landmark review of the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the future of global health calls on the global health community to establish guidelines for development and deployment of new technologies and to develop a human-centered research agenda to facilitate equitable and ethical use of AI.

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Scientists have developed a novel technique that can produce pure therapeutic drugs without the associated side effects.

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Seeing someone do something good for someone else motivates witnesses to perform their own helpful acts, an insight that could help drive cooperative behavior in communities navigating through the health crisis.

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The challenge of diversifying STEM fields may get a boost from the results of a new study that show field courses help build self-confidence among students -- especially those from underrepresented groups.

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