Neuroscientists have experimented on mice to identify the brain region that functions beyond sensory encoding and motor encoding, potentially opening up new directions to studying the cellular and circuit mechanisms of sensory-motor transformations. The researchers report a cortical region traditionally defined as whisker motor cortex in mice is most directly related to the transformation process.
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People often move their hands up and down to 'highlight' what they are saying. Are such 'beat gestures' important for communication? Researchers created words with an ambiguous stress pattern and asked listeners what they heard (DIScount or disCOUNT?). The beat gestures people saw influenced what they heard, showing that listeners quickly integrate verbal and visual information during speech recognition.
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A new study has revealed insights on the intricate, adaptive mechanisms of a protective system employed by the cells of mammalian immune systems. These defenses have evolved to set a type of tripwire that produces an immune response against attack from viruses.
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When their manhood is threatened, some men respond more aggressively than others. New research suggests who may be most triggered by such threats - younger men whose sense of masculinity depends heavily on other people's opinions.
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A new study uncovers intriguing genetic similarities between PTSD and other mental health disorders such as anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. The findings also suggest that existing drugs commonly used for other disorders might be modified to help treat individual symptoms of multiple disorders.
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Researchers detail the mechanism that allows propofol, a common anesthetic, to halt the movement of kinesin proteins that deliver cargoes to the far reaches of cells.
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A study has found that adolescents who frequently use cannabis may experience a decline in Intelligence Quotient (IQ) over time. The findings of the research provide further insight into the harmful neurological and cognitive effects of frequent cannabis use on young people.
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A security guard at a quarantine hotel has contracted the UK strain of coronavirus, without knowing, and visited a large number of locations in the community.
Ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) are incredibly strong materials used in jet engines, gas turbines, and cutting tools for nickel superalloys. Aluminum oxide (Al2O3) is hard and chemically inert, and tungsten carbide (WC) is used as a superhard material, but past efforts to create an Al2O3-WC CMC yielded unsatisfactory results. Recently, a study by Japanese scientists shows that adding zirconium atoms results in improved Al2O3-WC CMCs.
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Researchers find a disproportionate number of inmates with violent offenses suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder and alcohol use disorder.
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Scientists have discovered how a protein called Tip60 plays a vital role in the renewal of blood cells in the body. Without it, the stem cells that make new blood suffer catastrophic damage. This discovery could lead to better treatments for life-threatening blood-related diseases like leukemia.
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Expert computer programmers show higher proficiency in certain behavioral and attention skills than their novice peers. To identify the responsible brain regions, scientists used fMRI to analyze the brain activities of 30 programmers of different skill level, finding that seven regions of the frontal, parietal and temporal cortices in expert programmers' brains are fine-tuned for programming. The findings could provide better methods and tools for everyone to learn programming.
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A team has developed and patented a method to separate mucilage from chia seeds, yielding a protein-rich chia seed flour with improved bioactivity and functionality compared with conventional methods.
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Research based on the daily movements of people living in a contemporary hunter-gatherer society provides new evidence for links between the gendered division of labor in human societies over the past 2.5 million years and differences in the way men and women think about space.
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Access to legal cannabis stores is associated with a reduction in opioid related deaths in the United States, particularly those linked to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, finds a new study.
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New research suggests that a higher dietary intake of long chain omega-3 fatty acids in childhood may reduce the risk of developing subsequent asthma, but only in children carrying a common gene variant.
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New research demonstrates that hypnosis -- the process of focusing a person's attention on a specific task or sensation -- can turn a normally difficult visual task into a far easier one by helping individuals mentally 'fill in the gaps' of missing visual cues.
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Doctors are increasingly using genetic signatures to diagnose diseases and determine the best course of care, but using DNA sequencing and other techniques to detect genomic rearrangements remains costly or limited in capabilities. However, an innovative breakthrough promises to diagnose DNA rearrangement mutations at a fraction of the cost with improved accuracy.
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This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interviews various experts on a variety of health issues. To see more expert interviews, click here.
As the name implies, the book is about fasting and all the magnificent health benefits it provides. Is it for everyone? No, and he will be the first to admit that. But it can benefit most of us, certainly, those of us who are either overweight or obese. In his book, Asprey tells his own journey into fasting and what he's learned along the way.
"The word fasting is associated with pain, and I wanted to teach people some hacks for fasting," Asprey says. "I also put a whole chapter in for women, because fasting doesn't work for everyone and there is no one best kind of fasting. The evidence seems pretty clear that fasting the same way every day or every week is probably also not the best strategy.
So, how do you make it so you can fast without pain when you have stuff to do? And how do you make it so you fast with all of the emotions of fasting when you want to really dig deep and do the meditation, personal development side of fasting? Sorting through all that hasn't been done in a book, so that's why I wrote it."
Breaking the Starvation Myth
As noted by Asprey, a common concern is that fasting will put your body into starvation mode, thereby actually preventing fat loss. This is a persistent belief, but it's not true. That said, some strategies will indeed activate starvation mode, such as when you're eating a low-calorie diet for months on end. Asprey tells a personal story that encapsulates this dilemma:
"On my journey of losing 100 pounds, I was doing what everyone said would work. I went to the gym an hour and a half a day, six days a week, halfway tough cardio until I could max out all but two machines, and I would do 45 minutes on the treadmill at a 15-degree angle wearing a backpack — really just pushing it.
And, I went on a low-fat, low-calorie diet. At the end of 18 months, I'm sitting at a Carl's Jr. with friends. I'm eating the chicken salad with no chicken and no dressing and my friends are eating double western bacon cheeseburgers. I looked around and I'm like, 'I exercise more than all my friends and I eat less than all my friends, even though I'm taller than they are. Maybe I'm just eating too much lettuce.'
To have a 46-inch waist after that much exercise, low-calorie dieting and all the suffering and intense hunger … My god, the sense of personal failure that comes with that, it's one thing that holds people back and makes us stay heavy.
What's going on there is there is a hunger set point that is caused by ghrelin, one of the hunger hormones. It's a precursor to leptin. Research has shown that when you lose weight using a low-calorie diet or excessive exercise — and I was doing both — your hunger set point will remain your fat set point, and it will always do that.
The thing that turns your set point for hunger to your actual weight instead of to your fat weight is ketones. So, if you were to fast for a couple days or use the fasting hacks that I talk about in the book — there are three fasting hacks to turn off hunger, and two of them are going to help get your ketones up — even just one dose will reset your hunger levels."
As explained by Asprey, yo-yo weight loss and weight gain occurs because you're on the wrong diet. Key dietary principles for losing the excess weight and keeping it off include:
Getting at least half or more of your daily calories from healthy fats
Eating the right type and amount of protein
Avoiding inflammatory foods, including inflammatory vegetables (culprits include lectins and oxalic acid, for example)
Having periods of time when you fast (abstain from food)
Key Benefits of Fasting
So, what are the main benefits of fasting? Is it just the ease of weight loss? As explained by Asprey, there are many other health benefits to fasting beside the fact that stubborn weight will fall off. Importantly, the primary benefit of fasting is that it makes your body better at making energy.
This in turn has several benefits, one of which is improved blood sugar regulation, which will allow you to stave off insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction and all the diseases of aging associated with that. As noted by Asprey, if you can avoid cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, you're probably going to live longer, as these are the primary killers.
Fasting is also antiaging because it improves autophagy in your mitochondria and cells. Autophagy is a natural process that cleanses and detoxifies your mitochondria and cells. By breaking down old, damaged organelles, fresh, new ones can be made to replace them. And, with healthy, new mitochondria, your body can make more energy, more efficiently.
"That's an unappreciated side of fasting," Asprey says. "High-intensity interval training will do something similar, but when you combine that with fasting, your body is like, 'Get rid of that old stuff.' It's kind of like a snake shedding its skin. It's that autophagy process that is a really big deal."
The Most Important Fat to Avoid
As mentioned, about half or more of your daily calories should come from fats, but it's crucial to avoid certain types of fats. I'm currently writing a book on what I believe might be the primary disease-maker in the Western diet, namely omega-6 linoleic acid (LA).
LA makes up the bulk — about 90% — of the omega-6 consumed and is the primary contributor to nearly all chronic diseases. While an essential fat, when consumed in excessive amounts, LA acts as a metabolic poison.
The reason for this is because polyunsaturated fats such as LA are highly susceptible to oxidation. As the fat oxidizes, it breaks down into harmful sub-components such as advanced lipid oxidation end products (ALES) and oxidized LA metabolites (OXLAMS). These ALES and OXLAMS are actually what cause the damage.
One type of advanced lipid oxidation end product (ALE) is 4HNE, a mutagen known to cause DNA damage. Studies have shown there's a definite correlation between elevated levels of 4HNE and heart failure. LA breaks down into 4HNE even faster when the oil is heated, which is why cardiologists recommend avoiding fried foods. LA intake and the subsequent ALES and OXLAMS produced also play a significant role in cancer.
HNE and other ALES are extraordinarily harmful even in exceedingly small quantities. While excess sugar is certainly bad for your health and should typically be limited to 25 grams per day or less, it doesn't cause a fraction of the oxidative damage that LA does.
Processed vegetable oils are a primary source of LA, but even food sources hailed for their health benefits contain it, and can be a problem if consumed in excess. Cases in point: olive oil and conventionally raised chicken, which are fed LA-rich grains. To learn more about this hidden source of LA, see "Why Chicken Is Killing You and Saturated Fat Is Your Friend."
Many now understand that your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is very important, and should be about 1-to-1 or possibly up to 4-to-1, but simply increasing your omega-3 intake won't counteract the damage done by excessive LA. You really need to minimize the omega-6 to prevent damage from taking place. For more details about how to track your LA intake and minimize it, please view my recent article on how to do this.
Simple Hacks That Make Fasting Easier
Contrary to popular belief, fasting doesn't have to be difficult or painful. Asprey details three fasting hacks in "Fast This Way." The first one is to increase your ketone level. As explained by Asprey, hunger hormones start shifting when your ketone level hits slightly below 0.5, which is not yet the level at which you enter nutritional ketosis. He explains:
"Ghrelin will drop at 0.38, so almost no ketones. The hunger that comes with the ghrelin turns off. But there's also a satiety hormone, the one that makes you feel full, which is called CCK or cholecystokinin. CCK, when you hit levels of 0.48, CCK makes you feel full. So, if you can get your ketones up to that level in the morning, then you will not pay attention to food.
The first step to get your levels up is mycotoxin-free black coffee — the Bulletproof beans are that. I did the original research about this. Anything that causes inflammation is going to make you hungry because inflammation just means the electrons that should be powering your thoughts are going to create inflammation in the body. They must go somewhere.
These toxins are present in very small amounts. Coffee that has more than five parts per million is illegal to sell in China, Japan and Europe, but it gets sent to the U.S., and we wonder why we get really hungry two hours after we have coffee and why we want sugar in our coffee.
It has to do with toxins, not coffee itself. A study at UC San Diego is really interesting. They found that the amount of caffeine present in two small cups of black coffee will double ketone production.
The second way is to make the coffee 'bulletproof.' And what that means is, you take your mycotoxin-free beans and you add some MCT oil. The 8-carbon chain (C8) MCT is the correct one. C8 MCT raises ketones four times more than coconut oil. [Then] you [add] butter and blend it or really shake it."
Asprey funded research at the University of Washington with Dr. Gerald Pollack, who determined that when water is mixed with grass fed butter or MCT oil, it creates a very large exclusion zone (EZ) in the water, and this EZ is important during fasting.
When you drink regular water, your body takes the water and puts it near your cell membranes, which are made of tiny droplets of fat. Body heat warms the water, converting it from bulk water into EZ water, which your body requires for ATP production and other biological processes, including autophagy and protein folding.
"When you put that tiny bit of butter and the MCT oil and you blend it in the morning, the MCT is going to raise your ketone levels very meaningfully. I can always get to 0.5 with just a Bulletproof coffee. But you're also getting this water in the form of the coffee that is already primed for your body to use it to start burning fat, to start making energy," Asprey explains.
"This is why taking a bite of butter and drinking a cup of coffee isn't going to do it for you. It's a different process. And I have noticed profound differences from doing that … I have found that for women, in particular, starting out with this really helps, especially if you're over 40."
The Importance of Prebiotic Fiber
A third fasting hack is to make sure you're getting enough prebiotic fiber. According to Asprey, long term fasting and/or eating a carnivore-like, zero-carb diet for extended periods of time without cycling healthy carbs back in can alter your gut microbiota, which in turn can cause sleep disruptions.
When you feed your gut bacteria with prebiotics, they convert the prebiotics into propionic acid and butyric acid (butyrate), and butyrate is very pro-ketogenic.
"In fact, you can get into a state of ketosis by taking a handful of butyrate capsules," Asprey says. "You want more butyric acid if you want to live a long time and have a healthy metabolism, and studies show massive hunger suppression when you do this.
So, if you put prebiotic fiber, which has essentially no flavor, in your coffee in the morning … you'll also find that you care nothing about food. I was able to quadruple the number of species of [beneficial bacteria] in my gut using this. It's totally compatible with fasting and it turns off hunger like no one's business.
So now you're saying, 'Wait, a minute. I could have the coffee I was going to have anyway. I don't put the sugar and artificial crap in it. I get the mold-free coffee and then I have a choice of drinking a black, of adding butter and MCT, and/or adding prebiotic fiber.'
What you do then is you drink this and you just stop caring about food, you go into the zone and you have the best morning you've ever had. Then the next morning, maybe you only have black coffee or maybe you have tea or maybe you have nothing at all, but it's OK and it's even preferable to mix up your length and style of fasting."
Cyclical Keto and Fasting Are the Safest Approaches
In the interview, Asprey discusses several of the diet traps that people get themselves into. As a general guidance, Asprey and I both agree that the best strategy to stay out of trouble is to cycle in and out of whatever routine you're doing, be it low-carb keto or fasting.
While you may need to be very strict in the beginning, once you're metabolically flexible, mix things up once or twice a week. Eat three meals instead of one and/or spread them out. Add in more carbs.
"The idea is to be flexible about your fasting regimen," Asprey says. "I don't even like the word regimen. It's just a practice that we do and it's a practice that makes us feel good, it makes us perform better. And it makes us age less, but doing it too much is a real danger.
If you're going to do something like a four-day fast, after about 48 hours, there's all sorts of additional forms of autophagy that turn on. Once every three or six months, doing a 48-hour fast is really well-advised. But man, as a weekly practice, that'll mess you up …
Women will hit the wall before men do. I think there are evolutionary reasons for this. But it's a big problem and I oftentimes see thyroid problems manifest and autoimmunity. There are good studies that show chronic stressors trigger autoimmunity, and over-fasting is a chronic stressor almost by definition."
How Activated Charcoal Can Help
One reason why fasting is a stressor is because it releases toxins from your fat cells. A simple intervention to address this is the use of activated charcoal when you're fasting. This is particularly beneficial if you're also doing saunas.
"The universal thing that will happen is you will experience massive brain fog. You'll feel like a zombie. This was a big thing for me because I had toxic mold exposure [and] I had heavy metals. You have these very interesting things in your gut, these gut bacteria that make lipopolysaccharides (LPS).
LPS's can cross the gut barrier and then they cause inflammation in the body and trigger cravings in the brain. So, when the bad bacteria in your gut are going, 'I didn't get my sugar. I didn't get any food. Oh, my god, it's a mortal threat. If there's a threat, I should release toxins.'
So, they ramp up their LPS production and then you'll feel like garbage. Then you have to use even more willpower to get through your fast — or you could take activated charcoal that binds directly to LPS. Then you don't feel the hunger and you don't have to take the biological hit of all the toxins you're releasing from your fat, and that really makes a big difference."
Tripling Down on mTOR
In his book, Asprey also discusses how to integrate exercise into your fasting regimen. The best time to exercise is at the end of your fast. He explains:
"There's something in the body called mTOR, which drives growth. mTOR will drive muscle [growth]. So, if you want to get a bicep, then you need some mTOR. But if your mTOR is chronically elevated, your risk of cancer and the diseases of aging go up. If you eat too much protein, especially certain amino acids, your [mTOR] level goes up and stays up, and that's not good for you.
It's not enough to trigger muscle growth, but it's just enough to trigger inflammation. The way mTOR works is you suppress mTOR and then when you stop suppressing it, it surges forth and you get a big spike, which is what causes the benefits.
There's three things that suppress mTOR and I call the strategy 'tripling down on mTOR.' The first thing that is shown to increase mTOR is fasting. The longer you fast, the lower your mTOR goes, which is good for triggering autophagy and things like that.
Other things that lowers mTOR are coffee and exercise. So, by having coffee during the fast, you keep cranking down on it, and then you exercise and it's really low.
Then when you eat, which releases mTOR, and you have adequate protein in that meal, the body is like, 'Woo-hoo, I've got a huge surge of mTOR and I've got protein present. Now, I'm going to go to work and I'm going to fix everything. I'm going to replace all the cells I got rid of during autophagy. I'm going to grow the new mitochondria.'"
This is why you get more out of exercise when you do it at the end of a fast. I'm convinced this strategy has helped me radically build my muscles and improve my strength. One small tweak that may be helpful if you're doing very heavy exercise is to eat a small amount of food about 30 to 60 minutes before you start, essentially breaking your fast right before your exercise.
"There's great logic in that advice," Asprey says. "You fasted and then you broke the fast right before the exercise, because by the time those calories are digested and hit the blood sugar, you will be done with your workout. It's going to be a good half hour before that stuff really hits the bloodstream.
So, I would totally support that unless you're doing the kind of high-intensity workouts that I'm a fan of, the ones where if I tried to do it with a full stomach, I think I might throw up. They're very short but they're very intense."
More Information
Asprey discusses a number of other antiaging strategies in this interview as well — things like hormone regulation and the use of testosterone, and how fasting affects these levels — so for those details, be sure to listen to the whole interview.
He also goes into some of the problems that can occur when you're on a plant-based diet, and/or if your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is off-kilter, as well as how your diet and exposure to sunlight influence your circadian rhythm, and which supplements are helpful when fasting and which should be avoided.
"What we know now, and what is in 'Fast This Way,' is that when you show your body that it will be required to regularly go without something it thinks it needs, you walk away from that as a stronger person.
Your willpower is stronger, but more importantly, your cells are stronger, and then they will give you more energy all the time. And, going from a 300-pound tired, fat, uncomfortable guy to where I am now, even though I'm 48, if I could do it, I think anyone could do it," Asprey says.
Sign Up for a Guided Fast
To help you on your way, Asprey also provides a two-week program where he guides you through a 24- or 48-hour fast and answers questions on a daily basis. All you need to do is preorder "Fast This Way," and then send a copy of your receipt to FastThisWay.com and sign up for the program. There's an upload form on the website.
"I'll teach you the fasting hacks. We'll do some intermittent fasting together in a community, and then towards the end of this, we will actually do a 24-hour or 48-hour fast. I'm going to lead you through it," he says.
"We also [cover] mediation and the gratitude side of this. I just want to teach you this book because I spent thousands of hours writing it and I want you to get it.
You can send your receipt in any time. The training starts right after the book comes out. The book hits shelves January 19, and January 21 I'm going to start the fast. So, if you want to ask me questions, I'm going to be there for you."
In April 2020, I interviewed Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., about the potential role played by human gammaretroviruses in COVID-19. Mikovits is a molecular biologist1 and researcher, and was the founding research director of the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Nevada.
She may be one of the most censored researchers on the planet at this point, thanks in no small part to her participation in the documentary “Plandemic,” which went viral in a big way (plandemicseries.com).
Case in point: YouTube suspended our account for one week as soon as we uploaded today’s interview — even though the video was UNLISTED and not available for public viewing yet. Even worse, Mikovits’ third and most recent book, “The Case Against Masks: Ten Reasons Why Mask Use Should Be Limited,” is so heavily censored, no one can buy it.
“I don't even have a copy,” she says. “I'm sitting here with two copies of the other books but I can't even buy it. What the book sellers did, like Amazon, is they bought them all up from Skyhorse, the publisher, and now they won't ship them out of the warehouse.”
Clearly, Mikovits is considered a serious threat to the technocratic status quo, and once you hear what she has to say about COVID-19 vaccines — which as you’ll see is a complete misnomer — you may start to understand why.
COVID-19 Vaccines Aren’t Real Vaccines
The COVID-19 vaccine really isn’t a vaccine in the medical definition of a vaccine. It does not improve your immune response to the infection, nor does not limit you from getting the infection. It’s really an experimental gene therapy that could prematurely kill large amounts of the population and disable exponentially more.
“I'm just beside myself with anger over this synthetic gene therapy, this chemical poison, and what they're doing worldwide,” Mikovits says. “We're already seeing deaths from this shot. It's illegal. It shouldn't be done. It should be stopped right now. It should have never been allowed to happen, yet we see it being forced on the most vulnerable populations.”
Indeed, news and social media reports suggest recipients are starting to drop like flies. Many die of unknown causes within days, sometimes hours of getting the first or second shot.
Baseball legend Hank Aaron passed away two weeks after receiving the vaccine, yet this was not ever mentioned in his New York Times obituary. Surely, had he tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, he would have been declared a COVID-19 fatality, whether the virus actually had anything to do with it or not.
But when it comes to the vaccine, even eyebrow-raising timing is dismissed as coincidental and irrelevant. Now all of a sudden, old people dying shortly after vaccination are shrugged off with the excuse that they’re old and could have died any day anyway. Old people dying with SARS-CoV-2, however, must be stopped at any cost. Funny how that works.
The Problem With Synthetic RNA
The messenger RNA (mRNA) used in many COVID-19 vaccines are not natural. They’re synthetic. Since naturally produced mRNA rapidly degrades, it must be complexed with lipids or polymers to prevent this from happening. COVID-19 vaccines use PEGylated lipid nanoparticles, and PEG is known to cause anaphylaxis.2 Lipid nanoparticles may also cause other problems.
In 2017, Stat News discussed Moderna’s challenges in developing an mRNA-based drug for Crigler-Najjar, a condition that can lead to jaundice, muscle degeneration and brain damage:3
“In order to protect mRNA molecules from the body’s natural defenses, drug developers must wrap them in a protective casing. For Moderna, that meant putting its Crigler-Najjar therapy in nanoparticles made of lipids.
And for its chemists, those nanoparticles created a daunting challenge: Dose too little, and you don’t get enough enzyme to affect the disease; dose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.
From the start, Moderna’s scientists knew that using mRNA to spur protein production would be a tough task, so they scoured the medical literature for diseases that might be treated with just small amounts of additional protein.
‘And that list of diseases is very, very short,’ said the former employee … Crigler-Najjar was the lowest-hanging fruit. Yet Moderna could not make its therapy work ... The safe dose was too weak, and repeat injections of a dose strong enough to be effective had troubling effects on the liver in animal studies.”
However, if they call their drugs vaccines, they can bypass the safety studies. All of a sudden, they expect us to believe that all of these safety issues have been resolved? Another problem is related to how long the mRNA remains stable in your system. It’s encased in nanolipid to prevent it from degrading too rapidly, but what happens if the mRNA degrades too slowly, or not at all?
The idea behind mRNA vaccines is that by tricking your body into creating the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, your immune system will produce antibodies in response. But what happens when you turn your body into a viral protein factory, thus keeping antibody production activated on a continual basis with no ability to shut down?
In addition, your body sees these synthetic particles as non-self and much of the perpetual antibody response will be autoantibodies attacking your own tissues. Mikovits explains:
“Normally, messenger RNA is not free in your body because it's a danger signal. As a molecular biologist, the central dogma of molecular biology is that our genetic code, DNA, is transcribed, written, into the messenger RNA. That messenger RNA is translated into protein, or used in a regulatory capacity … to regulate gene expression in cells.
So, taking a synthetic messenger RNA and making it thermostable — making it not break down — [is problematic]. We have lots of enzymes (RNAses and DNAses) that degrade free RNA and DNA because, again, those are danger signals to your immune system. They literally drive inflammatory diseases.
Now you've got PEG, PEGylated and polyethylene glycol, and a lipid nanoparticle that will allow it to enter every cell of the body and change the regulation of our own genes with this synthetic RNA, part of which actually is the message for the gene syncytin …
Syncytin is the endogenous gammaretrovirus envelope that's encoded in the human genome … We know that if syncytin … is expressed aberrantly in the body, for instance in the brain, which these lipid nanoparticles will go into, then you've got multiple sclerosis.
The expression of that gene alone enrages microglia, literally inflames and dysregulates the communication between the brain microglia, which are critical for clearing toxins and pathogens in the brain and the communication with astrocytes.
It dysregulates not only the immune system, but also the endocannabinoid system, which is the dimmer switch on inflammation. We've already seen multiple sclerosis as an adverse event in the clinical trials, and we're being lied to: ‘Oh, those people had that [already].’ No, they didn't.
We also see myalgic encephalomyelitis. Inflammation of the brain and the spinal cord, which is [associated with] exogenous gammaretroviruses, the XMRVs.”
These High-Risk Groups Should Avoid COVID-19 Vaccine
According to Mikovits, research shows 4% to 6% of Americans have already been infected with XMRV gammaretroviruses via contaminated vaccines and blood supply for more than three decades, which is driving a number of chronic health conditions. Now, these synthetic gene therapies (the so-called COVID-19 vaccines) will further add to the chronic disease burden by triggering myalgic encephalomyelitis.
Making matters worse, the synthetic mRNA also has an HIV envelope expressed in it, which can cause immune dysregulation. “This is a nightmare,” Mikovits says. “I'm angry, as this should never be allowed.”
Mikovits’ hypothesis is that those who are most susceptible to severe neurological side effects and death from the COVID-19 vaccines are those who have previously been injected with XMRVs, borrelia, babesia, mycoplasma, through contaminated vaccines, resulting in chronic disease. (Her book, “Plague of Corruption,” details the science and history of XMRVs, which is a fascinating read.)
“Yes, absolutely,” she says. “That's one of our hypotheses. But also, anyone with an inflammatory disease like rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson's disease, chronic Lyme disease, anybody with an acquired immune deficiency from any pathogens and environmental toxins.
Those are the people who will be killed, murdered, by this vaccine, and Anthony Fauci knows it … I can't even sleep [because of] how evil this is. This is so deadly, I can't scream it loud enough from the rooftops.”
The chart below lists 35 diseases associated with XMRV infection. If you have any of these, you may want to think long and hard before you line up for an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, as your chances of severe side effects or death are likely far higher than someone who does not have any of these diseases.
This is not a complete list. There may be many other conditions that can put you into a high-risk category. One example is idiopathic thrombocytopenia (ITP), a deadly bleeding disorder. According to Mikovits, her work shows 30% of all ITP are associated with XMRVs.
Interestingly, one example is the 58-year-old Florida doctor who recently got the COVID-19 vaccine and died from sudden onset of ITP two weeks later. Dr. Jerry L. Spivak, an expert on blood disorders at Johns Hopkins University, told The New York Times “it is a medical certainty” that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine caused the man’s death.4,5 Pfizer, of course, denies any connection.
Genetic Alterations May Last for Life
So, just how long will the synthetic RNA in COVID-19 vaccines be maintained within your body, causing your cells to produce this aberrant protein? Mikovits believes it will escape degradation for months, years, maybe even for life in some cases.
All of this is eerily reminiscent of previous attempts to create a coronavirus vaccine, all of which failed due to the vaccines causing paradoxical immune reactions, or antibody-dependent immune enhancement. While the animals appeared to have antibodies against the virus, and should theoretically have been protected, when they were exposed to wild coronavirus, they got severely ill and most died.
Such failures may be why so many vaccine makers decided to use mRNA rather than following conventional vaccine development strategies, but the end result is likely going to be the same or worse.
“I have a 41-year-old daughter-in-law with a very aggressive colon cancer. We're seeing an explosion of chronic disease and these patients are not being discouraged from getting the vaccine. In fact, they're being scared by physicians into getting it.
How do we wake people up? Is it going to take millions of Americans and people worldwide dying? Will Hank Aaron dying help the Black community? … We know the mechanisms. We know that Blacks and Hispanics can't degrade RNA viruses as rapidly as Caucasians. We know that from studies all the way back to MMR. The MMR vaccine is associated with ITP. It says it right there on the package insert.
If you have a single nucleotide polymorphism in one of those RNases called RNase-L, you are more likely to get aggressive breast cancers, prostate cancers and other cancers from an XMRV infection (So why inject mRNA of syncytin, a gamma retrovirus envelope?).”
Breakthrough Genomics Could Save Millions of Lives
According to Mikovits, one solution is to use functional genomics technologies like Breakthrough Genomics, a company which uses machine learning to look at full genome sequences to determine which single nucleotide polymorphisms in ACE2 receptors, antiviral pathways like RNASEL and Interferons can make a person most susceptible to harm from these gene therapy “vaccines.”
“We have the technology to see who's susceptible to severe effects. It will be a huge part of the population,” Mikovits says.
While one size clearly doesn't fit all in any vaccine strategy, forcing a gene therapy on an entire population when it can be predicted that millions will die and develop deadly diseases like ITP is simply unconscionable. Yet anyone who dares speak about this, as Mikovits knows, risks having their careers and lives destroyed.
Symptoms of COVID-19 Vaccine Damage
Many of the symptoms now being reported are suggestive of neurological damage. They have severe dyskinesia (impairment of voluntary movement), ataxia (lack of muscle control) and intermittent or chronic seizures. Many cases detailed in personal videos on social media are quite shocking.
Equally shocking is that these videos are quickly removed by the social media platforms, ostensibly for violating some term of service. It’s hard to fathom how a personal experience can be considered “false information.”
“What is causing this is the neuroinflammation,” Mikovits says. “It's the brain on fire. You're going to see tics, you're going to see Parkinsonian disease, you're going to see ALS, you're going to see things like this developing at extremely rapid rates, and it's inflammation of the brain.”
Side effects are also suggestive of a dysregulated innate immune response and a disrupted endocannabinoid system, which acts as a dimmer switch on your immune system.
“We see mast cell activation syndromes (MCAS). The clinical symptoms are going to be the inflammatory diseases. We hear everybody calling it ‘long haul COVID’ — the extreme, profound, crippling fatigue, the inability to produce energy from your mitochondria.
It's not long haul COVID. It's exactly what it always was — myalgic encephalomyelitis, inflammation of the brain and the spinal cord. What they're intentionally doing is killing off [certain] populations, which they previously injured.”
Another common side effect from the vaccine we’re seeing is allergic reactions, including anaphylactic shock. A likely culprit in this is PEG, which an estimated 70% of Americans are allergic to. “These instantaneous effects are almost certainly the PEG and that lipid nano particle, the toxic particle that's being injected,” Mikovits says.
In the longer term, she suspects we’ll see a significant uptick in migraines, tics, Parkinson’s disease, microvascular disorders, different cancers, including prostate cancer, severe pain syndromes like fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis, bladder problems, kidney disease, psychosis, neurodegenerative diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) and sleep disorders, including narcolepsy. In young children, autism-like symptoms are likely to develop as well, she thinks.
We’ll End Up Killing the Most Susceptible
Aside from the chronic diseases listed earlier, others who are at high risk from these COVID-19 gene therapies include those who have gotten seasonal influenza vaccines, Blacks and Hispanics. Blacks and Hispanics are particularly at risk for antibody-dependent immune enhancement, in particular, due to genetics. Tragically, these vaccines are given to the most susceptible under the guise of racial and social justice.
“Johns Hopkins laid out that plan a few months ago to vaccinate ethnic minorities and the mentally challenged first. If your brain is already on fire, if you already have a neural inflammatory disease, why in the world would you inject this neural inflammatory toxin? You're killing the people who are the most susceptible.”
Women of childbearing age may also be at risk for infertility, as syncytin (the gammaretrovirus envelope encoded in the human genome the expression of which can be dysregulated by the synthetic syncytin RNA in the vaccine) is required for proper fusion of the placenta in the uterus and implantation of the egg. Indeed, the World Health Organization is now saying pregnant women should not get the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines due to reports of late-term miscarriages.6
What to Do if You Got the Vaccine and Are Having Problems
The primary reason why I wanted to interview Mikovits was to find out her recommendations for those who chose to get the vaccine and now regret it. Interestingly, what I learned is you use the same strategies that you would use to treat the actual SARS-CoV-2 infection.
I’ve written many articles over the past year detailing simple strategies to improve your immune system, and with a healthy immune system, you’ll get through it without incident even if you end up getting sick. Below, I’ll summarize some of the strategies you can use both to prevent COVID-19 and address any side effects you may encounter from the vaccine.
First of all, you’ll want to eat a “clean,” ideally organic diet. Avoid processed foods of all kinds, as they are loaded with damaging omega-6 linoleic acid that wrecks your mitochondrial function. Also consider nutritional ketosis and time-restricted eating, both of which will help you optimize your metabolic machinery and mitochondrial function. As noted by Mikovits:
“We have to think about detoxing metal, we have to think about glyphosate … We have to prevent inflammation in all tissue sites and we have to keep our immune system healthy ... You're going to want to be burning ketones instead [of sugar] for the neuroinflammation, so you're going to want to get into ketosis and take the stress off the mTOR pathway.”
With regard to glyphosate, a simple way to block glyphosate uptake is to take glycine. Approximately 3 grams, about half a teaspoon, a few times a day should be sufficient, along with an organic diet, so that you’re not adding more glyphosate with each meal.
To improve detoxification, I recommend activating your natural glutathione production with molecular hydrogen tablets. All of these strategies should help improve your resilience against SARS-CoV-2, and may even help your body detoxify if you’ve made the mistake of getting this experimental gene therapy.
Another helpful strategy is to maintain a neutral pH. You want your pH to be right around 7, which you can measure with an inexpensive urine strip. The lower your pH, the more acidic you are.
A simple way to raise your pH if it’s too acidic (and most people are) is to take one-fourth teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) or potassium bicarbonate in water a few times a day. Improving your pH will improve the resiliency of your immune system and reduce the mineral loss from your bones, thereby reducing your risk of osteoporosis.
Helpful Supplements
Nutritional supplementation can also be helpful. Among the most important are:
Vitamin D— Vitamin D supplements are readily available and one of the least expensive supplements on the market. All things considered, vitamin D optimization is likely the easiest and most beneficial strategy that anyone can do to minimize their risk of COVID-19 and other infections, and can strengthen your immune system in a matter of a few weeks.
N-acetylcysteine (NAC)— NAC is a precursor to reduced glutathione, which appears to play a crucial role in COVID-19. According to one literature analysis,7 glutathione deficiency may actually be associated with COVID-19 severity, leading the author to conclude that NAC may be useful both for its prevention and treatment.
Zinc— Zinc plays a very important role in your immune system’s ability to ward off viral infections. Like vitamin D, zinc helps regulate your immune function8 — and a combination of zinc with a zinc ionophore, like hydroxychloroquine or quercetin, was in 2010 shown to inhibit SARS coronavirus in vitro. In cell culture, it also blocked viral replication within minutes.9 Importantly, zinc deficiency has been shown to impair immune function.10
Melatonin— Boosts immune function in a variety of ways and helps quell inflammation. Melatonin may also prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection by recharging glutathione11 and enhancing vitamin D synthesis, among other things.
Vitamin C— A number of studies have shown vitamin C can be very helpful in the treatment of viral illnesses, sepsis and ARDS,12 all of which are applicable to COVID-19. Its basic properties include anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, antioxidant, antithrombotic and antiviral activities. At high doses, it actually acts as an antiviral drug, actively inactivating viruses. Vitamin C also works synergistically with quercetin.13
Quercetin— A powerful immune booster and broad-spectrum antiviral, quercetin was initially found to provide broad-spectrum protection against SARS coronavirus in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS epidemic,14,15,16 and evidence suggests it may be useful for the prevention and treatment of SARS-CoV-2 as well.
B vitamins— B vitamins can also influence several COVID-19-specific disease processes, including17 viral replication and invasion, cytokine storm induction, adaptive immunity and hypercoagulability.
Mikovits also recommends Type 1 interferons.
"The type 1 [interferon] — the primary source of interferon, alpha and beta — is the plasmacytoid dendritic cell. We know that's dysregulated in people with HIV, with XMRVs, with aberrant retroviral expression. Those people can't make interferon.
Type 1 interferons can be provided in a spray that you can spray directly into your throat, your nose, and that will give you the protection you need so that the virus doesn't [replicate]. It degrades it right away … Should you feel cough or fever, headache, immediately up your Type 1 interferon. Take a couple of sprays of that per day prophylactically as well, and that will keep the viral load down.
We know [SARS-CoV-2] isn't a natural virus, we know this is lab-created, but it'll calm the expression, it'll degrade the RNA for those who can't degrade the RNA, and that's the job of Type 1 interferon — to have your macrophages be these little Pac-Men that simply degrade the viral mRNA.”
Nebulized Peroxide — My Favorite Treatment Choice
My personal choice for the treatment of COVID-19 symptoms is nebulized peroxide. It’s a home remedy I recommend everyone familiarize themselves with, as in many cases it can improve symptoms in mere hours. You can also use it as a preventive strategy if you know you’ve been exposed to someone who is ill.
Nebulizing hydrogen peroxide into your sinuses, throat and lungs is a simple, straightforward way to augment your body’s natural expression of hydrogen peroxide to combat infections and can be used both prophylactically after known exposure to COVID-19 and as a treatment for mild, moderate and even severe illness.
Dr. David Brownstein, who has successfully treated over 100 COVID-19 patients with nebulized peroxide, published a case paper18 about this treatment in the July 2020 issue of Science, Public Health Policy and The Law. He also reviews its benefits in “How Nebulized Peroxide Helps Against Respiratory Infections.”
Nebulized hydrogen peroxide is extremely safe, and all you need is a desktop nebulizer and food-grade hydrogen peroxide, which you’ll need to dilute with saline to 0.1% strength. I recommend buying these items beforehand so that you have everything you need and can begin treatment at home at the first signs of a respiratory infection.
In the video above, I go over the basics of this treatment. Be sure to buy a nebulizer that plugs into an electrical outlet, as battery-driven ones are too low-powered to be truly effective. Also make sure your nebulizer comes with a face mask, not just a mouth piece. If it doesn’t come with a face mask, you can pick one up separately. Just search Amazon for “nebulizer face mask for adults.”
More Information
Hopefully, we’ve provided enough information to make you reconsider the COVID-19 gene therapy “vaccine.” At bare minimum, do more research before you make your decision. The simple truth is you don’t need it, so it’s an unnecessary risk.
To learn more, be sure to preorder a copy of “Ending Plague: A Scholar’s Obligation in an Age of Corruption.” We’re in a crisis in far more ways than one, and getting educated — and then educating others — is absolutely crucial. The lives of millions of people are at stake. So please, take the time to digest this information, understand it, and share it with those you love.
Sonia Kruger is as vibrant and playful as she was when she zoomed across the Strictly Ballroom floor nearly 30 years ago. And as she takes a swing at another energetic project, the seemingly age-proof 55-year-old talks to Body+Soul about growing older with grace (and a lot of humour).
Scientists describe how glutamate signals are transmitted across synapses to turn on the switch for synapatic plasticity, the ability of synapses to strengthen or weaken over time in response to increases or decreases in their activity.
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A new study has identified how specific communication among different brain regions, known as brain connectivity, can serve as a biomarker for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
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Researchers at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified how breast cancer cells hide from immune cells to stay alive. The discovery could lead to better immunotherapy treatment for patients.
from Top Health News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/2Mi9jxw
People who take opioid medications for chronic pain may have a hard time finding a new primary care clinic that will take them as a patient if they need one, according to a new 'secret shopper' study of hundreds of clinics across the country. Stigma against long-term users of prescription opioids, likely related to the prospect of taking on a patient who might have an opioid use disorder or addiction, appears to play a role.
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Recent data reveal a nutrient found in salmon and meat may help reduce your risk of bacterial infections.1 This is especially important considering the problems surrounding antibiotic usage. Before antibiotics, the average lifespan was 47 years and infectious diseases like pneumonia were rampant.2
While antibiotics transformed health care, they do carry some risk. For example, data show that from the years 2011 to 2015 there were 69,464 emergency room visits each year for children who had an adverse reaction to taking antibiotics.3
While these numbers sound high, some experts believe it's the tip of the iceberg,4 since this study only included children who went to the emergency room and not those who were treated in the urgent care, doctor's office or at home.
Scientists have also been warning that bacteria are developing resistance. In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published their first Antibiotic Resistant Threats Report, finding there were at least 2 million people who acquired antibiotic-resistant infections every year, with 23,000 deaths attributed to these infections.5 However, new estimates from 2019 show there are more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections each year in the U.S., from which 35,000 die.6
Other researchers believe even this estimate is too low and the true number is likely far higher.7 There are options that may help prevent bacterial infections other than drugs, including manuka honey, oregano oil, an intravenous cocktail of vitamin C, thiamine and hydrocortisone, and, as mentioned, a nutrient in salmon.8
Taurine May Help Fight Bacterial Infections
Scientists from five institutes led by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease discovered one way your gut microbiota help protect you from bacterial infections.9 Although scientists have known there are benefits to living harmoniously with beneficial bacteria, the mechanism used to protect you has not been identified.
Researchers are seeking ways to harness your gut health to replace antibiotics as more antibiotic-resistant bacteria develop. One study published in the journal Cell10 revealed how pathogens could shape the colonization resistance process that protects you from bacterial infection.
The results showed that previous infections help enhance resistance in the gut microbiota, which was associated with altering bile metabolism utilizing the sulfonic acid taurine.
When the researchers supplied taurine, it was a sufficient trigger to generate the change in function and therefore enhance resistance. The results of the study revealed “a process by which the host, triggered by infection, can deploy taurine as a nutrient to nourish and train the microbiota, promoting its resistance to subsequent infection.”11
The scientists tested the effect by transferring microbiota from an animal that had experienced an infection with Klebsiella pneumoniae into a germ-free mouse.12 They discovered the transferred microbiota helped prevent an infection with K. pneumoniae.
The bacteria involved in fighting the infection were deltaproteobacteria. There are a wide variety of gram-negative pathogens in the phylum (major group) proteobacteria, including Escherichia, Salmonella and Helicobacter.13 Further analysis led the researchers to identify taurine as a compound that triggered activity in deltaproteobacteria.
A byproduct of taurine is a poisonous gas, hydrogen sulfide. The researchers theorized that with low levels of taurine, harmful bacteria can colonize the gut. When levels are higher, it produces enough hydrogen sulfide to prevent this from happening. The researchers also found that one mild infection could trigger an adaptation to help the microbiota resist the next infection.
When the animals were supplemented with taurine, it helped support the microbiota. They also discovered when the same animals were fed bismuth subsalicylate, an ingredient found in antacids, this protection was reduced since bismuth inhibits the production of hydrogen sulfide.
What Is Taurine?
The biochemical name for taurine is 2-aminoethanesulfonic acid. Although it's commonly called an amino acid, it is a conditional compound your body does not use to create protein. Instead of a carboxyl group that is found in amino acids, taurine has a sulfide group, thus earning the name amino sulfonic acid.14
Taurine is conditional since an adult can produce it.15 However, infants are unable to produce amino sulfonic acid and thus need a diet rich in taurine to support their neurological development. The compound was first isolated from the bile of an ox, which is likely where the name came from as it is derived from the Latin word taurus, meaning bull or ox.
Taurine plays a role in the essential functions of regulating calcium, creating bile salts, balancing electrolytes and supporting the nervous system. People deficient in taurine may experience kidney dysfunction, developmental disorders, cardiomyopathy and damage to the retinal nerves.16
Amino sulfonic acid is found in high concentration in the central nervous system, skeletal muscles and eyes.17 Taurine is found in meat and other natural sources,18 including salmon, seaweed, dark chicken meat, dairy products and beef.19
Taurine levels in your body may drop in certain circumstances such as chemotherapy,20 liver disease,21 surgery, cancer, sepsis22 and diabetes.23 Since rich sources of taurine are found in meat and dairy products, people who practice a strict vegan or vegetarian diet may also be deficient.
Taurine Has an Anti-Inflammatory Effect on Your Heart
Taurine is an abundant free amino sulfonic acid and plays a critical role in several essential processes; among them is a strong general antioxidant activity.24 Amino sulfonic acid is found in higher concentrations in body tissues exposed to elevated levels of free radicals and oxidants.
This has suggested to researchers that taurine plays an anti-inflammatory role. The reaction with hypobromous acid produces a byproduct with anti-inflammatory properties. The anti-inflammatory effect has a known influence on diabetes and has demonstrated benefits on the cardiovascular system, potentially by inhibiting the renin-angiotensin system.25
This system has an influence on a variety of tissues and cells and is targeted by pharmacological interventions to help manage high blood pressure, heart failure and diabetes.26 According to researchers, nearly 50 years ago it was discovered that a taurine deficiency in cats led to retinopathy and could trigger cardiomyopathy in dogs and cats.
Data show that populations of people who eat more meat than seafood have higher death rates from heart disease. Since seafood has higher levels of taurine than meat, it suggested that amino sulfonic acid may play a role in protecting the cardiovascular system.
Research has found a correlation between taking taurine supplements and a lower risk of CVD in an animal model. In the lab, scientists observe a direct vasorelaxation when taurine is administered to a thoracic aorta in an animal in a dose-dependent fashion. Since it also plays a role in osmoregulation, it has been proposed the vasorelaxation occurs through this pathway.
Further studies have demonstrated taurine exhibits an anti-apoptotic effect on heart cells under ischemic conditions, protecting the heart cells when there is a lack of oxygen. This was demonstrated in an animal model when comparing the heart damage with and without taurine supplementation 30 days after a coronary artery occlusion.
In one animal study, researchers testing the heart muscle found that a taurine deficiency impaired energy metabolism and reduced ATP generation.27 The findings supported the hypothesis taurine deficiency starves the heart of energy, suggesting that supplementation could benefit patients who have heart failure.
More Health Benefits From Taurine
Just like the heart muscle, taurine plays a role in ensuring proper function and protecting against damage in your skeletal muscle.28 The combination of osmoregulation, membrane stabilization and regulation of intracellular calcium concentration may play a role in muscle performance.
Evidence appears to support a link between alterations in taurine levels within skeletal muscle and conditions such as muscular dystrophy and atrophy.
Lab, animal and human studies also demonstrate the role it plays in the immune system related to the antioxidant properties to protect tissue against inflammation, which researchers believe29 "give[s] support to consider taurine and taurine derivatives as potential drugs in human medicine, including infectious and chronic inflammatory disease."
Taurine supplementation may help reduce the potential risk for complications associated with diabetes30 and may help prevent the onset of the condition. The uptake of taurine by pancreatic cells decreased the pancreatic intracellular insulin levels, suggesting to the researchers that it plays a role in regulating the release of insulin from the pancreas and could reduce elevated blood glucose levels.
Since taurine plays an essential role in the production of bile salts, which help break down fatty acids, it's essential to metabolism and digestion.31 It is also found in high concentrations in the retina.32 Recent data demonstrated that deficiency triggered by the antiepileptic drug vigabatrin is involved in the retinal toxicity experienced by patients. This led to further investigation:33
“… suggesting that this compound may be involved in the pathophysiology of glaucoma or diabetic retinopathy. Along with other antioxidant molecules, taurine should therefore be seriously reconsidered as a potential treatment for such retinal diseases.”
Taurine also plays a role in your central and peripheral nervous system. In 2017, a review published in Birth Defects Research noted supplementation helps to promote the proliferation of brain cells required for long-term memory storage.34
An animal study showed supplementation with taurine may improve Alzheimer-like learning and memory deficits35 and seems to play a role in the development of epilepsy and autism.36
Choose Wild-Caught Over Farm-Raised Salmon
Wild-caught Alaskan sockeye salmon is rich in omega-3 fatty acids. People with the highest levels of omega-3 fats have lived 2.22 more years after age 65 than those with the lowest.37
Salmon is also high in B vitamins38 that are important for energy production.39 Phosphorus and magnesium, important for bone health, are found in salmon, as is astaxanthin, which is an anti-inflammatory antioxidant beneficial for your heart and immune system.40
However, it's important to steer clear of farmed and genetically altered salmon and instead seek out wild-caught Alaskan sockeye salmon. Unfortunately, two-thirds of the salmon in the U.S. is imported, mostly from industrial fish farms and processing factories.41
According to the Organic Consumers Association, farmed fish are raised on a diet of processed feed that can include genetically engineered soybeans and pesticide residues, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins and antibiotics.42
The toxins can accumulate in the fat of the fish. One study sampled over 2 metric tons of wild-caught and farmed salmon collected from around the world.43 They found farmed salmon had higher concentrations of organochlorine contaminants than wild-caught salmon, and European-raised salmon were significantly more contaminated than fish farmed in North or South America.
Similarly, when the Environmental Working Group tested farmed salmon from U.S. grocery stores, they found farmed salmon had, on average, 16 times more PCBs than wild salmon, four times more PCBs than beef and 3.4 times more PCBs than other seafood.44
Farmed salmon also does not have the nutritional profile of wild salmon, as the farmed variety is far higher in omega-6 fatty acids. Often you can tell the difference between wild caught and farmed salmon just by looking at it.
The flesh of wild sockeye salmon is bright red, courtesy of the natural levels of astaxanthin. It's also lean, so the white fat stripes you see in the meat should be thin. If the fish is pale pink with wide fat marks, the salmon is farmed.
Avoid Atlantic salmon as these are commonly from fish farms. The two designations to look for are “Alaskan salmon” and “sockeye salmon,” as Alaskan sockeye salmon are not allowed to be farmed. Canned salmon labeled Alaskan salmon is also a good, more affordable, option.
In this episode of Full Measure, award-winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson takes on Big Tech and its censorship of the information you see daily on the internet.1 Restriction of free speech has accelerated in recent months, when Facebook, Twitter and YouTube took the unprecedented steps of silencing the U.S. president’s social media accounts.
While many welcomed the censorship, others spoke out against the violation of free speech and the precedence it sets for the future. Even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he was uneasy about the decision, tweeting on January 13, 2021:2
“Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation. They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.”
Regardless of one’s political affiliations, the move highlights the immense control that corporations have over online information and how it can be yielded to support, or dismantle, certain agendas.
Efforts to Combat ‘Fake News’ Ramped Up After Election
Zachary Vorhies was a Big Tech insider for more than eight years. A former senior software engineer at Google and Google’s YouTube, he said everything was great — and then something happened: Donald Trump won the election in 2016. In the first week after the 2016 election, Vorhies told Attkisson, Google had an all-hands meeting.
The company’s CFO broke down in tears over the election results, while founder Sergey Brin said he was personally offended by them. In short, the bosses at Google were devastated by Trump’s unexpected victory, and soon after Vorhies said, “The company took a hard left and abandoned liberal principles and went toward authoritarian management of products and services.”
Eventually, as Vorhies realized Google is manipulating public opinion and the political landscape, he resigned so he could warn the public that Google appeared to be attempting a coup on the president. He echoed these sentiments during our 2019 interview, and shared his inside knowledge of this global monopoly, revealing why Google is not a reliable source of information anymore.
While some of the information revealed is related to politics, you can read about my views about the two-party U.S. federal government. The point of sharing this information is that Google is manipulating search results to reflect its views and influence social behavior while denying this is happening.
How Google Is Altering Reality
According to Vorhies, at the all-hands meeting that took place shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that one of the most successful things they had done during the election was applying “machine learning” to hide fake news.
Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that’s behind Google’s rampant censorship — something they’ve dubbed Machine Learning Fairness, or ML Fairness. “As you imagine,” Vorhies said during our 2019 interview (hyperlinked above), “they're not going to call their censorship regime something bad. They're going to call it something like 'fairness.'”
“So, if you're against that, you're against fairness. It's a euphemism. I discovered there was this umbrella project, 'ML Fairness,' and there were these subcomponents like 'Project Purple Rain,' which is a 24-hour response team that is monitoring the internet,” he said.
By 2017, Vorhies had uncovered more than 950 pages of confidential Google documents showing a plan to re-rank the entire internet based on Google’s corporate values, using machine learning to intervene for “fairness.” He resigned in June 2019 and turned over the documents to the Department of Justice, then released them to the public via Project Veritas to expose Google’s censorship activities.3 According to Project Veritas:4
“Things got political in June 2017 when Google deleted ‘covfefe’ out of its arabic translation dictionary in order to make a Trump tweet become nonsense. This would have been benign if it weren't for the coincidence of the main stream media attempting to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from the presidency, a week later.
At this point Zach Vorhies became suspicious that Google might be engaging in a seditious conspiracy to remove the President of the United States. Zach decided that the document cache had to be provided to the appropriate law enforcement agencies (Department of Justice) to disclose the seditious activity, and to the public in order to let them know the full extent of Google's information control abilities.”
‘Algorithmic Unfairness’ Tackles the Narrative of Reality
Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, made pushing down “fake news” and increasing “authoritative news” sound like a good thing, Attkisson reported,5 but when Vorhies looked at Google’s design documents, the fake news they were censoring wasn’t really fake.
“I was apolitical,” he said, “but I started to think, is this really fake news? Why are they defining it as fake news in order to justify censorship?” Part of this involved Google’s efforts at social reconstruction to correct “algorithmic unfairness,” which could be any algorithm that reinforces existing stereotypes.
Could objective reality be algorithmically unfair? Google says yes. Vorhies used the example of doing a Google search for CEOs, and the images returned included mostly men. Although it’s reality, this could be considered algorithmically unfair and, according to Google, justifies intervention in order to fix it. He also uses the example of the autofill search recommendations that pop up if you do a Google search.
Autofill is what happens when you start typing a search query into a search engine and algorithms kick in to offer suggestions to complete your search. If you type “men can,” you may get autofill recommendations such as “men can lactate” and “men can get pregnant,” or “women can produce sperm” — things that represent an inversion of stereotypes and a reversal of gender roles.
We've been led to believe that whatever the autofill recommendations are is what most people are searching for — Google has stated that the suggestions given are generated by a collection of user data — but that's not true, at least not anymore. As Vorhies said during our 2019 interview:
"This story about the autofill first got disclosed by Dr. Robert Epstein, who is a Harvard-trained psychologist and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. What he said was that Google had flipped a bunch of votes for Hillary using this autosuggest feature. I've investigated this claim. I've verified it to be true … It turns out that a lot of the popular searches were being suppressed.
… The most significant thing about this feature is the fact that you don't expect to have this part of your online experience to be hatched for political reasons. You think that this is legitimately what other people are searching for. As a result, you don't have your filters on. Your brain puts on these filters when it starts to evaluate politically charged information.
When you read a newspaper article, you may be thinking to yourself, 'This may be true, this may not.' You're skeptical. But when you're typing into a search, you don't think that because you don't think that's rigged, so whatever bias is inherent in that search result slips through and goes directly into your subconscious. This is what Epstein was explaining."
Vorhies said his tipping point came when Pichai told Congress the company doesn’t filter based on political bias and blacklist websites. “That’s when I saw that Sundar Pichai was lying to Congress by saying that they don’t use blacklists.”6
Big Tech Fact-Checking Ramped Up
The sudden onslaught of “fact-checking” organizations is another form of censorship that’s interfering with free discourse. Citing data from Duke University Reporters’ Lab, Attkisson says “fact check groups more than quadrupled in number over five years from 44 to 195.” Fact-checking now represents a multimillion-dollar industry that stands to benefit certain interests.
“Facebook and Google are major funders of news organizations and fact check efforts,” Attkisson reports, “spending hundreds of millions of dollars.” The problem with labeling something as “false and misleading information” is the damage that occurs if said information is not actually false or misleading. When a banner pops up on social media warning readers that the content is false, most people will not click through.
According to the Poynter Institute, one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners, which bills itself as a “global leader in journalism” that believes that a free press is essential,7 once a Facebook post is flagged as false by a fact-checker, its reach is decreased by an average of 80%.8
Further, Facebook’s list of trusted fact-checking partners is also heavily conflicted. Children’s Health Defense sued Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and three of its fact-checking partners — Science Feedback, Poynter Institute and PolitiFact9 — alleging, in part, that they are not independent or fact-based, even though they describe themselves as such.
Fact Checkers Receive Millions From Political Groups
PolitiFact is a branch of the Poynter Institute that says fact-checking journalism is its “heart,”10 while Science Feedback is a French organization that claims it verifies the “credibility” of “influential” science claims in the media.11
Science Feedback, which often sides with the vaccine industry, was also used to discredit a documentary that tied the coronavirus to a lab in Wuhan, China, but Science Feedback’s source was a U.S. scientist who worked at the Wuhan lab.
Further, according to Attkisson, PolitiFact received millions from groups looking to reimagine capitalism, count immigrants in the U.S. census and change voting processes for presidential elections from the electoral system to a popular vote.
PolitiFact also received $900,000 from the Democracy Fund, which is a major funder of anti-Trump political efforts, while the left-leaning Open Society Foundations and Omidyar Network gave the Poynter Institute $1.3 million for its international fact-checking network.12
As Vorhies said, “The problem is that they’re a monopoly. And if they’re going to put their finger on the public narrative, that’s going to be meddling in the election.”13
‘Jumping From the Fireplace Into a Fire’
Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act provides internet platforms liability protection for user-generated content. Big Tech is pushing for the inclusion of protection mirroring Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in various free trade agreements, to protect them from foreign regulations.
While Section 230 makes free speech online possible for everyone, it also allows Google, YouTube and Facebook to filter out and censor whatever they want while still qualifying as a platform rather than a curator of content.
Congress has threatened to punish Big Tech by stripping them of the legal protections in Section 230, but the government stepping in could add another layer of problems, Attkisson says. Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed, noting14:
“Just because you have a problem it doesn’t mean that every solution is the right one. And I think we could really jump from a fireplace into a fire if we then decide that we’re going to let whoever is in charge of the government decide what we see.”
Efforts to shut down public discussions and information are in full force. So, what can you do? Knowledge truly is power, so look beyond fact-checkers’ labels and the top of Google’s canned search results — and the corporations behind them — in your search for truth. There are alternatives for most if not all Google products, and by using these other companies, we can help them grow so that Google becomes less and less relevant.
Unlike their simple counterparts in artificial intelligence (AI) applications, neurons in the brain use dendrites - their intricate tree-like branches - to find relevant chunks of information. Now, neuroscientists have discovered a new computational method to make complex dendrite models much simpler. These faithful reductions may lead AI applications to process information much like the brain does.
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Genetic variations associated with both increases and reductions in risk of the neurodegenerative disease alter the action of ion channels within cellular organelles called lysosomes, a new study finds.
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Researchers have created the first platform to understand the mechanisms underlying blood pressure instability after spinal cord injury. The discovery has led to a new cutting-edge solution. Spinal cord stimulators can bridge the body's autonomous regulation system, controlling blood pressure without medication.
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In 2016, a team reported that a 25-year-old man recovering from a coma had made remarkable progress following a treatment to jump-start his brain using ultrasound. Now, researchers report that two more patients with severe brain injuries have also made impressive progress thanks to the same technique.
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A new study shows, for the first time, how an abnormal number of chromosomes (aneuploidy) -- a unique characteristic of cancer cells that researchers have known about for decades -- could become a weak point for these cells. The study could lead to the development of future drugs that will use this vulnerability to eliminate the cancer cells.
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Some languages require less neural activity than others. But these are not necessarily the ones we would imagine. Researchers have shown that languages that are often considered 'easy' actually require an enormous amount of work from our brains.
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Some languages require less neural activity than others. But these are not necessarily the ones we would imagine. Researchers have shown that languages that are often considered 'easy' actually require an enormous amount of work from our brains.
from Top Health News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/3r8VDUp
As surgeons balance the need to control their patients' post-surgery pain with the risk that a routine operation could become the gateway to long-term opioid use or addiction, a new study shows the power of an approach that takes a middle way.
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In a new and first of its kind study, researchers study fermented beverages to find the one with the most umami flavor. Which one wins -- champagne, beer, wine or sake?
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Researchers have discovered a novel and druggable insulin inhibitory receptor, named inceptor. The blocking of inceptor function leads to an increased sensitisation of the insulin signaling pathway in pancreatic beta cells. This might allow protection and regeneration of beta cells for diabetes remission.
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