Health & Fitness

Dr. Steven Gundry, a cardiologist, heart surgeon, medical researcher and author, is perhaps best known for his “Plant Paradox” book, which was a massive bestseller. He has now published another book called “The Energy Paradox: What to Do When Your Get-Up-and-Go Has Got Up and Gone.”

As the name implies, this book delves into the origins of fatigue and how to improve your energy at the molecular level. While he had not planned on writing a book about energy optimization, upward of 60% of his patients suffer from fatigue and a feeling of general malaise, so, clearly, this is something that affects an enormous number of people.

Time-Restricted Eating

The good news is there’s a lot you can do to improve your energy levels. One such strategy, which I embraced years ago, is time-restricted eating (TRE), a form of intermittent fasting in which you restrict all of your food intake to a certain number of consecutive hours each day.

As an added boon, this strategy doesn’t cost you a penny. If anything, it’ll save you money. Gundry was ahead of the curve on this one, having written about TRE in his first book, “Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution,” published in 2006.

“I had an entire chapter in that book devoted to time-restricted eating, and my editor at Random House at the time, Heather Jackson, said, ‘This is so crazy that I'm not going to let you do this.’

She said this. True story. And I said, ‘Look, I'm telling you, I've been doing this now for four years and I've been using it on my patients and it's not crazy. Here's the research.’ And she said, ‘OK. I'm going to give you two pages to make your case. I'm throwing the rest of the chapter away.’

So, I got two pages. I saw her at the mindbodygreen symposium last summer, before the COVID-19 outbreak. She came up to me and said, ‘You were right. I apologize. You weren't crazy, you weren't nuts. Everybody now knows.’”

Indeed, in recent years, TRE has gained a lot of recognition as mounting evidence shows the simple act of restricting the number of hours during which you consume food during the day will improve your health in a variety of ways, primarily by improving your mitochondrial health and metabolic flexibility.

As noted by Gundry, keeping your eating to a window of six to eight hours a day is an achievable goal for most people. However, most need to gradually ease into it.

“Metabolic flexibility is probably the underlying problem in the vast majority of diseases that we see and I wrote the book to try and make it easy,” Gundry says. “What I see in my practice is that a lot of people go, ‘OK. I usually eat breakfast at 7 and starting tomorrow I'm going to start eating breakfast — break-fast — at noon.’ And they fall flat on their faces.

They get headaches, they get hungry, they don't think right. They have no energy and they decide ‘This isn't for me.’ That's because they have a high insulin level, they're insulin resistant and can't use stored fat as an energy source …

So, in the book, what I do is, over a six-week period, I get them used to eating during a shorter and shorter time window. It's very much like learning a new exercise program. I couldn't run a marathon out the bat, but I can train and get there. So that's what we do.”

Part of the process involves retraining your circadian rhythm. Your food intake, which impacts the circadian rhythm of your gut microbiome, and other circadian rhythms are intricately connected, and the more you can realign these circadian rhythms, the better your whole body will function, including your mitochondria.

Crucial Notes on Meal Timing

At the most extreme end of TRE is the one meal a day (OMAD) routine, which can work well if you’re young and healthy. However, once you get into middle age and older, I believe it can start to backfire. I’m also not convinced that it’s healthy to remain on an OMAD diet in perpetuity, for the simple reason that your body will typically work best when you challenge it now and then.

During winter months, about six months out of the year, Gundry promotes using a two-hour, or even as short as a single-hour eating window during weekdays, and then eating during a much longer window during weekends. He’s been doing this for the past 21 years.

For me, cycling — mixing longer and shorter fasting intervals — has been a key to long term success, and taking the weekends off from this strict regimen may be part of why this strict regimen has worked so well for so long for Gundry.

“I think you've got to break it up. I don't do it all year around, and I break it up on the weekends, and the reason I do that is so I won't go mad,” Gundry says. Another important detail with regard to timing is to avoid eating at least three hours before bed. Even if you restrict your eating to six hours or less, if you eat too close to bedtime, you’re canceling out many of the benefits. As explained by Gundry:

“It's really important to stop eating at least three hours before bedtime for a couple of really important reasons. No. 1, you've got to undergo mitochondrial repair during the night.

You have to undergo brain cleaning during the night from the glymphatic circulation. Digestion takes huge amounts of blood flow, and if you're eating, all that blood flow is heading down to your gut when it should actually be going up to your brain.”

TRE Makes Most Diets Better

Gundry quotes data from Satchin Panda, which shows that rats raised on a standard American diet equivalent that also are put on a TRE regimen fare much better than those who are not on TRE. This despite the fact that they’re eating the same thing. The same has been shown to hold true in humans.

Remarkably, Panda has shown the average American eats for 16 hours a day. Essentially, they’re grazing all day long, stopping only while sleeping. About 90% eat for more than 12 hours.

Simply reducing your eating window to 12 hours would be an improvement. As noted by Gundry, “Big Food, Big Agriculture have convinced us that this is the proper way to eat.” In reality, the only thing these big businesses and their recommendations are good for is disease.

The Case for EMF Avoidance

Gundry and I are also in agreement about the dangers of electromagnetic fields (EMFs). I’ve previously written about how magnesium can help mitigate some of the damaging effects from EMF, and Gundry has a patient who appears to have had success using this strategy. Melatonin, which is a very potent mitochondrial antioxidant, is another potential mitigator.

“Melatonin is a very interesting way of mitigating against the bad effects of EMF,” Gundry says. “Now, as I talk about in the book, I used to think that people who said that they were sensitive to these invisible rays [EMFs] were out on the lunatic fringe.

But the longer I've been doing this, I've had some fantastic experiences with very credible people, who when we mitigated EMF got well. One patient was profoundly affected by her husband's AICD, a defibrillator, which was communicating his EKG with a satellite.

As soon as it went into him, she couldn't sleep next to him. She had migraine headaches. We finally turned off the transmitter in his AICD, and just like that, all of [her symptoms] went away. So, these people are canaries in a coal mine and we have to believe it.”

Leaky Gut Underlies Most Chronic Disease

While antioxidants like melatonin can certainly help improve mitochondrial function, I think there are better ways than simply piling on antioxidants. You also need to remove dietary and lifestyle factors that cause the energy depletion in the first place. EMF exposure is one environmental factor. Leaky gut, caused by lectins in your diet, is another factor that needs to be addressed.

According to Gundry, leaky gut is an underlying condition of most chronic disease, so, if you have a chronic ailment, chances are you have leaky gut. Thanks to Dr. Alessio Fasano, who heads up the Celiac Research Center at Harvard, we now have sophisticated tests that can diagnose this problem.

Fasano discovered the mechanism by which lectins cause leaky gut, and gluten is a lectin. When these and other food particles are able to cross your gut lining, they cause chronic inflammation, which requires a lot of energy to combat. This is one reason for your fatigue and general malaise. Gundry explains:

“If your immune system is distracted down to your leaky gut, first of all, it's not going to be available when [pathogens] come in through your nose or mouth. And secondly, your immune system is so hyperactivated that when it sees something that might not be all that important, it goes crazy and you get a cytokine storm. That, of course, is one of the major lethal consequences [of] the Western diet.”

Linoleic Acid Can Decimate Mitochondrial Health

Another dietary factor that decimates mitochondrial health, and thus energy production, is omega-6 linoleic acid (LA). “In the book, I talk about the Goldilocks effect,” Gundry says. However, LA is naturally found in virtually all foods, so it’s near-impossible to become deficient. The problem really is excessive intake, which is near universal in Western countries due to processed food.

The primary culprit here is industrial vegetable oils, which most people eat far too much of. If you’re eating a whole food diet, you’re more likely to have a healthy ratio of LA, but even then, it may be causing trouble if you’re eating too many LA-rich foods, such as conventional chicken, for example.

You can learn more about the mechanisms of action behind LA’s damage in “Why Chicken Is Killing You and Saturated Fat Is Your Friend” and “The Type of Fat You Eat Affects Your COVID Risk.” Olive oil is another food that is high in LA, but it also has other components that may modify some of the risks. Still, I choose to limit my olive oil intake. Overall, I try to keep my LA intake below 5 grams a day, regardless of the sources. Gundry has a more favorable view of olive oil, stating:

“If you limit your eating window, you actually stop that process from happening, which is really miraculous, No. 1. And No. 2, shameless plug for myself, with my Gundry MD high-polyphenol olive oil, you only need a tablespoon a day to get the equivalent polyphenols of a liter of olive oil a week.”

Surprising Benefits of Cheese

When it comes to fats, Gundry is a proponent of short and medium chain fatty acids. “For multiple reasons, I've been extolling the virtues of MCT oil since the ‘Plant Paradox,’” he says, adding:

“I think the saturated fats have other benefits. In particular, the saturated fats in cheeses may be one of the unsung heroes in longevity that I think needs more attention … I take care of a huge number of people who carry the APOE4 mutation, which is the Alzheimer's mutation. I noticed early on that cheese really elevated not only small dense LDLs, but also elevated for most of my patients’ oxidized LDL …

I don't like the traditional cholesterol theory of heart disease. On the other hand, I think oxidized LDL has an interesting place. What’s interesting is that when I've separated my patients into having them eat sheep cheese and goat cheese, I found dramatically different results.

I initially attributed it to the fact that sheep and goat have casein A2 and not casein A1. And I think casein A1 is a pretty bad actor. So, I said, well, I'm going to start letting my APOE4 [patients] have sheep and goat cheese, but in moderation. When I did that, I didn't see this oxidized LDL.”

One potential mechanisms for this might be because casein is a protein that can cause autoimmune reactions and contribute to leaky gut, which in turn contributes to increased LDL oxidation.

While most of Gundry’s autoimmune disease patients respond extremely well to Gundry’s plant paradox program, about 10% still do not fare well. Food sensitivity analysis has revealed a large number of them are sensitive to both casein A1 and casein A2.

Once their leaky gut is repaired, however, which may take up to a year, their immune systems typically become tolerant to these things again. “So, I think you can retrain the immune system once you get a good microbiome and seal the leaky gut.”

What About Meat?

While some autoimmune patients have reversed their conditions using a carnivore diet, popularized by Dr. Paul Saladino, who is a leading authority on the science and application of the carnivore diet, Gundry recommends limiting meat because of its effects on your gut microbiome. Interestingly, Gundry will be interviewing Saladino very shortly and that interview will be on his site. It should be a fascinating discussion.

“I have nothing against the carnivore diet as an elimination diet,” he says. “In fact, when Saladino was first on my podcast, he credited me as being the father of the carnivore diet because all plants are evil. And I went, ‘Please don't do that to me.’

I think one of the mistakes that people make in, particularly, a keto diet where they've eliminated fiber, you actually starve your gut microbiome from making butyrate. The other, I think worrisome, part about a carnivore diet is you tend to make more hydrogen sulfide. I'm a huge fan of hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg smell … but again, we get the Goldilocks rule …

Some is really good for you, it’s really good for mitochondrial function, but a lot is really toxic. And there's some evidence with carnivore diets that you produce too much hydrogen sulfide. Now, I also understand the argument that if we eat a lot of gristle and a lot of mucin, basically nose to tail, that you can make butyrate by fermenting protein-based animal ingredients. I think you can.

But if you look at all the super long-lived folks, one of the things they have is really great production of butyrate. Butyrate, that short chain fatty acid, does so much good for mitochondria, I can't even begin to tell you. Well, I do in the book.”

I agree that a strict no-carb diet is a mistake. Healthy carbs — think plant foods rich in fiber — need to be cycled in, there's no question. Not every day, but certainly once or twice a week, even when you’re on a ketogenic diet. I recommend restricting carbs to about 50 grams or so for most of the week, and then increasing that to 100 or 150 grams once or twice a week once you’re metabolically flexible.

Protein, mTOR Activation and Exercise

Meat, of course, is also a source of protein, and while too much protein can be harmful by activating mTOR (thereby contributing to cancer and other problems), too little can be an unmitigated disaster, as I found out.

For a time, I aggressively restricted protein in an effort to minimize mTOR, and ended up developing sarcopenia (muscle loss). The lesson here is that you need protein, especially if you’re working out, and especially as you get older. With regard to mTOR activation, Gundry notes:

“The only way we can actually measure the effect of mTOR long term is insulin like growth factor IGF-1. I take care of a lot of super old people, 95 and above. I have a lot of 105-year-old patients that I study, and they all have very low insulin-like growth factors.

We've tried experiments with patients, really reducing their animal protein and replacing it with plant-based protein. I’m not taking protein away. Their insulin growth factors will drop 50 to 70 points in a matter of months, and I think that's pretty interesting.

The other thing that's interesting is that exercise will actually change your gut microbiome to eat branch chain amino acids before they get into you, and branch chain amino acids are one of the biggest stimulators of mTOR.

That's why, if you're building muscle and you're a body builder, you gulp branch chain amino acids all the time. So, I think, probably Saladino — who exercises and also does TRE and has pretty good IGF-1s — can tolerate a very high animal protein diet.

The other thing that I've written about in all my books is that beef, lamb and pork have a sugar molecule called Neu5Gc, and fish and chicken have Neu5Ac. Many people make an autoantibody to Neu5Gc, so they attack their own blood vessels if exposed to beef, lamb and pork.”

Lastly, Gundry points out the importance of exercise. When you work your muscles, especially the big muscle groups, myokines are produced, which help grow new brain cells and aid your mitochondria. However, contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need to exercise continuously for 30 to 60 minutes each day, Gundry says. It’s OK to break it into smaller segments.

“Even walking up and down stairs for a minute may be as effective as walking 10 minutes on a level surface,” he says. “Doing a plank while you're watching TV for a minute is a phenomenal exercise. My favorite is when you're brushing your teeth, do deep knee bends, do squats.”

More Information

This interview coincides with the release of “The Energy Paradox: What to Do When Your Get-Up-and-Go Has Got Up and Gone,” so to learn more, be sure to pick up a copy. You can also learn more about Gundry by perusing his websites, GundryMD.com and DrGundry.com.

He has a weekly podcast that you can tune into as well for a wide range of health information from Gundry and his guests. You can also find him on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

from Articles https://ift.tt/3vv78sn
via IFTTT

Olympic gold medallist Giaan Rooney was only 23 years old when she retired from swimming – and she has never looked back. In a revealing interview with Body+Soul, the former professional swimmer turned television presenter discusses the reason she left the pool for good, her thoughts on the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and why she hopes her children will never follow in her footsteps.

from Health | body+soul https://ift.tt/30TQtRb

Mustering up the motivation to exercise can be tough for many of us... even for Olympic gold medalists! Former world record-breaking swimmer and television presenter Giaan Rooney shares her top four hacks for getting active (including why you should treat your next sweat sesh like a business meeting).

from Health | body+soul https://ift.tt/3eCPH30

Men experiencing vital exhaustion are more likely to have a heart attack, according to new research.

from Top Health News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/3bJBGyB

Researchers have determined what happens at a cellular level as the lung alveolus forms and allows newborns to breathe air. Understanding this process gives researchers a better sense of how to develop therapies and potentially regenerate this critical tissue in the event of injury.

from Top Health News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/3eBtUIT

Researchers have developed a new tool to study 'undruggable' proteins through the sugars they depend on. Almost 85 percent of proteins, including those associated with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, inflammation, and certain cancers, are beyond the reach of current drugs. Now, with a new pencil/eraser tool, researchers can start to study how sugar molecules affect these proteins, insights that could lead to new treatments for the 'undruggable.'

from Top Health News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/38D9MlL

Cancer cells can dodge chemotherapy by entering a state that bears similarity to certain kinds of senescence, a type of 'active hibernation' that enables them to weather the stress induced by aggressive treatments aimed at destroying them, according to a new study. These findings have implications for developing new drug combinations that could block senescence and make chemotherapy more effective.

from Top Health News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/3bH6vnA

Researchers find that neutralizing antibodies raised by COVID-19 vaccines are not as effective at neutralizing some new, circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants.

from Top Health News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/2OsJfkj

Researchers have studied the human microbiome to understand the relationship between these microorganisms and health. A recent analysis found the human gut also has over 142,809 different virus species that reside with your gut bacteria.¹ In recent years, scientific evidence has made it apparent that your gut microbiome plays a vital role in your health and disease prevention.

Your unique set of microbes influences the function of many organ systems. Microbes inhabit nearly every part of the human body. Work published in Nature in 2016² found that microbes outnumbered human cells 10-to-1. But, a team of researchers from Israel and Canada re-estimated it using a wide range of experimental data in the literature and discovered the number could vary.

For example, a "reference man" who is 20 years old, weighing 154 pounds (70 kilograms) and standing 5 feet 7 inches (1.7 meters), might have 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria.

But, this number could vary from person to person and the ratio may change after each bowel movement. And, “those numbers are approximate,” the study authors say. “… another person might have half as many or twice as many bacteria, for example — but far from the 10-to-1 ratio commonly assumed.”

Dozens of health conditions have been traced to the diversity and health of your gut microbiome, including cancer, obesity, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, Parkinson's disease and allergies.

One of the main reasons for this connection is that your gut is vital to your immune system. When your gut microbiome is disrupted, it automatically disrupts your body's immune function. As noted in a paper published in Clinical and Experimental Immunology:³

"The crucial position of the gastrointestinal system is testified by the huge amount of immune cells that reside within it. Indeed, gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) is the prominent part of mucosal-associated lymphoid tissue and represents almost 70 percent of the entire immune system; moreover, about 80 percent of plasma cells … reside in GALT."

Virus Database Catalogs Over 140,000 Species in the Gut

Scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have identified 142,809 nonredundant genomes⁴ from the Gut Phage Database (GPD), some of which had never been seen before. The results were a compilation of over 28,000 gut microbiome samples collected from around the world.⁵

The researchers found the diversity was "surprisingly high,"⁶ which opens new avenues for research into human health. Years of study have been dedicated to identifying the role bacteria play in human health, but little is known about the interaction between viruses and bacteria in the gut.

The researchers used DNA sequencing to catalog the biodiversity. One of the researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute commented in a press release about the types of viruses found and the important roles they play:⁷

"It's important to remember that not all viruses are harmful but represent an integral component of the gut ecosystem. For one thing, most of the viruses we found have DNA as their genetic material, which is different from the pathogens most people know, such as SARS-CoV-2 or Zika, which are RNA viruses.

Secondly, these samples came mainly from healthy individuals who didn't share any specific diseases. It's fascinating to see how many unknown species live in our gut, and to try and unravel the link between them and human health."

The viruses were a specific type called bacteriophages that infect bacteria.⁸ A lack of understanding of bacteriophages had stalled the study of the interrelationship of viruses and your gut microbiome, but recent advancements expanded scientists’ ability to identify and examine the community of viruses living in your gut.

The cataloging also revealed over one-third of the virus clusters do not infect just one species of bacteria and roughly 280 included the newly identified viral clade Gubphage, which is the second most prevalent virus clade. Bacteriophages are important to bacterial communities as they help drive adaptations by creating gene flow networks.⁹

The researchers stress there is a lot left to learn about these viruses, how they interact with gut bacteria and the role they play in human health. However, they also concluded from the data:¹⁰

“Having a comprehensive database of high-quality phage genomes paves the way for a multitude of analyses of the human gut virome at a greatly improved resolution, enabling the association of specific viral clades with distinct microbiome phenotypes. Importantly, GPD provides a blueprint to guide functional and phenotypic experiments of the human gut phageome, as we linked over 40,000 predictions to 472 cultured gut bacteria species.”

Microbiome Dysbiosis Can Develop With a Poor Diet

Processed and ultraprocessed foods have become the mainstay of a Western diet. Yet, there is much evidence¹¹ to demonstrate these foods have a significant impact on your gut microbiome, leading to inflammation, weight gain, cancer and cardiovascular risk. 

One animal study¹² aptly demonstrated the negative effects that a Western diet has on health. Eric Berg, Ph.D., is an expert meat scientist at North Dakota State University. He believes that pigs are an excellent substitute for humans to analyze the nutritive value of dietary intake.

“Like humans, pigs are omnivores and their anatomy and physiology are very similar,” Berg explained to a reporter from Tri-State Livestock News.¹³ Their gastrointestinal system and nutrient requirements are comparable to humans.

Through his experiments, Berg has learned that pigs do poorly on a diet that lacks protein with a good balance of amino acids. A food product may be high in protein, he explains, but if it is low in essential amino acids that make up the protein, the animals don't do well.

In a unique experiment, Berg fed pigs a typical Western diet and was forced to stop the study because the animals’ health was failing rapidly, including stunted growth, intramuscular fat, brittle bones, hair loss and pimples. Commenting on the link to human diets, he said:¹⁴

“We would never just feed corn to pigs, but balance their diet with a legume like soybeans to balance essential amino acids and then add vitamins and minerals … [Yet] we snack ourselves into non-nutrition. We may have a whole-grain bagel for breakfast and then snack on something else for lunch. As a result, our diet is out of balance.”

The overconsumption of ultraprocessed foods in the typical Western diet is also likely a culprit in the growing number of adults and children who are obese. In one analysis of results from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey,¹⁵ researchers found that ultraprocessed foods make up 57.9% of the average American's caloric intake.

Your Gut Health Impacts Disease Risk

This link between processed foods and obesity has taken on new meaning during the pandemic since even mild obesity may raise the risk of severe COVID-19. In one study¹⁶ of patients with COVID-19, researchers from Italy found patients with mild obesity had a 2.32 times greater risk of respiratory failure and 4.96 times greater risk of being admitted to the ICU compared to patients who were not obese.

When you consider that many people eat foods with added sugar at all three meals, it's easy to see how obesity has become the norm, rather than the exception. Yet, sugar is only one problem with processed and ultraprocessed foods. Industrially processed seed oils, often referred to as vegetable oil, may be an even worse offender.

Processed vegetable oils negatively impact your health in several ways but affect your gut microbiome by exposing you to toxic 4-hydroxynonenal (4HNE), which forms when the oil is heated for cooking and frying.¹⁷ 4HNE is highly toxic, especially to your gut bacteria, and consumption has been correlated with inflammatory bowel disease.¹⁸

Sun Exposure Improves Gut Diversity and Health

Research also highlights the role vitamin D plays in gut health and systemic autoimmunity. A review article, published January 21, 2020, in Frontiers in Immunology, notes,¹⁹ “Autoimmune diseases tend to share a predisposition for vitamin D deficiency, which alters the microbiome and integrity of the gut epithelial barrier.”

The paper reviews the several direct and indirect regulatory effects that vitamin D has on your immune system, including promoting regulatory T cells (Tregs), inhibiting differentiation of Th1 and Th17 cells, impairing the development and function of B cells, reducing monocyte activation and stimulating antimicrobial peptides from immune cells.

The relationship between vitamin D and autoimmunity is complicated. Aside from immunosuppression, vitamin D also appears to improve autoimmune disorders by the way it affects your microbiota composition and gut barrier.

The review also cites research showing that your vitamin D status alters the composition of your gut microbiome. Generally speaking, vitamin D deficiency tends to increase Bacteriodetes and Proteobacteria while higher vitamin D intake tends to increase the prevalence of Prevotella and reduce certain types of Proteobacteria and Firmicutes.

One research team²⁰ from the University of British Columbia was interested in the relationship between exposure to UVB light and the effect on the human gut microbiome. Past research suggested vitamin D could alter gut microbiome diversity and demonstrated that exposure to sunlight has a positive effect on people with inflammatory bowel disease²¹ and multiple sclerosis.²²

Since insufficient sunlight exposure could exacerbate or trigger chronic gut inflammatory diseases and vitamin D has an impact on microbiome diversity, the team designed the study to look at the influence these factors may have on each other.²³ After the intervention researchers found an increased number of species in the stool, including those associated with good health.

These results have the potential to affect those who live with immune-mediated or inflammatory diseases, which respond to changes in the gut microbiome. The combination of raising your vitamin D²⁴ level through sensible sun exposure and improving your gut microbiome diversity²⁵ can also have a significant impact on your body's ability to fight viral infections, including COVID-19.

How to Positively Influence Your Gut Microbiome

In the past decade, and more recently in the past year, it has become increasingly evident that optimizing your gut microbiome and vitamin D level is important for your health. You can keep pathogenic microbes and fungi in check by reseeding your gut with beneficial bacteria.

Regularly eating traditionally fermented foods is one of the easiest, most effective and least expensive ways to make a significant impact on your gut microbiome. Fermented vegetables are also high in fiber, which helps to feed your beneficial bacteria.

While I'm not a major proponent of taking many supplements, probiotics are an exception if you don't eat fermented foods on a regular basis. Spore-based probiotics, or sporebiotics, can be particularly helpful when you are taking antibiotics.

Processed foods and foods high in sugar and net carbohydrates negatively affect your gut microbiome as they damage beneficial bacteria and provide the necessary “food” for harmful bacteria to thrive.

It's also important to maintain optimal levels of vitamin D. While sensible sun exposure is the best way, this is not an option for many during the winter months. Before considering supplementation, though, it's important to get your vitamin D level tested. This helps you determine the amount of vitamin D3 you need to take.

It's important to remember that if you're taking vitamin D supplements you also need vitamin K2 to move calcium from your blood into your bones and teeth. Magnesium also helps optimize your vitamin D level. You can read more about the relationship between these three nutrients in “Magnesium and K2 Optimize Your Vitamin D Supplementation.”

from Articles https://ift.tt/3qGgw8z
via IFTTT

While the two currently available COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. are based on novel mRNA technology — which in actuality are experimental gene therapies, not true vaccines — the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is a bit different. It uses a chimpanzee adenovirus vector genetically engineered to express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein instead.

In the video above, James Corbett of The Corbett Report interviews¹ Whitney Webb, a writer and researcher who covers intelligence, Big Tech, surveillance and civil liberties, about some of the basic differences between these vaccines.

They then delve into the curious ties between Oxford University, AstraZeneca and the British eugenics movement — a topic Webb covered in her in-depth December 26, 2020, investigative report "Developers of Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Tied to U.K. Eugenics Movement,"² co-written with Jeremy Loffredo.

The Corbett Report interview and this article offer only a cursory summary of the findings in that report, so I highly recommend reading Webb's original article for a more detailed view.

The Not for Profit Myth

Webb points out that one of the reasons the AstraZeneca vaccine is being promoted for developing countries is because it doesn't require the deep-freeze cold storage that mRNA vaccines do, so the logistics surrounding distribution are far less cumbersome and complex. As a result, GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, has partnered with AstraZeneca to bring the vaccine to the developing world, including Africa³ and Egypt.⁴

Now, while AstraZeneca has promised it will not make any profit from its vaccine, there's a time limit on this pledge that most media pundits fail to note. The not-for-profit vow expires once the pandemic is over, and AstraZeneca itself appears to have a say when it comes to declaring the end date. It could be as early as July 1, 2021, according to a company memo obtained by the Financial Times.⁵

As explained by Webb, the patents and royalties for the AstraZeneca vaccine are held by a private company called Vaccitech, the investors of which include BRAAVOS (a capital investment company set up by a Deutche Bank executive), Google Ventures, the Wellcome Trust, the Chinese branch of Sequoia Capital, the Chinese drug company Fosun Pharma and the British government.

All of these investors stand to profit from this vaccine at some point in the near future, and Vaccitech has been quite open about the future profit potential with its shareholders, noting that the COVID-19 vaccine will most likely become an annual vaccine that is updated each season much like the seasonal flu vaccine.

In her article, Webb quotes Vaccitech's CEO Bill Enright, who promised that investors will receive "a big chunk of the royalties from a successful vaccine as well as 'milestone' payments if and when the pandemic is declared over and COVID-19 vaccines become a seasonal event."⁶

Mapping the Players

The actual developer of the vaccine, Webb explains, is the Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research, founded in 1995 as a public-private partnership between GlaxoSmithKline and the British government.

After a few years, a reorganization took place, turning the Jenner Institute into a partnership between the University of Oxford and the Pirbright Institute (previously known as the Institute for Animal Health). The Jenner Institute is also part of the Oxford Vaccine Group.

The AstraZeneca vaccine has also received U.S. funding. In 2020, the company received $1 billion in funding for its COVID-19 vaccine from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which is part of the Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is among those who have promoted the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine will need to become an annual inoculation, which will allow Vaccitech and its investors to massively profit well into the future.

Among the profiteers will be The Wellcome Trust⁷ which, like other Vaccitech investors, is part of the technocratic globalist network. Wellcome is the largest charity in the U.K. that funds "innovative biomedical research." It was formed in 1936 after the death of Sir Henry Wellcome, a pharmaceutical pioneer and progressive industrialist.

Their board consists of present or former bankers, insurance executives and investment board members. Sir Henry Wellcome, while still alive, founded the company that went on to become GlaxoSmithKline, so the Wellcome Trust is essentially the "philanthropic arm" of GSK.

Adrian Hill's Ties to Eugenics

Adrian Hill is the director of the Jenner Institute and was a lead developer of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Hill also heads the U.K. Vaccine Network, a government entity that decides where to funnel funding and vaccine technology.

One of Hill's bosses early on in his career, and his thesis adviser when he was a doctoral student, was the late David Weatherall, founder of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, a research institute at the University of Oxford.

Weatherall was a member of the Galton Institute from a time when it was known as the U.K. Eugenics Society, and he remained a member until his death in 2018. Hill gave a lecture at Galton in 2008 for its 100-year anniversary. As noted in Webb's article:⁸

"Arguably most troubling of all is the direct link of the vaccine's lead developers to the Wellcome Trust and, in the case of Adrian Hill, the Galton Institute, two groups with longstanding ties to the UK eugenics movement.

The latter organization, named for the 'father of eugenics' Francis Galton, is the renamed U.K. Eugenics Society, a group notorious for over a century for its promotion of racist pseudoscience and efforts to 'improve racial stock' by reducing the population of those deemed inferior.

The ties of Adrian Hill to the Galton Institute should raise obvious concerns given the push to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine he developed with [Sarah] Gilbert the vaccine of choice for the developing world, particularly countries in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, the very areas where the Galton Institute's past members have called for reducing population growth …

While the Galton Institute has attempted to distance itself from its past of promoting racial eugenics with surface-level public relations efforts, it has not stopped family members of the infamous racist from achieving leadership positions at the institute.

Emeritus professor of molecular genetics at the Galton Institute and one of its officers is none other than David J. Galton, whose work includes 'Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century.'

David Galton has written that the Human Genome Mapping Project, originally dreamt up by Galton's former president Walter Bodmer, had 'enormously increased … the scope for eugenics … because of the development of a very powerful technology for the manipulation of DNA.'

This new 'wider definition of eugenics,' Galton has said, 'would cover methods of regulating population numbers as well as improving genome quality by selective artificial insemination by donor, gene therapy or gene manipulation of germ-line cells.' In expanding on this new definition, Galton is neutral as to 'whether some methods should be made compulsory by the state, or left entirely to the personal choice of the individual.'"

Hill and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics

Hill also holds a senior position at the Wellcome Trust's Centre for Human Genetics. One of his former students there was Sarah Gilbert, who served as program director for the Centre. Gilbert is also co-founder of Vaccitech and a lead researcher on the COVID-19 vaccine along with Hill.

At the Centre for Human Genetics, Hill's focus has been "population genetics and race, particularly in Africa" Webb explains. In general terms, the Centre investigates race genetics and susceptibility to diseases and infertility. Hill's specialty is genetics and respiratory illnesses. The Wellcome Trust is also the archivist for the Eugenics Society, now the Galton Institute. Webb writes:⁹

"The crossroads between race and genes is important in the center's work, as an entire working group at the center, the Myers Group, is dedicated to mapping the 'genetic impacts of migration events.'

The center also funded a paper that argued that so long as eugenics is not coercive it's an acceptable policy initiative. The paper asks, 'Is the fact that an action or policy is a case of eugenics necessarily a reason not to do it?'

According to Hill's page on the Wellcome Trust site, race and genetics have long played a central role in his scientific approach, and his group currently focuses on the role genetics plays in African populations with regard to susceptibility to specific infectious diseases."

As noted by Webb in her interview, eugenics never really disappeared. It was simply rebranded into more acceptable terms revolving around "public health." This raises all sorts of questions, starting with: Why is the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, which has such strong eugenics ties, being earmarked for and marketed specifically to developing countries?

Anti-Racism Agenda, or Eugenics?

Webb also points out how so-called "woke vaccine policy" is using systemic racism as a justification for making sure the COVID-19 vaccine is given to minorities first.

Such justifications become all the more questionable if not outright suspicious in light of the eugenics angle, which tends to be heavily focused on reducing populations of Blacks and various native groups.

In the case of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Webb suspects there's an ulterior profit motive behind its not-for-profit pledge to developing countries. If the vaccine ends up being an annual inoculation, they may insist you keep getting the same brand. This way, if AstraZeneca ends up getting a majority share of the market from the start, Vaccitech and its investors will ultimately reap the greatest profits in years to come.

But in addition to the profit angle, there's also the possibility that they might alter the vaccine at any point in the future to fit the eugenics agenda, and no one would be the wiser. As noted by Webb in her article:¹⁰

"There are plans in place to exercise what could reasonably be described as economic coercion to pressure people to 'voluntarily' get vaccinated. Such coercion will be obviously be more effective on poor and working communities, meaning communities of color will be disproportionately affected as well.

Considering these facts, and the case for scrutinizing the safety of Oxford-AstraZeneca's 'affordable' vaccine option made above, any harm caused by vaccine allocation policy in the U.S. and beyond is likely to disproportionately affect poor communities, especially communities of color.

As such, the public should take all vaccine rollout policy assertions with a grain of salt, even when they come cloaked in language of inclusion, racial justice, and public health preservation.

As the cofounder of the American Eugenics Society (later renamed Society for the Study of Social Biology) Frederick Osborn put it in 1968, 'Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics.'"

Africans Leery of AstraZeneca's 'Gift'

Considering the history of Big Pharma using Blacks as guinea pigs, both in Africa and the U.S., it's not surprising that Africans are leery about the gift of COVID-19 vaccines. As just one example, a 2009 Jenner Institute vaccine trial in South Africa killed seven infants. In her article, Webb writes:¹¹

"An investigation conducted by the British Medical Journal found that the Hill-led Jenner Institute had … knowingly misled parents about the negative results of and questionable methods used in animal studies as well the vaccine being known to be ineffective.

The vaccine in question, an experimental tuberculosis vaccine developed jointly by Emergent Biosolutions and the Jenner Institute, was scrapped after the controversial study in infants confirmed what was already known, that the vaccine was ineffective."

As reported by the Inquirer in the video below, concern among South Africans has been so widespread that the South African government, in early February 2021, temporarily paused its rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Google Ventures' Conflict of Interest

As mentioned earlier, Google Ventures is another investor in Vaccitech. Considering Google has a vested stake in the success of a COVID-19 vaccine, its policy to censor "vaccine misinformation" is a clear conflict of interest that they really should be held accountable for, Webb says.

Indeed, it makes no sense that Google, which stands to profit from a COVID-19 vaccine, is allowed to suppress reporting on it. Disturbingly, Webb points out that, as far as she could tell, she's the only one who has pointed out this link between Google and the AstraZeneca vaccine. 

The Gates Foundation

Not surprisingly, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can also be found in this web of eugenics. Webb writes:¹²

"The Wellcome Centre regularly cofunds the research and development of vaccines and birth control methods with the Gates Foundation, a foundation that actively and admittedly engages in population and reproductive control in Africa and South Asia by, among other things, prioritizing the widespread distribution of injectable long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs).

The Wellcome Trust has also directly funded studies that sought to develop methods to 'improve uptake' of LARCs in places such as rural Rwanda. As researcher Jacob Levich wrote in the 'Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism,' LARCs afford women in the Global South 'the least choice possible short of actual sterilization.'

Some LARCs can render women infertile for as long as five years, and, as Levich argues, they 'leave far more control in the hands of providers, and less in the hands of women, than condoms, oral contraceptives, or traditional methods.' One example is Norplant, a contraceptive implant manufactured by Schering (now Bayer) that can prevent pregnancy for up to five years.

It was taken off the U.S. market in 2002 after more than 50,000 women filed lawsuits against the company and the doctors who prescribed it. Seventy of those class action suits were related to side effects such as depression, extreme nausea, scalp-hair loss, ovarian cysts, migraines, and excessive bleeding.

Slightly modified and rebranded as Jadelle, the dangerous drug was promoted in Africa by the Gates Foundation in conjunction with USAID and EngenderHealth. Formerly named the Sterilization League for Human Betterment, EngenderHealth's original mission, inspired by racial eugenics, was to 'improve the biological stock of the human race.'"

Are Any of the COVID Vaccines Safe?

I've written many articles detailing the potential and suspected, if not inevitable, problems with COVID-19 vaccines, primarily the mRNA gene therapies since they are the two currently in use in the U.S. You can find them all using the search bar at the top of this page.

In addition to their high risk of allergic reactions, there's compelling evidence to suggest they may trigger severe inflammation and immune dysregulation. Many scientists are also warning of the possibility for pathogenic priming and antibody-dependent enhancement, which will make subsequent infection with a coronavirus far more dangerous than were you not vaccinated.

In a paper¹³ titled, "COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease," published in Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, Dr. Bart Classen also warns there are also troubling evidences suggesting some of the mRNA shots may cause prion diseases such as Alzheimer's and ALS.

Meanwhile, Dr. J. Patrick Whelan, a pediatric rheumatologist specializing in multisystem inflammatory syndrome, has expressed concern about mRNA vaccines' ability to cause "microvascular injury to the brain, heart, liver and kidneys in ways that were not assessed in safety trials."¹⁴

Around the world, reports are now also pouring in of people dying shortly after receiving these COVID-19 vaccines.^{15,16,17,18,19,20} In many cases, they die suddenly within hours of getting the shot. In others, death occurs within the span of a couple of weeks.

As of February 12, 2021, the number of side effects reported to VAERS totaled 15,923, including 929 deaths.²¹ Pfizer’s vaccine has so far been responsible for 58% of deaths in the U.S. VAERS list, while Moderna’s vaccine accounts for 41%.

As of March 11, 2021, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg have all suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, either in full or in part, following reports of blood clots.²²

Austria has also suspended a particular batch of AstraZeneca’s vaccine in order to complete an investigation into the death of a 49-year-old woman who suddenly developed a severe coagulation disorder.²³

Another Austrian vaccine recipient, a 35-year-old woman, developed acute lung disease from a dislodged blood clot. The same vaccine batch had reportedly been used in Denmark, where a 60-year-old woman died from a blood clot. According to a March 2, 2021, report²⁴ by The Defender, U.K. data show the AstraZeneca vaccine has 77% more adverse events and 25% more deaths than the Pfizer vaccine.

To avoid becoming a sad statistic, I urge you to review the science very carefully before making up your mind about this experimental therapy. Also remember that the lethality of COVID-19 is actually surprisingly low. It’s lower than the flu for those under the age of 60.²⁵

If you’re under the age of 40, your risk of dying from COVID-19 is just 0.01%, meaning you have a 99.99% chance of surviving the infection. And you could improve that to 99.999% if you’re metabolically flexible, insulin sensitive, and vitamin D replete.

from Articles https://ift.tt/30I7fCk
via IFTTT