Health & Fitness

Despite not liking having her picture taken, Barber was more than happy to get in front of the camera to support a charitable cause because, as she figures, “if I put my stupid face on it, hopefully it will get the word out”.

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Sunnier areas are associated with fewer deaths from COVID-19, an observational study suggests. Increased exposure to the sun's rays -- specifically UVA -- could act as a simple public health intervention if further research establishes it causes a reduction in mortality rates, experts say.

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A new study continues to support a growing body of evidence that aluminum contributes to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Researchers found aluminum co-located with phosphorylated tau protein, which is an early initiator of AD.

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Alzheimer's disease is known for its slow attack on neurons crucial to memory and cognition. But why are these particular neurons in aging brains so susceptible to the disease's ravages, while others remain resilient?

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

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

The study therefore adds to growing evidence that leptin doesn't turn your appetite on and off just by controlling whether you feel hungry or full. It can also make you want food more or less regardless of hunger.

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By Ron Rosedale, M.D.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Hormones that are Vital for Optimal Health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Exactly is Leptin?

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

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

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

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

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

How Leptin Regulates Your Weight

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

Science points now to leptin as being that hormone.

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

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

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

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

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

How Leptin Resistance Leads to Disease

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

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

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

Leptin May Be Even More Critical Than Insulin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leptin appears to be the missing link.

Could Leptin Also Affect  How Fast You Age?

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

 

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

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

Could it perhaps affect the rate of aging itself?

The Biology of Aging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leptin’s Role in Improving Your Metabolism

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do You Become Leptin Resistant?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In this interview, Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., discusses the importance and benefits of regenerative agriculture and a future Regeneration International project that we'll be collaborating on.

We're currently facing enormously powerful technocrats who are hell-bent on ushering in the Great Reset, which will complete the ongoing transfer of wealth and resource ownership from the poor and middle classes to the ultra-rich. Perhaps the most well-known of the individuals pushing for this is Bill Gates who, like John Rockefeller a century before him, rehabilitated his sorely tarnished image by turning to philanthropy.

However, Gates' brand of philanthropy, so far, has helped few and harmed many. While his PR machine has managed to turn public opinion about him such that many now view him as a global savior who donates his wealth for the good of the planet, nothing could be further from the truth.

Gates' Stranglehold on Global Health

The magnitude of Gates' role over global health recently dawned on me. I believe the COVID-19 catastrophe would not have been possible had it not been for the World Health Organization, which Gates appears to exert shadow-control over. Remember, it was primarily the WHO that facilitated this global shutdown and adoption of freedom-robbing, economy-destroying measures by virtually every government on the planet.

When then-President Trump halted U.S. funding of the WHO in 2020, Gates became the biggest funder of the WHO. As explained in "WHO Insider Blows Whistle on Gates and GAVI," the WHO has turned global health security into a dictatorship, where the director general has assumed sole power to make decisions that member states must abide by, but according to a long-term WHO insider, Gates' vaccine alliance GAVI actually appears to be the directing power behind the WHO.

The two — Gates and the WHO — have been working hand in hand pushing for a global vaccination campaign, and Gates has a great deal of money invested in these vaccines. We've also seen extraordinary efforts to censor natural alternatives and inexpensive, readily available and clearly effective drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and it appears the reason for this is probably because they're competitors to the vaccine.

Emergency use authorization for pandemic vaccines are only given when there are no other treatments, so vilifying alternatives has been a key strategy to protect vaccine profits.

The Parallels Between Rockefeller and Gates

As noted by Shiva, the comparisons between Rockefeller and Gates are quite apt. Rockefeller created not just Big Oil but also Big Finance and Big Pharma. He had intimate connections with IG Farben.¹ There was a Standard Oil IG Farben company. Without the fossil fuels of Standard Oil, IG Farben couldn't have made synthetic fertilizers or fuels.

In 1910, Rockefeller and Carnegie produced The Flexner Report,² which was the beginning of the end for natural medicine in the conventional medical school curriculum. They eliminated it because it saw natural medicine as a hugely competitive threat to the new pharmaceuticals that were primarily derived from the oil industry.

Much of Rockefeller's history has been captured by Lily Kay,³ who sifted through Molecular Vision of Life's archives. There, she discovered that the Nazi regime, which was a eugenics regime that thought some people were inferior and needed to be exterminated to keep the superior race pure, didn't vanish when Germany lost the war.

Eugenics simply migrated to the U.S., and was taken up by Rockefeller under the term of "social psychology as biological determinants." The word gene did not exist at that time. Instead, they called it "atoms of determinism." Rockefeller paid for much of the eugenics research, which ultimately resulted in the silencing and suppression of true health.

To be healthy means to be whole, and wholeness refers to the "self-organized brilliance of your integrated body as a complex system," Shiva says. That's what Ayurveda is based on, and even this ancient system of medicine has been attacked in recent times. The notion of genetic determination ignores this foundational wholeness, seeking instead to divide the human body into mechanical components controlled by your genes.

"Coming back to the parallels, Rockefeller was behind it because he was driving the chemical industry. When the wars were over, they said, 'Oh my gosh, we have all these chemicals to sell.' And they invented the Green Revolution and pushed the Green Revolution on India.

Rockefeller, the World Bank, the USA all worked together, and if the farmers of India are protesting today, it's a result of Rockefeller's initiative, the Green Revolution in India. Most people don't realize what high cost India has borne; what high cost the state of Panjon has born.

Then you have Gates joining up with Rockefeller and creating the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) … which pretends to be his solution to climate change. I say, 'My god, what kind of stage has the world reached that absolute nonsense can pass the science?' I'll give you just three examples from his chapter on agriculture, in which he talks about how we grow things.

First of all, plants are not things. Plants are sentient beings. Our culture knows it. We have the sacred tulsi. We have the sacred neem. We have the sacred banyan. They are sentient beings. So many people are awake to animal rights. I think we need more people awake to plant rights and really tell Mr. Gates, 'No, plants are not things.'

He goes on to celebrate Norman Borlaug, who was in the DuPont defense lab, whose job it was to push these four chemicals by adapting the plants [to them]. So, he created the dwarf variety, because the tall varieties are free varieties … [Gates] says we're eating food because of Borlaug. No, people are starving because of Borlaug. The farmers are dying because of Borlaug."

Gates Offers Problems as Solutions

Gates hails synthetic fertilizer is the greatest agricultural invention. "Doesn't he realize synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are creating desertification, dead zones in the ocean, and nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas?" Shiva says. In short, he's offering the problem as the solution. Gates also, apparently, does not understand that nitrogen-fixing plants can fix nitrogen. He incorrectly claims that plants cannot fix nitrogen.

Gates is equally wrong about methane production from livestock. "Have you smelt methane behind nomadic tribes?" Shiva asks. "Have you ever smelt methane behind our sacred cow in India? No, they don't emit methane." The reason cows in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) emit methane that stinks to high heaven is because they're fed an unnatural diet of grains and placed in crowded quarters. It's not a natural phenomenon. It's a man-made one.

"You know what Mr. Gates wants to teach us? He says cows make methane because of their poor stomachs," Shiva says. "They call them containers. I think we should sue him for undoing basic biology 101. You've talked about how he controls the WHO. He's also trying to take control of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

[FAO] has recognized ecological agriculture is the way to go and supported [regenerative] agriculture up until last year, when Gates started to take charge. Now he's moving the food summit to New York. Five hundred organizations have said, 'This is no longer a food summit, it's a poison summit. The poison cartel and Bill Gates are running it to push more poisons, now under new names. So, we have a lot of work to do.'"

The answer to the environmental problems we face is not more of the very things that created the problems in the first place, which is what Gates proposes. The answer is regenerative agriculture and real food.

"When people are eating healthy food, there is no problem," Shiva says. "[Gates] wants to commit a crime against our gut microbiome, pushing more fake food through Impossible Food. And he wants to create conditions so that real food will disappear. That's why we all have to organize together and the scientists have to start being protected.

There's an extinction taking place. They call it the sixth mass extinction. Most people think the sixth mass extinction is about other species. They don't realize large parts of humanity are being pushed to extinction. Food is health, as Hippocrates said, [and that requires] indigenous systems of learning, ecological agriculture, small farmers.

In Bill Gates' design, all this that makes life, life, that makes society, society, that makes community, community, that makes healthy beings, he would like to push this to extinction because he's afraid of independence, freedom, health and our beingness. He wants us to be 'thingness,' but we are beings …

The worst crime against the Earth and against humanity is using gene editing technologies for gene drives, which is a collaboration of Gates with DARPA, the defense research system. Gene drives are deliberately driving [us] to extinction. Now he does it in the name of ending malaria. No. It's about driving to extinction.

Amaranth is a sacred food for us. It's a very, very important source of nutrition … There's an application in that DARPA-Gates report of driving the amaranth to extinction through gene rights. And when this was raised at the Convention on Biological Diversity, do you know what he did? He actually hired a public relations agency and bribed government representatives to not say no. Can you imagine?"

Gates' Long-Term Play

Gates clearly had a long-term vision in mind from the start. His growing control of the WHO began over a decade ago. Over this span of time, he also started transitioning into Big Pharma and the fake food industry, which would allow his influence over the WHO's global health recommendations to really pay off.

While fake foods have many potential problems, one in particular is elevated levels of the omega-6 fat linoleic acid (LA). If you eat real food, you're going to get more than enough LA. Our industrial Western diet, however, provides far more than is needed for optimal health already, and engineered meats are particularly loaded with LA, as they're made with genetically modified soy oil and canola oil.

This massive excess of LA will encourage and promote virtually all degenerative diseases, thereby accelerating the destruction of human health. In addition to that, Gates is also investing in pharmaceuticals, which of course are touted as the answer to degenerative disease. Again, his solutions to ill health are actually the problem. Shiva says:

"Gates … [is] entering every field that has to do with life. Our work in Navdanya, which means nine seeds, is basically work on biodiversity in agriculture. We started to bring together all the work that he's doing in taking over. I mentioned the Rockefeller Green Revolution, now the Gates-Rockefeller Green Revolution in Africa. The next step he wants to push is … digital agriculture.

He calls it Gates Ag One,⁴ and the headquarters of this is exactly where the Monsanto headquarters are, in St. Louis, Missouri. Gates Ag One is one [type of] agriculture for the whole world, organized top down. He's written about it. We have a whole section on it in our new report,⁵ 'Gates to a Global Empire.'"

Stolen Farmer Data Is Repackaged and Sold Back to Them

What does digital agriculture entail? For starters, it entails the introduction of a digital surveillance system. So far, Shiva's organization has managed to prevent Gates from introducing a seed surveillance startup, where farmers would not be allowed to grow seeds unless approved by Gates surveillance system.

The data mining, Shiva says, is needed because they don't actually know agriculture. This is why Gates finances the policing of farmers. He needs to mine their data to learn how farming is actually done. This knowledge is then repackaged and sold back to the farmers. It's evil genius at its finest.

Through his funding, Gates now also controls the world's seed supply, and his financing of gene editing research has undercut biosafety laws across the world. As explained by Shiva, the only country that doesn't have biosafety laws is the U.S. "The rest of the world does because we have a treaty called the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety," she says.

"While he created the appearance of philanthropy, what he's doing is giving tiny bits of money to very vital institutions. But with those bits of money, they attract government money, which was running those institutions. Now, because of his clout, he is taking control of the agenda of these institutions. In the meantime, he's pushing patenting, be it on drugs, vaccines or on seeds."

Taken together, Gates ends up wielding enormous control over global agriculture and food production, and there's virtually no evidence to suggest he has good intentions.

The Anatomy of Monopolization

The company that collects patents on gene-edited organisms, both in health and agriculture, is Editas, founded by a main financial investor for the Gates Foundation. Gates is also a big investor in Editas.

"So, here's a company called Editas to edit the world as if it is a Word program. The two scientists who got the Nobel Prize this year have both been funded in their research by Gates. My mind went back to how Rockefeller financed the research, got the Nobel Prize, and then made the money.

So, you finance the research. Then you finance the public institutions, whether they be national or international. You invest and force them down the path where they can only use what is your patented intellectual property. And, as he has said in an interview, his smartest investment was vaccines, because it is a 1-to-20 return. Put $1 in and make $20. How many billions of dollars have been put in? You can imagine how many trillions will be made.

At the end of it, where does food come from? It comes from seed. He wants to control it. It comes from land. He's controlling that. He's became the biggest farmland owner [in the U.S.]. But you need weather [control]. You need a stable climate.

So, what could be a weapon of control of agriculture? Weather modification. He calls it geoengineering. This is engineering of the climate. Again, making it look like he's going to solve global warming by creating global cooling."

As explained by Shiva, Gates is also heavily invested in climate modification technologies that not only will destabilize the earth's climate systems more, but also can be weaponized against the people by controlling rainfall and drought. In India, they've been having massive hail during harvest time, which destroys the harvest.

Is the UN Subservient to Gates?

According to Shiva, Gates is also corrupting the United Nations system, just like he's corrupted world governments and the WHO, and in so doing, he's destroying the efforts built over the last three decades to protect the global environment.

"Whether it be the climate treaty, the biodiversity treaty or the atmospheric treaties, he is absolutely behaving as if the UN is his subservient institution," Shiva says. "[He thinks] governments and regulatory bodies should not exist … and that people in democracy have no business to speak. [If they do], they're conspiracy theorists."

Taking Down Gates' Empires

As it stands right now, ordinary people are forced to fight battles that are in actuality rooted in institutional, structural and societal crimes. These crimes really need to be addressed the way Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire was addressed. In the case of Gates, his empire is actually multiple empires, and they all need to be dismantled. To that end, I will be collaborating with Shiva and Regeneration International, which she co-founded, on a project to boycott Gates' empires.

"I've noticed that no matter what the movement, they're using the word regeneration now. It could be a health movement, a democracy movement, a peace movement, a women's movement — everyone has realized that regeneration is what we have to shift to," Shiva says.

"So, what do we need to be doing in the next decade? For me, the next decade is the determining decade, because these petty minds' insatiable greed want to go so fast that if, in the next decade, we don't protect what has to be protected, build resilient alternatives and take away the sainthood from this criminal, they will leave nothing much to be saved.

The poison cartel is also big pharma. People think agriculture is here, medicine is there. No. The same criminal corporations gave us agrichemicals. They gave us bad medicine that creates more disease than it solves. So, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Poison — it's all one. And Bill Gates is holding it all together even more, and trying to make them bigger because he has investments in all of them …

I think [seeds] is where we have to begin … I'm hoping that we will be able, together, to launch a global movement soon to take back our seeds from the international seed banks. The strategy is we need to remind the world that these are public institutions [and] that they're accountable to the farmers whose collections these [seeds] are ...

On the food question, I think that's the big one because food and health go [together]. In Ayurveda, it says food is the best medicine, and if you don't eat good food, then no medicine can cure whatever disease you have. The best medicine is good eating. And Hippocrates said 'Let food be thy medicine.' So, I think this is the time to really grow a very big global campaign for food freedom.

Food freedom means you cannot destroy our right to grow food. Secondly, you cannot destroy our governments' obligations to us to support regenerative agriculture rather than support degenerative agriculture and subsidize it. And third, I think we should call for a worldwide boycott of lab foods …

Another part of this should be, don't let big tech enter our bodies. Let big tech not enter life sciences … These guys will make life illegal. Living will be illegal except as a little piece in their machine through their permission."

Each year, Navdanya holds a two-week campaign on food freedom starting October 2, which is nonviolence day. We now need to take that campaign to the global stage, and I will do my part to aid this effort. So, mark your calendar and prepare to join us in a global boycott of food that makes you sick — processed food, GMO foods, lab-created foods, fake meats, all of it.

More Information

You can learn more about Shiva's work and her many projects on Navdanya.org. During the first week of April every year, Navdanya gives a five-day course called Annam, Food as Health, via Zoom. In this course, you'll learn about soil and plant biodiversity and healthy eating for optimal health.

You can also learn more by reading the report "Earth Rising, Women Rising: Regenerating the Earth, Seeding the Future," written by female farmers. And, again, mark your calendars and plan your participation in the food freedom campaign, starting October 2, 2021.

"When all the spiritual forces, all of nature's forces and most of people's forces are aligned together, what can [a few] billionaires, technocrats — who want to be richer than they are, greedier than they are, more violent than they are — do?" Shiva says. "They don't count in the long run, really. It's just that we cannot afford to not do the things that we can do."

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In this interview, Dr. Val Kanter, a board-certified endodontist and biological dentist with a practice in Beverly Hills, California, discusses the oft-ignored dangers of root canal procedures and modern technologies with which these issues can be effectively addressed and corrected.

Unfortunately, few regular dentists fully appreciate the intimate links between your oral health and overall physical health and, as a result, some of their interventions can actually cause catastrophic health challenges.

The sad reality is that if we knew how to eat properly from the time we were born, the need for just about any type of dentistry would, in my view, decrease by at least 90%, because we just wouldn't develop cavities.

Thankfully we have trained professionals who can help restore our health, and Kanter is one of them. Her transition into holistic dentistry occurred after she moved from Florida to California and started doing some self-exploration.

“I had some enlightening moments,” she says, “and it was really interesting because I was raised in mainstream dentistry and mainstream health, not really understanding what I do now. It was through that self-discovery that I actually learned about water fluoridation and the major damage that has created.

I got involved with the Fluoride Action Network and worked closely with Michael [Connett] for a long time, publishing research on some of the damages. One of the things that is so obvious to us is fluorosis in kids. It was originally thought to affect only 10% of kids, and now we're up to a place where it's affecting 50% or more.

That's a window. It's a view of what's happening inside the body. That's what got me on the path and that led me into learning about ozone and laser therapy and it really opened up a whole new world for me in the field of endodontics.”

Do You Really Need a Root Canal?

One of the founding members of the American Endodontics Society, Dr. George Meinig, wrote the book "Root Canal Cover-Up." It’s a really good primer and provides solid information as to why you may want to consider avoiding root canal treatment.

The conventional idea is that it’s best to preserve whatever you can of the original tooth rather than replacing it entirely. Hence, they’ll do a root canal and attach a crown rather than pull the tooth and replace it, typically with an implant. The downside is that root canal-treated teeth can cause significant health complications that often aren’t recognized as being a side effect of the root canal.

According to Kanter, more than 20 million root canal procedures are done every year in the U.S. “It's an astronomical number, and most of those root canal procedures are done by general dentists,” she says. That in itself is a problem, as you typically do less than 10 root canals while in dental school, and once you’re in practice, much of the training you get is done by sales reps of various equipment.

“One of the most important things that I want the listeners to understand,” Kanter says, “is that there is a specialty out there that focuses on this procedure. If you do decide to have the procedure done, please go see a specialist. See two or three. Get multiple opinions.

It's so important, because I feel that a lot of root canal procedures are done unnecessarily. It's a quick way to hit a symptom, just like a medication. It's, ‘Oh, let's take out the nerve and the pain will stop.’ These inflammations inside the teeth can be reversed. I see it daily in my practice. I see a lot of patients who want to prevent a root canal.

There's a whole new world of regenerative dentistry and regenerative endodontics that if you're using the proper equipment, you can preserve the vitality of the teeth and that's my passion and goal. With that said, most of my practice is retreating old, contaminated root canals …

My goal is to teach all of the dentists out there about these procedures because then it doesn't even have to go to that level. If someone needs a root canal procedure, they should see an endodontist if they decide to go that route.

I think one of the top things that you should be seeking if you are a patient looking for a practitioner that's going to resonate with the things that you want — which are some of these regenerative procedures — is finding dentists that are using this laser therapy.

It's becoming more and more popular, but still probably about 10% of dentists use dental lasers. I would start there. Go to Fotona's website¹ and find someone in your area using this laser therapy.”

Prevention Basics

Of course, prevention is the best medicine, and some basic care can help you minimize the time you need to spend in a dentist chair. The most important factor in that regard is nutrition. Three crucial nutrients for oral and dental health are vitamins A, D and K. You also need a good supply of minerals.

“Unfortunately, most of our food is deficient in the minerals and micronutrients we need because of the way that farming has been done,” Kanter says. Ideally, you’ll want to do micronutrient testing along with testing your vitamin D level and hemoglobin A1C. Kanter will perform many of these tests at her office, and helps patients customize their diet.

“It's challenging because the nutritional component of dental schools is minuscule. That’s why I did advanced training with the ACIMD, which is basically integrative biological dentistry and medicine training to become a naturopath … By decreasing sugar in your diet, and stress, you can actually [heal your teeth].

Your teeth are a beautiful complex system that are actually healing themselves constantly. There's an outward fluid flow inside the nerve complex in your tubules and it's protecting your teeth. As soon as you start loading your body with sugar and all of these other things, the fluid flow just reverses, and that leads to an influx of bacteria and other toxins that can start to create inflammation in the tooth.

The tooth is a very complex and unique system, unlike anywhere else in the body. If you have inflammation from any other injury, your skin can stretch and swell, whereas the tooth is encapsulated in enamel, and it can't stretch. When inflammation starts to build up, it can quickly turn into a pathological process and that's what leads to major nerve damage.”

Ozone and Laser Therapy

Once pain sets in, you’re past the point of being able to prevent deterioration, but this is where regenerative dentistry can come in and save the day (and your tooth). One is ozone therapy. Another is laser therapy.

Pulpitis is inflammation of the pulp nerve complex of the tooth. Using these regenerative therapies, Kanter has successfully reversed this kind of inflammation in many patients. Even when decay and bacteria have made it all the way into the nerve tissue, laser therapy can sterilize the surface of the nerve, while ozone gas, which also kills pathogens, can actually stimulate your immune system to kick in and eradicate the remaining infection.

In the interview, you’ll find a video showing how the Erbium YAG laser treatment seemingly melts away the decayed tooth structure. Contrary to mechanical drilling, the laser is so gentle on the tooth structure, you don’t even need anesthesia. It also sterilizes the surface as you go along. Why is this important? Kanter explains:

“When you drill, you're starting to remove decay filled with bacteria. As the dentist is drilling deeper into the tooth into the more vulnerable layers near the nerve, you're carrying that bacteria that's trapped in the bur and you're actually driving it deeper in the tooth. With the laser, you're sterilizing cell layer by cell layer.”

Were the laser to hit the nerve, it also will not kill the nerve. Once the area is free of decay, Kanter will ozonate the entire surface, and since it’s a gas, the ozone is able to penetrate into and actually disinfect the tubules. Special bioceramic materials that are highly biocompatible are then used to complete the restoration of the tooth.

“Using photobiomodulation or low-level laser … a neodymium YAG laser, which is 1064 wavelength … you can actually stimulate the mitochondria inside the tissues, upregulating ATP production, collagen synthesis and angiogenesis,” she says.

“I generally use it at 20 Hertz, so the frequency is 20. Then, if it's intraoral, we usually use it at a 2-watt power level. It takes just a couple of minutes … We do these low-level laser procedures on every single patient that's coming to see me, and it's profound, the amount of healing and the reduction of pain and inflammation that we can see.”

In the future, we may even have the ability to regenerate tooth material naturally. As explained by Kanter, researchers are investigating the ability of collagen matrices embedded with different medications to stimulate natural tooth formation. There are also studies looking at how to regrow teeth from scratch.

The Hidden Hazards of Root Canals

There are several reasons for avoiding root canals. Importantly, research by Dr. Weston A. Price demonstrated just how interconnected your teeth are with your overall health. He implanted infected root canaled teeth under the skin of rabbits, and in many cases, the rabbits went on to develop the very disease that the donor of the tooth had.

Granted, dentistry has changed a lot since Price, so his results may not be directly applicable to today. Kanter, who is the endo director of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (IAOMT), is now in the process of developing studies to try to recreate some of his studies to see whether the root canals of today, in which teeth are able to be cleaned to a far greater degree, still produce the same systemic effects.

That said, as recently as nine years ago, the American Association of Endodontists, which oversees the specialty of endodontics, admitted that current techniques fail to completely remove all infected material from root canaled teeth. To illustrate this, Kanter shows a CT scan of a root canaled tooth (see video).

“The red area is the area that the instrument has cleaned out. The green area wasn't even touched. What this means is that a third of the soft tissue of this necrotic tissue in the tooth is completely untouched by instruments. Unfortunately, most [dental students] have in their head, ‘I need to get these instruments in and I got to do this shaping of these canals,’ and that's actually not what's cleaning the teeth at all.

What's happening is that the dentist is grabbing a syringe of a fluid to irrigate the tooth. Generally, they're using sodium hypochlorite, which is essentially bleach, and they're just taking a syringe with a small needle on it and they're introducing it down into the canal. It's not cleaning everything out. It's only cleaning a teeny tiny percentage of the dentinal tubules, leaving a ton of bacteria and toxins behind.

In the picture on the right, you see all this black material. These are complete channels of necrotic tissue that are left behind during these procedures. We can see why these teeth can be so toxic if all of this material is left behind. That's just looking at the main nerve channels, not even tubules. It's surprising that root canal treatments ever work.”

The good news is that the relationship of apical periodontitis and systemic illnesses is finally starting to be more widely recognized. Apical periodontitis is an infection around a tooth that leads to infection in the bone. “If you have apical periodontitis, you're three times more likely to develop coronary artery disease,” Kanter says. It’s also associated with a higher risk of kidney disease and cancer.

Up to 78% of the plaques found in heart attack victims have oral pathogens in them, and they’re the exact same pathogens you find in failed root canal treatments. This kind of systemic infection can be identified by looking at biomarkers such as CRP and interleukin-6.

Yes, There Are Ways to Make Root Canals Safer

In cases where regenerative techniques are inappropriate and more aggressive treatment is required, you basically have only two options left: extraction of the tooth or a root canal. The good news is that there are safer ways of doing a root canal these days, but you need to use a combination of ozone and laser therapy in order to achieve optimal sterilization. Ozone alone isn’t even enough. Kanter explains:

“I have incorporated ozone therapy into my root canal procedures for the last five years. In fact, I started a pilot study at UCLA looking at the efficacy of ozone gas and comparing it to traditional techniques. It was a blow to me, but unfortunately the ozone gas wasn't doing the job.

We use that at about 100 micrograms per milliliter, which is very high, but we only did it for one minute per canal. Now, what we know about ozone is that it’s both dose dependent and time dependent. Further studies are going to be done, but we may need to create a closed system where we can completely infuse the tooth with the ozone gas in order to sterilize it because, yes, of course, a gas is going to travel deeper into tubules than a liquid is.

The main issue is that if there's debris and blockages in these tubules, I don't believe the ozone gas to be able to penetrate. Now, with the traditional techniques, you're leaving so much behind. I have a really cool video that compares the traditional technique with the new laser activated irrigation. This is what's made me feel really good about these treatments that I'm doing on my patients …

With the new laser activation that I'm using in my practice, watch how quickly this biofilm is disrupted. The laser is simply at the top of the tooth. It doesn't have to extend down the canal, and look at that energy.

This is what not a lot of people are familiar with. You cannot have a root canal procedure without an advanced irrigation. It is absolutely critical. Within 10 to 20 seconds, look at the amount of biofilm that's disrupted. We're also seeing complete cleaning of the dentinal tubules … down to the microtubules as well …

There's one more technology on the market that's reaching a lot of endodontists. If you need a root canal procedure, find someone that's using either the laser or this gentle procedure. The general aid is using sound energy … all of these different frequencies, and you have a closed system on the tooth and it actually sucks all of the necrotic tissue and debris out of the root structure.

Between these two technologies, we're getting results like this. This is the look of the tubules when they're just sparkling clean. It is possible, but unfortunately the majority of root canal procedures that are being done are not using this.”

Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment

Another alternative treatment that can be very useful is hyperbaric oxygen treatment. By introducing higher pressures, you’re able to get oxygen deeper into the tooth area, thereby facilitating and speeding healing. Kanter has a couple of different hyperbaric centers in Los Angeles that she will sometimes refer patients to.

“The patients that come see me are generally very committed to their health. We do a variety of treatments that support the procedures that we're doing. We do ozone inside the tooth, where it has an antibacterial effect, but we also inject it around the tooth. We do that at their recall appointments as well, so we're constantly stimulating the immune system around these teeth.

We're also doing the low-level laser treatments, as well as microcurrent and other things to keep energy flowing in these areas where I know that there is scar tissue. We have to break that down, and eventually energy can start flowing through,” she says.

Why Extraction Isn’t an Ideal Solution

The second option, to extract the infected tooth, also has its issues. For example, there’s a decrease in neurofeedback to the brain, and so it's correlated with early Alzheimer's and other degenerative, neurodegenerative diseases, Kanter says. Also, when you take a tooth out, the periodontal ligament that encompasses the root needs to be completely removed as well.

This ligament nourishes the root from the outside and acts as a defense mechanism against bacteria. The problem is it also provides 70% of the blood flow to the surrounding jaw bone. So, when you take a tooth and the surrounding ligament out, you also cut the blood supply to your jaw in that area by 70%, which is why you end up seeing bone degeneration and resorption, as there’s nothing left to support that bone.

“There's definitely cases [in which] a tooth extraction is indicated, but I think there's plenty of patients out there that can withstand having a root canal procedure and remain healthy. Even Weston Price said there are different categories of patients out there.

There are patients who are going to be very susceptible to any sort of remnant bacteria in these teeth, causing systemic illnesses, and then there's going to be people that are just fine … Apical periodontitis or root canal infections cause systemic illnesses. But a root canal procedure or a root canal treated tooth in itself does not cause the systemic illness …

We need to do more research with these new techniques. It's definitely a goal of mine to get the research done, to mimic some of these older studies, using the new technology, and looking at not only getting rid of the bacteria but getting rid of the endotoxins and everything else the bacteria leave behind, because those move quicker than the bacteria once they're released into the body.”

Replacing Extracted Teeth

If you have a periapical abscess, it is typically too late to save the tooth as it is dead and seriously infected. In that case, it will need to be removed. Once a tooth is extracted, you then have to decide what you’re going to replace it with. Here, there are a number of options — implant, bridge or partial — each with its own pros and cons.

“First of all, if you're going to extract the tooth, it needs to be done by a surgeon using things like PRF, platelet rich fibrin, which really helps the site heal and create new bone and collagen in the area quickly, and also provides an immune response in the area. That's really important,” Kanter says.

“Also, if you're thinking about doing an implant, you need to do sensitivity testing … because [many] are sensitive to titanium, and most of the implants being placed are made of titanium. There are alternatives like zirconia, but it's important that you find out if you are compatible with these materials before you put them in your body.

If you're not able to put these in your body because of sensitivity, then your options are going to be a bridge or a partial. But metal in the mouth is becoming more and more of an issue. We're seeing it constantly. It's creating these interference fields in the mouth and a lot of people are having hypersensitivity reactions to them.

It turns into a domino effect on the patient's overall health. We're constantly evaluating that and helping our patients figure out what materials are best for them and what prosthesis or restorative plan is going to be best for them.”

Call to Action

Unfortunately, many have improperly cleaned root canal-treated teeth, and more often than not, there can be silent infections around these teeth. For this reason, Kanter urges anyone who has a root canaled tooth to get a three-dimensional cone beam image done of the tooth.

Many endodontists have this machine. If they don't have one, they should be able to refer you out for one. “You should have a 3D scan if you've ever had a root canal procedure,” Kanter says. “That's my call of action to all of your listeners.”

In the interview video, she shows what an infected root canal looks like. You cannot see this infection, however, on a standard dental X-ray. These are the kinds of post-root canal problems Kanter deals with in her practice, using the regenerative technologies discussed above.

“That’s 75% of my practice,” she says. “Patients get the CT, we find these issues, we find the connections into the sinus, how it's related to all of these [health] problems, and we just start breaking it down and doing our best to help these patients.”

So, getting a 3D cone scan of your tooth is the first step. Kanter recommends having the scan radiographically interpreted by your nearest university or a company called Beam Readers. “These are board-certified radiologists that look through every detail,” Kanter explains.

Again, to locate a biological endodontist familiar with the regenerative technologies discussed in this interview, check out fotona.com, or gentlewave.com. They offer lists of practitioners that are using these technologies.

“If you're going to someone using either of these technologies, you're going to generally be in good hands,” Kanter says. “In my practice, I'm using both. I use the laser and the gentle wave, so we are cleaning to the ultimate capacity in these teeth and that's what I feel is necessary.”

More Information

Kanter is creating an educational platform to teach and endodontists and dentists about diagnosis and precision dentistry on her website, i-endo.com. “These new courses are already starting, and I'm going to be spending the next decade really trying to change this paradigm and shift into the new way of healthcare,” she says.

To learn more about the nutritional aspects of dental health, check out Weston Price’s classic book, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration,” and for a foundational understanding of the health hazards of root canal treatment, see "Root Canal Cover-Up."

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Each year the Environmental Working Group releases a list called “The Dirty Dozen” of produce that is most heavily contaminated with pesticides.¹ The results are from an analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2021, strawberries, spinach and kale occupy the top three spots on the list, of which 90% of the samples tested positive for two or more pesticides.

Data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which evaluates produce for pesticide residue, indicate that every time you eat conventionally grown fruit you're likely consuming a measurable amount of pesticides.² The FDA continues to assert that pesticide residue is not a cause for alarm, yet the long-term consequences of cumulative exposure are unknown.

The most current FDA report³ using data from 2018 was published in September 2020. The testing methods used in 2018 found 809 pesticides and industrial chemicals, and residues of 212 different pesticides in 4,404 human food samples tested in the program.

The FDA report revealed the list of pesticides included the organophosphate chlorpyrifos, which was detected in 228 samples.⁴ The chemical, known to disrupt brain development and cause brain damage, neurological abnormalities, reduced IQ and aggressiveness in children, has a half-life on food of several weeks, making nonorganic foods a major source of exposure.⁵

Neonicotinoids were also widespread in the samples, including imidacloprid that took the top spot found in 395 samples. These chemicals are known to impair the immune system of bees, making them more vulnerable to infection and death when exposed to viral or other pathogens.⁶

Although the report evaluated 27 selected herbicides, it did not include paraquat, which the EPA states is "one of the most widely used herbicides in the United States."⁷

Paraquat Herbicide Has a History of Poisoning People

Paraquat dichloride, commonly shortened to paraquat, is the active ingredient in Gramoxone, which is an herbicide widely used in agricultural practices to control the growth of grasses and weeds.⁸ The chemical was developed in the 1960s and is active against most plant species.

Glyphosate was first registered in the U.S. in 1974.⁹ However as more glyphosate-resistant weeds are appearing, paraquat is becoming more popular once again.¹⁰ Farmers use it to clear fields of weeds and unwanted plants before planting soybeans and as a desiccant on legume crops.

The chemical is nonselective — meaning, according the National Pesticide Information Center, that it will kill most plants. It is inactivated when it comes in contact with soil,¹¹ which agribusiness found to be one of the greatest breakthroughs at the time of discovery. This meant that once sprayed on the soil, it would kill the weeds, but no biologically active residues would remain, allowing farmers to plant almost immediately after spraying.

However, it is also highly toxic to humans and even one sip can kill a person. After exposure on the skin or if inhaled during the application, it can result in seizures, heart failure and lung scarring.¹² In the 1970s, the U.S. government encouraged Mexico to spray marijuana fields with it in the hope it would kill the crops.¹³

Instead, what it produced were paraquat poisoned marijuana plants that were being harvested for commercial-grade marijuana and then sold.¹⁴ Once the leaves were burned and inhaled it began causing massive damage without a known antidote.

According to The New York Times¹⁵ in 1978, the dangers of inhaling, drinking or skin application of paraquat were not a secret to the U.S. State Department. According to The Intercept, the manufacturer was evaluating ways of ameliorating the danger in 1976 when Michael Rose, a scientist at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), which was the current manufacturer of paraquat, produced the “Rose Report.”¹⁶

In collaboration with the French newspaper Le Monde,¹⁷ The Intercept scoured through hundreds of internal documents and thousands of pages disclosed by Syngenta, the successor to ICI and current manufacturer of paraquat. Documents were also supplied by nonprofit organizations that had been extensively researching paraquat and another chemical the company had added to induce vomiting in an effort to stem a rising toll of deaths from people ingesting the paraquat.

The additive was named PP796 and the problem appeared to be the concentration at which the chemical was added to paraquat. In the “Rose Report,” it appeared the scientists had “cherry-picked” the data to determine the concentration at which PP796 should be added.

At issue was the life-saving additive’s cost, which was the reason the company did not add the emetic to the chemical until deaths were being recorded around the world.¹⁸

The EPA Has Not Protected US Citizens

The company's apparent motivation to finally add PP796 to Gramoxone in the U.S. came in 1986 when the U.S. EPA was considering subjecting the chemical to a special review that may have resulted in banning it from the market.¹⁹

In 1990, Jon Heylings, a junior scientist at Imperial Chemical Industries, discovered the concentration of PP796 was much less than would be needed to induce vomiting in case of accidental or suicidal consumption as was being reported globally. He reported the discrepancy to his superiors and believed it was being addressed.

More than 40 years after the “Rose Report” was published with the doctored calculations, Syngenta has not made alterations to the concentration of PP796, which Heylings describes as “a conspiracy within the company to keep this quiet.”

Additionally, papers released during litigation revealed that just one week before the “Rose Report” was released, another scientist at the company also reported the planned concentration of PP796 did not induce vomiting.²⁰

PP796 was added to Gramoxone in other countries years before it was added in the U.S. In 1981, an ICI scientist discovered reports from the U.K. and Japan clearly showed the emetic was not effective. In a memo released by Syngenta, ICI scientist Peter Slade wrote:²¹

“No statistical evidence has emerged that the emetic has reduced the number of deaths with the product. At best, only a few people have survived paraquat poisoning because of the inclusion of the emetic.”

The company responded to questions from The Intercept, sending an email that emphatically denied that PP796 was ineffective at the concentration reported in the “Rose Report.”²² According to Syngenta, Heyling’s claims that the concentration of emetic is much too low have been investigated and dismissed by the current company scientists.²³

In November 2019, EPA published new requirements,²⁴ hoping to mitigate risks associated with the application of paraquat. To meet standards under these new rules companies only had to include label changes, target training materials for those using paraquat, restrict the use to people who are certified to apply the chemical and use a closed packaging system for applications of less than 120 gallons.

In other words, the EPA added a label to a highly toxic chemical that is lethal when just drops are consumed. Mandatory training can be taken online, and certification is given after the individual takes a quiz.

Paraquat Associated With Neurological Diseases

Evidence of an association between paraquat and Parkinson's disease (PD) emerged in the 1980s.²⁵ After the release of studies showing that animals and humans exposed to paraquat had an increased risk of Parkinson's disease, Syngenta mounted a defense.

The Intercept reported²⁶ that documents released in the litigation showed the company had developed a strategy to address issues of neurotoxicity, which they believed to be a threat to their “business objectives,” and documents showed the company’s global regulatory manager advised taking steps to “shift the focus of serious PD research to other environmental factors.”

Based on scientific evidence, the European Union Court of Justice banned the pesticide in 2007, all while paraquat use continued to increase in the U.S. The number of poisonings and deaths continued to rise.

Although researchers continue to work on identifying the mechanism through which pesticides impact the neurological system,²⁷ these chemicals are known neurotoxins, including paraquat, organophosphates and organochlorine. In addition to the immediate effects, long-term, low-dose exposure may also be harmful.²⁸

Evidence has suggested that cumulative exposure can contribute to the development of Alzheimer's disease as well.²⁹ In one animal study, researchers investigated the effects that paraquat had on the development of beta-amyloid plaques and changes in cognition, finding there was an increase in oxidative damage in the mitochondria of the cerebral cortex that directly correlated with impaired learning and memory.

Other animal studies³⁰ have demonstrated the chemical impairs memory, learning and cognition in offspring when exposed during development. Beyond Pesticides³¹ reports that there is mounting evidence in the past years indicating low levels of exposure to pesticides have an adverse effect on the central nervous system, including the development of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson's disease and dementia-like diseases.

Many of the pesticides share features, including the ability to induce neuronal cell loss, mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress.³² Another study³³ used MRI imaging to look at the poison’s effects on humans by focusinv on the acute neurotoxic damage caused by paraquat. They found a significant number of abnormal signals in the brains of survivors after the acute toxic phase.

The results demonstrated that paraquat exerted a sustained neurotoxic effect during the acute and recovery stages of poisoning. Another animal study demonstrated that long-term, low-level inhalation of paraquat caused some male mice to lose their sense of smell.³⁴ The researchers³⁵ suggest that this data supports the importance of identifying the route of exposure when evaluating neurotoxicity.

Danger Increases When Pesticide Is Used on Lectins

Choosing nongenetically modified plants can help to reduce your exposure to pesticides and herbicides. But even if you manage to avoid GMO foods, you still might be paraquat-affected because, at harvest, some farmers may use herbicides as a desiccant to quick-dry the plants and speed ripening in preparation for the harvesting machine.

Farmers can be penalized if grain is moist at harvest, so desiccation also helps to improve profits. Paraquat is one of the chemicals used as a desiccant, which becomes exponentially more hazardous when it's combined with plant lectins.

Data published in the journal NPJ Parkinson's Disease in 2018³⁶ revealed that when paraquat is combined with lectins it can trigger hallmark damage found in people with Parkinson's disease. Lectins are compounds found in many plant foods, especially legumes such as peas, lentils, soybeans, beans and nuts.³⁷

The study suggests that these changes to lectins are the key link between paraquat and the resulting increased risk of Parkinson's disease. To address these concerns, in 1997 the EPA set residue tolerance levels for paraquat for 80 raw agricultural commodities, processed foods and animal feed.³⁸

However, during the re-registration, their updates for the acceptable dietary exposure tolerances for certain crops, included more than doubling the levels allowed in sorghum, soybeans and hops, and establishing a tolerance level for popcorn.

In 2014,³⁹ they updated residue tolerance levels for tuberous and corn vegetables, including ginger, potato and true yam, to 0.5 parts per million, which is one of the highest acceptable levels.

Between GMO crops and the act of desiccating the others with herbicides, this means that most plant-based foods that are conventionally grown are laced with dangerous levels of residual herbicides. Paradoxically, if the raw food found in your local grocery store isn’t enough worry, Bill Gates is now advocating that all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic “beef” like that manufactured by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.

According to the ingredient lists found on these fake meat products, many ingredients come from plants commonly sprayed with herbicides and desiccants. These include pea protein, mung bean, potatoes and soybeans.⁴⁰

You can read more about Gates’ investments and plans to push many nations into a “full solution to the protein problem globally”⁴¹ in “Bill Gates Says He Will Force You to Eat Fake Meat.”

The irony that Gates, who lives in a 66,000 square-foot mansion and travels in a private jet that burns 486 gallons of fuel each hour, is talking about how we can save the environment, is not lost on everyone. The Nation criticized Gates’ contradictions, calling him a “Climate Warrior. And Super Emitter.” writing:⁴²

“According to a 2019 academic study⁴³ looking at extreme carbon emissions from the jet-setting elite, Bill Gates’s extensive travel by private jet likely makes him one of the world’s top carbon contributors — a veritable super emitter. In the list of 10 celebrities investigated — including Jennifer Lopez, Paris Hilton, and Oprah Winfrey — Gates was the source of the most emissions.”

Reduce Your Risk With Locally Sourced Organic Produce

So, while Gates lives in a carbon-emitting heated and air conditioned 66,000 square-foot home, he advocates “saving” the environment by forcing the rest of us to eat highly processed plant-based foods laced with toxic chemicals. Now also the biggest U.S. farmland owner, Gates is calling plant-based and lab-grown meat substitutes “sustainable” and something that people can “get used to.”⁴⁴

As I’ve already pointed out, it's important to realize that exposure to pesticides and herbicides is not restricted to GMO plants. Even non-GMO foods may be contaminated when the herbicide is used as a desiccant immediately before harvest. And remember: The poison paraquat is considered one of the “best” drying options for legumes, which are high in lectins and therefore present an increased risk for toxic overload.

This means many of the foods that vegans and vegetarians rely on currently as their protein source pose a significant health risk. To avoid or at least minimize these hazards, it is important to buy organic beans, peas, potatoes and other foods high in lectins from a reliable source, ideally a local farmer you can trust and with whom you can discuss his farming methods.

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It's estimated that 1 in 3 Americans is deficient in at least 10 minerals, including potassium, manganese, magnesium and zinc, putting them at risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes.¹

"The Mineral Fix," written by James DiNicolantonio, Pharm.D., with whom I co-wrote "Super Fuel," and Siim Land, author of "Metabolic Autophagy," provides a comprehensive guide about the role of essential minerals and why you need them to optimize physiological function and survival. There are 17 essential minerals, broken down into seven macrominerals and 10 trace minerals. There are another five minerals that are possibly essential.

The primary role of minerals is to act as cofactors for enzymes, but that's just the bare minimum. "They literally are the shields for oxidative stress," DiNicolantonio said, "because they make up our antioxidant enzymes. They help us produce and activate ATP, help us produce DNA, protein, so literally every function in the body is dependent, in some way, on minerals."

Minerals' role in the creation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) alone is a clue to their importance. As the energy currency in your body, ATP is essential for cellular functions throughout your body, including in your heart, which is dependent on sufficient amounts of ATP to function properly. DiNicolantonio believes that not getting enough minerals in your diet can be just as damaging as eating an unhealthy diet focused on sugar and seed oils.

Three Reasons Why You May Be Deficient in Minerals

About a third of the U.S. population is likely deficient in the below 10 minerals (estimated % not hitting RDA/AI or estimated % deficient):²

DiNicolantonio cites three primary reasons why so many people are deficient, including the fact that our foods are more nutrient-depleted. People also aren't selecting the right foods to hit optimal intakes of minerals, and chronic diseases states are compounding the problem.

For instance, gastrointestinal damage can decrease the amount of minerals you absorb, while if you are living in a high state of inflammation, it's taxing to your system, which will increase the burn rate of minerals. Kidney damage increases the excretion of minerals, while high insulin levels will cause minerals to be excreted in your urine. "Those three key factors are why so many of us are depleted in so many minerals," DiNicolantonio said.

Minerals for Antioxidant Defense and Immunity

You may associate antioxidants with vitamins, such as vitamins C and E, but minerals were the first antioxidants in living organisms. DiNicolantonio uses the example of blue-green algae that lived billions of years ago, producing oxygen and creating an abundance of oxidative stress. They utilized selenium and iodine as antioxidants. In humans, we use these similarly.

Iodine is an essential mineral that helps prevent polyunsaturated fats from oxidizing, provides your thyroid with the necessary nutrients to produce thyroid hormones, and is a natural antibacterial agent. Thyroid hormones are essential for normal growth and development in children, neurological development in babies before birth and in the first year of life, and in regulating your metabolism.³

However, DiNicolantonio said, thyroid hormones also act as antioxidants, with effects 100 times stronger than vitamin C, vitamin E and glutathione. You need minerals, including iodine and selenium, to form your thyroid hormones, and your levels of powerful antioxidants like glutathione are directly dependent on your selenium and magnesium status.

There's also superoxide anion, the product of a one electron reduction of oxygen, which is the precursor of most reactive oxygen species and a mediator in oxidative chain reactions.

These oxygen free radicals attack the lipids in your cell membranes, protein receptors, enzymes, and DNA that can prematurely kill your mitochondria. Superoxide dismutase neutralizes superoxide anion, but it depends on copper and zinc. DiNicolantonio explained:

"If you're low in copper and zinc, you can't neutralize the superoxide, it combines with nitric oxide, reducing your nitric oxide levels, increasing blood pressure, leading to atherosclerosis and heart disease, and then you form the toxic peroxynitrite. So it goes to show you how just having a low mineral status can lead to high inflammation."

RDAs Are Inadequate

The recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for many minerals may be inadequate to protect your health and don't get you to the levels needed to optimize your antioxidant defenses, DiNicolantonio said, calling this issue the crux of their book.

RDAs are based on studies to make sure you're not deficient, but this level isn't the same as the one that will give you optimal health. In the case of enzymes dependent on vitamin C, for example, you need to consume 120 milligrams (mg) to 150 mg of vitamin C to make sure those enzymes are highly optimized, which is far more than the 6 mg to 8 mg of vitamin C needed to prevent scurvy.

"You can have up to a 1,000-fold difference between preventing deficiency and optimal intake," according to DiNicolantonio. Magnesium is another example but with lower differences between deficiency and optimal. You only need about 150 mg to 180 mg a day to prevent deficiency, but optimal levels are closer to the 600 mg/day level.

For comparison, the RDA for magnesium is around 310 mg to 420 mg per day depending on your age and sex.⁴ But like DiNicolantonio, many experts believe you may need around 600 mg to 900 mg per day. As noted in Open Heart:⁵

"Investigations of the macro- and micro-nutrient supply in Paleolithic nutrition of the former hunter/gatherer societies showed a magnesium uptake with the usual diet of about 600 mg magnesium/day …

This means our metabolism is best adapted to a high magnesium intake … In developed countries, the average intake of magnesium is slightly over 4 mg/kg/day … [T]he average intake of magnesium in the USA is around 228 mg/day in women and 266mg/day in men …"

Another important point that DiNicolantonio makes is that simply increasing your mineral intake by taking supplements may not be enough, because you need to be insulin sensitive to utilize the minerals properly. If you're insulin resistant, you can't drive the minerals into the cells to work well, and you'll be eliminating the minerals in urine as well.

"So really the first step," he says, "is to eliminate the harmful substances that are causing you to be insulin resistant in the first place. That's automatically going to boost your mineral status, because you're going to be able to utilize those minerals better."

Top Food Sources of Minerals

The best way to increase your mineral intake is via healthy foods. For copper and iron, for instance, DiNicolantonio recommends pairing muscle meat with liver, or eating oysters, which are also high in zinc. A lot of oysters may be contaminated with cadmium, however, so they should be eaten in moderation depending on where they're sourced from.

One of the foods with the highest minerals overall are mussels. They're high in manganese, chromium and copper, which are minerals many people are deficient in. Liver is another nutrient-dense food that's rich in minerals, but it's possible to overdo it.

According to DiNicolantonio, in terms of mineral consumption, one-half to 1 ounce of liver per day is the ideal amount, which will give you vitamin A, folate and copper. He recommends pairing this with about 10 to 12 ounces of pastured red meat per day, for the vitamin B12, protein, zinc and iron it provides.

If you don't like the taste of liver, try a blend of meat made with pastured liver, heart and muscle meat. You can add in more pastured ground beef to make it more palatable and still reap the rich mineral benefits.

Women need more than twice the amount of iron as men, so animal-based sources of iron, which are 10 times more bioavailable than plant sources, are important. For those who don't eat meat, combining vitamin C with beans, spinach and other iron-rich greens may help make the iron more bioavailable.

Benefits of Mineral Waters

It's important to balance animal foods with alkaline minerals like potassium and magnesium from plant foods or mineral waters, which will balance out the acid and help protect your kidneys. Mineral waters that contain bicarbonate can help with this acid-base balance, while providing an additional source of minerals like calcium and magnesium.

Drinking mineral water with a meal is also beneficial and can increase mineral absorption while lowering postprandial blood sugar. It's also useful to sip mineral water throughout the day, DiNicolantonio said, citing a study that found consuming 7 ounces of mineral water seven times a day increases magnesium absorption and retention by 40%, versus consuming larger amounts twice a day. He continued:

"It's that slow infusion, which mimics more of an evolutionary intake — we would have just drank water throughout the day and it would have been natural. It wouldn't be these artificially softened waters, it would be natural waters that contain bicarbonate, that contain magnesium, that contain calcium. So it's something that I do."

Less-Known Minerals That You May Be Missing

Minerals like boron often get overlooked, yet they're extremely important for well-being and health. Boron, consumed at levels of about 3 mg daily, is beneficial for bone health and testosterone, but it's thought that most Americans only consume about 1 mg.

The highest concentrations of boron are found in bones and tooth enamel and, according to the Natural Medicine Journal, it "appears to be indispensable for healthy bone function,"⁶ as it reduces excretion of calcium, magnesium and phosphorous.

There may also be other, as yet poorly understood, mechanisms by which it benefits bone-building and other aspects of health. The optimal dosage is unknown, but you can get significant amounts of this trace mineral by eating small amounts of raisins, peaches, prunes, dates, black currants and avocadoes.

A trace mineral supplement can also be helpful in optimizing your levels of "overlooked" minerals like boron, chromium and molybdenum. Chromium, which has been linked to improved blood sugar levels,⁷ can be found in mussels, lobster, crab and shrimp, as well as broccoli, in smaller amounts.

Further, chromium is lost in sweat, so you if sweat a lot due to living in a hot climate, sauna usage or exercise, a chromium supplement may be necessary, especially if you don't regularly consume chromium-rich foods. Copper is another mineral lost through sweat, and since most people don't consume much copper, it's possible to lose more copper than you've taken in if you sweat heavily for about an hour a day.

Molybdenum is another often-overlooked mineral, which is an essential catalyst for enzymes to help metabolize fats and carbohydrates and facilitate the breakdown of certain amino acids in your body. The best dietary source of molybdenum, according to DiNicolantonio, is liver.

If you want to learn more, or are concerned that you're not getting enough minerals, "The Mineral Fix" goes much more in-depth about the role of the 17 essential minerals your body needs, including optimal intake levels, symptoms of deficiency, how to test your mineral levels and best food sources.

>>>>> Click Here <<<<<

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