Health & Fitness

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an internal medicine doctor and former head of health at the Council of Europe, spoke with Planet Lockdown on the fundamental corruption at the World Health Organization and how it contributed to manufacturing a “test pandemic.”¹

The seeds were sown more than a decade ago during the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic. In 2010, Wodarg accused pharmaceutical companies of influencing WHO’s pandemic declaration, calling swine flu a “false pandemic” that was driven by Big Pharma, which cashed in on the health scare.²

According to Wodarg, the swine flu pandemic was “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century.”³ As noted by Planet Lockdown, Wodarg, then a member of the German Parliament, “knew something wasn't right when 800 cases in Mexico was declared a pandemic”:⁴

“He dug into the issue and discovered a hornet’s nest of lies and corruption inside the WHO. He floored a bill called Fake Pandemic and did much to deflate that fake scare at the time, to the consternation of the corrupt functionaries of these institutions.”

With a Definition Change, WHO Could Create Pandemic Anytime

Secret agreements were made between Germany, Great Britain, Italy and France with the pharmaceutical industry before the H1N1 pandemic began, which stated that they would purchase H1N1 flu vaccinations — but only if a pandemic level 6 was declared by WHO.

Six weeks before the pandemic was declared, no one at WHO was worried about the virus, but the media was nonetheless exaggerating the dangers.⁵ Then, in the month leading up to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, WHO changed the official definition of pandemic, removing the severity and high mortality criteria and leaving the definition of a pandemic as "a worldwide epidemic of a disease."⁶

This switch in definition allowed WHO to declare swine flu a pandemic after only 144 people had died from the infection worldwide.⁷ While the swine flu scare was eventually deflated, this wasn’t so with COVID-19, even though the real signs of a pandemic are absent. As Wodarg explained, it used to be that a pandemic was associated with widespread severe illness and death, but that’s no longer the case:⁸

“There was an explanation of what a pandemic is and it always was going with many, many people dying from infections. Many severe diseases, hospitals being overcrowded. It was such a catastrophe … and everyone in the street would notice that there is a pandemic because the neighbors would get ill, the people at work would get ill. In the bus, you would see people coughing.

In a pandemic … it’s something each of us would experience. This was a pandemic. And WHO changed it.”

By removing the severity and high mortality criteria, WHO could make a pandemic whenever they wanted. “The pandemic is just a picture spread by the media, making us afraid. But what the people experience is not what we used to understand when we used the word epidemic or pandemic,” he said.⁹ Now, the word pandemic has to do with fear, not illnesses. “It’s a brand for fear.”

COVID-19 Is a ‘Test’ Pandemic

If there hasn’t been a true pandemic, in the old definition of the word, then how are the media and government getting all of these high case numbers for COVID-19? This is due to the PCR test.

“It was accepted by WHO, and they said when the test is positive, we have a case of COVID-19. And this is how they started counting the cases,” Wodarg said. “What they counted was the activity of testing. And the more they tested, the more cases they found.”¹⁰

Positive reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests are not designed to be used as a diagnostic tool as they cannot distinguish between inactive (noninfectious) viruses and "live" or reproductive ones.¹¹

Inactive and reproductive viruses are not interchangeable in terms of infectivity. If you have a nonreproductive virus in your body, you will not get sick from it and you cannot spread it to others. Further, many if not most laboratories amplify the RNA collected far too many times, which results in healthy people testing "positive.”

The higher the cycle threshold (CT) — i.e., the number of amplification cycles used to detect RNA particles — the greater the chance of a false positive. While any CT over 35 is deemed scientifically unjustifiable,^12,13 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended running PCR tests at a CT of 40.¹⁴

A test known as the Corman-Drosten paper and tests recommended by the World Health Organization were set to 45 cycles.^15,16,17 When labs use these excessive cycle thresholds, you end up with a grossly overestimated number of positive tests, so what we're really dealing with is a "casedemic"^18,19 — an epidemic of false positives.

Wodarg says COVID-19 “was a ‘test’ pandemic. It was not a virus pandemic,”²⁰ because PCR tests may give a positive result when it detects coronaviruses that have been around for 20 years. He explained:²¹

“The SARS viruses, they are very long RNA viruses. There are 30,000 letters in this genetic information. The PCR test only takes a very small part of them, or two parts of them. So two words out of a whole book … before you start testing, you can already estimate how often this test will be positive. If you take a sequence which is in many varieties of viruses, you will have many positive tests.”

The PCR test only tests for certain sequences of the RNA. It gives a positive result when it only finds a small fragment; it doesn’t need the whole virus. If the virus was there weeks ago or you have a touch of the virus present, but no infection, it can still test positive and add another COVID-19 “case,” even though you’re not actually sick.

COVID-19 Shot Conflicts of Interest Putting Lives at Risk

The mass COVID-19 shot campaign is riddled with conflicts of interest at a fundamental level, and these conflicts are putting people’s lives at risk by putting vaccine production ahead of disease prevention. As Wodarg noted, if you want to earn money producing vaccines, you need new markets in which to use them, and new diseases so you can sell your vaccine.

“This is a very serious matter,” he said, which has nothing to do with health or hygiene — “it has to do with criminology”:²²

“When they want to sell their vaccines, they need people who are ill so they can make clinical studies. So when there is an outbreak, and they want to make clinical studies with their vaccine to protect people against this disease just breaking out … there is a conflict of interest.

If you have normal ways to stop the infection, with hygiene, with distancing, with isolating, with consulting with people, giving advice how to behave … if you stop the disease quickly, you’re not able to have enough cases for your study.”

So we have a “pandemic” that’s based on a test that doesn’t prove infection, but what it did do was make people afraid. And that fear was the basis for saying we need a vaccine. The shots, however, aren’t effective.

In November 2020, Pfizer, in a joint venture with Germany-based BioNTech, announced that their mRNA-based injection was “more than 90% effective” in a Phase 3 trial.²³ This does not mean that 90% of people who get injected will be protected from COVID-19, however, as it’s based on relative risk reduction (RRR).

The absolute risk reduction (ARR) for the jab is less than 1%. “Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the jab, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a jab, considers the whole population. ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs,” researchers wrote in The Lancet Microbe in April 2021.²⁴

Nonetheless, the jabs received emergency use authorization, which has paved the way for vaccine mandates and other assaults to your freedom and health.

Will Vaxxed People End Up Sicker?

The lack of effectiveness is one key reason why Wodarg believes most people do not need a COVID-19 jab. The other reasons include serious risks of adverse events from these experimental jabs, and the fact that, Wodarg says, cross-immunity exists due to multiple previous exposures to other coronaviruses in most people.²⁵ “The genetically produced so-called vaccines are not necessary, because we have immunity.”²⁶

As he stated, your immune system is well-equipped to protect you, and new viral exposures each year help to keep this complex system updated. Risk increases when you avoid regular viral exposures to keep your immune system ready:²⁷

“Those new ones that come, this is some work for your immune system to get an update, but it doesn’t make most people very sick, only in a few, rare cases.

When we are not trained, or we didn’t have contact with viruses for a very long time, because we were isolated somewhere alone, not having our grandchildren on our knees, not experiencing any training — it’s the same when you are out of training and you suddenly have to climb a high mountain. Maybe your heart goes into failure and you die — maybe you die when you have contact with something your immune system has forgotten.”

The spike protein that the shots stimulate your cells to produce is also deeply concerning, since it’s toxic:²⁸

“Vaccines are made to stimulate our cells, we don’t know which cells, or where the injection goes, but those cells that get contact with the vaccine, they produce spike proteins, which are very toxic. Normally, those spike proteins don’t come into the blood, this is why we don’t get seriously ill from coronaviruses. When you inject them, you bypass the natural immunity.”

This is a likely reason why there are so many side effects associated with the shots, as injecting these spike proteins is unnatural and very dangerous. It’s since been revealed that the spike protein on its own is enough to cause inflammation and damage to the vascular system, even independent of a virus.²⁹

Further, Wodarg says, once your body has been injected with the spike protein, it may have an overreactive response the next time it comes in contact with a typical coronavirus, potentially leading to a dangerous cytokine storm.

When counting COVID-19 cases this winter, Wodarg believes it is important to ask whether the person received a COVID-19 shot or not. “I am quite sure,” he said, “that those people vaccinated will be the severe cases and that those who are not vaccinated will just experience a normal flu.”³⁰

What’s more, once you’re vaccinated, they have all your data — the batch of the shot, the date and time. So, you’re essentially part of a clinical trial that you’ve never agreed to, and there’s no transparency about the risks involved. Wodarg believes that the pandemic “emergency” is being prolonged from month to month because it helps their injection studies, even as there are massive conflicts of interest involved.

If you listen to the media, you’ll be brainwashed that the jab is necessary, but don’t fall for the hype, including that getting the shot will earn you your freedom back. Wodarg said:³¹

“You won’t be free to travel. You will be controlled nevertheless, because the next virus already comes, the next jab is waiting. They want to perpetuate this game with us, with vaccines and with vaccine passports. It’s just the perfect control by this market and it has nothing to do with health. So we have to stop it.”

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Are you prepared to wear masks forever? Some are, but their positive attitude toward masks is a likely result of deceptive and misleading information. The resulting magical thinking relating to masks has created one of the most polarized debates in U.S. history and led to anti-maskers being labeled as “grandma killers.”¹

To be clear, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has blatantly lied about masks’ effectiveness. November 5, 2021, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky tweeted, “Masks can help reduce your chance of #COVID19 infection by more than 80%.”²

But as Dr. Vinay Rasad, MPH, a hematologist-oncologist and associate professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco, put it in the Brownstone Institute, “I don’t know how to put this politely, but it is a lie, and a truly unbelievable one at that … The idea that masks could reduce the chance of infection by 80% is simply untrue, implausible and cannot be supported by any reliable data.”³

Masks Have Meager Effectiveness, if Any

Walensky didn’t give a reference for her claim that masks reduce COVID-19 infection by 80%, but a large study⁴ from researchers at Yale, Stanford and the University of California Berkeley found much less impressive results from masks.

The trial involved 342,183 people from 600 villages in rural Bangladesh from November 2020 to April 2021. In villages that received masks, the number of symptomatic COVID-19 infections were 9.3% lower compared to villages without masks, or 11% lower in villages that received surgical masks instead of cloth masks.⁵

Why, then, hasn’t Walensky’s tweet been flagged for misinformation and targeted by “fact checkers” calling out the blatant lie? Rasad featured a tweet⁶ by Carnegie Mellon University mathematician Wesley Pegden, who said:⁷

“The head of the agency responsible for providing Americans with accurate and trustworthy information about interventions (like vaccines) that we actually know are really effective should not also be making fabricated quantitative statements in support of poorly evidenced ones.”

Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogens Live on Face Masks

While face masks continue to be recommended or mandated, little has been said about the risks inherent to covering your mouth and nose with fabric or other materials. Both cotton and surgical masks collect pathogens that may increase your risk of infectious illness — a factor that’s rarely taken into account when discussing their merits.

When researchers from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, analyzed the microbial community on surgical and cotton face masks from 13 healthy volunteers after being worn for four hours, bacteria including Bacillus, Staphylococcus and Acinetobacter were found — 43% of which were antibiotic-resistant.⁸

In order to best clean masks to remove the bacteria, the study found boiling at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees F), washing at 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees F) with detergent or ironing with a steam iron worked best, but only 21% of survey respondents said they cleaned their cotton face masks daily.⁹ According to the researchers:

“Taken together, this study suggests that a considerable number of bacteria, including pathobionts and antibiotic resistant bacteria, accumulate on surgical and even more on cotton face masks after use. Based on our results, face masks should be properly disposed of or sterilized after intensive use. Clear guidelines for the general population are crucial to reduce the bacteria-related biosafety risk of face masks …”

Researchers from Germany similarly questioned whether a mask that covers your nose and mouth is “free from undesirable side effects” and potential hazards in everyday use.¹⁰ It turned out they were not and instead posed significant adverse effects and pathophysiological changes, including the following, which often occur in combination:¹¹

Increase in dead space volume	Increase in breathing resistance	Increase in blood carbon dioxide
Decrease in blood oxygen saturation	Increase in heart rate	Decrease in cardiopulmonary capacity
Feeling of exhaustion	Increase in respiratory rate	Difficulty breathing and shortness of breath
Headache	Dizziness	Feeling of dampness and heat
Drowsiness	Decrease in empathy perception	Impaired skin barrier function with acne, itching and skin lesions

Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome Is Prevalent

The study referred to this cluster of symptoms as mask-induced exhaustion syndrome (MIES) and warned that children, pregnant women and those who are sick or suffering from certain chronic conditions may be particularly at risk from extended masking. While short-term effects include microbiological contamination, headaches, exhaustion, carbon dioxide retention and skin irritation, the long-term effects may lead to chronic issues:¹²

“Extended mask-wearing would have the potential, according to the facts and correlations we have found, to cause a chronic sympathetic stress response induced by blood gas modifications and controlled by brain centers. This in turn induces and triggers immune suppression and metabolic syndrome with cardiovascular and neurological diseases.”

Further, “it can be assumed,” they wrote, “that the potential adverse mask effects described for adults are all the more valid for children: … physiological internal, neurological, psychological, psychiatric, dermatological, ENT, dental, sociological, occupational and social medical, microbiological and epidemiological impairments …

The masks currently used for children are exclusively adult masks manufactured in smaller geometric dimensions and had neither been specially tested nor approved for this purpose.”¹³

Again, in taking on these unknown risks — both short- and long-term — to wear masks, the benefits are highly questionable and intended to thwart a pathogen with a low death rate for most populations:¹⁴

“[R]ecent studies on SARS-CoV-2 show both a significantly lower infectivity and a significantly lower case mortality than previously assumed, as it could be calculated that the median corrected infection fatality rate (IFR) was 0.10% in locations with a lower than average global COVID-19 population mortality rate.

In early October 2020, the WHO also publicly announced that projections show COVID-19 to be fatal for approximately 0.14% of those who become ill — compared to 0.10% for endemic influenza — again a figure far lower than expected. On the other hand, the side effects of masks are clinically relevant.”

‘The Mask of Your Enslavement’

It’s clear that the evidence in support of masks for physical protection against disease is lacking, while their potential for psychological harm is immense. Brownstone Institute highlighted the story of folk saint Escrava Anastácia, a slave of African descent who lived in Brazil during the 19th century.¹⁵

She was forced to wear a metal, muzzle-like mask during her lifetime in order to silence her from speaking out about the oppression and injustice she was facing. As written by Roberto Strongman, associate professor in the department of black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara:¹⁶

“The apparition of Anastásia at anti-lockdown rallies represents an opportunity to understand the current medical tyranny as a form of enslavement and to forge links of solidarity between communities whose freedom is threatened across all racial groups. The claim of cooptation deserves to be unpacked for a valid claim of cultural usurpation could easily work towards severing important alliances in a divide-and-conquer model.

While there are clear specificities between the suffering of Africans under the system of chattel slavery and the deprivation of civil liberties endured by most citizens around the world during the current pandemic panic, Anastásia reminds us of certain transhistorical constants in the process of dehumanization and subjugation of populations through the gagging and muzzling of their bodies to quell their protestations.”

Strongman pointed out several undeniable reasons why face mask mandates “fashion the citizenry as slaves” and act as symbols of enslavement. Among them, they:¹⁷

Lead to oxygen deprivation, promoting a state of physical and mental weakness

Are symbols of submission and used as part of master-slave dynamics

Enforce the creation of a carceral culture

Erase personhood and homogenize the masses — “The collectivized wearing of masks results in an enforced uniformity in which the individual cedes way to the nameless collectivity as the neo-meta citizen.”18

Are theatrical and act to conceal identities, rendering us alien to others and ourselves

Delete facial expressions and inhibit nonverbal communication, including that necessary for social organization that can lead to revolution

Reduce verbal output

Are visible displays of allegiance to the “system of medicalizing technocratic control”

Are part of preparing individuals for new societal roles — “However transitory the current regime of face masking might be, the population must face that we are being forced to undergo a rite of passage, a process of resocialization into the new normal.”

Promote a culture of fear

Act as deterrents of solidarity by making your neighbor into a “nameless pathogenic vector instead of your ally”

Magical Thinking on Masks

In addition to flat-out lies, the CDC also makes nonsensical statements, like this: “Cloth masks will not protect you from wildfire smoke … They might not catch small, harmful particles in smoke that can harm your health.”¹⁹

But we are to believe that they will protect us from an aerosolized virus? “The virus is 25X smaller than a smoke particle,” wrote Steve Kirsch, executive director of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation. “So it’s like trying to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence.”²⁰

Yet magical thinking — the belief that you can influence outcomes by doing something that has no causal connection to them — persists. Robert Dingwall, a consulting sociologist, questioned why the U.K.’s Health Security Agency expert panel used only a second-class evidence base that failed to demonstrate clear benefits on which to base their conclusion that face masks in the community help reduce transmission. He wrote:²¹

“The state of the face mask debate is rather as if Galileo had published his account of the heliocentric universe and then included a paragraph at the end telling the reader to ignore all the evidence because the Church had declared that everything revolved around the Earth.

In the absence of better-quality work — and we must ask why that research has not been done — some of the claims for face masks look much more like magical thinking than anything that demonstrates the sort of casual connection that might be recognizable as science.”

As the pandemic stretches on, science continues to be ignored and recommendations are primarily pushed based on emotional justifications and triggers. If science were actually followed, universal mask wearing by healthy people would not — indeed could not — be recommended.

In the beginning, health officials did, in fact, advise against masks for healthy people,²² but somewhere along the way — early on — they flip-flopped. Why? According to Strongman:²³

“Just as masks function as liminal artifacts in rites of passage and as part of animal training, these covid mask are harbingers of further intrusions to our integrity.

Wearing the masks is just one step away from receiving the shots, then accepting the vaccine passports and the implantable neural links until one’s original persona is buried by a cyborg. The masks function as an empirical compliance test for the projected acceptability of future corporeal technologies of control. Where will you draw the line?”

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This article was previously published December 10, 2020, and has been updated with new information.

Alzheimer's disease continues to be a leading cause of death in the U.S., with 1 in 3 seniors dying with Alzheimer's or dementia — more than the number killed by breast and prostate cancers combined.¹

While a cure has remained elusive, the connection between brain health and gut microbiota has grown clearer, and research suggests that the bacteria in your intestines may influence brain functioning and can even promote neurodegeneration.²

A team of Swiss and Italian researchers has taken the correlation a step further, with research showing a connection between imbalanced gut microbiota and the development of amyloid plaques in the brain;³ Alzheimer's is characterized by an accumulation of beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain.

Proteins Produced by Gut Bacteria May Trigger Alzheimer's

The study involved a cohort of 89 people between 65 and 85 years of age. Some of them suffered from Alzheimer's disease or other neurodegenerative diseases while others were healthy with no memory problems.

The researchers used PET imaging to measure amyloid deposition in their brains, then measured markers of inflammation and proteins produced by intestinal bacteria, such as lipopolysaccharides and short-chain fatty acids, in their blood.

Lipopolysaccharides (LPSs) are dead bacteria or, more specifically, the cell walls of dead bacteria. Your immune system treats them as living bacteria and mounts immune defenses against the perceived invaders. LPSs are proinflammatory and have been found in amyloid plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.⁴

The study revealed that high blood levels of LPSs and the short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) acetate and valerate were associated with large amyloid deposits in the brain. Other SCFAs, namely butyrate, appeared to have a protective effect; high levels of butyrate were associated with less amyloid.

Butyrate — an SCFA produced when gut bacteria ferment fiber — activates the secretion of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF),⁵ reduced levels of which have been linked to Alzheimer's disease.

"Our results are indisputable: Certain bacterial products of the intestinal microbiota are correlated with the quantity of amyloid plaques in the brain," explains Moira Marizzoni, a study author with the Fatebenefratelli Center in Brescia, Italy.⁶

Probiotic 'Cocktail' May Act as an Early Preventative

The study represents a continuation of prior research by the team, which found that the gut microbiota in people with Alzheimer's disease differs from those without the condition. In those with Alzheimer's, microbial diversity is reduced, with certain bacteria being overrepresented and other microbes decreased.

"Furthermore," said neurologist Giovanni Frisoni, study author and director of the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG) Memory Center in Switzerland, "we have also discovered an association between an inflammatory phenomenon detected in the blood, certain intestinal bacteria and Alzheimer's disease; hence the hypothesis that we wanted to test here: Could inflammation in the blood be a mediator between the microbiota and the brain?"⁷

With the connection growing stronger, the team is planning further research to reveal which specific bacteria or groups of bacteria may be responsible for the effect, which could ultimately lead to a preventive treatment "cocktail." Frisoni said in a news release:⁸

"Indeed, we must first identify the strains of the cocktail. Then, a neuroprotective effect could only be effective at a very early stage of the disease, with a view to prevention rather than therapy.

However, early diagnosis is still one of the main challenges in the management of neurodegenerative diseases, as protocols must be developed to identify high-risk individuals and treat them well before the appearance of detectable symptoms."

The Fasting Connection

One reason why fasting is so beneficial for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's is because it helps your body to cycle through autophagy and the rebuilding phase.

Autophagy is the process by which your body cleans out damaged organelles, encouraging proliferation of new, healthy cells, which relates to Alzheimer's because the refolding process is one of several factors that need to work in order for your brain to function.

Importantly, fasting activates autophagy,⁹ which is your body's way of taking out the trash, and will also trigger the regeneration of stem cells.¹⁰ In our 2017 interview, Dr. Steven Gundry explained that this also may have a direct connection with LPSs, and that giving your gut a rest from these proinflammatory proteins via fasting may be healing:

"We have an amazing repair system that goes to work when you're fasting. Not the least of which is [letting] your gut rest. It's probably one of the smartest things that any of us can do — putting the wall of your gut at rest, not having to absorb nutrients, not having to deal with the constant inflow of lectins or toxins. But I think more importantly, it gives [your body] a chance to finally do some serious cleaning of your brain …

Alzheimer's and Parkinson's have a unifying cause, and that is the brain is defending itself against perceived threat, a lot of which are LPSs. If you put your gut at rest and don't have LPSs coming into your system, and the longer you can maintain that, realistically, the better off you are.

As Jason Fung would say, intermittent fasting is great; doing a modified calorie-restricted diet is great, but it technically is so much easier to just stop eating … The second level of my modified food pyramid is 'Don't eat anything.'"

Probiotics Show Promise for Alzheimer's

The effect of beneficial bacteria on brain health is well-established, including in people with Alzheimer's disease. A 2016 study of 60 Alzheimer's patients looked into the effect of probiotic supplements on cognitive function, with promising results.¹¹ Those who drank milk containing probiotics experienced significant improvements in cognitive function.

While average Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores increased among the probiotics group and the control group, which drank plain milk, had a decrease in scores.

The probiotics group also had beneficial metabolic changes, including lowered triglycerides, very low-density lipoprotein and C-reactive protein, a measure of inflammation, as well as reduced markers for insulin resistance.

The researchers suggested the beneficial metabolic changes may be responsible for the cognitive improvements. Walter Lukiw, a professor at Louisiana State University who was not involved in the study, further explained to Medical News Today that your gut and brain are intricately connected:¹²

"This is in line with some of our recent studies which indicate that the GI [gastrointestinal] tract microbiome in Alzheimer's is significantly altered in composition when compared to age-matched controls …

… and that both the GI tract and blood-brain barriers become significantly more leaky with aging, thus allowing GI tract microbial exudates (e.g. amyloids, lipopolysaccharides, endotoxins and small non-coding RNAs) to access central nervous system compartments."

Probiotics May Inhibit Neurodegeneration

Probiotics are thought to influence the central nervous system and behavior via the microbiota-gut-brain-axis, and researchers have suggested they may have both preventive and therapeutic potential for Alzheimer's disease (AD) by modulating the inflammatory process and counteracting oxidative stress, among other mechanisms.¹³ Writing in the open-access Impact Journal on Aging, researchers explained:¹⁴

"It has been found that dysfunction in behavior and cognition is associated with GM [gut microbiota] dysbiosis. Activation of gut inflammation has been regarded as a possible pathogenic cofactor in cognitive deterioration and dementia.

Moreover, the most distinctive alterations in the GM of AD patients are decreased abundance of anti-inflammatory bacterial species (e.g. Bifidobacterium brevestrain A1) and increased abundance of pro-inflammatory flora phyla (e.g. Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes).

And restoring GM homeostasis could slow down the progression of AD. Therefore, the GM has been proposed as a key player in the pathogenesis of AD and might be a new potential therapeutic target for the prevention and treatment of AD."

They conducted a meta-analysis involving five studies and 297 subjects, which revealed a significant improvement in cognition and a significant reduction in malondialdehyde and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein — inflammatory and oxidative biomarkers — in probiotic groups compared to controls.¹⁵

Research is still uncovering which bacteria are most beneficial, but the Bifidobacterium breve strain A1 may be of particular use in Alzheimer's treatment. Using Alzheimer's disease model mice, researchers were able to confirm that daily oral administration of B. breve A1 reduced the cognitive dysfunction normally induced by amyloid beta.¹⁶

One of the mechanisms behind these protective effects was found to be suppression of amyloid-beta-induced changes in gene expression in the hippocampus. In short, the bacterium had an ameliorating effect on amyloid-beta toxicity.

Still other research suggests gut microbiota may contribute to Alzheimer's risk via multiple avenues, including by influencing aging, diabetes, sleep and circadian rhythm.¹⁷

It's also possible, researchers hypothesize, that decades of factors such as diet, stress, aging and genetics, combine to disrupt gut permeability and the integrity of the blood-brain barrier, allowing the entry of inflammatory agents and pathogens and inducing an inflammatory response that triggers a neuroinflammatory response in the brain.¹⁸

"There is mounting evidence that the gut microbiota interacts with AD pathogenesis by disrupting neuroinflammation and metabolic homeostasis," they noted, adding that "the gut microbiota has gone from being the forgotten organ to a potential key player in the AD pathology."¹⁹

Alzheimer's Prevention Strategies

Optimizing your gut flora is a key strategy to preventing Alzheimer's and a host of other chronic diseases. To do this, avoid processed foods, antibiotics and antibacterial products, fluoridated and chlorinated water, and be sure to eat traditionally fermented and cultured foods, along with taking a high-quality probiotic if needed.

Maintaining a healthy gut is one of the healthy lifestyle parameters outlined by Dr. Dale Bredesen, professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, and author of "The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline."²⁰

Bredesen's ReCODE protocol evaluates 150 factors, including biochemistry, genetics and historical imaging, known to contribute to Alzheimer's disease. This identifies your disease subtype or combination of subtypes so an effective treatment protocol can be devised.

Time-restricted eating or fasting, is another important strategy, as is reducing your intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids, also called PUFAs, found in vegetable oils, edible oils, seed oils, trans fat and plant oils. A high-fat, moderate-protein, low-carb ketogenic diet is ideal for preventing degeneration that can lead to Alzheimer’s,²¹ and this will also help to nourish a healthy gut.

Overall, nourishing your brain health is best done with a comprehensively healthy lifestyle. By leveraging 36 healthy lifestyle parameters, Bredesen was able to reverse Alzheimer's in 9 out of 10 patients.

This included the use of exercise, ketogenic diet, optimizing vitamin D and other hormones, increasing sleep, meditation, detoxification and eliminating gluten and processed food. For more details, you can download Bredesen's full-text case paper online, which details the full program.²²

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Previous research has found that chemotherapy can trigger muscle loss in people living with cancer, but a new study out of found it may also affect the way the body builds new muscle -- and at lower doses than previously known, having potential implications for treatments and rehab programs.

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Scientists have used glowing chemicals and other techniques to create a 3D map of the blood vessels and self-renewing 'stem' cells that line and penetrate a mouse skull. The map provides precise locations of blood vessels and stem cells that scientists could eventually use to repair wounds and generate new bone and tissue in the skull.

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Immune checkpoint inhibitors strengthen the immune response against cancer cells, but the medications are ineffective against certain tumors. Results from a new clinical trial indicate that adding radiation may overcome this resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

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An international research team has developed a new imaging technology. In the future this technology could not only improve the resolution of neutron measurements by many times but could also reduce radiation exposure during x-ray imaging.

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