Health & Fitness

Convalescent plasma can be effective early COVID-19 therapy, study finds

Research shows that high-titer (antibody-rich) COVID convalescent plasma -- when administered to COVID-19 outpatients within nine days after testing positive -- reduced the need for hospitalization for more than half of a study's predominantly unvaccinated outpatients.

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Global disparities persist in opioid painkiller access

Those who ogle also more likely to have harmful attitudes, study finds

Married mothers who earn more than their husbands take on an even greater share of the housework, research finds

Researchers outline bias in epidemic research -- and offer new simulation tool to guide future work

A team of researchers unpacks a series of biases in epidemic research, ranging from clinical trials to data collection, and offers a game-theory approach to address them, in a new analysis. The work sheds new light on the pitfalls associated with technology development and deployment in combating global crises like COVID-19, with a look toward future pandemic scenarios.

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Study shows critical protein may play a role in origin of mesothelioma

New algorithm will improve bowel-cancer patient care

Stabilizing low blood sugar in infancy prevents long-term brain damage

Americans love football, but differ on whether kids should play

Exercise may reduce depression symptoms, boost effects of therapy

Study shows that RNA can be targeted by small molecule drugs, creating new possibilities for disease treatment

Until now, proteins have been the target of most medications for the prevention and treatment of human disease. Drug developers have perceived RNA to be too unstable to target with drug therapy. However, a screen of 50,000 compounds has revealed drug-like activity against an RNA prototype called Xist, a result that opens the door for development of new medications.

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Where we grow up influences our sense of direction

New researcher has demonstrated that people's spatial navigation ability is influenced by their geographical origin. Growing up in rural or urban areas, or in cities of varying complexity, influences our sense of direction in adulthood. These results were obtained using data collected from the video game Sea Hero Quest.

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Lung damage may persist long after COVID-19 pneumonia

AI helps radiologists detect bone fractures

Distinct classes of fibroblasts in tumors play opposing roles, promoting or restraining pancreatic cancer growth

Researchers discovered that two distinct classes of fibroblast cells accumulate in pancreatic tumors and play opposing roles to promote and restrain pancreatic cancer growth. Appropriately targeting these cells may offer options to improve treatment outcomes.

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Good hydration may reduce long-term risks for heart failure

Staying well-hydrated may be associated with a reduced risk for developing heart failure. New findings suggest that consuming sufficient amounts of fluids throughout life not only supports essential body functioning but may also reduce the risk of severe heart problems in the future.

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Osmotic pressure and viscosity: Anticancer drug efficacy and restricting tumors using LDDS

Chemotherapy is known for its painful side-effects. It also has limitations when the cancer has metastasized to the lymph nodes. The lymphatic drug delivery system, where anticancer drugs are injected directly into the sentinel lymph nodes under ultrasound guidance, offers an alternative to conventional chemotherapy. Researchers have now found the optimal osmotic pressure and viscosity ranges, significantly improving the antitumor effect.

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Spirituality can improve quality of life for heart failure patients, study finds

Numerous studies have shown that spirituality can help improve quality of life for people with chronic diseases like cancer. According to a literature review, spirituality can also have a positive impact on quality of life for heart failure patients.

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Black patients with cancer fare worse with COVID-19, study shows

Lack of access to health care, social determinants of health, preexisting comorbidities and reduced access to clinical research are common to both cancer and COVID-19 in Black individuals. Together these two diseases create a perfect storm in this population, a new study indicates.

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Unprecedented videos show RNA switching ‘on’ and ‘off’

Using new simulations, researchers discovered one part of RNA smoothly invades and displaces another part of the same RNA, enabling the structure to rapidly and dramatically change shape. Called strand displacement, this mechanism appears to switch genetic expression from 'on' to 'off'.

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New nasal spray treats Delta variant infection in mice, indicating broad spectrum results

Researchers have shown a new compound delivered in a nasal spray is highly effective in preventing and treating COVID-19 caused by the Delta variant in mice. The researchers believe this is the first treatment of its kind proven to be effective against all COVID-19 variants of concern reported to date, including alpha, beta, gamma and delta.

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New test predicts sepsis before blood clots cause permanent organ damage, markedly increasing survival

In a potential paradigm change for sepsis diagnostics, a new test predicted sepsis soon after infection in mice -- well before blood clotting and organ failure -- enabling early antibiotic treatment and markedly increased survival. The findings provide a platform to develop rapid and easy-to-perform clinical tests for early sepsis detection and clinical intervention in human patients.

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Less antibody diversity as we age

As we age, our immune system works less well. We become more susceptible to infections and vaccinations no longer work as effectively. A research team has investigated whether short-lived killifish also undergo aging of the immune system. Indeed, they found that as early as four months of age, killifish have less diverse circulating antibodies compared to younger fish, which may contribute to a generalized decrease in the immune function.

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Scientists discover body's natural alarm to battle blood loss

Potential therapy may boost chemoimmunotherapy response in bladder cancer

Octopus-like tentacles help cancer cells invade the body

With help from the best tweezers in the world a team of researchers has shed new light on a fundamental mechanism in all living cells that helps them explore their surroundings and even invade tissue. Their discovery could have implications for research into cancer, neurological disorders and much else.

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Scientists find that the impact of social media on wellbeing varies across adolescence

Girls and boys might be more vulnerable to the negative effects of social media use at different times during their adolescence, say an international team of scientists. The researchers show that, in UK data, girls experience a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction when they are 11-13 years old and boys when they are 14-15 years old. Increased social media use again predicts lower life satisfaction at age 19 years. At other times the link was not statistically significant.

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DuckDuckGo Destroys Brand by Embracing Censorship

Since early 2020, when the World Health Organization announced a global pandemic and fearmongering by government health experts and mainstream media began, it has become more and more apparent the lengths to which Big Tech will go to censor information you receive.

One lone bastion had been DuckDuckGo, a search engine that ensured users their privacy and search results that were relatively unbiased. However, March 9, 2022,¹ the CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, announced on Twitter that:

“Like so many others I am sickened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create at DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search engine updates that down rank-size associated with Russian disinformation.”

The move by DuckDuckGo was only one in many made by social media platforms to reportedly clampdown on “disinformation” campaigns stemming from Russia.² And yet, you had to have been living under a rock to not have noticed the number of individuals complaining of censorship and reported removal of “misinformation” and “disinformation” from social media platforms in the last two years.

In fact, Google's move to remove content they didn't agree with cracked down in June 2019 when their algorithm replaced crowdsourcing with crowd control and removed nearly every article published on Mercola.com from the search engines. The move by DuckDuckGo is yet another in a long list of censorship actions designed to keep you in the dark.

Privacy-Focused Search Engine No Longer Unbiased

In this short video, author and comedian Jimmy Dore makes short work of the new DuckDuckGo censorship changes, pointedly asking what is so different about the Ukraine/Russian conflict that prompted policy change, which did not happen during other global issues. Dore notes it is funny that no tech companies acted when the U.S.:³

Invaded Iraq illegally and killed millions of people
Invaded Syria because we're now occupying one-third of Syria
Bombed Libya
Executed a bombing campaign in Somalia
Took actions in Afghanistan against the people of the country

Dore also mentions the shelling by the neo-Nazis in the Donbas area for eight years, the Yemen genocide carried out by Saudi Arabia and Israel's attacks on Syria and Palestine. Referring to the obvious lack of concern for other invasions, Dore comments — "Like so many others, I am sickened only by this one thing [Russia] ever, and I ignore everything else bad that happens in the world."⁴

Commenting on an article in Mashable, Dore notes that Google and Bing didn't take action against disinformation, saying:⁵ "You're taking action on the behest of the state, the security state to shape the narrative. You're only going to give one side of the story. This isn't fighting disinformation."

Mashable⁶ spoke with several social media platforms, including Meta, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and Tik-Tok, to ask what actions they are taking against “misinformation.” Meta runs Facebook and Instagram, which Mashable points out attempted to sway the election by manipulating content. Meta has blocked Russian state-run media and refused a request to stop labeling content.

Twitter says they're monitoring high-profile “vulnerable” users to stop account takeovers. Russia Today has over 4.5 million subscribers on YouTube and received more than 10 billion views across its YouTube channels. On the last weekend in February, YouTube demonetized all Russian state-run media. Snapchat stopped advertising in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and Tik-Tok announced they would take action against users who spread misinformation.

As Dore asks, "Is DuckDuckGo turning on its users or did they misunderstand the search engine to begin with? Is it your job to decide what's information and what's disinformation? I would say no. I would say I'm a grown-up and I can figure that out."⁷

DuckDuckGo has based their advertising and promotion around delivering “unbiased results,”⁸ which they now claim was based on user privacy policy and not necessarily the results you get in the search engine. However, that’s not what they wrote on Twitter, “When you search, you expect unbiased results, but that's not what you get on Google."⁹

Google Extended Their Censorship Reach in June 2019

As Dore quips, “We know Google is biasing their Google results. And they do it whenever they feel like it.”¹⁰ Just months before the pandemic, Google began to extend their censorship reach by changing their algorithm and removing many Mercola.com articles from the search results.

Traffic to Mercola.com from Google plummeted nearly 99% after the Google Broad Core Algorithm Update that took effect June 3, 2019.¹¹ According to Google’s blog August 1, 2019, these core updates were not supposed to target or punish particular sites.¹²

“In fact, there's nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or site … One way to think of how a core update operates is to imagine you made a list of the top 100 movies in 2015. A few years later in 2019, you refresh the list. It's going to naturally change.”

If this were true, then Mercola.com and other authoritative websites would not have lost significant traffic. According to a Search Engine Journal (SEJ) article¹³ published June 10, 2019, Google uses three factors when determining how websites are ranked. These are expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T). Yet, SEJ reported several websites that were leaders in their space had lost up to 90% of their traffic from the update on June 3, 2019.

The U.K. news site, Daily Mail, also suffered a major decline in traffic, ostensibly because they published unreliable news and clickbait articles. SEJ fact-checked the fact-checkers at MediaBiasFactCheck.com, that wrote:¹⁴

“In review, the Daily Mail tends to publish stories utilizing sensationalized headlines with emotionally loaded wordings such as “Woman, 63, ‘becomes PREGNANT in the mouth’ with baby squid after eating calamari”, which is a misleading headline.”

While the headline may have been clickbait, the article was indeed based in fact and cited the National Institutes of Health as a true story. Additionally, MediaBiasFactCheck.com uses Wikipedia as a source of finding fake news. As Sharyl Attkisson revealed on Full Measure, Wikipedia is full of falsehoods and twisted narratives used to convince the public of a specific narrative.¹⁵

Google’s extended censorship happened just 10 months before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March 2020. Could that have been to prepare searchers to read only the content Big Tech was doling out and not truly independent investigative journalism that invites debate and reporting on both sides of the issue?

Is It a Conspiracy When It Turns Out To Be True?

Mashable reports¹⁶ that for those who are not familiar with DuckDuckGo, the move to downrank websites based on the company's idea of "misinformation" or "disinformation" would not sound too far out of the ordinary. After all, Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have all updated their policies in the past two years to ensure their readers see only what the company wants them to see.

While the current Mashable article is about the Ukraine/Russia conflict, I've written about the pandemic censorship on these platforms for nearly two years. DuckDuckGo users took to Twitter, announcing their displeasure and intent to switch search engines. DuckDuckGo has roughly 3% of the U.S. market share, which DuckDuckGo claims is a user base of 30 million people.

Mashable writes that the search engine was not built to "placate users with a certain political ideology."¹⁷ Yet, the search engine was used as an alternative platform because the search results were not biased. Mashable then writes, "So, whether DuckDuckGo likes it or not, many of those types of users have adopted the search engine."

Exactly who are "those types of users"? Dore asks, "How do we get rid of half the country? I wish there was a bio lab to come up with a solution."¹⁸ The types of users that Mashable is referring to are likely the same who are routinely in Facebook jail or have had their accounts removed or deleted for sharing “misinformation.”

To date during the pandemic, people who published research data or questioned the government narrative about the virus or the shot were called conspiracy theorists or accused of publishing misinformation to lead people away from the “science.”

Yet, much of the information that was once called a conspiracy or misinformation is now accepted as fact. Although I’ve written about other examples in the past, these are two among many that have had a significant impact on health, the environment and the economy.

• SARS-CoV-2 was a lab leaked virus — An investigation by the House Foreign Affairs Committee published in August 2021,¹⁹ demonstrated using public and intelligence reports that the virus was manipulated using gain of function and leaked in September, well before the 2021 Military Games were held in Wuhan and close to the date of Event 201²⁰ that simulated the response to a dangerous coronavirus pandemic.

A study^21,22 published February 21, 2022, in Frontiers in Virology claims to have discovered that a sequence of the virus’ spike protein is a 100% match to a modified messenger RNA (mmRNA) sequence patented²³ by Moderna — in 2016.

• Limited vaccine efficacy and health damage — Among those banned from social media for claiming the vaccine would not work was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who was banned from Twitter for questioning vaccine mandates and wrote:²⁴

“Think of it — at best — as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity”

Since then:

◦Pfizer²⁵ and Moderna²⁶ have said people will likely need a fourth shot to maintain whatever protection they may have from the injection.

◦CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told Washington University she wasn’t aware the vaccine efficacy would wane,²⁷ which means she now knows that it does.

◦The U.K. finds roughly 90% of cases, hospitalizations and deaths are in vaccinated individuals.²⁸

◦The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) has been inundated with reports of adverse events, permanent health damage and death totaling 1,168,892 reports in 15 months as of March 4, 2022.²⁹

Crowdsourcing Replaced by Crowd Control

Science thrives in an atmosphere of debate, not censorship. Many would call evidence-based public debate essential to understanding and developing public health policy. Yet, DuckDuckGo has followed in the footsteps of other search engines and social media platforms by identifying its own brand of misinformation.

When voices are censored, humanity loses and fascism wins. In 2019, Pinterest banned me, and Google had erased most of my information from the search results. In the following two years, I was forced to take down all my articles after they were online for just 48 hours. What makes me so dangerous?

According to Search Engine Journal, in the late 2000s Google began using social shares and signals to impact their search engine ranking.³⁰ This utilized crowdsourcing so the websites that provided the best answers to your questions made it to the top of the search results.

This was a democratic system that rewarded publishers for sharing quality information. During this time, my information was frequently at the top of health searches because many people found it to be the most valuable. As Google's power grew, their goal of providing a service to you changed.

Instead of serving you quality search results, the new goal is to unite industry and government, forcing their beliefs on readers and manipulating your behavior and your future. Instead of crowdsourcing, Google began using crowd control.

The search engine has changed from looking at users as customers to making users custodians of their will and essentially making you a host to carry out their agenda. It sounds dystopian and like science fiction, but Google has become a puppet master and has learned how to manipulate their readers without them even knowing it.

Google’s Centralized Power Controls What You See and Believe

Lawrence Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, bailed ship the very next year,³¹ saying "trolls sort of took over" the site, that "The inmates started running the asylum,"³² and that "In some fields and some topics, there are groups who 'squat' on articles and insist on making them reflect their own specific biases."³³ In this short Ted Talk, Attkisson shares how to recognize those biases and what it means to society.

Considering Wikipedia's history of bias, it's not surprising that the online “encyclopedia” is Google's chosen arbiter of expertise and credibility. As reported by TechCrunch³⁴ in January 2019, Google donated $2 million to Wikimedia Endowment, Wikipedia's parent organization, and another $1.1 million to the Wikimedia Foundation.

To help sway public opinion and policy, Google has also recruited law professors to back up and promote its views. According to a 2017 Campaign for Accountability report,³⁵ Google has paid academics in both the U.S. and Europe millions of dollars to influence public opinion and policymakers alike.^36,37

When you consider power assessment by looking at lobbying expenditures, Google is leading the pack on corporate spending on lobbying — efforts primarily aimed at eliminating competitors and gaining power over others. According to a June 5, 2019, article³⁸ in The New York Times, "… four of the biggest technology companies are amassing an army of lobbyists as they prepare for what could be an epic fight over their futures."

The four companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple — spent $55 million on lobbying in 2018, which is just under double what they spent in 2016. Google could potentially also garner some protection or aid from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). According to an Aljazeera report³⁹ published in 2014, emails reveal a cozy relationship between Google and the NSA, with coordination occurring at the highest levels.

Two years later, in March 2016, Wired reported⁴⁰ the executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet and former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, had been chosen by the Pentagon to chair its new Defense Innovation Advisory Board.⁴¹

Google holds enormous power over what people read, see and therefore likely believe. Any dissenting view can be effectively stripped from the search results, so content is no longer crowdsourced by social signals, but instead is controlled by an alphabet soup of corporations bent on ensuring society follows their lead.

DuckDuckGo used to have a tenuous hold over unbiased results but has publicly announced their decision to relinquish it and cross over to join Google in the unrelenting effort to control your thoughts, behaviors and pocketbook. Without access to independent journalism through search, it’s more important than ever to stay connected and share information across your network of friends and family.

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The Healthy Sugar Substitute You’ve Likely Never Heard About

This article was previously published February 4, 2019, and has been updated with new information.

As you probably know, inflammation and oxidative damage are primary drivers of most chronic diseases. What you may not be aware of is the importance of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate hydrogen (NADPH) and NADPH oxidase, typically abbreviated as NOX, in these processes.

In a recent paper,¹James DiNicolantonio, who co-wrote my book, "Superfuel," details the importance of collagen and glycine for the inhibition of NADPH breakdown. DiNicolantonio, also co-wrote a book with Jason Fung, called "The Longevity Solution," which takes a deep dive into how collagen and glycine may help promote longevity.

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

Without sufficient amounts of NADPH, your body cannot recharge glutathione once it becomes oxidized. As you know, glutathione is crucial for detoxification, and both collagen and glycine effectively raises your NADPH level by inhibiting the enzyme that breaks down NADPH.

Considering the importance of NADPH for optimal health and chronic disease prevention, this is really important information that could make a big difference for many, as collagen and glycine are both easily obtainable and relatively inexpensive. But before we delve into the specifics of how glycine affects NOX and NADPH, let's review some of the basics.

What Is NADPH and NOX?

NADPH is the reduced form of NADP+. It's a reducing agent necessary for anabolic reactions, including lipid and nucleic acid synthesis. NOX is an enzyme complex that is bound to the cellular membrane, facing the extracellular space. Inhibiting NOX is a useful strategy to increase NADPH and your cells' ability to counter oxidative stress.

NOX is activated in a large number of pathological conditions that generate a great deal of oxidative stress. In fact, according to DiNicolantonio, NOX overactivity appears to play a significant role in a wide range of health conditions, including but not limited to:

Vascular diseases and vascular complications of other diseases (diabetes, kidney failure, blindness and heart disease for example)

Insulin resistance

Neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's

Cancer

Glaucoma

Pulmonary fibrosis

Erectile dysfunction

As explained by DiNicolantonio in a paper² detailing bilirubin's ability to inhibit NOX complexes and downregulate NOX activity, and the benefits of spirulina for this purpose:

"Activation of NADPH oxidase [NOX] is a key mediator of proinflammatory microglial activation … Oxidative stress in adipocytes, stemming largely from NADPH oxidase activity, appears to play a key role in the induction of insulin resistance and the skewing of adipokine and cytokine production in hypertrophied adipocytes."

Six Ways to Inhibit NOX and Increase NADPH

NADPH is used as a reductive reservoir of electrons for antioxidants that become oxidized and nonfunctional. NADPH is also necessary to make your steroid hormones and fats. When you have low levels, you are in deep trouble.

That said, NADPH appears to be a biological molecule that can be helpful or harmful depending on how much of it is circulating at the time, so it needs to be carefully regulated by your body. For example, although NOX lowers NADPH, it also plays an important role in helping your immune system fight bacteria, and helps your T-cells to function properly.

It follows then, that preventing many chronic diseases would require finding a means of inhibiting or modulating NOX. The good news is there are several ways of doing this that are neither costly nor cumbersome, including the following:

• Niacinamide — Taking nicotinamide can also help increase your NADPH level.³

• Lowering your glucose level and avoiding fructose — Excess glucose is converted to fructose and lowers your NAD+,⁴ so keeping your glucose low and avoiding fructose is part of the equation.

• Nutritional ketosis — Ketone metabolism increases the negative redox potential of your family of NAD coenzyme redox molecules, which helps control oxidative damage by increasing NADPH and promoting transcription of enzymes of the antioxidant pathways though activation of FOXO3a.⁵

• Glycine and collagen — As detailed in the featured paper, glycine and collagen (which also contains glycine) also have NOX-inhibiting effects, thereby raising your NADPH level.

The way glycine inhibits NOX superoxide production is by bringing chloride into the cell, which reduces the cell's ability to push out chloride ions (since it's pushing against a higher chloride gradient). Chloride ions are required to bring in electrons to generate superoxide, so by minimizing chloride ions, glycine helps minimize oxidative stress.

Glycine Upregulates NADPH and Has Anticancer Activity

According to the featured paper,⁶ supplemental glycine may be useful for the "prevention and control of atherosclerosis, heart failure, angiogenesis associated with cancer or retinal disorders and a range of inflammation-driven syndromes, including metabolic syndrome." Glycine may also be an excellent complement to spirulina, as both suppress NOX.

The featured paper also details the anti-angiogenic activity of glycine, which refers to its ability to inhibit the growth of blood vessels that feed tumors. Animal studies, for example, have shown mice with cancer that are fed glycine exhibit suppressed angiogenesis and tumor growth, even though glycine does not affect the proliferation of cancer cells directly.

DiNicolantonio and his team hypothesize that one of the reasons for this antitumor effect has to do with the fact that glycine increases the chloride level in endothelial cells, thereby limiting the export of chloride from the endosome. This in turn inhibits activation of NOX, which has pro-angiogenic activity (meaning it promotes the growth of blood vessels to tumors). According to this paper:⁷

"This might explain the well-documented anti-angiogenic effects of boosting plasma glycine to the high physiological range. The possibility that supplemental glycine may have clinical utility as an anti-angiogenic agent for cancer control merits evaluation — albeit the concurrent effects of glycine on anticancer immune surveillance should be considered.

The anti-angiogenic effects of glycine might also find application in prevention or treatment of the choroidal neovascularization associated with diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration. It will be of interest to determine whether retinal pigment epithelium expresses glycine receptors."

Glycine Also Supports Vascular Health

NOX activation also plays an important role in heart disease, and by inhibiting NOX (which raises NADPH), glycine may also offer protection against cardiovascular problems. DiNicolantonio and his team explain:

"The role of [NOX] complex activation in promoting pro-inflammatory behavior of vascular endothelium is well documented; in particular, endothelial [NOX] plays a mediating role in atherogenesis. It is reasonable to postulate that a high proportion of this [NOX] activation occurs in endosomes, and is susceptible to modulation by cytosolic chloride level.

If so, then we could expect elevated plasma glycine, via stimulation of glycine-activated chloride channels, to suppress endothelial inflammation by opposing endosomal [NOX] activity. Moreover, the hyperpolarizing impact of glycine on endothelium might also promote vascular health by boosting calcium influx into endothelial cells, thereby enhancing the protective activity of the endothelial nitric oxide synthase.

It also seems not unlikely, given the documented impact of glycine on macrophages, that supplemental glycine could oppose atherogenesis and plaque instability via anti-inflammatory effects on intimal macrophages and foam cells … Glycine may also provide antioxidant protection to heart muscle … Moreover, in mice subjected to cardiac pressure overload or angiotensin II administration, glycine supplementation lessens the ensuing cardiac hypertrophy."

Glycine Supplementation May Improve Your Health

Considering how important it is to minimize inflammation and oxidative stress, and the role NOX and NADPH play in these processes, glycine supplementation holds great promise as a simple and inexpensive aid. I personally take one-quarter teaspoon (about 1 gram) twice a day.

Since glycine is mildly sweet, you could even use it as a healthy sugar substitute in tea or coffee. As noted by DiNicolantonio, "Intakes as high as 31 grams daily have proved safe. It is therefore ideal for incorporation into functional foods and beverages." The paper also cites a number of studies showing glycine supplementation may be beneficial for the prevention and/or treatment of:⁸

Metabolic syndrome — As noted in DiNicolantonio's paper, "In humans with metabolic syndrome supplemented with 15 grams glycine per day (5 grams thrice daily), plasma markers of oxidative stress declined by 25 percent relative to placebo"
Complications from diabetes
Alcoholic and nonalcoholic liver disorders
Cardiac hypertrophy

Glycine supplementation may also:⁹

Help improve sleep

Maintain cartilage integrity

Moderate the adverse metabolic effects of high-fructose diet

Boost glutathione synthesis, especially when used in combination with a N-acetylcysteine (NAC) supplement

Improve oxidant-scavenging activity by converting to pyruvate, which is a direct scavenger of hydrogen peroxide and inhibits formation of age-advanced glycation end-products

Have antioxidant effects by increasing synthesis of heme and bilirubin, although evidence of this is still lacking, and the effect is likely to be modest

Help detoxify glyphosate — Glyphosate is an analog of the amino acid glycine.¹⁰ It attaches in places where you need glycine. Importantly, glycine is used up in the detoxification process, hence many of us do not have enough glycine for efficient detoxification.

To eliminate glyphosate, you need to saturate your body with glycine. Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, who is a specialist in metal toxicity and its connection to chronic infections, recommends taking 1 teaspoon (4 grams) of glycine powder twice a day for a few weeks and then lowering the dose to one-fourth teaspoon (1 gram) twice a day. This forces the glyphosate out of your system, allowing it to be eliminated through your urine

While glycine powder is an inexpensive option, collagen is another alternative that is extremely rich in glycine. If going this route, I recommend looking for organic grass fed collagen.

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How the Pandemic Was Fabricated

For the past two years, I and many others have detailed the ways in which COVID-19 deaths have been overcounted to create the illusion of the pandemic being far worse than it actually is.

Now, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and individual states are backtracking on their death statistics, showing we were right all along. Deaths were initially exaggerated for political purposes, and now they’re being downplayed for the same reason.

CDC Removes More Than 72,000 COVID Deaths

As reported by The Defender,¹ March 14, 2022, the CDC had removed 72,277 “COVID deaths” from the tally, including 24% of those attributed to children under 18.^2,³ They claim a “coding logic error,” a faulty algorithm, had “accidentally” counted deaths that weren’t related to COVID. As reported by Udumbara:⁴

“Some of the pediatric deaths attributed to COVID-19, according to a search of the CDC’s Wonder system, include deaths where drowning or drug use was listed as the primary cause of death.”

Meanwhile, the CDC used the false death statistics among children to push for COVID shots for 5- to 7-year-olds. In November 2021, CDC director Rochelle Walensky cited that data to justify the recommendation to issue emergency use authorization for the Pfizer shot for this age group.⁵

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that it took the CDC two years to realize this error. It’s simply not believable, and The Epoch Times has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for internal communications relating to the data change.⁶

Ironically, the adjustment comes on the heels of fact-checking articles “debunking” claims that COVID deaths have been overcounted. For example, in early March, Health Feedback claimed there’s “no evidence COVID deaths have been overcounted,” and that “the evidence suggests the opposite.”⁷ Yet here we are. Deaths were clearly overcounted, not undercounted. That fact check didn’t age well.

CDC Has Been Turned Into a Propaganda Agency

According to Dr. Meryl Nass, a member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, the CDC is cherry-picking data to justify its public health policies, and when it gets caught, it simply blames its “outdated IT systems.” In a March 19, 2022, article, she wrote:⁸

“CDC is not a public health agency. It is a public propaganda agency that collects a massive amount of data. CDC marshals its huge data library to create presentations that support the current administration’s public health policies ...

A 2007 Senate oversight report on the CDC noted the agency spent $106 million on the Thomas R. Harkin Global Communications (and Visitor) Center, and summarized its 115-page report with the following:

‘A review of how an agency tasked with fighting and preventing disease has spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars for failed prevention efforts, international junkets, and lavish facilities, but cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease.’”

Health Officials End Reporting COVID-19 Deaths

Curiously, three months before the CDC started changing its mortality statistics, the U.S. Health and Human Services stopped collecting data on hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 altogether. The HHS announced⁹ changes to the reporting requirements for hospitals and acute care facilities January 6, 2022. The new guidelines, which took effect February 2, note “The retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” which include the “previous day's COVID-19 deaths.”

What are they trying to hide? Are they stopping the flow of data to prevent examination and analysis? According to some, the HHS hospital data are among the best we have in the U.S., so ending that data collection doesn’t make sense. January 2021, Alex C. Madrigal, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, wrote:¹⁰

“In a series of analyses that we ran over the past several months, we came to nearly the opposite conclusion of other media outlets. The hospitalization data coming out of HHS are now the best and most granular publicly available data on the pandemic.”

An unnamed federal health official spoke with a reporter from WSWS,¹¹ calling the move to stop reporting COVID-29 hospital deaths “incomprehensible.” The official added:

“It is the only consistent, reliable and actionable dataset at the federal level. Ninety-nine percent of hospitals report 100% of the data every day. I don’t know any scientists who want to have less data.”

Changing Definitions Justify the COVID Narrative

From the start of the pandemic, changing definitions have allowed authorities to manipulate data in whatever way they needed. Now, states are starting to change the way they define a “COVID death,” resulting in lowered mortality rates. In Massachusetts, for example, COVID deaths dropped by 3,700 after the state changed its definition to be in alignment with that of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.¹²

As reported by CBS Boston:¹³

“The state said currently the COVID death definition includes anyone who has the disease listed as a cause of death on their death certificate. It also includes anyone who had a diagnosis within 60 days but did not have it listed as a cause on their death certificate. Under the new definition, the timeframe is changed to 30 days for people without a COVID diagnosis on their death certificate.”

For the record, counting someone who died of any cause as a COVID death simply because they tested positive within 30 days of their death is still a grossly inaccurate way of determining the true death toll from this virus, because we know PCR tests have a false positive rate of about 97% when run at 35 cycles or greater,¹⁴ as was the norm from the start.

Results From At-Home Tests Aren’t Reported

Case counts are also being adjusted downward. In mid-January 2022, the Biden administration started distributing half a billion at-home COVID tests to the American public,¹⁵ and the results from those are not being reported anywhere.¹⁶ As a result, case counts will be skewed downward. According to 13NewsNow:¹⁷

“... the fallibility of case counts is the reason health officials track several COVID-19 metrics, like hospitalizations, deaths, and now, even viral samples in the wastewater¹⁸ — metrics that do not necessarily rely on people to go get tested or report the results they get at home.”

And yet the HHS is no longer requiring hospitals to report COVID deaths, which is one of the metrics health officials are supposedly focusing on in lieu of tracking cases. Don’t get me wrong, PCR testing was a scam from the start and I’m not suggesting we should pay much attention to those data. The point here is that the tracking of COVID data has been fatally flawed from the start.

What they’re really trying to do is shift toward passive monitoring, starting with wastewater sampling.¹⁹ Eventually, the goal is to monitor every person’s biological processes in real-time, and this is part and parcel of the transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution and The Great Reset.

CDC Hides Data

To make matters even murkier, the CDC is also hiding data on COVID hospitalizations and the COVID jab. The stated justification for not making certain data public is that people are “misinterpreting” the data. In other words, the data show that the COVID jabs don’t work, and the CDC doesn’t want that to be widely known.

It has also collected data on the effectiveness of COVID-19 boosters, but for some reason has not included the data for 18- to 49-year-olds in any of its publications. “Coincidentally,” this is “the group least likely to benefit from extra shots,” the Times pointed out, adding:²¹

“Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots.”

COVID Has Served a Purely Political Agenda

Over the past two years, the pandemic has been used to usher in a range of radical changes that would never have been accepted were it not for widespread panic. It was used to implement illegitimate voting rules, which appear to have had an impact on the 2020 elections.

It was used to announce the urgent need for a “Great Reset” and a Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s been used to strip people of basic human rights, and to justify radical environmental policies that will result in lower standards of living.

It was also used to abruptly transition the vaccine industry from conventional vaccine manufacturing using eggs to the use of risky gene transfer technology. The only thing the pandemic has not been used for is to make recommendations that actually improve public health. And throughout, data have been massaged and manipulated to justify the unjustifiable.

Now, it appears data are being manipulated yet again — this time to artificially end the COVID crisis so that the Biden administration can take credit for it during the upcoming elections. As stated in a February 24, 2022, letter from Impact Research, titled “Taking the Win Over COVID-19”:^22,²³

“It’s time for Democrats to take credit for ending the COVID crisis phase of the COVID war, point to important victories like vaccine distribution and providing economic stability for Americans, and fully enter the rebuilding phase that comes after any war. Below we lay out some strategic thoughts for Democrats positioning themselves on COVID-19 ...”

Strategic positioning includes declaring the crisis phase over; pushing for “feeling and acting more normal;” and taking the side of people who are burned out on COVID and don’t want to hear about it anymore. Not setting a standard of zero COVID as the “victory condition,” and to “stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead.”

“If Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November,” the letter states.²⁴

Dr. Anthony Fauci perhaps did not receive this memo, as he is out there signaling that we can expect a return to COVID restrictions at any given point. In a mid-March CNN interview, he stated that “we need to be flexible” and “if we see a resurgence, we have to be able to pivot and go back to any degree of mitigation that is commensurate with what the situation is. We can’t just say ‘We’re done, now we’re going to move on.’”

Based on what we’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if this “pivot” back into COVID crisis mode were to occur right before the midterm elections.

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Simple but Powerful Ways to Boost Athletic Performance

James DiNicolantonio, PharmD, (my coauthor for “Superfuel”) and Siim Land have written three books together, “The Immunity Fix,” “The Mineral Fix” and, now, “WIN: Achieve Peak Athletic Performance, Optimize Recovery and Become a Champion,” which is the topic of today’s discussion. “WIN” is a great reference, loaded with simple but powerful exercise strategies. It’s also one of the best books ever written on hydration.

I’ve often warned that unless you’re engaging in regular exercise, especially after you hit 40 or 50, you’re headed for an eventual metabolic and structural catastrophe. The only sure thing about your future is that you’ll become frail, which is a miserable way to die. There’s no magic pill for frailty.

To avoid frailty you simply must engage in regular movement and exercise. When and what you eat, and how you hydrate, can make a big difference in your performance though, and can affect your payoff in terms of the amount of muscle you can build.

Should You Eat Before Exercising?

Many fitness experts believe that you should have carbs and protein before you work out, because you'll be able to work out stronger. However, I believe far greater benefits can be had by exercising in a fasted state, as this will allow you to maximize autophagy. Land addresses this in his brilliant book, “Metabolic Autophagy.” DiNicolantonio says:

“I think it's important to train both in a fasted state, as well as loading with complex carbs about an hour before vigorous exercise. The reason is because you want metabolic adaptations for both systems — utilizing fat for fuel in a fasted state, and also the ability to utilize glucose.

Essentially, if you're exercising in a fasted state, your body's going to be better at utilizing fat for fuel, and it's going to help spare glycogen, which is important for anaerobic performance. So, training in a fasted state ... will help more vigorous exercise performance [by] sparing of glycogen, because you're able to utilize the fat for fuel better, and you're probably going to burn fat better in a fasted state as well.

But the data is very clear that if you are performing at a vigorous pace, essentially 70% VO2 max or higher, preloading with about 50 grams of complex carbs is absolutely going to help preserve muscle glycogen levels and improve performance, both from an endurance and a peak power output standpoint.”

Land agrees, stating that the choice of exercising in a fasted state or not depends on your goal. If you’re a professional athlete, he believes it makes more sense to have some carbs and food in your system, because it will optimize performance. And, if you’re competing, you’ll need to train at near-peak performance most if not all the time, so training in a fasted state may be counterproductive.

“Of course, there is some merit to training periodically in a fasting state or a low-glycogen state, to build up this metabolic flexibility and adaptation. But from a progressive overload perspective, which means that you actually get better over time, you get stronger or faster, whatever the sport is, then you will need to have some calories to help you to push yourself further,” Land says.

For the average person, however, especially older people, optimizing autophagy is likely a far more important health goal. Nothing depletes glycogen from your muscles more effectively than exercising in a fasting state, which will maximally upregulate autophagy. So, for many, it’s a really powerful strategy. That said, it’s not black-and-white. As noted by Land:

“Always exercising in a fasting state can also lead to a muscle catabolism, and that can also be harmful for the elderly. So even for the elderly, it can be good to, periodically at least, have some calories in their system, especially amino acids, during the exercise to help to prevent this muscle catabolism.”

Should You Take HMB?

One of the things you want to achieve with your exercise is the activation of mTOR, and one way to do that is to make sure your body has plenty of branched-chain amino acids, especially leucine, isoleucine and valine. One of the metabolic byproducts of leucine is hydroxymethylbutyrate (HMB). Some fitness experts recommend taking HMB either before or after your workout.

According to DiNicolantonio, there’s evidence that HMB is beneficial, particularly in catabolic states, but the jury’s still out. Some studies show dramatic improvements in muscle gains when using HMB, but it’s still fairly controversial. “Personally, I can't necessary recommend it outside of really low-caloric intake states to help preserve muscle mass,” he says.

Land agrees, saying he believes HMB would be most appropriate for people with sarcopenia, or people who are on low-calorie or low-protein diets. “If you're getting enough protein in your diet, then you probably don't need it,” he says.

How Proper Hydration Can Optimize Your Workout

My favorite part of “WIN” is the section on hydration. There’s far more to proper hydration and hydrating for fitness performance than meets the eye. Most will simply drink water or, worse, sports drinks chockfull of sugar in addition to the electrolytes, and call it done. But as explained by DiNicolantonio:

“If you're a highly competitive athlete, training three months out before competition ... then you want to practice something called dehydration acclimation. Multiple sessions of mild dehydration will lead to adaptations where you will get expansion of baseline blood volume and all these other adaptations, where you're actually performing better later on.

Your training may suffer a little bit performing dehydration acclimation [but] you get those metabolic adaptations. Then, before competition, you do salt loading with high doses of salt and fluids about 90 minutes prior. That's going to dramatically boost blood volume and increase performance. But you don't always want to use high doses of salt, because you want adaptations to being in a dehydrated state.

So, there's really three ways to hydrate. If you don't feel like you have a lot of energy before a training camp, you want to take 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams of sodium [one-half to 1 full teaspoon of salt] and 10 to 20 ounces of fluid, respectively, to get a blood volume expansion of about 3% to 4%, so that you can train fairly well.

The goal then is to actually lose about 1.5 to 2.5% of your body weight through sweat, which will induce mild dehydration. When you do that multiple times, you get dehydration acclimation ...

The top benefits are when you start hitting 3,000 to 4,300 milligrams of sodium, which is essentially 1.5 to 2 teaspoons of salt per liter of fluid. When you hit those higher amounts (consumed with 26 to 33.8 oz. of fluid, respectively), you can get 8% to 10% increases in blood volume and dramatic improvements in performance ...

If you want to acutely boost performance dramatically, you want an 8% to 10% increase in blood volume, because the blood volume drops within five minutes of vigorous exercise by 8% to 10% as blood flows away from the heart towards working skeletal muscle.

This relative drop of blood volume feeding the heart ... is really the main linchpin for decreasing athletic performance. So, if you ... take appropriate salt solutions prior to performance, you can prevent the drop in blood volume and dramatically improve performance.

When I say dramatically improve performance, there's nothing better. Nothing even comes close to preloading with salt and fluids. I'll give you an example. Beta-alanine can increase the time you can perform vigorous exercise by about one minute. However, taking salt solutions can increase exercise time by anywhere from typically 10 to over 20 minutes, so it's 10 to 20 times more effective than the best preworkout [supplement] on the market.”

The Importance of Carnosine

That said, beta-alanine is also very important. It’s the rate-limiting amino acid for the formation of carnosine, which slows the aging of cells and protects against mitochondrial dysfunction.¹ It’s especially important if you’re prediabetic, which a majority of Americans are. Another way to boost your carnosine level is with magnesium orotate. Orotate (orotic acid, a mineral) converts into beta-alanine, and then into carnosine in your liver.

So, it basically acts like a delayed-release beta-alanine. There are also carnosine supplements available, but they’re not as cost-effective. As noted by DiNicolantonio, taking a precursor is typically better than taking the actual substance that you're trying to increase.

Hydration Is More Than Merely Drinking Water

A common misconception is that hydration is all about water intake. DiNicolantonio and Land turn that myth on its head in their book. Merely hydrating with plain water can actually have negative effects on performance, both vigorous exercise performance and endurance exercise. DiNicolantonio explains:

“To give you an example, if you consume just 5 ounces of water in 15 minutes, that exceeds gastric emptying. And, when you're vigorous exercising, gastric emptying dramatically goes down. So, if you drink too much water, you're going to bloat the system.

Water is just going to sit in the stomach, and you can actually decrease vigorous exercise performance by 2.5% just drinking water, which is what most people think is going to help them.

So, that's the problem in vigorous exercise. In endurance exercise, drinking too much plain water dramatically increases hyponatremia or low sodium levels in the blood, which can kill you ... Drinking plain water has also been shown to increase the susceptibility of skeletal muscle to electrically-induced muscle cramps. So again, salt and electrolytes play key roles here at reducing muscle cramps, especially in performance in the heat ...

If you get the salt solution dosing correct, it can decrease your heart rate by nine to 10 beats per minute. It can increase exercise duration by 20 to 21 minutes, which is essentially anywhere from 25% to 50% increase in how long you can exercise vigorously, which is crazy when you think about it.

And, it can decrease core body temperature by three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit, because we lose water from our blood volume to dissipate heat through sweat. And so, if you have more fluid, you can cool off better. You'll have better sweat rates, and that can evaporate and cool you down quicker. So, you can keep your core body temperature lower simply by drinking salt solutions before exercise.”

Hydration and Other Benefits of Glycine

To do the hydration protocol reviewed above, you’d start drinking the salt solutions around 90 minutes before your exercise, finishing it off over the course of about 30 minutes. It’s important to not include any kind of glucose in the solution, as glucose will increase diuresis and cause dehydration.

To your salt solution you could, however, add glycine, an amino acid with a mildly sweet taste. Glycine helps increase the absorption of sodium in the intestine and decrease core body temperature. Glycine is also an inhibitory neurotransmitter and may help reduce muscle cramps. Glycine is thought to be the reason for why pickle juice is so effective at rapidly aborting muscle cramps.

“There's been two studies showing that pickle juice, at about 2.5 ounces, can abort a muscle cramp within 30 to 90 seconds,” DiNicolantonio says. “It can't be due to volume expansion and interstitial fluid expansion. It would never happen that quick. It's the acetic acid in the pickle juice, we think, that releases glycine, and that basically aborts a muscle cramp.”

My favorite hydration strategy is to drink a quart of water about one hour before my workout and sauna, in which I have added two packets of our new electrolyte powder and one-half teaspoon of glycine powder (about 3 grams).

Summary of the Dehydration Acclimation Protocol

So, to summarize the dehydration acclimation protocol discussed above:

90 minutes before exercise, start drinking a solution of 0.5 to 1 teaspoon salt with 10 to 20 ounces of fluid to get a blood volume expansion of 3% to 4%, or 1.5 to 2 teaspoons of salt with 26 ounces to a full liter of fluid, respectively, for an 8% to 10% increase in blood volume for maximum improvement in performance.
Optional: Add 4 o 6 grams of glycine to improve sodium absorption and decrease core body temperature.
Next, your goal is to lose 1.5% to 2.5% of your body weight through sweat, which will induce mild dehydration.
Rehydrate using a formula of one-half teaspoon of sodium per liter of fluid lost during your training.
As you do that multiple times, you become acclimated to dehydration and get all the benefits of that — better baseline blood volume, better sweat rates, improved ability to cool off.

Raising Your Alkalinity Can Boost Performance

There's a common misconception that delayed-onset muscle soreness is due to lactate or lactic acid. As explained by DiNicolantonio, lactate is actually the beneficial molecule that pulls the acid — hydrogen ions — out of your cells. Your body actually uses lactate as fuel during exercise.

However, lactate correlates with high acid in your cells, so there's this myth that lactate is bad for you, even though it’s not. When you vigorously exercise, you produce loads of hydrogen ions because ATP demand exceeds supply. When that happens, you automatically retain acid.

You can get ahead of the problem by boosting your bicarbonate level to hit peak alkalosis. This will increase your pH, reducing the acidity in your blood, and this too can dramatically improve performance. The reason for this is because many mitochondrial enzymes are pH-sensitive. As the cell becomes more acidic, it shuts down those enzymes and reduces ATP production. Eventually, the muscle ceases to work.

“A lot of people don't believe that you can make the body more alkaline,” DiNicolantonio says. “Well, it's clear you can, because you can boost bicarbonate levels using things like sodium bicarbonate or sodium citrate.

A lot of people also don't believe that diet has anything to do with the acid/base balance in the body, but it does. Because, from a physiological perspective, the kidneys can only get rid of 40 to 70 milliequivalents of acid before it starts retaining 1 milliequivalent of acid for every 2.5 milliequivalents above that threshold. To get rid of that retained acid, you have to breathe it out, but to breathe out acid, you have to deplete one molecule of bicarbonate.

So yes, you can breathe out acid, but it's not a free lunch. You will deplete your bicarbonate levels. This is why you do need a balance if you're on an animal-based diet or a carnivore diet. You need to be consuming some type of bicarbonate-forming substance, whether it be sodium citrate or sodium bicarbonate, to offset the acid load of the diet.”

I agree that this is likely a crucial point. If you’re on a high-meat or carnivore diet, you need to address this because you can get far too acidic and it best to neutralize this excessive acidity with bicarbonate and/or citrate. I personally use both, as citrate has the added advantage of binding to oxalates in your foods.

Testing for and Correcting High Acidity

The good news is you can easily measure the pH of your body fluids with a litmus test. According to DiNicolantonio, the best time to test is four hours after a meal. If your urine pH is less than 6.8, you're likely retaining acid. Ideally, you want to be around 7.4.

If you’re too acidic, you can take either sodium citrate or sodium bicarbonate to lower it. DiNicolantonio’s preference is sodium citrate, as it does not increase the pH of your stomach the way sodium bicarbonate does. He explains:

“Essentially, when you are consuming bicarbonate, it's making the stomach pH increase and you're diluting the acid of your stomach. You need acid in order to digest food and absorb nutrients. It's super important. So, if you start messing with the pH of your stomach, that's not good because you might not be able to digest food well.

That's how we kill pathogens, too, so the risk of food-borne illness will go up as well. And chloride is important to form hydrochloric acid in the stomach acid. The reason why I like sodium citrate is because you're not dumping bicarbonate into the gut, and you're not decreasing the acidity of the stomach.

The key here though is that most studies have inappropriately dosed sodium citrate much too close to exercise to show benefits. It takes longer to form bicarbonate in the body when you take citrate versus taking bicarbonate. So, you actually should be dosing sodium citrate about four hours before performance to get to a peak alkalosis state.

What's great about citrate too is, if it doesn't get converted to bicarbonate, citrate is actually better than bicarbonate in regards to improving alkalinity. Because one molecule of citrate can bind three hydrogen ions, whereas it's a one-to-one binding of bicarbonate to hydrogen. So, citrate really is just an amazing way to alkalinize your body ...

But here's what's really important. You don't want to drink it in solution, because it's tough on the gut. It's really something you want to take with food, at least 20 to 25 grams of carbs. You take it four hours before performance, which is really when you should be having your protein meal. So, it's nice that you can dose the citrate with food, so you can tolerate it better ...

Five grams of sodium citrate inhibits 60 milliequivalents of acid. An average carnivore is going to produce 150 to 200 milliequivalents of acid. So, in order to neutralize that, you would need anywhere from 5 grams of sodium citrate, about three times a day.

You really want to be at a net acid excretion of zero, because even if your body is able to excrete acid, it's still damaging on the kidneys to do that, so you want to try to get it to a neutral acid excretion.”

The Importance of Getting Your Protein Dosage Right

“WIN” also delves into the issue of protein, which is really important. In the past, I got overzealous about not activating mTOR and went on a low-protein diet (0.6 to 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram). It was a terrible mistake.

Once I realized it and doubled my protein intake to 1.5 grams per kg (140 to 150 grams) per day. This helped me put on over 25 pounds of muscle mass and I now weigh 200 pounds for the first time in my life and my body fat is around 10%. Land expounds on this important topic:

“In animal studies, mTOR activation can be linked to accelerated aging and some cancers. But there's no human studies, and at least when it comes to exercise performance, mTOR is still quite central to things like muscle protein synthesis and muscle growth.

We also know that muscle use is very important for longevity and anti-aging, so I think the worries about [mTOR] can be a bit overblown. I mean, protein isn't the only thing that activates mTOR. It's also carbs and insulin, so you're screwed either way if you're wanting to restrict mTOR.

But there's a limit to how much mTOR you're going to activate in one sitting. Because the amount of protein synthesis is also limited, and that threshold is around 20 to 40 grams of protein in one sitting, you're not going to activate more muscle protein synthesis by consuming more protein. So, it doesn't matter if you eat 100 grams of protein or 20 grams of protein in one sitting. You're still going to activate the same amount of mTOR ...

If you eat six times a day, then you're still going to turn on mTOR even if you eat very few calories. Even if you eat like 100 calories or 10 grams of protein. You're on a low-protein diet, you're eating 10 grams of protein, but you're eating six times a day then it's still spiking your mTOR several times, compared to eating two times a day or once a day.

But even if you are eating 200 grams of protein, for example, in one sitting, you're not going to activate more mTOR because it's going to be capped off. That's why athletes and bodybuilders are eating six times a day, to basically have their protein synthesis elevated frequently so that they will build more muscle and recover faster.

So, that's why the athlete would be eating more frequently whereas the average person [shouldn’t]. And it doesn't matter how much protein they're eating. If you're eating in a confined eating window, then the eating frequency basically matters in terms of how much mTOR you're going to activate over the course of 24 hours, not the actual amount of protein in grams.”

How Much Protein Do You Need for Muscle Building?

So, just how much protein do you need? The recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein is quite low, only 0.4 grams per pound of body weight.

But the research shows that, at least for elderly people, higher protein intake is better for maintaining muscle mass and bone density and reducing frailty. For the elderly, Land recommends 0.7 to 1.0 grams of protein per pound of body weight (double that amount for grams per kg). So, the RDA is considered inadequate even for regular people.

When it comes to sports and fitness, protein demands increase exponentially as well. According to Land, the optimal peak seems to be around 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, or 0.8 to 1 grams per pound of body weight. You're not going to be building more muscle if you eat more protein than that. Higher amounts will help burn more fat though, or will result in less weight gain if you’re in a calorie surplus. DiNicolantonio chimes in:

“For athletes, the evidence is pretty clear that you want about 30 grams of protein four times a day as a minimum. If you do a whole-body workout, you actually want to increase that to about 40 grams of protein to maximize muscle protein synthesis. The data is pretty clear too, that taking 30 to 40 grams of casein, which is a long-acting protein, about 30 minutes before bedtime, will help maximize muscle protein synthesis.”

How to Cool Down More Effectively

Another important topic covered really well in “WIN” is how to lower your core body temperature. Most people make the mistake of simply cooling the back of their neck or their chest when they get hot.

But to rapidly and effectively lower your body temperature, you need to focus on your glabrous skin, which is enervated with special blood vessels that can dilate and bring in cold directly from the venous supply right into the arterial supply, bypassing the capillaries. Your glabrous skin is found on:

The palms of your hands
Your ears
Your face, particularly the forehead and cheeks
The bottoms of your feet

How Cooling Your Body Can Improve Performance

DiNicolantonio explains:

“Studies show that cooling the glabrous skin is twice as effective as cooling the chest or the back. In really hot situations, the glabrous skin can dump five times as much heat as compared to non-glabrous skin. The best way to cool those skin surfaces down is using water, because water conducts heat/cold two to four times better.

So simply putting your palms and the bottoms of your feet in cold water, you do that for 30 minutes and you're going to drop your body temperature. The goal for precooling the body is to drop core body temperature by 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 0.3 degrees Celsius.

You see the dramatic improvements in performance because you have a larger tank to soak up all the heat before you hit a critical core body temperature [where you start to sweat and lose electrolytes] ...

If you're precooling the body, you want to avoid water temperatures of 59 Fahrenheit or less, because that can actually inhibit performance. Ideally, you want to be between that 64 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit, which is considered cool water.

You can start at 84 and slowly notch your way down. What the studies show is that if you're using 84 Fahrenheit water, it's probably going to take you an hour to drop half a degree Fahrenheit. But if you're using 64, it'll probably only take you 20 to 30 minutes, depending on how much surface area you're cooling.

You don't even have to do precooling. You can do this during training. It's been shown if you cool glabrous skin, like cooling both of the palms during the rest periods, you can increase bench reps and pull-ups by 40-140%. So, you get really good benefits from cooling the body.”

To learn more, be sure to pick up a copy of “WIN: Achieve Peak Athletic Performance, Optimize Recovery and Become a Champion.”

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Top Tips to Optimize Your Mitochondrial Health

This article was previously published December 15, 2019, and has been updated with new information.

If you want to avoid becoming a cancer statistic (and who doesn't?) you'd do well to familiarize yourself with the metabolic theory of cancer. In August 2016, we presented the Mercola.com Game Changer Award to Thomas Seyfried, Ph.D.,¹ a professor of biology at Boston College and a leading expert and researcher in the field of cancer metabolism and nutritional ketosis.

Following is a rerun of this popular and important article and interview with Seyfried, in which we discuss his book, "Cancer as a Metabolic Disease" — an important contribution to the field of how cancer starts and can be treated.

Each day, some 1,600 people die from cancer in the United States alone. Worldwide, we're looking at a death toll of about 21,000 people daily. So many of these deaths are unnecessary — they're preventable and treatable.

Seyfried is one of the pioneers in the application of nutritional ketosis for cancer, a therapy that stems from the work of Dr. Otto Warburg, who was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant biochemists of the 20th century. Warburg received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1931 for the discovery of metabolism of malignant cells.

Besides being a medical doctor, Warburg held a Ph.D., and was personal friends with Albert Einstein and many of the most prominent scientists of his time. His life's mission was to find a cure for cancer, and he actually did. Unfortunately, few were able to appreciate the importance of his findings.

Seyfried has followed in Warburg's scientific footsteps, and is conducting important research to advance this science. He has in fact exceeded Warburg's initial supposition, shedding important light on the metabolic underpinnings of cancer.

Cancer as a Metabolic Disease

The traditionally held view or dogma is that cancer is a genetic disease, but what Warburg discovered is that cancer is really caused by a defect in the cellular energy metabolism of the cell, primarily related to the function of the mitochondria, which are the little power stations within each cell.

The mitochondria were not well understood in Warburg's time but, today, we have a much better understanding of how they work.

In my view, this information is the game changer that not only treats cancer but virtually every single disease known to man, because at the core of most serious ailments you find mitochondrial dysfunction. As noted by Seyfried:

"A dogma is considered irrefutable truth, and that cancer is a genetic disease is, no question, a dogma. The problem with dogma is that sometimes it blinds you to alternative views and sets up ideologies that are extremely difficult to change.

All of the major college textbooks talk about cancer as a genetic disease. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) website, the first thing they say is cancer is a genetic disease caused by mutations … [and] if cancer is a genetic disease, everything flows from that concept.

It permeates the pharmaceutical industry, academic industry and textbook industry — the entire knowledge base. There's very little discussion of alternative views to the genetic view. The argument now is that, yes, metabolic problems occur in cancer cells. No one denies that.

But these are all due to the genetic mutations. Therefore we must maintain ourselves on the established track that all of this metabolic stuff could be resolved if we just understood more about the genetic underpinning of the disease.

Now that would be well and good if it were true. But evidence is accumulating that the mutations we see that are the prime focus and the basis for the genetic theory are actually epiphenomenal.

They're downstream effects of this disturbance in the metabolism that Warburg originally defined back in the 1920s and '30s."

How the Metabolic View Alters Cancer Treatment

As Seyfried notes, the problem today is not that scientists and doctors cannot understand the science; it's that they cannot accept that this could be the truth behind the nature of the disease, because it changes how you approach treatment.

If defective mitochondria are responsible for the origin of cancer, and defective energy metabolism is responsible for the majority of the phenotypes, i.e., the observable characteristics of the disease that you see, then how do you treat the disease?

In my view, one of Seyfried's most magnificent contributions to this science was his compilation of research from independent and well-respected scientists within various disciplines, who conducted valuable experiments but had no clue how to interpret the results.

Seyfried put all of their work together, forming a strong scientific foundation for the theory that cancer is indeed a metabolic disease, not a genetic one, and that genetic mutations are a downstream effect of defective energy metabolism in the mitochondria.

"Those nuclear transfer experiments were always present in the literature. They were considered anomalies. They were not consistent with the view that cancer is a nuclear genetic disease … but the observation was not interpreted in light of [being] the origin of cancer.

I bundled all those observations together in a new light, looking at the conclusions of those experiments in light of whether the results would support a nuclear gene-based theory versus a mitochondrial metabolic theory …

It was just interpreting a series of experiments in light of the origin of the disease, and then asking what conclusion would these experiments support. Would it support the nuclear genetic theory of cancer, or would it support the mitochondrial metabolic theory of cancer?

In each of these cases, the results more strongly supported the metabolic theory of cancer than the nuclear genetic theory," Seyfried says.

What the Nuclear Transfer Experiments Showed

The nuclear transfer experiments in question basically involved transplanting the nuclei of a tumor cell into a healthy and normal cytoplasm (the material within a cell, excluding the cell nucleus), which include the mitochondria, the energy-generating organelle of the cell.

The hypothesis is that if cancer is nuclear-gene driven and the phenotype of cancer is dysregulated cell growth, meaning if genetic mutations are responsible for the observable characteristics of the disease, then those abnormal genes should be expressed in the new cytoplasm. But that's not what happened.

Again and again, what was observed was that when the nuclei of a cancer cell were transferred into a healthy cytoplasm, the new cytoplasm did NOT form cancer. It remained healthy and normal.

"What was interesting is that in many of these nuclear transfer experiments, the organisms aborted at certain periods of development. That abortion seems to be related to how many mutations were in the nucleus that was transferred," Seyfried says.

"It was true that these cancer nuclei did contain mutations, but those mutations were not causing the hallmark feature of the disease, that is proliferation. Rather, they were causing abortion at some developmental point of the organism that had those nuclei … On the other hand, when the normal nucleus was transferred back into a cancer cytoplasm [which had defective mitochondria], either the cell died or it formed tumor cells."

Additional evidence has been produced by Benny Kaipparettu, Ph.D., and colleagues at Baylor University. When they transplanted normal mitochondria (with its nuclei intact) into cancer cell cytoplasm, it caused the cells to stop growing abnormally. It downregulated the oncogenes that were alleged to be driving the tumor and made the cells grow normally again.

On the other hand, when they took the mitochondria from a tumor cell and moved it into a very slow-growing type of cancer cell, the cancer cells began growing very rapidly. As noted by Seyfried, "When you bundle all these experiments together, you come to the conclusion that nuclear mutations cannot be the drivers of the disease."

What About BRCA1 and Other Inherited Cancer Genes?

A common argument for the genetic theory is that cancer can be inherited; therefore it must have genetic underpinnings. Li-Fraumeni syndrome,² which raises your risk of developing cancer at a very young age, and BRCA1, which raises your breast cancer risk, are two examples.

"The answer is, yes, on the surface, that would appear to be true," Seyfried says. "But as Warburg said, there are many secondary causes of cancer but there is only one primary cause, and that's damage to the respiration. So inherited mutations through the germ lines that cause cancer to affect the mitochondria, it is [still] the mitochondria that is the origin of cancer.

It just so happens that the defect is coming from an inherited gene rather than a chemical carcinogen, radiation, viral infection or an infection of some parasite or whatever, all of which damage respiration; all of which can cause cancer.

Clearly the origin of the disease is a disturbance of the respiratory capacity of that cell which then, if the cell is to survive, must upregulate genes necessary for fermentation. Many of those genes are the so-called oncogenes. The oncogenes are simply fulfilling a rescue event of that cell to function in a fermentation metabolism rather than an oxidative metabolism. We can downregulate oncogenes simply by putting in new respiration."

If genetic mutations are not the primary cause of cancer but rather a secondary, downstream effect of dysfunctional cell respiration, why and how do mutations occur? As explained by Seyfried, once the cells' respiration is damaged, that damage then leads to a compensatory fermentation, which requires the upregulation of oncogenes (cancer genes).

Damaged respiration also produces large amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and secondary free radicals that damage DNA proteins and lipids (fats inside your cellular membranes). The ROS also cause mutations in the nuclear genome. So the mutations are the result of defective respiration and subsequent exaggerated ROS production.

Why the War on Cancer Has Not Yet Been Won

At present, the cancer industry is focusing on the downstream effects of the problem, which is why the "war on cancer" has been such a miserable failure.

"Personalized medicines, checkpoint inhibitors, all of these kinds of therapies are basically looking at downstream effects of the disease," Seyfried says. "Unfortunately, most of the cells in the tumor are all different from each other genetically.

You're not going to be able to target all of the different cells using these kinds of approaches. Even though you may get success for a few months, or even a year in some people, the majority of people will not respond effectively to these kinds of therapies for the most part."

Why Being an Efficient Fat Burner Is so Important

The ROS also target the actual mitochondria themselves, where respiration occurs, which brings us to a very important point. ROS are mostly generated through the co-enzyme Q couple in the electron transport chain. Both glucose and fatty acids produce FADH2, which can generate ROS.

In contrast, fat-derived ketone bodies produce only NADH, which increases the redox span of the co-enzyme Q couple and reduces production of ROS. Hence, ketone bodies are considered a more "clean" fuel than is either glucose or fatty acids Today, most people are burning glucose as their primary fuel, thanks to an overabundance of sugar and processed grains in the diet and a deficiency in healthy fats.

If you have less ROS being generated in the mitochondria, you end up with less mitochondrial damage and less DNA damage. So not only is switching the fuel you're feeding your body the key component of cancer treatment, but in my view it's the primary way that you prevent cancer from occurring in the first place.

"I think that's an important point. One of the things that trigger cancer is inflammation. We have inflammation. Chronic high levels of blood sugar create inflammation. This you see in a lot of situations. Glucose itself is not carcinogenic, but elevated dysregulated glucose metabolism can lead to inflammation, and can cause a number of other disturbances in the overall metabolism of the body," Seyfried says.

"If you fast, if you stop eating, your blood sugar goes down. Your insulin levels go down. The body starts to metabolize fat for energy. But the fatty acids themselves are only one component. The major components of course are the ketone bodies … They are water-soluble fat products. They readily enter cells and they're metabolized to acetyl-CoA through a series of steps.

These steps generate nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH), which is a reducing equivalent. But they also keep the coenzyme Q couple in an oxidized state. This is very important because it's that coenzyme Q couple where ROS are in fact generated in the first place …

Ketones are clean fuel only in the sense that they suppress the formation of ROS, especially when blood sugar levels are low, because if you have very high ketones AND high blood sugar, you have ketoacidosis, which is a life-threatening event."

Do Not Confuse Nutritional Ketosis With Ketoacidosis

Nutritional ketosis should NOT be confused with diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), which is not a concern unless you have Type 1 diabetes. It's rare for a person with normal physiology to elevate their ketones above 7 or 8 millimole (mmol). If you have DKA, your ketones will be about 20 mmol. Additionally, your blood sugars will be very high, while in nutritional ketosis blood sugars are very low. These are clearly two entirely different states.

And whereas ketoacidosis can be life threatening, nutritional ketosis is a healthy state that helps you maintain maximum energy efficiency and reduces ROS production in your body. As noted by Seyfried, "Mitochondria actually get very healthy when ketones are metabolized as opposed to some of the other fuels, especially glucose."

For the last few decades, most natural health enthusiasts would attempt to circumvent the ROS challenge by taking antioxidants, either through foods high in polyphenols and other natural antioxidants, or supplements. I now believe this is a fatally flawed strategy that has significant drawbacks.

Rather than trying to quell the ROS after they're produced, it's far more effective to address the ROS generation at its source, which is the fuel your body is primarily burning for energy. Change the fuel, from sugar to fat, and you will generate fewer ROS.

Ketones Prevent Dysregulated ROS Production

It's not that ketones don't generate any ROS; they do, just not as much. And this brings us to yet another crucial point. ROS are not merely agents of destruction; they're also powerful signaling molecules. If you suppress them indiscriminately, you'll create biological dysfunction.

So you do not want to eliminate them. You just want to control them to optimal levels so all the signaling can occur without damage. That's what happens with ketones. When your body is burning ketones as its primary fuel, you more or less ensure that you're in an ideal therapeutic window with regard to ROS generation, so you have neither too much nor too little ROS.

"There's no question about that. It's what we call a homeostatic state," Seyfried notes."Ketones prevent dysregulated ROS production … You're allowing your body to remain healthier for a longer period of time. That's basically what we're doing here … Cancer is accelerated entropy. It's a total disorganization of the homeostatic parameters within cells and outside the cells in the morphogenetic field and in the entire body itself.

Cancer patients have all kinds of disturbances in systemic homeostasis. It's not just in the cells … When the body has cancer there are a number of ramifications that take place throughout the body.

We're producing more acidity. There are a lot of responses in the part of hormones and signaling cascades throughout the body as a result of this disease. One has to treat cancer as a systemic [disease]. The whole body has to be treated but in a nontoxic way."

Indeed, toxicity is one of the biggest failures of current treatment protocols for cancer. The majority of treatments for cancer are extremely toxic, which further exacerbates the problem. Many cancer recurrences are likely due to the initial treatment.

On the other hand, when you view cancer as a metabolic disease, you can target and manage the disease without creating systemic toxicity. As explained by Seyfried, you do this by targeting the fuels the cancer cells are using, primarily glucose and glutamine.

"What we have to recognize … is that if cancer is a mitochondrial metabolic disease and you get cancer because of mitochondrial failure in certain populations of cells and certain tissues, if you prevent your mitochondria from entering into this dysfunctional state … [then] the probability of getting cancer is going to be significantly reduced.

To what percent? I would say a minimum of 80%. Cancer is probably, as I said in my book, one of the most manageable diseases that we know of …

The problem is that many people don't want [to take the preventive steps to avoid cancer]. They're like, 'I have to therapeutically fast for a week? Oh, I'm not going to. Give me a break' … An effective prevention is to eat less and move more. A lot of people don't want to do that … Once you realize what cancer is, that it's a metabolic disease, you can take charge of those kinds of things. In other words, getting cancer is not God's will. It's not bad luck."

Most Disease Is Rooted in Mitochondrial Dysfunction

Cancer is not the only outcome when mitochondrial respiration goes awry. This kind of dysfunction also plays a role in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

It's also at play in seizure disorders and in diabetes, obesity, hypertension and hypercholesterolemia. Most of the major diseases we're currently treating with harsh and toxic drugs can potentially be solved with proper nutritional intervention that addresses your choice of cellular fuels.

How exactly do you do that? According to Seyfried, in order to achieve nutritional ketosis, you need to reduce net carbohydrates (total carbs minus fiber) to less than 100 grams, probably less than 50 grams. I have a slightly different view on this, which I'll expound on in the next section.

You also need to reduce your amino acid content. Glutamine is the most common amino acid in proteins, and besides glucose, cancer cells can use glutamine for energy and growth as well. The combination of both glucose and glutamine creates a really "supercharged system," Seyfried notes.

In order to lower glutamine, you have to eat less protein. Also, there's a threshold for amino acids, above which you will simply stimulate the mTOR pathway, which in conjunction with insulin may wield a more powerful influence on mitochondrial dysfunction and mitochondrial biogenesis than insulin alone.

How to Assess the Health of Your Mitochondria

How can you assess the health of your mitochondria? There are a couple of ways of doing this. Seyfried has published a paper on the glucose ketone index calculator³ (GKIC) in an open access journal, which can be accessed by anyone. You can use that calculator to assess the health and vitality of your mitochondria.

The GKIC looks at your glucose to ketone ratio. Ketones must be measured by blood, not urine, and your glucose must be entered in mmol, not in milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). "When you have a glucose ratio of 1.0 or below, you know your mitochondria are in a very healthy zone," Seyfried says.

Now, getting down to a 1.0 is quite difficult. I'm typically between 2 and 3, and my diet is about 80% healthy fats with minimal net carbs. You may need to do a complete fast in order to get that low. However, you don't need to remain in that ultralow zone for very long. On the other hand, if you have cancer, you'll want to hit that mark as much as possible.

"You do a water fast for about three to four days, then you can take some exogenous ketones, and you can get your blood sugars way down," Seyfried says. "To prevent cancer, you don't have to stay there [longer than] four or five days every six months or something like this. It's just a guide," Seyfried says.

"Some people can get into these zones very quickly and very easily. Other people really struggle. All of this is a biomarker gauge. We've done some interesting linear regression analysis on survivability of mice with cancer using the GKIs, the independent variable, the glucose-ketone index.

There definitely is statistical relationship on how long you can keep your GKI [and] how long you can survive with a very aggressive cancer. Clearly, it's just one biomarker system that allows individuals to help battle their own cancer."

Therapeutic Ketosis Made Simpler With a Nutrient Tracker

That strategy will likely be too extreme for most folks, unless you're faced with death or otherwise highly motivated. Rather than doing lengthy water fasting, I believe a more user-friendly strategy would be to restrict your net carbs below 50 grams per day and your protein to below 1 gram per kilogram of lean body mass. Most people eat a lot more net carbs and protein than that.

To make sure you're actually meeting these targets you need an analytical tool to do a detailed nutritional analysis of what you're eating. Otherwise, you really don't know how much fat, carbs and protein you're getting. This was my motivation for working with the developer of https://ift.tt/PcVm4nh, an online nutrient tracker, to create a Mercola version of the software programmed specifically for nutritional ketosis.

You can sign up and use Cronometer.com/Mercola for free. This software will make all the calculations for you, based on the parameters you enter, such as your height, weight, body fat percentage and waist circumference. You can also enter and track various biomarkers, such as fasting glucose, which is an essential measurement.

You really must keep tabs on your fasting blood sugar. Ideally, you would measure it twice a day; first thing in the morning and right before you go to bed. You want to get your blood sugar below 70 mg/dL, ideally somewhere around 60.

If your fasting blood sugar is significantly higher in the morning than in the afternoon, it's likely due to glucogenesis, which is a sign you're not getting enough protein. You need a certain amount of amino acids or else your body will start to metabolize lean body tissue to generate them. In that process, the excess gets shuttled to your liver, which is what generates the extra glucose (hence the elevated reading in the absence of food).

More Information

If you really want to dig deep into the details of therapeutic ketosis, read Seyfried's book, "Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer." If you want to start with a shorter treatise, you can read through his paper, "Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: Implications for Novel Therapeutics," published in the journal Carcinogenesis in 2014,⁴ or his 2015 paper in the journal Frontiers.

Hopefully, we've inspired you to consider the nutritional roots of cancer and other chronic disease. I can promise you will hear a lot more about this in the months and years to come, as I am convinced addressing mitochondrial dysfunction is the real key to solving most of our current health problems.

The good news is that optimizing mitochondrial function can be effectively accomplished through diet and lifestyle strategies like exercise. No costly drugs or invasive procedures required.

And, while we still have a long way to go, more doctors are starting to pay attention. "This is the tipping point," Seyfried says. "Many physicians are coming on board. I think things are going to start changing for the best and for the success of people."

Too many people have died and continue to die needlessly. It's time to get back on the right track. It's going to require a lot of education, but the effort is absolutely worth it. The information about how to prevent cancer and other chronic illness already exists. It's just a matter of applying it.

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