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01/08/22

Pam Popper is the president of Wellness Forum Health and cofounder of Make Americans Free Again, which plays a significant role in the fight to help preserve American freedoms. An important part of that task is building a powerful community and, as noted by Popper, “COVID has brought some people together who probably should know each other better,” and that includes us.

Popper and I are aligned with respect to our desire to educate the public about fundamental health principles, including foundational basics for preventing and treating COVID-19.

We are also in agreement that the COVID pandemic is a cover for something else entirely — a global takeover by powerful and profit-hungry interests. And finally, we both agree that participating in protest marches and signing petitions doesn’t really achieve much, and that there are far more effective strategies, as she has demonstrated.

COVID Operation

In 2020, Popper published the book “COVID Operation: What Happened, Why It Happened, and What’s Next,” which she wrote with financial and private wealth adviser Shane Prier, in which they detail the backstory behind the COVID-19 hoax.

“The background on the situation is my company, Wellness Forum Health, is about 27 years old, and our niche is informed medical decision making. In other words, we don't tell people what to do. [We teach people] how to make decisions about health the way they make decisions about cars and houses and retirement accounts and other things that are important to them ...

Now, the medical profession has become the Wild West. Medical journals are filled with inaccurate information. So, we added ... rules for filtering evidence, and we teach people the rules. The rules are things like: Conflicts of interest have to be considered.

We have to understand the difference between a correlation, and a cause and effect relationship, [and] something that is statistically significant but clinically meaningless. You get the idea.

If you're looking at a lot of information, you have to filter it based on rules, just like you have to play football based on rules ... So, for 27 years, I've been talking about the problems in health care, which is [that] nobody abides by any rules. There isn't any informed decision making. Doctors tell people to do things and they say, ‘OK, that's called consenting.’

But that's not consenting at all, in my opinion. And so, a lot of my research really was based on [that], and the books I wrote revealed the incompetence of big medicine, big food, big pharma, some of the criminal intentions, and that this [the COVID scam] isn't new, it's just a bigger version of it.

The second week in March of 2020, I knew what this was because I had covered fake pandemics in the past. There was one in the 1950s, there was one in the 1970s, another one in 2009. These are just the big ones that got a lot of attention. So, I knew what this was. I do some business in China; I knew what they were up to.

So, I put out this very controversial [video report]. I didn't think it was going to be controversial. I was just reporting the news, which I had done on video twice a week for [years].

Instead of the usual few dozen responses, I got 3,500 responses to this video and they included death threats and hysteria — ‘You're going to be responsible for killing people’ — the whole 9 yards. And I thought, wow, this is just something else. So that's how this all started.

If you go back and watch that original video, I said that this took place in China, they did it deliberately, that they had reasons and motivations for doing this, that this was a fake pandemic and the end game was forced vaccination. It was a 15-minute video, but that was the bottom line. And unfortunately, it turned out to all be true. I wish I'd been wrong about it.

As [the pandemic] went on, I just kept doing more and more research, posting more and more videos. And at some point, probably late spring or early summer, I realized the breadth and depth of this whole thing and knew that they were never going to stop, and we had to do something about it. That's when we formed Make Americans Free Again.”

Litigation Efforts

One of the primary ways in which Make Americans Free Again is fighting the tyranny is by filing lawsuits against mask and COVID jab mandates. She explains:

“We have three branches of government, and the executive branch — with very few exceptions, for example, Ron DeSantis in Florida — has gone completely rogue. They now operate as emperors and empresses, rulers over their people. So, you can't deal with those people. The legislatures up until recently have been fairly useless.

The only reason they're doing anything now is really to protect themselves, in my opinion, not because they're looking out for people. So, you have one branch of government left, which is the courts. We [knew] we were going to have to use that in order to a) get our freedoms back and b) go after these people for what they did, which is committing fraud and hurting and killing people.”

By early summer 2020, a slew of lawsuits had been filed across the U.S. Unfortunately, it was highly uncoordinated. People weren’t thinking things through. There was no cohesive strategy, and that was their downfall, Popper says. She estimates some 6,000 lawsuits have failed in court, causing many to give up on the judicial system as well. Not Popper, though.

“We've been winning in court and I'll tell you how in a minute. But it is better to stop, think and [then] do something. Less activity, more deliberately performed, is a better idea.

Interestingly enough, I heard from this lawyer in Florida who had made the same observation as me. This hurry up and file strategy isn't working, so why don't we look at these lawsuits and figure out what they're doing wrong? And this is very, very important for anybody listening to this who just wants to hurry up and file.

What people were doing was filing the lawsuit against the government saying, ‘You are violating our constitutional rights.’ And you know what the government would say? ‘Oh, we know we are, but we don't have any choice because it's an emergency.’ And then the judge would rule in the government's favor.

We filed the very first lawsuit challenging the emergency declaration itself in Ohio, accusing our governor of fraud. We said, ‘There is no emergency. You declared this fraudulently, and therefore all the actions that you've taken are not warranted.’ And the thing that I think people don't realize, not living in Ohio, is that we were the model state.

People think it's California [or] New York, but we were the first to shut down, first to close the schools, first to cancel events, first to close bars and restaurants. Why is that? Because the criminals behind this needed a very popular conservative governor who could do well on Fox and CNBC and MSNBC. Every Sunday, our little criminal was the toast of the Washington shows. He was so responsible, taking care of his people.

By the time we filed our lawsuit on August 31 [2020], we knew a second shutdown was coming. By this point in time, we had some intelligence coming from government employees and that sort of thing. We never got locked down a second time.

We won when we filed, because we avoided the second lockdown. I think that the people behind this told the emperor, DeWine, ‘Let this alone, don’t do something that would make this judge just snap his fingers and order discovery.’ So, we didn't get a shutdown.

The other thing that happened is there was virtually no enforcement of the restrictions that were left in terms of gathering limits and that sort of thing ... Because of that, we thought, OK, this is a good strategy. So, we started doing more of it and we filed several lawsuits in several states.

For those people who don't have confidence in the court, first of all, look at some of the lawsuits that have been filed. They're bad ones. If I was the judge, I would throw them out too, because the judge can't make law. The judge has to go with what the law says.

The second thing is that there are bad judges and bad courts, but our strategy has been to file with a coordinated legal team, because the most important thing they want to avoid, and we've seen this in every lawsuit, is discovery, because discovery is where we get to depose Mr. Fauci; discovery is where the CDC has to give us the documents. I don't need them 36 times. I need them one time and then the whole legal team gets them.

One judge in the United States of America someplace is going to give us discovery. I can't talk about where, but we think that's in the process of happening right now in one of the court cases, and then everybody will [have that information].”

Progress Report

Cases Make Americans Free Again have won include one in which they represented the New York City police. They won an injunction until trial on the COVID jab mandate for the police force. In Florida, their attorney won a lawsuit against the City of Gainesville, which was implementing a “vaccinate or terminate” policy.

They’ve also seen general changes in behavior as a result of these and other lawsuits. “We've put the criminals on notice that now judges are watching, so everything you do is subject to being hauled back into court and saying, ‘Look at what these people are doing.’” Popper says.

Across the U.S., they’re challenging the emergency orders, demanding the state prove there’s an actual emergency afoot. So far, none has been able to provide any evidence that COVID-19 is a public health emergency. Instead of proving an emergency exists, state defense lawyers have spent all their energy on motions to have the cases thrown out.

In Ohio, Popper feels they have been successful by applying pressure on the governor through the courts. DeWine converted the Ohio State Fair to a virtual event, and it appeared that he was planning to restrict or cancel big summer events. But in what many people considered a surprise, he lifted the emergency declaration and made Ohio a free state. We’ll never know, but it might have been because our case was still pending in court. We then withdrew it because we got our way.

Popper is also planning to make some still yet unrevealed announcements. “We're getting ready for some really wonderful first of the year surprises for the criminals in charge,” she says, “so stay tuned.”

Rampant Lawlessness

Of course, they’re now trying to convince everyone that Omicron is a lethal threat, hence the emergency powers must remain in place, but even in the absence of a clear threat — as many now see through the fearmongering — they’re likely to keep pushing for more restrictions, vaccine passports, mask mandates and everything else. As noted by Popper:

“They don't seem to require any justification for anything, they just do what they want. We've degenerated to living in a completely lawless society where people get up every morning and decide what they're going to do, much the way that communist leaders and totalitarian dictators do.

I mean, our government resembles more the government of China or North Korea than it does what we used to have. So, I don't think that they really need to justify the emergency use authorization. If they decide they're going to do it, they'll just do it, and they've stopped giving reasons.

To that point, I thought it was very interesting when Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, said, ‘We're going to cut the quarantine back to five days because that's about all we can get people to do.’ So, in other words, our new policy is as much tyranny as the public will swallow.

She also made a stunning admission that their research showed that the compliance with quarantine was less than 30%. That goes to what I've been saying all along, which is that the resistance is much bigger than most people realize.

This is certainly what I'm experiencing building our organization. They do a great job of making it look like everybody's on board, but everybody's not on board. And I still contend that the vaccination rate is very, very low. I think they can't even get to 60%. It was under 50% last summer. I was able to prove it with their data ...

The compliance rate has been exaggerated and it was all a mirage to try and get people to say, ‘Well, if everybody else is doing it, I'll do it too. It must be OK,’ because at that point in time, last summer, people didn't know a lot of people who'd been injured or died. I think everybody knows somebody who's been injured or died from this now.”

The number of parents refusing to jab their children is also a clear majority. According to Popper, parents have taken their children out of schools that mandate the COVID jabs, and some schools have had to reverse course as a result. Case in point: The Los Angeles school system dropped the COVID jab requirement when they realized they had 30,000 unvaccinated students and if they all left, the whole school system would cease to exist.

“Even The New York Times covered a school in Brooklyn that had eight teachers with nobody to teach,” Popper says. “That's the level of resistance.” Meanwhile, media are trying their best to make it seem as though compliance is high across the board. She recounts one example, where a local paper claimed compliance with the mask mandate was nearly 100%, when wherever you went, the vast majority were maskless.

“So that is the level of propaganda. All you have to do is walk into a store and know that there is no compliance. And then the newspaper, obviously, that was a preprint sent to them a long time ago, [telling them that] at such and such a time, you're supposed to publish this. It's just laughable.”

Building Community and Parallel Societies

Popper has also made great strides in community building, which I believe is a crucial strategy for safeguarding our freedoms in the long term. This was a natural outgrowth of the legal work. They realized they needed a lot of people to contribute funds, so they needed to connect with people who were willing to pitch in to save our freedoms.

“We had the first meeting in my office last summer and there were five people there — me and two people who I work with, and two guests. And so, we agreed to do it next week, and those two people brought people. And something happened that I did not plan. I'm going to be very honest about this. I'd love to tell you that I preconceived all of this and then acted on it.

But people would come into the meeting and they would have that shell-shocked look — like my church is closed, my neighbor's not speaking to me, I'm realizing what's going on with my kids, it's ridiculous. The organizations I used to be involved with, they don't exist anymore.

And so now they're starting to make friends, and people who have their kids at home are starting to connect with each other, and all this kind of stuff. And I had this epiphany one night. The No. 1 thing these people don't want us to do is congregate, which means the most important thing for us to do is congregate.

So, that was the beginning of building not only the body of people it would take to fund what we need to do, but what I call the Make Americans Free Again parallel society. A year and a half later, we now start a new group every three or four hours in the United States. I'm not kidding. They're all over all 50 states. They're everywhere.

Here's the way this works. It is a parallel society, so, the first thing is, everything you need, you can get your group. People found out that there were churches that didn’t close, because none of this gets advertised. You try to stay under the radar screen. So, churches that were not closed, you could go there and you didn’t have to wear a mask.

People found doctors, dentists that didn’t make you wear a mask ... So, we lived a parallel life. During the worst of everything in Ohio, our people lived a pretty normal life. We had a fundraiser with 400 people when the gathering limits were 10, because we knew where to do it. One of the members of our group owned a place where we could do it.

People have also found new jobs ... It is a very much cloistered society where we do business with one another. We homeschool our kids together, we pool our resources to fund these lawsuits, our social life is together.

We did this program called Small Business Rescue where we would support businesses in our community. The government doesn’t have any plan for these people, so we buy local, we support them. So, it is a parallel society.”

Make Americans Free Again societies are also looking for and finding doctors who are operating cash practices (so they’re not reporting to or taking orders from anybody) and who will provide early treatment for COVID.

“So, everything you need, you get from your group ... and I can tell you right now, I can say this with a great deal of confidence, if I needed something, a place to live, if I didn’t have any food, if I needed money, if I needed medical care, if I needed a job, you know where I get that?

From my Thursday Group and the Thursday Group network. [Editor’s note: It’s called Thursday Group because the group meets on Thursdays.] This is what is missing. If this had all been in place [before the pandemic], they could never have done this to us. They took advantage of the fact that society’s quite fractured, that you don’t have these local connections.

People beat me up sometimes a little bit. ‘Why won’t you let people have Zoom meetings?’ Here’s why. If we need to save a business in Worthington, Ohio, somebody in Portland, Oregon can’t help us do that. You can’t eat at this restaurant every week and support them. It has to be local, local, and it has to be in person.”

2022 Prognosis

In the interview, Popper describes the many homeschooling benefits and successes members are reporting, which is profoundly encouraging. Overall, the community building, the parallel structures being created across the U.S. give her an optimistic outlook on the future. They’re proof positive that the whole takeover agenda is backfiring on the technocratic deep state.

“I’m optimistic with a qualifier,” she says. “I always want people to understand that I understand the gravity of the situation. If you have a spouse in the hospital right now who’s being slaughtered with ventilators and remdesivir, my rosy prognosis might strike you like nails on a chalkboard.

I want people to know the reason I get up every morning — the reason I invest so much of my own money and time, and I’ve risked my own life to do this — is to make that right.

Having said that, with that disclaimer, my outlook for this year is really positive and optimistic. The reason I say that is [because] we have a quantifiable enemy. We know what they’re up to. I am watching them scramble and fail. There is only one reason why they would be issuing all these edicts and Biden would say something like, ‘I’m losing patience’ ... is because they’re not getting their way.

I think the best example of that is the CDC walking back the recommendations on the quarantine, because we just can’t get people to do it. It’s a stunning admission really to the public. So, I think this is going to be a year when this goes away.

Even the Israeli government is saying we’re going to make everybody get a fourth shot, but maybe we’re just going to have to let everybody go out and mingle and get some herd immunity. There is an awakening of the government that they need to change course ...

I like an enemy that’s on the defensive. It’s gone from the offensive to the defensive. That means, and I’ll give you another caveat, that there are probably more horrifying things in store as they flail about and try to hang onto their power.

A couple things I’ll recommend. Scott Atlas was a speaker at our conference this last year and he’s the former adviser to President Trump. He wrote a book called ‘A Plague Upon Our House.’ It’s a horrifying book, mainly because he reveals the stupidity and ineptitude of people like Fauci and Birx.

Atlas told us that Fauci can't even pronounce medical terms properly and Birx doesn't understand statistics. Most eighth graders have a better grasp of math than she does. What people like that do is they flail about when they are failing because they don’t have the skill set to do anything else ... So we're going to see some of that kind of behavior, but at the end of the day, this time next year, I think we will be in an entirely different situation.

A lot of our freedoms will be restored and a lot of the nonsense will go away. Then it just is a matter of spending the rest of our lives, just like we've done with the Nazis, tracking these people down and making them pay for what they did. And believe it or not, last fall, they were trying a 100-year-old Nazi in Berlin for what he did. So, it'll be the same thing. We'll be looking for them in South America, in China and every place else to bring them to justice.”

How to Start Your Own ‘Thursday Group’

For liability and other reasons, Make Americans Free Again cannot connect you with already existing groups. You have to start your own, which is what they teach you. Popper explains:

“It's easy. We provide everything you need. My email address is pampopper@msn.com. You can email me. I hold conference calls every week during which I share our entire strategy and tell people how to get started working with us ... Get engaged with us, donate money if you can.

Do what you need to do to keep yourself in a positive frame of mind, and starting a group and gathering a group of like-minded people is important ... We can go from having felt quite powerless to being the most powerful people in the country, if we're smart about it.

You start with one other person. People forget, I'm leading a group with hundreds of thousands of people, but it started with two guests. So, you just start with somebody who sees things the way you do. We give you a meeting format. We have training programs for our meeting leaders.

We have meeting leader conference calls every other week. We have a meeting leader coordinator in the office ... Every Thursday, we send out the update, what the agenda is going to be, here's the video you're going to show, so nobody has to spend all day researching what am I going to talk about. We follow the same format every week, so we make it as easy as possible. And that's how you start.

I heard a lot from people when this all began, ‘I don't know anybody and it's too hard, this is outside of my comfort zone.’ The longer this has gone on, the more people have said, ‘What's going on is so far outside of my comfort zone that starting this group seems like it's easy by comparison.’ So, I promise you, if you do this, we'll support you in every way possible, and you can't mess it up if you just follow our format.

We have a strategy that means we win at stuff. We don't take on things that don't result in winning. For example, I don't have any particular objection to petitions and declarations, but I haven't seen them solve this.

The Great Barrington Declaration got half a million signatures and tens of thousands were doctors and well-respected health professionals. It did nothing. Great statement, but it doesn't change anything.

The biggest protests in the world are in Germany and Australia. Take a look over there, that doesn't change anything. Protests are great for people to get together, but when you promise people that it's going to make a difference and it doesn't, it demoralizes them.

We have people who are demoralized. They need to feel like they're winning, and when people come to our groups, what they see is winning. You save a business, you win. You get a kid out of school, you win. You raise money and file a lawsuit, you win. Winning is what we need for people to feel good. Getting them involved in more stuff that results in failure, not so good. So, we're really focused and disciplined.”

More Information

I really encourage you to consider creating your own Thursday Group. To do that, send an email to Popper at pampopper@msn.com and ask to be added to her weekly conference call.

For more information, you can also visit www.Makeamericansfreeagain.com. Even if you don’t start your own group, consider making a tax-deductible donation to The Wellness Forum Foundation, a 501c3 organization, which pays for Make Americans Free Again’s legal expenses. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the Donation link.)



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This article was previously published August 16, 2020, and has been updated with new information.

Siim Land has written an excellent book called "Metabolic Autophagy: Practice Intermittent Fasting and Resistance Training to Build Muscle and Promote Longevity."1 It's a valuable synergetic companion to my book, "Fat for Fuel," as it delves into some areas I did not cover. It compiles and presents all the basic science you need to know in a digestible format.

Here, we discuss Land’s latest book, "Stronger by Stress: Adapt to Beneficial Stressors to Improve Your Health and Strengthen the Body,"2 which came out in July 2020. It reviews the really important concepts of hormesis and antifragility.

"Part of the reason I wrote the book was to help people become more resilient and more robust, because the world we live in is full of unpredictable challenges," Land says.

"Pandemics and viruses are part of them, but there's also other potential dangers like global warming or fluctuations in temperature, different kinds of physical challenges that have been a part of the human condition for eons.

The modern human has become somewhat more fragile towards those things, and this kind of goes to show why most people just overreacted to the coronavirus and were really scared.

The book itself was meant to create more resilient people in the face of these unavoidable challenges of life, because you can't really avoid them. You can't create this bubble society where everything is perfect. We all come across different kinds of stressors all the time."

Stronger by Stress

As it pertains to COVID-19, evidence suggests if you can get two key variables right — a vitamin D level of at least 30 ng/mL (75 nmol/L) and metabolic flexibility — your chances of getting sick from SARS-CoV-2 infection are fairly remote. But improving your resilience against stress is also important.

"If your body is unfit or lacking key nutrients, then even the smaller stressors in your life are going to become more dreadful. You're going to experience chronic stress, and you're going to overactivate the sympathetic nervous system, even if you're stuck in traffic or if you spill a cup of coffee or whatever it is.

These small stressors can become really massive if your body is incapable of dealing with those stressors. On the other hand, if your body has been exposed to the right amount of stress at the right time, then it has also built up this higher level of stress adaptation and resilience. So, the small stressors are becoming literally meaningless. You have a bigger capacity to face even the larger stressors."

What Is Antifragility?

Antifragility is a term coined by economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, "Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder." The term describes a state that is the opposite of fragility. Antifragility describes how stress makes you stronger rather than breaking you down or apart.

"[Antifragility] isn't precisely the same thing as robustness or resilience," Land says. "Something that is robust is something like a piece of stone or a metal. You can heat it, you can drop it on the ground. It's not going to break, but it's going to stay the same, it's not going to change, whereas something that is antifragile is going to gain from the stress."

Time-Restricted Eating Builds Antifragility

One of Land's favorite tools for health and longevity is intermittent fasting, or more accurately termed, time-restricted eating, and one of the reasons for this is because it allows you to become metabolically flexible and insulin sensitive, which builds your antifragility.

"A [2019] study in the New England Journal of Medicine found intermittent fasting mimics a lot of the same effects of calorie restriction. It can actually be somewhat more beneficial because it not only has life extension benefits, but it also turns on certain key defensive mechanisms inside a body that make it more antifragile and also provide additional health benefits.

One of those things has to do with autophagy, but there's also things like increased glutathione, increased NRF2, sirtuins and NAD and many other longevity-boosting and immune-strengthening pathways that get activated when you're fasting that don't necessarily get activated when you are restricting calories."

So, time-restricted eating is a great way to get the benefits of calorie restriction without experiencing the negative side effects from it, because extreme and prolonged calorie restriction can also leave you vulnerable and more fragile by triggering muscle loss, for example.

That will actually shorten your life span and make you more vulnerable to potential dangers in your environment, such as falling and breaking your hip. Intermittent fasting can sidestep these negative side effects.

Time-Restricted Eating for Muscle Building

A persistent question surrounding intermittent fasting is what the best strategy is. Should you eat just once a day, or can you get away with two or more meals as long as you eat it all within a certain time window? And, if so, how long can that window be? Land comments:

"I think there isn't inherently much difference between eating one meal a day or doing the 16-to-8 type of intermittent fasting where you eat twice a day within eight hours because, already, if you're fasting within one 24-hour period, then the fast itself isn't substantially different. The amount of autophagy wouldn't matter that much either in such a short timeframe, as long as you're still healthy."

Now, if your intention is to build muscle, having two meals a day within a six- to eight-hour window would make more sense. Having just one meal a day is likely better if you are seeking to lose weight, but might be challenging.

This is likely for the simple reason that you're only going to build muscle when you activate mTOR, and to activate mTOR you need to introduce protein and leucine or branched-chain amino acids, along with some healthy carbohydrates.

If you eat twice, six hours apart, you can activate mTOR twice a day, thus allowing you to get better muscle-building benefits. As explained by Land:

"What determines your muscle growth throughout the 24-hour period is the balance between mTOR stimulation and autophagy. So, if you're eating only once a day, then the amount of mTOR stimulation is relatively small compared to eating twice a day or three times a day.

That's why if someone has the goal of increasing their muscle mass, maintaining muscle mass or preventing sarcopenia, then for them it is much wiser to incorporate more frequent meals. For them I would say that a 16-to-8 type of fasting where they eat twice a day is perfectly suitable, and is actually better than the one meal a day.

It becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain muscle mass if you're already predisposed to sarcopenia and you're eating once a day, because there's a threshold of how much mTOR you can stimulate per meal, and how much muscle protein synthesis you can create per meal as well. It doesn't have to mean that you start eating six times a day. Increasing the eating window is generally a better idea.

For most people, I would say that the 16-to-8 type of fasting, where they fast for 16 hours and eat within eight hours, is a really good balance between getting a daily stimulation in autophagy, while at the same time also stimulating enough mTOR and being able to build muscle."

I found this advice personally helpful as I was pushing my eating window to four hours, but after Land related this commonsense strategy, I extended it to six to eight hours, which actually is easier on the kidneys. Also, as noted by Land, pushing your eating window to be excessively narrow can backfire and slow down your metabolism.

In the context of stress adaptation and antifragility, if your body becomes too accustomed to the fasting because you're eating only one meal a day all the time, then that can eventually slow down your metabolism and lower thyroid functioning. This in turn makes you more prone to insulin resistance, which is exactly what you're trying to avoid by eating just once a day.

Carbs Aren't All Bad

While carbs have gotten a bad rap, they are still an important part of your diet. In fact, when you're seeking to stimulate mTOR, carbs may be just as important as protein, because insulin secretion is a powerful activator of mTOR.

I believe carb cycling can be highly beneficial in this respect. If you're chronically low-carb, it will provide you with significant benefits initially, but long-term, it can backfire. Land explains:

"Carbs can be useful for muscle growth, but they're not a necessary part of it. You can stimulate mTOR and build muscle with protein only … but the insulin is still a very powerful anabolic hormone and it does help. It is possible to build muscle with a low carb or a ketogenic diet, but at the same time carbs can be also useful.

I do believe that chronic ketosis isn't necessarily the best solution either, especially for metabolic flexibility because there are a lot of studies showing that chronic ketosis can eventually lead to insulin resistance or some mild forms of it …

I believe a more flexible approach is better in the long-term because you're able to still use both. You're still able to become a fat burner while at the same time you don't become insulin resistant towards carbs either, and you can incorporate both.

In practice that would mean that people can do some form of cyclical keto diet, where they eat keto on some days but also incorporate some days where they eat more carbs to kick themselves out of ketosis, as well as break this mild insulin resistance that may develop. I myself like to eat keto on days where I'm not working out.

So, on my rest days where I don't have a lot of physical activity, then it's perfect to stay in ketosis and eat low carb because my body isn't burning that many carbs for fuel either, whereas on days where I do high-intensity training or some resistance training, or on days when I want to really stimulate mTOR, and on those days, I'll just have more carbs because the body uses carbs and glycogen during a workout.

If you eat carbs after a workout, then the body is already primed to use those carbs more efficiently instead of storing them as fat or instead of developing diabetes from it. So, it's a perfect time to strategize or time your carbohydrate intake around your exercise.

Your body is the most insulin sensitive after a workout because the muscle contractions activate the glucose transporter GLUT4. Then you don't even need insulin to shuttle carbs into muscle cells either. So that's why having some carbs around a workout itself won't necessarily be harmful as long as you are still metabolically flexible and you have metabolic health."

Land's explanation above caused me to change my own carb cycling to a more optimal schedule. While nothing is set in stone and listening to your body is important, if you are not insulin resistant, I believe cycling in carbs once or twice a week and remaining low-carb, below 50 grams per day, the rest of the week is a good strategy, as nutritional ketosis has so many profound metabolic benefits.

That said, if you're already insulin resistant, as 90% of the population is, or diabetic, then adding carbs will be counterproductive, so it's important to assess your individual situation. If your metabolic flexibility is already good, then being on a restrictive low-carb diet isn't really necessary anymore.

Hydroxy Methylbutyrate

One excellent reminder in Land's book is the importance of hydroxy methylbutyrate (HMB), a metabolite of the branched-chain amino acid leucine, which is the most potent stimulator of mTOR. To activate mTOR and boost muscle protein synthesis, you need a significant quantity of leucine, at least 3 grams.

I have kidney damage from mercury poisoning that limits me from eating high amounts of protein. The beautiful thing about HMB is it doesn't stress the kidneys. After reading "Stronger by Stress," I started adding HMB to my breakfast as I wasn't getting the minimum dose of leucine needed to activate mTOR. Since then, I've noticed a significant change in my body's ability to create more muscle mass. Land comments:

"Using leucine or HMB can be really useful for getting more protein synthesis from less protein. You can get away with eating less protein and still getting the benefits of the mTOR stimulation. But I would say that leucine itself could be better than HMB by itself.

HMB has some anticatabolic effects, but most of those effects are mediated by leucine and mTOR itself. You could use both, but if you want to get more benefits from the mTOR and muscle growth, then leucine is probably more important than HMB."

The Benefits of Heat-Shock and Cold-Shock Proteins

"Stronger by Stress" also delves into the science of heat-shock proteins and cold-shock proteins, activated by exposure to heat and cold respectively. Heat-shock proteins repair misfolded proteins and RNA, increase glutathione and promote autophagy, among other things.

Cold-shock proteins also activate antioxidant defense mechanisms, and lower inflammation and oxidative stress. Born and raised in Estonia, Land is familiar with the cold, and embraces cold exposure for its physical conditioning and mental toughness benefits.

"If you are habitually engaging in cold exposure throughout the entire year, then the winter itself becomes a piece of cake. It becomes less stressful on yourself and it becomes less damaging. You're able to adapt to it faster than normal people.

If you're constantly using central heating or you're using the heating in your car and you're never really exposed to the cold for any longer than a few minutes, then you're missing out on the benefits of the cold shock proteins. You're also making your body more vulnerable and more fragile, back to the original point that we talked about.

So that's why I do it. The mental aspect is also really great. I used to take a cold shower every morning, and it really helped me develop more self-discipline and self-control.

The rationale for me was that if I'm able to start the day with a cold shower, then anything else for the rest of the day is going to be that much easier because I already climbed over this initial challenge."

Muscle Building Is Essential to Avoid Sarcopenia

In the interview, Land reviews some of his recommendations for high-intensity resistance training, such as doing multiple sets, split training and other strategies that are also covered in his book. As noted by Land, maintaining muscle and keeping physically active are probably two of the best things you can do to extend both your life span and health span.

Age-related muscle loss, called sarcopenia, is a significant threat to health that virtually no one can escape. Use it or lose it applies here, and muscle is far easier to lose than gain, and it’s lost much faster than you can build it.

For this reason, I strongly recommend strength training for all ages, especially the elderly. The good news is you can effectively build muscle without risking injury from heavy loads by using blood flow restriction (BFR) training. In Japan, where the technique was developed, it's known as KAATSU. You can learn more about the fascinating history of BFR in my interview with Steven Munatones, who brought this fitness system to the U.S.

It's important to realize that sarcopenia is not just cosmetic, and it's not just about frailty. Your muscle tissue, which makes up about half of your body's tissues, is a metabolic organ, an endocrine organ. Your muscle tissue makes cytokines and myokines, and is a sink for glucose.

Insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes accelerate sarcopenia, and research shows glucose fluctuations are independently associated with this condition. As noted in one 2019 study,3 "glucose fluctuations were significantly associated with a low muscle mass, low grip strength, and slow walking speed."

The effectiveness of BFR for the prevention and reversal of muscle wasting is directly addressed in an April 2019 study4 in the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle:

"Muscle wasting leads to significant decrements in muscle strength, cardiorespiratory, and functional capacity, which increase mortality rates. As a consequence, different interventions have been tested to minimize muscle wasting.

In this regard, blood flow restriction (BFR) has been used as a novel therapeutic approach to mitigate the burden associated with muscle waste conditions.

Evidence has shown that BFR per se can counteract muscle wasting during immobilization or bed rest. Moreover, BFR has also been applied while performing low intensity resistance and endurance exercises and produced increases in muscle strength and mass.

Endurance training with BFR has also been proved to increase cardiorespiratory fitness. Thus, frail patients can benefit from exercising with BFR due to the lower cardiovascular and join stress compared with traditional high intensity exercises.

Therefore, low intensity resistance and endurance training combined with BFR may be considered as a novel and attractive intervention to counteract muscle wasting and to decrease the burden associated with this condition."

BFR Summary

In brief, BRF involves exercising your muscles while partially restricting arterial inflow and fully restricting venous outflow in either both proximal arms or legs.5

Venous flow restriction is achieved by using thin elastic bands on the extremity being exercised. By restricting the venous blood flow, you create a relatively hypoxic (low oxygen) environment in the exercising muscle, which in turn triggers a number of physiological benefits, including the production of hormones such as growth hormone and IGF-1, commonly referred to as "the fitness hormones."6

It also increases vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which acts as "fertilizer" for growing more blood vessels and improving their lining (endothelium).

I believe BRF is one of the best strategies available to address the epidemic of sarcopenia,7 and for most people who are not competitive athletes it may be the only form of resistance training they need. Land, like me, is a big fan of the KAATSU system,8 and uses it every day.

"If I'm not doing an actual workout with them, then I'll just use the KAATSU cycle, the on and off pressures. So even if I'm not doing an actual exercise with them, then I'll still do the cycle to pump more blood into the muscle and accelerate recovery.

On other days, I'll use [the bands while doing] biceps curls and pushups. With the legs, I'll do squats and lunges, or just regular walking. I really enjoy them and I find that they accelerate recovery. Even if it's not for the exercise performance, I think the cardiovascular effects are still worthwhile."

Bad Fats Are Worse for You Than Sugar

Land also discusses the benefits and importance of omega-3 fats, and the hazard of vegetable oils and oxidized, rancid fats. It's important to realize that both omega-3 and omega-6 oils are integrated into your cell membranes.

While omega-3s make your cell membranes healthier, omega-6 fats from vegetable oils wreak havoc with your cellular metabolism, and have a half-life of 600 to 680 days, as explained in my interview with Dr. Chris Knobbe. I firmly believe, as does Land, that harmful oils and fats are far more hazardous to your health than added sugar and grain carbs.

"The aspect of lipid peroxidation itself is also accelerating aging and causes carcinogenesis and also leads the creation or the accumulation of lipofuscin, which is this age-related wear and tear pigment," Land explains.

"Lipofuscin also begins to cause cellular damage and inhibits autophagy. Again, once you have bad fats stuck inside your cell membranes, then burning fat itself also becomes an inflammatory act.

So, if you are fasting while you have bad fats inside your cell membranes, then you are leaching those same bad fats into your system, and that's why you may get a lot of detox symptoms. You may actually feel worse from fasting or ketosis just because you're burning the wrong fats that are stuck inside your body fat."

One simple way to tell whether you might have a lot of bad fats in your system is to look at your skin. The dark so-called "age spots" or "liver spots" many have are caused by lipofuscin. Those spots can eventually disappear if you clean up your diet.

More Information

We cover a lot of ground in this interview, as we review many of the topics Land covers in his book. For example, we touch on the harmful impact of high iron, which in conjunction with lipid peroxidation is particularly disastrous; the importance of sleep and nose breathing; and how to avoid mouth breathing while asleep.

We also discuss senolytic therapies — strategies that remove senescent (old, damaged) cells, thus providing antiaging benefits. One of the most effective senolytic therapies, in Land's opinion, is intermittent fasting. Cyclical ketosis also helps clear out senescent cells, and certain compounds, such as curcumin, EGCG, quercetin, resveratrol, sulforaphane and allicin have senolytic effects.

Because fasting is a powerful senolytic therapy, these compounds are best taken while you're fasting. So, for example, provided you've eaten your last meal early enough in the evening, take your supplement right before you go to bed. That way, it can work for another several hours while you're sleeping.

Land also discusses how autophagy and nutritional ketosis may help protect against EMF damage. To learn more about all of these topics that we've merely scratched the surface of here, be sure to pick up a copy of "Stronger by Stress,"9 which is a great follow-up to and continuation of "Metabolic Autophagy: Practice Intermittent Fasting and Resistance Training to Build Muscle and Promote Longevity."10 Both are excellent and well worth reading. In closing, Land reminds us:

"It's important to engage in these small stressors that have a hormetic effect on a regular basis because they're not permanent. You're going to lose them if you don't use them. So, if you don't use the sauna, then you're going to lose your ability to tolerate heat. The same applies to exercise, to fasting.

Those things should be a part of your regular lifestyle. They are really beneficial for your overall longevity as well as just resiliency against stress. So, I personally feel that doing intermittent fasting, cold showers, heat exposure — all those things have helped me tolerate stress in other areas of life much better.

I'm able to tolerate stress from work, I'm able to tolerate stress from other people so I don't get triggered or I don't get angry at other people. I'm not stressed out from those things because my stress resiliency is much higher than it is in the average person."



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Scientists have shown in both anxious rats and military veterans with PTSD that acute stress is associated with increased myelination of axons in areas of the brain associated with memory and emotions. These areas in the brain's gray matter are normally only lightly myelinated. Since myelin speeds communication in the brain, the increased myelination may be making some neural circuits hyperresponsive to memories of trauma.

from Top Health News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/3n7vwh2

The U.S Food and Drug Administration approved prescription eye drops, called Vuity, to treat presbyopia, commonly known as age-related farsightedness. People with presbyopia have trouble focusing on objects close up, and it commonly affects people beginning in their early- to mid-40s, progressively worsening until about age 65.1

If you have presbyopia, you may find that you need to hold books farther and farther away in order to see them clearly. The solution, until now, is typically reading glasses, which those affected may keep with them throughout the day — in the kitchen, the car, the office and the bedroom — just to go about their daily activities.

Vuity may change that, offering presbyopia patients an option to see nearby objects clearly without a need for glasses, but it does come with some risks that glasses do not.

Prescription Eye Drops Could Replace Reading Glasses

Vuity is the first FDA-approved eye drop to treat presbyopia in adults. Its active ingredient is pilocarpine HCl ophthalmic solution 1.25%, a muscarinic receptor agonist.2 The drug itself is not new; it's commonly used by eyecare practitioners to lower intraocular pressure, constrict pupils following dilation and treat dry eye.3

For presbyopia, Vuity works by reducing your pupil size. By contracting certain muscles in your eyes, it helps you to focus on nearby objects. "Reducing the pupil size expands the depth of field or the depth of focus, and that allows you to focus at different ranges naturally," Dr. George Waring, the principal investigator for one of Vuity's clinical trials, told CBS News.4

Two phase 3 clinical trials, involving 750 people, compared Vuity to a placebo drop. Although they haven't been published in a peer-reviewed journal, the trials reportedly found that Vuity led to a statistically significant improvement in vision compared to placebo.5

One trial participant told CBS News the eye drops are a "life changer," adding that once she started using them, "I would not need my readers as much, especially on the computer, where I would always need to have them on."6

Vuity is intended to be used once daily, with one drop in each eye.7 It takes effect in about 15 minutes and lasts for six to 10 hours.8 A 30-day supply costs $80 and is said to work best in people aged 40 to 55 years.9

What Are the Signs of Presbyopia?

An estimated 128 million Americans have blurry near vision, most of them aged 40 and older.10 The term presbyopia comes from the Greek word for "old eye," alluding to the fact that many people have trouble seeing close-up objects clearly as they age. As for what causes it, the American Academy of Ophthalmology calls it a normal part of the aging process, explaining:11

"Your clear lens sits inside the eye behind your colored iris. It changes shape to focus light onto the retina so you can see. When you are young, the lens is soft and flexible, easily changing shape. This lets you focus on objects both close-up and far away. After age 40, the lens becomes more rigid. It cannot change shape as easily. This makes it harder to read, thread a needle, or do other close-up tasks."

If you've found that you need to hold reading material farther away in order for the letters to be clear, it's a sign of presbyopia. Other symptoms include blurred vision at a normal reading distance and eyestrain or headaches that occur after you've been reading or doing close-up work. The blurry close-up vision may be worse when you're tired or in a dimly lit area.12

Age is the greatest risk factor for presbyopia, with the Mayo Clinic stating, "Almost everyone experiences some degree of presbyopia after age 40."13 However, certain medical conditions, including diabetes, multiple sclerosis and heart disease and drugs, including antidepressants, antihistamines and diuretics, increase the risk of premature presbyopia, which occurs in people younger than 40.

Vuity Might Not Work in Advanced Cases

Presbyopia is typically a progressive condition, and the eye drops may not work as well in people with more advanced cases. Speaking with Eyes on Eyecare, Sathi Maiti, OD with the Periman Eye Institute, stated that the eyedrops would appeal to many of her patients:14

"If Vuity works well it could be a game-changer in terms of how we treat presbyopia. As eye doctors, because it is so common I think a lot of the time we forget how much presbyopia really impacts the quality of life of many of our patients, and this is a type of solution that many of them might be seeking out."

However, it's possible that not everyone will benefit to the same degree. Maiti said:15

"It will likely work best for those who don't have very precise vision needs and are okay with some compromise or fluctuation in clarity. Since I haven't had the chance to see how it works in real life yet, it's a little hard to say, but my best guess would be for early presbyopes who don't need super high adds yet."

Alanna Nattis, DO, a refractive cornea surgery specialist at SightMD, also speaking with Eyes on Eyecare, echoed Maiti, stating:16

"I believe the drop will have the strongest effect on early presbyopes with minimal refractive error. That being said, I do think there is room for use of this drop in patients who prefer to wear distance-only and reading-only spectacles or contact lenses … I do not believe this eye drop will be as efficacious for patients who have advanced presbyopia, nor those with relatively dense cataracts."

What Are the Risks?

Vuity is not a cure for presbyopia; it's a temporary fix that stops working after a set number of hours — until you add more drops. Further, it may not allow you to get rid of your reading glasses entirely. Even the Vuity website states, "VUITY™ is not intended to replace other options for presbyopia."17

By shrinking your pupils, Vuity also affects low-light vision, which is why its maker warns that the drops should be "used with caution in night driving and other hazardous activities in poor light." They also warn that temporary problems may occur when changing focus between near and distant objects, so you shouldn't drive or use machinery if your vision isn't clear while you're using the drops.18

The most common side effects reported were headache and eye redness, although a risk of retinal detachment was also reported in rare cases. There's also a potential for eye injury or contamination, particularly if the dispensing bottles touches the eye or other surfaces. During clinical trials, 1% to 5% of patients also reported:19

  • Blurred vision
  • Eye pain
  • Visual impairment
  • Eye irritation
  • Increased lacrimation (flow of tears)

Cost will also be a factor for many, as the drug isn't currently covered by insurance because it's considered "not medically necessary" since glasses are widely available and less expensive. "I don't think anyone knows yet how much it will cost to patients and if it will be covered by insurance. I think many doctors are wondering how we will bill for it as well," Maiti said.20

As for other options for treating presbyopia, reading glasses are the least invasive option. Contact lenses, refractive surgery and even lens implants are also available, as are corneal inlays, in which a small plastic ring is inserted into the eye's cornea. The opening in the ring acts like a pinhole camera, which allows focused light to enter so you can see nearby objects more clearly.21

Google has also invested in "smart" contact lenses for people with age-related farsightedness,22 and other eye drops that work similar to Vuity are in trials.23 While the eye drops are convenient and potentially could reduce reliance on reading glasses for a sizeable number of middle-aged adults with presbyopia, their usefulness must be weighed against the potential for adverse effects.

Glasses do not come with a risk of retinal detachment, for instance, however rare it may be. That being said, I recommend avoiding reading glasses as much as possible.

Try This Instead of Reading Glasses

There is some evidence that training your brain, namely targeting perceptual learning by repeatedly practicing a demanding visual task, may improve visual performance in people with presbyopia. In one study, the brain training enabled subjects to "overcome and/or delay some of the disabilities imposed by the aging eye."24

A number of apps are available that offer this form of brain training for improved vision. In a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers explained that the vision benefits seemed to stem from changes in the brain — not in the eye itself:25

"This improvement was achieved without changing the optical characteristics of the eye. The results suggest that the aging brain retains enough plasticity to overcome the natural biological deterioration with age."

For presbyopia, I recommend not wearing sunglasses and avoiding reading glasses. As you age, there's a tendency to want to make that font bigger to see text better, but I recommend resisting that temptation, as it's only going to make matters worse.

Also, avoid squinting and simply blink instead. Blink multiple times until the text becomes clear, then relax your eyes to refocus. Brighter light may also help you read without increasing the font size on your tablet or computer, or using reading glasses.



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