Health & Fitness

In this interview, investigative journalist Whitney Webb, who does both independent work and collaborations with The Last American Vagabond, discusses the little-known details of Operation Warp Speed, a joint operation between U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Defense to produce a fast-tracked COVID-19 vaccine and other therapeutics.

As you may have noticed by now, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other platforms are censoring information relating to COVID-19 in general and vaccine information in particular. Many commentators who touch on these issues have been deplatformed altogether, so information on these crucial topics are getting harder to come by.

“We're at a point where the line between Silicon Valley and the national security state has become so blurred, you really can't distinguish where one begins and where the other ends,” Webb says. This in large part helps explain how and why big tech is getting away with such blatant censorship as deplatforming of individuals who discuss issues the mainstream media refuse to touch.

“You can definitely make the argument that it’s state censorship to a degree,” she says. “I think it's quite telling that a lot of these companies, from the very beginning of their existence, had some sort of funding from U.S. intelligence.”

Operation Warp Speed

As noted by Webb, you’d expect Operation Warp Speed, being a government program, to be governed by some federal regulatory agency like the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or even the HHS, but no. It’s almost entirely funded and operated by the CIA and the U.S. military. Webb explains:

“When Operation Warp Speed was announced … it was essentially sold to the public as a joint operation between HHS and the Department of Defense. So, the military was involved from the beginning. But oddly enough, last month, a lot of information about Warp Speed started to come to light.

One was the organizational chart of its leadership, which showed that by and large, the entire operation is dominated by military. There were very few civilian health officials, and most of those civilian health officials are involved in the therapeutic side of Warp Speed, which as we know now is the most drastically underfunded part of this initiative.

It was initially given a $10 billion budget, and they've already spent $10 billion on the vaccine. Only $450 million have been given through Warp Speed to a therapeutics project, which of course we now know is Regeneron, which is allegedly what Trump received when he was at Walter Reed.

What I'm saying is that most, the vast majority, of the money and time and energy has gone to a vaccine specifically, not really therapeutics. And so, if you look at the organizational chart, the people that aren't directly deployed by the DoD or military intelligence were essentially put in the therapeutics part, which was drastically underfunded. It's focused largely on the vaccine.

What's also interesting is we know that Operation Warp Speed currently has about six vaccine candidates. And we know now that they plan to use them all, and that they plan to allocate a specific vaccine to specific populations — what they identify in their official guidance as critical populations — which they announced just a few days ago.”

Palantir

A company called Palantir was given the contract to come up with the vaccine allocation strategy and determine the critical populations each vaccine should be distributed to. Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel, was initially funded by QTL, the CIA's venture capital arm.

The CIA was its only client for the first three years of its existence. At present, Palantir is a contractor to 17 U.S. intelligence agencies and also the U.S. military. The company is also in charge of COVID-19 data under the auspices of the HHS. Hospitals must now report their COVID-19 data to Palantir or lose their Medicaid and Medicare funding. Palantir is also involved in things like predictive policing.

“There are a lot of things in Warp Speed that are concerning. One of the things I read about recently is that Google and Oracle, two large tech companies that have longstanding ties to the CIA, are going to be involved in what they describe as a pharmacovigilance surveillance system, or what was more recently referred to by the head of Warp Speed as an incredibly precise tracking system, whereby everyone who receives one of these vaccines will be tracked and surveilled, not just to make sure that they get a second dose ...

but also to see what happens to people's physiology, because they admit that every single one of these vaccine candidates … has never been brought to market or licensed by the government before,” Webb says.

Pharmacovigilance Surveillance

According to Webb, the plan is to monitor vaccine recipients for 24 months after the first dose. The question is, how do you monitor such a large population? One way would be to employ biosensors that collect and send biological metrics automatically.

Monsef Salafi, a long-time head of GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine division, who is now part of Warp Speed, is a leading proponent of bioelectronic medicine, the use of injectable or implantable technology for the purpose of treating nerve conditions. The MIT Technology review has referred to it as hacking the nervous system. But it also allows you to monitor the physiology of the human body from the inside. 

The vaccine coordinator for Operation Warp Speed is Matt Hepburn, a former program manager for DARPA, where he oversaw the development of ProfusA,¹ an implantable biosensor that allows a person’s physiology to be examined at a distance via smartphone connectivity. ProfusA is also backed by Google, the largest data mining company in the world. Salafi is also invested in a company called Galvani Bioelectronics, which was cofounded by a Google subsidiary.

“So, you have Google being contracted to monitor this pharmacovigilance surveillance system that aims to monitor the physiology and the human body for two years,” Webb says.

“And then you have the ties to the ProfusA project, which oddly enough is supposed to work inside the human body for 24 months — the exact window they've said will be used to monitor people after the first [vaccine] dose.”

Guinea Pigs ‘R Us

In short, rather than doing long-term safety studies on both animals and humans beforehand, what’s being put into place is a “safety study” after the fact, where vaccine recipients are monitored for side effects. Unfortunately, Warp Speed, being shrouded in secrecy, has not released details about what biological parameters would actually be monitored and surveilled. As noted by Webb:

“It really doesn't make sense, if you think about it, for something that … is funded by American taxpayers to produce a medical countermeasure or a vaccine [during] peace time, is being run by the military under extreme secrecy with a lot of involvement of intelligence contractors, or intelligence agencies themselves.

We now know, for example, that the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security are directly involved in Operation Warp Speed, but they won't really say exactly what parts they're doing. But there are some indications as to what they could be involved with.

And the fact that Silicon Valley companies that have been known to collaborate with intelligence [agencies] for the purpose of spying on innocent Americans — Google and Oracle, for example — are going to be involved in this surveillance system … for everyone that gets the vaccine.

It's certainly alarming, and it seems to point to the fulfillment of an agenda that was attempted to be pushed through or foisted on the American public after 9/11, called Total Information Awareness, which was managed, originally, by DARPA.

It was about using medical data and non-medical data — essentially all data about you — to prevent terror attacks before they could happen, and also to prevent bioterror attacks and even prevent naturally occurring disease outbreaks.

A lot of the same initiatives proposed under that original program after 9/11 have essentially been resurrected, with updated technology, under the guise of combating COVID-19.”

Human Trials Reveal Plenty of Risk

Webb also discusses the vaccine trials currently underway around the world, and the fact that even though the vaccines are being given to perfectly healthy, younger individuals, they’re reporting lots of side effects, including serious ones. Most recently, a volunteer physician in the Brazilian arm of AstraZeneca’s trial died from receiving the placebo, which was not sterile saline but the meningitis vaccine.²

As detailed in “How COVID-19 Vaccine Trials Are Rigged,” none of the vaccines are designed to actually prevent infection. The primary measure of success is whether or not the vaccine results in fewer symptoms when you’re infected with SARS-CoV-2.

While the AstraZeneca trial initially stated the vaccine was being tested against a saline placebo,³ as I mentioned earlier, it’s since been revealed that they’re using the meningitis vaccine as the “placebo,” which can help hide a variety of side effects. The study was not halted following that death, but it’s already been paused twice due to unexpected serious illnesses. Both instances were deemed unrelated to the vaccine, of course.

“These are really things that have the potential to be very drastic because you have to consider that the sample sizes are quite small. [If] you extrapolate to the size of the U.S. population, potentially hundreds of thousands of people [may] suffer very adverse health effects,” Webb says.

Why the Lack of Transparency?

Webb also points out that rather than being contracts between government and the vaccine companies, the vaccine contracts have been funneled via a third party. Why? One potential reason is because this exempts them from Freedom of Information Act requests. It also exempts vaccines made under those contracts from many federal regulations, including federal safety regulations.

“We also know, because of the changes HHS made per the Prep Act, that any person that produces a COVID-19 vaccine … associated with Operation Warp Speed will not be liable for any sort of damages it may cause.

And, it's definitely concerning that these vaccine companies, a lot of which just have atrocious track records, are being given billions of dollars and being allowed to operate under the utmost secrecy, developing something for the American public that can very well be mandated, or, for some people, even if it's not an official mandate, if they want to keep their jobs or they want to stay in school, they'll have to receive it anyway. So, it's definitely an issue that more people should be talking about.”

Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, it’s extremely difficult to get this information out. YouTube, which is owned by Google, censors all of it. This is beyond questionable considering Google’s involvement with Operation Warp Speed. In short, they’re censoring to protect their own interests.

Perishability Heightens Vaccine Failure Risks

Aside from the fact that mRNA vaccines have never been used in humans before now, there’s also the issue of their perishability. This is yet another factor that heightens the risk of these vaccines. At best, they may become ineffective unless stored properly; at worst, they may produce unexpected side effects.

Unlike conventional vaccines, which simply need to be refrigerated, mRNA vaccines need to be kept on dry ice in order to maintain a temperature below zero. This clearly complicates delivery and storage, which apparently is one reason why the military will be in charge of distribution.

“The person in the Pentagon who is overseeing [the distribution] aspect is a man named Paul Strauss. He's one of the people who has been most adamant about the secrecy and insisting that they can't release certain things. So, that doesn't instill me, personally, with a lot of confidence as to what's going on,” Webb says.

“But yes, there are a lot more logistical hurdles than there have been in past planned vaccination programs, which of course didn't involve the military, this extreme secrecy, and didn't involve DHS or the NSA. The HHS, like I said earlier, sold this as a joint, essentially 50/50 HHS and DoD initiative. But really, the number of HHS officials on this list is quite small.”

Laying Down Infrastructure for Totalitarian Control

As mentioned, 9/11 became the justification for a series of tyrannical control mechanisms in the form of the Patriot Act that stripped Americans of civil liberties and privacy.

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the fact that it hasn’t resulted in an excess number of deaths above the historical norm for any given year, appears to be used as yet another excuse for the implementation of more tyrannical controls. It appears that what they’re doing is laying down the infrastructure for a totalitarian control system set to be deployed later. Webb agrees, saying:

“I tend to agree with you in a big way, and I'll give you an example of an initiative that's being put out right now by HHS that they claim is about preventing coronavirus outbreaks before they happen, and how it plays into this longstanding effort to produce ‘smart cities.’

HHS, a few weeks ago, issued a solicitation, which was given to this MIT spinoff company called Biobot Analytics. Essentially, they say it’s to create a nationwide wastewater surveillance system where they will be robotically sampling sewage from various cities around the country.

They say that will be done to test for COVID-19 and use an AI algorithm to predictably determine if a COVID-19 outbreak will take place in the future, up to 11 days before symptoms would even allegedly begin to show in that particular population. They say that would be done to enable rapid containment of those communities before this alleged future outbreak could happen.

What you can see there, in my opinion, is what was previously trying to be sold to the public as predictive policing, but now it's sort of the predictive policing approach to healthcare. We have to prevent infection or prevent outbreaks before it happens, which obviously is rife for abuse by a government that is fundamentally corrupt and out of control.

If they wanted to lock down a particular community, all they have to say is, ‘Our new surveillance system has identified, through this algorithm, that there will be an outbreak here in 11 days. So we have to shut everything down in this entire city.

What this wastewater surveillance system requires is sensors throughout a sewage system in a particular city, which is the underground infrastructure of what are often today called smart cities — cities filled with sensors that are united by the internet of things, 5G and Wi-Fi.

What's very alarming is that the developers chosen for this wastewater surveillance system come from a lab at MIT called Sensible City Labs, and it's not sensible. It’s sensible [in that it’s] able to be sensed. Essentially, MIT is a smart cities lab that was chosen by HHS to develop this under the guise of COVID-19.

And what is also alarming, in my opinion, is that this company has partnered with HHS before, not to predict coronavirus or to sample for coronavirus in wastewater, but to detect patterns of illicit drug use in certain populations, which dovetail with the war on drugs in the United States. Whether it has to do with opioids or marijuana use or any other illegal substance, it allows surveillance on what people are ingesting in a particular community.

They also talk about analyzing people's diets, what they're ingesting — if people are eating foods that the government has decided are associated with illnesses, they can see if too many people are eating the wrong foods and then accordingly ban those foods through a municipal or a statewide edict and things like that.

It's really a recipe for the micromanaging of regular human habits where the government was not previously involved …

[After] 9/11, the invisible enemy [was] these faceless terrorists abroad. Now, under coronavirus, the invisible enemy is a microbe that can exist anywhere, including within your own body. Therefore, to fight and win the war against the microbe we have to know what's going on inside of your body also.

And so, we're seeing the potential for the use of something like ProfusA and Operation Warp Speed, or this effort to surveil sewage, to determine what people are putting in their bodies. It’s definitely a very slippery slope in what I would call the beginnings of a Biosurveillance state.”

The Technocratic Underground

Indeed, it all appears to be part and parcel of a longstanding technocratic plan to govern society through technology, programmed by scientists and technicians and automated through the use of artificial intelligence, rather than through democratically elected politicians and government leaders.

Much of it is being developed and implemented in really underhanded ways. For obvious reasons, the true, long-term purpose is never actually admitted. For example, while smart cities have received public pushback, this plan to equip the sewage system with biosensors is essentially a way to build the system from below ground, up.

Since it’s underground, people will be far less likely to object to it or understand it as an intrusion of privacy. Ultimately, topside technologies will be added in the form of smart homes, until people are living in smart cities whether they signed up for it or not.

Google’s Transhumanist Goals

Webb also discusses the influence and role of Google in greater depth, including the current antitrust case filed against the company by the U.S. Department of Justice.  

“There are a lot of things that Eric Schmidt has done over the years that are deeply concerning. He, and a lot of other people involved with Google, including Google's top futurist, as he describes himself, Ray Kurzweil, are very big proponents of what is often called transhumanism, this belief that it's the destiny of the human race, it will be the pinnacle of human evolution, to combine with machines and defeat death.

Schmidt is a person that certainly feels that way and was close with Kurzweil. Now he's in charge of the artificial intelligence modernization efforts of the government.

It’s very, very disconcerting, especially when you look at a lot of the military's own modernization plans that are set to begin next year, with having an unprecedented role for artificial intelligence and targeting and flagging people that soldiers will then shoot with these augmented reality helmets the Pentagon has bought.

It’s a lot of the Orwellian surveillance structure that we're seeing rolled out, whether through Warp Speed or by HHS under the guise of COVID-19 response, it definitely seems to dovetail significantly with plans that have been developed by people like Schmidt for the modernization of the U.S. government itself, particularly the national security state.

And I really don't think that there's much of a coincidence that those two things are happening in tandem.”

Antitrust Case Against Google May Actually Benefit Them

As for the antitrust case against Google filed by the DOJ at the end of October 2020, ⁴ Webb doubts it will hurt the company. In fact, she suspects Google, just like the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil, wants to be broken up in order to be able to expand into other markets.

“The government was able to look like they were actually doing something about Standard Oil, but actually Standard Oil wanted to be broken up. That allowed the Rockefeller family to extend their influence and reach … far beyond oil.

For example, they got involved with totally remaking Western medicine ... and in shaping what we now know as Big Pharma … So, I think it's interesting that this is happening with Google now, and that it's only targeting Google's search monopoly, which is what Google began with.

But since then, Google's business has expanded far beyond search and they're poised to have a big role in upcoming health care initiatives, for example. I think they're ready to extend their tentacles, to use that metaphor, into a lot more different sectors, far beyond their search engine.

So maybe people would be assuaged publicly if they think, ‘Oh yeah, Google has been taken down and broken up by the government,’ when in reality they don't care about their monopoly on search anymore, and they're already too big to fail. I honestly think at the end of the day, a lot of this antitrust posturing towards Google, I don't really know if it will go anywhere,” she says.

Data Is the New Oil

Webb also points out that Google’s future is secured by its central and ever-growing role in data mining. Google will be harvesting brand new biological data through the upcoming Warp Speed surveillance system, and in September 2020, Google partnered with the Pentagon to develop predictive diagnostics for cancer using AI, which they intend to extend to other diseases as well, including COVID-19.

“There's this big push to create an all-powerful artificial intelligence algorithm in order to enable a lot of the functionality that they want to impose in smart cities and these other initiatives they've been putting forth.

In order to do that, they need access to data. That's why we've heard over the past couple of years that data is the new oil. It feeds back into this race to develop the greatest AI algorithm. This is very concerning when you look at the National Security Commission on AIs objectives.

They say the only way to maintain U.S. global military hegemony, and also economic hegemony, is to harvest more data than any of their adversaries’ states from Americans in order to be able to develop a better AI algorithm before China can do the same.

That's what these very powerful and influential organizations are saying. And if you actually look at their documents, they essentially say that there needs to be a total remaking of Americans way of life to facilitate that type of data extraction from a smaller population than the Chinese population.

For example, more data needs to be harvested per American citizen in order to facilitate that leapfrogging of China’s artificial intelligence. So, there is a lot to be concerned about, but I think a lot of people have declined to look at these commissions and institutions and what their thought process is …

And where they're going is nowhere good. It’s essentially pointing to tyranny in a technocratic system that's not even governed by humans. It’s governed by an algorithm created by man.

So obviously, it's a can of worms they're attempting to open, and the people that are behind this, whether the military and intelligence agencies, when they work in complete secrecy like they are in Warp Speed, they're historically up to no good … Historically they ruthlessly pursue their own ambitions at the expense of American interests. It's definitely worth considering all of these things.”

Bioterror Predictions

Based on her research, Webb suspects there will be another phase to the COVID-19 pandemic, some sort of bioterror event, likely before April 2021.

“I don't have a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the plans there. If you look at the people that predicted the coronavirus crisis before it happened, they were also immediately positioned to benefit from that crisis as it emerged. Bill Gates, for example, in April said that the coronavirus crisis is Pandemic 1, and it will be followed by Pandemic 2, which … would be a bioterror event.

And the way to respond to this Pandemic 2 would be to do the same types of preparations you would do for bioterrorism. That's straight from Bill Gates … Gates [also] frequently … talked about the need to merge international security, i.e., U.S. foreign policy with health security, as he calls it, and essentially merge the war on terror with a war on bioterror.”

She points out that Event 201, held by Gates, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins in October 2019, featured a novel coronavirus. Was it really a coincidence that a novel coronavirus outbreak occurred 10 weeks later?

‘Dark Winter’ — The Signal for an Anthrax-Related Event?

An earlier tabletop pandemic exercise was done in June 2001. The simulation, called “Dark Winter,” predicted major aspects of the subsequent 2001 anthrax attacks. During the last presidential debate, the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, stated the U.S. is headed for a “dark winter” — an unusual phrase that raised questions among some commentators.

Before that, the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) testified in front of Congress saying that this winter was going to be the “darkest winter” in modern U.S. history. Somehow, many plans actually seem to be signaled beforehand, if you’re keen enough to pick up the cues. Interestingly, with regard to the “Dark Winter” reference and its anthrax connection:

“The Johns Hopkins center for health security has a sister organization at UPMC (University of Pennsylvania Medical Center) called the UPMC Center for Biosecurity, in Pennsylvania. They're currently, under the guise of coronavirus vaccine research, attempting to fuse anthrax with the coronavirus spike protein. They are also attempting to do the same for measles.

Those are essentially gain of function studies. The person that runs their center for vaccine research at UPMC is a major proponent of these gain of function studies. And when there was a gain of function moratorium, he was its most vocal opponent and was giving all these talks to government officials about how it needed to be lifted.

What's very odd about what's going on at UPMC is that in the beginning of the year they were set to produce what could have easily been the first coronavirus vaccine, a COVID-19 vaccine candidate, but it used traditional and tested vaccination methods that are already on the market …

Oddly enough after that had made some headlines … UPMC received a lot of money from CEPI [the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations], which of course is backed by Gates, and as soon as that money was received, that vaccine candidate was quietly dropped, and in its place were these experiments to merge measles with the coronavirus spike protein, and then merge anthrax with that same spike protein.

‘Dark Winter’ may not mean much to the mainstream American public, but it certainly means something to the national security community when they hear that term being thrown around on TV. And then you have Bill Gates saying that after the coronavirus pandemic there's going to be a bioterror attack.

You also have the Council of Europe, a very influential and elitist think tank in Europe, saying that coronavirus will be followed by bioterror. High-ranking former CIA officials [are also saying it]. A lot of the people involved in Dark Winter in the biodefense industrial complex, which was created after the 2001 anthrax attacks, are all saying the same thing.

We really need to start listening to these people. Of course, they in advance have a narrative they create, not unlike the Dark Winter 2001 exercise itself, which initially claimed that the anthrax attacks were committed by Iraq working with Al-Qaeda. And then lo and behold it's traced to the U.S. military (at Ft. Detrick) so obviously it did not come from Iraq or from Al-Qaeda.

What you have now are attempts to seed the similar narrative about who will be blamed for events upcoming in the future. They set it up on purpose, I would argue, so that when the event takes place, people are more receptive to those predetermined narratives about this particular crisis and don't immediately start questioning what could have happened.

They essentially want these events to take place. They want to ramp up the fear, and then they want to conveniently tack blame to something very quickly before an actual thorough investigation can take place. That's what we saw in the aftermath of September 11 and also in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks.”

Be Ready, but Not Fearful

If you listen to the interview in its entirety, you’ll have a good idea of why I’m so impressed with Webb’s investigative skills. It’s important to become educated about what’s really happening so that you don’t capitulate to the fear they're seeking to imbue in us.

It’s a fearful public that allows the technocratic elite to dictate the future and rip away our personal freedoms. It’s fear that allows tyranny to flourish. Remember, there are more of us than there are of them. But enough of us must be willing to stand up and say no, we won’t accept this plan.

On another level, being aware of the plan allows you to plan for your own safety and security ahead of time, so you’re not running around in a panic when something does happen. As the old saying goes, “Being forewarned is being forearmed.”

To find more of Webb’s work, be sure to check out her website, unlimitedhangout.com. You can also find her videos by searching Bitchute, and she has her own podcast channel called Unlimited Hangout on Rokfin.com. Warp Speed reporting can also be found on thelastamericanvagabond.com. At present, Webb is also still on Twitter @_whitneywebb.

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In this interview, social justice and anti-GMO advocate Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., discusses her book, "Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom," which she co-wrote with her son, in which she argues that the ultra-wealthy elite are responsible for a majority of the environmental, financial and health crises currently facing us.

In reality, it's really about the 0.001% — the small number of billionaires and centibillionaires who have become ultra-rich over the past 30 years or so. Most of them didn't exist before globalization. The 1% is just a useful metaphor for the ruling elite that the publisher thought would be easier to communicate.

One of the key players is, no surprise, Bill Gates, whose wealth and "philanthropic" efforts have garnered him unprecedented influence over agriculture and global health policies that threaten food security and human health.

"I was in Paris for the climate summit, and I've been doing this UN Summit since the Earth summit in '92. I've been doing the Biodiversity Convention, drafting of clauses, including Article 19.1, which basically required biosafety and assessment of GMOs. So, I was very surprised that, for the first time, the billionaires were on the stage with the heads of state," she says.

The Ongoing Transfer of Wealth

One of the "solutions" to climate change offered by this billionaire club was geoengineering, which in reality is no solution at all. As noted by Shiva, if the climate is already changing for the worse, engineering temperatures, deflecting sunlight, dumping iron fillings on the ocean and chemicals in the sky, and creating artificial volcanoes, you're simply creating additional problems without solving the original one.

At the end of the August 2020 update of the book, she also discusses COVID-19, and how this engineered pandemic has catalyzed the transfer of wealth to the rich. While global lockdowns have decimated small businesses and left many to struggle financially, the rich have amassed fantastic profits.

"The 2008 crisis was very clearly about deregulation of the financial economy," she says. "It was about collateral, it was about taking securities, bundling up risk, and then the system totally collapsed because it was really trading in fictions. But I've been working on the economy, because I started to work on the seed in 1987.

Companies wanted to own and patent life. That's how my journey on GMO started. But they also wanted to change the trade laws. They wanted to own seed as their creation. They wanted an intellectual property treaty in the GATT. I first heard this in a 1987 [United Nations] meeting.

That's when I decided: a) I would save seeds, b) I would keep track of the GATT and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The antiglobalization movement grew out of that, and the International Forum on Globalization. We shut down WTO in Seattle, which shows the power of the people. We will not allow this lie of seed being Monsanto's invention.

I worked with our [Indian] parliament, I worked with our government to write laws. Article 3G [says] seeds are not inventions. This is what has prevented Monsanto from ripping off Indian farmers even more than they did. They've been taken to court now for the illegal collection of technology fees …

Basically, what we have today is this transfer of wealth. Monsanto's behavior is also the big tech's behavior. Do they produce anything? No. They only collect rents on digital platforms. They're rent collectors …

I saw the seed issue with Monsanto. I said, 'Here they are collecting rents from seed, which they didn't make. Then we won't let them own it.' In effect, whether it's Amazon or Gates, they're basically rent collectors. What they've done with this pandemic is literally create a closed economy, which depends on them and their rent collection."

The eight-minute video below provides a sobering summary of the massive wealth transfer that has occurred in 2020 thanks to pandemic lockdowns, during which small businesses were forced to close while giant multinational companies were allowed to stay open and thereby monopolize the market. The end result is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.

The End of Democracy

Shiva goes on to review how India mobilized against Walmart's encroachment, which threatened to destroy local businesses. The COVID-19 lockdowns, however, have prevented the same kind of mobilization against the tech and retail giants.

As local businesses around the world have had to close their doors for months on end, Amazon.com's power has exploded. Amazon is even encroaching on grocery suppliers.

"I was just reading a paper, that the super wealthy in the U.S. have transferred $50 trillion to themselves [over the past 30 years; the globalization period] … While they rob you of your job, they're still extracting [money from] you for that forced software program on digital payments, for software programs on … digital education.

Poor Indian children, who could afford a universal education, now cannot afford education because their parents have no smartphones. So, we are seeing an engineered imposition of an economy. A healthy economy grows as an evolution with choices, with justice, with equity …

True economies would say, 'Here is what I bring. If my digital [currency is] better than your cash, choose it. Is my forced vaccination better than your immunity? Make your choice.' The minute choice is removed from people's life, democracies stop. When the choice is removed from our conditions of being, our conditions of living, then life is threatened …

What is globalization but deregulation of commerce? It is knocking down every law that was put in place by democratic societies for the protection of the environment, the protection of health, the right to education, the rights of workers. Now that's what's being targeted."

In India, they recently eliminated all labor laws, and they're trying to remove the Farmers' Rights Act, as well as environmental laws. This is what allows for the transfer of wealth to happen, Shiva says.

The End Game

As explained by Shiva, all of these companies are essentially rent collectors. Facebook turns our minds into a raw material that is then capitalized upon. "Gates is particularly vicious because through the Gates Foundation, he pretends to be doing philanthropy," she says.

But with every philanthropic endeavor, he carves out new colonies from which he can collect new rents and make new investments. "That's why no matter how much he gives, he gets richer and richer," Shiva says. "A genuine giver would get poorer."

In her book, she explains how, without Gates, there would be no commercial gene editing, for example, which is the new GMO. He created a company called Editas Medicine Inc. to facilitate the patenting of these new climate-resilient plants, with which they aim to create new medicines. "He will do biofortification to solve the nutrition problem. He is particularly vicious," she says. As for what the ultimate goal might be, Shiva says:

"The first thing is, of course, they want to use their money-making tools to make more money. So, it is a dictatorship of the technology balance. That's why people should be paying a lot more attention to the violent imposition of digitalization.

A lot of my friends, who never studied the roots of these violence systems, who never understood that agrichemicals came from Hitler's concentration camps and that the agrichemical industry is the poison cartel responsible for the genocide, they're continuing that genocide.

Technologies as tools of domination and exploitation are not neutral. A lot of progressive think, 'More digitalization, more democracy.' How can a surveillance economy be an enlargement of your freedom? You have to have the systems in place, the regulations in place, the choices in place to be able to make these technologies a servant and not your master."

The Global Merger

They also want to merge all of these various industries together — agriculture, technology and finance. Shiva recounts how, in 2016, India banned all cash and made digital transactions compulsory. In short order, "90% of poor people lost their savings, their incomes," she says, as small, local economies evaporated. Meanwhile, the wealthy elites also control the world's economy via their asset funds.

"Corporations don't own themselves anymore. Even the corporations are owned by the billionaires, the same BlackRocks, the same Vanguards control every big company, Coca-Cola to McDonald's to Boeing. Look at anything in the world, it's the billionaire money and their asset management funds.

Last year, BlackRock increased its wealth from $1 trillion to $7 trillion, which means the billionaires increased their wealth. During the lockdown, they invaded even more deeply into the Amazon and became richer.

So, these investment asset management funds are the billionaires' wealth, and it is increasing. That is merging with IT and information technology and the tech barons, and it's merging with biotechnology and the chemical industry.

That's why they're talking about digitalization of agriculture — farming without farmers and, worse, food without food. One of the big pushes of Gates and Silicon Valley is into fake food."

As noted by Shiva, while Big Biotech claims GMOs will save your health and protect the planet, these pesticide-laden plants are in fact doing the complete opposite.

We Are the Throwaways

There's also the issue of social justice. She cites Gandhi, who said that if you're in doubt about what the right thing to do is, "bring the face of the most vulnerable person to your mind's eye and do what is good for them." If you think it will harm them more, don't do it.

"They deliberately want to get rid of large parts of humanity," Shiva says. "First through hunger, then through sickness. They want a digital economy, they want a sick economy. Otherwise, you wouldn't be spending all your time on Big Pharma; you'd spend your time making sure that the smaller farmer doesn't get destroyed …

On a planetary scale, we are seeing these irresponsible, greedy, indifferent, callous men bring the world, and humanity, to a brink. That's why we have to act and find creative ways …

All of these tech barons who have taken over the economy, hiding behind the virus, are all jumping into life sciences. Google has a new life sciences division. This will be the final defeat of Mother Nature, At a time [when] the world is waking up to the rules of nature and healthy bodies, healthy ecosystems, an eco-healthy planet, they're still carrying on the Colonial franchise of defeating Mother Nature."

The Great Economic Reset

None of these things is coming out of left field. They've been carefully planned for many decades. We now see clear evidence that a "great economic reset" is in the works, which will transition everything over to digital currencies.

As noted by Shiva, the industrial revolution shifted our mindset to one where we thought of nature as dead. The result was ecological destruction and the fragmentation of society. The coming economic reset is basically part of an effort to further manipulate and shift our mental framework toward something wholly unnatural. Shiva says:

"In India, they attacked and are still attacking organic and created something called the Zero-Budget Natural Farming … What they're basically doing is giving big loans to the state, which then gives fat loans to the farmer. In the meantime, Gates is mining farm data.

He's getting people placed in the homes of farmers to mine data. Then they'll create algorithms to sell that data back. But all of this is now being reduced to carbon in the soil. You'll get zero % for what you grow. You can get no needs of yours met through food and fodder, but we will allow you to trade in the global market on the carbon in your soil, and that's what would keep you alive. This whole financialization of nature is one aspect.

The second aspect in the great reset is to redo the economy to make it look like those who are now disposable throwaway people deserved it. They created the language of competition.

[When I was writing] my epilogue, I had just received Microsoft's patent, [which] basically reduces human beings to users. Our brain activity is tapped into in various ways. Everyone wants to have smart wear these days. I should call it spyware. That data goes through algorithms. Those algorithms will decide what [we are worthy of and] Bitcoins will be allocated to us.

But every child born is born worthy. Every member of society has equal human rights. So, they're undoing everything we've put in place on humanity, on human rights, on democracy. This is where we need to be alert.

I think the whole issue of the pandemic and the lockdown was useful for them for two reasons. One, they could get everyone afraid. Second, they could get everyone distracted while they took over the economy, they took over our minds. They basically transferred all the remaining wealth to themselves."

More Information

To learn more, please listen to the interview in its entirety, and be sure to pick up a copy of "Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom." You can also find more details about Shiva's work on Navdanya.org.

"I personally feel that this assault is coming at a time when, in India and the world, there's a new rising of consciousness of the planet and its living systems, of our health and our living systems, and the connection between our health and the health of the planet. At this point … it needs a lot of brutal violence to impose. So, to the extent they can keep the virus as their shield to hide behind, they will."

I agree with Shiva when she says that rather than allowing COVID-19 fear-mongering take over our lives, we need to look at the infrastructures of life, humanity, democracy, economy and taxation, "and start thinking about who's taking them away from us."

"You have to protect that which you treasure," she says. "Freedom and life are what are being taken right now … We have to resist fear and we have to resist hate. We are thinking beings; let us use the minds we've been given and let us rebuild community.

Again, I don't think the 6-foot distancing is by accident. Why do they use the words 'social distancing' rather than 'physical distancing'? Six feet is a physical measure. They … want us to forget that being a human being means being in community. They want us to be users of gadgets.

We must be community. We must remember that we are interrelated to the rest of life on Earth and to society. That's why we have to be talking [about how to] rebuild regenerative economies … I think we lost a lot of time thinking the only issue was energy, how energy is produced. We lost two decades of how food is produced.

I really believe that if people start becoming aware that eating good food is the single most important [strategy for health], and growing food in the right way is the single most important part to regeneration of the planet, this will rebuild community …

I think we need to start doing homework to say, 'Where's the wealth going? How should the tax flow look? How is our money going to make the billionaires richer? How can they keep extracting more money out of us?

How is our public money the new subsidy to create the infrastructure for greed, rather than be the public resources to create the infrastructure of life, of care and of solidarity? … What in our current legal framework can stop this hemorrhaging of public money to move upwards to the billionaires?

These are foundational issues. Who are we as human beings? How will we live in the future? What is the future we will create long after the robber barons are gone, because they were there in the 1930s and we learned how to get rid of them. If there's one project we should have, it's strategies to get rid of the robber barons, whatever it takes …

I don't think we have the luxury to be hopeless. Hope is something you must cultivate on a daily basis. Cultivating hope is cultivating resistance. Cultivating hope is cultivating the strategy."

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Scientists showed that mice exposed to potentially lethal levels of total body radiation were protected from radiation damage if they had specific types of bacteria in their gut. They demonstrated that the bacteria mitigated radiation exposure and enhanced the recovery of blood cell production as well as repair of the gastrointestinal tract.

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Dr. Paul Saladino is the author of “The Carnivore Code.” I’ve previously interviewed him about the carnivore diet and the impact of metabolic health on COVID-19 outcomes. The video¹ above features Saladino on a recent episode of the Joe Rogan podcast.

It’s a three-hour conversation, but my focus here is on Saladino’s viewpoints on omega-6 seed oils, and the surprising fact that conventional chicken and pork are significant stealth sources of oxidized omega-6 fats that can contribute to ill health by impairing vital mitochondrial signaling.

Vegetable Oils Are Responsible for Epidemic of Ill Health

In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that one of the most damaging components in our modern diet is processed vegetable oils, as they contain excessive amounts of oxidized omega-6 linoleic acid, a polyunsaturated fat (PUFA). The biological damage they cause is even worse than that caused by refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup.

According to ophthalmologist Dr. Chris Knobbe, who has researched the matter extensively, virtually all chronic metabolic and degenerative diseases, including age-related macular degeneration, are primarily caused by a preponderance of industrial vegetable oils in the diet.

The reason for this is because these oils trigger mitochondrial dysfunction that then drives the disease process, and several studies^{2,3,4,5,6,7,8} have demonstrated the truth of this. The good news is that simply replacing dangerous oils with healthy saturated fats can go a long way toward boosting your health and reducing your risk of chronic disease.

Unfortunately, many health authorities have insisted — and still insist — omega-6-rich oils like soybean, corn and canola oil are healthier than saturated animal fats such as butter and lard, and this myth has been a tough one to dismantle, despite the evidence against it.

How Processed Vegetable Oils Harm Your Health

There are many reasons to avoid or eliminate industrially processed seed oils from your diet. As mentioned, vegetable oils are a concentrated source of omega-6 linoleic acid, which can lead to a severe imbalance between the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio in your diet.

In fact, I’ve found it is extremely difficult to correct this imbalance simply by taking more omega-3. In fact, excess omega-3 can also contribute to ill health. Your first and most important step is to cut down on the omega-6s, or else you’re always going to be nutritionally lopsided.

Even organic, biodynamic olive oil can shift your ratio in the wrong direction, as olive oil is also a source of omega-6 linoleic acid. If, like me, you’re in the habit of eating olive oil, you may want to limit your intake to 1 tablespoon per day or less. The problem, really, is twofold:

1. Most people get far too much omega-6 and too little omega-3, thus ending up with a lopsided ratio, and this ratio is what impacts health. Ideally, this ratio would be close to 1-to-1
2. Most of the omega-6 people eat has been damaged and oxidized through processing

Then there’s the issue of direct toxicity from pesticides and herbicides. Most of the vegetable oils produced today — especially canola, corn and soy — are made from genetically engineered (GE) crops, and are therefore a significant source of toxic glyphosate exposure.

Thirdly, vegetable oils degrade to extremely toxic oxidation products when heated, including 4-hydroxynonenal (4HNE) cyclic aldehydes,⁹ which are what cause oxidized low-density lipoprotein (LDL) associated with heart disease. Aldehydes also crosslink tau protein and create neurofibrillary tangles, thereby contributing to the development of neurodegenerative diseases. Processed vegetable oils also harm health by:

Increasing inflammation.10

Damaging the endothelium (the cells lining your blood vessels) and causing an increase in penetration of LDL and very low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) particles into the subendothelium. In other words, these oils get integrated in your cell and mitochondrial membranes, and once these membranes are impaired, it sets the stage for all sorts of health problems. As discussed in my July 2020 interview with Knobbe, the PUFAs from vegetable oils, seed oils and trans fats are primarily stored in your fat cells, opposed to being used for fuel, and have a half-life of 600 to 680 days.11 They also get incorporated into tissues, including your heart and brain. One result of this could be memory impairment and increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, which is exactly what they found with canola oil.12 As reported in one 2017 study:13 “Our findings do not support a beneficial effect of chronic canola oil consumption on two important aspects of AD pathophysiology which includes memory impairments as well as synaptic integrity. While more studies are needed, our data do not justify the current trend aimed at replacing olive oil with canola oil.”

Damaging your mitochondria and DNA by making your cell membranes more permeable, allowing things to enter that shouldn’t.

Making the cell membrane less fluid, which impacts hormone transporters in the cell membrane and slows your metabolic rate.

Inhibiting cardiolipin, an important component of the inner membrane of your mitochondria that needs to be saturated in the omega-3 fat DHA to function properly. Cardiolipin can be likened to a cellular alarm system that triggers apoptosis (cell death) by signaling caspase-3 when something goes wrong with the cell. If the cardiolipin is not saturated with DHA, it cannot signal caspase-3, and hence apoptosis does not occur. As a result, dysfunctional cells are allowed to continue to grow, which can turn into a cancerous cell.

Inhibiting the removal of senescent cells, i.e., aged, damaged or crippled cells that have lost the ability to reproduce and produce inflammatory cytokines that rapidly accelerate disease and aging.

Stripping your liver of glutathione (which produces antioxidant enzymes), thereby lowering your antioxidant defenses.14

Inhibiting delta-6 desaturase (delta-6), an enzyme involved in the conversion of short-chained omega-3s to longer chained omega-3s in your liver.15

Exposing you to toxic 4-hydroxynonenal (4HNE), which forms during the processing of most vegetable oils, even if the oil is obtained from organic crops — 4HNE is highly toxic, especially to your gut bacteria, and consumption of 4HNE has been correlated with having an obesogenic balance of gut flora. It also causes DNA damage and instigates free radical cascades that damage your mitochondrial membranes.16

The Molecular Biology of PUFAs

If you want to go deep and geek out on the molecular biology of what is going on with excessive linoleic acid (LA) intake, then I strongly advise watching the video above.

Saladino interviews veterinarian Peter Dobromylskyj, who maintains the Hyperlipid Blog.¹⁷ In it, they describe in great detail how eating these seed oils and other foods high in LA, like chicken and pork, destroy mitochondrial signaling in the adipocyte and disrupt your metabolic functioning.

One key point from this Dobromylskyj interview is the explanation of how PUFAs break your metabolic mechanism and contribute to obesity. As explained by Saladino, as he reviews a study on this topic:

“Let’s look at what happens when you give humans a bunch of polyunsaturated fats … You are supposed to be insulin resistant in ketosis. That’s how your body partitions glucose to the cells that need it.

And here you have a ketogenic diet based on … canola oil, safflower oil or soybean oil, and you see people remain insulin sensitive when they’re in ketosis. This is clear evidence that polyunsaturated fats are breaking your metabolism. Glucose is lower because it’s going into your cells; it’s making bigger cells. You’re getting fat.”

For clarity, does this mean a ketogenic diet, meaning a diet high in healthy fats and low in non-vegetable carbs, is fattening? No. The take-home message here is that a proper ketogenic diet must be based on healthy saturated fats, not destructive vegetable seed oils that are loaded with LA.

Eating a high-fat diet, when the fats are primarily LA from processed vegetable and seed oils, is far worse than eating a chronic high-carb diet. The type of fat is of crucial importance, as it impacts your mitochondrial, cellular and metabolic functioning.

Fats like LA can persist in your cell membranes for months to years, continuing to wreak havoc with your metabolism the entire time, while the sugar is quickly metabolized.

Aside from that, this also helps explain why processed foods are so fattening. It’s not just that they’re loaded with added sugars. They’re also loaded with LA that breaks your metabolic machinery and promotes fat accumulation and inflammation.

Choose Your Fats Carefully

Examples of healthy fats that belong in your diet include but are not limited to organic coconut oil, ghee, grass fed butter, lard, tallow, black seed oil (Nigella sativa), avocados, raw dairy products, olives, organic pastured eggs and raw nuts.

To learn more about the ins and outs of dietary fats, pick up a copy of my book “Superfuel: Ketogenic Keys to Unlock the Secrets of Good Fats, Bad Fats, and Great Health,” cowritten with James DiNicolantonio, Pharm.D., which gives more in-depth specifics on how to discriminate between healthy and harmful dietary fats. Dr. Catherine Shanahan’s list of good and bad cooking oils and fats is also useful.

Stealth Sources of Harmful PUFAs: Chicken and Pork

As explained by Saladino in the featured Rogan interview, aside from processed foods (which are loaded with vegetable oils) and vegetable cooking oils, there are also two common stealth sources of harmful PUFAs in the modern diet, namely conventionally farmed chicken and pork.

He shows a graph illustrating meat consumption, which has significantly risen over the decades. But it’s not the total consumption that is causing the problem, he notes. Specifically, the problem is not related to red meat consumption, which has actually gone down. Rather, it’s “lean white” meats, particularly chicken but also pork, that help drive the chronic disease trend. 

Long thought of as a healthier type of meat, primarily because it’s leaner than red meat, the problem with conventional chicken (and pork) is that the animals are fed corn — typically GE varieties that are farmed with glyphosate.

And what happens when animals are fed corn? The meat becomes high in omega-6 linoleic acid, as corn is high in this type of fat.¹⁸ So, as Saladino points out, high chicken consumption actually adds to your vegetable oil consumption, and can therefore contribute to systemic inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction and metabolic ill health.

“PUFAs act differently in our body,” Saladino says in the Rogan interview. “At the level of our mitochondria, it looks like this polyunsaturated fat, this linoleic acid-rich vegetable oil, is signaling things differently.

There’s a lot of compelling evidence to suggest linoleic acid is driving adipocyte hypertrophy — the fat cells are getting bigger. Fat cells can do two things. They can get bigger or they can divide. When fat cells get big, and don’t divide, they eventually start leaking inflammatory mediators.”

This doesn’t mean you cannot eat chicken or pork. However, unlike cows, buffalo and lambs, these animals have only one stomach and as such any omega-6 fats they eat are not metabolized and stored in their tissues. Since these animals, even healthy organically grown animals, are typically fed grains, they are loaded with omega-6 fats and may have 10 TIMES the LA content that beef, lamb or buffalo do.

That is why I think it is really a good strategy to avoid eating these meats and replace them with animals which have far lower LA content. If you want to know how much LA you are eating simply go to cronometer.com and carefully enter your food that is accurately weighed out and you can see precisely how much LA you are eating. It would be great to get your daily intake under 10 grams per day.

Safeguard Your Health by Ditching Vegetable Oils

To recap, if you want to avoid dangerous fats of all kinds, your best bet is to significantly reduce or eliminate the following from your diet:

• Processed foods of all kinds
• Industrially processed cooking oils such as corn oil, canola oil, soy and cottonseed oils
• Conventionally farmed chicken
• Conventionally farmed pork

My comprehensive nutrition plan offers helpful guidance for this process. When cooking, coconut oil, butter, lard and ghee are healthy options. Also be sure to swap out margarines and vegetable oil spreads for organic butter, preferably made from raw grass fed milk. Butter is a healthy whole food that has received an unwarranted bad rap.

To further balance your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio you may also need a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fat, such as krill oil, if you’re not in the habit of eating small, fatty fish such as sardines, anchovies and mackerel, and/or wild caught Alaskan salmon.

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Twice each year, every U.S. state except Hawaii and Arizona transition from daylight saving time (DST) to standard time and back again.¹ Yet, the research is quite clear that meddling with time, and therefore sleep, has negative effects on your health.

DST was first introduced in 1918 when it was called "fast time."² The law was signed by the president to support the war effort. It followed a similar initiative in Germany that went into effect in 1916.³ After the war ended, the law was repealed and then reinstated during World War II.⁴ Three weeks after World War II ended, the law was again repealed.

By 1963, Time magazine called the resulting state of confusion a "chaos of clocks."⁵ Nearly 20 years after the end of World War II, DST was restored under the Uniform Time Act.⁶ This standardized when DST would begin and end, and gave states the option to stay on standard time year-round.

In 1973, Congress determined DST should be observed all year, but this was again changed in 1974 when the clocks were moved forward in the spring and fell back an hour in the fall.⁷ In 1986 the time officially changed at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October.

The date in the fall changed in 2005 to the first Sunday in November in response to lobbying from the golf, barbecue and candy companies, which wanted more daylight during the evening hours to accommodate Halloween night and the traditional passing of sugar treats.⁸ The current dates and times have remained unchanged since 2007.

Long-Term Health Effects of Daylight Saving Time

Part of the risk posed by DST is that it can shrink the average amount of sleep an adult gets by up to 20 minutes during transitions.⁹ Chronic sleep disruption contributes to a rising number of people who are obese.¹⁰ Dr. Chris Winter, author of "The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep Is Broken and How to Fix It," explains how sleep is an integral part of your eating patterns by affecting the hormones ghrelin and leptin:¹¹

"Appetite in general is often not the body requesting food; it's the body anticipating food. When your body knows you eat lunch around 12:30 p.m. or so every day, it anticipates and prepares for the meal.

These two hormones are intimately associated with sleep, which is part of why when we're not sleeping well, we tend to overeat. It's a tight hormonal balance and daylight-saving shifts can absolutely throw it off."

A lack of sleep may also raise the risk you can experience a fatal accident. Dr. Beth Ann Malow from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and colleagues published a commentary reviewing large epidemiological studies that document these negative health effects.¹² Malow commented on their findings:¹³

"People think the one-hour transition is no big deal, that they can get over this in a day, but what they don't realize is their biological clock is out of sync. It's not one hour twice a year. It's a misalignment of our biologic clocks for eight months of the year.

When we talk about DST and the relationship to light, we are talking about profound impacts on the biological clock, which is a structure rooted in the brain. It impacts brain functions such as energy levels and alertness."

Another team of researchers published an analysis of the effect daylight saving time has on a spectrum of diseases.¹⁴ They gathered data using a population-based, cross-sectional analysis from an insurance claim data set of over 129 million patients in the U.S. and Sweden.

They evaluated the effect shifting time by one hour twice each year had on hundreds of age- and sex-specific health conditions. Their data confirmed past research results that heart attacks,¹⁵ accidents,¹⁶ mental health concerns¹⁷ and immune-related diseases¹⁸ increase during the time shift.

The analysis also revealed several surprises. For instance, it showed an increase in substance abuse in men ages 41 to 60 near DST.¹⁹ They also found immune-related disorders that had not been associated in the past with daylight saving time occur more often in the first week following the spring DST shift.

The analyses revealed a higher number of complications during pregnancy and childbirth, and increases in renal failure.²⁰

"To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to report the DST-related RRs [relative risk] of disorders involving the digestive system (such as noninfective enteritis and colitis), which rose three percent after the spring DST shift in females over 60 and six percent in males under ten."

Your Suprachiasmatic Nucleus Is Involved

Your body runs on an internal clock known as your circadian rhythm. When you mess up this internal clock, your cells are exposed to an unusual amount of stress. Many of the health conditions attributed to the biannual time change are because these internal clocks are not easily reprogrammed and are synchronized to a 24-hour cycle of light and dark.²¹

Another system in the body responsible for regulating your internal clock is located in the hypothalamus and called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN).²² It functions through hormonal and chemical signals to synchronize your internal clock, which in turn regulates your sleep-wake cycle and has an effect on the regulation of other physiological activities.

These activities include your core body temperature, neuroendocrine function, memory and psychomotor activity.²³ The SCN is made up of multiple circadian oscillator neurons that function a little like a pacemaker.

Although your body uses several environmental cues to regulate your circadian rhythm, the most important is your exposure to light. Your SCN produces an electrical output using a specific rhythm in response to light.²⁴ Aging and sleep deprivation will have a negative effect on the electrical amplitude of your SCN, which is essential for optimal behavioral and physiological mechanisms.

There's growing evidence suggesting your SCN contributes to cognitive performance and overall health. When there's a negative impact on this 24-hour rhythm it increases your risk for depression, sleep disorders, neurodegenerative disease and cancer.²⁵

Since your SCN responds to light, disruption in light exposure can trigger negative health effects. As the Earth rotates, your body clock adjusts to light changes, including seasonal change.²⁶

However, the sudden adjustments that come with time changes in the spring and fall are what researchers believe triggers the increased incidence of heart attack, stroke, traffic accidents and a higher number of injuries.

Fred Turek from Northwestern University directs the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology and says this about a one-hour time change twice a year: "You might not think that a one-hour change is a lot. But it turns out that the master clock in our brain is pretty hard-wired."²⁷

Data Don't Support Daylight Saving Time

One of the reasons given for keeping DST, despite strong evidence it has negative health effects, is the potential it may help save energy. However, as this short video demonstrates, while it may have originally reduced energy use in the early 1900s, the cost difference for a single-family in modern times is just $4 each year.

A second argument is that it offers people more sunlight after work to enjoy recreational activities. Theoretically, this may lead to more physical activity and better health. However, a study published in 2014,²⁸ which gathered data from people living in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, found it did not make a difference in the amount of time outdoors, but had an effect on the types of activities.

They concluded, "… the potential for DST to serve as a broad-based intervention that encourages greater sports/recreation participation is not supported by this analysis."

Financial losses are also felt in the stock market. An analysis published in the American Economic Review revealed each time the clocks changed there was an impact on the function of the financial markets.²⁹ The scientists believe desynchronized sleep reasonably explained the effect on the market that was different from other Mondays on the two weekends when the time changes.

When a potential $4 savings in energy is compared against the loss of finances, productivity and rising health care costs from injuries and illness, it's apparent moving the clocks in the spring and the fall is not an effective way of managing human and environmental resources.

Experts also disagree about how long it takes your body to recover from the time change. Till Roenneberg is a German chronobiologist who says his studies demonstrate your body's circadian clock never adjusts during DST. In an interview with a reporter from National Geographic, he said:³⁰

"The consequence of that is that the majority of the population has drastically decreased productivity, decreased quality of life, increasing susceptibility to illness, and is just plain tired. Light doesn't do the same things to the body in the morning and the evening. More light in the morning would advance the body clock, and that would be good. But more light in the evening would even further delay the body clock."

Europe Is Ditching DST in 2021

Many Europeans will soon not have to struggle with a biannual time change. March 26, 2019, the European Parliament voted to end DST in 2021.³¹ The Guardian reported that member states will be allowed to "choose whether to remain on 'permanent summer' or 'permanent winter' time under the draft directive."³²

Europeans call DST "summertime" and standard time is "wintertime." This means countries that opted to remain permanently on summertime will make their final adjustments in March 2021. Countries that decide to remain on permanent wintertime will change their clocks for the last time in October 2021.

As more published data establish the negative effects on health, finances and productivity, the tide is beginning to turn in the U.S. with state bills introduced each year that propose changes to DST.³³

Tips to Transition When the Clock 'Falls Back'

Until DST is either repealed or remains in place year-round, you'll have to make changes to your sleep schedule twice a year. In this short video I share several strategies to help you fall asleep and to improve the quality of your sleep.

Small shifts in your circadian timing are happening all year since many ignore their body's internal clock, either by necessity to accommodate their work schedule or by choice.

Pushing the limit of your body clock by getting up early and staying up late may not be worth it when it comes to your long-term health. University of Alabama associate professor Martin Young has suggested several natural strategies to help resync your body after a time change, including:³⁴

• Wake up 30 minutes earlier on Saturday and Sunday, to minimize the impact of getting up earlier on Monday morning
• Go outside in the sunlight in the early morning
• Exercise in the mornings over the weekend, in keeping with your overall level of health and fitness
• Consider setting your clock ahead on Friday evening, allowing an extra day to adjust over the weekend

I would also add to these recommendations the suggestions from the video above and the following:

• Practice good sleep hygiene, including sleeping in complete darkness, checking your bedroom for electromagnetic fields and keeping your bedroom temperature cool enough for optimal sleep. For a full report about how to maximize the quality of your sleep, see "Sleep — Why You Need It and 50 Ways to Improve It."
• Optimize your vitamin D level to support your immune function, which is especially important during cold and flu season.
• Manage your stress with whatever stress-busting techniques work for you. Consider using yoga, exercise, meditation or Emotional Freedom Techniques.
• Eat dinner earlier and pay attention to your diet, making sure you are consuming plenty of fresh, whole foods, preferably organic, and minimal amounts of processed foods and fast foods; keep your sugar consumption low, especially fructose. I invite you to review our optimized nutrition plan to help you develop an eating plan that supports your overall health.
• Consider encouraging your legislature to change DST by signing a petition to your congresspersons or getting involved in your state to pass a resolution.

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Examining data from the first six weeks of their landmark DETECT study, scientists see encouraging signs that wearable fitness devices can improve public health efforts to control COVID-19.

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