Health & Fitness

NSW has restrictions that allow a maximum of 300 people per venue, provided the one person per four-square-metre rule is adhered to. This violation occurred just 10km from an emerging COVID cluster, too. 

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Cloth masks can be washed, reused and worked into your wardrobe.

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Scientists have suspected mutations in a cellular cholesterol transport protein are associated with psychiatric disorders, but have found it difficult to prove this and to pinpoint how it happens. Now, researchers have provided evidence that mice with disrupted ABCA13 protein demonstrate a hallmark behavior of schizophrenia.

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Dawson Church,¹ Ph.D., is a leader in the energy psychology movement, one of the most common forms being the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), which I have promoted for years. Church investigated and built on the EFT techniques developed by Gary Craig² in the 1990s (which in turn was a derivative of the founder of energy tapping, Roger Callahan’s, work³).

While Craig was not a clinical investigator, Dawson's work has led to over 100 clinical trials on EFT. In this interview, Church shares insights from his experience, which he has also documented in the books “Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality” and “Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity and Joy.”

This information is particularly timely in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While the infection itself has been shown to be far less lethal than initially suspected, government responses to it have undoubtedly led to an epidemic of fear and stress, which can have serious health consequences. As explained by Church:

“The stress we feel in our minds and bodies can often do far more harm than pathogens. I've done several randomized controlled trials of cortisol.

When you think a negative thought, when you feel stress, when you have a fearful belief, your cortisol level rises within three minutes. Chronically high cortisol produces all kinds of ill effects in your body, including depressed immune function and increased inflammation. The fear will get you even if the virus doesn't.”

The Importance of Positive Thinking

As noted by Church, our brains are hard-wired and evolutionarily adapted to pay attention to potential threats. Failing to notice a threat can get you killed, whereas there’s no evolutionary reward for failing to notice the good stuff. As a result, most of us need to train our brain to notice the positive, and to feel gratitude.

“We're subject to a constant barrage of bad news, so it takes meditation, it takes tapping, it takes time in nature,” Church says. “You really have to be deliberate in your efforts to redirect your attention and not have it hijacked by all the bad stuff out there.

What I do in response is to read positive blogs, news and media. That doesn't mean I never read any bad news, I stay informed, but I make sure I read positive things. I'm reading Marcus Aurelius right now … I meditate for an hour every day. And I anchor myself in what I call in my book 'Mind to Matter,’ Nonlocal mind.

Tune into nonlocal mind, look out the window and see the roses and the bees and the sunset, and then it's a lot easier to stay centered when confronted by difficult local events. I also focus on compassion.”

The Benefits of Eco Meditation

In 2008, Church attended a conference where he presented with Roland McCraty,⁴ head researcher in how the heart and mind interconnect from HeartMath Institute, and Joe Dispenza,⁵ whose fields include mind-body medicine and brain/heart coherence. Curious about what would happen if he combined the best evidence-based methods, he came up with what eventually became known as “EcoMeditation” — a conglomerate of techniques proven to rapidly increase positivity and well-being. They include:

• EFT tapping
• Neurofeedback (heart rate variability control)
• Mindfulness
• HeartMath’s quick coherence technique
• Self hypnosis

According to Church, when you do them together, they reinforce each other. “The whole is more than the sum of its parts,” he says. EcoMeditation has now been empirically tested and refined, showing that it can lower baseline cortisol levels by one-third in as little as a week. And, when stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline decline, the neurochemicals of repair and rejuvenation such as DHEA, serotonin and dopamine increase.

In one trial, Church looked at the effects of EcoMeditation on immunoglobulins, antibodies that bind to and neutralize corona viruses. In just two days, participants who did EcoMeditation had a 27% rise in these antibodies in their mucous membranes.

“You produce a huge shift in your immunity by lowering stress,” Church says. "Meditate, tap, use your favorite methods to lower your stress level. This automatically upregulates your immune system.”

Emotions Are Contagious

The year 2020 has been challenging for most people. The drumbeat of negative news can overwhelm even the most resilient among us. In Chapter 2 of “Mind to Matter,” Church talks about a phenomenon called “emotional contagion.” In a nutshell, researchers have shown that emotions have an impact similar to that of infectious disease. They’re contagious, and affect those around us.

He cites one study in which they found that the next-door neighbor of a happy person is 35% more likely to be happy as well, and the neighbor twice removed is 15% more likely to be happy. That person’s neighbor, in turn, who is 3 degrees removed from the happy person is 6% more likely to be happy. The same contagion rule applies when the emotions are negative.

“We're in the middle of this mass contagion of fear,” Dawson says, “and it is depressing our immune systems, rendering us less resilient, affecting us psychospiritually, making us less able to cope. That’s when we need a bigger dose of positivity, joy and gratitude. We need to do that deliberately. That means meditation, it means consuming positive media. It means not exposing yourself to needless negative emotions.”

The Chemical Effects of Meditation

One of the reasons Dawson recommends meditation is because of the distinct biochemical effects it produces. He explains:

“Mystics describe this experience of oneness with the universe. When they meditate, they lose any sense of as isolated beings. If you look at MRIs of Tibetan monks, you find that the part of the brain that constructs the sense of self — the mid-prefrontal cortex — downregulates. They lose themselves.

Another part of the brain that downregulates is the part of the parietal lobe, the temporal parietal junction that handles 'proprioception', the location of our body in space. When they're in this deep mystical experience, their sense of self has turned off and their brains' ability to locate their bodies and space is turned off.

At the same time, oxytocin, the love hormone, floods their cells. They experience this ecstatic bliss as anandamide, serotonin and dopamine flood their brains and they've lost the sense of who they are and where they are, and they're literally feeling one with the universe.

Do that each morning using EcoMeditation and you're one with what I call nonlocal mind. You have that experience of mystical unity. Then, after meditation, you come back into your body, come back to your local mind, your mid prefrontal cortex turns back on, you’re a local self again, your parietal lobe comes back. You know where you are in time and space.

You then bring all the resilience of that contact with nonlocal mind into local reality and you're then far more effective … Over time, these parts of the brain start to shift into this function as the neurological wiring changes, and then it becomes a trait.”

To show you how effective meditation can be in daily life, Dawson cites a 10-year-long study of high performing people by the McKinsey Consulting Group. It found that those who are able to enter this flow state are five times as productive as ordinary people.

Another study by DARPA described in his book "Bliss Brain" found people who meditate improved their ability to solve complex problems by 490%. “That's why meditation is a powerful antidote to dealing with all the chaos of the world around us,” Dawson says. These and many other studies can be found on www.eftuniverse.com/research-studies/eft-research.

EcoMeditation Summarized

As mentioned, EcoMeditation incorporates several different techniques, including EFT tapping, breath control and meditation. To download a free EcoMeditation audio track that guides you through each of the steps, see EcoMeditation.com. Step 1 involves tapping a series of acupuncture meridian end points. Dawson explains their relevance:

“Over 100 clinical trials have shown that [tapping] regulates the body. It downregulates your stress. It improves your mood, it decreases anxiety and depression very, very quickly ... The research shows that symptoms of trauma, hypervigilance, intrusive negative thoughts, depression — all of these things are regulated by tapping.”

When you’re doing EFT, you first focus on a target problem by formulating a statement. The target problem might be ‘I'm afraid of catching the virus.’ It might be, ‘I'm afraid of dying.’ It might be 'I've lost my job, I don't know how I will cope.’ However, in Eco Meditation, you tap the points without defining a specific target problem.

“We know that general tapping produces an effect,” Dawson says. It basically regulates your energy system in a general way and helps you enter a space of calm. Next, you add in heart coherent breathing, muscular relaxation, neurofeedback techniques and meditation on compassion.

“There are several things that move the needle in terms of neuroplasticity in the brain quicker than others,” Dawson says the one that changes the brain the quickest is compassion …  a response to the suffering of the world and just a sense of acceptance of people just as they are.

We get people to this compassionate state and then they start to feel really centered, really resilient, really happy. Focus on a person who makes you feel unconditionally loved. That might be a Saint. It might be a historical figure. It might be a childhood hero … Focus on that person and then … expand that compassion to every atom in the universe.

That's the very general conceptual framework we use to keep people out of trauma. We've had to really refine this thing over the years because a lot of people traumatized and it's very easy to trigger traumatic memories.

If you go into that altered state without adequate preparation, it can be  produce what's called retraumatization. The instructions for EcoMeditation have been very carefully calibrated to avoid the possibility of retraumatization, which of course is the opposite of resilience, which we're trying to produce.”

Emotional intensity is also important for optimal results, and the emotion of gratitude typically generates this. As such, compassion and gratitude go hand in hand and work very well together. Lastly, you need to recenter in your body. So, at the end of the meditation, open your eyes and take in your surroundings. You feel the weight of your body in the chair or on the cushion as you re-anchor yourself in the here and now.

“We don't want people to bliss out and then not be able to bring it back down to the immediate issues of their lives,” Dawson explains. “We want to have them experience that mystical state, and then come back and be effective in their daily lives.”

Sheltering in Love

When California issued its first round of lockdown orders, Dawson and his wife agreed to use that time of increased togetherness to be extra nice to each other — to literally shelter in love. He explains:

“We realized we would be together a lot more than usual. We said we're going to use this as a crucible to really be nice to each other. We weren't not nice to each other before, but we knew we’d have tension.

We used this as a way to shelter in love, get to know each other better … I began to learn things about her. I began to be fascinated by her. We used the crisis to strengthen our relationship. Families are systems. When you change one element of a system, you change the whole system.

That's why, in a marriage, in a family, not everyone has to change. People think that ‘Oh, my husband has to change. My wife has to change. My kid has to change. My parent has to change.’ Actually … your chances of getting them to change are approximately zero. The only person you have leverage over is yourself …

We know, through that new science of emotional contagion, that your emotions are contagious. So, make that choice to work on yourself, to find your negative emotion, to release it, to be this agent of positive emotional contagion all around you and soon you'll find it spreads far beyond you.

Be proactive. Do the things it'll take to shift your mood. When we shift psychology, we shift biology. People don't realize how dependent their biology is on their psychology. For example, in study of  a weekend EcoMeditation, anxiety went down by 26%. Depression went down by 32%. PTSD symptoms went down by 18%. Pain went down 43%. All of these are psychological shifts people are making as they tap and meditate.

Average resting cortisol went down significantly by 29%. The resting heart rate went down by 5% and their immunoglobulins went up by 27%. These are your leverage points and you can decide proactively to meditate to tap and to release all that negative emotion you have.

Fill your mind with positive thoughts. I'm not saying don't read anything negative. You can't avoid it. You need to be well informed. But be informed and see it through the lens of that positive being. Tune into nonlocal mind every day. That's something you can choose to do.

EcoMeditation is about 15 to 20 minutes long. It doesn't take long and you're making a powerful declaration that you are choosing to be that agent of positive emotional contagion. You then enter your day after that morning meditation as a resourceful person, a resilient person.

Are there still problems — financial problems, medical problems, family problems? Sure. There might be all those problems. But now you are a resilient person who is facing those problems and bringing five times the problem-solving ability into that situation.”

For me, personally, the COVID-19 pandemic has probably been one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I have never been healthier, I think, in my life as a result of this forced discipline to stay at home and pursue a healthy lifestyle, many of which are detailed in Dawson’s book. It’s a great toolbox.

More Information and Free Resources

Again, to learn more about the scientific underpinnings of tapping, visit www.eftuniverse.com/research-studies/eft-research, and for a free eco meditation audio track, see EcoMeditation.com. If you want professional EFT help, you can tap with a practitioner, live via the internet, on tappingplace.com. Free tapping resources and meditations are also available on DawsonGift.org

Also consider picking up a copy of “Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality,” in which you’ll find 30 different practices that will help reprogram your mind and energetic system, including yoga, Chi Gung, Tai Chi, spending time in nature, grounding and much more. The book is available on Amazon, but you can also get it free — just cover the cost of shipping — if you order it on mindtomatter.com.

“Pick the ones that fit your lifestyle and love yourself enough to do that,” Dawson says. “Make a practice of doing them. Be that proactive person and then you'll find your whole lifestyle to change.

One of the problems that meditators have [is that] we really have to calibrate ourselves when we meet other people because they're not here, they're not full of love, joy and laughter. They're full of anguish, stress and doubt. [So] you listen to people, you hear their grief and pain and sorrow and loss.

Then, by the end of your time with them, they've been affected by your positive emotional contagion and we then can change the emotional tone of our whole world. One of the cool things about those studies is that positive emotions travel out to affect those around you. So, do negative ones, but negative ones only affect people 2 degrees of separation out.

Positive ones affect people 3 degrees of separation out. We're actually more effective as agents of emotional contagion if we’re positive than negative. So, go out there and meet people where they are. Listen to them if they're suffering, but then bring the power of joy and beauty and all those benefits of nonlocal mind into your local world and be that powerful change agent …

Do things to love your mind and body, and then be that vibrant person who helps those around you shift. A suffering world needs us now more than ever.”

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Thomas Lewis, author of “The End of Alzheimer’s: The Brain and Beyond,” is a microbiologist with a Ph.D. from MIT. He’s done a lot of work on diagnostic testing, and in this interview, we explore how retinal assessment and other laboratory tests can be used to stratify your risk factors for chronic disease and COVID-19. Lewis recently published an excellent paper on this.

We first met almost two years ago at the Academy for Comprehensive Integrative Medicine in Orlando, Florida, where he gave a presentation on how assessment of the retina can be used as a diagnostic tool to evaluate your risk for a wide variety of diseases.

The Eye-Brain Connection

As just one example, glaucoma and Alzheimer’s disease are often linked together, with glaucoma occurring first, as they did in Lewis’ father’s case. His dad developed glaucoma several years before he developed Alzheimer's.

Lewis goes so far as to refer to glaucoma as “Alzheimer's disease of the eye,” and Alzheimer's as “glaucoma of the brain.” Similarly, cataracts are a manifestation of your innate immune response against acute and chronic infection. If you are, say, 50 years old and you have early nuclear cataracts, it's a bad sign, as it’s an indication of a chronic infection.

The infection is what’s causing this unfolded protein response to slowly matriculate in the lens of the eye. According to Lewis, “If you have an early cataract, that's a bad sign for longevity. Most people with cataracts die of some vascular event fairly young.”

Your Eye Is a Window Into Your Overall Health

Lewis explains the general theory for using the eye as a biomarker for systemic disease:

“When you look at disease, in the allopathic system, you're either healthy or you're sick. But we really lie on a continuum of health. I say we live on four different continuums, determinants of health, lifestyle, risks, things like that. For physiological health, we measure blood, stool and urine …

For pathology, which is largely ignored, we do ultrasounds, MRIs and CT scans that assess tissue changes. The eye happens to be particularly good at that because the eye is transparent, and the methodology used to measure the eye is low-cost and noninvasive but highly precise and accurate.

For example, optical coherence tomography (OCT) is much more precise at looking at micro vessels, capillaries, compared to MRI because the wavelength of light they use to create the interference is a much shorter wave length. In other words, it gives much more detail than an MRI.”

OCT is a type of tomography that uses safe, nonionizing light waves. At a cash price of about $50, it’s also an affordable diagnostic tool that can tell you a lot about what’s going on in your body.

I was intrigued with the test and found a local optometrist to perform it for me. I hadn’t had an eye exam for a few decades so thought it would be a good checkup. Well, I had no glaucoma, 20/20 vision, near and far without glasses, and my OCT was totally normal, like that of a young adult. It’s great to know that lifestyle changes work. Next month I will share an article on what they have done for my physical body.

Again, because the eye is transparent, OCT allows you to see all the micro vessels, and whatever is happening in this carotid tissue — the vasculature in your eye — is also happening in the rest of your body, as the carotid is the most vascular tissue in your entire body.

“Whereas the brain uses 10 times more oxygen than most tissue on a per mass basis, the retina, which is constantly converting photons to electrons, uses even more oxygen on a per mass basis. If you're vulnerable, the eye is potentially a canary for that vulnerability,” he explains.

“That's why we use this test. It's so simple to see if there are life risks that are translating into physiological risk and then changing into pathological risks. When you're changing into pathological risk, a bad ending is getting closer because you have tissue damage, basically.”

The COVID Connection

Many common lab tests can also tell you a lot about your health and the state of your immune system. When COVID-19 broke out, Chinese researchers reported patients had elevated ferritin and erythrocyte sedimentation (SED) rate, among other things. Lewis compared the COVID-19 lab panels with the work he’d been doing for the past 15 years, and found they matched up nicely.

“It's not about treating COVID-19, it's about measuring how full your vessel is towards these markers that create the cytokine storm, high inflammation, and kill you, and try to modulate that,” Lewis says.

"Why does the Z-Pak treat COVID-19? It doesn't. It treats bacterial infection, but we all have a subclinical bacterial infectious burden, and that burden is taking up immune system bandwidth, which makes you less able to fight something as virial as COVID-19. That's why Z-Pak works …

There's nothing really special about COVID-19 and our immune response, because our immune response is innate and adaptive. It's [about] being able to more accurately measure your immune compromised status. And almost everything we measure is reversible through very simple processes, supplementation, lifestyle activities, treating the infection, treating the pre-existing virus.”

Understanding Cytokines

One of the most lethal aspects of COVID-19 is the cytokine or bradykinin storm that can develop. A cytokine is a short-lived signaling protein that has regulatory properties on nearby cells. It could be beneficial or it could be detrimental. It could be proinflammatory, or it could be anti-inflammatory.

So, it's not so much that cytokines are bad — they're absolutely necessary and you'd be dead in a few heartbeats without them — but when they get out of control, they can kill you. That's what’s known as a cytokine storm, which I have discussed extensively in previous newsletters. It is one of the reasons why vitamin D works so well; it aborts most cytokine storms through its modulation of your immune response.

Risk Score Versus Diagnosis

What the retinal assessment and various lab assays can do is identify a brewing problem, which can then be addressed using strategies such as nutritional supplementation and lifestyle changes.

“For the average person, knowing where you are on that continuum would be extraordinarily valuable,” Lewis says, “and that's the testing we're doing and trying to promote more broadly.”

The key, however, is not to be within the “normal” reference ranges for disease markers, examples of which include fibrinogen, D-dimer, SED rate or C-reactive protein. What Lewis has done is determine the point at which there’s a statistical increase in early mortality. “That sets a completely different set of normal ranges for biomarkers, which is what we use. These ranges are much tighter compared to normal reference ranges, so you are amplifying the signal your body is projecting about your health. We're not diagnosing people, we're risk scoring people,” he explains.

Helpful Lab Tests

Screening tests that can help assess the state of your health and immune system include:

1-25 Dihydroxy vitamin D — This is the activated form of vitamin D. Vitamin D increases antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and improves the activity of neutrophils (white blood cells that fight bacteria).

RBC magnesium — Magnesium is an important cofactor for the activation of vitamin D. Taking magnesium can actually reduce the amount of oral vitamin D you require to optimize your vitamin D level.

Neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) — This marker alone determines prognosis in most solid tumor cancers. Neutrophils go up when there’s a bacterial infection, while lymphocytes are suppressed by viruses. As explained by Lewis, “The NLR is sort of an amplified barometer for your stealth infectious burden. The absolute count should be 1.5 or below.” Anything above 55% neutrophils is indicative of a chronic, likely bacterial, infection.

Red blood cell distribution width (RDW) — Red blood cells are born small and die large. If your RDW is wide, you likely have plaques and inflamed carotid arteries. Above 16 or 17, RDW could be a sign of anemia, but between 12.5 and 16, it’s a pure sign of inflammation.

C-reactive protein — A marker of inflammation. This should be 0.6 or below.

Fibrinogen — As a signaling molecule for tissue repair, fibrinogen is a good marker for how well your body is able to repair itself. If your fibrinogen is between 150 and 285, your repair and recovery is probably meeting or outpacing wear and tear, allowing you to properly heal and recover. Above 285, you are probably deteriorating more rapidly than you're repairing. Fibrinogen is also a clotting factor marker, so in COVID-19 and sepsis, for example, high fibrinogen is indicative of a cytokine storm. Pre-cytokine storm levels are also indicative of several chronic diseases, including heart attack and cancer.

Ferritin — Ferritin is an iron transport protein that becomes elevated in COVID-19 and other serious illnesses. Iron catalyzes growth of bacterial pathogens. Typically, when your blood cells are under attack by a pathogen, your body responds by hiding the iron from the antigen (the infection) in the ferritin protein, thereby resulting in anemia (low iron) and high ferritin. If you have elevated ferritin, the iron may not be available to the pathogen, but it is still available to the cells of your body. Iron is a powerful oxidant stressor that will radically increase oxidized species, reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species, which activates the NRLP3 inflammasome and radically increases inflammatory mediators and cytokines. The solution for high ferritin is to donate blood. If your ferritin is above 100, consider giving blood periodically.

Fasting insulin — Insulin resistance is a foundational contributor to most chronic disease and significantly increases your risk of complications and death from SARS-CoV-2 infection. Fasting glucose is also a useful test that you can easily do at home.

Uric acid — Uric acid is a multifactorial inflammatory marker. It also helps protect against hypoxia.

Homocysteine — Homocysteine is a vascular toxin associated with heart disease that is influenced by your vitamin B levels. As explained by Lewis: “LabCorp keeps changing their reference normals, and now they're as high as 17. But the Framingham's study shows that with a baseline of 9, every five points higher homocysteine leads to a 40% increase in dementia because it's a vascular toxicity.”

SED rate — The SED rate is a measurement of how fast your red blood cells settle in a test tube. Red blood cells have a repulsive charge on the outside of their membranes (zeta potential) that allow them to remain buoyant. When this repulsive charge is lacking, they settle faster. As explained by Lewis: “SED rate is a surrogate for how good your electrical system is working, which I then use as a surrogate for your gut and how well it's doing at digesting and making minerals bioavailable, because it's the sodium potassium pump that drives the electric potential of cells, among other minerals.” Ideally, if your zeta potential is good and high, your SED rate should be close to zero. The lower, the better. The higher your SED rate, the worse off you are, as this means the “battery” of your red blood cells are discharged, which will result in systemic problems and overall low energy levels. Typically, your SED rate will improve once you start to heal and rebalance your gut.

Where to Get These Tests

Your primary care doctor can order any and all of these lab tests for you. However, they may not be able to thoroughly guide your treatment based on your results, which is what Lewis and his team specialize in. So, for testing and a comprehensive analysis, consider turning to www.healthrevivalpartners.com.

“Come through us and we'll help you solve your problem,” Lewis says. “Under our services tab, we have a COVID-19 service, and there we have five different levels of panels, from just a population screening to a very deep dive. Basically, every marker we talked about today, and more.

Looking at the lipids, the chemistry, liver function, metabolic, all that stuff, is included. We don't take insurance, but I can order these labs. My team can order these labs anywhere in the country …

We couple the lab test with a highly functional intake survey. What we've done, and we were publishing a paper on this, is we've created a risk score for every single question and answer that is typically on a functional intake questionnaire, and made it digitized, so it's online. You take it.

We give you a letter grade, which is sort of a reflection of your total risk portfolio, and then subsections of grades. Then we give you a very detailed color-code report, which really turns into your treatment plan, if you will. We want to ameliorate these different things. And we have health coaches to help you organize them because some things you want to do in series, other things you want to do in parallel. We call this the hierarchy of health.

Anybody who does a blood test gets that. And then our team is trained on how to help you understand your labs from a very detailed chronic perspective, but also look back at the risk factors and show you what risk factors could potentially have led to an elevation in that lab. So, you see a very clear one-to-one correlation.

We give you a letter grade, but there's a score underneath it. And then we give you what we call our chronic disease temperature, which is the amalgamation of 20 of these important biomarkers into a single score. We have a plot of our chronic disease temperature versus our chronic disease assessment.

It's a fairly linear thing, showing you that your risks are tied to your physiological health. And then we've shown, in populations that we work with, that when we lower their risk grade — just the lifestyle things, cleaning up the teeth, improving the gut, cleaning the diet up, detoxification — as their risk rate goes down, their physiological score goes down, which is a good thing because we want your score as low as possible.

That's the essence of what we do. We have functional doctors, regular doctors, health coaches.”

Managing Your Expectations

While most health problems can be successfully addressed with nutritional and other lifestyle changes, it’s important to manage your expectations of how long it’s going to take. As noted by Lewis:

“I have a very simple explanation to set expectations up. If it took you 10 years to get into something chronic, it's going to take you at least 10 months to get out of it. And that's with diligence, consistency and the proper treatment. When we have really compliant people [working on healing] rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, brain fog, we get this major inflection of health improvement at five months.

Why is that? Because everything in nature is log linear. We are wired to understand that implicitly, but society has taught us instantaneous gratification. We think if we do one thing, we'll get one result. But really everything is an asymptote, going into disease is an asymptote, so you're incubating, incubating, incubating, and then suddenly things go wrong.

While getting out of that state is the reverse of that, it takes you a long time to move the needle and start feeling better. Then all of a sudden, you reach that inflection point and you feel better.

Everything in nature, including health, it’s a log linear relationship to get to where you want to be … When people understand that and buy into that concept, then they can stay the course and we can actually make them better. It's not an overnight thing. That's the only point I'm trying to make.”

More Information

Again, HealthRevivalPartners.com is where you can sign up for your biomarker panel and receive the guidance you need to address whatever problems you may be having. For more information about the eye-brain connection and what your eye health can tell you about your Alzheimer’s risk, which we touched on at the beginning of this interview, see RealHealthClinics.com.

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In the video above, American cattle rancher Shad Sullivan from North Texas is interviewed by host Patrick Bet-David about the future of the cattle and meat industry. In April 2020, Sullivan posted a YouTube video¹ discussing how U.S. farmers are being forced to dump the food supply — plowing under vegetable crops, euthanizing millions of chickens, aborting sows and burying feeder pigs, and dumping milk by the hundreds of thousands of gallons.

Sullivan says officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture are also preparing farmers to depopulate cattle that are ready to harvest due to a “bottleneck created by the effects of COVID and the logistics therein.” Yet, while preparing U.S. cattle ranchers to cull their herds, the U.S. is actively importing beef from other countries.

The first shipment of beef from Namibia, for instance, arrived in the U.S. in April 2020, prompting Sullivan to ask, “Am I the only one that sees a problem in this? … We are importing beef from other countries. Beef that is less regulated than our beef, less safe, not as high-quality of product, and yet, it’s happening. At the same time, they’re preparing for us to euthanize our harvests.”²

USDA Email Told Farmers It Would Assist in Depopulation

Sullivan received an email from the USDA in April 2020, stating that it would help farmers to find alternative markets for their harvests, and if that couldn’t be done, state veterinarians and government officials would assist with culls, or depopulation, of the animals.

In May 2020, the USDA announced that its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) had established a National Incident Coordination Center that would support producers who could not move their animals due to the closing of processing plants because of COVID-19.

“Going forward,” the announcement stated, “APHIS’ Coordination Center, State Veterinarians, and other state officials will be assisting to help identify potential alternative markets if a producer is unable to move animals, and if necessary, advise and assist on depopulation and disposal methods.”³

As processing plants shut down across the U.S. near the beginning of the pandemic, farmers were forced to euthanize hundreds of thousands of animals, a waste of meat during a time when many are struggling to find food, and a sentence that’s caused emotional and economic damage to farmers.

Because the processing is concentrated into a small number of large facilities, a U.S. government statement noted at the time, “[C]losure of any of these plants could disrupt our food supply and detrimentally impact our hardworking farmers and ranchers.”⁴

The government also cited statistics that closing one large beef processing plant could lead to a loss of more than 10 million servings of beef in a day, and noted that closing one processing plant can eliminate more than 80% of the supply of a given meat product, such as ground beef, to an entire grocery store chain.⁵ These highlight the glaring problems that come along with a highly concentrated and centralized food system.

Four Companies Control 85% of the Beef Cattle Supply Chain

Due to the allowance of acquisitions and mergers, four companies — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef, which is owned by Marfrig Global Foods — control the majority of the U.S. beef supply. These companies are multinational corporations that act as processors and distributors of beef. Decades ago, according to Sullivan, there may have been 800 different processors of beef, where now there are only four.

By taking away all competition, they’ve taken control of the entire industry. In April 2019, Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef were accused of violating federal antitrust law by colluding to drive down the price of cattle they bought from ranchers while boosting retail prices, in order to boost profits.⁶

According to the lawsuit, which was filed by the Ranchers Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF), the companies “engaged in tactics — including purchasing fewer cattle than a competitive market would otherwise demand and running their processing plants at less than available capacity” — that had the end result of creating surpluses in the cattle market but shortages in the wholesale beef market.⁷

“There’s an oligarchy of power and control at the top of the chain,” Sullivan said, “and that trickles down to you … They are able to eliminate competition in the United States while bringing in cheaper, lower quality meat from other countries.” In 2020, the U.S. imported beef from at least 19 countries, including Nicaragua, Japan, Croatia, Lithuania and Chile.

Product of the USA Doesn’t Mean It’s From the US

The original Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) rule, which was approved in 2002 and took effect in 2008, required the country of origin to be listed on meat labels. In 2013, the COOL rule was improved and meat packages were supposed to be required to label where the animal that provided your meat was born, raised and slaughtered.

At the time, industrial meat producers like Tyson, Cargill and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association were among those who spoke out against the rule, calling it unnecessarily costly and “short-sighted,” while fearing it would shrink demand for imported meat.

Unfortunately for U.S. consumers seeking greater transparency in their food sources, the meat giants needn’t have worried because global dictators stepped in and essentially told consumers they don’t have the right to know.

In 2015, the World Trade Organization ruled U.S. law requiring COOL labels on meat was illegal, as it discriminated against Canadian and Mexican meat companies and gave an advantage to U.S. meat producers.⁸ By removing COOL, multinational companies are allowed to pass off imported meat as U.S.-raised, while U.S. farmers suffer.

As long as it’s processed in a U.S. facility, it can be labeled “Product of USA”⁹ — even if that processing involves nothing more than unwrapping and rewrapping the package, or cutting a piece of meat into smaller pieces.

The National Cattleman’s Beef Association, a cattle industry lobbying group, continues to push back against mandatory COOL, as processors don’t want the added expense of having to differentiate and label meats from different origins. R-CALF USA, which represents independent cattle producers, is fighting for mandatory COOL, calling it an individual right and liberty issue.

But “it’s a pay to play system,” Sullivan says. “The packers pay to sit on the board of directors and then they’re required to play how the packers want.” When asked how much similarity there is with pharmaceutical lobbyists and lobbyists in the meat industry, Sullivan says, “Very similar … it’s all about money, power and control. Lobbying is power.”

It’s Nearly Impossible for Next Generation to Raise Cattle

There are now 727,906 beef farms and ranches in the U.S. In 1979, Sullivan says, there were 1.2 million to 1.3 million. The dramatic decline is the result of a gradual disappearance because of the lack of competition throughout the industry. As more acquisitions and mergers occur, small farms disappear. Meanwhile, expenses are on the rise, and, without competition in the marketplace, profits fall.

Bet-David asked Sullivan if he would be able to “sell” someone on getting into the industry today, and Sullivan said, “It’s financially impossible.” An individual looking to get into the cattle industry would be faced with the high cost of land, startup costs and overhead, for slight profits, if any, making it a losing proposition for most, especially without a lot of extra cash to pull from.

Currently, Sullivan says he spends $1,200 per animal for a $900 return. “And therefore, across America, we have seen hundreds of thousands of youth not return to the family operation after high school or college.” Sullivan believes that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one-third of the remaining beef farms and ranches in the U.S. may disappear after 2020 — maybe more.

As more farms and ranches shut down, the industry becomes even more concentrated. One thing that can help U.S. farmers is to support mandatory COOL. According to the American Grassfed Association (AGA), “U.S. cattle producers received higher prices for their cattle when the origins of foreign beef was distinguished in the marketplace.”¹⁰

As it stands, Americans may be eating imported meat that came from a country with lower standards for their meat, but they have no way of knowing it. This is even true for grass fed beef, about 80% of which is imported into the U.S. from other countries that can produce it at a lower cost.¹¹ It’s a food safety issue, according to Sullivan:

“The consumer doesn’t know where that food safety issue lies. They need to have the choice to do that. And if I’m gone as an individual producer, who fills my shoes now, in this time and age? Nobody.

Only multinational corporations, the conglomerates, the control … We have the highest quality beef supply … we’ve spent the last 150 years improving our herds. We want that to be differentiated from those people who have not worked so hard to be in the U.S. market.”

Regenerative Farming Has Saved Farmers

One way cattle farmers have differentiated themselves in these difficult times is by converting to grass fed, regenerative farming. Allen Williams, Ph.D., a sixth-generation family farmer, has consulted with more than 4,200 farmers and ranchers in the U.S. on soil health, cover-cropping, livestock integration, grazing management and other regenerative agriculture practices.

Many of the farmers and ranchers Allen has worked with over the past 20 years were in deep distress, trying to farm and ranch conventionally, and failing. Many of them were on the brink of losing their farms, which had been in the family for generations. By teaching them regenerative land management techniques, many of them were able to rebuild and prosper financially.

“The average age of farmers and ranchers across the U.S. are people in their 60s and early 70s,” Williams said. “So, we desperately need the younger generation to return to the land, and these regenerative practices allow them to have that opportunity to return and to do it in profitable and viable manner where they can support their young and growing families."¹²

Regenerative farming pioneer Will Harris, who runs White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia, is another example of how you can accomplish the conversion from conventional to regenerative agriculture and thrive financially. He produces high-quality grass fed products, including beef and other animal products.

The Grassfed Exchange is one resource for ranchers, who can learn how to produce the highest quality beef using 100% grass-based production models.¹³ Supporting the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption (PRIME) Act, introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., is also beneficial, as it would allow farmers to sell meat processed at smaller slaughtering facilities and allow states to set their own meat processing standards.

Because small slaughterhouses do not have an inspector on staff, a requirement that only large facilities can easily fulfill, they’re banned from selling their meat. The PRIME Act would lift this regulation without sacrificing safety, as random USDA inspections could still occur.¹⁴

On an individual level, the best way to support U.S. farmers is to seek out locally produced food as much as possible, including grass fed beef, and buy it directly from the farm or a farmers market whenever you can.

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There are several COVID-19 vaccines in development, and some have reached human trials. One of the recently revealed challenges of some forms of the vaccine is a connection to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) — either triggering a false positive test for it or potentially increasing the risk of an HIV infection.

HIV triggers acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). HIV is a retrovirus, which some experts believe is at the heart of several chronic diseases, including myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and autism. While some retroviruses can infect your germ cells, and therefore pass to your offspring, it’s not believed that HIV has that capacity.

The first HIV case was reported in 1981.¹ Over the next 35 years, the infection created panic in some communities, raised the risk of death and triggered multiple public health programs. As scientists grew to have a better understanding of the infection, they developed better treatment methods for those who are infected.

By 2019 surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical Center had performed the first living donor kidney transplant in the U.S. from an HIV patient to an HIV recipient. It was time, effort and science that brought treatment modalities to the point where HIV is now thought of as a chronic disease and not a death sentence.²

Australia Abandons Vaccine After False Positive HIV Tests

In the race to produce a viable vaccine for COVID-19, one developed at the University of Queensland, Australia, was scrapped when scientists found participants developed a false positive test for HIV after vaccination. This affected a $750 million planned order for the vaccine.

The vaccine was developed in a collaboration between the university and biotech company CSL and was one of several using a protein that prompted a response from the human immune system. These types of vaccines have been in use for years and have a known track record, as compared to the newer mRNA vaccines in development.

Examples of protein-based vaccinations include those given for pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type B and hepatitis B. Scientists have also used genetically engineered viruses to prompt the immune system to create antibodies against a pathogen. The technique of modifying the adenovirus has been in development for nearly three decades across several vaccines.⁴

The problem with the COVID vaccine was with two HIV protein fragments that scientists used to produce a molecular “clamp” on the coronavirus spikes. The clamp was meant to stabilize the virus, allowing an individual's immune system to effectively develop antibodies after exposure to the vaccine.

While researchers thought there was no risk from the vaccine of directly infecting the volunteer with HIV, the clamp caused trial participants’ bodies to produce antibodies that HIV tests recognized as a positive response.

Even though they felt the vaccine appeared to be safe and effective, they thought the false positive testing for HIV would undermine public trust. In order to continue the development and use of this vaccine, it would have required the current HIV test to be re-engineered to differentiate between those testing positive from the vaccine and those who had the virus. Prime Minister Scott Morrison spoke with reporters, saying:⁵

“We can’t have any issues with confidence and we are as a nation now, with a good portfolio of vaccines, able to make these decisions to best protect the Australian people.”

The New York Times calls this a “misstep”⁶ “that can inevitably occur when scientists, during a pandemic … rush to condense the usual years-long process to develop vaccines into a matter of months.”

Warning: Modified Virus Vaccine May Increase the Risk of HIV

Currently, the idea is to modify the adenovirus, which normally causes a common cold, with genes from SARS-CoV-2. This tricks the immune system into thinking it has been infected and then producing antibodies against the infection.

Researchers believe the adenoviruses are excellent vectors with several advantages over other viruses for this type of research, including the ease of genetic manipulation and the ability to induce robust T cell and antibody responses.⁷ However, there have been major drawbacks using adenoviruses in gene therapy and vaccines.

Researchers who had used recombinant adenovirus type 5 (Ad5) vector 10 years ago for an HIV-1 vaccine warned against using the same process for the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. Published in The Lancet, they outlined the challenges they had faced in two human trials with Ad5 vectored HIV-1 vaccine.

Data from both studies suggested the vaccination could increase the risk of acquiring HIV from the environment more easily than before. The mechanism for this increased susceptibility was not determined, but further exploratory studies suggested the Ad5 vaccine promoted HIV replication in CD4 T-cells, which could potentially make you more susceptible to an HIV infection.⁸

The results from the Step trial demonstrated the risk of acquiring HIV was higher in uncircumcised men having unprotected anal sex with an HIV-seropositive partner. The data from the Phambili study suggested that vaccinated heterosexual men also had a consistently higher increased risk of infection.

The results were compelling enough that in 2014 the National Institutes of Health acknowledged recombinant Ad5 vaccines may have a major problem as they could “increase susceptibility to HIV infection. This also raised the question of whether the problem extends to some or all of the other recombinant adenovirus vectors currently in development or to other vector-based vaccines.”⁹

The lead author of this paper was Dr. Anthony Fauci, who went on to recommend “against further use of Ad5 as a vector in HIV vaccines,” as reported by Forbes Magazine.¹⁰ These concerns were also reiterated by the researchers of the original HIV-1 vaccine studies, who wrote in The Lancet:¹¹

“On the basis of these findings, we are concerned that use of an Ad5 vector for immunisation against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) could similarly increase the risk of HIV-1 acquisition among men who receive the vaccine.

Both the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics disproportionately affect vulnerable populations globally. Roll-out of an effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine globally could be given to populations at risk of HIV infection, which could potentially increase their risk of HIV-1 acquisition.”

Emergency COVID Vaccines May Trigger Massive Side Effects

In the past, efforts to vaccinate against other coronaviruses have revealed serious concerns. Vaccines developed for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) tended to trigger antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).

This means that for some who received the vaccine, it has a paradoxical effect that increases your risk of severe infection if you are exposed to the virus. In other words, the vaccine enhances the virus’ ability to get inside your cells, which results in more severe disease.

This process may manifest in different ways, which include ADE and allergic inflammation caused by Th2 immunopathology. Given what is currently known about the virus and behavior in the body, some scientists have argued that ADE is only one immune enhancement pathology that may cause a dysregulated and potentially dangerous response to a COVID-19 vaccine.¹²

In May 2020 I interviewed Robert Kennedy Jr., during which he described the well-known hazards of coronavirus vaccines and summarized the history of coronavirus vaccine development. In 2002, following three consecutive SARS outbreaks, vaccine research had begun. Ten years later in 2012, Chinese, American and European scientists were working on a SARS vaccine and had about 30 promising candidates.

Of those, the four best vaccine candidates were then given to ferrets, which are the closest analog to human lung infections. While the ferrets displayed robust antibody response, which is the metric used for vaccine licensing, once they were challenged with the wild virus, they all became severely ill and died.

The same thing happened when they tried to develop an RSV vaccine in the 1960s. RSV is an upper respiratory illness that is very similar to that caused by coronaviruses. At that time, they had decided to skip animal trials and go directly to human trials. Kennedy recounts the experiment, saying:¹³

“They tested it on I think about 35 children, and the same thing happened. The children developed a champion antibody response — robust, durable. It looked perfect [but when] the children were exposed to the wild virus, they all became sick. Two of them died. They abandoned the vaccine. It was a big embarrassment to FDA and NIH.”

Even Pfizer acknowledges in their clinical protocol that COVID-19 disease enhancement is a real risk following certain vaccinations.¹⁴ Despite years of research and alternative development strategies, ADE concerns remain, and, as explained by Kennedy, coronavirus vaccines remain notorious for creating paradoxical immune enhancement.

Coronaviruses Produce Two Types of Antibodies

Coronaviruses produce more than neutralizing antibodies. Instead, they trigger two antibody responses in your body. This difference may be at the heart of why vaccines to prevent coronavirus infections have thus far been ineffective, and sometimes dangerous:

• Neutralizing antibodies bind to the virus in a way that blocks the ability of the pathogen to infect your cells.¹⁵
• Binding antibodies (also known as nonneutralizing antibodies) are produced during an infection but are unable to prevent a viral infection.¹⁶

Binding antibodies can also trigger an abnormal immune response.¹⁷ Another way to look at this is, instead of protecting you, the vaccine triggers an abnormal response, which causes your immune system to backfire so you develop a severe disease from the infection.

Many of the COVID-19 vaccines currently in development are using mRNA to trigger an immune response by instructing cells to make the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.¹⁸ The idea is to create the spike protein so your body produces antibodies, without making you sick in the process. The key question is: Which of the two types of antibodies are being produced through this process?

Weigh a Personal Risk-Benefit Ratio Before You Decide

Regardless of how effective or ineffective COVID-19 vaccines are, it is likely that several will be released to the public in relatively short order — all while racing through a process that normally takes years to ensure some measure of safety.¹⁹

Ironically, current data^20,21,22 no longer support a mass vaccination mandate, considering that the lethality of COVID-19 is lower than the flu for those under the age of 60.²³ If you’re under the age of 40, your risk of dying from COVID-19 is even lower, at just 0.01%, or a 99.99% chance of surviving the infection — and you could improve that further if you’re metabolically flexible and have optimal levels of vitamin D.

Unfortunately, participants in current COVID-19 vaccine trials are not being told that by getting the vaccine they may end up with more severe COVID-19 disease once they’re infected with the virus.²⁴ The speed at which the vaccines are being produced and released may create a second wave of severe disease and death from medical interventions.

In the meantime, as health officials pushed them to develop “warp speed” vaccines, the pharmaceutical companies were unwilling to move ahead unless they were shielded from liability if the vaccine were to produce injuries.²⁵ As one senior executive at AstraZeneca said:²⁶ “This is a unique situation where we as a company simply cannot take the risk …”

The industry is already protected by the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act that prohibits claims against companies that develop and release products for a public health emergency. Plus, the Supreme Court has also upheld rulings that protect vaccine makers,²⁷ without any seeming regard for the citizens who are injured.

Your decision to vaccinate or not for COVID-19 is currently a personal choice. Before making your decision, consider balancing your risks and benefits, evaluating the research and results of the vaccine and the danger of fatality in your personal circumstances. Also, consider taking significant steps to improve your metabolic flexibility and optimizing your vitamin D levels to lower your risk of severe disease.

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