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A study links thyroid disease with human exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). PFOA is a persistent organic chemical used in industrial and consumer goods including most nonstick cookware and stain- and water-resistant coatings for carpets and fabrics.
The study included nearly 4000 adults aged 20 and older whose blood serum was sampled between 1999 and 2006 for PFOA.
The researchers found that the individuals with the highest PFOA concentrations were more than twice as likely to report current thyroid disease.
Previous animal studies carried out by other scientists have shown that the compounds can affect the function of the mammalian thyroid hormone system. This system is essential for maintaining heart rate, regulating body temperature and supporting many other body functions, including metabolism, reproduction, digestion and mental health.
By Dr. Mercola
Mary Shomon is one of the top leaders in the field of thyroid research. She is the extremely popular About.com thyroid guru, as well as my go-to person when I'm looking for thyroid-related information.
Already a New York Times bestselling author, Mary's latest book, The Menopause Thyroid Solution: Overcome Menopause by Solving Your Hidden Thyroid Problems, deserves a place on every woman's bookshelf. It's a landmark study in the vital role your thyroid plays in helping you manage even your most difficult menopausal symptoms.
Are You Experiencing Menopause … or "Thyropause"?
If you're a woman in your 40's or 50's and are feeling fatigued, depressed, and are gaining weight, you're not alone. Forty million other women in the U.S. are suffering right along with you with what most assume are the symptoms of menopause.
But are your symptoms really menopause related?
Did you know the drop in reproductive hormones beginning at middle age (and sometimes much earlier) often triggers a reaction in your thyroid? Mary calls this thyroid slowdown "thyropause," and as she explains in her new book, the changes in your thyroid may actually be the cause of your symptoms.
If you're taking hormones for menopausal symptoms, natural or prescribed by a doctor, you may be taking unnecessary medication. What you may need to do instead is to investigate what's going on with your thyroid.
In The Menopause Thyroid Solution, Mary shows you how to distinguish between thyroid and menopause symptoms. She also helps you with food choices, medication options, supplements, and lifestyle changes you can make to alleviate symptoms, improve your metabolism and increase your energy level.
Connecting the Dots
The conventional approach to medicine is to treat each of your symptoms as completely independent from the others. The fact is, symptoms do not occur in a vacuum, but most traditional practitioners are just not interested in hearing about anything other than your most bothersome complaint.
This is especially counterproductive when considering the cause of your menopausal-type symptoms.
Your hormones are part of a network, your endocrine system. Yet if your problems seem to be hormone-related, the majority of allopathic MDs will treat you very specifically for either menopause, or thyroid problems.
This tunnel vision approach is unlikely to work for long, if at all, since there's a high probability your symptoms are both menopause and thyroid related.
What Mary does so beautifully in her new book is connect the dots for you, using a holistic approach that covers everything from determining the cause of your hormonal-based symptoms and understanding how they overlap, right through a wide range of steps you can take to heal yourself and dramatically improve the quality of your health and your life as you age.
Her book also explains the pros and cons of traditional, natural and bioidentical hormone treatments for estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, pregnenolone, and cortisol imbalances. This information couldn't be timelier given the latest serious threat to the production of natural hormonal remedies.
Mary Shomon's latest effort is an empowering book which helps you take better care of your own health as you age, as well as arms you with the information you need to get the most out of visits to your doctor or other health care provider.
I highly recommend The Menopause Thyroid Solution to women of all ages, and especially those of you who are entering or are in perimenopause or menopause. To learn more about the book, visit menopausethyroid.com.
By Dr. Mercola
Hypothyroidism is far more prevalent than once thought. The latest estimates are that 20 million Americans have hypothyroidism, but the actual numbers are probably higher.
Some experts claim that 10 to 40 percent of Americans have suboptimal thyroid function.
Thyroid hormones are used by every cell of your body to regulate metabolism and body weight by controlling the burning of fat for energy and heat. Thyroid hormones are also required for growth and development in children.
Iodine is Key for Thyroid Health
Iodine is the key to a healthy thyroid and efficient metabolism, and even comprises a large part of the thyroid hormone molecule itself.
Even the names of the different forms of thyroid hormone reflect the number of iodine molecules attached -- T4 has four attached iodine molecules, and T3 (the biologically active form of the hormone) has three -- showing what an important part iodine plays in thyroid biochemistry.
Iodine deficiency is one of the three most common nutritional deficiencies, along with magnesium and vitamin D.
Since iodine is so important for thyroid function, wouldn't you expect to see an increase in hypothyroidism with insufficient iodine levels?
Yes, and that is exactly what we have seen.
This means that your thyroid problem could actually be an iodine deficiency problem.
If you feel sluggish and tired, have difficulty losing weight, have dry skin, hair loss, constipation or cold sensitivity, it could all be related to hypothyroidism.
More than 100 years ago, iodine was shown to reverse and prevent goiter (swelling of your thyroid gland) and to correct hypothyroidism. But we now understand that iodine's effects are much farther reaching.
Iodine has four important functions in your body:
- Stabilization of metabolism and body weight
- Brain development in children
- Fertility
- Optimization of your immune system (iodine is a potent anti-bacterial, anti-parasitic, anti-viral and anti- cancer agent)
While iodine levels have fallen, there have been simultaneous increases in rates of thyroid disease, breast cancer, fibrocystic breast disease, prostate cancer, and obesity in American adults, and an increase in mental retardation and developmental delays in American children.
Why are Iodine Levels Dropping?
Iodine deficiency is on the rise in the United States. Simple supplementation may not be the answer as the following issues also need to be addressed.
Recent national survey data suggest that just over 11 percent of the total U.S. population, and over 7 percent of pregnant women, and nearly 17 percent of all reproductive-aged women, are deficient in iodine.
The Total Diet Study, performed by the FDA, reported an iodine intake of 621 µg for 2 year-olds between 1974 and 1982, compared with 373 µg between 1982 and 1991. During this same time period, the baking industry replaced iodine-based anti-caking agents with bromine-based agents.
In addition to iodine's disappearance from our food supply, exposure to toxic competing halogens (bromine, fluorine, chlorine and perchlorate) has dramatically increased.
You absorb these halogens through your food, water, medications and environment, and they selectively occupy your iodine receptors, further deepening your iodine deficit.
Fluoridation of water is a major contributor to iodine deficiency, besides being very damaging to your health in many other ways.
Additional factors contributing to falling iodine levels are:
- Diets low in fish, shellfish and seaweed
- Vegan and vegetarian diets
- Decreased use of iodized salt
- Less use of iodide in the food and agricultural industry
- Use of radioactive iodine in many medical procedures, which competes with natural iodine
Crying Wolff
A huge reason why iodine fell out of favor is the "Wolff-Chaikoff Effect," which has been a disaster for public health.
An experiment was done that resulted in a case of hypothyroidism, which researchers misinterpreted as being caused by excessive iodine intake. However, the individual was given intravenous radioactive iodine -- which is toxic. It had nothing to do with food or supplement iodine intake, and the two are completely different.
Yet, tales of this experiment quickly spread, creating a fear of iodine that caused it to be removed from the American food supply for the last three decades.
Iodine deficiency is particularly profound in the Midwest and Great Lakes region of the United States because iodine is typically found only in soils close to the oceans, whereas soils of inland areas are iodine deficient. In fact, that region used to be called the "goiter belt" because of its extremely high incidence of people with goiters.
The Toxic Halides -- Iodine's Fiercest Competitors
Iodine is a member of a class of related elements called "halogens" that includes bromine, fluorine, and chlorine. When they are chemically reduced, they become "halides": iodide, bromide, fluoride, and chloride. These are the forms you usually encounter in your foods, medications and environment.
Iodide and chloride are beneficial in small amounts, but bromide and fluoride are toxic. They grab onto your iodine receptors, blocking the action of iodide and thyroid hormones, resulting in, or at least contributing to many serious diseases.
One of the main problems is that the toxic halides become stuck in your body.
There is no known detoxification pathway for bromine and fluorine -- your body simply cannot break them down. So, they build up in your tissues and wreak havoc on your health.
Bromides
Bromides are a menace to your endocrine system and are present all around you.
Despite a ban on the use of potassium bromate in flour by the World Health Organization, bromides can still be found in some over-the-counter medications, foods, and personal care products.
The use of potassium bromate as an additive to commercial breads and baked goods has been a huge contributor to bromide overload in Western cultures.
Sodium bromate can be found in products such as permanent waves, hair dyes, and textile dyes.
Benzylkonium is used as a preservative in some cosmetics. Even trace amounts of bromine can trigger severe acne in sensitive individuals. And who needs skin care products that cause acne?
Bromine is also found in fire retardants used in carpets, mattresses, upholstery, and furniture and some medical equipment.
Based on animal research, bromides have been linked to behavioral changes and neurodevelopmental disorders, including Attention Deficit Disorders, in children.
The United States is quite behind in putting an end to the egregious practice of allowing bromine chemicals in your foods and products whereas other nations have taken the bull by the horns:
- In 1990, the United Kingdom banned bromate in bread
- In 1994, Canada did the same
- Brazil recently outlawed bromide in flour products
- The European Union has banned some PBDE compounds (polybrominated diphenyl ethers)
What's taking us so long?
Again, corporate profits trump health concerns when it comes to doing what is best for the public.
Great Resource for Learning More
Author and patient advocate Mary Shomon is one of the leading educators on thyroid health in the U.S. and has led the most popular consumer forum, the About.com thyroid guide. Mary cautions thyroid patients not to run out to the health food store and load up on iodine or iodine-rich supplements like kelp and bladderwrack.
According to Mary, in someone who is not iodine-deficient, excessive iodine supplementation can actually worsen a pre-existing thyroid condition, or trigger further thyroid dysfunction. The key is in getting the right amount of iodine -- not too much, not too little.
The way to evaluate your iodine intake is a test that measures how much iodine you are excreting in your urine.
The general protocol requires you to take a dose of iodine, collect your urine for 24 hours, and then send the sample off to a lab where they calculate your iodine level based on how much iodine you are spilling into your urine. If you are interested in being tested for iodine deficiency, this urine iodine challenge test is the most accurate way to assess your iodine status.
Getting Your Iodine Levels Up
If you are iodine deficient, I recommend adding sea vegetables to your diet.
The best source of organically bound iodine that I know of is non-commercially harvested seaweeds. The dose is about 5 grams a day or about one ounce per week, so a pound would last about two months.
It is typically better to obtain a nutrient from a natural food whenever possible than from a supplement, so use supplements only as a last resort.
Some patients also report that they respond better to food-based forms of iodine -- like seaweeds -- than the supplement forms. However, if you are going to use a supplement I would strongly advise using supersaturated iodine (SSKI) which is available as an inexpensive prescription. Typically 1-3 drops a day are all that are required.
Please avoid using Lugol's solution or iodine, as that can actually worsen your thyroid condition.
The fact that your thyroid only transports iodine in its ionized form (i.e. iodide) is straight out of the textbooks. Your thyroid reduces iodide (I-) into iodine (I2) for use in formation of thyroglobulin. Your body doesn't utilize iodine directly. It has to split the I2 into two I- ions, which is an oxidative reaction that causes oxidative stress.
Iodide transporters are located in other areas of your body besides the thyroid gland, including your breasts and colon. One family of iodide transporters is called the sodium-iodide symporter, and the other is called pendren. Dr. David Brownstein (see below) discusses the sodium-iodide symporter but doesn't mention pendren. However like all ion transporters they too require a charge in order to move a molecule across the membrane, which means iodine must be in its ionized form.It's possible that some may see good results using Lugol's for some afflictions, but according to autism expert Catherine Tamara, in her experience it is very clear that children with autism, and their mothers, do fine with iodide, but not necessarily with iodine.
For more information about the research that makes me question the recommendation for iodine and Lugol's solution, please see these studies:
- Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health 1992, 37:535-548 "Evidence of Thyroxine Formation Following Iodine Administration in Sprague-Dawley Rats"
- Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health 1991, 32:89-101 "Comparison of Toxicity Induced by Iodine and Iodide in Male and Female Rats"
- Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health 1998, 55:93-106 "Comparison of the Effects of Iodine and Iodide on Thyroid Function in Humans"
- Biological Trace Element Research 2006, 110:193-209 "Analyses of Toxic Metals and Essential Minerals in the Hair of Arizona Children with Autism and Associated Conditions, and Their Mothers"
Keeping your iodine levels optimal is particularly important if you are a women that is contemplating pregnancy, or are already pregnant Make sure you are taking seaweed or a prenatal vitamin with the right amount and form of iodide, not iodine, to help protect your baby.
Tips for Optimizing Thyroid Function
David Brownstein, M.D., has written several books on thyroid and iodine, which are a valuable resource for those of you who want more information.
Also, Dr. Hyman has made some good recommendations if you have a sluggish thyroid:
- Identify and treat underlying causes (e.g., iodine deficiency, hormone imbalance, environmental toxicity, inflammation)
- Adjust your diet and understand the role of nutrition (iodine, as well as tyrosine, selenium, vitamins A and D, zinc, B vitamins, and omega-3 fats), food allergies, gluten intolerance, and foods that contain goitrogens, such as soy, which interfere with the utilization of iodine
- Get plenty of exercise
- Reduce your stress
- Enjoy saunas and hot soaks for detoxification,
- Use supplements, if necessary for nutritional support
- If you are on thyroid hormones for less than five years, most people find that they respond far better to natural thyroid hormone supplementation that has both T1, T2, T3 and T4, not just T4 like Synthroid. Armour Thyroid and Nature-Thyroid are the best known, but compounding pharmacists can also produce natural thyroid hormone prescriptions.
The more you can rid your body of the toxic halides, the more iodine your body will be able to hang onto, and the better your thyroid will function.
Laura Power, MS, PhD, LDN, offers these suggestions for increasing secretion of fluorine and bromine::
- High-dose iodine
- High-dose vitamin C
- Unrefined sea salt
- Epsom salts baths
- Sweating in a far infrared sauna
The Future of Natural Thyroid Drugs
This is a surprising and shocking injustice that is occurring in the U.S. right now.
The FDA has shut down natural desiccated thyroid drug production and distribution by three major firms, and is now calling the century-old natural remedy an "unapproved drug."
One of the ways you can typically differentiate a natural physician from a conventional one is by the type of thyroid hormone replacement therapy they prescribe. Natural physicians will almost exclusively used desiccated thyroid hormone products like Armour Thyroid.
I have put thousands of patients on this and it was my consistent experience that most did far better on these than the synthetic versions. About the only exception were people that were taking synthetics for longer than 10 years. Seems like their body had a tough time adjusting back.
Taking desiccated thyroid hormone off the market will cause harm, danger and damage to hundreds of thousands and perhaps more than that, unless they are allowed access to this safe and superior thyroid replacement.
Two other major manufacturers/distributors now have long-term backorders for their bioidentical hormone products, which include Armour, Nature-Throid, and Westroid.
The uncertainty about the future of natural thyroid drug options has many patients and practitioners concerned, and the Save Natural Thyroid Coalition has been formed in response.
Along with recently holding its first kickoff teleconference to discuss the future of natural desiccated thyroid (NDT) drugs, the Save Thyroid Coalition has also created the Save Natural Thyroid YouTube channel, where patients and practitioners can create and post videos supporting natural thyroid.
I am actually serving on this committee and going to support it with as much media exposure is required to prevent this travesty of justice. It is depriving patients of a valid and natural way to support their thyroid function that has typically been damaged by toxins and stress.
They've also formed a Save Natural Thyroid Facebook Group to strategize and help keep thyroid patients informed. If you or anyone you love uses bioidentical hormones, you may want to join this group to keep up on the latest updates.
If you're newly diagnosed with hypothyroidism, or have not been on synthetic hormones for very long, I strongly recommend Armour Thyroid -- a natural porcine thyroid extract, which provides not only T3 and T4, but also T1 and T2, which will help normalize your hormone response.
The fact that the FDA may now severely limit, or eliminate, this option is distressing, as it is clearly the best option for many people.
Major Pharmaceuticals has put out a press release saying that they've been forced to shut down production of all natural desiccated thyroid drugs, a treatment for hypothyroidism that has been in use for over a century. Major received notice from the FDA that their complete line of desiccated thyroid drugs can no longer be manufactured, and that the FDA is pulling the designation that allowed them to sell these drugs.
Major is also saying that the FDA is requiring that all manufacturers that wish to continue manufacturing submit an NDA or ANDA (New Drug Application or Abbreviated New Drug Application) for approval. Desiccated thyroid drugs were in use in the early 1900’s, and already on the market when the government regulatory groups to oversee medications were formed, so they never went through the new drug application process.
Biotech, Time Cap Labs, and Major are no longer manufacturing natural desiccated thyroid drugs. RLC and Forest are now the last makers of natural desiccated thyroid drugs in the U.S., and their products are unavailable or in short supply in throughout the nation.
This article was previously published November 22, 2020, and has been updated with new information.
In this interview, Dr. William Seeds, an orthopedic surgeon, reviews how to optimize your metabolic function, improve cellular efficiency and make you more resilient against respiratory viruses using ketones — a topic previously discussed in my interview with Travis Christofferson, who wrote the book "Ketones: The Fourth Fuel."
"My science background has been cellular molecular biology and biochemistry, so that's something I've been deeply involved with for the last 35 years," Seeds says.
"It's parlayed into orthopedics, my specialty, because of tissue healing and optimizing cell efficiency and the flexibility of the cell to improve tissue healing in what we do surgically. So, it's always played an integral role in what we've tried to do to optimize patient outcomes."
Ketones are water-soluble fats that have powerfully beneficial metabolic benefits and also aid in tissue healing. Ketone esters are a convenient way to increase ketones and are helpful in cases of viral infections such as COVID-19, as they reestablish cellular homeostasis, provide rapid energy, recharge your antioxidants and control oxidation within the cell.
"We're looking to reestablish the homeostasis of the cell, which is basically the redox of the cell, and that is very important in controlling an inflammatory state like COVID-19.
The premises behind what these ketone esters do is they have the ability to give the cell an immediate energy source that doesn't utilize a lot of energy to use it. This helps a cell produce more ATP, more energy, that it may need to function where it is in a higher state of activity because of its stressors it's working against."
Ketones also increase nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate hydrogen (NADPH), a powerful metabolic co-factor that improves your body's ability to recharge antioxidants like superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione peroxidase and hexokinase-1 to their functional state by donating an important reducing electron.
NADPH, in my view, is probably one of the most important biomolecules in your body, right up there with NAD+ and ATP. It is the primary way your body recycles its antioxidants. It essentially transfers electrons to them to help reduce excessive oxidative stress.
This is important because once those antioxidants are used, whether produced endogenously or taken exogenously in a supplement, they no longer work. They need to be recharged, which is what NADPH does. This explains why many studies that have attempted to show benefit from taking high dose antioxidants fail.
When antioxidants are taken as supplements they have the potential to indiscriminately suppress beneficial free radicals, but when you recharge antioxidants with NADPH, your body is able to selectively and wisely discriminate between the specific free radicals you want eliminated. There are beneficial free radicals, such as nitric oxide, that you don't want to eliminate. Seeds agrees, adding:
"The key is understanding that you're benefiting your endogenous antioxidant system versus exogenously taking supplements that are potentially reducing your equivalents. Your cells are inherently intelligent and understand how to utilize these ratios of NADP over NADPH and NAD over NADH.
It's giving the cell back the ability to become efficient and flexible. As you reduce glutathione peroxidase, it goes out there and takes care of superoxide or any other type of possible free radical.
Then that will take those electrons but then it has to be changed again, it has to be reduced again to be active and that is the critical part of understanding this — especially in states of high demand, like COVID-19, where you've got, for instance, the alveolar type 2 cells that are highly metabolically active that are producing superoxide dismutase in the lung area that needs to work against the free radical process produced by cytokine storm and so forth.
You have to have the ability to constantly provide that NADPH or you're in trouble. Whether it's a cytokine storm or an increased oxidative state, this is how we get into trouble and how this leads to metabolic diseases, immune diseases and so forth."
In addition to increasing NADPH, ketones also suppress inflammatory pathways present as a result of an infection. Infection initiates an inflammatory cascade of proinflammatory cytokines. One of the benefits of ketone augmentation, either endogenous or exogenous, is that it suppresses potent proinflammatory pathways like NRLP3.
As explained by Seeds, the NRLP3 process is all about activation of the inflammasome. NF kappa B is a transcription factor in the nucleus of the cell responsible for initiating the production of proinflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-1 beta, interleukin-6 and TNF alpha. The overproduction of these cytokines by your immune system is what results in a proinflammatory state.
In addition to boosting NADPH, ketones can also elevate NAD+, which in turn upregulates SIRT genes, SIRT3 in particular, that directly control inflammation. SIRT3 deacetylates inflammasome and decreases the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines.
"These proinflammatory agents we're talking about, interleukin-1 beta, tumor necrosis factor alpha and interleukin-6, are necessary for normal cell activity but higher levels are what need to be controlled. So, we're giving the cell the nutrition it needs to make intelligent decisions of how to utilize what it has to control the environment when the cells is getting out of is homeostatic pattern."
In addition to SIRT3, SIRT1 and SIRT2 are also important, and they tend to be activated by beneficial nutrients that we take in our diets, such as resveratrol. However, SIRT1 is useless unless NAD+ is high enough. And, as explained by Seeds, when you upregulate SIRT1, you also upregulate AMPK, which in turn improves mitochondrial biogenesis.
SIRT2, meanwhile, is activated by a polyphenol flavonoid called quercetin. I believe quercetin may be a superior alternative to hydroxychloroquine because not only does it act like a zinc ionophore to increase zinc levels inside the cell but it also activates SIRT2 and has beneficial effects on inflammasome.
The two graphics below are from the paper Seeds wrote, describing the effects of metabolic therapy on COVID-19.1
There are strategies to boost your endogenous ketone levels — such as following a cyclical ketogenic diet and taking C8 (caprylic acid) MCT oil — which is what I prefer. This typically takes more time and commitment but is far less expensive, as ketone esters are typically about $1 per gram and a therapeutic dose can range from 5 to 25 grams.
Seeds typically uses exogenous ketones such as 1,3-butanediol beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is available in products like KetonAid. This strategy has high compliance and helps you achieve more rapid change in ketone levels and ketosis, and allows for greater precision but is costlier.
"All you need is 5 grams to elevate your endogenous production of almost 1 millimole (mmol/L) of ketosis," Seeds says. "If you [take], let's say 25 grams, you'll get that to 3 to 5 mmol/L … that will be around for about three to four hours. We believe that range, anywhere above 1 mmol/L is going to be effective initially, to see those changes [in] NADPH, NAD and the inflammasome action.
Now, in our treatment of people that are directly in a COVID-19 situation where we're trying to treat respiratory problems and want a higher millimole concentration, we're going to use the 25 mg [dose] to get that 3 to 5 mmol/L concentration.
What we're truly working on is relieving that bronchial constriction and working on changing the calcium balance of that excitation coupling that's happening with the muscle around the bronchials. That's why the ketone esters have been so effective for us because we get a very quick improvement in that bronchial dilatation.
That's been absolutely a wonderful tool for us as physicians to be able to utilize early on, when people are feeling that chest tightness and having some early respiratory changes. We've done it also on the back end of COVID-19, where people who have been treated are still having respiratory and fatigue issues."
Through his peptide society, the SSRP Society,2 he's been able to work with hundreds of U.S. doctors, describing these protocols and how exogenous ketones can be used in early treatment of COVID-19, and as a prophylactic. In many cases, a patient's respiratory status can be improved within minutes.
The use of ketones is one of three interventions that I'm convinced can have nearly immediate benefit. The other two are molecular hydrogen and nebulized hydrogen peroxide. Each one of these can provide near-miraculous benefits in a very short amount of time.
We also discussed the use of C8 caprylic acid in greater depth in the interview, which is the most effective form of MCT oil, so for more details, please listen to the interview. We also discuss the use of ketone esters in professional athletics.
One fascinating fact brought up by Seeds is that they now have evidence showing that taking C8 MCT oil about 20 minutes before radiation exposure, such as an X-ray or flying in a commercial aircraft, can inhibit 100% of the radiation damage.
Another important aside is that when you take MCT oil or ketone esters, their efficacy will be significantly increased if you cut down on carbohydrates. There's a big difference in the blood ketone levels you can achieve taking either of them with a high-carb diet, a low-carb diet or when fasting. Fasting will raise your ketone blood levels the most.
Seeds also segues into a discussion about how good old-fashioned baking soda and Alka-Seltzer Gold can be used to squelch excessive inflammation at the molecular level, as bicarbonate immediately neutralizes peroxynitrites, which are among the most damaging free radicals there are. Seeds summarizes a typical regimen:
"I like the Alka-Seltzer Gold — it has to be that specifically, as it doesn't have the aspirin in it. I'll have people take it just to build up their bicarb level. Take two tabs in the morning, two tabs in the middle of the day and two tabs at night. I'll have them do that for about three days to a week, and then I have them go down to just doing two tabs a day.
If you're using baking soda by itself, I'll have people start with a half a teaspoon about every three hours. I'll have them do six doses a day for a few days, and then go to a full teaspoon, three times a day for a few weeks … That's been an easy prophylaxis, and we utilize bicarb in many other aspects too, in immune diseases and so forth."
While simple baking soda (sodium bicarb), as Seeds recommends, will work, I personally use and recommend using potassium bicarb. You can purchase it inexpensively in pound quantities at nuts.com.
The key to using it effectively is to pick up some litmus pH paper and regularly monitor your urine. Ideally, your pH should be about 7. Without the bicarb it will likely be 6 or even lower. I use about one-half teaspoon three to four times a day based on my urine pH.
This is a powerful strategy I would encourage nearly everyone to adopt as by keeping your urine pH around 7 with the bicarb you will avoid having to neutralize the acidity with either amino acids from your muscles or calcium and other minerals from your bones. This is a simple inexpensive habit that can go a long way to improving your health
Bicarb also works well together with ketone esters, as the bicarbonate improves the power output of the cell. This can be particularly useful for athletes. Seeds explains:
"It takes it to a new level. Bicarbonate absolutely improves the power output of the cell, of the muscle, just based on improving the ability to work against the buildup of lactic acid over time. It's just improving [athletes'] ability to perform longer, and when you combine ketones and bicarbonate, you've all of a sudden changed the playing field.
You're still getting the signaling of that lactic acid process. You're not affecting what the lactic acid is important for in the brain, because that's what's going to improve the increase in insulin for you also. The key here is understanding that you're not changing signaling. All you're doing is controlling the pH of the cell …
The signaling is of utmost importance for improving insulin to improve the utilization of glucose. So, it's just a really amazing circle, and if you understand these pathways, you've got some tremendous tools that are WADA [World Anti-Doping Association] approved. There are no stipulations against any of this type of stuff.
When we're giving bicarb, that's going to challenge the ionic change of the hydrogen ions that are going to be produced. It's going to be able to challenge that instead of going into the muscle and taking glutamine, and then to the liver to produce ammonia to balance out the pH. And so, we're preserving muscle. We're preserving bone.
Let me take this a step further, if I can. Diets today are set up to destroy that acid base metabolism and over time — what I just described — is what's happening. You get a slow leak of loss of amino acid from the muscle.
We've studied it based on nitrogen produced in the urine, and the kidney has to make up for this acid buildup because of the protein buildup. It has to deal with it by taking amino acids from muscle or alkali from bone.
So, we've got this strategy of utilizing bicarb that changes that. It stops osteopenia. It stops sarcopenia, and on top of it, it's got these other aspects of improving cell metabolism."
To learn more about Seed's practice and how he's revolutionizing medicine with peptide therapy, see Seeds.md. He's also written a book on peptide protocols — which is a discussion we did not cover in this interview — and how they can improve metabolic function and cellular efficiency. "Peptide Protocols: Volume One" was released in August 2020, and can be found on Amazon.com.
In this interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental activist and attorney turned ultimate freedom fighter, discusses his latest book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” which is a must-read if you want to know more about the behind-the-scenes of this giant fraud. We could talk for hours and not cover but a fraction of what's in this book, which Kennedy calls a “devastating indictment of Tony Fauci.”
In a nutshell, Kennedy describes how Fauci turned the National Institutes of Health into an incubator for pharmaceutical products, and essentially sold the entire country to the drug industry. The book is an incredibly well-referenced record of his history of decimating human health, and exposes him as a self-serving charlatan.
I particularly enjoyed how Kennedy placed Fauci in the context of Rockefeller’s legacy with respect to Bill Gates, who developed an alliance with Fauci over 20 years ago. Rockefeller set us on a course of toxic, profit-driven medicines synthesized from the byproducts of the oil refinery process a century ago, and Gates picked up where he left off and then collaborated heavily with Fauci.
Fauci, in turn, has had a hand in creating the vaccine gold rush. In 2000, he met with Bill Gates, who asked to partner with the NIH in an agreement to vaccinate the entire population of the world with a battery of new vaccines. In 2009, this agreement was rebranded as “The Decade of Vaccines,” the objective of which was to implement mandatory vaccinations for every adult and child on the planet by the year 2020.
“I show how they use the pandemic simulations, working very closely with the intelligence agencies, with the big media companies and the major pharmaceutical companies to make that happen,” Kennedy says.
“Gates calls what he does philanthropy capitalism, [the idea that] you can use philanthropy to make money. He had a foundation where he has sheltered $50 billion in tax-free money. And, he continues to have absolute control over it. He uses that money to gain control of public health agencies in our country and the World Health Organization.
He's created a lot of his own [organizations] with Dr. Fauci and a lot of these quasi-governmental agencies that people think are governmental. They're actually front groups of the pharmaceutical industry like GAVI and SEPI ...
He uses this battery and this control of the WHO to set pharmaceutical or medical policy, public health policy around the globe, in a way that maximizes the profits from his stakeholding in these big pharmaceutical companies.
I also show he's simultaneously doing the same thing to control the global food supply ... [He’s] really trying to change both public health and food policies in ways that benefit corporations that he's invested in and that he's partnered with.”
Gates didn’t lure Fauci to the dark side, however. Fauci had already spent decades playing with people’s lives and sacrificing public health for profit. One of the darkest stains on Fauci’s career, aside from his role in the COVID pandemic, was his handling of the HIV epidemic.
The first cases of AIDS surfaced in 1981. Initially, the AIDS program was run by the National Cancer Institute, a separate institute inside the Health and Human Services Department (HHS). The general belief was that AIDS had a chemical etiology caused by drug use. This all changed when the HIV virus was discovered.
Fauci started working for the NIH in 1968 as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He became director of the NIAID in 1984, the year after the discovery of the HIV virus, and was appointed director of the Office of AIDS Research in 1988, when that office was established. As explained by Kennedy, Fauci essentially built the NIAID around an AIDS drug called AZT.
“AZT was a chemotherapy formulation that was so toxic it killed all the rats when they gave it to them. The inventor of AZT felt that it was unsafe for any human use, so he didn't even patent it,” Kennedy says.
“Very early on, the National Cancer Institute had found that when you put AZT in a culture of HIV, that killed the HIV, not surprisingly. It killed anything it touched. And so, Fauci partnered with the manufacturer of AZT ... He guided that formulation through the regulatory process and tried to fast track it. He cheated terribly on the clinical trials.
In the clinical trials, it was killing everybody. It literally kills everybody who takes it. But he was able to keep the people in the treatment group alive by giving them huge numbers of blood transfusions. It does keep them alive for the eight weeks, and based upon that eight-week trial, he got approval for AZT. It was unprecedented.
As Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the polymerase chain-reaction (PCR) technique, said, with any chemotherapy drug, you're supposed to give it to somebody for two weeks. Chemotherapy is designed to kill every cell in the body, but hopefully it kills tumor cells first, and you can take the person off it. The tumor dies, if you time it right, and the person doesn't die.
If you put somebody on that for life, like Tony Fauci was doing, every one of them is going to die. And that's what happened. Meanwhile, there were a lot of drugs at that time that were being repurposed. Local, community-based doctors in San Francisco and New York who were treating the AIDS community were finding that these drugs treated the symptoms of AIDS, and they stopped people from dying.
Fauci made a deliberate crusade to sabotage those, to make sure they were not available to sick people, in order to make sure that AZT would be the only solution. And AZT was the most expensive drug in history. It was $10,000 for a one-year supply [while costing just $5 per dose to manufacture, plus U.S. taxpayers paid for all of the research and development of the drug] ...
Tony Fauci basically created this template that he then used over the next 45 years, to develop toxic drug after toxic drug. He killed early treatment, and killed any protocol that competed with his pharmaceutical enterprise. A lot of people have died [as a result].”
Although a bonanza of money was made with AZT, it pales in comparison to Pfizer making out like a bandit with its COVID shot. The U.S. taxpayers paid $20 billion to fund the research, and another $10 billion to market the COVID jab. Pfizer created the best-selling drug in the world and will make $35 billion from it this year.1 Even better, unlike AZT, this is absolutely risk-free and they can never be sued for injuries.
An estimated 330,000 people have died from AZT alone. Overall, the similarities between the AZT scandal and what's happening today with the COVID jab and remdesivir are striking. Again, Fauci has discouraged the use of any prevention for COVID-19, and any treatment using inexpensive and relatively nontoxic drugs such as hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.
U.S. taxpayers funded the research while drug companies have made an estimated $100 billion in profits from the shots in a single year, all while having zero liability for injuries and deaths even as people are being coerced into taking them.
“Everything in Tony Fauci's career is Groundhog Day,” Kennedy says. “Again, and again, and again, he is repeating the same behavior and it is paying off. And he has this way of talking where he never really says anything. And this habit of just lying, and lying, and lying ...
I knew a lot about what happened during the HIV crisis because my uncle, Ted Kennedy, was chair of a health committee at that time. Teddy was the first presidential candidate to court the gay vote, and I was running his campaign at that time ...
In the health committee, his primary concern for most of the time was AIDS. I talk about this in my book.
Finally, Fauci was called in front of Congress, and was just fileted. Henry Waxman and all of these well-known Democratic congressmen were saying, ‘What the hell are you doing? You've produced nothing. You're totally incompetent.’ After that, his career was over, and he decided at that point, ‘OK, I'm going to work on getting these repurposed drugs on the market.’
He did that for a couple of years, and he had a project, which was a dual track project where they could, without going through the clinical trials and FDA randomized, placebo controlled trials, they could get approval for these drugs, so that people could get insurance for them and pay for them. So, I was deeply involved in this for many, many years, and I've known Tony Fauci for a long time.
I have insights on who he really is, that most liberal Democrats are utterly ignorant of. He is the opposite of everything they believe. He is the architect who turned our public health system over to the pharmaceutical industry. He does not do public health. And there is no metric at NIH, where they look and say, ‘We are improving public health.’
The only metric they have is, ‘How many vaccines have we given? How many pharmaceutical drugs have we sold? How much kickback money are we getting into the agency?’ As I explain in the book, this agency has become an incubator for the pharmaceutical industry.”
Fauci is responsible for an annual budget of about $6.1 billion. He gets another $1.6 billion from the military to do bioweapons research, which is where 68% of his $437,000 a year salary comes from. (Fauci is the highest-paid federal employee in the U.S. Second-highest is the president, at $400,000 a year.)
“That's why he had to do that gain-of-function shenanigans in Wuhan,” Kennedy says. “He had to do it, because he had to hold on to his salary. And most of his salary comes from bioweapons research ...
Gain-of-function research has never provided a single scientific or medical development that has assisted us in responding to pandemics. Not one. But Fauci continues to do it, because it is critical to his salary. And it's critical to that funding stream.”
Now, the bulk of the NIAID’s funding was intended to be used to study American health and to improve it; to eliminate infectious allergic diseases and autoimmune diseases. Instead, under Fauci’s watch, the chronic disease epidemic has exploded.
This, despite the fact that between Fauci, Gates and the U.K. Wellcome Trust, they control 63% of the biomedical research on earth through their funding. Over his career, Fauci alone has distributed more than $930 billion in research grants through the NIAID. You could say they control all of it, really, because they also have the capacity to dry up funding to projects they don’t want done.
Case in point: Something happened in 1989, triggering a series of epidemics — autism, food allergies, Tourette's Syndrome, narcolepsy, ADD/ADHD, speech delay, language delay, rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune diseases like juvenile diabetes. All of them sprang up right around 1989. Why? What’s causing them? It’s Fauci’s job to find out, but he refuses to, and he blocks anyone else from digging too deep.
“Tony Fauci's job is to say, why did that happen? It has to be an environmental toxin. Genes don't cause epidemics. They provide the vulnerability, but they cannot cause an epidemic. You need an environmental toxin. All we have to do is figure out which one started in '89, and became ubiquitous the same year. But if anybody tries to do that study, Fauci will ruin their career.”
Top suspects include vaccines, which dramatically increased in '89, and virtually all of the chronic diseases that have skyrocketed are listed as potential side effects on the manufacturers’ inserts. The herbicide glyphosate also became ubiquitous around that time, and really exploded in 1993 when RoundUp Ready corn was invented. GMOs, other pesticides, ultrasound and PFOAs are other potential culprits.
“Our kids are swimming around in a toxic soup. And it could be all of those things, or it could be one or another, but it's easy to find out. You just do the science. And that science is easy to do, but it will never be done as long as Tony Fauci's in office, because he doesn't want us to know — because those are the industries he has survived by protecting,” Kennedy says.
Kennedy goes on to explain how Fauci works on behalf of Big Pharma, and why he’s become so important for the drug industry.
“Between 2009 and 2016, about 230 drugs were approved by the FDA, all of which came out of his shop. So, he is an incubator for Pharma.
And here's what he does: At his lab, he has petri dishes filled with every virus [imaginable], and he has scientists that are messing around with different molecules and different poisons, and they'll drop those poisons into a petri dish and see if it kills the culture. If it kills the culture, then he has a potential antiviral drug.
The next step is, they give it to rats, and see if it kills the rats. If most of the rats survive, now you have a potential antiviral that may work in humans. Then, he farms it out to a big university. Now the person it goes to at the university is usually a very powerful person. It's the dean of the medical school, or the chair of one of the departments, and they run the clinical trials, which is extremely lucrative.
So, they will do the Phase 1 trial, and they'll recruit maybe 100 people for the trial. Fauci gives that principal investigator maybe $20,000 per recruit. The university skims off 50% to 75% of that. So, now, that university is hooked into the system.
Then, if the drug works in Phase 1 and Phase 2, then they have to bring in big groups of people — 10,000 people — and you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. And they have to bring in a pharmaceutical company that now takes control of about half the patent.
Tony Fauci's agency keeps a share of the patent. For example, they now collect royalties on the Moderna [COVID] vaccine. [The NIAID] gets half the royalties, billions of dollars. The university researcher keeps some of the patent, so he is now permanently attached to Tony Fauci and will do anything he says, and the university itself is getting some of that patent.
So, it's hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to these universities every year, in addition to the grants that he's giving, and he can cut all that off if somebody at the university does the wrong study.
Once the drug goes through Phase 3, it goes to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Fauci says, ‘Well those are independent scientists at FDA.’ The panel is called VRBPAC [Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee], and they're NOT people who work for the FDA. They're outside persons who are brought in.
Well, where are they brought in from? They're Tony Fauci's principal investigators from all the universities, who are working on his other projects, and they're brought in to rubber stamp the drug ...
They OK it and give it a license, because they know that, next year, their drug is going to be in front of that committee, and they are going to want the committee to rubber stamp them. So, that committee never says no. It always green lights everything, and it's completely controlled by Fauci. He controls the whole process ...
Every expert you see on CNN is on Tony Fauci's payroll, and CNN will never tell you that. It will say, ‘This is an independent virologist, he's an immunologist at Baylor University, or Stanford, or Harvard.’ They're not telling you where that guy's bread is being buttered, and that the person who's buttering it is Tony Fauci, with your taxpayer dollars. The whole system is just fixed.”
As more and more of Fauci’s lies and his funding of sadistic experiments on animals and aborted fetuses are coming to light, Kennedy predicts Fauci will be forced to resign, especially as the book comes out and people really start to understand what he’s been up to all these years.
“Nobody who was not a sadist in his soul would allow [the beagles being eaten by sandflies] experiment to happen,” Kennedy says. “Yet, Tony Fauci deemed that the best use for $450,000 of U.S. taxpayer money, with all of the screaming needs in public health.
But it's not just $450,000. Millions and millions [of dollars] he has put into these sadistic experiments where they’re torturing animals to death. Like you'd see in a schoolyard with little boys, who don't know any better and need to be told, ‘You don't do that to another creature.’ Fauci doesn't have that instinct, it's lacking.
It explains what he has done during COVID — denying early treatment to millions of Americans and forcing them to suffer and die in their homes, or on ventilators and remdesevir, which is a deadly toxic drug, rather than get treated and be healthy.
And punishing, silencing, censoring, delicensing, discrediting any doctor who tries to say, ‘Wait a minute, I've been treating patients, and my patients aren't dying, because I'm using hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin’ and an entire battery of repurposed drugs that we now know treat virtually all COVID cases.
Seventy to 90% of COVID deaths and hospitalizations could have been prevented, and there are hundreds of studies that support that. Yet, he forbids people from doing it. That is a sociopath ...
And shutting down a million businesses, is that really going to save lives? There's no study that indicated it would ... We have 4.2% of the global population, and we had 14.5% of the deaths. Why is anybody listening to this guy? There's no Health Minister in the world who has a worse track record than Tony Fauci.
There are many countries that had 1/100th of our death rate per million in population. And guess what? Those are mainly the African and Asian countries, that as a matter of course are giving ivermectin for river blindness and hydroxychloroquine for malaria control.”
In support of Kennedy’s assertion that Fauci will be forced to resign, you can view his recent grilling November 4, 2021, by Sen. Rand Paul in front of Congress. What is most impressive are the comments, which are virtually unanimously disparaging Fauci.
In his book, Kennedy includes a chapter on some of the animal trials Fauci funded. He also tells a far grimmer story, where the guinea pigs were Black and Hispanic children. At least 85 of these children died, but the number could be as high as 1,000 or so. Fauci got these children by arranging for foster care programs in New York and six other states to assign children who had lost their parents to AIDS to participate in drug studies.
These children had no guardian, so they were illegal studies. To do a clinical trial on children, you need to have a guardian appointed who puts their interests first, ahead of the drug companies. Fauci didn't want that, so he allowed these studies to go forward without a legal guardian for any of these kids. No one was watching out for them. The trials weren’t even done by licensed medical professionals.
“They were mainly Dominican immigrants, who were deeply compassionate, who discovered in the middle that they were actually being hired to treat these children as guinea pigs, and they were killing huge numbers of them. Many of the kids didn't even have HIV, so they had no possible benefit from the drug, which is illegal.
Yet Fauci got away with all of it. I believe there was a Congressional investigation for a brief time, but like everything that gets near him, it kind of peters out. The BBC did a documentary on these kids back in 2004 called ‘Guinea Pig Kids.’
They interviewed these children, [one] who said, ‘I took the drugs. They made me feel sick. I was vomiting, I couldn't eat, I was tired all the time, it was painful, and I refused to take it.’
And when they refused, they were sent to another of Tony Fauci's principal investigators at Columbia Presbyterian who installed a feeding tube to force feed these children these toxic chemotherapy drugs that they refused to take ... As bad as Beagle gate is, what he did to these Black and Hispanic children is even worse.”
As for the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy equates it to the culmination of Fauci’s career. In the book, he recounts how Fauci has been a key figure in pandemic planning — not necessarily how to prevent one, but how to create it, as infectious disease mortality had dropped so dramatically that infectious diseases were becoming an increasingly low priority.
So far, every single pandemic that has been dramatized has turned out to be a complete fraud, and the same can be said for COVID. All the while, billions of dollars were spent on vaccines.
“They've taken all of these lessons they learned from all the other fake pandemics and rolled it into coronavirus,” Kennedy says. “Now, I want to make clear, I'm not saying that coronavirus is not a pandemic, or that it doesn't kill a lot of people. It does. But we've all been manipulated by an exaggeration of cases, the exaggeration of deaths, the obscuring of data, all of the manipulations that they've done to us.
[In the book] I have a picture that somebody got from a Freedom of Information Act request. It’s a March Madness graph of all of the different pandemics — fake pandemics — [Fauci] has tried during his career, all converging with the grand winner being coronavirus. And [Fauci] signed it, somebody on his staff made it.
But it was Tony Fauci's triumph, winning March Madness. It's basically a picture of his career. Him trying every three or four years a new fake pandemic, and finally hitting on all eight cylinders with coronavirus. It's like it's a joke, and we are the punchline ...
Here's what I would say to people. We have to stop this. This is the hill that we all have to die on. If you are a parent, and you let them give this [COVID shot] to your child, you are not doing your job as a parent. If you are a doctor, you are committing malpractice to give this to a child. We all need to resist.
I would say that every American who sees what's happening has to start engaging in civil disobedience every day. And that may mean going to a store and telling them, if they demand a vaccine passport, that you are not going to patronize that store anymore. It may mean resisting on the job. Do not quit! Make them fire you. Because then you have a lawsuit.
Right now, the best thing is to make them fire you for not taking an emergency use authorization vaccine, because there are no approved vaccines in this country available to any American. It was a myth, it was a hoax, it was a chicanery for them to say, ‘We approved this Comirnaty vaccine.’ If you go on Pfizer's website, it will tell you, ‘We do not make Comirnaty available in the United States.’
Why are they trying to go after our kids? Here's why. The vaccines can only get liability protection once they are approved. The only way they get liability protection is if they're on the child's vaccination schedule. And then, once the CDC votes them onto the child vaccination schedule, then they get liability protection, even for adults.
One lawsuit can bankrupt the company if they didn't have liability protection. So that's why they're going after our kids. They need it to get that liability protection. And we need to stop them from the collateral damage they're going to cause to an entire generation of children; 26 million children will get a vaccine that's been tested on 1,300 kids, with catastrophic results.”
To learn more, be sure to pick up a copy of “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.” You don’t want to miss this fascinating and carefully researched book.
