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Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published March 3, 2018.

Saturated fat and cholesterol have been wrongfully vilified as the culprits of heart disease for more than six decades. Meanwhile, research has repeatedly identified refined carbs, sugar and trans fats found in processed foods as the real enemy. The first scientific evidence linking trans fats to heart disease while exonerating saturated fats was published in 1957 by the late Fred Kummerow,1 biochemist and author of “Cholesterol Is Not the Culprit: A Guide to Preventing Heart Disease.”

Unfortunately, Kummerow’s science was overshadowed by Ancel Keys’ Seven Countries Study,2 which linked saturated fat intake with heart disease. The rest, as they say, is history. Later reanalysis revealed cherry-picked data was responsible for creating Keys’ link, but by then the saturated fat myth was already firmly entrenched.

Keys’ biased research launched the low-fat myth and reshaped the food industry for decades to come. As saturated fat and cholesterol were shunned, the food industry switched to using trans fats (found in margarine, vegetable shortening and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) and sugar instead.

The Big Fat Surprise

Investigative journalist Nina Teicholz was one of the first major investigative journalists to break the story on the dangers of trans fats in a 2004 Gourmet magazine article.3 In the video above, Joe Rogan interviews Teicholz on her 2014 book, “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” which grew out of that initial exposé.

In it, not only does she dismantle the belief that saturated fat and cholesterol make you fat and cause disease, she also reveals that while the dangers of trans fats are now becoming widely recognized, the recommended replacement — vegetable oils — may actually be even more harmful.

She also delves into the politics and shady underbelly of nutritional science, revealing how the food industry has manipulated the scientific discussion and built a largely false foundation for the nutritional recommendations we’re given.

Corruption is not the sole problem, though. Teicholz notes there is a very strong tendency to “fall in love” with your own ideas and beliefs, and this is as true for scientists as it is for regular people. And, when you strongly believe something to be true, you will tend to find the evidence you’re looking for and ignore anything that refutes it. So, it’s really a human psychology problem.

Scientists are not supposed to fall into this all-too-human trap. “They’re taught to distrust their beliefs [and] shoot down their own hypothesis,” Teicholz says, “but in the case of nutrition science, that didn’t happen … They cherry-picked the evidence and completely ignored and actively suppressed, even, anything that contradicted their ideas.” This certainly included Keys, who was passionately wed to his hypothesis that saturated fat caused heart disease.

Busting the Low-Fat Myth

Teicholz points out the fact that saturated fat has been a healthy human staple for thousands of years, and how the low-fat craze has resulted in massive sugar consumption that has increased inflammation and disease.4 The American Heart Association (AHA) started encouraging Americans to limit dietary fat, particularly animal fats, to reduce their risk of heart disease in 1961, and maintains this position to this day.

Just last summer, the AHA sent out a presidential advisory to cardiologists around the world, reiterating its 1960s advice to replace butter and coconut oil with margarine and vegetable oils to protect against heart disease.

Yet historical data clearly shows this strategy is not working, because concomitant with low-fat diets becoming the cultural norm, heart disease rates have soared. The AHA also ignores research demonstrating the low-fat, low-cholesterol strategy does more harm than good. For example:

  1. In 2012, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology examined the health and lifestyle habits of more than 52,000 adults ages 20 to 74, concluding that lower cholesterol levels increase women’s risk for heart disease, cardiac arrest and stroke. Overall, women with “high cholesterol” (greater than 270 mg/dl) actually had a 28% lower mortality risk than women with “low cholesterol” (less than 183 mg/dl).5
  2. In 2013, prominent London cardiologist Aseem Malhotra argued in the British Medical Journal that you should ignore advice to reduce your saturated fat intake, because it’s actually increasing your risk for obesity and heart disease.6
  3. A 2014 meta-analysis published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, using data from nearly 80 studies and more than a half-million people, found those who consume higher amounts of saturated fat have no more heart disease than those who consume less. They also did not find less heart disease among those eating higher amounts of unsaturated fat, including both olive oil and corn oil.7,8

The following graph, from a British Journal of Nutrition study published in 2012, also shows how Europeans who eat the least saturated fats have the highest risk of heart disease, whereas those who eat the most have the lowest rates of heart disease — the complete opposite of conventional thinking and AHA claims.

Your Body Needs Saturated Fat and Cholesterol

Cholesterol is not only beneficial for your body, it’s absolutely vital for optimal functioning. For example, cholesterol is needed for the construction of your cell membranes and helps regulate the protein pathways required for cell signaling. Having insufficient amounts of cholesterol may negatively impact your brain health, hormone levels, heart disease risk and more.

Your body also needs saturated fats to function properly. One way to understand this need is to consider the foods ancient humans consumed. Many experts believe we evolved as hunter-gatherers and have eaten a variety of animal products for most of our existence on Earth. To suggest that saturated fats are suddenly harmful to us makes no sense, at least not from an evolutionary perspective.

Reducing saturated fat to extremely low levels, or shunning it altogether, also doesn’t make sense when you consider its health benefits and biological functions, which include but are not limited to:

Providing building blocks for cell membranes, hormones and hormone-like substances

Facilitating mineral absorption, such as calcium

Acting as carriers for fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K

Converting carotene into vitamin A

Helping to lower cholesterol levels (palmitic and stearic acids)

Antiviral activity (caprylic acid)

Optimal fuel for your brain

Providing satiety

Modulating genetic regulation and helping prevent cancer (butyric acid)

High-Carb Versus High-Fat Diets

As noted by Teicholz, by eliminating saturated fat and cholesterol-rich foods we’ve also eliminated many of the most nutrient-dense foods from our diet — eggs and liver being just two examples — and this also has its repercussions for human health and development. Vitamins A, D, E and K are fat-soluble, which means you need the fat that comes naturally in animal foods along with the vitamins in order to absorb those vitamins.

Additionally, fat is very satiating, so you’re far less likely to overeat on a high-fat diet than a high-carb diet. Most people who complain about “starving” all the time are likely just eating too many carbs (quick-burning fuel) and not enough fat (slow-burning fuel).

Then there’s carb addiction, of course, which further fuels the cycle of hunger and overeating. What’s worse, when you eat a high-carb diet for a long time, it blocks or shuts down your body’s ability to burn fat, which means all of your body fat remains right where it is, as it cannot be accessed for fuel.

By shifting your diet from high-carb to high-fat, you eventually regain the metabolic flexibility to burn both types of fuel — fat and sugar — which solves most of these problems; the hunger and cycle of overeating, weight gain, inflammation and related disease processes. Cyclical ketogenic diets are very effective for this, as is intermittent fasting and longer water fasts for those who are overweight.

The Problem With Vegetable Oils

As mentioned earlier, Teicholz’s book also delves into a new nutritional twist that has developed as the dangers of trans fats have been exposed and accepted. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has removed partially hydrogenated oils — the primary source of trans fats — from the list of “generally recognized as safe” ingredients, the vegetable oils (such as peanut, corn and soy oil) that have replaced them may have even more harmful health ramifications.

When heated, vegetable oils degrade into extremely toxic oxidation products. According to Teicholz, more than 100 dangerous oxidation products have been found in a single piece of chicken fried in vegetable oils. As early as the 1940s, animal experiments showed animals would develop cirrhosis of the liver or enlarged liver when fed vegetable oils. When fed heated vegetable oils, they died prematurely.

Cyclic aldehydes are among the most toxic of these byproducts, and animal research has shown even low levels of exposure cause serious inflammation, which is associated with heart disease and Alzheimer’s. Findings like these make the AHA’s recommendation to use margarine and vegetable oils all the more troubling.

In her book, Teicholz also cites research in which aldehydes were found to cause toxic shock in animals by damaging the gastrointestinal tract. We now know a lot more about the role your gut plays in your health, and the idea that aldehydes from heated vegetable oils can damage your gastric system is frighteningly consistent with the rise we see in immune problems and gastrointestinal-related diseases.

How a Cyclical Ketogenic Diet Can Improve Your Health

Two-thirds of the American population is overweight or obese,9 more than half of all Americans struggle with chronic illness,10 1 in 5 deaths in the U.S. is obesity-related11 and 1 in 4 deaths is related to heart disease.12 Saturated dietary fats and cholesterol are not to blame for these statistics. The evidence is actually quite clear: Excessive net carbohydrate intake is the primary culprit behind these disease statistics, primarily by decimating your mitochondrial function.

To address this, you need to eat a diet that allows your body to burn fat as its primary fuel rather than sugars, and to become an efficient fat burner, you actually have to eat fat. In my latest book, “Fat for Fuel,” I detail a cyclical or targeted ketogenic diet, which has been scientifically shown to optimize metabolic and mitochondrial health. A primary difference between this program and other ketogenic diets is the cyclical component.

It’s important to realize that the “metabolic magic” in the mitochondria occurs during the refeeding phase, not during the starvation phase. If you’re constantly in ketosis, you’re missing out on one of the most valuable benefits of the ketogenic diet. Basically, once you have established ketosis, you then cycle healthy carbs back in.

As a general rule, I recommend adding 100 to 150 grams of carbs on the day or days each week that you do strength training. Some of the most important benefits of this kind of eating program are:

Weight loss — By rebalancing your body’s chemistry, weight loss and/or improved weight management becomes nearly effortless. Studies have shown a ketogenic diet can double the weight lost compared to a low-fat diet.13

Reduced inflammation — When burned for fuel, dietary fat releases far fewer reactive oxygen species and secondary free radicals than sugar. Ketones are also very effective histone deacetylase inhibitors that effectively reduce inflammatory responses. In fact, many drugs are being developed to address immune-related inflammatory diseases that are HDAC inhibitors.

A safer and more rational strategy is to use a ketogenic diet, as it is one of the most effective ways to drive down your inflammation level through HDAC inhibition.

Reduced cancer risk — While all cells (including cancer cells) can use glucose for fuel, cancer cells lack the metabolic flexibility to use ketones, while regular cells thrive on these fats. Once your body enters a state of nutritional ketosis, cancer cells are more susceptible to being removed by your body through a process called autophagy.

A cyclical ketogenic diet is a fundamental, essential tool that needs to be integrated in the management of nearly every cancer.

Increased muscle mass — Ketones spare branched-chain amino acids, thereby promoting muscle mass.14 However, make sure to implement cyclic ketosis. Chronic ketosis may eventually result in muscle loss as your body is impairing the mTOR pathway, which is important for anabolic growth. mTOR needs to be stimulated, just not consistently, as many people do with high protein diets.

Lowered insulin levels — Keeping your insulin level low helps prevent insulin resistance, Type 2 diabetes and related diseases. Research has demonstrated that diabetics who eat a low-carb ketogenic diet are able to significantly reduce their dependency on diabetes medication and may even reverse the condition.15

Lowering insulin resistance will also reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s. Recent research strengthens the link between insulin resistance and dementia even further, particularly among those with existing heart disease.16,17,18

Mental clarity — One of the first things people really notice once they start burning fat for fuel is that any former “brain fog” lifts, and they can suddenly think very clearly. As mentioned earlier, ketones are a preferred fuel for your brain; hence, the improved mental clarity.

Increased longevity — One of the reasons you can survive a long time without food is due to the process of ketosis, which spares protein breakdown.19 A fairly consistent effect seen in people on a ketogenic diet is that blood levels of leucine and other important structural proteins go up, allowing these proteins to perform a number of important signaling functions.

Ketones also mimic the life span-extending properties of calorie restriction20 (fasting), which includes improved glucose metabolism; reduced inflammation; clearing out malfunctioning immune cells;21 reduced IGF-1, one of the factors that regulate growth pathways and growth genes and which is a major player in accelerated aging; cellular/intracellular regeneration and rejuvenation (autophagy and mitophagy).22

Original Comments


Source: mercola rss

In late February 2023, Moderna agreed to pay $400 million to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for the patent it holds on Moderna’s mRNA shot.1

The patent process is a part of the COVID mRNA shots that the media haven’t really addressed and people in general don’t know anything about — probably because it’s a total racket. Based on internal documents and correspondence, it appears the NIAID funded the creation of SARS-CoV-2. At the same time, it patented and receives royalty payments for the “vaccine” against said virus.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is supposed to be the primary government agency responsible for public health research, but by the looks of it, it appears instead to be in the business of creating public health threats in order to profit from them.

And the agency itself isn’t the only one raking in profits. Many patents are held by individuals working at the NIH/NIAID. So, taxpayers fund research that may or may not work out, while Big Pharma, the NIH and individuals at the NIH profit from products that end up on the market. This is a clear conflict of interest that can hurt public health in any number of ways.

For starters, it incentivizes the NIH to support and promote potentially dangerous drugs, as we’ve clearly seen during the COVID pandemic. The NIH also has a significant stake in regulations that impact patents and vaccine mandates, and may use its influence to benefit itself rather than the public.

Conflicts of Interest Influence Public Health Policy

In the Full Measure video above, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson reports the findings of watchdog group Open The Books, which recently took a deep dive into “the issue of government scientists collecting royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies for discoveries made while working on your dime.”

According to OpenTheBooks.com founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski, the NIH distributes $32 billion of taxpayer funds as research grants each year to an estimated 56,000 different entities. “That basically buys you the entire American health care space,” he says.

As the largest federal grant-maker, the NIH has a monopoly on what research gets done and what doesn’t, as it decides which scientists and projects get that money. Scientists vying for grants also recognize that in order to get a piece of that pie, they have to play by the rules, and that means doing work that supports establishment narratives on public health policy.

But that’s not all. The NIH is also gobbling up patents, which further weakens its incentive to protect and promote what’s truly in the public’s best interest due to the financial conflicts of interest that come into play.

How the Third-Party Royalty Complex Works

As explained by Andrzejewski, under the 1984 Bayh-Dole Act, government scientists can collect royalties from drug companies for discoveries they make while working on the public’s dime:

“Here’s how the third-party royalty complex works. You have a government scientist funded by taxpayers, and they work in a government lab that’s also funded by taxpayers. And when they have an invention [a drug, device or therapeutic] … the NIH … then licenses that invention … to the private sector.

And the private sector then pays royalties back to NIH. NIH then distributes those royalties on a royalty split schedule, back to the scientist. Details of those royalty payments to government scientists are kept as strictly held secrets.”

In fact, these royalty payments are kept under such closed wraps, scientists who receive them aren’t even required to divulge them on their financial statements, let alone to the public. Congress can’t even access those data.

In mid-June 2022, Sen. Rand Paul questioned then-NIAID chief Dr. Anthony Fauci about whether he’d ever received royalty payments from an entity to which he had given a research grant, and whether he or anyone else on the vaccine committee had ever received payments from vaccine makers.2 Fauci suffered one of his now-famous lapses of memory and wouldn’t answer.

NIH Fights to Shield Conflicted Parties

Paul’s questioning of Fauci came on the heels of a lawsuit filed against the NIH to obtain these payment disclosures. The lawsuit was filed by Open The Books in October 2021. But while the NIH eventually did release them, many of the most crucial pieces of information were redacted, and Paul’s attempt to get answers led nowhere. As noted by Andrzejewski:

“That lawsuit unearthed 3,000 pages of royalty payments to NIH scientists from 2010 to 2021. During that time, 2,407 government scientists received $325 million in secretive royalty payments, averaging out to more than $135,000 each.

But much is left unknown. NIH redacted or blacked out key details. We don’t know who paid it. We don’t know how much each individual scientist received. We can only see their names and count the number of times that each scientist received a payment.

And they also redacted the invention, the license number or the patent number … So, every single one of those individual, third-party royalty payments has the appearance of a conflict of interest …

We need to be able to follow the money. Unelected bureaucrats are running the entire American health care complex without any scrutiny. They’re basically telling the American people, ‘Sit down, shut up, pay up. We’ll run things.’ And that’s not how the federal government is supposed to operate.”

COVID Jabs Are Rife With Conflicts of Interest

Conflicts of interest also appear to have played a role in the U.S. government’s preferential treatment of Pfizer and Moderna during the pandemic. Pfizer was the first to receive government authorization for its COVID jab, and it just so happens to be part of an NIH royalty-sharing agreement.

Moderna also has such an agreement. What this all means is that the NIH helped invent certain technologies that went into these shots, and then licensed those technologies to Pfizer and Moderna in return for royalty payments.

So, the NIH has been making tens of millions of dollars from the COVID shots. Could that financial incentive influence the NIH’s stance on vaccine mandates? What do you think?

As you may recall, Johnson & Johnson’s COVID jab was vilified for causing blood clots, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration even limited the authorized use of the Janssen shot to people over the age of 18 who have no access to Moderna’s or Pfizer’s jabs, and/or those who voluntarily opt for the Janssen shot, understanding the risks.3

Meanwhile, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s shots also cause blood clots, but neither of them was placed under restrictions. Instead, both were added to the U.S. childhood and adult vaccination schedules. Janssen wasn’t.

The NIH Royalty Cash Cow

The NIH’s secret royalties and the conflicts of interest these payments create were also addressed by “Rising” hosts Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray in a recent episode (video above). Alexander Zaitchik, author of “Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines,” also joined them on the program.

In Zaitchik’s view, the biggest scandal is not that government scientists are receiving royalty payments from drug companies but, rather, the intimate relationship that exists between government and “an industry that is using the monopoly system to price gouge the American people.”

“The NIH has basically abandoned its role to serve the public,” Zaitchik says, “and instead has become much too aligned with the industry and is an enabler, an accomplice and a protector of these monopolies. The vaccines are a point in case.

Government science was basically given, along with these massive research subsidies, through Warp Speed, to Moderna, for example. And there were no public interest provisions attached.

There were no pricing promises, there were no requests that technology be transferred [shared] with other parts of the world. It was basically a conveyor belt for private industry … So, for me, the real problem is NIH [being] fully aligned with industry on the monopoly question when public science is involved …”

Public Gets Fleeced Coming and Going

When public monies are being used for research, any scientific discoveries ought to be used for the public’s benefit, and the patents should remain public property with broad licensing rights.

This used to be the default position, but not anymore. In the 1970s, Big Pharma convinced Congress that this policy was slowing down innovation, and that if companies were allowed to claim exclusive rights to the patents, they’d be more apt to innovate. The Bayh-Dole Act was an outgrowth of this.

But we can now see why and how that doesn’t work. Public health is literally being sacrificed for profit, and since government agencies are in on it, there’s no one left to look out for the public’s interests.

Additionally, the public ends up getting fleeced twice. First, our tax dollars are being used to fund the research that private companies then lay claim to, and then we end up paying top dollar for the products we funded the development of, as there’s no price competition.

As noted by Zaitchik, while the Bayh-Dole Act is a bad law, it does have a rider that says generic production of drugs created with government funding can be mandated. However, every time patient groups have approached the NIH and asked for this provision to be enforced, as the monopoly is hurting patients who cannot afford the exorbitant prices, the NIH has rejected those requests.

For example, the U.S. Army invented a breakthrough prostate cancer drug, and Americans are paying six times the price for this drug compared to other parts of the world. But even though the government has the power to lower the price by mandating generic production, it refuses to do so.

“The whole system, up and down, has been completely corrupted by the amount of money and power the industry has been allowed to amass, because of the corruption in the patent system in general,” Zaitchik says.

Big Pharma Endangers Public Health

In closing, I’d like to draw attention to a paper published in Surgical Neurology International in October 2022, titled “The Pharmaceutical Industry Is Dangerous To Health. Further Proof With COVID-19.”4

“The COVID-19 period highlights a huge problem that has been developing for decades, the control of science by industry,” the author, Fabien Deruelle, an independent researcher in France, writes.

“In the 1950s, the tobacco industry set the example, which the pharmaceutical industry followed. Since then, the latter has been regularly condemned for illegal marketing, misrepresentation of experimental results, dissimulation of information about the dangers of drugs, and considered as criminal.

Therefore, this study was conducted to show that knowledge is powerfully manipulated by harmful corporations, whose goals are: 1) financial; 2) to suppress our ability to make choices to acquire global control of public health.”

Deruelle’s paper reviews a long list of techniques that drug companies use to shape and control the science, including the following:

  1. Falsification of clinical trials and making data inaccessible
  2. Faked studies
  3. Conflict-of-interest studies
  4. Concealment of the jab’s short-term side effects
  5. Concealment of the fact there is no knowledge of the long-term effects of the COVID-19 jab
  6. Dubious composition of the COVID shots, with many ingredients remaining unlisted
  7. Inadequate testing methods
  8. Conflicts of interest within governments and international organizations
  9. Bribing of physicians
  10. Denigration of renowned scientists who express differing views
  11. The banning of alternative effective treatments
  12. Unscientific countermeasures that eviscerate liberties and freedoms
  13. Government use of behavior modification and social engineering techniques to impose isolation, masks wearing and vaccine acceptance
  14. Scientific censorship by the media

White Collar Crooks Are Running the Show

Deruelle points out that all but one of the primary drug companies producing COVID “vaccines” — Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Merck and Johnson & Johnson — have long criminal histories, having been busted and fined huge sums for illegal marketing, recommending drugs for off-label use, misrepresenting trial results and concealing information about known dangers of their drugs. Moderna is the only exception, as it’s only been around since 2010. Deruelle writes:5

“In 2007, Merck paid $670 million, in 2009, Pfizer paid $2.3 billion, in 2010, AstraZeneca paid $520 million, and in 2012, Johnson and Johnson paid a fine of $1.1 billion …

Since 1995, Pfizer has been assessed more than $6.5 billion in penalties for 42 instances of misconduct; 36 instances of misconduct since 1995, resulting in over $11.5 billion in penalties for Johnson and Johnson; 35 instances of misconduct since 1995 and $8.8 billion in penalties for Merck.

Pfizer is singled out as having persistent criminal behavior and casual disregard for the health and well-being of patients. Pfizer is no different from other pharmaceutical companies, but it is larger and more egregious. Pfizer is a habitual offender, persistently engaging in illegal business practices, bribing physicians, and suppressing unfavorable trial results.”

Will Pfizer Stand Trial?

True to form, Pfizer is also accused of scientific fraud in its COVID-19 jab trial. Brook Jackson, who worked at one of Pfizer’s trial sites, sued Pfizer in 2021 for violating the False Claims Act.6 U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale heard oral arguments on the motions to dismiss, March 1, 2023.

As reported by The Epoch Times March 2, 2023,7 defense attorneys for Pfizer argued that “whether protocol violations occurred was ultimately irrelevant because the federal government was made aware of them but still granted emergency authorization to Pfizer’s vaccine.”

Jackson’s lawyers countered by saying the FDA authorized the vaccine before reviewing Jackson’s complaint. Judge Truncale has not issued a ruling as of this writing, and Jackson’s attorney suspects it may be weeks or even months before the judge issues his opinion.8

Conflicts of Interest Shaped COVID Responses

Deruelle also specifically delves into the conflicts of interest and relationships between the drug companies involved during COVID-19 and governments, international organizations and media — and how they worked the COVID “emergency” for their own benefit. Here are some select excerpts:9

“In 2009, the H1N1 episode should already have been enough to reveal that governments and the WHO are not autonomous. Work has shown that the 2009 H1N1 pandemic seems (based on case fatality rates [CFRs]) to have been the mildest influenza pandemic on record. Following investigations by the BMJ, it appears that this event declared by the WHO is significantly tainted by conflicts of interest.

A report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has heavily criticized the WHO, national governments, and EU agencies for their handling of the swine flu pandemic: distortion of priorities of public health services all over Europe, waste of huge sums of public money, provocation of unjustified fear among Europeans, and creation of health risks through vaccines and medications which might not have been sufficiently tested before being authorized in fast-track procedures.

According to former head of health at the Council of Europe, W. Wodarg, the swine flu outbreak was a false pandemic driven by drug companies that influenced scientists and official agencies …

During the COVID-19 period, France hired private consulting firms, mainly McKinsey and Company, which is known for working with pharmaceutical companies. The Senate Inquiry Commission reports that McKinsey contributed on all aspects of the health crisis, notably for social engineering strategies on the vaccination campaign and the extension of the health pass …

The suppression of good science and scientists is not new, but COVID-19 unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, suppressing science for political and financial reasons … Since the beginning of COVID-19, much scientific data and expert opinion have been censored or labeled as false or misleading by many internet platforms …

In June 2019, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations signed a partnership (2030 agenda). In the field of health, this alliance is designed to combat key emerging global health threats and achieve universal health coverage. In October 2019, in New York City, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and its partners the WEF and the Gates Foundation, hosted Event 201, a fictional coronavirus pandemic …

Among the partners of the WEF, there are: Pfizer, AstraZeneka, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, McKinsey, and Facebook et Google. A few months later, a coronavirus pandemic is declared, accompanied by its highly mediatized universal solution, the vaccine …

In addition to Event 201, other pandemic simulations, civil (MARS and SPARS in 2017) and military (Dark Winter in 2001, Atlantic Storm in 2003 and 2005, Global mercury in 2003, and Crimson Contagion in 2019), have taken place over the past 20 years. All these simulations correspond to fear programs induced by false media.

For the general welfare of the population, all these scenarios lead to the same methods (identical to those used during COVID-19): Isolation, control of movements and liberties, censorship, propaganda, and coercive vaccination of the population …

[T]here is no doubt that this is an event manipulated by governments, international agencies, pharmaceutical industries, and the media. In addition to the huge profits obtained by the pharmaceutical groups involved, the primary goal of this ‘pandemic’ seems to be compulsory vaccination, because the introduction of a European vaccine passport had already been planned since 2019 …

The objective of the WHO is to impose the Chinese model to become the norm. That is to say, a system with centralization of each person’s health data and restriction of freedoms for the unvaccinated … A period such as COVID-19 represents a powerful lever for increasing the effectiveness of global governance.”

Conflicts of Interest Threaten Our Freedom

In the final analysis, conflicts of interest and the collusion between government and industry does more than rob us of our hard-earned money. It now threatens our very freedom, as these monopolies are being used to further a totalitarian takeover of global proportions.

As such, we can no longer turn a blind eye or accept excuses such as “these relationships don’t influence our decision-making.” They absolutely influence the decisions being made, and the public is consistently on the losing end. Congress needs to start taking this seriously, and revisit laws such as the Bayh-Dole Act, which is currently allowing private monopolies to profit while no one is looking out for our interests.


Source: mercola rss

Dim-Witted Antivaxxers?

The science is in! I am using the word “science” loosely here — but a study, published in Environmental Research and Public Health, and authored by Alice Cancer, Carola Salvi, Alessandro Antonietti, and Paola Iannello, has concluded that the vaccine skeptics are, you know, the rigid folks who are not particularly bright and not particularly endowed with the ability to solve problems.

I supposed that lack of problem-solving skills in Big Pharma skeptics is the reason why — slowly — the mainstream is gradually admitting to what the so called “antivaxxers” were saying three years ago.

Also, a thought on the mental flexibility on the part of the folks who embraced the experimental treatments. (It would probably be more appropriate to call it moral flexibility.)

The study is predictably titled: “Not getting vaccinated? It Is a matter of problem‐solving abilities and socio‐cognitive polarization.” Don’t you love the confident titles of scientific papers nowadays? The science is settled, folks. Anyway, here is a quote from “Psypost”:

“A new study published in suggests that individuals who struggle with problem-solving and demonstrate absolutist thinking, political conservatism, and xenophobia are more likely to refuse to get vaccinated. These findings indicate that a focus on improving problem-solving skills may result in improvements in public health due to higher vaccination rates [emphasis mine.]

A quick a translation from Orwellian to English: In this sentence, the phrase “problem-solving skills” stands for “obedient compliance,” and the phrase “improvements in public health” stands for “further grown of pharmaceutical profits and medical data sharing so that the overlords can build their AI faster.” Moving on.

“The research team hypothesized that problem-solving skills and socio-cognitive polarization are two constructs associated with vaccine acceptance. Problem-solving skills involve the ability to generate new ideas and new methods to consider the problem at hand. Problem-solving may require individuals to think flexibly to expand their thinking beyond what they previously understood.”

“Socio-cognitive polarization includes measures of conservative political ideology, absolutist thinking, intolerance of ambiguity, and xenophobia. According to the research team, ‘people who score high on [socio-cognitive polarization] may be less likely to handle complexity and seek out alternative explanations when processing information.’” Here is how far and deep “the science” went to draw that conclusion:

The study recruited 277 U.S. participants using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform [emphasis mine]. Participants completed online surveys measuring problem-solving ability through a rebus puzzles task and socio-cognitive polarization through a composite measure of absolutist thinking, political conservatism, and xenophobia. They also took a survey measuring their vaccine acceptance.” Now, that’s precision!

“The research team acknowledged that their use of the internet prevented demographics without technological access from participating in the study. This may mean their results are slightly skewed. Additionally, the cross-sectional design of the study prevents direct cause-and-effect conclusions … Despite these concerns, the study highlights the critical role of problem-solving skills and socio-cognitive polarization in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance.”

“Individuals who are more flexible in their thinking and less rigid in their socio-cognitive orientation may be more likely to accept COVID-19 vaccines. The study’s findings indicate that cognitive and social rigidity may represent risk factors for COVID-19 vaccine refusal and may have significant implications for public health interventions aimed at promoting vaccines.”

There we have it. Bring on the digital vaccines, I guess, “digital vaccines” being of course a euphemism for behavioral modification software.

Digital Vaccine project
Digital Vaccine project at Carnegie Mellon University

Blaming the “Backward Village Yokel”

Sarcasm aside, I would like to juxtapose the aforementioned “brilliant science” with a 1947 commercial for DDT. In that ad, an entomologist tries to educate African villagers on how DDT is safe and effective. (Of course it is, the “scientists” made it, so why wouldn’t it be?)

As the camera shows what would be considered stereotypical “uncivilized pagans” — who are evidently in a dire eternal need of being “saved” by foreign “educated folks,” and who don’t know how to take even one correct step in life without “parental guidance” from the “civilized” ones — the narrator tells the story that goes something like this: “Oh, the villagers don’t believe the scientist.

They are still very suspicious of DDT. They are concerned that the DDT powder constitutes ‘bad magic’ or that it may poison their people.” Well, who was right, the chemical industry-funded “science,” or the allegedly backward members of the African village?

Historical Context

But here is the kick. Proverbial “village yokels” have been the scapegoats of the financial interests of the elites for a long time. And yet, we are somehow led to believe that the elites of the past demonized the “village yokels” of the past correctly — and only today, they became corrupt and started to demonize the modern “village yokels” (the farmers, the conservatives in rural areas, etc.,) incorrectly.

Are you kidding me? Those are the same elites, using the same principle of thievery and domination! They lied all along!

The pointing of the refined fingers of the elites at the “village yokels” whose powers they want to curb and whose stuff they want to steal — and accusing them of all sorts of suspicious things — is a movie that has been playing for centuries on end! Even the Bolsheviks were complaining about the “backward peasants,” who for some weird reason seemed unenthused about the prospect of giving away their cattle for the good of the victory of the dictatorship by the proletariat!

And this is how the power-hungry maniacs (also known as the “deep state” or the “elites”) get us every time. They point at the scapegoats, and who is a better scapegoat for the elites than the cartoonish “conversative anti-vaxxer,” or the more traditional dirt-covered village yokel, the pagan type?

“By the way, here is a funny thing, “Antivaxxers” are really just proponents of bodily autonomy who are aware of the abysmal track record of the pharmaceutical giants — and the Latin word “paganus” just means “a rural dweller” (a “village yokel,” so to speak) — and so demonizing the “pagani” was really just a way of the Roman super elites to consolidate their political power.

Demonizing the “pagani,” historically, was a way of the political and spiritual predecessors of the WEF to arrange for an “own nothing and be happy” situation for anyone who didn’t go along with the power consolidation program of the day. Yes, it is that cynical. Very Schwabian. Very Hitleresque. As a result, our ancestors — our blood, wherever we come from — were intentionally and darkly — and then just ignorantly — demonized.

How do you feel about your family members, your direct blood from maybe thousands of years ago, intentionally demonized by the same elites that are demonizing you today? (And on similar grounds (“ignorant,” “backward,” “extremely dangerous to society,” and “too free”).”

Is it really plausible that the mobsters used to be wonderful, righteous people up until a certain point in time (in ancient Rome, none the less) and preached correct ideas — and then all of a sudden, they became corrupt — but it only happened when they targeted “my tribe”? I don’t think so. This is not how it works. A mob is a mob is a mob, and relying on any mob for protection is a bit of a limited hangout.

The way I see it, we will only defeat Klaus Schwab and his wretched vampire crew when we realize that the “village yokels” of the past were slandered by the same general kind mobsters who are slandering us today. When we realize that we can nourish our own relationship with the Creator and the mystery of life without decimating others, without supporting the decimation of others or bending their free will, and without arrogantly assuming that other cultures are inferior to ours.

The DDT commercial above is just one slice of culture but in a way, it sums up the history of the world. The underlying theme goes something like, “A few people lie, many people die.”

And I wish we could win this battle against Klaus Schwab by yelling louder or pointing fingers more often at the Schwabian mobsters. But as long as we accept a part of the mythology that allowed for Schwab to come to power in the first place, we are helping the wrong guys. I am convinced of that as a result of my entire life.

It took me many years to figure this out and shed the lies that had been given to me and to many of my ancestors over time. The bad guys have been piling on, generation after generation: dividing, hurting, robbing, pitting people against each other, doing bad magic onto people, tapping into people’s bad habits and tricking them into acting against their best interests. Yes, this is a story that has been unfolding for a very long time.

Enough of the metaphorical bad sorcerers working for the elites. Enough is enough. We are smarter than this. We are more loving that this. And, dear educated folk, we are not close-minded at all.

The Difficult Task of “Convincing” Others, With Love

Like many of us, I have spent many hours of my life “banging my head on the wall,” so to speak, trying to get through to the people I care about, begging them to look at facts. Sounds familiar, right?

Earlier in my journey, it frustrated me to no end. I just felt, “Dear God, this is all so dangerous, how can this person not see the obvious?!! Maybe, if I just find better words or repeat then again, or talk louder, maybe then I’ll be able to get through? Maybe then they will hear me, for once?”

As you can imagine, the overall result was, LOLZ. People take their sweet time to pay attention to the facts — but when I turned on the patience, the process stopped killing me and started bringing me joy. I started seeing more progress with patience, and with love, and with genuine respect for their soul and their right to choose what makes sense to them — than I saw with banging my head on the wall.

Today, when I encounter a person who, in my opinion, is sincerely subscribed to the most fantastical lies, I don’t despair. Oh, and the menu of lies is very long. Over time, the elites have developed the most exquisite lies for every psychological type, and tested them, and refined them, and mixed them up — so yeah, their menu is very long, indeed.

And so, after screaming to the skies many times and having finally found my grounding, today, I look at someone whose ideas are, in my opinion, simply ridiculous, and see my brother or sister who is on his or her journey, a legitimate journey, journey of the soul.

I see a sacred spirit traveling though the juggle of this broken world, doing stupid things perhaps, and perhaps at the moment, actually helping Klaus Schwab (my heart!) by supporting various elite-generated lies about how the world works. And yes, the damage is real, and it hurts me still, but the journey is in progress, and the Creator has no time limit.

That was key to my own peace of mind. I am just one person, on my journey, trying to do my job. The burden of master planning is not mine. I can safely shed that burden and just focus on my job. My job is much easier to do than worrying about the master planning for the world.

The way I feel about it, the Creator doesn’t care about time. The Creator cares about doing our job with love, not fearing doing what feels right, and respecting other people’s free will.

Only being grounded in love in the most mysterious spiritual sense will get us out of it. Only honesty about what has happened in the past and what is happening today will get us out of this. Honesty fueled by love brings out the best courage out of us, the courage of the pure spirit that turns us, humble human beings, into lions. This is all mysterious. And no, we don’t own the sphere of time. We just need to do our job right. And everything will be fine.

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.


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What will the future hold for people whose exposure to COVID-19 occurs during the first years of life? That question was recently asked by Katherine J. Wu, a staff writer at The Atlantic.1

“To be a newborn in the year 2023 — and, almost certainly, every year that follows — means emerging into a world where the coronavirus is ubiquitous … Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this virus will be one of the very first serious pathogens that today’s infants — and all future infants — meet,” she writes.

“Eventually, the expectation is that the illness will reach a stable nadir, at which point it may truly be ‘another common cold,’ says Rustom Antia, an infectious-disease modeler at Emory.

The full outcome of this living experiment, though, won’t be clear for decades — well after the billions of people who encountered the coronavirus for the first time in adulthood are long gone.

The experiences that today’s youngest children have with the virus are only just beginning to shape what it will mean to have COVID throughout a lifetime, when we all coexist with it from birth to death as a matter of course.”

COVID Jab Prevents Natural Herd Immunity

Wu praises the COVID jab as being part of why we can be hopeful for future generations that have to live with this new virus, but is that really realistic? Right now, everything points to the COVID shot being a disaster, and no one actually knows what the long-term effect will be on children who get it.

Wu highlights the fact that children’s immune systems have the advantage of “marshaling hordes of interferon — an immune molecule that armors cells against viruses.” This is thought to be a primary reason why COVID-19 isn’t nearly as lethal in young children as in older adults.

The problem that Wu completely misses is that the COVID jab inhibits the type-1 interferon pathway,2 so mass injecting young children may actually erase the natural herd immunity against COVID-19 that would develop if all children remained unjabbed. The shots will NOT, as Wu suggests, help us achieve herd immunity at all.

Cancer Rates in Young People Will Likely Rise

Mass injecting children with a drug that impairs their immune system may also (rather predictably) result in exploding cancer rates. Already, aggressive cancers have exploded among adults who got the shots,3 even though it’s only been a little over two years since their rollout.

For example, data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED)4 — historically one of the most well-kept and most heavily relied-upon medical databases in the world — showed that, compared to the previous five-year averages, cancer among Department of Defense (DOD) personnel in 2021 skyrocketed.

Overall, cancers tripled among servicemen and their family members after the rollout of the COVID shots. Breast cancer went up 487%. Exploding cancer rates are also seen elsewhere. Indeed, the explosion of cases is so bad that cancer is now one of the top three leading causes of premature death among young working-age adults — a trend that in turn has driven down U.S. life expectancy by three years.

Cancer Relapses and Metastasis Rates Are Exploding

November 26, 2022, The Daily Sceptic published a letter5,6 to the editor of The BMJ, written by Dr. Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St. George’s University of London, warning that COVID boosters may be causing aggressive metastatic cancers:

“COVID no longer needs a vaccine programme given the average age of death of COVID in the U.K. is 82 and from all other causes is 81 and falling,” Dalgleish wrote. “The link with clots, myocarditis, heart attacks and strokes is now well accepted, as is the link with myelitis and neuropathy …

However, there is now another reason to halt all vaccine programmes. As a practicing oncologist I am seeing people with stable disease rapidly progress after being forced to have a booster, usually so they can travel. Even within my own personal contacts I am seeing B cell-based disease after the boosters.

They describe being distinctly unwell a few days to weeks after the booster — one developing leukemia, two work colleagues Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and an old friend who has felt like he has had Long COVID since receiving his booster and who, after getting severe bone pain, has been diagnosed as having multiple metastases from a rare B cell disorder.

I am experienced enough to know that these are not coincidental anecdotes … The reports of innate immune suppression after mRNA for several weeks would fit, as all these patients to date have melanoma or B cell-based cancers, which are very susceptible to immune control — and that is before the reports of suppressor gene suppression by mRNA in laboratory experiments. This must be aired and debated immediately.”

In a December 19, 2022, article7 in Conservative Woman, Dalgleish continued discussing the phenomenon of rapidly spreading cancers in patients who were in stable remission for years before receiving their COVID boosters. He noted that after his letter to The BMJ was published, several oncologists contacted him to say they’re seeing the same thing in their own practices.

“Seeing the recurrence of these cancers after all this time naturally makes me wonder if there is a common cause?” he wrote.8 “I had previously noted that relapse in stable cancer is often associated with severe long-term stress, such as bankruptcy, divorce, etc.

However, I found that none of my patients had any such extra stress during this time, but they had all had booster vaccines and, indeed, a couple of them noted that they had a very bad reaction to the booster which they did not have to the first two injections.

I then noted that some of these patients were not having a normal pattern of relapse but rather an explosive relapse, with metastases occurring at the same time in several sites … Scientifically, I was reading reports that the booster was leading to a big excess of antibodies at the expense of the T-cell response and that this T-cell suppression could last for three weeks, if not more.

To me, this could be causal as the immune system is being asked to make an excessive response through the humoral inflammatory part of the immune response against a virus (the alpha-delta variant) which is no longer in existence in the community.

This exertion leads to immune exhaustion, which is why these patients are reporting up to a 50% greater increase in Omicron, or other variations, than the non-vaccinated.”

Swedish pathologist, researcher and senior physician at Lund’s University, Dr. Ute Krueger, has also observed an explosion in rapidly advancing cancers in the wake of the COVID shots, with the largest increase occurring among 30- to 50-year-olds.9,10 According to Krueger, tumor sizes are also dramatically larger, multiple tumors in multiple organs are becoming more common, and cancer recurrence and metastasis are both increasing.

Cancer Deaths Are Being Intentionally Hidden

Disturbingly, as detailed in “How Cancer Deaths From the COVID Jabs Are Being Hidden,” analysis of U.S. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) data suggests the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is filtering out and redesignating cancer deaths as COVID deaths to eliminate the cancer signal, and has been doing so since April 2021.

The signal is being hidden by swapping the underlying cause of death with main cause of death. As many as 20% of the weekly so-called COVID deaths are actually cancer deaths.

An Unconscionable Experiment on Humanity

Absolutely no one knows what the long-term ramifications of giving these injections to infants and young children will be. It’s a public health experiment unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. So far, we’ve not seen cancer rates among children skyrocket, but the uptake among young children has also been low.

Since their immune systems are also more robust, children may be protected from cancer for a time even if they do get the jab. The question is how long? The U.S. childhood vaccination schedule now includes the initial series plus an annual COVID booster. How many boosters will it take before a child’s immune system breaks and cancer starts to proliferate?

Excess Mortality Skyrocketing

We’ve also seen massive increases in excess mortality from abnormal clotting issues and heart problems since the COVID shots rolled out. If side effects such as cancer, heart disease and stroke are killing working age adults in unprecedented numbers already, what will the excess mortality be, say, 10 years from now if children and teens keep getting mRNA boosters every year?

I shudder to even think about it. Making matters even worse, drug makers are working overtime to deliver other mRNA-based “vaccines” as well, including one against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has already fast-tracked it. This, despite the fact that previous attempts to create an RSV vaccine failed because they caused antibody dependent enhancement (ADE).

No Benefit, Massive Cost

Now that we’re more than two years into the COVID injection campaign, the cost-benefit analysis is clearer than ever. The benefit is so small as to be inconsequential, while the costs are enormous. Here’s a quick summary breakdown, based on available evidence:

Benefit — Short-term (four to six months) protection from severe COVID illness and death.

Cost — Negative effectiveness after a few months (meaning the risk of infection, hospitalization and death from COVID is higher than before the injection). It also doesn’t prevent infection or spread of the virus, so vaccine-induced herd immunity can never be achieved.

The shots destroy immune function, making people more prone to all types of infections and chronic diseases, which in turn puts pressure on the health care system, raises disability rates and excess mortality, and lowers life expectancy. On top of all that, there’s evidence suggesting the shots have adverse effects on fertility, which could potentially result in a population collapse.

Evidence mRNA Jabs Cause Fertility Problems

By December 2021, at which time the COVID jabs had only been out for one year, reports of surges in menstrual changes and stillbirths were already proliferating. And, while health officials were, and still are, adamant that the COVID shot is safe for pregnant women, the data tell a very different story.

The study11 most widely used to support the U.S. recommendation for pregnant women to get injected was sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in April 2021. According to this study, the miscarriage rate among COVID jab recipients was 13.9%.

However, there was a MAJOR mistake made in this study, which was highlighted in a rapid communication12 from the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK). The authors are Aleisha Brock, Ph.D. of New Zealand, and Simon Thornley, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in the section of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Auckland.

They explained that the NEJM study “presents falsely reassuring statistics related to the risk of spontaneous abortion in early pregnancy, since the majority of women in the calculation were exposed to the mRNA product after the outcome period was defined (20 weeks’ gestation).”13

When the risk of spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) was recalculated based on the cohort that was injected prior to 20 weeks’ gestation, the incidence of miscarriage was seven to eight times higher than the original study indicated, with a cumulative incidence of miscarriage ranging from 81.9% to 91.2%!

What’s more, 12.6% women who received the jab in the third trimester reported Grade 3 adverse events, which are severe or medically significant but not immediately life-threatening.

Another 8% also reported a fever of 38 degrees C (100.4 degrees F), which can lead to miscarriage or premature labor.14 Another problem with the NEJM study is that follow-up only continued for 28 days after birth, meaning the long-term effects of prenatal exposure to babies is still unknown.

A Pfizer-BioNTech rat study also showed the injection more than doubled the incidence of preimplantation loss. Birth defects, specifically mouth/jaw malformations, gastroschisis (a birth defect of the abdominal wall) and abnormalities in the right-sided aortic arch and cervical vertebrae, were also observed.15

Transhumanist Cabal Intend to Change Humanity

It’s become quite clear that the technocratic, transhumanist cabal that it trying to seize worldwide control is aggressively trying to genetically alter humanity. But to what end? Considering all the negative effects we’re seeing in adults, just two years in, what will happen to the infants and children who have been jabbed over the next decade or two? Especially if they start getting mRNA boosters every year?

Transhumanism is “sold” as the way of the future — a future in which everyone is in perfect health and can live as long as they want. We already see how the COVID shots are advertised as a simple “software update” for your immune system. The idea is that, eventually, any health issue will be solved this way.

The problem with this utopia is manifold, however. First of all, considering how disastrous this first mRNA injection is, it seems clear the reengineering of an already perfect biological system isn’t as easy as they make it out to be, and I for one doubt they’ll ever perfect it.

Secondly, while they say this transhumanist utopia is for everyone, it’s absolutely not. Do you really believe they want 8 billion people to be in perfect health and live for hundreds of years?

Perfect health means perfect reproductive capacity, so the number of offspring would be staggering. Clearly, they don’t want this, seeing how these same individuals are already complaining that the world is overpopulated. So, perfect health for everyone is a pipedream.

Extreme life extension for the masses also isn’t in the cards. Already, they want people to die as close to retirement age as possible, to minimize payouts. Do you really think they’d be willing to pay billions of people to spend 100 years in retirement?

Even if the retirement age was pushed way back to, say, 150, and the average life span is 175, who’s going to employ all these people? Remember, robots and artificial intelligence are already slated to take over most jobs, making most humans obsolete. There’s simply no incentive to extend the health span and life span of billions of people.

No, the transhumanist utopia is intended to be reserved for a select few, and this is something to keep in mind as they continue these genetic experiments on humanity. They’re not for our benefit.

What Are They Turning Us Into?

In closing, here’s a snippet from a November 22, 2022, Truth Talk article, in which blogger Katrina Wicks ponders the reasons behind the transhumanist push:16

“They make no secret of it, it’s not some wild conspiracy theory and is in fact being implemented in front of us and around us. Changing humans from what we are, into something else. Augmented humans seem to be on the horizon, as well as disrupted, corrupted and spliced humans too …

‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ … by H.G. Wells … highlights an obsession with making animals more human through ‘medical intervention’ … I wonder if they are trying to do the opposite … to make humans more animal like? …

A certain international organization seems to have a nominated mascot who is the mouthpiece of how they want us to be bio-mechanical beings essentially, being constantly monitored, tested, observed and upgraded. Weird huh? Yet they gleefully put these plans forward and explain how and when. Just not really covering the why, or at least the real reasons for it.

But you can make up your own mind on what their purpose really is … what is out there for everyone to see is that they do want control.

Of your daily activities, thoughts, fears, aspirations … and generally of your future. So that is where you do get to take an active role, unless you already consider your life forfeit and have already accepted their new regime and landscape. But if you do not … and you have chosen to live, then now is the time.”


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Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published April 10, 2018.

In 2011 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified cellphones as a Group 2B “possible carcinogen,”1 and the evidence supporting the theory that electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation from cellphones can trigger abnormal cell growth and cancer2,3 just keeps growing and getting stronger.

In February, the findings of two government-funded animal studies4 were published. Curiously enough, the published interpretation of this $25 million research (conducted by the National Toxicology Program [NTP], an interagency research program currently under the auspices of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) significantly downplays the actual findings of the studies.

Cellphone Radiation Linked to Brain and Heart Tumors

The NTP research includes two studies: one on mice and one on rats. Male rats were more likely to develop heart tumors, while female rats and newborns exposed to high levels of radiation during pregnancy and lactation were more likely to have low body weight. DNA damage and damage to heart tissue were also observed in both male and female rats, but not mice. Other types of tumors did occur in both types of animals, though, including brain, prostate, liver and pancreatic tumors.

According to the researchers, if these results can be confirmed, then cellphone radiation may indeed be a “weak” carcinogen. As you’ll see below, that confirmation was delivered last month, in the form of published research by the Ramazzini Institute.

The animals in the NTP studies were exposed to cellphone radiation for nine hours a day for two years (basically the full life span of a rat). As noted by The New York Times,5 the heart tumors (malignant schwannomas) found in male rats are “similar to acoustic neuromas, a benign tumor in people involving the nerve that connects the ear to the brain, which some studies have linked to cellphone use.”

The scientists also expressed surprise at the finding of DNA damage, as the conventional belief is that non-ionizing radiofrequency radiation cannot harm DNA. “We don’t feel like we understand enough about the results to be able to place a huge degree of confidence in the findings,” John Bucher, Ph.D.,6 senior scientist at the NTP told reporters. Such statements fly in the face of warnings issued by NTP researchers two years ago.

NTP Whitewashed Its Conclusions

Partial results from these studies were initially released in 2016 because they were deemed too serious to hold back. After all, the health of hundreds of millions of Americans, let along billions of users worldwide, is at stake. At the time, Christopher Portier, Ph.D., retired head of the NTP who was involved in the launch of the study, insisted the findings showed clear causation. “I would call it a causative study, absolutely,” he told Scientific American.7 “They controlled everything in the study.”

David McCormick, Ph.D., director of the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute where the study was conducted, was equally clear, telling reporters,8 “What we are saying here is that based on the animal studies, there is a possible risk cellphone RF [radio frequency] is potentially carcinogenic in humans. These are uncommon lesions in rodents, so it is our conclusion that they are exposure related.”

As noted by Microwave News,9 while some of the pathology data was updated since the initial release in 2016, the changes are minor. The interpretation, however, changed dramatically. Now, even though the findings are identical, the NTP insists it’s “not a high-risk situation” and that the risk to human health is negligible.

Microwave News lists a number of possible political reasons for the sudden turnaround, including new NTP leadership, the current White House administration’s disdain for science that threatens big business and the overarching power of the major telecommunications players of today: Apple, Google and Microsoft. There’s no doubt there are incredible amounts of money at stake.

Ramazzini Institute Duplicates NTP Findings

Whatever the reason, it’s quite clear the NTP is now downplaying findings that a mere two years ago were considered of significant importance for public health. The whitewash was made even more obvious with the March 7 online publication of a lifetime exposure study10 by the highly respected Ramazzini Institute in Italy, which like the NTP shows a clear link between cellphone radiation and Schwann cell tumors (schwannomas).11,12,13

But, contrary to the NTP, Ramazzini researchers are now urging the IARC to re-evaluate its carcinogenicity classification for cellphones. According to Fiorella Belpoggi, director of research at the Ramazzini Institute and the study’s lead author, RF radiation from cellphones should probably be classified as a “probable” human carcinogen rather than a “possible” carcinogen. In an interview with Microwave News, Belpoggi said:14

“The [Ramazzini Institute] findings on far field exposure to RFR [radio frequency radiation] are consistent with and reinforce the results of the NTP study on near field exposure, as both reported an increase in the incidence of tumors of the brain and heart in RFR-exposed Sprague-Dawley rats …

The two laboratories worked independently at many thousands of kilometers’ distance, using the same strain of rats, and found the same results. It cannot be by chance.

Both findings are also consistent with the epidemiological evidence, where an increased incidence of tumors of the same cells (Schwann cells) of the acoustic nerve had been associated with the use of mobile phones.

We and NTP have evidenced the hazard of RFR exposure, as regards the risk we have to consider that about seven billion of people are exposed on the planet, and even if the risk is to be considered low, due to the large number of exposed individuals, we could expect thousands of people affected by serious diseases like cancer of the peripheral nerves and brain.”

Indeed, a recent analysis15,16 reveals the incidence of glioblastoma multiforme, the deadliest type of brain tumor, more than doubled in the U.K. between 1995 and 2015. According to the authors, the dramatic increase is likely due to “widespread environmental or lifestyle factors,” which would include cellphone usage.

Véronique Terrasse, spokesperson for the IARC, has stated the organization will look into it once the NTP has delivered its final report,17 which may take several months.

NTP and Ramazzini Show Effects Are Reproducible

The NTP-funded studies found rats exposed to RF radiation began developing glial cell hyperplasias — indicative of precancerous lesions — around week 58; heart schwannomas were detected around week 70. Ramazzini’s study confirms and reinforces these results, showing RF radiation increased both brain and heart tumors in exposed rats. This, despite the fact that Ramazzini used much lower power levels.

While NTP used RF levels comparable to what’s emitted by 2G and 3G cellphones (near-field exposure), Ramazzini simulated exposure to cellphone towers (far-field exposure). In all, the Ramazzini Institute exposed 2,448 rats to 1.8 GHz GSM radiation at electric field strengths of 5, 25 and 50 volts per meter18 for 19 hours a day, starting at birth until the rats died either from age or illness.

To facilitate comparison, the researchers converted their measurements to watts per kilogram of body weight (W/kg), which is what the NTP used. Overall, the radiation dose administered in the Ramazzini study was up to 1,000 times lower than the NTP’s — yet the results were strikingly similar. As in the NTP studies, exposed male rats developed statistically higher rates of heart schwannomas than unexposed rats.

They also found some evidence, although weaker, that RF exposure increased rates of glial tumors in the brains of female rats. As noted by Ronald Melnick, Ph.D., a former senior NIH toxicologist who led the design of the NTP study and current senior science adviser to the Environmental Health Trust:19

“All of the exposures used in the Ramazzini study were below the U.S. FCC limits… In other words, a person can legally be exposed to this level of radiation. Yet cancers occurred in these animals at these legally permitted levels. The Ramazzini findings are consistent with the NTP study demonstrating these effects are a reproducible finding. Governments need to strengthen regulations to protect the public from these harmful non-thermal exposures.”

The NTP’s conclusion that there’s no cause for concern is also challenged by an independent review panel, which concluded its review of the two NTP studies March 28. According to this panel of experts, there’s “clear evidence” linking RF radiation with heart schwannomas and “some evidence” linking it to brain gliomas. It remains to be seen whether the NTP will accept or reject the panel’s conclusions in its final report.

Why Evidence of Rodent Schwannomas Could Spell Trouble

As explained by Louis Slesin, Ph.D., editor and publisher of Microwave News, the increased incidence of schwannomas in rodents exposed to RF is no mere coincidence, and is of great concern for public health:20

“Schwann cells play a key role in the functioning of the peripheral nervous system. They make the myelin sheath, which insulates nerve fibers and helps speed the conduction of electrical impulses. There are Schwann cells just about everywhere there are peripheral nerve fibers. They are present in most organs of the body — whether mice, rats or humans. Schwann cell tumors are called schwannomas.

The NTP found schwannomas in many other organs, in addition to the heart, of rats chronically exposed to cellphone radiation. These included a variety of glands (pituitary, salivary and thymus), the trigeminal nerve and the eye … The NTP also saw schwannomas in the uterus, ovary and vagina of female rats.

The brain has no Schwann cells — the brain is part of the central nervous system. There, glial cells play a similar function. In fact, Schwann cells are a type of glial cell …

Tumors of the glial cells are called gliomas. The NTP also saw an increase in glioma among the male rats exposed to GSM and CDMA radiation. Higher rates of glioma have been reported in a number of epidemiological studies of cellphone users. The other tumor linked to cellphone radiation in human studies is acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the auditory nerve … formally called a vestibular schwannoma.

While schwannomas and gliomas are commonly noncancerous tumors, they can develop into malignant schwannomas or glioblastomas … The implication is that instead of searching for consistency in RF’s ability to cause cancer in specific organs, the emphasis should now be on specific cell types — beginning with Schwann cells in the periphery and glial cells in the brain.”

Mitochondrial Damage Is an Even More Pressing Concern

I believe it would be a serious mistake to consider cellphones safe simply because we’re not seeing a dramatic uptick in brain (and/or heart) tumors. Remember, cellphone radiation has already been acknowledged to be a carcinogen, and most all carcinogens, like cigarette smoking, take decades to increase cancer risk. Cellphones are indeed the cigarettes of the 21st century and we won’t see the epidemic of cancer for another decade or two.

The NTP’s research also reveal DNA and cellular damage. The researchers claim there’s no explanation for this, but that’s far from true. A number of scientists and EMF specialists have presented evidence for a number of different mechanisms of harm. Among them:

Allan Frey, Office of Naval Research,21 showed cellphone radiation weakens cell membranes and your blood-brain barrier. Some of his experiments demonstrated that dye injected into animals was able to penetrate into the brain when exposed to pulsed digital signals from microwaves.

Today, these findings are particularly notable since cellphones are held close to the brain. The take-home message is that radiation from your cellphone weakens your blood-brain barrier, allowing toxins in your blood to enter your brain, and into the cells of your entire body.

Martin Pall, Ph.D., has published research22,23,24,25 showing that low−frequency microwave radiation activates voltage-gated calcium channels (VGCCs)26 — channels in the outer membrane of your cells. Once activated, the VGCCs open up, allowing an abnormal influx of calcium ions into the cell, which activates nitric oxide (NO).

NO is the only molecule in your body produced at high enough concentrations to outcompete other molecules for superoxide and is a precursor for peroxynitrite.27

These potent oxidant stressors are thought to be a root cause for many of today’s chronic diseases.28 Peroxynitrites modify tyrosine molecules in proteins to create a new substance, nitrotyrosine and nitration of structural protein.29 Changes from nitration are visible in human biopsy of atherosclerosis, myocardial ischemia, inflammatory bowel disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and septic lung disease.30

Significant oxidative stress from peroxynitrites may also result in single-strand breaks of DNA.31 This pathway of oxidative destruction — triggered by low-frequency radiation emitted from mobile devices — may partially explain the unprecedented growth rate of chronic disease since 1990,32 and is a far greater concern than brain tumors.

According to Pall’s theory, the physical locations where VGCCs are the densest are indicative of the diseases you might expect from chronic excessive exposure to EMFs. As it turns out, the highest density of VGCCs are found in your nervous system, the pacemaker in your heart and in male testes. As a result, EMFs are likely to contribute to neurological and neuropsychiatric problems, heart and reproductive problems.

Paul Héroux, Ph.D., professor of toxicology and health effects of electromagnetism at the faculty of medicine at McGill University in Montreal, stresses the impact EMFs have on the water in your body. The mechanism of action he proposes involves the enzyme ATP synthase, which passes currents of protons through a water channel.

ATP synthase basically generates energy in the form ATP from ADP, using this flow of protons. Magnetic fields can change the transparency of the water channel to protons, thereby reducing the current. As a result, you get less ATP, which can have system wide consequences, from promoting chronic disease and infertility to lowering intelligence.

Will Findings Affect 5G Rollout?

We’re now facing the rollout of high-speed wireless 5G technology across the U.S. How might the NTP and Ramazzini findings affect this transition? According to Melnick,33 “It should most likely lead to a reduction in exposure limits.” He also hopes the findings will compel public officials and telecommunications companies to not promote the use of 5G devices for children.

In a recent investigative report for The Nation, Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie reveals “the disinformation campaign — and massive radiation increase — behind the 5G rollout.”34

The evidence for harm goes back more than two decades. By early 1999, findings from more than 50 studies were already raising “‘serious questions’ about cellphone safety.” This evidence was shared in a closed-door meeting of CTIA’s board of directors, which is the trade association for the wireless industry.

Epidemiologist George Carlo, hired by CTIA in 1993 to defuse concerns about cellphone radiation, was unable to give the industry the clear evidence of safety it desired. Instead he found the converse. Among this evidence was findings of “correlation between brain tumors occurring on the right side of the head and the use of the phone on the right side of the head.”

Research also suggested that cellphone radiation was capable of causing “functional genetic damage.” Carlo urged the telecom industry to “do the right thing: Give consumers ‘the information they need to make an informed judgment about how much of this unknown risk they wish to assume,’ especially since some in the industry had ‘repeatedly and falsely claimed that wireless phones are safe for all consumers including children.'”

Safety Has Taken a Backseat to Profit

The reason nothing ever came of Carlos’ investigation is because the CTIA refused to accept the findings and publicly discredited him for doing the work he’d been paid to do in the first place. In 1999, wireless technologies were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are today. Now, the stakes are higher than ever, and there can be little doubt that profit is still weighing heavier than science.

“This Nation investigation reveals that the wireless industry not only made the same moral choices that the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries did; it also borrowed from the same public-relations playbook those industries pioneered.

The playbook’s key insight is that an industry doesn’t have to win the scientific argument about safety; it only has to keep the argument going. That amounts to a win for the industry, because the apparent lack of certainty helps to reassure customers, even as it fends off government regulations and lawsuits that might pinch profits,” Hertsgaard and Dowie write.35

“Funding friendly research has perhaps been the most important component of this strategy, because it conveys the impression that the scientific community truly is divided …

The wireless industry has obstructed a full and fair understanding of the current science, aided by government agencies that have prioritized commercial interests over human health and news organizations that have failed to inform the public about what the scientific community really thinks.”

5G Will Dramatically Increase Radiation Exposure

The transition to 5G will dramatically increase RF-EMF radiation exposure as it will require the installation of small antennas every 250 feet or so to ensure connectivity. Some estimates suggest millions of new antenna sites will have to be erected in the U.S. alone.

In September last year, more than 180 doctors and scientists from 35 countries signed a petition36 to enact a moratorium on the rollout of 5G due to potential health risks, noting that “RF-EMF has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment.” The petition also points out that:

“5G technology is effective only over short distance. It is poorly transmitted through solid material. Many new antennas will be required and full-scale implementation will result in antennas in every 10 to 12 houses in urban areas, thus massively increasing mandatory exposure …

More than 230 scientists from 41 countries have expressed their ‘serious concerns’ regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to EMF generated by electric and wireless devices already before the additional 5G roll-out …

Effects include increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damages, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders and negative impacts on general well-being in humans. Damage goes well beyond the human race, as there is growing evidence of harmful effects to both plants and animals.”

Protect Yourself From Excessive EMF

There’s no doubt in my mind that RF-EMF exposure is a significant health hazard that needs to be addressed if you’re concerned about your health, and the roll-out of 5G would certainly make remedial action all the more difficult. Late last year, California governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill to establish statewide standards for 5G networks.37

Senate Bill 649 sought to restrict the ability of local government to block antenna placement, which led to opposition from local officials across the state. Brown decided to let local leaders have control over 5G infrastructure. In time, we’ll likely see similar legislation in other states, so keep your eyes and ears open, and be sure to get involved whenever an opportunity presents itself. In the meantime, here are several suggestions that will help reduce your RF-EMF exposure:

Connect your desktop computer to the internet via a wired Ethernet connection and be sure to put your desktop in airplane mode. Also avoid wireless keyboards, trackballs, mice, game systems, printers and portable house phones. Opt for the wired versions.

If you must use Wi-Fi, shut it off when not in use, especially at night when you are sleeping. Ideally, work toward hardwiring your house so you can eliminate Wi-Fi altogether. If you have a notebook without any Ethernet ports, a USB Ethernet adapter will allow you to connect to the internet with a wired connection.

Shut off the electricity to your bedroom at night. This typically works to reduce electrical fields from the wires in your wall unless there is an adjoining room next to your bedroom. If that is the case you will need to use a meter to determine if you also need to turn off power in the adjacent room.

Use a battery-powered alarm clock, ideally one without any light. I use a talking clock for the visually impaired.38

If you still use a microwave oven, consider replacing it with a steam convection oven, which will heat your food as quickly and far more safely.

Avoid using “smart” appliances and thermostats that depend on wireless signaling. This would include all new “smart” TVs. They are called smart because they emit a Wi-Fi signal and, unlike your computer, you cannot shut the Wi-Fi signal off. Consider using a large computer monitor as your TV instead, as they don’t emit Wi-Fi.

Refuse smart meters as long as you can, or add a shield to an existing smart meter, some of which have been shown to reduce radiation by 98 to 99%.39

Consider moving your baby’s bed into your room instead of using a wireless baby monitor. Alternatively, use a hard-wired monitor.

Replace CFL bulbs with incandescent bulbs. Ideally remove all fluorescent lights from your house. Not only do they emit unhealthy light, but more importantly, they will actually transfer current to your body just being close to the bulbs.

Avoid carrying your cellphone on your body unless in airplane mode and never sleep with it in your bedroom unless it is in airplane mode. Even in airplane mode it can emit signals, which is why I put my phone in a Faraday bag.40

When using your cellphone, use the speaker phone and hold the phone at least 3 feet away from you. Seek to radically decrease your time on the cellphone. I typically use my cellphone less than 30 minutes a month, and mostly when traveling. Instead, use VoIP software phones that you can use while connected to the internet via a wired connection.

eht cellphone radiation infographic

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Source: mercola rss

Cancer treatment is an expanding and lucrative health care sector with scientists studying an ever-growing list of natural treatments. One such study1 documented improved quality of life and some disease control with IV administration of mistletoe extract.

Many of the current medical treatments for cancer have significant side effects and may quicken death. A British paper2 suggested that chemotherapy causes or speeds death in 27% of cancer patients. The data also showed that 43% of the patients experienced significant toxicity and 19% of patients who died from chemotherapy should not have been receiving treatment.

Other cancer treatments also have significant side effects, including radiation therapy, surgery, hormone therapy and stem cell transplants. On the other hand, natural treatment therapies, such as mistletoe extract, can help improve outcomes without dangerous adverse events, potentially helping the American Cancer Society’s3 estimated 1.9 million new cases of cancer in 2022.

Could COVID or Long COVID Increase Your Risk for Cancer?

According to the American Cancer Society,4 the estimates for 2022 were “based on incidence and mortality rates from 2018 and 2019.” They report that these numbers do not account for the unknown impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on cancer diagnosis and death.

These figures also do not account for the impact that the COVID-19 jab has had on the reactivation of cancers in remission, the return of aggressive cancers and new cancer diagnoses. One paper5 published in 2021 suggested that individuals who experience long-haul COVID symptoms may be predisposed to the acceleration of current cancer progression or the development of new cancer.

The researchers propose that the increased risk may be related to an increase in chronic low-grade inflammation and tissue damage triggered by long COVID, which evidence suggests is related to the spike protein that envelops the virus and not the virus itself.6,7

According to a 2023 paper in Nature Reviews Microbiology, the at-risk population may be at least 65 million people worldwide who are estimated to have long COVID.8 Of course, this number is vastly underrepresented when you consider the people who have accepted the COVID jab and subsequent production of the mRNA-directed systemic spike protein.

IV Mistletoe: Better Quality of Life and Some Disease Control

Notably, the results of the featured study were obtained in patients who had advanced cancers and treatment-resistant tumors. The study was a Phase I trial9 designed to determine the recommended dose of IV mistletoe Helixor M that would be used in Phase II testing.

The aim was to evaluate safety in patients with progressing solid tumors and who were “heavily pretreated” with at least one, and up to six, lines of chemotherapy. The patients received increasing doses of Helixor M three times each week and the researchers documented adverse events, changes in disease stability, target lesions, disease control rate and the median quality of life using the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-General questionnaire.

The data were gathered from a small group of 21 patients, from which the researchers concluded that a 600 mg dose of mistletoe extract was effective with the lowest risk of adverse events. Patients were followed for a median of 15.3 weeks.

While the primary goal of the study was to identify the dose of mistletoe extract that could be used to test for effectiveness, the researchers did note cancer stabilized in five patients for an average of 15 weeks. In three patients, the tumors reduced in size, which stayed stable for two to five months.

The most common side effects the patients reported were chills, nausea and fatigue, which the patients also reported were manageable. Importantly, the patients also reported an improvement in quality of life, which the researchers theorized could positively impact the length of time patients could tolerate their chemotherapy treatments.

Channing Paller, associate professor of oncology from Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, commented in a press release that Phase II studies in combination with chemotherapy would be the next step since:10

“Intravenous mistletoe demonstrated manageable toxicities with disease control and improved quality of life in this group of patients, who had already received multiple cancer therapies.”

History of the Mistletoe Plant

Mistletoe is a semi-parasitic plant that grows on the branches of trees all over the world, most commonly oak, pine, elm and apple.11 For centuries it’s been used in traditional medicine to treat menopausal symptoms, seizures and headaches. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder noted that it could be used against poisons, epilepsy and ulcers.12

It was the Celtic Druids of the first century that likely began using mistletoe in the hope of restoring fertility since they noted it could blossom during the winter months. The association with fertility and vitality continued and in the 18th century, it was incorporated into Christmas celebrations or kissing under the mistletoe.

European mistletoe (Viscum album) is also commonly used as an adjunctive treatment for cancer outside the U.S. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health13 reports that in Europe, extracts are given by injection and may also be taken by mouth as a dietary supplement.

A 2014 paper14 published in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine noted that by 2017 mistletoe would have historically been used for 100 years in the treatment of cancer. It was first recorded by Dutch physician Ita Wegman, who used it to treat breast cancer.15 In recent years, the number and quality of studies have grown reporting improved patient outcomes when administered with chemotherapy to help reduce adverse effects.

Mistletoe Extract in Cancer Treatment

Based solely on the numbers, it’s likely most people either have a personal experience with or know someone who has had cancer. Emerging data show the development of cancer is not a genetic problem but, rather, a metabolic disease primarily rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction.

One of the major concerns with chemotherapy used to treat cancer is the indiscriminate toxicity that poisons your body systematically in an attempt to kill cancer cells. There are also signs the treatment options cause more harm than good. For example, the hormone therapy drug tamoxifen16 used to treat breast cancer may reduce the risk of breast cancer but elevates the incidence and mortality risk of uterine cancer.

According to the National Cancer Institute,17 mistletoe extracts are among the most widely studied alternative and complementary medical therapies for cancer. And in Europe, they are among the most prescribed drugs for cancer. Currently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved mistletoe extracts to treat any condition.

A search on ClinicalTrials.gov18 for Helixor M, one formulation of mistletoe extract, returns results for nine studies investigating mistletoe extract for several types of cancer including unspecified solid tumors, bladder cancer, osteogenic sarcoma, pancreatic cancer and colorectal cancer.

Suzanne Somers, an American actress best known for the role she played in the sitcom “Three’s Company,” is also an author, singer, businesswoman and health spokesperson who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001. She used mistletoe extract in the treatment of her breast cancer, which she spoke about in an interview with Yahoo! Life in 2018.19

Following a lumpectomy and radiation she opted for alternative medicine. After personal research, she chose treatment with injections of Iscador, a mistletoe extract, as well as placing a higher priority on sleep and other lifestyle choices.

Power of Mistletoe as an Adjunctive Cancer Therapy

According to the National Cancer Institute,20 mistletoe is a potential anticancer agent since studies have demonstrated it can kill cancer cells in lab studies, and down-regulate cell migration and invasion. Studies have also demonstrated that it supports natural killer cell-mediated tumor cell lysis and stimulates the immune system.

On a basic level, cells become cancerous when they lose the ability to die like normal cells or programmed cell death also called apoptosis. However, phytonutrients,21 such as those found in mistletoe extract, have the capacity to support your immune system and restore apoptosis to cancer cells so they don’t grow unchecked.

The results of a 2009 literature review of 41 studies evaluating the clinical effect of Iscador on the survival of cancer patients suggested cancer patients who used Iscador as an adjuvant treatment demonstrated better survival rates.22 The National Cancer Institute23 also records several human and clinical studies using a preparation of mistletoe extracts, such as Iscador or Helixor M.

Systematic reviews have found improvements in quality of life and symptom relief. Data from one review24 of 26 randomized controlled trials (RCT) and 10 non-RCTs revealed mistletoe extract improved quality of life and reduced side effects of chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Mistletoe has also been studied in terminally ill patients with pancreatic cancer, one of the most aggressive types of malignancies.25 In a 2013 study26 of 220 patients with locally advanced or metastatic pancreatic cancer, the patients were evenly randomized to receive Viscum album extract and supportive care or a control group who received no antineoplastic therapy and supportive care.

The data demonstrated the overall survival for those receiving Viscum album was 4.8 months and 2.7 months for patients in the control group. The researchers concluded that the intervention was “nontoxic and an effective second-line therapy that offers a prolongation of OS (overall survival) as well as less disease-related symptoms for patients with locally advanced or metastatic pancreatic cancer.”27

More Information About Using Mistletoe Therapy

Dr. Nasha Winters is an integrative oncologist and coauthor of “Mistletoe and the Emerging Future of Integrative Oncology.” Winters is herself a cancer survivor and shared her thoughts about the comprehensive strategies needed to address cancer in an interview with me.28

According to Winters, mistletoe is likely to be useful as an adjunct therapy for all cancers, and she, along with several other doctors, has been training health care providers on how to use mistletoe. The good news is the number of doctors trained in this therapy is growing, and the treatment itself is only between $200 and $300 a month, so it’s highly affordable while also being highly effective.

I think integrating this into any cancer therapy you’re considering is a crucial step toward taking control of your health. However, it’s important to note that oral supplementation for cancer treatment is ineffective, as the lectins responsible for the anticancer effects are broken down in your GI tract and therefore can’t enter your bloodstream.

The Physicians’ Association for Anthroposophic Medicine (PAAM) sponsors Winters’ mistletoe training.29 While many are held in person, there’s also a course available online for licensed physicians. Here’s a list of resources where you can find more information:

AnthrosophicMedicine.org offers articles, research, books, webinars and more. To locate a clinician trained in the proper administration of mistletoe, see PAAM’s health provider directory.

Clinicians interested in training can visit the education section of PAAM’s website. The next annual training conference will be held in Loveland, Colorado, April 29 through May 6, 2023.

Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health (MTIH) is the not-for-profit association co-founded by Winters that is building a research hospital in Arizona. MTIH also offers a master course for practitioners, and grants to help patients access these therapies. Certified practitioners can be found on terrain.network.

These practitioners include medical doctors and oncologists who have been taught Winters’ methodology of testing, assessing and treating cancer (which includes but is not limited to mistletoe therapy). MTIH-certified practitioners are also listed on DrNasha.com.

Mistletoe-therapy.org is a European website that offers helpful information for patients and scientific papers directed at clinicians.

You’ll find a page of resources, including links to training, research, organizations and lab companies on the book’s website: www.themistletoebook.com. Proceeds from this book go to fund clinical research and contribute to physician training.

Last, but certainly not least, you’ll want to pick up a copy of “Mistletoe and the Emerging Future of Integrative Oncology.” It’s an excellent resource that makes the information accessible to anyone interested in learning about this approach to cancer therapy and is an introductory summary of intensive professional training available through PAAM.


Source: mercola rss

For the month of March we are offering two refreshing oils that help purify the air and support healthy skin!                           […]

The post Lovely Lantana & Leleshwa Oils appeared first on Everyday Essentials.

Source: plant therapy Blog

Blood flow restriction (BFR) training, which I perceive to be the greatest innovation in exercise training in the last century, was developed in Japan by Dr. Yoshiaki Sato in 1966. There, it’s known as KAATSU, which means “additional pressure.” KAATSU was brought to the U.S. just over a decade ago by Steven Munatones, after he completed a 13-year mentorship by Sato.

In summary, BFR involves partially obstructing blood flow to your extremities while exercising. This intermittent hypoxia generates an increase in anti-inflammatory myokines, the muscle version of cytokines, which in turn provides a whole host of beneficial hormonal responses.

Aside from dramatically improving muscle tone and preventing sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss), KAATSU is also a wonderful tool for post-surgical rehabilitation, allowing you to regain physical function in a fraction of the time that you would normally anticipate.

Importantly, it will also improve your metabolic flexibility, so that you can seamlessly transition between burning fat and glucose as your primary fuel. It does this by increasing the number of glucose transporters, which absorb and lower your blood sugar in your cell membranes. As a result, your insulin level won’t go up and you won’t develop insulin resistance.

KAATSU is really a specific type of BFR therapy, as it uses a device that automatically inflates and deflates the cuffs you place around your extremities. “Conventional” BFR uses static pressure from elastic or inflatable bands, and while that can provide benefits when used correctly, KAATSU is far superior for several reasons, which we’ll review here.

How KAATSU Builds Muscle

One of the reasons I’m so excited about KAATSU is it’s ability to help build muscle mass and prevent sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is a progressive decline in muscle mass as you age, primarily due to the decrease in blood flow supply to muscle stem cells which are called satellite cells.

When your satellite cells don’t get the nourishment they require, it becomes very difficult to build muscle. Once you are over 50, this is always working against you, even if you’re doing hardcore resistance training. KAATSU solves this problem. It increases the blood supply to your satellite stem cells, which provides the necessary metabolic support needed to increase muscle protein synthesis and grow your muscles.

KAATSU has the added benefit of allowing older people, like me, to engage in relatively aggressive exercise with almost no risk of injury because you’re using very light weights, or if you’re frail and/or elderly, none at all. As explained by Munatones:

“KAATSU cycle is basically a very clever biohack that will allow the muscles to work and allow the vascular tissue to become more elastic. You don’t perceive the pain of heavy lifting, but your vascular tissue and muscle fibers are being worked out just as effectively, and you can do it for a longer period of time.

Putting the KAATSU bands on your legs and walking down to the beach, walking your dog or just walking around the neighborhood, standing, cleaning your windows of your house, folding your clothes, banging out emails, all of these things can be done with the KAATSU bands on your arms or legs. You’re getting the benefit of exercise.

Beta endorphins are being produced; hormones and metabolites are being produced as you’re doing simple things — and that is the way to get the older population in Japan, in the United States, around the world, to understand that you can stop sarcopenia, but you have to exercise. You don’t have to run a 10K, you don’t have to go down to Gold’s Gym. Just put on the KAATSU bands and live your life.”

What Makes KAATSU so Different From Standard BFR

As explained by Munatones, the KAATSU device inflates and deflates according to preset algorithms, creating pressure and releasing pressure at set intervals. In the standard KAATSU device, it’s 30 seconds of compression followed by five seconds of release, and each subsequent compression provides slightly more pressure.

This incremental increase in pressure is really where the magic lies, and it’s taken Sato more than 30 years of experimentation to find just the right “sweet spots” to trigger the greatest improvements.

“The second difference between standard BFR, as we know it in the physical therapy world, and KAATSU is the shape of the air bladder inside the band,” Munatones says. “With KAATSU, there is a narrow air bladder, and when it inflates, it inflates in an oval shape.

That oval shape means the pressure on the arterial flow is minimal, but the pressure on the Venus flow, from your limbs back to your torso, is much greater. That is the secret that Dr. Sato found. He wanted to engorge the vascular tissue of your limbs in blood. That’s the catalyst for all of these biochemical changes.”

This is why I no longer recommend using inexpensive BFR bands because conventional BFR will not produce benefits anywhere nearly as good. There’s risk of injury there, and you can’t get the same benefits. Unfortunately, many physical therapists still do not understand that BFR and KAATSU are really two different things. Munatones comments:

“The current state of the physical therapy market is more [focused on] muscle growth. Muscle hypertrophy is the goal of BFR. Sato and his team of cardiologists in Tokyo were also focused on muscle, but they were specifically focused on the vascular tissue. The key patent of Dr. Sato is the strengthening of the vascular tissue.

They knew that if they made our vascular tissue more elastic, basically antiaging, enabling our vascular tissue to be as elastic as it was when we were in our teens and our 20s, that would be a catalyst for hormonal production — everything from nitric oxide, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), brain derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) and hundreds of other beneficial myokines.

So, their focus was engorging the limb in blood to the point where your hands or feet get pink, rosy, and in some cases, if you’ve been doing it long enough, a dark red. We want the vascular tissue of our arms and legs to be very, very much engorged in blood …

Engorged in blood, you feel that lactate, you feel that metabolic waste build up very efficiently. That’s the real focus. We focus on the vascular tissue and the resultant hormonal response as opposed to muscular strength.”

Using KAATSU During Daily Activities Pays Dividends

Twice a week, Munatones provides free Q&A sessions during which you can ask questions about KAATSU (sign up for the KAATSU Q&A Zoom sessions here). I’ve attended a few of those and was surprised to find that most people don’t use KAATSU with any weight. They’re just wearing the bands while doing chores or activities of daily living, and that’s enough to see improvement.

“The non-athletes who start KAATSU doing average everyday things, once they see their increased strength, once they start looking in the mirror and seeing some definition in their arms, their core, their legs, they get motivationally excited to do more,” Munatones says.

“It’s really great to see this migration from a non-athlete, sedentary lifestyle, to a much more active one, and that drive is coming from inside themselves.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have the athletic population, that former college athlete, that former high school quarterback, or she might be a runner, a rower, a basketball player. Now they’re older and they know how to push themselves.

They typically are the exact opposite. They start lifting with heavy weights and say, ‘God, I can’t do much more than 10 minutes.’ I go, ‘Wait, wait, stop. Don’t be so aggressive. Be gentle, slow down. I’d rather you use the KAATSU cycle for 45 minutes than 10 minutes.’

And they go, ‘Oh, you mean I could still get the benefits of exercise, muscle building, stamina increase, if I slow down? If I don’t use heavy weights? If I’m not as intense?’ And I go, ‘Yes.’

So these former athletes start coming down the intensity scale. So it’s very interesting seeing the non-athletes sort of go up the intensity scale, and the former athletes or athletes come down the intensity scale. They all sort of meet in this happy median in the middle.”

KAATSU Eliminates Need for Recovery Days

An added boon is that you don’t need recovery days. You can use KAATSU every day if you want. I used to do conventional strength training twice a week and KAATSU five days a week. Now, I no longer do conventional strength training at all and I am able to train every day with KAATSU without the need for recovery days. At most, I use 30% of my one rep max, with KAATSU, which allows me to work out longer and more frequently.

“We call it ‘time under tension,'” Munatones says. “How much total time, let’s say, in a one-week period do you have the bands inflated on your arms? To do long-term sustained time under tension, you absolutely have to use the KAATSU cycle and you absolutely have to do it with non-intense, non-all-out vigorous movement.

Walking is great. Some people do Pilates, some people do yoga, some people actually just sit and watch Netflix. We have a lot of people who are older, they’re in retail, or they are in law enforcement. Let’s say they’re on their feet all day long and they come back home and they just want to be off their feet. They sit back on the couch, put the KAATSU bands on their legs and have a great recovery session.”

KAATSU During All Phases of Exercise

Anyone who’s familiar with exercise knows you start with a warmup, then you do the exercise itself, followed by a cool-down session. KAATSU can be beneficial during all of these phases. It is limb-specific, though. If you have the bands on your arms, it’s not going to warm up or help recovery in your legs. So place the bands on the limbs you’re working that day.

Never use arm bands and leg bands simultaneously. It’s either one or the other. Using it on arms and legs at the same time could cause a dangerous drop in blood pressure.

“Quite often, our elite athletes, our competitive athletes … use it before they get to the gym, before they get to the track, before they get to the pool, so when they start their traditional warmup, their vascular tissue is already ready to go.

And so, if we talk to our track athlete, they’ll say ‘I feel light on my feet.’ If we’re talking to a basketball player, volleyball player, they’ll say ‘I’m already jumping near my vertical leap max.’

So they’re using it before, they’re using it during, and very importantly, afterwards — after they’ve taken a shower, they could be hydrating, they could be talking with their friends. Whatever body part they focused on in that workout, they’re throwing the bands on, 30 seconds pressure on, five seconds pressure off.

During that five seconds, metabolic waste is being whooshed out and, therefore, they are ready for the next workout the next day. And that’s why, if you’re using KAATSU seven days a week, there really is no need for a rest day.”

On a side note, if you don’t want to use weights or a cable resistance machine, both of which can get pricey, loop resistance bands are an inexpensive alternative that work great. It’s like a giant rubber band and it comes in a variety of resistances, from 5 pounds of resistance all the way up to 300 pounds.

With KAATSU, all you need are two or three of the smallest bands, and you can do virtually every type of exercise with these bands that you can do on a cable resistance machine, which, in my view, is one of the best pieces of strength training equipment out there.

The Mind-Muscle Connection

KAATSU also helps with the mind-muscle connection. Most bodybuilders will tell you that you have to focus on the muscle you’re working. Just mindlessly moving through a range of motion with weight will not suffice. Sato was well aware of this as well. When you slow down the movement and focus on contracting the muscle, you’ll feel the lactate build up.

The same principle applies when rehabilitating from a stroke or an injury that’s affecting one side of your body. In this case, place the KAATSU band on the injured side, say the right arm, and then perform a movement with that arm. For example, you could hold a toothbrush or hairbrush, and then go through the movement of brushing your teeth or hair while focusing on the muscle involved in the movement.

“Boy, when I saw the effect of that mind-muscle focus on able-bodied people and then people who were injured or disabled, it really opened my eyes to what KAATSU can do for people,” Munatones says.

I’m really excited about KAATSU because, to me, it’s the ideal form of exercise for the elderly and those who have been sedentary for a long time and will die prematurely if they don’t get some type of exercise intervention. And again, while constant-pressure BFR bands can give you some benefits, it’s the regular and consistent releasing of pressure that activates the anti-inflammatory myokines, which I exponentially lower when wearing static bands.

When wearing the KAATSU bands for 45 minutes, you’re cycling the pressure on and off twice per minute, so you’re getting a lot of activations. With that, you’re also getting a lot of hormonal cascades. With constant-pressure BFR, your muscles will grow, but over time they’ll get spastic. I experienced this first-hand. So now, I never use constant tension. I always use cycle mode. As noted by Munatones:

“You use less weight, less resistance for more muscle, you do less intensity for better results. On the face of it, on the macro level, it doesn’t make sense. But if you look at it at a micro level, what is actually happening within the body as you engorge limb in blood, KAATSU makes a whole lot of sense.”

How Professional Athletes Use KAATSU

KAATSU is also a superior choice for athletes. I’ve already mentioned how they use it for warmups and cool downs. Many professional athletes also use KAATSU during practice, but with different protocols. Munatones explains:

“For example, if we’re working with Olympic track athletes, they could be using their bands while working on their starts, or that first hurdle on the hurdles. They typically will do a KAATSU cycle to warm up. If they’re doing a very specific motion in the starting blocks, they’ll use it in constant mode there, and then release the bands.

This is very important for athletes. We found that the human growth hormone, and most of the hormones that are released, are released about 12 to 15 minutes after you take off the bands. So the maximal production of hormones isn’t when you have the bands on. There’s a time delay. So what does that mean?

Now, when we share that information with a professional athlete, let’s say an NBA player who’s in the NBA dunk contest. Well, they’ll KAATSU, ideally, 15 minutes before they get on the court to do their dunk. They want to maximize their physicality when their hormones, their adrenaline, their beta endorphins, et cetera are flowing. You want to perform at that point in time.

So, we basically backdate; we go back and say, OK, let’s say at 12 noon, you know that your race is going to start, so let’s finish the KAATSU session at 11:45. That gives you enough time to put on your jersey, get ready, et cetera. Same thing in between periods, in between halves. We have everybody from high schoolers, to college athletes, to pros, that are using the bands.

This actually came from the Japanese pitchers who are using the bands in between innings. So it’s a nine-inning game. Let’s say they pitched six innings, they were recovering in between the first and second and third and fourth inning.

We did a test with the equivalent of the NCAA baseball players in Japan, and found, for those who use KAATSU exclusively, their pitch count and their number of innings that they pitched increased over the whole season versus the control group that did not use KAATSU during that season …

At the Olympics, especially for 100-, 200- and 400-meter runners, you’ve got three races: the preliminary heats, the semi-final heats and the final heats within one 36-hour period. They’re doing KAATSU in between the pre-lims and semi-finals, and between the semi-finals and finals, simply to get that body back to 100% as quickly as possible.

We also have professional-level arm wrestlers. In a tournament, you might have as many as five, six or seven arm matches within a very short period of time. As soon as they’re finished, we want that metabolic waste whooshed out. So they throw on the KAATSU bands on both arms and do some KAATSU [in between matches.”

KAATSU Is Ideal for People in Sedentary Professions

KAATSU is also being used by submariners, truck drivers and people in other sedentary professions.

“If you’re a submariner, you’re pretty confined for months on end. You’re living in a small space, obviously there’s some stress involved, just dog some simple bicep curls, hand clenches, tricep extensions and squats by your bunk,” Munatones says.

“These are all innovative ways we use KAATSU. For long distance haulers, truck drivers, this is an ideal way, in a confined space, that you can get a workout if you don’t have the luxury of going to the gym.

Or, you might be on a business trip. Maybe you’re at a convention and you’ve been on your feet all day. By the time you get back to your hotel room, you’re just exhausted. Throw it on there.

We’re in 49 countries around the world. It’s really a heartfelt labor of love that we’re doing. We hear so many stories that are really touching, and that drives us every single day. So if people are interested, they’re very welcome to attend our Tuesday and Thursday one-hour sessions.”

You can sign up for these free KAATSU Q&A Zoom sessions here. The next three sessions will be held March 21, 23 and 28 at 9 a.m. Pacific time. Whether you’re elderly, recovering from an injury, a professional athlete or someone in a sedentary profession, KAATSU can be a real game changer. To learn more, check out my previous article, “How to Stay Fit for Life,” in which I review the science behind KAATSU and explain in greater detail how to use it.

For a limited time, you can get 10% off the C-3 KAATSU unit ($100) by using this link: https://www.kaatsu.com/go/NVIC.  Be sure that you purchase the C-3 and not the more expensive Bluetooth recently launched which is not recommended due to the EMFs it releases.


Source: mercola rss

Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published January 28, 2018.

One in 4 Americans over the age of 45 is on a statin drug to lower their cholesterol. Are these drugs really as bad as some of the evidence suggests — or might they be even worse than suspected? Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., is a senior research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) whom I’ve interviewed on a number of occasions.

She’s an absolute treasure trove of valuable health information. Here, we discuss statin drugs, which are also featured in her fictional book, “Cindy and Erica’s Obsession to Solve the Healthcare Crisis in America,” for which I wrote the foreword. The story, while fictional, is based on Seneff’s own life and passion for science, and delves into autism, Alzheimer’s, statins, vaccines, glyphosate and more.

In this interview, we focus on another book, “The Dark Side of Statins: Plus, the Wonder of Cholesterol,”1 the last one written by Dr. Duane Graveline, who himself was a victim of statin side effects and died from complications related to statin use. Seneff’s husband was also severely affected by statins, which triggered her scientific exploration into these popular drugs.

“He really changed my career by getting sick,” she says. “He was diagnosed with heart disease 10 years ago and put on a high-dose statin — four times the normal dosage. The doctor said, ‘You have to take this for the rest of your life. If you don’t, I will no longer be your doctor.’ And he immediately started suffering from side effects — muscle pains and weakness; even the road rage and behavioral changes.

I just knew this drug wasn’t working and I started researching statins … In fact, I started doing it as part of my work at MIT. I started analyzing statin side effects and finding all kinds of horrible things. He got off them after a year. He slowly tapered it down and I’m happy to say he’s statin free and doing great at this point, 10 years later. His doctors keep on reminding him [to go back on a statin] and he keeps on telling them no, politely.”

How Studies Overestimate Statin Benefits

As noted by Seneff, it’s pretty easy to overestimate the benefits of statins by confusing people with absolute and relative risk. This is a statistical trick used quite frequently to demonstrate drug effectiveness. Seneff explains:

“They do a study in which the absolute risk is very rare. Let’s say 2 percent of the population is actually expected to have whatever it is they’re monitoring, like, say, a heart attack. They then look over a period of time and find that 2 percent of the control group has the occurrence [they’re looking for, in this case a heart attack] and the treatment group has, let’s say, 1.5 percent instead of 2 percent.

That’s a 0.5 percent decreased risk from [the individual’s] standpoint, but from their standpoint, it’s a 25 percent improved performance because it’s 0.5 out of 2 — one-quarter of the relative risk has been taken away. Therefore, it’s a 25 percent improvement, which sounds much better than 0.5 percent.”

Statins Offer Poor Defense Against Heart Disease

Unfortunately, while statins may decrease the frequency of mild heart attacks, they will not necessarily lower your risk of heart disease or death from a major heart attack because of the damage they do to your muscles, including your heart muscle. On a side note, statins’ ability to lower the risk of minor heart attacks is likely related to their ability to lower C-reactive protein, far more so than the lowering of cholesterol.

However, according to Graveline, you only need one-tenth of the dosage, say 2 milligrams (mg) rather than 20 mg to get this anti-inflammatory benefit, and there are far safer and more effective ways to lower inflammation than taking a statin, even at a low dosage. As Seneff says, “You’re trading heart attack for heart failure, and I think a heart attack is preferred over heart failure.” There are three primary reasons why statins fail to decrease the rate of death from heart disease:

1. Statins lower your cholesterol, which is an important precursor for many of your steroid hormones, including progesterone, testosterone, aldosterone, cortisol and vitamin D. Cholesterol sulfate (produced when you expose your skin to the sun) enters cell membranes and helps build structured water that protects against oxidative damage. Cholesterol is also needed to create DHEA sulfate.

2. They also deplete your body of Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which is needed for muscle health, and lowers your levels of vitamin K2 and HMG co-enzyme A reductase, the latter of which is an enzyme your liver uses to make ketones. So, if you’re on a statin drug, you have dramatically impaired ketone production, even if you’re fasting.

3. Statins also lower dolichol, which Graveline believed is just as important as CoQ10. Not only does dolichol play an important role in mitochondrial function, it is also responsible for the process of putting sugar chains on top of glycosylated proteins. This is important because these so-called glycosaminoglycans help maintain the barrier function in the cell and regulate the uptake of nutrients.

In practical terms, this means that your muscle cells (including your heart cells), which require lots of energy, get heavily impacted by statins. One side effect from lack of dolichol is Type 2 diabetes, and statins have indeed been found to cause drug-induced diabetes. Dolichol also fixes DNA mistakes. CoQ10, a powerful antioxidant, also helps, and both of these DNA “repair masters” are depleted by statins.

Statins Make You Age Faster

Contrary to popular belief, high cholesterol is not a primary risk factor for heart disease. It’s actually a vital nutrient needed for health that shouldn’t be artificially and indiscriminately suppressed.

“That’s absolutely true,” Seneff says. “When my husband was prescribed a statin, I knew cholesterol was vitally important to the body and I knew there was high concentrations in the brain.

Two percent of the body’s weight and 25 percent of the body’s cholesterol in the brain. So, you don’t want to mess with losing cholesterol in your brain. Of course, statin side effects include a lot of cognitive issues and that was one of the things that faced Graveline.

He suffered something called transient global amnesia after taking statins for about three months. The doctors said, ‘No way the statin could be causing that,’ but he wanted to [stop taking] it anyway … A year later, the doctor said, ‘Well, the statin didn’t cause it, so you should go back on the statin because you still have high cholesterol.’

He went back on [the statin] and shortly thereafter he had another episode of transient global amnesia. From that point on, he stopped taking the statin.

Then he became obsessed and wrote several books on statins … [H]e died of an ALS-like condition, which he suspected the statins had contributed toward … [I]n the book he says, ‘Statins make you grow older faster.’ And I think that’s a very good way to describe them.

They give you all the things you get when you get older, faster. And since you never got old before, you don’t know how fast you’re supposed to get old, so you just think, ‘Well, I’m getting old. This is just the way it is.’ And it’s not. It should be much, much slower … So, everyone gets duped. Each person individually gets old fast and doesn’t realize that’s happening to them because of the statin.”

Protect Your Heart: Beware of Cellphone Radiation

Two factors that can have a significant impact on your heart health and risk of heart disease are exposure to glyphosate-containing pesticides and electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Seneff touches on both of these issues in this interview, noting that each also has a tendency to worsen the effects of the other. “I think glyphosate messes up your natural electrical system, which makes you much more susceptible to EMFs,” she says.

Considering the evidence, I firmly believe excessive exposure to microwave radiation from cellphones and other wireless technologies are a hidden and completely ignored contributor to heart disease. While evaluating studies showing you can radically reduce biological microwave damage using calcium channel blockers, Martin Pall, Ph.D., discovered a previously unknown mechanism of biological harm from microwaves emitted by wireless technologies.2

Embedded in your cell membranes are voltage gated calcium channels (VGCCs), which are activated by microwaves. When that happens, they open up, allowing a massive influx of intracellular calcium, which in turn stimulates the release of nitric oxide (NO).

Inside your cell and mitochondria, this NO combines with superoxide to form peroxynitrite. Not only do peroxynitrites cause oxidative damage, they also create hydroxyl free radicals, which are profoundly destructive and cause mitochondrial dysfunction.

One of the tissues with the highest density of VGCCs is the pacemaker in your heart. What the research tells us is that excessive microwave exposure can be a direct contributor to conditions such as cardiac arrhythmias.3 According to Seneff, EMFs also contribute to arterial calcification (blocked arteries). So, if you care about your heart health, and/or already struggle with heart problems, you’ll want to make sure you:

  • Avoid carrying your cellphone in a pocket near your heart
  • Avoid using portable computers and tablets
  • Turn off your cellphone at night, as even if you are not talking it can damage you up to 30 feet away unless it’s in airplane mode with Bluetooth and location services turned off
  • Turn off your Wi-Fi at night (ideally in the day also)
  • Most importantly, turn off the electricity to your bedroom at the circuit breaker each night. This typically works for most bedrooms unless you have a room or rooms adjacent to your bedroom, in which case you might need to shut that off too. This will radically lower electric and magnetic fields while you sleep. If you need a clock you can use a battery-operated one and even better a talking clock with no light that can be picked up on Amazon

Shocking Glyphosate Statistics

Both glyphosate and EMF exposure have dramatically increased in recent decades. Between 1974 (the year glyphosate entered the U.S. market and just over two decades before GE crops were introduced) and 2014, glyphosate use in the U.S. increased more than 250-fold. Globally, glyphosate use rose nearly fifteenfold since 1996, two years after the first GE crops hit the market.4

Recent research shows that while few individuals had detectable levels of glyphosate in their urine in 1993, by 2016, 70% of them had it.5 Overall, the prevalence of human exposure to glyphosate increased by 500% during the study period (1993 to 2016), while actual levels of the chemical in people’s bodies increased by an astounding 1,208%.

Glyphosate Increases Allergenic Potential of Proteins

Seneff has done a lot of research on glyphosate, teasing out a number of mechanisms by which it causes biological harm. Much of this was discussed in “Roundup Herbicide May Be Most Important Factor in Development of Chronic Disease.”

More recently, Seneff and her research partner, Anthony Samsel, a research scientist and environmental and public health consultant, have found a significant amount of circumstantial evidence suggesting the chemical takes the place of glycine (an amino acid) in proteins, thereby impairing trypsin’s function, which is to digest proteins.

This increases the proteins’ allergenic potential. Glyphosate also causes leaky gut, allowing undigested proteins access to your general blood circulation. The end result is autoimmune disease, as your immune cells go into overdrive. “We have an epidemic in all kinds of different autoimmune diseases and food allergies, and I think all of that traces back to glyphosate,” she says.

The “gly” in glyphosate actually stands for “glycine,” which is one of the most common and also the smallest amino acid. So, glyphosate is basically a glycine molecule with a side chain attached to the nitrogen atom, and even though it’s a modified glycine molecule, it’s still glycine. This is why it can replace the regular amino acid glycine in your system. Unfortunately, it’s now toxic. Seneff explains:

“Certain proteins have certain glycines that absolutely have to be glycine in order for them to work properly. A good example is myosin. Myosin in the muscles [allow for] muscle contraction. It’s a really important protein in the muscles for movement. It has a glycine at position 699 in the amino acid sequence. If you change that glycine into alanine, which is to say you add one extra methyl group, it ruins the protein.

It only has 1 percent capacity to contract. It loses 99 percent of its capacity to contract. Really amazing. So, if you put glyphosate instead of glycine, you’re going to have at least as bad an effect as you would with alanine, and probably worse. It will cripple the protein and maybe that’s how you get chronic fatigue syndrome.”

Other Adverse Health Effects of Glyphosate

Collagen also contains large amounts of glycine, and we have an epidemic of joint pain, back pain, knee and hip pain. These too may well be the result of glyphosate exposure. Glyphosate also impairs health by causing imbalance in your gut microbiome, and by weakening your immune system. Seneff explains:

“The neutrophils are unable to do their job and then the tryptophan gets squirreled away inside the macrophages as kynurenine, [which] then gets taken over to the brain, causing all kinds of trouble in the brain.

So, there’s this whole complicated thing that’s going on between the brain and the gut — the gut-brain axis communication system — with the microbes being messed up by the glyphosate, the gut being leaky, and the leaky gut barrier introducing a leaky brain barrier.

So, the barriers are all leaky. The placental barrier is leaky too, so the placenta gets in trouble during pregnancy. All this stuff that’s happening because of glyphosate. It’s such a cascade.”

Glyphosate also depletes food of tryptophan by impairing the shikimate pathway in the plant. As a result, food is becoming increasingly tryptophan depleted, leading to widespread deficiency. Eventually, you can get into a situation where the tryptophan gets totally depleted, and when your liver doesn’t get enough, it cannot make enough N-arachidonoyl dopamine (NADA) — one of the most important signaling molecules in your body — because NADA depends on tryptophan.

Downstream, you may also end up with serotonin and melatonin deficiency in the brain, which can lead to sleep disorders, depression and violent or suicidal behavior. Aside from tryptophan, disruption of the shikimate pathway also decreases all of the other aromatic amino acids, including tyrosine and phenylalanine, along with all of their derivatives, which include dopamine and melanin and folate.

Supplements Recommended for Statin Users

As mentioned, statin drugs deplete your body of a number of important nutrients. For this reason, Graveline recommends taking the following supplements if you’re on a statin drug:

Ubiquinol, the reduced version of CoQ10.

Folate — Avoid folic acid, the synthetic version of folate, as it is oxidized and will use up a lot of antioxidant capacity in your liver to turn it into folate. Moreover, if you have been exposed to glyphosate, your body’s ability to do this will be impaired. A good supplement form is 5-methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF).

Vitamin C — Your best bet here is to simply eat vitamin C-rich foods, and only take a vitamin C supplement if you’re feeling ill. The liposomal version of vitamin C is very effective. I typically recommend taking it every hour until you feel better. Liposomal vitamin C may also help abort an allergic reaction when taken in high amounts.

Selenium — Statins wreak havoc with selenoproteins, so a selenium supplement is advisable. In fact, most people need to take supplemental selenium.

Lecithin — I’m not a big fan of lecithin and I would suggest simply eating one whole organic, pastured egg per day instead. Lecithin is phosphatidylcholine, which eggs contain plenty of. If opting for a supplement, I recommend using a liposomal form. Also make sure it’s not made from genetically engineered soy. A safer alternative is organic sunflower lecithin.

Animal-based omega-3 fats — Ideal sources include small fatty fish such as sardines and anchovies and salmon roe. Ideally, check your omega-3 index to make sure you’re in a healthy range.

D-Ribose, as statins interfere with D-Ribose processing.

Magnesium — Most people are deficient in magnesium, but if you’re on a statin, you may be at even greater risk. Having low magnesium also raises your risk of suffering adverse effects from EMF, as magnesium is a natural calcium channel blocker. When you take high enough doses of magnesium, you actually lower your risk for developing damage from EMFs.

Alpha lipoic acid — This is a sulfur-containing molecule which may be part of its benefit.

Vitamin K2 — Statins block the K2 pathway and impair vitamin K2 absorption, and K2 is important for the prevention of arterial calcification, as it helps shuttle calcium out of soft tissues into your teeth and bones, where it belongs.

Pyrroloquinoline quinone, more commonly known as PQQ. Similar to CoQ10, PQQ helps improve mitochondrial function.

Chances Are You Don’t Need a Statin

That statins have proliferated the way they have is a testimony to the power of marketing, corruption and corporate greed, because the odds are very high — greater than 100 to 1 — that if you’re taking a statin, you don’t really need it. The only subgroup of people I believe might benefit from it are those born with a genetic defect called familial hypercholesterolemia, as this makes them resistant to traditional measures of normalizing cholesterol.

Even more importantly, cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. Heart disease is largely caused by inflammation, as several experts have explained in detail, including Dr. Ron Rosedale, Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, Dr. Stephen Sinatra and Stephanie Seneff. Increased cholesterol is your body’s natural response to inflammation. It is wrongly blamed because it’s found at the “scene of the crime,” but it’s not the criminal.

If your physician is urging you to check your total cholesterol, then you should know that this test will tell you virtually nothing about your risk of heart disease unless it is 330 or higher. HDL percentage is a far more potent indicator for heart disease risk. Here are the two ratios you should pay attention to:

  • HDL/Total Cholesterol Ratio — Should ideally be above 24%. If below 10%, you have a significantly elevated risk for heart disease.
  • Triglyceride/HDL Ratio — Should be below 2%.

Remember, your body needs cholesterol. It is important in the production of cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D and bile acids that help you to digest fat. Cholesterol also helps your brain form memories and is vital to your neurological function. There is also strong evidence that having too little cholesterol actually increases your risk for cancer, memory loss, Parkinson’s disease, hormonal imbalances, stroke, depression, suicide and violent behavior.

So, please, think long and hard before filling a prescription for a statin drug, and begin by implementing healthy lifestyle strategies instead. You can find a long list of articles detailing heart healthy strategies here.

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Source: mercola rss