Lose Them Pounds

Traditionally, fermented foods are a simple strategy to affect and optimize the health of your gut. Fermented foods are teeming with beneficial microbes that are sadly lacking in many Americans’ diets. Nearly every culture has a recipe for fermented food that has been passed down through the generations.

Kimchi has a long tradition in Korea where it’s served as a side dish with most meals.1 Cabbage and radish are the two most popular vegetables used in the preparation of kimchi, but some family recipes also use cucumber, onion and carrot as the primary vegetable.

The flavor and microflora of kimchi are impacted by additional ingredients such as garlic, salt and fermented fish sauce. Most Korean families have their own recipes, which are closely guarded secrets.2 Yet, the nature of the process of fermenting means that no two batches ever taste exactly the same. In addition to the ingredients, the temperature and length of fermentation contribute to the flavor of the finished product.

Originally, fermenting cabbage and other common vegetables to make kimchi was a way of preserving fresh vegetables for the winter months.3 Although it is available commercially, you can easily experiment at home with your own vegetables to develop a flavor and nutritional profile you enjoy.

While the flavor will vary depending upon the ingredients you use, most kimchi is sour and spicy. If you use garlic during fermentation, the flavor and taste of the vegetable will intensify.

As it has become more popular, it can be found in the refrigerated section of many grocery stores or purchased at Asian markets and sushi bars. Because it’s made with vegetables and fermented it contains an ample amount of fiber and is rich in microbes that help feed a healthy gut.

Importance of Probiotic Foods to Your Health

Foods rich in beneficial bacteria act as probiotics. Using a probiotic supplement or eating fermented foods has become increasingly popular as evidence mounts that probiotics have a beneficial effect on the bacterial communities residing in your gut.4

The most common bacteria found in probiotics are from the lactobacillus and bifidobacterium groups.5 Information from the 2012 National Health Interview Survey showed approximately 4 million adults in the U.S. had used probiotics or prebiotics in the 30 days leading up to the survey.6

Recent information published in 20197 also recorded approximately 3.9 million people regularly take probiotic supplements with the expectation that they will help improve digestion and immune function, prevent heart disease and improve mental health.

Food manufacturers have recognized the benefits of eating probiotic foods and have incorporated this in their advertising, especially for fermented dairy foods like yogurt. However, store-bought yogurt brands are also high in sugar, which feeds harmful bacteria in the gut. In this case, the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages of consuming probiotics from store-bought yogurt.

The production of kimchi is accomplished by fermenting vegetables with lactic acid bacteria (LAB), the same bacteria used in fermenting yogurt.8 This group of bacteria is one of the most significant groups of probiotics, demonstrating a high survival rate in test conditions and resistance to low pH indicating reasonable tolerance to bile.9

Probiotics Benefit Leaky Gut and Inflammation

Although some bacteria can cause disease, there are nearly 100 trillion of them living in your gut, which are collectively called the gut microbiota.10 What exists in your gut is a balance of harmful and beneficial bacteria that contribute to your body’s control of the inflammatory response.11

When the bacteria in your gut are out of balance it increases the permeability of the membrane lining your intestinal wall. This is referred to as leaky gut. The tiny gaps allow undigested food, bacteria and metabolic waste to enter your bloodstream, which sets up an inflammatory response in your body.

This inflammation also confuses the immune system and increases the risk for an autoimmune attack.12 Leaky gut syndrome has been associated with inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. However, even healthy people can have varying degrees of intestinal permeability that can lead to a variety of health symptoms.

Kimchi plays two roles in protecting your gut health. In the first place, it is a rich source of probiotics helping to reseed your gut microbiota with healthy, beneficial bacteria. Kimchi is also high in insoluble fiber, which is the preferred source of nutrition for beneficial microbes.

Research from the University of California13 has shown the microbial balance in the gut microbiota is driven in part by the intestinal tract’s ability to limit resources to harmful microbes when beneficial microbes are given adequate nutrition. In addition to helping to close intestinal permeability, beneficial bacteria produce short-chain fatty acids as a byproduct of metabolism.14

These fatty acids signal the cells in the large bowel to limit the amount of oxygen within the large intestines. Beneficial bacteria are anaerobic and don’t survive well in an environment high in oxygen. This is another pathway in which the microbiota and your intestinal cells collaborate to promote a cycle that maintains gut health.

The signaling pathway can malfunction when beneficial bacteria are not provided adequate nutrition. If you eat a diet high in sugar and carbohydrates, it feeds the harmful bacteria. This both increases the oxygen level and intestinal permeability and makes your body more susceptible to aerobic enteric pathogens, such as E. coli and salmonella.

Animal studies have also indicated that probiotics can help reduce inflammation and improved the physical functioning of the intestinal tract in older mice.15 The researchers found a probiotic cocktail “could ameliorate age-related leaky gut and inflammation, hence opening up novel avenues to explore and exploit the clinical utilities of such therapeutic regimens.”16

Your Gut Health Impacts Disease Risk

Protecting your gut health can also reduce your disease risk. Scientific evidence has demonstrated that many conditions and diseases, such as learning disabilities, diabetes, obesity and Parkinson’s disease, are influenced by your gut microbiome. One review published in 2020 goes so far as to say that most inflammatory diseases begin in the gut.17

Dr. Alessio Fasano,18 a pediatric gastroenterologist, researcher and director of the Center for Celiac Research and Treatment, points out that there are simply not enough genes to account for the high number of chronic diseases that affect humans.

Genetics also cannot explain the timing of the disease onset. Instead, he suggests that it’s important to look at the gut microbiome as “it is the interplay between us as individuals and the environment in which we live that dictates our clinical destiny.”19

Evidence has shown that exposure to bacterial overgrowth and gluten are the two most powerful triggers to stimulate the production of zonulin by intestinal epithelial cells.20 Zonulin is a family of proteins that are a biomarker for gut permeability. Activation of the pathway may be a defense mechanism to remove bacterial overgrowth or changes in composition (dysbiosis) or both.

Kimchi can help protect against bacterial overgrowth and thus limit the activation of the zonulin pathway. Chronic inflammatory diseases that have been associated with dysregulation of this pathway include autoimmune and metabolic disorders, intestinal diseases and neuroinflammatory diseases.21

In other words, you can affect the potential risk and reduce the symptoms of health conditions far outside your gut when you take care of your gut microbiome by providing a diet rich in probiotics and nutrition to feed your beneficial bacteria.

Gut Health May Improve Sleep and Support Your Immune System

Researchers have discovered there is a curious bidirectional link between your gut and your sleep habits. Two studies shed light on this connection. The first was published in Frontiers in Psychiatry22 and focused on the role that your gut microbiome plays in insomnia and depression. The authors wrote:23

“There is considerable evidence showing that the gut microbiome not only affects the digestive, metabolic, and immune functions of the host but also regulates host sleep and mental states through the microbiome-gut-brain axis.

Preliminary evidence indicates that microorganisms and circadian genes can interact with each other. The characteristics of the gastrointestinal microbiome and metabolism are related to the host’s sleep and circadian rhythm.”

As noted in the paper, there is mounting research that suggests your gut microbiome affects your sleep cycle through what’s known as the gut-brain axis. According to the authors, this happens through three different pathways, all of which use a bidirectional flow.

In a second study,24 researchers investigated how your sleep affects the microbes in the gut, which we already know have far-reaching effects on your general health and the strength of your immune system.25 Using advanced sleep measuring devices, the quality of a participant’s sleep was measured and then compared to the composition of their gut microbiome to see if a correlation could be made.

The researchers found that diversity was positively correlated with sleep efficiency and total sleep time. They also found several bacterial groups that were negatively correlated with sleep quality indicating there is a link between the composition of your gut microbiome, sleep physiology and your immune system.

In addition to supporting your sleep hygiene, a healthy gut may also protect against viral infections, such as severe COVID-19 disease.26 In a review27 of more than 1,000 patient records, researchers found that those who presented on admission to the hospital with GI symptoms and suspected COVID-19 infection had worse outcomes than those who did not have GI symptoms.

Even after adjusting for comorbidities, demographics and other clinical symptoms, the results held. You can read more about the links between COVID-19 and your gut microbiome in “A Healthy Gut to Help Combat COVID.” One of the researchers from Rush University spoke with a journalist from MedPageToday, saying:28

“We knew that GI symptoms could be part of the infection but we did not know if they made a difference and conferred higher risk. So we wanted to look into the impact of initial GI symptoms to see if they might coincide with more serious disease and we found that those with GI symptoms also had established risk factors for severity, such as older age, diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.”

More Kimchi Benefits

In addition to the probiotic benefits from kimchi, the nutritive content has also been extensively studied. Researchers have found the dish is high in vitamins A and C along with 34 amino acids.29 The major carotenoids reported are lutein and beta-carotene in a variety of concentrations that are related to the agricultural practice, harvesting and fermentation methods used.

Depending on the raw materials, kimchi may also be high in calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium. The most important bioactive compounds are phytochemicals that have been prized for their medicinal potential with antiobesity, anticancer and anti-atherosclerotic properties.

Researchers have focused on the polyphenolic contents of kimchi as it relates to health claims that include protective effects against a variety of different types of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and cardiovascular disease. Many of the raw materials are important sources of dietary phytochemicals, including onions, which are a source of flavonoids, including quercetin.

Animal studies have demonstrated antiobesity actions as it relates to the animal size, weight and inflammatory response from fat tissue. Other studies have shown kimchi can help balance cholesterol, triglycerides and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels.

Regular consumption may help to reduce the potential for metabolic syndrome and balance high blood pressure. Fermentation appears to boost the benefits of the raw materials used in kimchi to improve metabolic parameters with antiaging effects.30

The LAB bacteria, dominant in the fermentation of kimchi,31 appears to reduce or eradicate putrefactive and pathogenic bacteria that may be present in the process. This helps to increase the functionality of the food and contributes to the large number of health benefits found in research, including the effects on obesity, cancer and colorectal health.

Control Quality by Making Your Own Fermented Vegetables

Some people start out making fermented foods for health benefits and then get hooked on the flavor or vice versa. Kimchi has a high level of beneficial bacteria that are ideal for optimizing your gut flora, and it is high in fiber to help nourish those bacteria. Eating one-quarter to one-half cup of fermented veggies with one to three meals each day can have a dramatic impact on your health.

If you’re new to fermented foods, introduce them gradually, beginning with as little as 1 teaspoon of kimchi with a meal. Observe your reactions for a couple of days before adding another small portion and increase your dose gradually as your body can tolerate.

While cabbage is the main ingredient in traditional kimchi, other common elements include mustard greens, garlic, ginger root, Asian radish and Korean chili powder.

It is surprisingly easy to make your own kimchi at home, which allows you to tweak the recipe to suit your taste and to control the quality of the ingredients. You can find recipes for homemade kimchi in “The Tangy Tasty Superfood Korean Families Eat with Every Meal” and “Join the Kinetic Culture and Make Your Own Fermented Vegetables.”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/29/what-is-kimchi-good-for.aspx

Health care is becoming increasingly digitalized, starting with online medical records and now moving toward replacing human health care providers with robots. Writing in JAMA Network Open, a team of doctors and researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, cited the COVID-19 pandemic as being instrumental in the expansion of telehealth offerings at many health care systems.1

The goal of telehealth is to limit human contact to lower the risk of infectious disease transmission, but removing the human element of care dramatically changes the doctor-patient relationship. While most existing telehealth systems involve the patient controlling a tablet or smartphone, the researchers suggested that a mobile robotic telehealth system controlled by clinicians would offer a more dynamic experience.

However, before implementing robots to engage with patients in emergency rooms across the U.S., they wanted to find out if robots would be accepted — and they were surprisingly well received.

Americans Open to Robotic Care

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers began to look for ways to minimize interactions between patients coming into emergency rooms and health care providers. In cooperation with Boston Dynamics, they created mobile robots that can measure vital signs like temperature, breathing rate, pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation.

The dog-like robots have four legs and carry an iPad that allows for video communication with a health care provider.2

“Often as engineers, we think about different solutions, but sometimes they may not be adopted because people are not fully accepting of them,” study author Giovanni Traverso said in a news release. “So, in this study we were trying to tease that out and understand if the population is receptive to a solution like this one.”3

First, they conducted a U.S. survey of 1,000 people to gauge attitudes about using robotic systems in hospital settings. In addition to questions about their usefulness in carrying out specific health care tasks, the participants were asked to consider their usefulness “with an emphasis on using robotic systems to limit direct human contact and conserve personal protective equipment” during the pandemic.4

The results revealed that most people were open to robotic health care services, including not only initial interviews and reading of vital signs but also somewhat more complex procedures, like testing for COVID-19 using a nasal or oral swab, placing an intravenous catheter, drawing blood and moving critically ill patients into a prone position.5

“Surprisingly, people were pretty accepting of the idea of having a robot do a nasal swab, which suggests that potential engineering efforts could go into thinking about building some of these systems,” the study’s lead author, Peter Chai, said.6

Most Said Robot Care Was Similar to In-Person Care

The next phase of the study took place in Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s emergency department. Fifty-one patients were approached about taking part in the robot study, and 41 agreed to participate (one did not get to complete the experiment because of a signaling malfunction with the robot).

The robot, controlled by a clinician, was then navigated to the patient and a video triage interview was conducted via the robot’s tablet computer.

Patients were then asked to evaluate the experience. Out of the 40 patients, 37 (92.5%) said the experience was satisfactory, and 33 (82.5%) said that being interviewed by the robotic system was as satisfactory as being interviewed in-person by a clinician. “For the purposes of gathering quick triage information, the patients found the experience to be similar to what they would have experienced talking to a person,” Chai said.7

The team is now working on smaller robots that would be able to interact with patients outside of a typical hospital setting, such as in an ambulance or field hospital, as well as developing sensors that could take vital signs remotely.8

Another piece of the puzzle, however, before the widespread rollout of robotic health care can take place, is ensuring that people will accept this impersonal technology. As such, they stress, “Future work may consider approaches to maximize acceptance of robotic systems among patients, especially those who declined to participate in the present study.”9

Health Passports: Another Form of Digital Health Care

It’s likely only a matter of time before you’ll be asked to prove your vaccination status in order to carry on with your daily life. “The government seems to be developing vaccine passports by stealth, making sure the technology is in place for anyone who needs it,” wrote Lara Prendergast, The Spectator’s assistant editor.10

She’s referring to the U.K. government, which has given sizable grants to a number of private companies developing such technology, however vaccine passports are also being implemented around the world. Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Cyprus and Malta are among the countries that have expressed positivity toward vaccine passports to revive tourism, while in the U.S., plans for vaccine IDs are under evaluation.11

The Commons Project and the World Economic Forum created the Common Trust Network, which developed the CommonPass app that’s intended to act as a health passport in the near future.

The app allows users to upload medical data such as a COVID-19 test result or proof of vaccination, which then generates a QR code that you will show to authorities as your health passport.12 The proposed common framework “for safe border reopening” around the world involves the following:13

Every nation must publish their health screening criteria for entry into the country using a standard format on a common framework
Each country must register trusted facilities that conduct COVID-19 lab testing for foreign travel and administer vaccines listed in the CommonPass registry
Each country will accept health screening status from foreign visitors through apps and services built on the CommonPass framework
Patient identification is to be collected at the time of sample collection and/or vaccination using an international standard
The CommonPass framework will be integrated into flight and hotel reservation check-in processes

Eventually, the CommonPass framework will be integrated with already existing personal health apps such as Apple Health and CommonHealth. If you want to travel, your personal health record will be evaluated and compared to a country’s entry requirements, and if you don’t meet them, you’ll be directed to an approved testing and vaccination location.

Significant Human Rights Concerns

Airline JetBlue announced that passengers flying to Aruba from Boston’s Logan International Airport could use the CommonPass digital health pass to enter the country.14 The plan is to quickly expand the program to other cities in JetBlue’s network — and this is only the beginning.

But, while being positioned as a way to regain a sense of normalcy and travel with ease, it’s actually a restriction of freedom — one in which you must “present your papers” before you can cross a border. The “easy” steps to enter Aruba, which prior to the pandemic would have consisted of showing your passport, now include:

Download the CommonPass app
Get tested for COVID-19 by COVID testing companies Vault and XpresCheck, either at home or at the airport
Prior to your flight, enter your “invitation code” into the CommonPass app and upload your COVID-19 test results into CommonPass
Fill out an online embarkation-disembarkation card, which includes your negative PCR molecular COVID-19 test; you can add your CommonPass ID in order to pre-verify with Aruba that you are “cleared to travel”
Upon arrival in Aruba, proceed through the “dedicated CommonPass immigration lanes to start … vacation sooner”

Already, this is creating two “classes” of people — those who have the CommonPass and those who don’t. This is just one of the significant human rights and civil liberty concerns being created by the implementation of digital health passports.

As noted by Rosalind Comyn, policy and campaigns manager at the National Council for Civil Liberties in the U.K., “In essence, what vaccine passports are trying to do is create a system whereby some people can access freedoms, services or other kind of spaces and places and other people are excluded from them.”15

Big Tech Striving To Be a Digital Health Power Player

From robotics to artificial intelligence (AI), the future of health care is digital, and technology companies like Google are investing heavily in this area. In November 2018, for instance, Google hired the former CEO of Geisinger Health, David Feinberg, to run its Google Health initiative and soon after acquired DeepMind Health, which is part of an AI company creating AI assistances for health care providers.16

Google is working on developing voice recognition technologies to support doctors in their paperwork along with an image library that trains AI models to detect diseases. It’s also involved in electronic health records, developing a model that uses machine learning to make predictions about patient outcomes, like the likelihood of readmission or death.17

It’s a concerning trend, considering the “frightening”18 amount of data Google and other technology companies collect. WebMD dominates health searches done through Google and shares user information with Google’s advertising arm and other third-party firms — a practice that is illegal in Europe.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft collect data entered into health and diagnostic sites, which is then shared with hundreds of third parties — and this data is not anonymized, meaning it’s tied to specifically to you, without your knowledge or consent.19

What this means is DoubleClick, Google’s ad service, knows which prescriptions you’ve searched for on the site, thus providing you with personalized drug ads, and Facebook knows what you’ve searched for in WebMD’s symptom checker, as well as any medical diagnoses you received.

This, along with many other behind-the-scenes partnerships, adds up to large-scale generation of health-related data points that could be used for targeted advertising, insurance premium decisions and much more.

Protecting Your Privacy From Technology

I’ve been talking about the privacy risks associated with online health records since 2008. The risks, and privacy-encroaching technologies, have only increased since then. The use of robots to replace in-person meetings with your doctor are only the beginning, as are the health passports starting out with the COVID-19 vaccine or a negative COVID test for international travel.

It’s setting a precedent for expansion that can be extended to other vaccines and medical information, and then to domestic travel and even leaving your house, as the passports will be carried on your phone that has location-tracking abilities. The creation of a decentralized web is part of the answer to protecting your freedom but you can also consider safeguarding your own online privacy if you haven’t done so already.

To encrypt your text messages and keep them from becoming data mining fodder, download the Signal or Telegram app and/or use a virtual private network (VPN) on your desktop, laptop and mobile devices. As far as robotic doctors go, you’re likely going to see more of them, to the point that one day they may play a larger role in health care than people.20
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/27/robotics-in-health-care.aspx

Manganese is an essential trace element you must get from your food as your body cannot make it. However, evidence demonstrates that genetically engineered glyphosate-resistant plants are deficient in manganese, which translates to a manganese-deficient food supply.

Manganese is used as a cofactor for many enzymatic activities involved in carbohydrate metabolism, scavenging reactive oxygen species, reproduction, immune system response and bone formation.1

Your body absorbs manganese in the small intestines, after which some is stored in the tissue. Approximately 25% to 40% of the manganese in your body is stored in bone tissue. Your body uses regulatory control through absorption and excretion to maintain stable concentrations.

Up to 90% of the manganese absorbed in your intestinal tract may be excreted in bile through your intestinal tract. Manganese levels are difficult to measure and not routinely evaluated in clinical practice. Yet, since more of the food supply is manganese-deficient, it stands to reason that many more people are or are becoming manganese-deficient.

Glyphosate Creates Manganese Deficiency in Food Supply

Glyphosate was first approved in the U.S. in 1974 and subsequently introduced into crops. To date, the Environmental Protection Agency lists “no risks of concern to human health from current uses of glyphosate” on their website.2 Contrary to independent researchers and statements by the World Health Organization, they also say there is “no indication that glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor”3 and “no evidence that glyphosate causes cancer in humans.”4,5

What agricultural experts have discovered is that glyphosate does limit plant absorption of micronutrients like manganese.6 Soybean growers are familiar with yellowing of glyphosate-tolerant beans after application, also known as “yellow flash.” Glyphosate chelates with manganese, causing a deficiency within the plant and the resulting yellow leaves.

Researchers used field experiments from 1999 to 2001 to evaluate ways of reducing the impact on plant growth using liquid formulations of manganese.7 What they found in the early studies was that adding manganese into the herbicide solution reduced the effect of the herbicide on weed control. To overcome the reduced control, they experimented with larger applications.

The primary endpoint in the study was weed control and not the effect additional herbicide might have on plant growth or the safety of the soybean yield. In these field studies, the addition of manganese reduced weed control but did not influence soybean yield.8

Another study published in 20079 evaluated the different methods of manganese application to crops that might maintain weed control in glyphosate-resistant plants and improve yield. During the study, they found manganese application improved yield. Interestingly, the conventionally grown soybeans without glyphosate application did not increase yield with manganese fertilization.

This indicated the plants were not deficient without the application of glyphosate. The researchers also found the yield in the conventionally grown soybeans was greater than the yield of the glyphosate-resistant plants without manganese fertilizer. In other words, conventionally grown soybeans had a greater yield than glyphosate-resistant plants.

Manganese-Rich Foods Are Commonly Glyphosate Treated

According to the National Institutes of Health,10 manganese can be found in a wide variety of food types, including seafood such as clams, oysters and mussels. Agricultural crops that may be rich in manganese include soybeans, leafy green vegetables, coffee, tea and whole grains. Unfortunately, the list of agricultural crops is also commonly sprayed with the popular herbicide glyphosate.

The Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) Dirty Dozen for 202111 — a list of foods that contain higher levels of pesticides than others — includes spinach, kale, collard and mustard greens. They reported that more than 90% of the samples of leafy greens tested positive for two or more pesticides.

One sample of kale, collard and mustard greens tested positive for up to 20 different pesticides and spinach had 1.8 times more pesticide residue by weight than the other crops that were tested.

According to the University of Tennessee Extension,12 glyphosate, which is found in Roundup and other herbicides, is allowed in most vegetable plants. A greenhouse experiment from Sabanci University, Turkey,13 found applications of glyphosate reduced the concentration of calcium, magnesium and manganese, particularly in young leaves.

At plant maturation, the seed concentrations of calcium, magnesium, iron and manganese were significantly reduced by glyphosate, suggesting the herbicide interferes with the uptake and translocation of the minerals. Ultimately this affects seed quality and future crops.

Even your coffee and tea likely test positive for glyphosate. The herbicide is commonly used on coffee plantations to control weeds14 and testing has also found it in tea leaves.15

According to the National Wheat Foundation,16 33% of wheat fields in the U.S. have had glyphosate application. Yet, a study17 commissioned by EWG found glyphosate in over 95% of oat-based food samples and in all of the wheat-based foods that were tested, including dried pasta and cereals.

A study from Canada18 listed food items with the highest percentage of glyphosate in the samples tested, including 90% of pizza, 84% of crackers, 73% of couscous and 67% of lentils.19

Manganese Deficiency and Health

Since agricultural use of glyphosate is popular, it is difficult to avoid consuming foods contaminated with the herbicide unless you are seeking out organically grown and locally sourced produce, as well as steering clear of processed foods. As I said, manganese is required in small amounts but is essential for multiple functions.

One paper reported on an animal study in which cows were fed Roundup Ready feed. The animals developed a severe deficiency in serum manganese.20 Signs of manganese deficiency in animals can include impaired growth and reproductive function, altered carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, impaired glucose tolerance and skeletal abnormalities.21

In humans, manganese has a significant impact on physiology and gut dysbiosis. Since it is integral to many physiological processes it also influences neuropathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, depression and prion diseases.22

In some neuropathology, such as autism and Alzheimer’s disease, glutamate overexpression within the central nervous system can be explained by a manganese deficiency. Oxidative damage and mitochondrial dysfunction may result in a reduction of manganese superoxide dismutase, which functions to protect mitochondria from oxidative damage.

A deficiency in manganese may also lead to osteoporosis and osteomalacia since the synthesis of chondroitin sulfate is dependent on the presence of manganese. Lactobacillus, a beneficial bacterium in the gut microbiome, is dependent on manganese for antioxidant protection. A reduction in Lactobacillus in the gut is associated with anxiety,23 autism24 and chronic fatigue syndrome.25,26

Infertility rates and birth defects may also be affected by manganese deficiency since sperm motility is dependent on the essential element.27 However, even when there are optimal levels of manganese in the body, some researchers believe that glyphosate can promote toxic accumulation in the brainstem that ultimately leads to Parkinson’s disease and other prion diseases.28

Can You Get Too Much Manganese?

As stated, manganese is an essential element, but the body requires a specific balance for optimal health. In other words, you can have too little, but you can also get too much. In one study29 from a population-based sample of healthy Chinese men in six provinces in China, researchers found those who had a high serum manganese level appeared to have harmful effects on their sperm motility and morphology.

In several regions throughout Canada, the groundwater had naturally high levels of manganese, which triggered the question of whether this potentially neurotoxic element could affect the cognition of children living in the area. A research team from the University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada,30 studied children who had been exposed to high concentrations of manganese in their drinking water.

They evaluated the intellectual functioning of the children and compared them against those who had lower exposure to manganese.31 The results revealed that children who were drinking tap water that was in the upper 20% of concentrations had IQ tests that were six points below those who were drinking water that had little to no manganese.

One of the researchers explained, “We found significant deficits in the intelligence quotient (IQ) of children exposed to a higher concentration of manganese in drinking water. Yet, manganese concentrations were well below current guidelines.”32

Until this study in 2010, manganese was not on a list of inorganic substances that were being tested in drinking water. More recently, a paper published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry33 demonstrated that alterations in manganese homeostasis could alter neurological physiology and cognition, either through overexposure or insufficiency.

It is unlikely you would be overexposed to manganese unless, like the children in Quebec, your drinking water is contaminated. Other overexposures can come from working in mines and welding environments,34 having iron deficiency anemia35 or chronic liver disease,36,37 since the liver is responsible for filtering excess manganese in the body.

Glyphosate Damages Health in Many Ways

If there has been one thing that the events of 2020 have taught us, it is that we must fully evaluate the information being communicated to us over mainstream media. Each health and wellness decision may have an impact on your ability to withstand severe COVID-19 or the new iterations being considered in laboratories around the world. Exposure to glyphosate is one of those decisions.

Scientific evidence has demonstrated the highly damaging effects of endocrine disruption38,39,40 this ubiquitous chemical has on humans and other mammals, as well as the impact it has on plant health, food supply and your future.

In my interview with senior research scientist Stephanie Seneff, which you can watch at “The Troubling Role of Glyphosate in COVID-19,” we discuss the critical part glyphosate has played in the past years in overall health and during the current global pandemic. One of the issues has been the way in which your body may sometimes substitute glyphosate for glycine in the construction of proteins.

This leads to proteins that don’t function. Monsanto’s own research dating to the late 1980s showed that glyphosate accumulates in a variety of tissues, even though they claim it does not.41 Instead, the researcher proposes that “A significant portion of total sample radioactivity was found to be incorporated into proteins.” The result is a distorted protein that can’t work the way it’s supposed to.

Another compound in the body that is like manganese in the way it is essential in the right amount and toxic in excess amounts, is deuterium. In normal physiology, your mitochondrial cells help remove deuterium, which is a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen.

But, when your mitochondria are damaged by glyphosate, they are unable to eliminate deuterium properly. When your body doesn’t have enough structured water to trap the deuterium and your mitochondria are damaged, the deuterium can impair energy production, cause mitochondrial dysfunction and contribute to the development of chronic diseases.

Tips to Reduce Your Glyphosate Exposure

Seneff and I discussed several ways in which glyphosate can affect your health and the overall function of your body. To reduce your potential risk of a manganese deficiency and the resulting neurological damage, the answer is to eat certified organic or biodynamically grown foods whenever possible.

Seneff is committed to buying only certified organic foods and related in the interview that she has seen health improvements since she and her family began doing that. Other dietary recommendations to help mitigate the risk of glyphosate toxicity including eating or drinking more:

Sulfur-containing foods such as organic eggs and wild-caught seafood
Organic grass fed milk and butter. Butter is one of the lowest deuterium foods available

Glacier water, which is naturally low in deuterium
Animal fats, which are also low in deuterium

Molecular hydrogen
Probiotic-rich fermented foods such as sauerkraut and apple cider vinegar

To help “push” glyphosate out of your body and mitigate its toxicity, you can take an inexpensive glycine supplement. I take between 5 and 10 grams a day. It has a light, sweet taste, so you can use it as a sweetener. Seneff agreed in our interview, saying:

“It makes sense because it’s basically going to outnumber the glyphosate molecules. Remember, glyphosate’s going to compete with glycine in building the protein. If there’s a lot of glycine around, then it’s much less likely that glyphosate will get in there.”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/26/manganese-deficiency.aspx

1 Which of the following scenarios is the most likely outcome from the rollout of voluntary health passports that track your vaccination status?
There will never be another lethal pandemic
Health passports will become mandatory, thereby bankrupting Big Tech because they have to give the technology away for free to billions of people
Health passports will become mandatory, thereby creating two classes of citizens; unvaccinated will have few human freedoms
The voluntary “health passes” now being rolled out are just the tip of the iceberg. Before long, they will become mandatory, at which point unvaccinated individuals will be effectively excluded from society. Learn more.

Anyone who opts in will have their health safeguarded

2 Using data from VAERS and the CDC, the death rate following COVID-19 vaccination is:

2% to 4%

0.2% to 0.4%
0.0024% to 0.0028%Using March 5, 2021, VAERS statistics, assuming all deaths have been reported as required, the lethality rate of COVID-19 vaccines is 0.0028%. CDC statistics puts the death rate following COVID mRNA vaccination at 0.0024% — significantly higher than that following influenza vaccination at 0.0000265%. Learn more.
No one has died following COVID-19 vaccination

3 Which of the following companies was in 2019 found partially liable for the human and financial costs of the opioid epidemic in the U.S.?
Moderna

Pfizer

AstraZeneca
Johnson & Johnson
In 2019, Johnson & Johnson was found partially liable for the “human and financial costs” of the opioid epidemic in the U.S. and was ordered to pay $572 million to the state of Oklahoma. Learn more.

4 The Archdiocese of New Orleans announced that the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine is “morally compromised” because:

It uses an abortion-derived cell line in development, testing and production of the vaccine
The Archdiocese of New Orleans announced that the vaccine is “morally compromised” as it uses the abortion-derived cell line in development and production of the vaccine as well as the testing. Learn more.
There aren’t enough doses to give to all high-risk patients

It’s too expensive for the average patient

It’s not available to developing countries

5 Which of the following organizations has clear ties to the globalist technocratic network that seeks to take over global governance through the Great Reset?
National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC)
Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, while anonymously funded, can easily be linked to a number of technocratic centers within the globalist network that seeks to take over global governance through the Great Reset. Learn more.
U.S. Right to Know (USRTK)

Public Citizen

6 Bossche believes that the widespread COVID-19 vaccination campaign will efficiently turn what was a relatively harmless virus into a:

Thing of the past

Political statement
Bioweapon of mass destruction
Bossche states that the widespread COVID-19 vaccination campaign will efficiently turn what was a relatively harmless virus into a “bioweapon of mass destruction.” Learn more.
Mild seasonal illness

7 By funding research and financing public institutions, Bill Gates is able to do what?
Provide research that improve government’s ability to protect public health

Force scientists into independent research

Provide the public with free access to valuable research
Force public institutions down a path where they can only use his patented intellectual property
By funding research and financing public institutions, Gates is able to force those institutions down a path where they can only use his patented intellectual property. Learn more.

 
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/29/week-175-health-quiz.aspx

It typically takes a lot longer for truth to become public knowledge than the finely orchestrated propaganda we are all exposed to on a daily basis, but eventually, truth tends to rise to the surface.
This appears to be the case with the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as well, as we’re now starting to see more mainstream media reporting what alternative media have been saying for months, which is that the most likely origin of the virus is a laboratory.
I first mentioned that the outbreak had the hallmarks of a laboratory escape in my February 4, 2020, article, “Novel Coronavirus — The Latest Pandemic Scare.” Currently, the mainstream narrative is that while it may indeed have been a lab creation after all, it’s certainly not part of a bioweapons project.
Well, at least that brings us halfway, and this is good news. Personally, I wouldn’t dismiss the bioweapon’s angle just yet, though. In the end, we may well find that this pandemic was the result of a bioweapon program after all, which is precisely why I believe we need to permanently ban gain-of-function research. The risks to public health are simply too great.
As noted by investigative journalist Alison Young in a recent USA Today op-ed, in which she details a number of hair-raising near-misses involving extremely lethal pathogens that could have led to unmitigated disaster were it not for sheer luck:1

“The risk that a laboratory-released virus — carried into the community by a worker who didn’t know they were infected or through the leak of infectious waste — could cause a deadly outbreak has been a growing concern for many years.

In America, scientists and members of Congress … and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office have expressed concerns for years. In reports and hearings, they’ve worried that the proliferation of laboratories working with high-risk pathogens is increasing the aggregate threat of a deliberate or accidental lab release causing a catastrophic outbreak …

If the COVID-19 pandemic were found to have been caused by a lab accident, it would have far-reaching implications for the fragmented and secretive oversight of biological research in the United States and worldwide that currently relies heavily on the scientific community to police itself.”

US State Department Suspects Lab Leak
In a March 21, 2021, interview with Sky News Australia2 (video above), David Asher, former lead investigator for the U.S. State Department’s task force that looked into the origins of COVID-19, said the data they collected “made us feel the Wuhan Institute was highly probably the source of the COVID pandemic.”
According to Asher, three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who worked with the RatG13 coronavirus — the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 identified to date — appear to have been the first cluster of cases of COVID-19. They fell ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 as early as October 2019. At least one of the workers required hospitalization.
He also points out there is evidence in the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 suggesting it’s been synthetically altered. It has the backbone of a bat coronavirus, combined with a pangolin receptor and “some sort of humanized mice transceptor.” “These things don’t naturally make sense,” Asher says, adding that experts around the world agree that the odds of this configuration occurring naturally is “very low.”
Another troubling indicator that something was amiss at the WIV was the Chinese government’s taking down of a WIV database in September 2019. According to the Chinese, this was done because of “thousands of hacking attempts.”
However, Asher points out many other databases were taken offline around the same time as well.3 The Chinese also tried to remove data posted in a European database containing viral sequencing from patients exhibiting COVID-19-related symptoms.
SARS-CoV-2, a Suspected Bioweapon Vector

Interestingly, the sequences posted in the European database included adenovirus, which is a vaccine vector. This, Asher says, could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 is part of a vaccine program.
Now, it doesn’t make sense to create a vaccine for just any virus that they happen to be working on. It is, however, consistent with a biological weapons program. Meaning, first a biological weapon is created, and then an antidote, such as a vaccine, is developed to defend your own population and your allies.
In an earlier article4 by The Sun, Asher is quoted saying the WIV “was operating a secret, classified program,” and that “In my view … it was a biological weapons program.” He stops short of accusing China of intentional release, however, which also would not make sense from a bioweapon point of view. Instead, he said he believes is was a weapon vector that, during development, “somehow leaked.”5
This falls in line with a March 27, 2020, assessment report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, which stated that SARS-CoV-2 was likely an accidental release from an infectious diseases laboratory. According to Newsweek,6 “The classified report, titled ‘China: Origins of COVID-19 Outbreak Remain Unknown,’ ruled out that the disease was genetically engineered or released intentionally as a biological weapon.”
In a March 8, 2021, Politico article,7 columnist Josh Rogin also pointed out that “just months into the pandemic, a large swath of the government already believed the virus had escaped from the WIV lab, rather than having leaped from an animal to a human …”
Hallmarks of Guilt

Asher also told Sky News8 he’s never seen a more systematic cover-up, and The Sun9 quotes him as saying that “Motive, cover-up, conspiracy, all the hallmarks of guilt are associated with this.”
Regardless of how the virus came about, Asher is unequivocal about China’s behavior resulting in a global pandemic, as they delayed border closings and even claimed the virus didn’t appear to spread from human to human, even though there were clear indications that it did. Indeed, people were secretly complaining about China’s lack of transparency from the earliest days of the pandemic. As reported by RTE:10

“China insists that it was transparent during the early outbreak, delivering ‘timely’ information to the WHO. Indeed, the WHO publicly praised China for its openness and cooperation. Yet behind the scenes, the Irishman leading the emergency response complained they weren’t getting the information or access they needed.

In leaked recordings obtained by Prime Time, Dr. Michael Ryan is heard comparing it to China’s cover-up during the SARS outbreak in 2003. ‘This is exactly the same scenario, endlessly trying to get updates from China about what was going on in Guangdong and then, bang,’ he said.

‘The WHO barely got out of that one with its neck intact given the issues that arose around transparency in southern China … We do need to shift gears here.

‘There’s been no evidence of human-to-human transmission’ is not good enough,’ Dr. Ryan is heard saying in the recordings … ‘We need to see the data, we need to be able to determine for ourselves the geographic distribution, the timeline, the epicurve and all of that,’ he said.”

Chinese Researchers Sought to Distance China From the Virus
In a March 22, 2021, article,11 The Sun also reported that emails from Dr. Shi Zhengli at WIV, obtained by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) via freedom of information act requests, “shows how Chinese scientists fought to shift blame” for the pandemic away from China and Wuhan.
To distance themselves from the virus, they initially tried to get it renamed, as SARS-CoV-2 links it to the Chinese SARS outbreak of 2003. Shi suggested the virus be called TARS-CoV or HARS-CoV, to clearly differentiate it from the Chinese SARS outbreak.
They also feared the virus might become known as the “Wuhan coronavirus” or “Wuhan pneumonia.” The scientists’ effort to change the scientific name “shows their conscription into political processes,” Gary Ruskin, executive director of USRTK said, adding that “The power to name is the power to define.”
Congress Demands Information From the NIH

Other good news includes a March 18, 2021, letter12 from the U.S. Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce to the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, requesting “information, assistance and needed-leadership” from the agency “to advance an independent scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In the letter, they quote Stanford professor David Relman, who in a November 2020 commentary in the journal PNAS stated that:

“A more complete understanding of the origins of COVID-19 clearly serves the interests of every person in every country on this planet. It will limit further recriminations and diminish the likelihood of conflict; it will lead to more effective responses to this pandemic, as well as efforts to anticipate and prevent the next one.

It will also advance our discussions about risky science. And it will do something else: Delineating COVID-19’s origin story will help elucidate the nature of our very precarious coexistence within the biosphere.”

The Committee also stresses that while the WHO attempted to investigate the origins of the virus and had vowed to be guided by science and not exclude any hypothesis, they failed to live up to this promise, as China “did not provide complete access or independence” for the team.
Without conducting a thorough investigation, but rather relying on information provided by the Chinese, the team roundly dismissed the lab-origin theory and announced it would no longer be part of their investigation.
Within days, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus walked back the team’s outright dismissal saying “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.”13 Perhaps he realized the WHO was about to make a public relations mistake so severe it would never recover.
China Cites ‘Privacy Laws’ to Avoid Crucial Data Sharing
In response to questions as to why China refused to share original patient data with the WHO’s investigative team, the Chinese head of the WHO joint team claims such data cannot be copied and shared due to patient privacy and data protection laws.14
As noted by OneShared.World founder Jamie Metzl in a Tweet,15 this sounds like a dubious justification considering the Chinese government is “forcibly extracting genetic samples from Uighurs [and] Tibetans,” a practice reported by The New York Times in June 2020.16 Besides, Metzl notes, “If anonymized data can be shared safely in democracies, it can be shared safely everywhere.”
WHO Investigation Was Tainted From the Start
Lastly, while not discussed in the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce’s letter, the WHO’s investigative team was also severely biased from the start, thanks to the inclusion of Peter Daszak, Ph.D., president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on pandemic prevention that worked closely with bat coronavirus researchers at the WIV, including Shi.
Daszak was also found to have played a central role in the early plot to obscure the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 by crafting a scientific statement condemning such inquiries as “conspiracy theory.”17,18 Mainstream media have been referring to and relying on this manufactured “consensus” statement ever since to “debunk” counternarratives.
Was US-Funded Research Used in Chinese Bioweapons Program?

The Committee on Energy and Commerce does raise the issue of the U.S. having potentially funded the research that resulted in SARS-CoV-2, and that the Chinese military may have been involved as well. According to the letter,19 the U.S. government has “determined that the WIV has collaborated on projects with China’s military,” and “engaged in classified research … on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
It is imperative to determine not only where SARS-CoV-2 originated, but also how and if NIH’s funding and research to projects at the WIV could have contributed to SARS CoV-2. ~ U.S. Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce
Disturbingly, since the NIH has funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV through grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, this could mean the U.S. actually funded research that ended up being used in a Chinese military bioweapons program.

“Accordingly, it is imperative to determine not only where SARS-CoV-2 originated, but also how and if NIH’s funding and research to projects at the WIV could have contributed to SARS CoV-2,” the letter states.20

The letter includes a long list of information requests, including:

All information the NIH has about laboratory accidents at the WIV since January 2015.
Any communication between NIH staff, grantees, subgrantees, contractors and subcontractors with the China-based NIH, the Chinese National Science Foundation, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Chinese CDC, regarding events at the WIV between August 2019 and the present.
Whether the WIV invited researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston (UTMBG), as indicated in an April 2018 State Department cable, whether any UTMBG researchers ended up conducting research there, and any documents relating to that research.
All correspondence between the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance since January 1, 2020, related to funding involving the WIV.
The sources for its April 2020 communication with EcoHealth Alliance, in which the NIH stated it had “received reports” that the WIV “has been conducting research … that pose serious biosafety concerns.”

Scientists Also Call for Independent Investigation
Two dozen scientists and policy experts have also signed an open letter21 calling for an independent investigation into the virus’ origin,22 listing a number of flaws in the joint WHO-China inquiry, including the universal absence of evidence demonstrating a wholly natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. If the virus was truly natural, surely, we’d have some evidence of its evolution at this point, yet we have nothing.
In addition to the shortcomings of the WHO’s investigative commission, the letter also details what a full and independent investigation “should look like,” starting with the creation of a multidisciplinary team, whose members have “no unresolved conflicts of interest and no full or partial control by any specific agenda or country.”
They also recommend “considering all possible scenarios for each pathway,” and then following standard forensic approaches, which include securing full access to all relevant sites, records, logs, databases and samples.
Gain-of-Function Research Must Be Banned
I firmly believe we need to ban gain-of-function research across the world. As noted by Marc Lipsitch in his 2018 review, “Why Do Exceptionally Dangerous Gain-of-Function Experiments in Influenza?”:23

“This is a question of intense debate … Experiments to create potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs) are nearly unique in that they present biosafety risks that extend well beyond the experimenter or laboratory performing them; an accidental release could, as the name suggests, lead to global spread of a virulent virus, a biosafety incident on a scale never before seen …

While there are indisputably certain questions that can be answered only by gain-of-function experiments in highly pathogenic strains, these questions are narrow and unlikely to meaningfully advance public health goals such as vaccine production and pandemic prediction.

Alternative approaches to experimental influenza virology and characterization of existing strains are in general completely safe, higher throughput, more generalizable, and less costly than creation of PPP in the laboratory and can thereby better inform public health. Indeed, virtually every finding of recent PPP experiments that has been cited for its public health value was predated by similar findings using safe methodologies.”

While the origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains to be conclusively proven, a paper24 published in Nature in 2015 discussed how a “lab-made coronavirus related to SARS” capable of infecting human cells had stirred up debate as to whether or not this kind of research is worth the risks:

“Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that ‘grows remarkably well’ in human cells. ‘If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,’ he says.”

With 20/20 hindsight, we now have a much clearer idea of what the release of such a virus can do. We may chalk it up to luck that SARS-CoV-2 turned out to be orders of magnitude less lethal than initially suspected, although government containment measures have turned out to be devastating and deadly as well. If this kind of research is allowed to continue, the next time there’s a leak, we may not be nearly as lucky.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/29/highly-probable-covid-leaked-from-lab.aspx

Geert Vanden Bossche, Ph.D., a vaccinology insider and former global director of vaccine programs, including work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has called for the mass vaccination campaign against COVID-19 to end. In the video above, he speaks with Discernable about one of his primary concerns with COVID-19 vaccines, which is immune escape.
Bossche describes a general principle in biology, vaccinology and microbiology that if you put living organisms like bacteria or viruses under pressure, via antibiotics, antibodies or chemotherapeutics, for example, but don’t kill them off completely, you can inadvertently encourage their mutation into more virulent strains. Those that escape your immune system end up surviving and selecting mutations to ensure their further survival.
“It will have a very tough time … and a lot of these microorganisms will die,” Bossche says. “But if you cannot really kill them all, if you cannot prevent, completely, the infection and if there are still some microorganisms that can replicate despite this huge pressure, they will start to select mutations that enable them to survive.”
COVID-19 has a high capacity for mutation but, according to Bossche, if the virus isn’t under pressure, it won’t necessarily see a need to select mutations to, for instance, become more infectious. But if you put it under pressure, as is occurring during the mass vaccination campaign — or as Bossche calls it, the “one big experiment” — this may change.
“This in its own right would not be a disaster … because … viruses can only replicate and multiply in living cells,” Bossche adds. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is an enveloped cell, so it cannot survive long in the environment. However, during a pandemic, when the virus is virtually everywhere, it’s not difficult for it to find a living host in order to replicate.
Some of Bossche’s concerns have merit, but there’s another side to this story, as noted by Rosemary Frei, who has a master of science in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary and is an independent investigative journalist in Canada. Frei believes that Bossche has a “not-so-hidden agenda,” which is to push the development and widespread use of a different type of vaccine.

“[F]rom my experience as a former long-time medical writer and journalist — particularly a four-month stint with media-relations giant FleishmanHillard in 1994 (yes, I’ve worked for the dark side) — this has all the hallmarks of a drug company astroturf campaign,” Frei says.

“It’s another step in the decades-long erasure of the fact that our sophisticated and highly effective immune systems work well and don’t need any assistance from the biomedical/pharmaceutical industry.”1

Bossche: ‘It’s Exactly the Same as Antibiotic Resistance’

Bossche explains the dangers of mass COVID-19 vaccination and uses antibiotic resistance as an example. Antibiotics are increasingly losing their effectiveness against common bacteria, which have figured out how to evade the drugs. In the case of COVID-19, the virus may be developing ways to evade your “self-made antiviral antibiotics,” or antibodies.
Your body has both cell-mediated immunity, which is part of your innate immune system, and humoral immunity, which generates acquired antibodies that are elicited in response to specific pathogens. While acquired antibodies, such as those generated by the COVID-19 vaccine, are germ-specific, cell-mediated immunity is not and serves to protect you from a broad range of potential invaders. Bossche explained:2

“As the innate immune system cannot remember the pathogens it encountered (innate immunity has no so-called ‘immunological memory’), we can only continue to rely on it provided we keep it ‘trained’ well enough. Training is achieved by regular exposure to a myriad of environmental agents, including pathogens.

However, as we age, we will increasingly face situations where our innate immunity (often called ‘the first line of immune defense’) is not strong enough to halt the pathogen at the portal of entry (mostly mucosal barriers like respiratory or intestinal epithelia).

When this happens, the immune system has to rely on more specialized effectors of our immune system (i.e., antigen-specific Abs [antibodies] and T cells) to fight the pathogen.”

COVID-19 vaccines are meant to induce highly specific antibodies that target SARS-CoV-2. However, as in the case of antibiotic resistance, it’s essential that these antibodies are able to eliminate all of the virus. If not, a worsened outcome could result, including the immune escape that Bossche is warning of:3

“In case of bacterial disease it is critical to not only chose the right type of antibiotic (based on the results from an antibiogram) but to also take the antibiotic for long enough (according to the prescription). Failure to comply with these requirements is at risk of granting microbes a chance to survive and, hence, may cause the disease to fare up.

A very similar mechanism may also apply to viruses, especially to viruses that can easily and rapidly mutate (which is, for example, the case with coronaviruses); when the pressure exerted by the army’s (read: population’s) immune defense starts to threaten viral replication and transmission, the virus will take on another coat so that it can no longer be easily recognized and, therefore, attacked by the host immune system. The virus is now able to escape immunity (so-called ‘immune escape’).”

But Frei disagrees with Bossche’s notion that viral resistance will create an uncontrollable mutant virus:4

“There is the possibility of viral resistance … but it’s not the major threat Vanden Bossche attempts to scare us about by saying the virus is likely to mutate so much and so quickly because of the current mass vaccination campaigns that soon it could escape all current attempts to stop its spread. Remember, for example, that yearly flu mass vaccination hasn’t caused influenza to spiral out of control and decimate the global population.”

Mass Vaccination ‘Creates an Irrepressible Monster’

Bossche believes that scientists, vaccinologists and clinicians are being blinded by the positive short-term effects COVID-19 vaccines may have for individuals while overlooking their “disastrous consequences for global health.” In ordinary circumstances, an occasional viral “escape mutant” isn’t overly concerning because it’s unlikely to quickly find access to a host in which to replicate.
During a pandemic, however, it’s quite easy for the mutated, variant virus to find new hosts, which could include those with asymptomatic COVID-19 or people who have received only the first of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine, leaving them with a suboptimal immune response. According to Bossche:5

“The combination of viral infection on a background of suboptimal Ab maturity and concentration enables the virus to select mutations allowing it to escape the immune pressure.

The selection of those mutations preferably occurs in the S protein as this is the viral protein that is responsible for viral infectiousness. As the selected mutations endow the virus with increased infectious capacity, it now becomes much easier for the virus to cause severe disease in infected subjects.”

He believes people who have had asymptomatic COVID-19 infections may experience a short-lived rise in S (spike)-specific antibodies, which suppresses the innate immune response, which could have disastrous effects, including for children:6

“This is to say that with an increasing rate of infection in the population, the number of subjects who get infected while experiencing a momentary increase in S-specific Abs will steadily increase. Consequently, the number of subjects who get infected while experiencing a momentary decrease in their innate immunity will increase.

As a result, a steadily increasing number of subjects will become more susceptible to getting severe disease instead of showing only mild symptoms (i.e., limited to the upper respiratory tract) or no symptoms at all. During a pandemic, especially youngsters will be affected by this evolution as their natural Abs are not yet largely suppressed by a panoply of ‘acquired’, antigen-specific Abs.”

A perfect storm may have been created because lockdowns implemented since the beginning of the pandemic have meant that people have not had regular exposure to a variety of pathogens, which is necessary to keep the innate immune system in top working condition.
Frei again takes issue with Bossche’s assessment, in part because she says he hasn’t provided direct evidence to support his statements. Further, she notes, “Vanden Bossche downplays the effectiveness of the antibodies our bodies naturally produce as part of the second-line (‘adaptive’) part of the immune system that also has served us extremely well for millennia.”7
Will Mass Vaccination of Elderly Increase Death in the Young?

Bossche stated that mass vaccination of the elderly against COVID-19 will dramatically increase morbidity and mortality rates in younger populations because, as the elderly become protected, the virus will seek out younger people to survive.
His reasoning is that if the virus escapes the S-specific antibodies that are temporarily increased in asymptomatically infected people, it can take advantage of the suppressed innate immunity, allowing the virus to multiply rapidly.
“Selecting targeted mutations in the S protein is, therefore, the way to go in order for the virus to enhance its infectiousness in candidates that are prone to getting the disease because of a transient weakness of their innate immune defense,” Bossche said.8
Bossche alleges that another problem is that variants of SARS-CoV-2 are now reportedly circulating,9 which don’t match well with the vaccine.10 He says people who have been vaccinated are potentially becoming asymptomatic carriers and are shedding the more infectious variants into the community:11

“We’re also facing a huge problem in vaccinated people as they’re now more and more confronted with infectious variants displaying a type of S protein that is increasingly different from the S edition comprised with the vaccine (the latter edition originates from the original, much less infectious strain at the beginning of the pandemic).

The more variants become infectious (i.e., as a result of blocking access of the virus to the vaccinated segment of the population), the less vaccinal Abs will protect.

Already now, lack of protection is leading to viral shedding and transmission in vaccine recipients who are exposed to these more infectious strains (which, by the way, increasingly dominate the field). This is how we are currently turning vaccinees into asymptomatic carriers shedding infectious variants.”

There is controversy over the infectious variants that Bossche mentions, however. Frei points out that, “Vanden Bossche also asserts that there’s an ‘ever[-]increasing threat from rapidly spreading, highly infectious variants, but as I detailed in my February 3, 2021, article12 and accompanying video on the new variants, there is no proof that they are highly infectious or will be any time soon.”13
Perfect Storm for COVID to Resist the Human Immune System

Bossche believes it will only take a few more targeted mutations for the virus to fully resist S-specific anti-COVID-19 antibodies, whether they’re produced from vaccination or natural infection. The result could be that this population becomes especially vulnerable due to their no longer useful S-specific antibodies in combination with a suppressed innate immune response. According to Bossche:14

“… [W]e’ll have whipped up the virus in the younger population up to a level that it now takes little effort for Covid-19 to transform into a highly infectious virus that completely ignores both the innate arm of our immune system as well as the adaptive/acquired one (regardless of whether the acquired Abs resulted from vaccination or natural infection).

The effort for the virus is now becoming even more negligible given that many vaccine recipients are now exposed to highly infectious viral variants while having received only a single shot of the vaccine. Hence, they are endowed with Abs that have not yet acquired optimal functionality.

There is no need to explain that this is just going to further enhance immune escape. Basically, we’ll very soon be confronted with a super-infectious virus that completely resists our most precious defense mechanism: The human immune system.”

In essence, Bossche states that the widespread COVID-19 vaccination campaign will efficiently turn what was a relatively harmless virus into a “bioweapon of mass destruction,” and that the combination of stringent infection prevention measures combined with the inadequate COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out will allow the pandemic to get worse instead of better.
Ironically, Bossche recommends that the solution to ending the COVID-19 pandemic, other than letting the virus run its natural course, is to create natural killer (NK) cell-based vaccines. He maintains that widespread use of NK cell based vaccines may assist the innate immune system to eliminate coronaviruses at an early stage of infection. But, according to Frei, this is a red flag in Bossche’s open letter. She states:15

“It’s not very logical to believe that the only solution to the theoretical possibility of immune escape, as espoused by someone who’s got a long and strong focus on vaccination as opposed to other ways to improve health, is yet more mass vaccination.

… I do agree that we should stop the use of the current vaccines. But we also we need to stop production and use of antivirals and antibodies and all other parts of the Covid-industrial complex. Covid has an extremely high survival rate. So why develop yet another expensive, invasive and experimental solution to a problem that barely exists, if it does at all?”

Bossche does recommend exercise, healthy food, rest and a good mental attitude, along with staying away from toxic influences, to bolster the health of your immune system. But in the meantime, he says, “there is not one second left for gears to be switched and to replace the current killer vaccines …”16
He’s reached out to the World Health Organization and other international health organizations to warn of the potentially detrimental consequences of further viral immune escape triggered by the current COVID-19 vaccination campaign, calling it the “single most important public health emergency of international concern,” but so far all have remained silent.
Frei, meanwhile, is trying to spread the word that she believes Bossche’s letter is simply “a continuation of the overall Covid deception”:17

“When combined with the contents of his open letter, it’s impossible to believe that he’s in fact an insider who’s now turned against his very high-powered comrades [including the drug industry and vaccine proponents] … It’s more likely that he’s their accomplice.”

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/27/why-mass-covid-19-vaccination-must-end-now.aspx

Dr. Mercola Interviews the Experts
This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interviews various experts on a variety of health issues. To see more expert interviews, click here.

Dr. Steven Gundry, a cardiologist, heart surgeon, medical researcher and author, is perhaps best known for his “Plant Paradox” book, which was a massive bestseller. He has now published another book called “The Energy Paradox: What to Do When Your Get-Up-and-Go Has Got Up and Gone.”
As the name implies, this book delves into the origins of fatigue and how to improve your energy at the molecular level. While he had not planned on writing a book about energy optimization, upward of 60% of his patients suffer from fatigue and a feeling of general malaise, so, clearly, this is something that affects an enormous number of people.
Time-Restricted Eating

The good news is there’s a lot you can do to improve your energy levels. One such strategy, which I embraced years ago, is time-restricted eating (TRE), a form of intermittent fasting in which you restrict all of your food intake to a certain number of consecutive hours each day.
As an added boon, this strategy doesn’t cost you a penny. If anything, it’ll save you money. Gundry was ahead of the curve on this one, having written about TRE in his first book, “Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution,” published in 2006.

“I had an entire chapter in that book devoted to time-restricted eating, and my editor at Random House at the time, Heather Jackson, said, ‘This is so crazy that I’m not going to let you do this.’
She said this. True story. And I said, ‘Look, I’m telling you, I’ve been doing this now for four years and I’ve been using it on my patients and it’s not crazy. Here’s the research.’ And she said, ‘OK. I’m going to give you two pages to make your case. I’m throwing the rest of the chapter away.’
So, I got two pages. I saw her at the mindbodygreen symposium last summer, before the COVID-19 outbreak. She came up to me and said, ‘You were right. I apologize. You weren’t crazy, you weren’t nuts. Everybody now knows.’”

Indeed, in recent years, TRE has gained a lot of recognition as mounting evidence shows the simple act of restricting the number of hours during which you consume food during the day will improve your health in a variety of ways, primarily by improving your mitochondrial health and metabolic flexibility.
As noted by Gundry, keeping your eating to a window of six to eight hours a day is an achievable goal for most people. However, most need to gradually ease into it.

“Metabolic flexibility is probably the underlying problem in the vast majority of diseases that we see and I wrote the book to try and make it easy,” Gundry says. “What I see in my practice is that a lot of people go, ‘OK. I usually eat breakfast at 7 and starting tomorrow I’m going to start eating breakfast — break-fast — at noon.’ And they fall flat on their faces.
They get headaches, they get hungry, they don’t think right. They have no energy and they decide ‘This isn’t for me.’ That’s because they have a high insulin level, they’re insulin resistant and can’t use stored fat as an energy source …
So, in the book, what I do is, over a six-week period, I get them used to eating during a shorter and shorter time window. It’s very much like learning a new exercise program. I couldn’t run a marathon right out the gate, but I can train and get there. So that’s what we do.”

Part of the process involves retraining your circadian rhythm. Your food intake, which impacts the circadian rhythm of your gut microbiome, and other circadian rhythms are intricately connected, and the more you can realign these circadian rhythms, the better your whole body will function, including your mitochondria.
Crucial Notes on Meal Timing

At the most extreme end of TRE is the one meal a day (OMAD) routine, which can work well if you’re young and healthy. However, once you get into middle age and older, I believe it can start to backfire. I’m also not convinced that it’s healthy to remain on an OMAD diet in perpetuity, for the simple reason that your body will typically work best when you challenge it now and then.
During winter months, about six months out of the year, Gundry promotes using a two-hour, or even as short as a single-hour eating window during weekdays, and then eating during a much longer window during weekends. He’s been doing this for the past 21 years.
For me, cycling — mixing longer and shorter fasting intervals — has been a key to long term success, and taking the weekends off from this strict regimen may be part of why this strict regimen has worked so well for so long for Gundry.
“I think you’ve got to break it up. I don’t do it all year around, and I break it up on the weekends, and the reason I do that is so I won’t go mad,” Gundry says. Another important detail with regard to timing is to avoid eating at least three hours before bed. Even if you restrict your eating to six hours or less, if you eat too close to bedtime, you’re canceling out many of the benefits. As explained by Gundry:

“It’s really important to stop eating at least three hours before bedtime for a couple of really important reasons. No. 1, you’ve got to undergo mitochondrial repair during the night.
You have to undergo brain cleaning during the night from the glymphatic circulation. Digestion takes huge amounts of blood flow, and if you’re eating, all that blood flow is heading down to your gut when it should actually be going up to your brain.”

TRE Makes Most Diets Better
Gundry quotes data from Satchin Panda, which shows that rats raised on a standard American diet equivalent that also are put on a TRE regimen fare much better than those who are not on TRE. This despite the fact that they’re eating the same thing. The same has been shown to hold true in humans.

Remarkably, Panda has shown the average American eats for 16 hours a day. Essentially, they’re grazing all day long, stopping only while sleeping. About 90% eat for more than 12 hours.

Simply reducing your eating window to 12 hours would be an improvement. As noted by Gundry, “Big Food, Big Agriculture have convinced us that this is the proper way to eat.” In reality, the only thing these big businesses and their recommendations are good for is disease.
The Case for EMF Avoidance
Gundry and I are also in agreement about the dangers of electromagnetic fields (EMFs). I’ve previously written about how magnesium can help mitigate some of the damaging effects from EMF, and Gundry has a patient who appears to have had success using this strategy. Melatonin, which is a very potent mitochondrial antioxidant, is another potential mitigator.
“Melatonin is a very interesting way of mitigating against the bad effects of EMF,” Gundry says. “Now, as I talk about in the book, I used to think that people who said that they were sensitive to these invisible rays [EMFs] were out on the lunatic fringe.
But the longer I’ve been doing this, I’ve had some fantastic experiences with very credible people, who when we mitigated EMF got well. One patient was profoundly affected by her husband’s AICD, a defibrillator, which was communicating his EKG with a satellite.

As soon as it went into him, she couldn’t sleep next to him. She had migraine headaches. We finally turned off the transmitter in his AICD, and just like that, all of [her symptoms] went away. So, these people are canaries in a coal mine and we have to believe it.”
Leaky Gut Underlies Most Chronic Disease

While antioxidants like melatonin can certainly help improve mitochondrial function, I think there are better ways than simply piling on antioxidants. You also need to remove dietary and lifestyle factors that cause the energy depletion in the first place. EMF exposure is one environmental factor. Leaky gut, caused by lectins in your diet, is another factor that needs to be addressed.
Leaky gut is an underlying condition of most chronic disease, so, if you have a chronic ailment, chances are you have leaky gut.
According to Gundry, leaky gut is an underlying condition of most chronic disease, so, if you have a chronic ailment, chances are you have leaky gut. Thanks to Dr. Alessio Fasano, who heads up the Celiac Research Center at Harvard, we now have sophisticated tests that can diagnose this problem.
Fasano discovered the mechanism by which lectins cause leaky gut, and gluten is a lectin. When these and other food particles are able to cross your gut lining, they cause chronic inflammation, which requires a lot of energy to combat. This is one reason for your fatigue and general malaise. Gundry explains:

“If your immune system is distracted down to your leaky gut, first of all, it’s not going to be available when [pathogens] come in through your nose or mouth. And secondly, your immune system is so hyperactivated that when it sees something that might not be all that important, it goes crazy and you get a cytokine storm. That, of course, is one of the major lethal consequences [of] the Western diet.”

Linoleic Acid Can Decimate Mitochondrial Health

Another dietary factor that decimates mitochondrial health, and thus energy production, is omega-6 linoleic acid (LA). “In the book, I talk about the Goldilocks effect,” Gundry says. However, LA is naturally found in virtually all foods, so it’s near-impossible to become deficient. The problem really is excessive intake, which is near universal in Western countries due to processed food.
The primary culprit here is industrial vegetable oils, which most people eat far too much of. If you’re eating a whole food diet, you’re more likely to have a healthy ratio of LA, but even then, it may be causing trouble if you’re eating too many LA-rich foods, such as conventional chicken, for example.
You can learn more about the mechanisms of action behind LA’s damage in “Why Chicken Is Killing You and Saturated Fat Is Your Friend” and “The Type of Fat You Eat Affects Your COVID Risk.” Olive oil is another food that is high in LA, but it also has other components that may modify some of the risks. Still, I choose to limit my olive oil intake. Overall, I try to keep my LA intake below 5 grams a day, regardless of the sources. Gundry has a more favorable view of olive oil, stating:

“If you limit your eating window, you actually stop that process from happening, which is really miraculous, No. 1. And No. 2, shameless plug for myself, with my Gundry MD high-polyphenol olive oil, you only need a tablespoon a day to get the equivalent polyphenols of a liter of olive oil a week.”

Surprising Benefits of Cheese
When it comes to fats, Gundry is a proponent of short and medium chain fatty acids. “For multiple reasons, I’ve been extolling the virtues of MCT oil since the ‘Plant Paradox,’” he says, adding:

“I think the saturated fats have other benefits. In particular, the saturated fats in cheeses may be one of the unsung heroes in longevity that I think needs more attention … I take care of a huge number of people who carry the APOE4 mutation, which is the Alzheimer’s mutation. I noticed early on that cheese really elevated not only small dense LDLs, but also elevated for most of my patients’ oxidized LDL …
I don’t like the traditional cholesterol theory of heart disease. On the other hand, I think oxidized LDL has an interesting place. What’s interesting is that when I’ve separated my patients into having them eat sheep cheese and goat cheese, I found dramatically different results.
I initially attributed it to the fact that sheep and goat have casein A2 and not casein A1. And I think casein A1 is a pretty bad actor. So, I said, well, I’m going to start letting my APOE4 [patients] have sheep and goat cheese, but in moderation. When I did that, I didn’t see this oxidized LDL.”

One potential mechanism for this might be because casein is a protein that can cause autoimmune reactions and contribute to leaky gut, which in turn contributes to increased LDL oxidation.
While most of Gundry’s autoimmune disease patients respond extremely well to Gundry’s plant paradox program, about 10% still do not fare well. Food sensitivity analysis has revealed a large number of them are sensitive to both casein A1 and casein A2.
Once their leaky gut is repaired, however, which may take up to a year, their immune systems typically become tolerant to these things again. “So, I think you can retrain the immune system once you get a good microbiome and seal the leaky gut.”
What About Meat?

While some autoimmune patients have reversed their conditions using a carnivore diet, popularized by Dr. Paul Saladino, who is a leading authority on the science and application of the carnivore diet, Gundry recommends limiting meat because of its effects on your gut microbiome. Interestingly, Gundry will be interviewing Saladino very shortly and that interview will be on his site. It should be a fascinating discussion.

“I have nothing against the carnivore diet as an elimination diet,” he says. “In fact, when Saladino was first on my podcast, he credited me as being the father of the carnivore diet because all plants are evil. And I went, ‘Please don’t do that to me.’
I think one of the mistakes that people make in, particularly, a keto diet where they’ve eliminated fiber, you actually starve your gut microbiome from making butyrate. The other, I think worrisome, part about a carnivore diet is you tend to make more hydrogen sulfide. I’m a huge fan of hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg smell … but again, we get the Goldilocks rule …
Some is really good for you, it’s really good for mitochondrial function, but a lot is really toxic. And there’s some evidence with carnivore diets that you produce too much hydrogen sulfide. Now, I also understand the argument that if we eat a lot of gristle and a lot of mucin, basically nose to tail, that you can make butyrate by fermenting protein-based animal ingredients. I think you can.
But if you look at all the super long-lived folks, one of the things they have is really great production of butyrate. Butyrate, that short chain fatty acid, does so much good for mitochondria, I can’t even begin to tell you. Well, I do in the book.”

I agree that a strict no-carb diet is a mistake. Healthy carbs — think plant foods rich in fiber — need to be cycled in, there’s no question. Not every day, but certainly once or twice a week, even when you’re on a ketogenic diet. I recommend restricting carbs to about 50 grams or so for most of the week, and then increasing that to 100 or 150 grams once or twice a week once you’re metabolically flexible.
Protein, mTOR Activation and Exercise
Meat, of course, is also a source of protein, and while too much protein can be harmful by activating mTOR (thereby contributing to cancer and other problems), too little can be an unmitigated disaster, as I found out.
For a time, I aggressively restricted protein in an effort to minimize mTOR, and ended up developing sarcopenia (muscle loss). The lesson here is that you need protein, especially if you’re working out, and especially as you get older. With regard to mTOR activation, Gundry notes:

“The only way we can actually measure the effect of mTOR long term is insulin like growth factor IGF-1. I take care of a lot of super old people, 95 and above. I have a lot of 105-year-old patients that I study, and they all have very low insulin-like growth factors.
We’ve tried experiments with patients, really reducing their animal protein and replacing it with plant-based protein. I’m not taking protein away. Their insulin growth factors will drop 50 to 70 points in a matter of months, and I think that’s pretty interesting.
The other thing that’s interesting is that exercise will actually change your gut microbiome to eat branch chain amino acids before they get into you, and branch chain amino acids are one of the biggest stimulators of mTOR.
That’s why, if you’re building muscle and you’re a body builder, you gulp branch chain amino acids all the time. So, I think, probably Saladino — who exercises and also does TRE and has pretty good IGF-1s — can tolerate a very high animal protein diet.
The other thing that I’ve written about in all my books is that beef, lamb and pork have a sugar molecule called Neu5Gc, and fish and chicken have Neu5Ac. Many people make an autoantibody to Neu5Gc, so they attack their own blood vessels if exposed to beef, lamb and pork.”

Lastly, Gundry points out the importance of exercise. When you work your muscles, especially the big muscle groups, myokines are produced, which help grow new brain cells and aid your mitochondria. However, contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need to exercise continuously for 30 to 60 minutes each day, Gundry says. It’s OK to break it into smaller segments.

“Even walking up and down stairs for a minute may be as effective as walking 10 minutes on a level surface,” he says. “Doing a plank while you’re watching TV for a minute is a phenomenal exercise. My favorite is when you’re brushing your teeth, do deep knee bends, do squats.”

More Information

This interview coincides with the release of “The Energy Paradox: What to Do When Your Get-Up-and-Go Has Got Up and Gone,” so to learn more, be sure to pick up a copy. You can also learn more about Gundry by perusing his websites, GundryMD.com and DrGundry.com.
He has a weekly podcast that you can tune into as well for a wide range of health information from Gundry and his guests. You can also find him on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/28/energy-paradox.aspx

In this interview, Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., discusses the importance and benefits of regenerative agriculture and a future Regeneration International project that we’ll be collaborating on.
We’re currently facing enormously powerful technocrats who are hell-bent on ushering in the Great Reset, which will complete the ongoing transfer of wealth and resource ownership from the poor and middle classes to the ultra-rich. Perhaps the most well-known of the individuals pushing for this is Bill Gates who, like John Rockefeller a century before him, rehabilitated his sorely tarnished image by turning to philanthropy.
However, Gates’ brand of philanthropy, so far, has helped few and harmed many. While his PR machine has managed to turn public opinion about him such that many now view him as a global savior who donates his wealth for the good of the planet, nothing could be further from the truth.
Gates’ Stranglehold on Global Health

The magnitude of Gates’ role over global health recently dawned on me. I believe the COVID-19 catastrophe would not have been possible had it not been for the World Health Organization, which Gates appears to exert shadow-control over. Remember, it was primarily the WHO that facilitated this global shutdown and adoption of freedom-robbing, economy-destroying measures by virtually every government on the planet.
When then-President Trump halted U.S. funding of the WHO in 2020, Gates became the biggest funder of the WHO. As explained in “WHO Insider Blows Whistle on Gates and GAVI,” the WHO has turned global health security into a dictatorship, where the director general has assumed sole power to make decisions that member states must abide by, but according to a long-term WHO insider, Gates’ vaccine alliance GAVI actually appears to be the directing power behind the WHO.
The two — Gates and the WHO — have been working hand in hand pushing for a global vaccination campaign, and Gates has a great deal of money invested in these vaccines. We’ve also seen extraordinary efforts to censor natural alternatives and inexpensive, readily available and clearly effective drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and it appears the reason for this is probably because they’re competitors to the vaccine.
Emergency use authorization for pandemic vaccines are only given when there are no other treatments, so vilifying alternatives has been a key strategy to protect vaccine profits.
The Parallels Between Rockefeller and Gates

As noted by Shiva, the comparisons between Rockefeller and Gates are quite apt. Rockefeller created not just Big Oil but also Big Finance and Big Pharma. He had intimate connections with IG Farben.1 There was a Standard Oil IG Farben company. Without the fossil fuels of Standard Oil, IG Farben couldn’t have made synthetic fertilizers or fuels.
In 1910, Rockefeller and Carnegie produced The Flexner Report,2 which was the beginning of the end for natural medicine in the conventional medical school curriculum. They eliminated it because it saw natural medicine as a hugely competitive threat to the new pharmaceuticals that were primarily derived from the oil industry.
Much of Rockefeller’s history has been captured by Lily Kay,3 who sifted through Molecular Vision of Life’s archives. There, she discovered that the Nazi regime, which was a eugenics regime that thought some people were inferior and needed to be exterminated to keep the superior race pure, didn’t vanish when Germany lost the war.
Eugenics simply migrated to the U.S., and was taken up by Rockefeller under the term of “social psychology as biological determinants.” The word gene did not exist at that time. Instead, they called it “atoms of determinism.” Rockefeller paid for much of the eugenics research, which ultimately resulted in the silencing and suppression of true health.
To be healthy means to be whole, and wholeness refers to the “self-organized brilliance of your integrated body as a complex system,” Shiva says. That’s what Ayurveda is based on, and even this ancient system of medicine has been attacked in recent times. The notion of genetic determination ignores this foundational wholeness, seeking instead to divide the human body into mechanical components controlled by your genes.

“Coming back to the parallels, Rockefeller was behind it because he was driving the chemical industry. When the wars were over, they said, ‘Oh my gosh, we have all these chemicals to sell.’ And they invented the Green Revolution and pushed the Green Revolution on India.
Rockefeller, the World Bank, the USA all worked together, and if the farmers of India are protesting today, it’s a result of Rockefeller’s initiative, the Green Revolution in India. Most people don’t realize what high cost India has borne; what high cost the state of Panjon has born.
Then you have Gates joining up with Rockefeller and creating the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) … which pretends to be his solution to climate change. I say, ‘My god, what kind of stage has the world reached that absolute nonsense can pass the science?’ I’ll give you just three examples from his chapter on agriculture, in which he talks about how we grow things.
First of all, plants are not things. Plants are sentient beings. Our culture knows it. We have the sacred tulsi. We have the sacred neem. We have the sacred banyan. They are sentient beings. So many people are awake to animal rights. I think we need more people awake to plant rights and really tell Mr. Gates, ‘No, plants are not things.’
He goes on to celebrate Norman Borlaug, who was in the DuPont defense lab, whose job it was to push these four chemicals by adapting the plants [to them]. So, he created the dwarf variety, because the tall varieties are free varieties … [Gates] says we’re eating food because of Borlaug. No, people are starving because of Borlaug. The farmers are dying because of Borlaug.”

Gates Offers Problems as Solutions

Gates hails synthetic fertilizer is the greatest agricultural invention. “Doesn’t he realize synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are creating desertification, dead zones in the ocean, and nitric oxide, which is a greenhouse gas?” Shiva says. In short, he’s offering the problem as the solution. Gates also, apparently, does not understand that nitrogen-fixing plants can fix nitrogen. He incorrectly claims that plants cannot fix nitrogen.
There’s an extinction taking place. Most people think the sixth mass extinction is about other species. They don’t realize large parts of humanity are being pushed to extinction. ~ Vandana Shiva
Gates is equally wrong about methane production from livestock. “Have you smelt methane behind nomadic tribes?” Shiva asks. “Have you ever smelt methane behind our sacred cow in India? No, they don’t emit methane.” The reason cows in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) emit methane that stinks to high heaven is because they’re fed an unnatural diet of grains and placed in crowded quarters. It’s not a natural phenomenon. It’s a man-made one.

“You know what Mr. Gates wants to teach us? He says cows make methane because of their poor stomachs,” Shiva says. “They call them containers. I think we should sue him for undoing basic biology 101. You’ve talked about how he controls the WHO. He’s also trying to take control of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
[FAO] has recognized ecological agriculture is the way to go and supported [regenerative] agriculture up until last year, when Gates started to take charge. Now he’s moving the food summit to New York. Five hundred organizations have said, ‘This is no longer a food summit, it’s a poison summit. The poison cartel and Bill Gates are running it to push more poisons, now under new names. So, we have a lot of work to do.'”
The answer to the environmental problems we face is not more of the very things that created the problems in the first place, which is what Gates proposes. The answer is regenerative agriculture and real food.
“When people are eating healthy food, there is no problem,” Shiva says. “[Gates] wants to commit a crime against our gut microbiome, pushing more fake food through Impossible Food. And he wants to create conditions so that real food will disappear. That’s why we all have to organize together and the scientists have to start being protected.
There’s an extinction taking place. They call it the sixth mass extinction. Most people think the sixth mass extinction is about other species. They don’t realize large parts of humanity are being pushed to extinction. Food is health, as Hippocrates said, [and that requires] indigenous systems of learning, ecological agriculture, small farmers.
In Bill Gates’ design, all this that makes life, life, that makes society, society, that makes community, community, that makes healthy beings, he would like to push this to extinction because he’s afraid of independence, freedom, health and our beingness. He wants us to be ‘thingness,’ but we are beings …
The worst crime against the Earth and against humanity is using gene editing technologies for gene drives, which is a collaboration of Gates with DARPA, the defense research system. Gene drives are deliberately driving [us] to extinction. Now he does it in the name of ending malaria. No. It’s about driving to extinction.
Amaranth is a sacred food for us. It’s a very, very important source of nutrition … There’s an application in that DARPA-Gates report of driving the amaranth to extinction through gene rights. And when this was raised at the Convention on Biological Diversity, do you know what he did? He actually hired a public relations agency and bribed government representatives to not say no. Can you imagine?”

Gates’ Long-Term Play
Gates clearly had a long-term vision in mind from the start. His growing control of the WHO began over a decade ago. Over this span of time, he also started transitioning into Big Pharma and the fake food industry, which would allow his influence over the WHO’s global health recommendations to really pay off.

While fake foods have many potential problems, one in particular is elevated levels of the omega-6 fat linoleic acid (LA). If you eat real food, you’re going to get more than enough LA. Our industrial Western diet, however, provides far more than is needed for optimal health already, and engineered meats are particularly loaded with LA, as they’re made with genetically modified soy oil and canola oil.

This massive excess of LA will encourage and promote virtually all degenerative diseases, thereby accelerating the destruction of human health. In addition to that, Gates is also investing in pharmaceuticals, which of course are touted as the answer to degenerative disease. Again, his solutions to ill health are actually the problem.
Shiva says:

“Gates … [is] entering every field that has to do with life. Our work in Navdanya, which means nine seeds, is basically work on biodiversity in agriculture. We started to bring together all the work that he’s doing in taking over. I mentioned the Rockefeller Green Revolution, now the Gates-Rockefeller Green Revolution in Africa. The next step he wants to push is … digital agriculture.
He calls it Gates Ag One,4 and the headquarters of this is exactly where the Monsanto headquarters are, in St. Louis, Missouri. Gates Ag One is one [type of] agriculture for the whole world, organized top down. He’s written about it. We have a whole section on it in our new report,5 ‘Gates to a Global Empire.'”

Stolen Farmer Data Is Repackaged and Sold Back to Them

What does digital agriculture entail? For starters, it entails the introduction of a digital surveillance system. So far, Shiva’s organization has managed to prevent Gates from introducing a seed surveillance startup, where farmers would not be allowed to grow seeds unless approved by Gates surveillance system.
The data mining, Shiva says, is needed because they don’t actually know agriculture. This is why Gates finances the policing of farmers. He needs to mine their data to learn how farming is actually done. This knowledge is then repackaged and sold back to the farmers. It’s evil genius at its finest.
Through his funding, Gates now also controls the world’s seed supply, and his financing of gene editing research has undercut biosafety laws across the world. As explained by Shiva, the only country that doesn’t have biosafety laws is the U.S. “The rest of the world does because we have a treaty called the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety,” she says.

“While he created the appearance of philanthropy, what he’s doing is giving tiny bits of money to very vital institutions. But with those bits of money, they attract government money, which was running those institutions. Now, because of his clout, he is taking control of the agenda of these institutions. In the meantime, he’s pushing patenting, be it on drugs, vaccines or on seeds.”

Taken together, Gates ends up wielding enormous control over global agriculture and food production, and there’s virtually no evidence to suggest he has good intentions.
The Anatomy of Monopolization

The company that collects patents on gene-edited organisms, both in health and agriculture, is Editas, founded by a main financial investor for the Gates Foundation. Gates is also a big investor in Editas.

“So, here’s a company called Editas to edit the world as if it is a Word program. The two scientists who got the Nobel Prize this year have both been funded in their research by Gates. My mind went back to how Rockefeller financed the research, got the Nobel Prize, and then made the money.
So, you finance the research. Then you finance the public institutions, whether they be national or international. You invest and force them down the path where they can only use what is your patented intellectual property. And, as he has said in an interview, his smartest investment was vaccines, because it is a 1-to-20 return. Put $1 in and make $20. How many billions of dollars have been put in? You can imagine how many trillions will be made.
At the end of it, where does food come from? It comes from seed. He wants to control it. It comes from land. He’s controlling that. He’s became the biggest farmland owner [in the U.S.]. But you need weather [control]. You need a stable climate.
So, what could be a weapon of control of agriculture? Weather modification. He calls it geoengineering. This is engineering of the climate. Again, making it look like he’s going to solve global warming by creating global cooling.”

As explained by Shiva, Gates is also heavily invested in climate modification technologies that not only will destabilize the earth’s climate systems more, but also can be weaponized against the people by controlling rainfall and drought. In India, they’ve been having massive hail during harvest time, which destroys the harvest.
Is the UN Subservient to Gates?

According to Shiva, Gates is also corrupting the United Nations system, just like he’s corrupted world governments and the WHO, and in so doing, he’s destroying the efforts built over the last three decades to protect the global environment.

“Whether it be the climate treaty, the biodiversity treaty or the atmospheric treaties, he is absolutely behaving as if the UN is his subservient institution,” Shiva says. “[He thinks] governments and regulatory bodies should not exist … and that people in democracy have no business to speak. [If they do], they’re conspiracy theorists.”

Taking Down Gates’ Empires
As it stands right now, ordinary people are forced to fight battles that are in actuality rooted in institutional, structural and societal crimes. These crimes really need to be addressed the way Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire was addressed. In the case of Gates, his empire is actually multiple empires, and they all need to be dismantled. To that end, I will be collaborating with Shiva and Regeneration International, which she co-founded, on a project to boycott Gates’ empires.

“I’ve noticed that no matter what the movement, they’re using the word regeneration now. It could be a health movement, a democracy movement, a peace movement, a women’s movement — everyone has realized that regeneration is what we have to shift to,” Shiva says.
“So, what do we need to be doing in the next decade? For me, the next decade is the determining decade, because these petty minds’ insatiable greed want to go so fast that if, in the next decade, we don’t protect what has to be protected, build resilient alternatives and take away the sainthood from this criminal, they will leave nothing much to be saved.
The poison cartel is also big pharma. People think agriculture is here, medicine is there. No. The same criminal corporations gave us agrichemicals. They gave us bad medicine that creates more disease than it solves. So, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Poison — it’s all one. And Bill Gates is holding it all together even more, and trying to make them bigger because he has investments in all of them …
I think [seeds] is where we have to begin … I’m hoping that we will be able, together, to launch a global movement soon to take back our seeds from the international seed banks. The strategy is we need to remind the world that these are public institutions [and] that they’re accountable to the farmers whose collections these [seeds] are …
On the food question, I think that’s the big one because food and health go [together]. In Ayurveda, it says food is the best medicine, and if you don’t eat good food, then no medicine can cure whatever disease you have. The best medicine is good eating. And Hippocrates said ‘Let food be thy medicine.’ So, I think this is the time to really grow a very big global campaign for food freedom.
Food freedom means you cannot destroy our right to grow food. Secondly, you cannot destroy our governments’ obligations to us to support regenerative agriculture rather than support degenerative agriculture and subsidize it. And third, I think we should call for a worldwide boycott of lab foods …
Another part of this should be, don’t let big tech enter our bodies. Let big tech not enter life sciences … These guys will make life illegal. Living will be illegal except as a little piece in their machine through their permission.”

Each year, Navdanya holds a two-week campaign on food freedom starting October 2, which is nonviolence day. We now need to take that campaign to the global stage, and I will do my part to aid this effort. So, mark your calendar and prepare to join us in a global boycott of food that makes you sick — processed food, GMO foods, lab-created foods, fake meats, all of it.
More Information
You can learn more about Shiva’s work and her many projects on Navdanya.org. During the first week of April every year, Navdanya gives a five-day course called Annam, Food as Health, via Zoom. In this course, you’ll learn about soil and plant biodiversity and healthy eating for optimal health.
You can also learn more by reading the report “Earth Rising, Women Rising: Regenerating the Earth, Seeding the Future,” written by female farmers. And, again, mark your calendars and plan your participation in the food freedom campaign, starting October 2, 2021.

“When all the spiritual forces, all of nature’s forces and most of people’s forces are aligned together, what can [a few] billionaires, technocrats — who want to be richer than they are, greedier than they are, more violent than they are — do?” Shiva says. “They don’t count in the long run, really. It’s just that we cannot afford to not do the things that we can do.”

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/28/vandana-shiva-on-bill-gates-empires.aspx

You expect to produce a ticket to get on a plane, train or enter the theater. But Bill Gates has designed it so children in Los Angeles need a ticket to go to school.1

The app is called the Daily Pass and follows on the heels of the city’s digital vaccine verification announced in January 2021. Digital health passports and vaccine verifications are the beginning of data collection and social engineering that are being designed to change your behavior and control your movements.

These digital passports are being fed to a public that is weary of lockdowns and mask-wearing and longs for the ability to get back to some semblance of normalcy. It is being dangled as a mechanism for freedom. Adults will be required to show proof of a vaccine or a recent negative COVID-19 test before being able to travel, attend a concert or enjoy a meal in their favorite restaurant.

The problem is that to live life freely, you must have “papers.” Instead of freedom, it’s discrimination and a movement toward technocratic fascism, setting the stage for increased surveillance and erosion of your privacy. Despite this blatant move toward a surveillance state, many are welcoming digital passports because they’ve been led to believe it’s necessary to protect public health and safety.

The new Daily Pass app rolled out in Los Angeles is the next step in adjusting the behaviors and movements of children with full knowledge that when children are acclimated to the requirements of the Great Reset, it’s more likely they will continue to “follow the leader” as adults.

Health Pass Required for Children to Enter School

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced the launch of “a one-stop-shop web app built specifically for the District” on their website.2 LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner called it the “golden ticket in Willy Wonka,” which allows anyone with the pass easy access into the school building.3

The app was developed with Microsoft to generate a unique daily QR code that is scanned by the system at school.4 Without that code, students will not be allowed to enter the school building. The code is generated after the student gets a negative test result for COVID-19, reports a temperature under 100 degrees and answers daily health questions on the app, a procedure which the school says will not take more than two minutes.5

To generate the daily pass, the student must test negative using a PCR test.6 The LAUSD tells their parents, employees and students: “While we recommend the use of nasal swabs, anyone can request a saliva test if they prefer. Both tests are what’s known as PCR tests, the gold standard for COVID-19 testing.”7

This leads parents, students and employees, who may not stay abreast of research studies, to believe that PCR testing is the most accurate method of identifying a COVID-19 infection. However, as I’ve talked about, PCR testing may be highly inaccurate and the results have been manipulated based on the cycle threshold used.

In addition to these requirements, students must confirm they have not been in close physical contact with anyone with symptoms, have not traveled outside of Southern California for the past 10 days and agree that they have been “as safe as possible.” In addition, the app user is then informed:8

“If you ‘disagree’ with any of the above, you will not be allowed to enter a school or District office and you can schedule a COVID-19 test if you are an employee or student at …”

Within the app, students are asked, “Do you agree to commit to the safest behaviors possible and in so doing, keeping the schools safer?” and within the portal users are told:9

“Anonymous data from Daily Pass will be used by the Los Angeles Unified’s research and health care collaborators — Stanford University, UCLA, The Johns Hopkins University, Anthem Blue Cross, Healthnet, and Cedars Sinai — to provide insights for strategies to create the safest possible school environment.”

These statements, separating the word “disagree” in quotes and content from the explainer video discussed below, are subtle and subconscious ways of pressuring students and staffers to accept behavioral changes and vaccinations in the march toward greater surveillance and control.

Additionally, the user is told their information will be shared “anonymously.” However, it is difficult to imagine that this information will remain anonymous when highly secured banks,10 retailers11 and even the federal government12 have been hacked and information stolen.

On the Road to a Health Passport

What began in Los Angeles as digital vaccine verification in January 2021, has quickly morphed into a comprehensive check-in system children must pass in order to enter their school buildings. NBC Los Angeles reports on the other functions daily pass will have, including:13

“… register and schedule appointments, track vaccines in stock, perform check-in and data capture at time of appointment, sort high-risk individuals, offer waitlists to low-risk individuals and dashboards to view data, among other features, the district said.”

To introduce the app to students and parents, the district produced an explainer video, positioning it as a solution for children who are fearful of becoming sick. One Twitter post captioned the video, “California is a dystopian nightmare.”14

The explainer video introduces Daily Pass as a solution. After following the student through her first day at school where she dutifully follows the safety rules, including staying 6 feet apart from other students, the cartoon character announces to her father that she is no longer scared and grateful that her father kept her safe.

The Daily Pass is an iteration of vaccine passports, both of which may quickly morph into health passports during 2021 and 2022 if they are widely accepted. Although vaccination is currently presented as a voluntary medical procedure, without a vaccine you may ultimately experience severe limitations to travel, indoor events and socialization.

However, giving special privileges to those who are vaccinated essentially amounts to mandatory vaccination and acceptance of surveillance and tracking. The presentation as a measure to protect public health is in reality threatening your freedom to go about normal daily life unless you consent to the COVID-19 vaccine.

In addition to the Microsoft Daily Pass, the CommonPass app is intended to act as a health passport where users upload medical data that go far beyond vaccination. It is anticipated the CommonPass will integrate with personal health apps currently in place, such as Apple Health and CommonHealth. If your personal health record doesn’t meet entry requirements, you could be denied.

Data Show Schools Are Not Super Spreaders

As Los Angeles gears up to closely monitor and surveil children throughout the school district, early data from a study performed by the University of Warwick in the U.K. has found that children in schools are not super spreaders.15 This is consistent with information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says that “fewer children have been sick with COVID-19 compared to adults.”16

The study looked at information on school absences between September 2020 and December 2020. The researchers were interested in students who stayed home sick because of COVID-19, and how the number who became ill may vary across time.

Teachers and students were evaluated, including how the absences changed during November lockdown and in December when the lockdown was lifted. The results of this evaluation found that the infection rate within the schools matched the surrounding community.

This indicates there is no evidence that schools were a driver of more cases of COVID-19. Researchers were unable to ascertain from the data whether the students and teachers who acquired COVID-19 caught it at the school or in the community.17 However, as was expected with what is known about the virus, the rate of infection in primary schools was lower than that in secondary schools.

Dr. Mike Tildesley was one of the researchers and is a scientific adviser to the U.K. government. Despite the results of the study and the historical rate of infection in children, when speaking to a BBC reporter, he had a telling comment about how the decisions to reopen schools would be made: “You could potentially think about doing early years first. But this is a political decision.”18

How Much Further Damage Will Close Monitoring Trigger?

Information from a recent study19 using data from Germany’s first registry recording experiences of children wearing masks has revealed that they are suffering physical, behavioral and psychological harm. Data was collected from 25,930 children, from which the researchers found there were 24 health issues associated with wearing masks that fell into these three categories.20

Of the problems that children were having, 68% of them were reported to the registry by parents. The researchers concluded the frequency of registry use and the variety of symptoms being reported indicated the importance of the subject. They recorded symptoms that:21

“… included irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), less happiness (49%), reluctance to go to school/kindergarten (44%), malaise (42%), impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%).”

Added to these concerning symptoms, they also found 29.7% reported feeling short of breath, 26.4% being dizzy and 17.9% were unwilling to move or play.22 Hundreds more reported experiences including “accelerated respiration, tightness in chest, weakness and short-term impairment of consciousness.”

It is important to remember that these results were based solely on the experiences children were having wearing masks. According to the new Daily Pass app, children in Los Angeles will now be undergoing closer monitoring and regulations that include social distancing from their peers, testing and daily questionnaires.

On a daily basis, children will be more closely monitored in school, which may lead to increased symptoms of behavioral and psychological harm. In addition to this, measurements of anxiety and depressive disorder in adults jumped dramatically between January to June 2019 and January 2021.

Data from the CDC23 show the percentage of adults reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder and/or depressive disorder was 11% in the first quarter of 2019, but jumped dramatically to 41.1% across the nation by January 2021.24

This is important since evidence has demonstrated there’s a positive relationship between a child’s behavioral problems and mental health with maternal mental health25 and parental mental health.26

This means that independent of their own stress and psychological harm from mask-wearing, lockdowns and the new Daily Pass, children also respond negatively to the rising rate of anxiety and depression exhibited by adults.

Remember, This Is Not About Disease Transmission

It’s important to remember this is not about disease transmission but, rather, about surveillance and control. Called the Great Reset or Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Great Reset is instead what journalist James Corbett says is:27

“… working as some sort of marketing tool for the very old ideas of centralization of control into fewer hands, globalization [and] transformation of society through Orwellian surveillance technologies.”

The process through which this is all being funneled was developed by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D., a psychologist who studied and perfected sales techniques.28 His theory revolves around getting people to say “yes.” The more you say “yes,” the more likely it is you’ll say yes to the next request.

He postulated and proved it’s easier to get someone to agree with you if you start small. Colin Shaw, founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, describes the process this way:29

“Suppose I want you to give me $100. If I ask you for $100, you are probably going to say no. You likely have a rule about not giving people $100 when they ask for it. However, if I ask for $1, you would probably say yes. I get more than $1 you give me, though; I get you used to the idea of giving me money when I ask for it.

Then, once we have established that you would give me money, I ask for more the next time, like $20. Since you had already given me $1, you might think, ‘Well, what’s a little bit more?’ Bit by bit, I work my way up to $100, starting with gaining your commitment early at a lower amount.”

Each small step seems reasonable and maybe an action you could support. But, ultimately, the current goal is greater than getting $1, wearing a mask or downloading a health passport. Make no mistake, when it comes to vaccinations, this process may create legal prejudice and segregation, isolating those who do not choose to vaccinate.

The Daily Pass, CommonPass and vaccinations are being sold as a means of increasing your freedom, but instead are slowly stripping away your personal rights. Studies revealing the lifelong harm being heaped on children and adults by actions that aren’t supported by scientific evidence don’t often make the mainstream media. These outlets must conform to their advertisers’ wishes.

Therefore, it is crucial that you share information from studies and independent journalists who are standing up to defend your rights and personal freedoms using a strong foundation in scientific evidence. Once personal freedoms disappear it will be nearly impossible to get them back. Unless we stand together against tyranny, we will lose our civil liberties.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/25/children-health-passport.aspx

Dr. Mercola Interviews the Experts
This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interviews various experts on a variety of health issues. To see more expert interviews, click here.

In this interview, Ari Whitten, author of “The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy,” reviews the mechanics and basic benefits of red light and infrared light. Whitten, who has a degree in kinesiology, exercise science and movement science, has studied natural health, fitness and nutrition for over 20 years. He’s been a personal trainer, health coach and nutritionist for many years, and went on to do a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology.
Light as Nutrition
Red and near-infrared light are, of course, a subset of natural sunlight, which actually acts and has value as a nutrient. Red light and near-infrared light therapies are ways to get some of those benefits. It may be particularly valuable and beneficial for people who aren’t getting enough natural sunlight exposure, and that’s a majority of people. As noted by Whitten:
“There’s a mountain of literature showing that regular sun exposure is one of the most powerful and important things you can do for your health and to prevent disease. Simultaneously, we have a general public that is afraid of sunlight.
Even the subject of melanoma is rife with misunderstanding because there is research showing, mechanistically, that if you expose cells in a Petri dish to lots of UV light, you can absolutely induce DNA damage and induce cancer formation.
You can take rats and expose them to tons of isolated UV light and induce cancer. You can even find an association between sun burns and increased melanoma risk.
Despite all of those things, it is also the case that when you compare people with regular sun exposure to people with much less sun exposure, they do not have higher rates of melanoma.
In fact, there’s a bunch of studies comparing outdoor workers to indoor workers, showing that outdoor workers have lower rates of melanoma despite three to nine times more sun exposure.”
One of the reasons for this is because indoor workers are exposed to fluorescent lighting, which is loaded with dirty electricity or high voltage transients that cause biological harm. So, not only do they not get sunlight exposure, but they also get harmful EMF exposure.
But the biggest factor has to do with the frequency of exposure. Intermittent exposure – occasional exposure followed by many days or weeks of little to no exposure – tends to be more problematic than regular, frequent sun exposure, as you’re more likely to burn and cause DNA damage in your skin.

Regular exposure, on the other hand, ameliorates this risk, as it engages innate adaptive systems in your skin, your melanin in particular, that are explicitly designed to prevent DNA damage from UV light exposure.
“So, we have this system built into our bodies that’s designed to allow us to get all these benefits of sunlight without the DNA damage and the increased skin cancer risk,” Whitten says.”Framing light as a nutrient is the best way of understanding this.
Just as we require adequate nutrients from the food we eat, just as our bodies require physical movement to express normal cell function, we also require adequate light exposure to express normal cell function. The absence of that exposure to sunlight creates abnormal cell function. And there are myriad mechanisms through which this occurs.
Vitamin D is obviously the most well-known one that regulates over 2,000 genes related to immune health, musculoskeletal health and many other things. But there are many other mechanisms [as well].”
Bioactive Wavelengths
As explained by Whitten, there are specific bioactive wavelengths, and they work through different mechanisms. One mechanism is through your eyes, which is why you’re typically better off not wearing sunglasses on a regular basis. When you’re outdoors on a sunny day, without sunglasses, blue and green wavelengths enter your eyeballs and feed through nerves into the circadian clock in your brain.
Your circadian clock, in turn, regulates a variety of bodily systems, from neurotransmitters involved in mood regulation to hormones involved in immune function. A dysregulated circadian rhythm has been linked to dozens of diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurological diseases.
“I consider disrupted circadian rhythm and poor sleep to be probably the single most common cause of low energy levels and fatigue,” Whitten says. Fatigue is the key focus of his Energy Blueprint brand, and in the interview, he reviews some of the other root causes for poor energy and fatigue, aside from light exposure.
In summary, your body’s resilience, i.e., your ability to tolerate environmental stressors, is directly dependent on the robustness, both in terms of quantity and quality, of your mitochondria. When your resilience threshold is exceeded, disease processes are activated, and fatigue can be viewed as the initial universal symptom prior to overt disease. For more information about this side topic, be sure to listen to the interview or read through the transcript.
Red Light Therapy
Modern day red light and near-infrared light therapy is an extension of the original Helio therapy or sun-based therapy, which has a long and rich history of use for a number of diseases, including tuberculosis.
Over the past few decades, more than 5,000 studies have been published about red and near-infrared light therapy, a.k.a, photobiomodulation, for a wide range of ailments, from combating wrinkles and cellulite to hair regrowth, sports performance, accelerated injury recovery, increased strength and much more.
“You get improvements in strength adaptations, improvements in muscle protein synthesis and the amount of muscle that’s gained, amplified fat loss, increased insulin sensitivity — all when combined with exercise, compared with exercise alone,” Whitten says.
“There’s also research on people with Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism showing profound reductions in thyroid antibodies, as well as thyroid hormone levels. There are also hundreds of studies on random niche things like helping people with diabetic ulcers … combating arthritis pain and chronic pain, joint health, tissue and bone healing …
There are at least dozens, if not hundreds, of studies on using red light therapy in the context of people undergoing chemotherapy to combat oral mucositis, which is inflammation of the oral mucosa that happens as a side effect of some chemotherapy drugs. One of the most, if not the most, effective treatment for that is red light therapy.”
There are also studies showing benefits for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients. The difficulty is getting the light to sufficiently penetrate the skull. According to Whitten, near-infrared at 800 to 900 nanometers will penetrate about 20% to 30% deeper than red wavelengths in the range of 600 to 700 nanometers.
“So, if you’re trying to treat the brain, you need a pretty powerful device to be able to emit a strong enough beam of light to penetrate through the skull bone to actually deliver some of that light — which is a relatively small portion, probably less than 20% or something of the overall light being emitted — into the brain,” he says.
More Is Not Necessarily Better
A common fallacy is that if something is beneficial, then the more the better. But this can be a hazardous assumption. As explained by Whitten, there is a bi-phasic dose response to red and near-infrared light therapy. Basically, you need to do enough of it to experience its effects, but if you overdo it, you can cause negative effects. So, it’s all about finding the sweet spot.
That said, as a general rule, your risk of exceeding the beneficial dose with light therapy is lower than it is with something like exercise. Meaning, it’s much easier to overdo exercise and end up with tissue damage from that than it is to overdo red and near-infrared light therapy.
“I interviewed Dr. Michael Hamblin, who’s widely recognized as the world’s top researcher on red and near-infrared light therapy, and I asked him explicitly about this biphasic dose response. I was actually pretty shocked by his response.
He kind of blew off the whole thing as not really significant, [saying] ‘It’s really hard to overdo it, and I’m not worried about really negative side effects from overdoing it.’ Having said that, he is a researcher and he’s doing things in a lab.
And what I’ve seen in my group of about 10,000 people that have gone through my program, many people with severe chronic fatigue or debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome, is there seems to be a small subset of people, I’m guessing somewhere between 1% and 5% of people, that have a really negative reaction to it, even at really, really small doses, let’s say two minutes of red light therapy …
So, there seems to be this small subset of people that is really hypersensitive and prone to negative effects. Generally, in my experience, those people are usually in very poor health overall.”
One potential reason for this is because, like exercise and fasting, light therapy is a type of hormetic stress, which works in part by transiently increasing free radicals or reactive oxygen species.
People with extremely poor mitochondrial health will have a very low resilience threshold, so their capacity to tolerate that burst of reactive oxygen species will be low. At that point, they’re simply creating damage, and their bodies don’t have the resilience to effectively recover from it.
Mechanisms of Action
As noted by Whitten, there are several accepted mechanisms of action, and then there are more speculative mechanisms. One of the most well-known mechanism is cytochrome c oxidase, a photo receptor on your mitochondria that literally captures photons of red and near-infrared light.
Cytochrome c oxidase, photo receptors on your mitochondria, capture photons of red and near-infrared light. The most effective wavelengths that activate this system are in the 600 to 700 nanometer and the 800 to 1,000 nanometer ranges. In response to those light photons, your mitochondria will produce energy more efficiently.
The most effective wavelengths that activate this system are in the 600 to 700 nanometer range, and the 800 to 1,000 nanometers range. In response to those light photons, your mitochondria will produce energy more efficiently. “In general, cells — whether it’s skin cells, your thyroid gland, your muscle cells — they work better if mitochondria are producing more energy,” Whitten explains.

This is one general principle of how light therapy can help heal such a diverse range of tissues and conditions. Another mechanism is related to the benefits of hormesis and the transient spike in reactive oxygen species. That burst of reactive oxygen species creates a cascade of signaling effects that stimulate the NRF2 pathway and heat shock proteins, for example.
As a result, your intracellular antioxidant response system is strengthened and your mitochondria are stimulated to grow bigger and stronger. It also stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis, the creation of new mitochondria. Ultimately, all of this increases your resistance to a broad range of environmental stressors.
“If hormesis is dosed properly, it should not create lasting harm. It should stress the system temporarily and stimulate adaptive mechanisms that ultimately make the whole system more resistant to any kind of harm,” Whitten says. “But you shouldn’t be doing hormesis at a dose that is actually creating damage.”
Light Therapy Modulates Gene Expression
A third mechanism of action involves retrograde signaling and the modulation of gene expression. Your mitochondria play a key role here as well. As explained by Whitten:
“Mitochondria are not just mindless energy generators, but they are also environmental sensors that pick up on what’s going on in the environment. Are there toxins present, is there a pathogen present? Is there increased inflammatory cells present?
They’re picking up on these signals. They’re also picking up on light signals … and reactive oxygen species from hormetic stress. And they’re relaying these signals back to the mitochondria in a way that modulates gene expression.”
There’s a specific set of genes that are expressed in response to red and near-infrared light therapy. In summary, it activates genes involved in cell repair, cell regeneration and cellular growth, depending on the tissue.
For example, in your brain, it activates brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), in your skin, it increases expression of fibroblasts that synthesize collagen, in your muscles, it locally increases expression of IGF1 and factors involved in muscle protein synthesis. “So, you’re getting these local effects in those specific tissues that upregulates genes involved in cell healing, growth and repair,” Whitten says.
Exposure to UVA, red light and near-infrared light also increases the release of nitric oxide (NO) which, while being a free radical, also has many metabolic benefits in optimal concentrations. Many of the benefits of sun exposure cannot be explained solely through the production of vitamin D, and the influence of NO may be part of the answer.
There’s also a speculative line of research suggesting that red and near-infrared light interact with chlorophyll metabolites in a way that helps recycle ubiquinol from ubiquinone (the reduced version of CoQ10).
So, those specific wavelengths of light may help recycle reduced CoQ10, which also enhances energy production. “So, there may be this really interesting synergy between your diet and red and near-infrared light therapy were consuming more chlorophyll-rich compounds may enhance this effect,” Whitten says.
Light Structures Water
Yet another mechanism of action has to do with the structuring the water that surrounds your cells. One of the best ways to build this structured water is through exposure to sunlight. Simply drinking structured water is ineffective. Whitten explains:
“The structuring of water is a really fascinating layer of the story. There’s research showing that the water near membranes, and our mitochondria are composed of membranes, can actually change in viscosity in response to red and near-infrared light therapy.
There are a couple things that happen there. One is that reduced viscosity actually helps the physical rotation of the ATPAs, the ATP synthase pump on the mitochondria, which is the last part of the respiratory chain in mitochondria that creates ATP molecules. That’s a physical rotary mechanism.
So, you have this rotary pump that needs to move in water, and there’s some research suggesting that it moves more efficiently with less resistance when the viscosity of that surrounding water is reduced, and that this may, at least partly, be responsible for the enhanced energy production.
But there’s one other layer to the story. I’ve dug really deep into the literature on light and deuterium. It was tough to find any literature on this, but I did find one really interesting study. Basically, what they found is that, when the viscosity of this water around the mitochondrial membranes is reduced, it does two things.
It pushes the deuterium molecules — which is this isotope of hydrogen that tends to damage mitochondria — away from the mitochondria and makes it less likely to go through the mitochondrial ATP synthase pump where it can create damage.
It also enhances the movement of hydrogen ions — normal hydrogen not deuterium — across the membrane, so more hydrogen can move faster and more efficiently through the mitochondria, whereas deuterium moves less efficiently.

So, it doesn’t necessarily deplete deuterium from your body … but it almost mimics deuterium depletion in a way by making the deuterium much less likely to actually get into the mitochondria where it would create damage.”
On Saunas
We cover far more in this 1.5-hour interview than I’ve summarized here, so for more information, be sure to listen to the interview in its entirety. For example, we delve into the benefits of sauna bathing and the hormetic response to heat stress, which helps repair misfolded proteins.
We also discuss the different types of saunas, the problem posed by electromagnetic fields and why most near-infrared saunas really aren’t. As a quick summary review, there are no pure near-infrared saunas, as part of the near-infrared spectrum is non-heating. Incandescent heat lamps, which is what most people are referring to when talking about near-infrared saunas, emit mostly mid- and far-infrared.
Only about 14% of that light is in the near-infrared spectrum. That said, these kinds of incandescent heat lamps could potentially still deliver a therapeutic dose if you use them for about 20 minutes.
“Let’s frame it this way,” Whitten says. “If you have a heat a near-infrared style sauna, a heat lamp style sauna, where you’re sitting in a chamber that is 110 degrees to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, you cannot claim that it has the same benefits of a sauna when the research on sauna uses sauna chambers that are massively hotter than 110 to 120 degrees. They’re using temperatures of 170 to 220 degrees.
So, if it’s 100 degrees less, you can’t just say it has all the benefits of saunas. Maybe it does have the same benefits, or maybe it has some of the benefits, or maybe it even has superior benefits. But all of those are speculative claims that you can’t make until you’ve done the studies …
We know, for example, that in animal studies, heat stress extends lifespan. It stimulates all kinds of mechanisms that are involved in longevity, autophagy, increased resilience via these hormetic pathways. And in general, when it comes to hormesis, I believe you do need to get a bit uncomfortable.

It should be something that pushes you into your edge of discomfort. And my experience with the heat lamp style sauna is that by themselves, these 110-, 120-degree F chambers, don’t really push the edge of discomfort apart from maybe the local area that’s being exposed to the light from the heat lamps.”
One way to get around this and eliminate the EMF problem, is to preheat your far-infrared sauna as high as it’ll go, then turn it off and turn on your near-infrared bulbs. As for benefits, heat stress is known to:

Preserve muscle mass and prevent the loss of muscle if you’re unable to exercise for a period of time
Lower your risk of infections
Improve detoxification
Reduce your risk of depression, cardiovascular and neurological disease
Reduce all-cause mortality

More Information
To learn more, be sure to pick up a copy of Whitten’s book, “The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy.” On his website, TheEnergyBlueprint.com, you can also access his Energy Blueprint podcast, articles, programs and testimonials.
In his book, Whitten provides specific recommendations for red- and near-infrared therapeutic devices, which can save you a lot of research time if you’re considering this kind of therapy. As noted by Whitten:

“There are a few good brands. It really matters what device you get. I want to put this caution out there because there are a lot of junk devices. There are a lot of devices that are one-fiftieth the power output of the devices that I recommend, and somebody who isn’t savvy to that, isn’t knowledgeable about why the power output of these devices matters, might just go on Amazon and buy some $30 device.
If you get an underpowered device, you’re not doing the same red light therapy, or near-infrared light therapy as [when you’re using] a real high-powered device. So, it is very important to do this the right way, to get the right quality device and to dose it the right way.”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/03/21/red-light-near-infrared-light-therapy-benefits.aspx