A Psychiatrist speaking about malignant narcissism in the context of Trump's intractable malignant narcissism. He doesn't mention Trump by name, but psychologically aware people have been forced to contemplate the painfully obvious cult-like adulation of Trump by approximately half the population in this country.
It's been frustrating, and very difficult to understand. Perhaps this brief 10 minute contemplation will shed light on the dangerous phenomenon of malignant narcissism.
Let's start by establishing that our senses were "built" in prehistoric times. Anatomically "modern" senses arrived with anatomically modern humans, some 100,000 years ago. Compare that with the advent of sensory technology, the first lenses were invented about 700 years ago, the first microphones about 175 years ago. Does that mean "nature technology" is way way ahead of homo sapient technology? Yep.
It's interesting that our more critical senses are clustered in a tight group on our head. Look in a mirror sometime and notice that the distance from the eyes to the nostrils is only about 2-3 inches, with the ears right in the center of that narrow range. And all are extremely close to the brain. I think Wall Street would call that a high frequency collocated server lol. And Daniel Kahneman would call it "thinking fast". Which simply means it's an eternity in survival terms before conscious thought occurs in a danger situation, meanwhile our senses, brain, and nervous system automatically leap into defensive action in "nano" seconds.
So it's not a leap to say the primary function of our senses is survival. Romance, art, and beauty come after we can begin to relax a little on the survival front, and the senses are involved in those lovely things too.
But what does any of this have to do with traveling the health highway? Well, assuming you're not about to be food for a predator, the next order of business is to make sure you don't put a toxin in your mouth and swallow. Our sense of taste and smell are excellent in the discrimination between toxin and nutrient.
Or at least they used to be. These days more people die from the consumption of toxic substances than any other reason. Even during the Covid-19 pandemic? Yep, as of this writing, about one year into the pandemic, according to the CDC, 317,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 infection. And 655,00 die every year of heart disease on a continuing rolling basis, year after year. And the number increases every year.
So what happened? When and why did our senses suddenly stop working? Well actually they didn't, but (so called) "food science" discovered you can make a shit load more money selling Mars Bars than food fit for human consumption. It turns out our anatomically modern instinctual blueprint, also 100,000 years old, combined with our senses, are easily fooled into "fast" thinking that toxins are food.
Why is that? Well it's actually very simple, in nature, 100,000 years ago, calories were scarce, and we had to hunt and gather them in wild conditions. (Whole Foods Market came later:) So when we found them we were happy to live another day, and ate until we were satisfied. If we ate "modern" industrial "food like" substances until satisfied we would have, well, exactly what we do have now, the vast majority of "modern" humans being diseased, crippled, and killed by toxic "food like" substances.
Now use this search term in google: "when did medical science recognize heart disease is a diet caused condition?" Crickets. It hasn't happened yet.
Instead we are lulled into thinking stents, statins, beta blockers, vasodilators, and bypass surgery is going to fix us up. It doesn't. At best these slow progression a bit, they certainly don't halt progression. And the dirty little secret is that a simple change of diet reverses heart disease. Let me say that again in case you missed it: reverses heart disease. And if that weren't news worthy enough, the same diet reverses a number of other diseases also, most notably diabetes, which is responsible for 1.6 million deaths yearly. In addition, this diet reduces likelihood of the many cancers by significant levels, and significantly improves or reverses the many autoimmune conditions.
What is this magic diet? Well, it's the one promoted and taught by an activist group in Washington DC called "The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine". These are doctors, clinicians, and researchers fighting an uphill battle against the corrupt and corrosive forces generating huge (and I do mean huge) profits on the development and production of all these "senses fooling" toxic substances, and all the medications, treatments, and procedures that do little to nothing to heal diseases caused by said substances.
Look up PCRM, they are not hard to find:
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
I also want to thank all the other teachers and promoters of what I have come to call The Disease Reversal Diet, fighting the good fight, boots on the ground, one audience, one individual at a time. In particular my primary mentor Dr. Douglas Graham.
Chris Wark is the indefatigable cancer warrior. He works tirelessly to bring to his readers the exponentially increasing level of disease research focused on the efficacies of a whole food plant based diet.
And here he goes again, speaking with Wamidh H. Talib, PhD, a Professor of Cancer Biology at Applied Science Private University in Amman, Jordan.
Enjoy.
The Study
The garlic lemon juice recipe
https://www.chrisbeatcancer.com/the-anticancer-power-of-lemon-and-garlic-extracts/
The interview with Researcher Dr. Wamidh Talib
In our conversation toward the end you asked a question and I didn't give a complete answer. Many people do not have to resort to extreme diets to avoid diabetes and other problems of dietary excess. They don't have to go on diets to lose weight. Why some and not others? There's an overarching issue, and aspects of that issue. Basically it comes down to quality of calories, and how many calories are consumed vs burned. It's not a mystery, but in the modern world we are mystified, and as a result many of us develop health problems that are dietary in origin. These health problems can take many forms, collectively they are known as "metabolic syndrome". Here's the Mayo Clinic page for metabolic syndrome https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/metabolic-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20351916
I'm not going to say too much about this one, it's very controversial, but if you want to at least see a cogent introduction to the other side of the story I can suggest a look at this conversation.
This is one of the best interviews of Dr. Joel Fuhrman I've seen. Dr. Fuhrman is famous for coining the term "Nutritarian Diet", which is basically just a plant based diet with a high nutrient to calorie ratio, the exact opposite of the "empty calorie" standard American diet that is making us sick and killing us prematurely.
The Nutritarian Diet is not complicated, confusing, or hard to do. More of us should know about it!
Watch this if you have 1) athletic aspirations, 2) would like to have the strongest immune system possible, or 3) would like to be healthy, strong, and lucid right into your 80's and 90's.
Or all of the above!
One of the better all round conversations on pandemic issues I've seen:
The reason I'm looking at cases vs mortality is total cases are going to be higher at this point because more testing is being done. We're in the seasonal surge period (2nd wave) in the fall to Christmas period that epidemiologists have been predicting from early in the crisis.
Some folks seem to have the idea if they can identify those few plants with "special" qualities they are good to go. They're on the hunt for the "silver bullet". Hate to say it, but there ain't no silver bullet. The point isn't special plants, it's simply plants in general, in the variety that provides the body with optimal levels of macro nutrients (carbs, proteins, and fats), and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc).
That variety of plants is fruits and veg, whole grains, spuds, legumes, and some nuts and seeds. Leafy greens and beans for protein. There's a saying in the investing world the only free lunch is diversification. This variety is the dietary diversification that meets our needs for nutrition perfectly, in the least taxing way (does not drag energy down with digesting and detoxing).
This is the standard Whole Foods Plant Based Diet recommended by a growing group of MDs and Nutritionists. They recommend it because it works.
This group of foods has another advantage for people changing their diet, it's the foods we grew up eating, minus the animals. That makes the diet satisfying and familiar, which is important when changing life long habits.
Your taste buds will thank you, and it won't take long for your body to begin thanking you either.
A very lucid introduction to some of the basic concepts of focused protection are expressed in this 11 minute interview of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration:
First, an overview. Epidemics and pandemics are notable mostly for their lethality. The common cold virus can produce huge case numbers but low lethality, and generally we are not nearly as concerned.
Health considerations finally prevailed over the tobacco industry, the Surgeon Generals warning appeared on all tobacco products, and ads like these disappeared overnight.
I think it should be said at the outset we don't get to see this alternate POV on conventional media sources. And we might also want to notice and keep in mind conventional media has been a little bit hysterical, and sometimes more than a little. When the alternate POV breaks through as it did with the Great Barrington Declaration, and if one is really familiar with what these virologists, epidemiologists, and public health scientists are saying, it quickly becomes obvious this POV is misrepresented.
As just one example, they do not say not to wear masks. They are not devoid of common sense...if the disease is respiratory we would obviously rather filter the air we breathe.
What they are saying is collective damage to human health from the virus is greatly exacerbated by lockdown. And they are insistent this POV is completely apolitical. It occurs to me if the pandemic had come at the beginning of a presidential term, with a president who was him or herself a calming influence, we would not have seen near the levels of hysteria about the pandemic. The virus doesn't care who the president is. We've conflated political hysteria, which was present before the pandemic, with a medical emergency, resulting in off the chart levels of "social hysteria disorder" (if I may coin a term).
Let's remember that "herd immunity" is not some kind of dirty word (as media would have us believe), it is simply the biological mechanism by which all epidemics and pandemics are eventually terminated. It can happen organically as people are exposed to the virus, and it can happen via the "viral mimics" in vaccines, and some combination of the two. We are led to believe the only mechanism by which pandemics are halted is via vaccines. If that were true it's very unlikely our species "sapiens" would have survived the 100,000 years of our time on the planet leading to the discovery of vaccine technology 200 years ago.
Let's also remember that cases can go up while pandemic mortality goes down. And as I write cases are going up, we have to continue to be careful and use good common sense: wear a mask in doors and close quarter out of doors, wash your hands frequently, and keep a social distance from others.
Here's a conversation between an emergency room doctor who was in the thick of it, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Since it is literally impossible to find a fair and balanced consideration of these views in conventional media we may want to hear what at least one of the experts holding this point of view has to say.
Biology is seemingly infinitely complex. Here's a definition of the biological sciences: "Biological sciences encompasses all the divisions of natural sciences examining various aspects of vital processes. The concept includes anatomy, physiology, cell biology, biochemistry and biophysics, and covers all organisms from microorganisms, animals to plants."
We've been on a quest to discover and understand all of the interactive mechanisms that play individual and coordinated roles in life function, and an almost unimaginable amount of data has been compiled. Just think of the data that has been compiled in the process of discovery and mapping of the human genome alone.
Why do we do this? Well part of the answer is simple - we are a species possessed of insatiable curiosity. But why? And the answer to that question is the topic of this blog - we want to achieve higher and higher levels of functioning.
To see examples of "the genetics solution", take a quick glance at this NIH (National Institute of Health) site for the National Human Genome Research Institute:
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Genetics-vs-Genomics
Two of the bullet points that stand out:
- Genetics and genomics both play roles in health and disease.
- Why are genetics and genomics important to my health?
After many years of discovery and research we've mapped the human genome with the overarching purpose of understanding and controlling disease processes. And not a moment too soon, health in the developed world has been getting worse for quite some time. So we've mounted great effort and resources to understand exactly, down to microscopic minutiae level, how to control our health for the better. Underlying all this effort was the belief that the answers lay in what is not yet known.
Newer and better drugs will be developed to that end. They will be expensive, probably very expensive, but no doubt worth every penny.
You may have noticed my tongue in cheek just there. There are subcultures among us that regularly achieve very high levels of health from birth to death, and longer happier lives in the process, with relative ease and at almost no cost. How is this possible? The answer is they have focused almost exclusively on the cause of health. Or, one might say, the energy input-output question.
I've been writing in this blog about this since discovering the importance of this question, which was finally made completely clear to me by my primary health educator Dr. Doug Graham. It's basically quite simple, but there are some puzzle pieces that have to come together for understanding. And there is a general thrust in this direction by other health educators and other similar schools of thought. Integrative medicine is one such, and the paleo movement is another.
I've looked carefully at the variations and have found the school of thought that goes under the broader name of "no oil whole food plant based" to be of the highest quality to the "input" side of the equation, and so the more efficient approach. The word vegan doesn't describe this approach sufficiently, but a particular approach to veganism can.
You may have guessed by now what the energy input-output question is referring to. It is simply this: the quality of the inputs (to the body) equals energy out. The computing phrase "garbage in garbage out" works. It is basically that simple.
The psycho-cultural problem we run into is that it is very difficult bringing ourselves to see the "normal" ways we've been eating and living our lives is garbage in garbage out. There are complexities here but the primary problem is the things we've learned in the formative years are very "sticky"... in other words we have come to unconsciously associate these things with our very survival. And survival is of course the prerequisite to health. So, ironically, we have come to unconsciously associate "garbage in" as health producing. And we've come to think of all sorts of toxic substances as "healthy" to "protect" these unconscious associations. But the problem of course is these toxic inputs are killing us en masse way too early. It is, as they say, one hell of a hoary conundrum.
Paleo and integrative medicine take steps toward resolving this conundrum by retaining as much of the old way as possible, while being considerably better than the old way. We get to keep our "anchor" comfort foods while improving the foods around the anchors, and improving lifestyle habits also.
But there is a revolution going on in the young that I believe will eventually overtake the less efficient ways, it is the vegan revolution. I don't consider this an idealistic fantasy, I'm well aware there will always be those who know full well that "smoking is bad for you" and smoke anyway. There is a curious relationship between what we may perceive as near term pleasure and long term pain. But that is a different issue for another time perhaps.
The scientific evidence for the more energy efficient inputs is being established as we speak, and in fact many consider "the weight of the evidence" to have already landed, and I agree with that view. But cultural change can happen slowly.
Meanwhile, we don't have to wait. But we first need convincing. The book that really convinced me in the early stage of my health education was a fast easy read about the foundational work in reversing heart disease by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. This work resulted in published studies, and was followed by "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease", the popular book referred to above.
The energy input-output question, properly addressed, fixes way more than heart disease, but heart disease is the leading cause of all death in the developed world, so Esselstyn chose it as the best thing to study.
What percentage of cardiologists still do not recommend this approach as the only known way to reverse heart disease? And instead prescribe comparatively ineffective drugs and surgery? These doctors either reject it out of hand, or "go along to get along" with "the standard of care". To be fair, it's not their job to teach health education, their job is to do the best they can under the circumstances. But it's not good enough, in fact it's not good at all. I question that it even reaches the level of "triage medicine".
But you better believe cardiologists have all heard about Dr. Esselstyn's work by now, it's a threat to their way of practicing medicine. Think about it...a proven way to reverse heart disease. An inconvenient truth for the medical system as it currently exists, and an incredibly convenient truth for the rest of us. It's completely free, easy to understand, and the only side effect is radiant health. Sound too good to be true? It's not. There are 10's of thousands of "anecdotal proofs" walking around now. Folks that would have been long dead following the standard of care. I know this because I'm one of them.
So I will heartily and happily recommend this book as an excellent starting place on a journey toward the highest levels of health. For a quick introduction to Dr. Esselstyn and his work, have a look at this recent talk he delivered to a Sentara Healthcare audience.
The revolution is growing.
Why even pose the question? Logic tells us herd immunity is simply the biological mechanism that ends pandemics, and there is no other. It comes about through exposure to the virus, and/or a "viral mimic" in the form of a vaccine. If one is never exposed to any form of the virus, biologic or artificial, there can be no immunity, individual or herd.
If you know anything at all about Jordan Peterson you will probably know he is considered to be quite controversial. I have to admit I don't understand this point of view at all, I find him to be self-evidently grounded, common sensical, and brilliant. Can we also call him an original thinker? I think so, if only in the sense he arrives at eternal truths of what it is to be human more quickly and fluidly than other original thinkers who've come before him.
Women deserve to know there is a much higher risk of breast cancer with consumption of dairy products. To underline the point The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is suing the FDA to put health warnings for breast cancer risk on cheese and dairy.
This may sound absurd to our ears today, but consider a situation that may end up being very similar to this one: the warning label for lung cancer risk went on cigarettes in 1964, but as early as 1957 the link between smoking and lung cancer had become scientifically incontrovertible:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jun/02/thisweekssciencequestions.cancer
The video below should begin at 4:10, where the cheese and breast cancer link is discussed:
https://youtu.be/2XEox82C4x0?t=250
Various approaches to fasting seems to be the topic du jour from cancer researchers to paleo/keto dieters. Here's an excellent conversation between Rich Roll (Author of "Finding Ultra" and podcaster par excellence) and Dr. Alan Goldhamer, the founder of True North Health Center, longest running fasting clinic in the US.
I personally did a 12 day water fast with Dr. Doug Graham at a retreat center north of Seattle. Doug teaches the principles of fasting while you are in a water only fast, experiencing it first hand. The benefit of this kind of personal experience and education is profoundly life changing.
Vegetables don't have enough calories to be the primary food source, exception being the tubers. Let's say you wanted to be a "high raw" vegan (which means low levels of cooked starches), to get enough calories you really only have two choices to get enough calories, fruit or fat.
Since in my last blog I railed at all the over the counter drugs at all the corner pharmacies our society is deluged with, I thought I'd offer one example of how easy (and beneficial) it is to avoid them almost completely.
This video is from Kristina Carrillo-Bucaram, 14 years raw vegan, and a former student of Doug Graham. Yes, it really is possible to thrive on a completely raw vegan diet, if you know what you are doing. And Doug does know, he's been a 100% raw vegan for 30 some years now, and he teaches it in his yearly retreats in Washington state. These principles are so good to know whether you're vegan or not.
Enjoy.
In my previous blog post "How old is too old? (to get healthy)" I said "people just don't know how powerful the whole food plant based diet is in reversing most of the common health disorders of our time. Once you really get that? It is exciting, and you want to share the good news."
These days we have the idea we probably need some man made substances to get healthy, and stay healthy. You know them, the pharmaceutical drugs and supplements, and all the over the counter pills, potions, and tinctures every pharmacy is filled with. That's not to say there's no place for modern medicine at all, but wouldn't it be nice to know how much of that stuff is an ineffective attempt to compensate for something we're doing wrong to begin with?
Doug Graham shows us the elegant logic of "The Cause of Health". All you have to remember is the body heals itself if you simply get out of it's way.
Well apparently as long as you're still breathing there is no upper age limit where "it just doesn't matter anymore".
Here's a story of what happened to a 96 year old woman in ill health and on all the standard meds when she moved in with her daughter and son-in-law...who both just happened to be whole food plant based.
