Thursday, September 24, 2020

Vaccines are wonderful? Or toxic? Which is it?

The following is a rebuttal I made to a very good friend who is 100% in the vaccines are wonderful camp. And let me say at the outset I am not 100% in the vaccines are crap camp, but I am skeptical for reasons that will become apparent if you have the patience to follow this post fully to completion.

My friend said:

That notion about getting autism from vaccination has been proven false after thorough investigation!!!!

And I responded:

Proven false after investigation by the industries that profit from it. The models under test were heavily contaminated with bias. If you watch the entire hour and a half interview of Dale Bigtree (link below) you will see the allegation there were no placebo controlled trials, and understand the importance of that in studies on health.


Do you think the autism epidemic is a mystery? It's only a mystery in that we do not have studies that track down the exact mechanism...because the industry that profits is powerful enough to block those unbiased studies from taking place. IMHO we know what the general mechanism is, it is the ingress of toxins into the body that overwhelm the body's detoxification capacity.


Let me unpack that a little bit. First this is the mechanism that causes all the epidemic increases in so called post industrial diseases from alzheimer's to diabetes. These diseases collectively kill about 90% of the developed world population prematurely. Heart disease alone kills more people than any other post industrial disease, and there are dozens of epidemic post industrial diseases, I'm not going to list them all here. The mechanism of all these diseases is overload of the body's innate capacity to remove toxins, which is the basis of the body's self-healing capacity.


Here is the critical point - modern pharmaceutical medicine gets this completely wrong. It adds more toxins to the mix. These toxins can serve to mask symptoms at best, but they also degrade health overall. Pharmacology is, and continues to be, blind to this problem because of profit bias and what I'm going to call (shorthand) "magic thinking" bias, both of which operate completely on the unconscious level. To understand the depth of this problem it's important to realize the "unconscious" part of this equation is the root of the problem. The entire point of science is to do an "end around" unconscious bias with the placebo controlled method! But the design of models under test are contaminated with unconscious bias at the outset, eliminating or degrading effective placebo controls, and skewing results in favor of pre-existing bias.


Sorry to "yell", but this is the critical point - NO PLACEBO CONTROLLED STUDIES OF CAUSAL MECHANISMS FOR AUTISM have been performed. This problem "infects" pharmacological "science" (using the word loosely) in general, but is particularly acute in the case of autism. Where there is profit there is unconscious bias, period. All of us mere humans are subject to this bias.


The "disease reversal diet", and I'm not talking vegan here, I'm talking whole foods in general, works because of two things in particular: first it removes toxic post industrial foods from the diet and replaces them with foods we are evolutionarily adapted to - which are exclusively whole foods. There were no toxic brew food lab concoctions and concentrations 100,000 years ago. Paleos and a certain subset of vegans understand the criticality of this idea. In addition to food lab chemical garbage consider all the toxins we regularly consume that are considered "OK", or even better than ok. Coffee. Alcohol. Refined carbohydrates (pure sugars). Refined fats (pure oils). Disease reversal diets work to the extent ALL toxins are removed from the diet. It does not have to be perfect, it only has to be "good enough" to get back to the point the body's innate capacity for 24/7/365/birth-to-death detoxification is no longer overwhelmed.


Physical activity accelerates detoxification, it is not enough on it's own. Fasting, done properly, accelerates detoxification, and is enough on it's own to "reset the body", but if not followed with a "good enough" whole foods diet will fail in the long run.


A complete lifestyle change is required, and that is difficult for three reasons. 1) No "authority" is telling us we should do this. It's amazing but true, most humans have a need to believe their government "has their back". But governments are rarely a good source of health information. 2) "The food doesn't taste good." There is a brilliant little book "The Pleasure Trap" that explains this very "sticky" problem in detail, IMHO one is not fully "armed" without this information. Very basically we become addicted to toxins because we do not understand the unconscious instinctual complex sufficiently to deal with the biological forces working to attract us to overstimulation. The food doesn't taste good because we are addicted to overstimulation. 3) We are herd animals, we only feel safe in numbers. There are valid reasons for that but they quickly become counterproductive, and we have difficulty with discrimination on that point. We only want to eat what everyone else is eating and everyone else is not eating real food.


Get yourself an extremely healthy subculture, it's the only hope.


Post industrial technology is giving us choices that did not exist 100,000 years ago. Our instincts, like the rest of our biology, evolved in that era. In an era where resources were scarce, nature "controlled" what we put in our bodies. Paradoxically however, technology also gives us the opportunity for the longest "healthy life spans" in human history, but we are not taking advantage of it. Generally we do not even appreciate that this is possible, it's not "a thing". These technological advantages boil down basically to protect us from "exposure to the elements". Combine that advantage with the advantage of the very best diet and lifestyle choices and we might see a boom in centenarian populations. Instead everyone is dying prematurely from post industrial conditions.


(I'm going to add one thing here I did not think to say in my original rebuttal to my friend. I don't want to give the impression that I naively think all cases of autism are reversible with dietary changes. There are definitely cases where toxicity is at such a concentration it becomes irreversible. This rises to the level where "poisoning" is the more appropriate descriptor, and of course goes beyond autism.)


So, if you are still with me and you'd like to continue, please watch the entire Del Bigtree interview with an open mind, otherwise I've said my piece. Here is the link again





Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Women Deserve to Know

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




Thursday, September 10, 2020

Undoing the Consequence of Dietary Excess

 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.

https://youtu.be/yaWVflQolmM




Sunday, September 6, 2020

Making the vegan diet work

 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.

To get enough vitamins and minerals you also have to get enough calories. Vegans who don't understand this will fail on the diet sooner or later. And supplements are generally ineffective in this regard, isolated nutrients do not have the same power as the "nested nutrients" in whole foods.

But fats are lower in vitamins and minerals than whole food plants. Pure fat (oils) have nil levels of micronutrient content.

And eating too many fats makes one insulin resistant, or in other words carbohydrate intolerant.

Carb intolerance means plant food intolerance, because plants are mostly carbs.

Since I am a high carb vegan I keep my fats low and fruits are my staple food source. Starchy foods will work also, and I do eat them, but fruits are higher in micronutrient content and easier to digest. Lower energy load in digestion equals higher "available energy" per calorie. Similar to higher miles per gallon efficiency in cars. The net benefit is generally higher levels of available energy.

The story of life from childhood to elderhood is decreasing energy and (hopefully) increasing wisdom. Higher available energy as we age is a good thing.

My blood sugar is at low normal levels and stable. If I begin to consume higher levels of fat my blood sugar levels will increase and destabilize, and I'll begin to feel bad and gain weight. That is not good, so I don't do it...

Instead I "surround" my staple fruit consumption with a wide variety of other plant foods, using the basic prescription for the whole food plant based diet, which is fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and moderate consumption of nuts and seeds (the healthy fats).

Also: I have kicked refined products to the curb, reducing consumption of refined carbs (pure sugar) and refined fats (pure oil) to nil. And I avoid salt as it desensitizes the taste buds and reduces the innate deliciousness of healthy whole plant foods.

Pure sugar, pure fat, and salt are all toxic. Most people do not realize it can take as little as two tablespoons of salt in a single dose to kill a healthy adult human. But salt water sailors know this.

The key to robust health is to reduce toxic input to every extent possible, and increase nutrient dense energy efficient whole food intake.

BTW, pharmaceutical medications are toxic. One of the great benefits to the healthy whole foods plant based approach is it allows us to greatly reduce, and typically eliminate, toxic medications. That combined with "natural" bodyweight and increased energy is about as good as it gets.