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Category: Natural Remedies - Organic Lifestyle Magazine Category: Natural Remedies - Organic Lifestyle Magazine

The Mediterranean Diet May Help Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease

Research has shown that the Mediterranean diet may lower your risk for dementia by interfering with the build-up of amyloid, and tau. These are proteins that turn into plaques and tangles often resulting in Alzheimer’s disease.

The true diet is simple, plant-based cooking, with the majority of each meal focused on fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans and seeds, with a few nuts and a heavy emphasis on extra-virgin olive oil. Fats other than olive oil, such as butter, are consumed rarely, if at all. And say goodbye to refined sugar or flour.

Mediterranean diet may prevent memory loss and dementia, study finds

Researchers found that for every point of higher compliance with the diet participants had one less year of brain aging. The study was published in Neurology, and examined 343 people who were at high risk for Alzheimer’s and then compared them to 169 “cognitively normal” participants.

Researchers tested cognitive skills, (language, memory, and executive function), used brain scans to measure brain volume, and tested spinal fluid from 226 people for amyloid an tau protein biomarkers.

Participants were then asked how well they were following the diet and found that those who did not follow the diet closely had more signs of amyloid and tau buildup than those who did.

This study is not the first of its kind. A previous study of nearly 6,000 older Americans showed that those who followed the Mediterranean diet or similar lowered their risk of dementia by a third.

The Mediterranean diet is one that closely follows OLM’s own recommended diet. With staples of whole grains and legumes, fresh fruits and vegetables, and no flour or refined sugar those who follow the Mediterranean diet are going to be much better off than those who follow a traditional western diet.

Related:



Natural Pain Relief for Athletes

Being an athlete can take quite a toll on the body, even with a great diet. Over weeks of training I’ve found that even on the best diet, I’m bound to run into injuries and soreness. That being said there are several things that make a big difference in how I feel the next day and rather or not I’m able to train the next day.

Currently, I’m training for a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu competition in May. I’m new, and my workload isn’t nearly that of a seasoned professional athlete, but for the average person, it’s intense.

Every day I do a full body weight lifting workout, yoga, stretching and breath control, 100 bodyweight squats, three sets of push-ups and pull-ups, drilling and training with my dad for about 20 minutes, a mile run, and training at the gym for 3-4 hours a day.

Most injuries I get heal quickly. Since starting Brazilian jiujitsu I’ve suffered jammed toes, a bruised trachea, a pulled quad muscle, and most recently a pulled muscle in my rib area near my spine. Every other injury has been quick to heal, gone in three days at the most. My rib injury took longer to heal. Even after it got better, I spent weeks being sore in that area and having to pay special attention not to reinjure it.

I’ve got a competition soon so extended time off isn’t an option, nor is any sort of pain management that would slow my healing long term. I don’t take pain medication of any sort, nor do I use recreational pain relief like cannabis. Cannabis and over-the-counter pain relief, as well as prescription pain medication all slow down the healing process exponentially for temporary relief.

I view my pain (and many other things in life) like a credit card. Using medication to relieve pain temporarily means dealing with a longer lasting injury, and more pain in the long run. For instance, if I have an injury that hurts at a 6 out of 10, I can smoke some weed or take some other pain medication. But once it wears off that 6 becomes a 7, maybe an 8. And of course, the next dose of pain relief won’t be as effective unless you up the dosage. That’s not my idea of a desirable feedback loop.

To promote healing, we do hot-cold compresses switching back and forth to attract blood flow and inflammation for healing. In the end, we use lots of deep tissue oil on the area. Deep tissue repair oil is my number one recommendation for pain relief and healing if you’re only going to use one thing to aid in the healing process. I use it multiple times a day when I feel sore and before or after a workout. Deep tissue oil has menthol crystals, cayenne, wintergreen oil, and other things to promote healing and attract blood flow to the target area.

I also do hot epsom salt baths as often as needed. It’s nothing revolutionary, but epsom salt does help release tension, relax the muscles and prevent soreness.

Many people recommend Boswellia, an herbal extract, to help with inflammation and pain. Although I’ve never used it, you can read more about it and its benefits in this article.

I stretch and do yoga every day to work on flexibility and aid in healing as well. Even if I’m injured to the point of being unable to workout, I still stretch for movement and healing.

Many other athletes have done down similar paths of using natural remedies to help heal, but very few go deep enough to get the full benefits. Acupuncture and chiropractic care are two examples of holistic routes that some people go down, but as great as they are, they’re really only temporary pain relief. Acupuncture and chiropractic work can be great aids for the body in addition to a healthy diet and routine, but they don’t fix any problems on their own.

Diet

Without a healthy diet, I wouldn’t be able to do this every day, but I’ve learned that there’s a difference between fueling my body for everyday life, and my diet when I’m training. When I’m training, I eat a high caloric diet with lots of protein. My main sources of protein are eggs, meat, and cheese. I generally eat less than a pound of meat a week. I have a little bacon in every salad, and between one and three nights a week, we’ll have sausage or bacon in dinner. I also eat homemade beef jerky for protein in between classes.

Eating an anti-inflammatory diet is probably the most important part of my healing process because it goes beyond just healing. My diet is even more strict than it was prior to fighting, although prior to fighting I ate better than almost anyone I knew. I have to eat a diet that not only aids in healing but prevents me from getting injured frequently. With the right diet, you can make your body impervious to injury. I don’t sit around and wait for an injury to start eating a diet that promotes healing.

Every day I eat a large salad with lots of different vegetables. Diversity is an extremely important part of a healthy diet that many people are missing. There are lots of professional athletes who have figured out that a healthy diet allows them to perform radically better, along with recovering faster and overall feeling better. That being said, not many people have figured out that there’s a big difference between eating some kale salad and eating a 10-cup salad with kale, collards, rainbow chard, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, and more. My salads have at least 10 different vegetables and herbs in them. This article goes into how I make my salads and cranberry lemonade.

Three to four times a week I drink my “anti-inflammatory smoothie“. I make it with an abundance of anti-inflammatory foods like ginger, pineapple, cranberries, tart cherries, and turmeric (to name a few). I drink lots of cranberry lemonade to flush out toxins and inflammation, as well as stay hydrated. Lastly, I obviously avoid inflammatory foods. I limit my grains and avoid corn (although occasionally we make homemade tortillas). I don’t even eat oatmeal anymore, because it’s too similar to gluten in the way it digests and causes inflammation.

Many fighters and bodybuilders eat lots of oatmeal as a good source of protein and fuel. For many people, it’s great. But, like most other grains, it’s inflammatory. I feel it when I eat them. I’ll bet if you’re paying attention, you can too. When I’m in need of protein and fuel I stick to things like eggs, homemade beef jerky, walnuts, chia seeds, and raw sheep’s cheese.

It seems like the list of foods I can’t eat is extremely long, but the list of foods I can and do eat is even longer. The guidelines are pretty simple, make everything from scratch, eat tons of raw veggies, eat tons of cooked veggies, and avoid any and all things processed.

Supplements

With a healthy diet the average person shouldn’t need to take supplements everyday when they’re healthy, but someone who’s pushing their body on an athletes level may find that they function better with supplements.

Currently, I take Sf722 every day, generally because I eat a lot of fruit. Sf722 also helps pump my body full of good stuff similar to salads. Without Sf722 my skin can be prone to breaking out from rolls on the mats, and my healing and recovery slows. I also take Abzorb, or other enzymes to help with digestion, especially if I eat pasteurized nuts. I take vitamin D, Vitamin B, and thyroid and/or pituitary glandular supplements to prevent endocrine system crashes.

When you’ve taken antibiotics or medication or done anything to eradicate your gut microbiome, your gut isn’t producing enough vitamin B. This can be one of the last things to correct itself after you’re healthy. Taking vitamin B helps heal your gut and helps the endocrine system by providing your body with vitamins that your gut should be producing.

When you’re overweight, even just a small amount your body has a hard time assimilating vitamin D from the sun. not to mention most of us don’t get enough sunlight anyways. Being overweight also leads to extra stress on the kidneys (and lower back) and the endocrine system.

Sleep

Diet and sleep are equally as important for overall health, and when it comes to how sore I am and my recovery time for an injury. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get a good night’s sleep when my injury is severe enough, but it’s always a top priority.

I always get a minimum of 8 hours of sleep. Regardless of the quality of sleep, I’m in bed trying to sleep for at least 8 hours. Sometimes depending on the workout the day before, or how an injury is healing, I can get more than 10 hours of sleep.

Related: Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones

Training

While training anything contact or combat related it’s extremely important than you learn how to protect yourself from injury while drilling and rolling. It took me way too long to learn how to fall properly in jiujitsu, and it’s still a work in progress. Falling down wrong was the number one cause of injury for me while training.

Related: Running Without Knee Pain

That being said, once I learned how to protect myself from injury I found that training was actually extremely important for healing my most recently injury. So, if you can move, move. Staying active and using your body is extremely important for working your muscles and building them back stronger after an injury.

Generally, I use the rule use it or lose it. Broken bones often don’t need casts (and strong healthy bones are harder to break). Staying active is usually your best bet for healing quickly.

Conclusion

Some days I wake up barely able to move! Training this hard has been really intense, but I know that with the way I do things, my recovery time is radically faster than anyone else I know doing the same thing as me.

In my experience the most important thing to do is to be in tune with your body to an extreme. The moment something isn’t right I can tell, and I can feel a difference in the way certain foods fuel my body. I track my sleep and my diet, and when things aren’t working the way they should I back track and examine where I might have gone wrong.

This takes time, and it takes mistakes. I’ve experimented with lots of different foods and routines and I’ve seen how certain things make me feel, and how they effect my performance. Working out and being active is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t mean much if you’re not healthy enough to sustain it.




Natural Coronavirus Prevention

It’s important to note that when looking at studies for supplementation to prevent or help treat coronavirus we’re usually looking at research on supplement efficacy for other viruses. We’re dealing with a novel virus with this pandemic. But, the body is a holistic, complex system. Having a body in homeostasis during a pandemic only makes sense. And while coronavirus is new and different, it’s still a virus. And we have a lot of good science on how to help prevent virus infections.

Vitamin C

Vitamin C has long been touted to cure everything from cancer to liver failure. Studies show that ingesting vitamin C supplements does not seem to be the cure-all we’d hoped for but the studies that administer intravenous vitamin C look very promising. If our pharmaceutical industry had our best interests at heart patients who are being treated for severe cases of coronavirus would be administered IV Vitamin C, and many lives would likely be saved.

Regular injections aren’t practical for normal people, and we suspect there might be a few side effects if people use injections regularly as a preventative measure. But Vitamin C injections do show a lot of promise for treating many diseases.

This is not to say that vitamin C supplementation is useless. If you don’t have enough vitamin C in your body when you get sick the vitamin C may reduce severity and duration, but not much. A better way to get enough vitamin C in order to prevent disease is to eat the right foods before there is a health issue.

If you think you may be low on vitamin C, liposomal is the more absorbable form of vitamin C.

It’s not a magical cure-all, but Vitamin C supplementation does make sense for most people with conventional diets.

Related: Homemade Vitamin C

Zinc

Zinc helps your immune system fight off infection, helps the body heal wounds, and is needed for making protein and DNA.

There have been several studies testing whether zinc supplements can help treat or prevent the common cold. A comprehensive review of 18 of such studies showed zinc is may reduce the duration of patients’ common cold.

Studies also show that colds, school absences, and antibiotic prescription rates are lower in for those who take zinc supplementation regularly, suggesting that zinc could also prevent colds.

The National Institutes of Health says oysters as the best food source of zinc avaialble. Another benefits of oysters is they have copper in just the right amount to make the zinc more easily absorbed and assimilated (if you don’t have enough copper you can’t get enough zinc). You can also get zinc from red meat, legumes, nuts, whole grains, and dairy.

Zinc has been proven to reduce symptoms of illnesses from rhinoviruses by messing with the viruses’ RNA replication, but there are no studies yet that look at zinc with COVID-19. We don’t know how similar COVID-19 is to rhinoviruses, but it is possible that zinc could mess with the RNA replication of coronavirus in a similar way. Regardless, getting enough zinc to keep your immune system strong makes sense for the other aforementioned reasons.

Related: Celiac, Zinc, and Tobacco Use

Glutathione

COVID-19 deaths are usually attributed to a “cytokine storm”, which is a physiological feedback loop where our body creates an excessive release of cytokines, a pro-inflammatory signaling molecule. A new study has evaluated the treatment of two patients with COVID-19 pneumonia who were given IV and orally administered glutathione.

Oral and IV glutathione, glutathione precursors (N-acetyl-cysteine) and alpha lipoic acid may represent a novel treatment approach for blocking NF-κB and addressing “cytokine storm syndrome” and respiratory distress in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.

Science Direct – Respiratory Medicine Case Reports

Obviously, this is only two cases that were studied. We need a lot more information. But there are some other papers that support supplementing with glutathione, but there is nothing yet conclusive.

Dr. Richard Horowitz is a board-certified internist with a private integrative medicine practice. He is considered to be one of the best Lyme disease doctors and he’s built a practice around combining conventional treatments with alternative, naturopathic methods to treat Lyme disease. Dr. Horowitz has treated patents successfully with glutathione therapy.

“It is a miracle and it’s not,” says Horowitz of glutathione, which he has used on thousands of patients in his medical practice over the past 30 years. “It’s already in the literature—there are published articles on glutathione showing that it has anti-viral activity against herpes viruses, HIV, and hepatitis. The problem is, all of the COVID research is happening through pharmaceutical companies. No one is looking at natural approaches. You hear a little about how low vitamin D might put you at risk, so it’s coming out in dribs and drabs.” And just like with vitamin D, you can be deficient in glutathione—especially if you’ve been exposed to a lot of environmental toxins (which is everyone). Older people are also more likely to be depleted of the compound.

Two Potential Treatments for COVID-19 Unfold in the Hudson Valley 

Vitamin D

Dr. Rhonda Patrick at Found My Fitness thinks vitamin D may be what those who are getting hit with COVID-19 are missing. Other interesting points include:

  • People with genetic predisposition to lower vitamin D levels are more likely to die of respiratory disease
  • People with normal vitamin D levels are less likely to die from respiratory disease
  • Too much vitamin D can be toxic, though concerns of hypercalcemia tend to be overblown
  • Vitamin D and Vitamin K increase may increase bone density and prevent hypercalcemia
  • Don’t be concerned with eating “too many leafy greens” and issues with oxalates, kidney stones, etc.
https://youtu.be/4_ZJ8YDOX6g?t=1935

Gut Health

This is the key. Not just for coronavirus defense, but for our health in every physical aspect of our lives. You cannot have a healthy gut and be low in vitamin D, or zinc, or other nutrients. Gut health is everything. When the best farmers see a sick plant they treat their soil’s microbiome first and foremost. When we’re sick, our microbiome is off. When we’re well and everything is working optimally we have a balanced, healthy gut to thank.

In the first case of novel coronavirus reported in the U.S., the patient reported two days of nausea and vomiting along with diarrhea in addition to respiratory symptoms. In some small studies, researchers have linked patients with gastrointestinal issues to poorer coronavirus outcomes. Poor gut health seems to equate to severe disease symptoms including higher fevers and a greater risk of liver injury.

The suggestion is that the gastrointestinal symptoms are caused by the virus invading the ACE2-containing cells that are found throughout the bowel. This, together with the presence of the virus in the stool, suggests the gastrointestinal tract as another possible route of infection and transmission.

The Conversation – Worried about coronavirus? Pay attention to your gut

But it’s not just that the virus attacks the gut. Science is on the verge of discovering that our gut microbiome supplies our entire body with its microbiome. And what they don’t yet know, but is nevertheless true, is that a body with a healthy, diverse, and plentiful microbiome is a much less hospitable host for foreign invaders.

The health of our gut bacteria plays a crucial role in how our immune system reacts to every disease, including coronavirus. Diet is crucial to developing and maintaining healthy gut flora. The wider variety of raw vegetables and herbs one consumes, the more diverse one’s gut bacteria will be. And diversity is key to a healthy microbiome.

This article, How To Heal Your Gut, goes into detail about how to develop a healthy gut microbiome and is the basis for ridding the body of and being less susceptible to nearly every disease.

From our sister company, Green Lifestyle Market, here are our top supplement picks for anyone concerned with COVID-19 or just wanting to keep their immune system strong:

But don’t skip the aforementioned gut health article! Diet is far more important than supplements, and if finances are tight, put your money towards healthy food before you purchase supplements.




Data Shows How to Protect Against Coronavirus and We Address Conspiracy Theories

I’m not, nor have I been, concerned with contracting COVID-19. Pathogens infect people who are vulnerable. The concept of random/chance infections doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. If a pathogen does kill everyone and anyone regardless of how healthy the host is the pathogen would burn out its host supply. Evolutionarily speaking this isn’t something that makes sense.

The medical science community is just now discovering how gut health is synonymous with overall health. Of course, they’re trying to figure out what drugs can be made from the revelations and not how one can take their health into their own hands because the truth is not profitable. The truth is the only way to sustain proper gut health is to continually eat a wide variety of raw vegetables and herbs while avoiding toxic foods and chemicals that imbalance the microbiome.

Studies are showing a number of factors that play a role in the severity of COVID-19 symptoms. Some of these we have control of and some of these we don’t. Let’s start with those we have no control over.

Age

Viruses like influenza are more likely to injure and kill both the young and the older population, given their more vulnerable immune systems. But COVID-19 is a little different.

Children under the age of 18 are far less likely to have symptoms of infection, and they are also less likely to need hospitalization, and kids are less likely to die of COVID-19.

People over the age of 75, on the other hand, are far more susceptible to the worst COVID-19 has to offer. Below is a chart with data provided by New York City Health as of May 13, 2020.

AGE Number of Deaths Share of deaths
0 – 17 years old 9 0.06%
18 – 44 years old 601 3.90%
45 – 64 years old 3,413 22.40%
65 – 74 years old 3,788 24.90%
75+ years old 7,419 48.70%
TOTAL 15,230 100%
Age of coronavirus deaths via World Meters

The data we have is very limited so far but China and other countries, and other states within the U.S. show numbers for 75+ between 20% and 35%.

As you probably heard in the news, coronavirus has been hitting nursing homes hard.

Sex

Men are much more likely to suffer symptoms from coronavirus than women. Data provided by New York City Health as of April 1st states that 61.8% of fatalities are men. Other studies of other regions show similar percentages. Researchers are trying to figure out why. Men face higher risk of complications with other respiratory illnesses as well, as the flu also affects men disproportionately.

The evidence in current studies points towards men having weaker immune systems than women, especially when it comes to common viral respiratory infections. Men are more susceptible to them, symptoms are worse, they last longer, and men are more likely to be hospitalized and die from the flu.

Sue is a clinical assistant professor in family medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland

study published in Frontiers in Public Health reported that men and women were equally likely to contract the novel coronavirus.

So why are men more likely to die? Theories range from how testosterone affects the body to the fact that men are often less likely to take care of themselves. As usual, it’s likely a confluence of issues.

Blood Type

A study found that people with blood type A were 50% more likely to experience severe COVID-19 symptoms than people with other blood types. On the flip side, those with blood type O were 50% less likely to face severe symptoms of COVID-19. 

Race

CDC statistics show that 33% of people who’ve been hospitalized with COVID-19 are African American. Some local communities that report data have found similar patterns.

Black people make up only 13% of the U.S. population but they make up more than 30% of COVID deaths, according to research from Johns Hopkins University.

The disproportionate death rate may be significantly explained by the fact that there’s a higher prevalence of obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes among African Americans compared with Caucasians. But there’s more to it than that.

Black workers are also more likely to have employment that does not allow them to work from home, and they are less likely to have the safety nets that allow them to take time off. There’s a likely possibility that the African American community is more likely to be exposed to the virus. Detroit was hit particularly hard by the pandemic, but the daily cases and the death rate in Michigan have been on the decline for some time, indicating that the virus may have run its course. Perhaps Detroit inadvertently followed Sweden’s model.

Related: Sweden’s Approach To Coronavirus, and Did It Work? What Should We Have Done?

While doctors warn against taking high doses of vitamin D The NHS says wants people to consider taking 10 micrograms of vitamin D3 a day throughout the pandemic – particularly if they spend most of their time inside.

Besides blood type, most of the data above indicates that health plays a big role in determining the outcome of someone who is infected by CVOID-19. The data below proves it.

Underline Medical Conditions and Immunocompromised

Of people who were sick enough to be hospitalized with coronavirus, 89% had at least one chronic condition. About half of those patients had high blood pressure and obesity, about a third of the patients had diabetes, and another third had cardiovascular disease.

People with obesity tend to be more likely to develop heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other health issues.

Besides staying fit, what else can one do to protect themselves from COVID-19? Vitamin D, Glutathione, and most importantly, gut health play an enormously important role in determining one’s ability to fight off COVID-19.

Vitamin D

Some studies have indicated that vitamin D deficiency is linked to poorer outcomes with coronavirus. There are not any studies showing the vitamin D supplementation can help one overcome the virus, and other underlying risk factors, such as heart disease and diabetes make it hard to draw conclusions because people with these conditions are often low in vitamin D.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njrQxR0neV4&list=WL&index=2&t=102s

Glutathione

COVID-19 deaths are attributed to something called a “cytokine storm”, a physiological reaction in which our immune system causes an excessive release of cytokines, a pro-inflammatory signaling molecule. The only treatments modern medicine knows to do for this symptom are oxygen therapy and assisted ventilation.

A new study has evaluated the effects of dose oral and IV glutathione in the treatment of two patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.

Oral and IV glutathione, glutathione precursors (N-acetyl-cysteine) and alpha lipoic acid may represent a novel treatment approach for blocking NF-κB and addressing “cytokine storm syndrome” and respiratory distress in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.

Science Direct – Respiratory Medicine Case Reports

To be clear, that’s only two cases that were studied in that paper. There are other papers that support the hypothesis, but there is nothing yet conclusive.

Dr. Richard Horowitz, a board-certified internist with a private integrative medicine practice is considered to be one of thes top Lyme disease doctors. He has built a practice around combining classical and complementary treatments for Lyme diseases. 

“It is a miracle and it’s not,” says Horowitz of glutathione, which he has used on thousands of patients in his medical practice over the past 30 years. “It’s already in the literature—there are published articles on glutathione showing that it has anti-viral activity against herpes viruses, HIV, and hepatitis. The problem is, all of the COVID research is happening through pharmaceutical companies. No one is looking at natural approaches. You hear a little about how low vitamin D might put you at risk, so it’s coming out in dribs and drabs.” And just like with vitamin D, you can be deficient in glutathione—especially if you’ve been exposed to a lot of environmental toxins (which is everyone). Older people are also more likely to be depleted of the compound.

Two Potential Treatments for COVID-19 Unfold in the Hudson Valley 

Gut Health

In the first case of novel coronavirus reported in the U.S., the patient reported two days of nausea and vomiting along with diarrhea in addition to respiratory symptoms. In some small studies, researchers have linked patients with gastrointestinal issues to poorer coronavirus outcomes. Poor gut health seems to equate to severe disease symptoms including higher fevers and a greater risk of liver injury.

The suggestion is that the gastrointestinal symptoms are caused by the virus invading the ACE2-containing cells that are found throughout the bowel. This, together with the presence of the virus in the stool, suggests the gastrointestinal tract as another possible route of infection and transmission.

The Conversation – Worried about coronavirus? Pay attention to your gut

But it’s not just that the virus attacks the gut. Science is on the verge of discovering that our gut microbiome supplies our entire body with its microbiome. And what they don’t yet know, but is nevertheless true, is that a body with a healthy, diverse, and plentiful microbiome is a much less hospitable host for foreign invaders.

The health of our gut bacteria plays a crucial role in how our immune system reacts to every disease, including coronavirus. Diet is crucial to developing and maintaining healthy gut flora. The wider variety of raw vegetables and herbs one consumes, the more diverse one’s gut bacteria will be. And diversity is key to a healthy microbiome.

This article, How To Heal Your Gut, goes into detail about how to develop a healthy gut microbiome and is the basis for ridding the body of and being less susceptible to nearly every disease.

From our sister company, Green Lifestyle Market, here are our top four supplement picks for anyone concerned with COVID-19:

But don’t skip the aforementioned gut health article! Diet is far more important than supplements, and if finances are tight, put your money towards healthy food before you purchase supplements.

And now that you have some facts to arm yourself against COVID-19, let’s talk analysis some of the so-called “fake news” that’s going around regarding coronavirus.

Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories

Germs are real, and they can kill you. But cellular health is what separates the vulnerable from the robust immune systems. Your gut is the engine that powers your body. While this should seem obvious to anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of biology, it’s still considered conspiracy theory to suggest that getting ill with a virus is anything more than bad luck, even though the science continually supports our position. Speaking of conspiracy theories, let’s debunk a few.

Coronavirus Doesn’t Exist

Enough people have been sick and enough people have died that this conspiracy should be put to rest. On social media, there are lots of posts asking, “Do you know anyone who has actually gotten coronavirus?” Yes, I do. And when I comment as such I am often accused of being in on the conspiracy, or they say the people I know died of something else falsely attributed to COVID-19 (which does have some truth to it, considering that healthy people do not die from this disease). The problem with the biggest conspiracies, like flat-earth, is that people just don’t keep secrets well enough. If coronavirus were a hoax, there would be massive amounts of people sounding the alarm.

It’s 5G

There are many people claiming that people who think they are suffering from COVID-19 are actually being killed by 5G wireless. The timing is close but not close enough to make this conspiracy work. It is possible that 5G infrastructure could exacerbate symptoms, but that’s also true for glyphosate, refined sugar, fluoride, and other toxins we ingest daily. There aren’t yet any studies on the effects of 5G because the cellular companies don’t want them, but some studies that indicate 4G is associated with problems for our health. And if the studies’ conclusions are true, 5G is likely to be worse. But there are also a lot of studies that indicate cellular frequencies don’t directly harm our health. What we do know for sure is that radiation from towers and our cellphones, and Wi-Fi, is harming birds and bees along with other animals and insects. This is reason enough to be concerned with our own health regarding EMFs. Whether it’s direct effects or indirect (environmental degradation), EMFs aren’t good for us.

The Coronavirus is a Bioweapon

You may have heard that Bill Gates had coronavirus created In a lab to implement the New World Order and install human trackers on all of us.

Bill Gates is a dangerous man with many foolish ideas. But he’s not powerful enough to pull this off and I don’t think he’s “evil”. He seems to be a perfect example of how true this quote is:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

Upton Sinclair or curmudgeon H. L. Mencken

But the engineering of viruses is happening, and we’d be foolish to completely rule out the idea that a government or company would accidentally or purposefully release such a virus. The vast majority of scientists don’t believe COVID-19 was engineered accidentally or on purpose, but viruses are being genetically modified. There are some scientists who do believe COVID-19 was manufactured, and governments, as well as corporations, have been known to lie to us every chance they get.

This is a Made Up Virus to Get Trump Out of Office

The virus isn’t made up, but it’s pretty clear the left is leveraging the pandemic to help get Trump out of office. For evidence, there is plenty of blatant hypocrisy to chose from. If things were reversed, the Democrats would be all about restarting the economy while republicans would be sheltering in place and screaming about how Dems are trying to kill us all.

Conclusion

I stated that healthy people aren’t dying from coronavirus. With some online searching, it is easy to find plenty of media claiming this is not true. Stories such as one about a very physically fit man who almost died of coronavirus and one about a child in California who died are used as “A devastating reminder that COVID-19 infects people of all ages.” But it’s important to note that these cases are extremely rare, and one should also understand that strength and physical fitness are not synonymous with good health. Many men who can run marathons in their 20s and 30s develop autoimmune diseases in their 40s. Children who died, as rare as this is, were not in good health either.

If the CDC had our best interests in mind, they would have at least said something about the importance of eating right during a pandemic instead of trying to frighten us into sheltering in place.




Does Elderberry Increase Risk Of Death With CoVID-19?

There are a few articles circulating around the natural-health blogosphere that warn of potential increased risk when consuming Elderberry to avoid or lessen the severity of the coronavirus.

…elderberry also enhances cytokine response, which may not be so good when one of the complications of pandemic influenza is cytokine storm.

Vancouver Sun – 2010

This concern comes from a 2001 study that concluded:

Sambucol Elderberry Extract and its formulations activate the healthy immune system by increasing inflammatory cytokine production.

NCBI – 2001

But a 2016 study showed Elderberry can inhibit cytokines in people who have a health issue where cytokines were not helpful to the overall situation. 

A natural preparation “Inflaminat” based on black elder berries (Sambucus nigra L.), violet tricolor herb (Viola tricolor L.) and calendula flowers (Calendula officinalis L.) possessing anti-cytokine activity was developed using the designed algorithm. 

Science Direct – 2016

Furthermore, cytokine storms are a consequence of severe infections. A cytokine storm will happen when someone is severely ill with any influenza or any Coronavirus. At this point, when someone is dealing with a cytokine storm, the person should be hooked up to a ventilator.

Conclusion – Is Elderberry Safe with Coronavirus?

Elderberry, as a preventative tonic, without any added sugars, is perfectly safe to consume if someone is trying to avoid or lessen the severity of a virus, including coronavirus. Elderberry seems to suppress viruses and may reduce inflammation. Also, check out other supplements to defend against coronavirus.




Coronavirus – Your Guide to the CoVID-19 Pandemic

Coronavirus is a well-known pathogen that primarily targets the human respiratory system. Previous outbreaks of coronaviruses (CoVs) include the “severe acute respiratory syndrome,” (SARS, SARS-CoV) from 2003 and the “Middle East respiratory syndrome,” (MERS, MERS-CoV) from 2012.

The coronavirus may spread from person to person much more easily then initially thought. Bars, restaurants, and many “non-essential” stores are closed all around the U.S. and the world. Restrictions could last for months. Also, we’re out of toilet paper.

What is the coronavirus? Should you be concerned? What can you do to stay well? Isn’t this just the same virus that causes colds? Did the Chinese government create this virus in a lab in order to quell the protests? Or did the Democratic establishment create the virus and send it to China just in time to have it come back to America to win the election for Bernie Sanders by propping up Medicare for All? Some of those are great questions. Let’s dive in.

Index

Linfa Wang directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. He says the coronaviruses are named so because when seen under a microscope the spiky surface of the virus resembles a crown. The caption for the image above comes from the CDC’s website:

This illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses. Note the spikes that adorn the outer surface of the virus, which impart the look of a corona surrounding the virion, when viewed electron microscopically. A novel coronavirus, named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China in 2019. The illness caused by this virus has been named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).”

CDC Image Libray

Glossary:
  • Coronavirus – A group of related viruses that infect mammals and birds
  • SARS – A disease called “severe acute respiratory syndrome” caused by the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV)
  • SARS-CoV – The strain of virus that causes SARS
  • MERS – A disease called “Middle East respiratory syndrome” caused by MERS-CoV.
  • MERS-CoV – The Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus is distinct from SARS coronavirus and the common-cold coronavirus
  • Coronavirus pandemic – The current pandemic of COVID-19 in 2019 and 2020 caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)
  • CoVID-19 – The illness caused by SARS-CoV-2
  • SARS-CoV-2 – Previously known as “2019 novel coronavirus” (2019-nCoV), this virus is behind (2019-2020) coronavirus pandemic (ongoing at the time of publishing)
  • Zoonotic – Refers to a disease transmitted from animals to people, or more specifically, a disease that normally exists in animals that can infect humans
  • Pandemic – WHO defines as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people”

Before SARS, the world had little concern for the coronaviruses, mostly known for causing common colds. The 2003 SARS outbreak started a global search for animal viruses that could find their way to humans. For the first time, scientists were aware of a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential.

The emergence of SARS-CoV heralded a new era in the cross-species transmission of severe respiratory illness with globalization leading to rapid spread around the world and massive economic impact3,4. Since then, several strains—including influenza A strains H5N1, H1N1, H7N9, and MERS-CoV—have emerged from animal populations, causing considerable disease, mortality, and economic hardship for the afflicted regions.

Nature Medecine

Current Status

SARS-CoV caused 775 world-wide deaths in 2003. MERS-CoV caused 79 world-wide deaths in 2012. As of March 15th, 2020, at 10:20 am, SARS-CoV-2 has killed 5,984. The United States reports 3,046 cases with 60 deaths at this time.

On March 24th Word Meter reports 414,661 coronavirus cases worldwide with 18,552 deaths and 108,293 recovered. Click here for current statistics.

Coronavirus Timeline

Coronaviruses were not worrying scientists before 2003; they were only known to cause mild upper respiratory tract infections. 

SARS-CoV emerged in 2003 as a pandemic. It originated in Guangdong Province, China and spread to 37 different countries, causing 8,273 confirmed cases of infection, of which 775 (9%) were fatal. It disappeared as inexplicably as it started.

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was identified in 2012 in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia leading to 182 total confirmed cases, of which 79 (43%) were fatal. Epidemiologists initially feared it could become a massive, deadly pandemic; the death rate started out at around 30%. But the virus remained geographically restricted.

Screenshot YouTube/Chen Qiushi

December 30Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, messaged his college-classmates telling them about the “unspecified coronavirus.”

December 31– China alerted The World Health Organization (WHO) to dozens of cases of an unusual pneumonia being treated in Wuhan, a port city of 11 million people in the central Hubei province. The virus was unknown.

 January 1– Many who worked at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market were sick, so the market was shut down. The market is known as a “wet wild-animal market.” A “wet market” sells meat, fish, produce, and other perishable goods. A “wild-animal market” sells… you guessed it!

January 2Li was summoned to a police station. He was told his warning was illegal and had “severely disturbed the social order.” He signed a statement that he says read, “We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice — is that understood?” Li capitulated and was not detained. He returned to work.

January 11 – Chinese state media reported the first known death.

January 12 – the first confirmed United States case was reported in Washington State – a man in his 30s developed symptoms after returning from a trip to Wuhan.

January 20 – President Xi Jinping issued a statement on coronavirus, vowing to “resolutely curb the spread of the epidemic.”

January 23 – China stopped allowing planes and trains to leave the city of Wuhan and suspended buses, subways, and ferries. At this point, at least 17 people had died and more than 570 others had been infected, including in Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, South Korea and the United States. No deaths had outside of China had occurred.

January 30 – WHO declared COVID-19 a “public health emergency of international concern”. Also, the U.S. State Department warned travelers to avoid China.

January 31213 people had died and nearly 9,800 had been infected worldwide. The Trump administration suspended entry into the United States for foreign nationals who had visited China within the previous two weeks.

Dr. Li Wenliang told the New York Times that officials should have shared information about the coronavirus at the beginning of the outbreak. “I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.”

February 2 – A 44-year-old man in the Philippines died after being infected. Officials believe he was the first to die of the disease outside of China. At this point, more than 360 people had died from COVID-19, 359 of them in China.

February 5 – In Yokohama, Japan, more than 3,600 passengers were quarantined aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship. The number of people who tested positive for the virus was the largest cluster of coronavirus cases outside of China.

A total of 621 people aboard the ship were infected.

February 7 – Researchers in Guangzhou, China suggested that pangolins sold at the Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market were a potential source of the coronavirus outbreak. Pangolins were not listed as inventory sold at the market. Pangolin sales are illegal, which could explain the omission.
 Dr. Li Wenliang died from contracting the coronavirus. He was hailed as a hero by many for trying to ring early alarms that a cluster of infections could spin out of control.

February 10 – the death toll in China hit 908, with the number of confirmed cases up to 40,171.

February 13 – Officials reported more than 14,840 new cases of confirmed infected in Hubei Province

February 14 – An 80-year-old Chinese tourist died in Paris – the first coronavirus death outside of Asia.

February 21 – After the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in South Korea was linked to a surge of infections in the country, the government shut down thousands of kindergartens, nursing homes, and community centers and ended all political rallies in the capital, Seoul.

February 19 – Iran announced two cases, then hours later reported that both patients died.

February 20 – Global coronavirus cases reached nearly 76,000, according to W.H.O.

February 22 – Iran announced two additional deaths. The source of the virus in Iran is not known.

February 23 – Italian officials confirmed a third death. Local authorities closed the Venice Carnival and suspended sporting events.

February 24The Atlantic published an article, “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus. Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.

February 24 – The Trump administration asked Congress for $1.25 billion for coronavirus response. At this time, 35 confirmed cases and no deaths had been reported in the U.S. Iran announced it had 61 coronavirus cases and 12 deaths, more than any other country except China. In Italy, 800 people had been infected. The death toll in China rose to 2,595 with 77,262 confirmed cases. Italy reported its 7th death.

February 26 – Health officials in Brazil reported that a man who returned from a business trip to Italy tested positive for the coronavirus. This was the first known case in Latin America.

February 27 – Germany had nearly 60 cases and France reported 57. Both England and Switzerland reported additional cases, while Belarus, Estonia, Denmark, Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and Lithuania all reported their first infections.

February 28 – Nigeria confirmed its first case. The patient was an Italian citizen who had returned to Lagos from Milan.

February 29 – South Korea reported 813 confirmed cases, bringing the total to 3,150 with 17 deaths. Iran reported its cases had jumped from 388 cases to 593 in a 24 hour period, with the death toll at 43.  

The United States recorded its first coronavirus death as the number of global cases rose to nearly 87,000. The Trump administration issued its highest-level warning, known as a “do not travel” warning, for areas in Italy and South Korea, the areas most affected by the virus, barred all travel to Iran, and denied any foreign citizen U.S. entry if they had visited Iran in the previous 14 days.

March 2 – Saudi Arabia’s health ministry announced its first coronavirus case.

March 3 – Italy announced their death toll reached 77, equalling the total deaths in Iran, and the W.H.O reported that coronavirus has infected more than 90,000 around the globe, killing about 3,000.

March 4 – A strict ban on the consumption and farming of wild animals was initiated across China.

March 7 – The coronavirus caused nearly 3,500 deaths and infected another 102,000 people in more than 90 countries.

March 8 – Italy imposed a strict quarantine in the state of Lombardy and 14 other areas, affecting a total of 16 million people.

March 9 – Iran released an estimated 70,000 prisoners, without specifying if or when those released would need to return. Germany reported its first two deaths, with more than 1,100 confirmed cases.

The U.S. announced that more than 570 people in 36 states were infected. The Atlantic reported, “…we can only verify that 4,384 people have been tested for the coronavirus nationwide.” Meanwhile, South Korea had tested more than 100,000 people.

March 10 – Iran and Italy recorded their highest death tolls in a single day: 54 people died in Iran and 168 fatalities were recorded in Italy. 

March 11 – Turkey, Ivory Coast, Honduras, and Bolivia confirmed their first cases and WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

March 12 – Global fatalities surpassed 4,600 with infections exceeding 126,100 cases.

March 13 – The NY Times reports that Sick People Across the U.S. Say They Are Being Denied the Coronavirus Test.

March 14 – South Korea had tested more than 248,000 people and identified 8,086 cases.

March 15 – New York reported 950 cases, Washington is the second hardest hit with 769, and California is a distant third with 375. California ordered 7 million residents to “shelter in place”. The White House urged older Americans to stay home and for everyone to avoid groups of more than 10 people.

The CDC said that “Gatherings of 50 or more people should be canceled for 8 weeks.

March 16 – A study shows coronavirus can survive in the air in some settings. And the U.S. death toll rose to 69 across 12 states. The total number of confirmed cases in the U.S. climbed to 3,774. The worldwide death toll was more than 6,500. Restaurants and bars closed around the country. Restrictions could last months. Canada closed its border.

March 17 – CNN reports that “Trump is finally starting to take the pandemic seriously.” He is quoted as saying, “It’s bad. It’s bad.”

March 18th – Trump Invokes The Defense Production Act to force American industries to manufacture medical supplies. Hospitals and other health workers are running out of M95 masks, gowns, gloves, and ventilators.

March 19th – Trump wants direct payments of $1,000 for adults, $500 for kids in the coronavirus stimulus bill.

March 20th – U.S. Tax Deadline Extended is extended to July 15th, Illinois, New York and California have ordered all residents to stay home, and
Washington D.C. reported its first death from the virus.

March 21st – 300K cases worldwide, 195,000 Americans who are symptomatic have been tested.

March 22nd – Fifteen states in the U.S. have “stay at home” executive orders in place.

March 23rd – 2020 Tokyo Olympics postponed until 2021 and Trump wants to get the economy moving again, saying he may scale back closures despite worsening outbreak.

March 24th – The death toll in Italy’s Lombardy is around 400 in a day.

Coronavirus Transmission

The Wuhan Seafood Market was believed to be ground zero for the zoonotic CoVID-19. The market sells not just fish, but also snakes, raccoon dogs, porcupines, deer, and more. Hundreds of dead animals were inside cages at the market within close proximity to other food and humans. But now reports are coming in that the market was not the epicenter.

How Did We Catch It?

Footage obtained by CNN

Scientists believed the Wuhan market was where the virus first spread to humans. It should be noted that the Wuhan market was not unusual. There are hundreds of similar markets in mainland China that offer a wide range of exotic animals for many purposes. It is unclear which animal transferred the virus to humans — bat, snake, and pangolin have all been suggested, with the pangolin being the most likely culprit.

These animals have their own viruses. These viruses can jump from one species to another species, then that species may become an amplifier, which increases the amount of virus in the wet market substantially.”

Hong King University Virologist Profreesser Leo Poon

Poon says that when a large number of people visit these kinds of markets, the risk of the virus jumping from animals to humans rises sharply. Poon was one of the first scientists to decode the SARS coronavirus during the 2003 epidemic. That outbreak was linked to civet cats used as food in a Guangzhou market.

China May Have Found Patient Zero

New government documents from China say they found an earlier case of COVID-1. They say a 55-year-old man from Hubei province contracted the virus on Nov. 17, 2019. The documents suggest the disease was spreading, undetected, for weeks before anyone was aware of the impending outbreak.

Chinese authorities have so far identified at least 266 people who were infected last year, all of whom came under medical surveillance at some point.

Some of the cases were likely backdated after health authorities had tested specimens taken from suspected patients.

Interviews with whistle-blowers from the medical community suggest Chinese doctors only realised they were dealing with a new disease in late December.

China’s first confirmed Covid-19 case traced back to November 17

How Contagious Is It?

It seems to be very contagious. With new research, it’s now believed that the virus can spread much more easily then initially thought.

Initially, the experts thought that the virus seemed to be spreading mainly from person-to-person, with those who come in close contact with one another, within about 6 feet. They said that transmission was happening when a previously uninfected person breathes in respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

Then reports came out that in some environments, the virus can become airborne. Hospitals are an ideal setting for aerosol transmission, which is the suspension of tiny particles or droplets in the air. 

The virus is transmitted through droplets, or little bits of liquid, mostly through sneezing or coughing. When you do an aerosol-generating procedure like in a medical care facility, you have the possibility to what we call aerosolize these particles, which means they can stay in the air a little bit longer.”

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit

Scientists calculate how easily a virus spreads and give it a “basic reproduction number,” or R0 (pronounced R-nought). This number predicts how many people are likely to catch a given pathogen from a single infected person.

Currently, SARS-CoV-2 (yes, that’s the one causing the COVID-19, the current coronavirus), was estimated to have an R0 at around 2.2. This means a single infected person will infect about 2.2 others, on average. The flu typically has an R0 of 1.3. These numbers are likely to be revised as this article is written.

New studies in several countries along with a large coronavirus outbreak in Massachusetts have shown that the virus does spread much more easily than previously thought. A Massachusetts coronavirus cluster with at least 82 cases appears to have been started by people who were not yet showing symptoms. More than half a dozen recent studies show that people without symptoms are causing substantial amounts of infection.

We won’t know how contagious it is until we have much better testing. More on that clusterfuck of a situation below.

Can Someone Spread the Virus Without Being Sick?

It was initially believed that coronavirus does not seem to be very contagious until a person is symptomatic, coughing and sneezing near others. But now we believe the virus probably does spread before people show symptoms, as there have been many reports of this happening, but it is not thought to be transferred as easily this way.

Of course, this could change at any moment. The virus could become much more virulent and contagious, or it could become less dangerous with a mutation or two.

Can Coronavirus Spread From Contact With Contaminated Surfaces Or Objects?

The CDC believes it’s possible for a person to contract COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, like with gas pumps and the transfer of money.

It’s not the most contagious pathogen we’ve seen, but it is very contagious and can be quite virulent, and at any moment it can become more even contagious by mutating.

Coronavirus Symptoms

Symptoms of COVID-19 manifest after an incubation period of an average of 5.2 days. For those who died, the onset of symptoms to death ranged from 6 to 41 days with a median average of 14 days, depending on the patient’s age and immune system.

The most common symptoms with COVID-19 and SARS are similar. They include fever, cough, sore throat, and fatigue. COVID-19 is unique in that it targets the lower airway, often causes lots of sneezing, and many patients (especially sicker ones) show sputum production, headaches, hemoptysis, dyspnoea, lymphopenia, and intestinal symptoms including diarrhea (few patients with MERS-CoV or SARS-CoV had diarrhea).

Update: Loss of smell and taste could be the earliest symptoms of the novel coronavirus.

Doctor groups are recommending testing and isolation for people who lose their ability to smell and taste, even if they have no other symptoms.

NY Times

https://twitter.com/jamescakmak/status/1239032800541642752

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t This the Same Virus That Causes the Common Cold?

Yes and no. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more serious illness.

Pretty much everyone has heard of E-Coli contaminating spinach or some other leafy vegetable. E-Coli can make us sick and it can kill immunocompromised people, like the elderly. But you also probably have E-Coli in your gut right now. It’s part of your beneficial bacteria.

To say that coronavirus is the same pathogen that causes the common cold is an ignorant simplification.

Is This Just Like a Bad Flu?

It is very similar to a bad flu pandemic in a lot of ways, but the influenza virus should not be underestimated. See the list below of the most deadly pandemics. Two of them were the flu. Coronavirus is more dangerous than the average flu. For instance, it can cause some pretty severe, potentially long-term lung damage.

Flu caused by the influenza virus can be serious one year and relatively inconsequential another year. 80,000 people died from the flu in 2014 (supposedly, but flu death numbers are often grossly inflated).

Who Is Most At Risk and Why?

Update: People who travel and people who are in crowds are more likely to get it. The elderly, people with another underlying illness or a history of illness, and older males are at higher risks of dying from the virus.

The effect of sex on susceptibility to Covid-19 is less clear than the age effect, but preliminary data suggest men might be more susceptible. China CDC found that 106 men had the disease for every 100 women, while the WHO mission found that men make up 51% of cases. A study of 1,099 Covid-19 patients in Wuhan through Jan. 29 found a greater imbalance: 58% were male, the China Medical Treatment Expert Group for Covid-19 reported last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Scientific America

Immunocompromised people are susceptible to more serious symptoms, or death. Younger people are much less likely to die or suffer more serious symptoms. The healthier you are, the less likely you are to contract a coronavirus infection or any other pathogen.

Researchers are looking at the discrepancy of serious cases and deaths between areas within the Hubei Province, where the outbreak initiated, and the rest of the world. In other words, the rest of the world isn’t dying at nearly the rate people were dying in the Hubei Province. It seems the disease is less fatal as it moves away from where the outbreak initiated. And the mortality rate is much lower in healthier and less dense populations.

Severe cases tend to occur in men and many suffer from one or more co-morbidities such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease as well as diabetes. Several sequelae have also have been observed including cellular immune deficiency, coagulation activation, myocardia injury, hepatic and kidney injury, and secondary bacterial infection. 

Is COVID-19 receiving ADE from other coronaviruses?

The phrase “one or more co-morbidities” means the person is already very sick. In other words, if you have diabetes or poor kidney function or if there’s anything else not working properly in your body, you are more likely to get the worst symptoms.

That’s not to say that seemingly healthy people have nothing to worry about. People of all ages, some without known previous complications, are dying. But we doubt anyone with a healthy immune system could die from this. Though, keep in mind, there are lots of unhealthy people who think they’re healthy – in fact, that may be the majority of the younger population.

What Can One Do to Avoid Infection?

People who travel and people who are in crowds are more likely to catch it. Avoid traveling, avoid crowds. A mask may be a good idea if you’re concerned. If you are in a public place, make sure you wash your hands before touching your hair, eyes, nose, or mouth. If you’re at home, quarantining yourself and you’re washing your hands every hour, that’s not helping. And neither is hand sanitizer. But it makes sense to wash your hands often if you’re in public places and especially before touching vulnerable parts of your body if you may have come in contact with a contagion.

But mostly…

Stay healthy! The above advice is very important for anyone who spends time with others who may be more at risk but staying healthy is by far the best defense. There are supplements you can take (see below), but if you’re already healthy, you have much less of a chance of getting infected with anything. To understand how this works, check out How To Heal Your Gut. If you are older or otherwise have a weaker immune system, now is not the best time to go out to eat. If you have a weak immune system, now is the time to eat healthy, whole-food, home-cooked meals and take care of yourself.

Does Hand Sanitizer Work?

Not really. The coronavirus has caused a massive shortage of hand sanitizer, but they don’t work nearly as well as washing one’s hands. Click on the image below for more information about how to wash your hands.

Photos show why hand sanitizer doesn’t work as well as soap and water to remove germs

Also, just stop buying hand sanitizers! There is mounting evidence that the chemical antimicrobial ingredients are harmful, and they could lead to antibacterial resistance. The best defense is a healthy gut. Everything else, from handwashing to taking supplements, doesn’t compare to the power of a healthy gut.

Do you hear about all those people who bought massive amounts of hand sanitizer to sell on eBay? Assholes…

Do Masks Work?

Yes! If you want to walk around like that, sure. But in Atlanta, they’re not having any of that, as you can see below. Then again, Georgia has the 8th most coronavirus cases in the U.S. at 99 (at the time of this writing) so maybe not such a good idea…

https://www.facebook.com/robin.h.latimore/posts/10158516397954589

In all seriousness, if you are concerned and want to ensure that you won’t catch an airborne virus, or you want to make sure you don’t transmit it to your more vulnerable loved ones, a mask makes sense, regardless of the B.S. the CDC is saying.

Wearing a face mask is not a guarantee you won’t get catch it. Coronavirus can transmit through the eyes. Also, tiny viral particles, known as aerosols, can penetrate masks, making them much less effective in some situations. Plus, as mentioned previously, the virus is much more contagious than we initially suspected. However, masks are effective at capturing droplets, which is the most likely method of transmission and they may also catch some airborne contagions.

If you think you might be infected, the best thing you can do for others is to wear a mask and change them frequently (don’t touch the face-part of the mask when removing). And then get healthy so you don’t catch this kind of crap anymore. You owe it to yourself and others.

Update: N95 masks are much more likely to stop spread but there is a shortage around the country so we donated all but a few of ours to a hospital. Homemade masks are recommended and being used all over the country including in hospitals.

Elbow Bumps?

Ugh… I suppose it makes sense, but I ain’t doing it! Then again, I’ve never been a fan of touching people anyways.

Should I Cancel Routine Doctor Appointments?

The mainstream media is saying to avoid public places, but when you Google the question, “Should I Cancel Routine Doctor Appointments?” the answer from the experts is to keep the appointments. But the “experts” work for big-pharma and their answers don’t make sense. Now is obviously not the very best time to be around other sick people if you don’t want to risk exposure.

What Is The Death Rate For Coronavirus?

Some media is reporting that the death rate may be as high as 3.8%, but that’s not accurate. If you look at all of the people who have died and you divide that by all of those who have tested positive for the virus you may get over 3% (though that number is dropping). But this math does not account for the many more people who contracted the disease and did not get tested or did not have symptoms serious enough to warrant medical assistance. Also, the death rate seems to decline when it gets farther away from ground zero.

So far, it appears the coronavirus is more deadly than the flu, but, there’s still not enough information to know the mortality rate of the virus. The annual flu typically kills at around 0.1% in the U.S. CoVID-19, so far, is showing a 0.05% mortality rate within the U.S. this year, according to the CDC as of March 16th. Also, while CoVID-19 numbers are skewed due to poor testing, flu death statistics are radically inflated (when people die for unknown causes the flu is often written as cause of death, and when flu vaccines cause complications leading to death the deaths are often labeled as flu as well).

We probably won’t have good estimates for a while. I think it’s less than 1%, maybe 2% at the highest. But it’s pretty high; it’s probably higher than the average flu death rate. It’s enough to overwhelm hospitals – not because we can’t handle 100,000 people dying, but because we can’t handle an additional 100,000 people dying on top of the mortality we already deal with every day.

Can I Get Tested For Coronavirus?

If you’re in a country with decent medical care, yes, most likely.

If you’re in America, or some other third-world country, the answer is a bit more complicated.

Our testing kits that our country was planning to use did not work properly. We did not have a backup in place. Other countries use test kits that work.

On February 12, the CDC announced that the problem was the result of a faulty reagent. The third primer, the one that picks up the whole family of coronaviruses, wasn’t working properly. CDC officials told labs to sit tight, new kits were coming. As a result, for weeks, only a handful of laboratories in just a few states had the ability to test for Covid-19. Everywhere else, health departments with suspected cases on their hands had to send samples directly to the CDC for testing. And under the CDC’s narrow testing guidelines at the time, only people with symptoms and a history of travel to China were eligible to receive a test. This meant many infectious people were missed during the crucial early days of the virus’s spread to the US, as The New York Times reported.

Everything You Need to Know About Coronavirus Testing

As of March 14th, South Korea tested more than 248,000 of its citizens, identified 8,086 cases, and 72 had died (or 0.9% of those infected). In Hubei (ground zero), the fatality rate stands at approximately 4.5%.

As of March 9th, The U.S. has reported testing 8,554 people. Instead of using the template approved by the World Health Organization, the CDC set out to create its own test kit from scratch, and it was “plagued by delay and dysfunction…”

As of March 16th, some states have seen a big increase in coronavirus tests but the “U.S. still lags far behind.”

As some states are ramping up testing, there is an issue of cost:

Going forward, tests will be conducted at sites including hospitals. And those sites will most likely want to bill an insurer, Kates said. So how much will it cost patients to get the coronavirus test? “It is going to be a function of whether or not they are insured and what kind of coverage they have,” Kates said. “They could face the cost of a doctor’s office or hospital outpatient or ER visit — a particular issue for those who are uninsured or have a high deductible.”

How much does it cost to get tested for the coronavirus? Unfortunately the answer could depend on how good your insurance is

How Bad Is This Likely To get?

That might depend more on the stock market than anything (because our financial system is stupid – obviously, if a little cold can ruin us this badly). Trump indicated that he is just waiting for the weather to get warmer, and it’s true that this could knock out the virus, but he’s starting to come around to the severity of the situation. “Trump says coronavirus upheaval could last beyond August.”

Some researchers believe the virus will infect as much as 80% of the U.S. population.  The prevailing “optimistic guess” among the experts is that the outbreak will last about two months. But it could be much worse.

Epidemic experts from around the world conferred with officials from the CDC last month about what might happen if SARS-CoV-2 “gained a foothold in the United States.” The CDC’s worst-case scenarios would be “staggering” if the right actions aren’t taken soon.

One of the agency’s top disease modelers, Matthew Biggerstaff, presented the group on the phone call with four possible scenarios — A, B, C, and D — based on characteristics of the virus, including estimates of how transmissible it is and the severity of the illness it can cause. The assumptions, reviewed by The New York Times, were shared with about 50 expert teams to model how the virus could tear through the population — and what might stop it.

Between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to a projection that encompasses the range of the four scenarios. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.

The true danger of coronavirus will probably not be the death toll from the virus itself. Experts say health systems may be overwhelmed by the number of cases requiring hospitalization. The calculations based on the CDC’s scenarios suggested, 2.4 million to 21 million people in the United States could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. Fewer than a tenth of those are for people who are critically ill.

The number of available beds is not as critical as the lack of equipment. Ventilators and ecmo machines are crucial for critical patients with this disease, and hospitals are not equipped to handle large numbers requiring them. They will be faced with deciding who receives life-saving treatment and who is left to die.

March 13th – Worst-Case Estimates for U.S. Coronavirus Deaths

Let’s look at the context. The ebola virus outbreak in 2014 caused 2,337 deaths internationally but none in America. In the 2017-2018 flu season, 80,000 people died from influenza. As of March 17, 2020, the U.S. death toll for CoVID-19 tops 80, but it’s hard to say if things are slowing down or if things are just getting started in the U.S.

As the pandemic spreads and the death toll mounts, more data shows a particular danger to the elderly. A March 4 analysis of the first 105 deaths in Italy had an average age of 81. If 70% of the U.S. population gets it (which is likely by some respected estimates) the United States death toll could reach up to 1.7 million. This is why some are calling it the “Boomer Remover“.

Right now, much of the United States is reporting stores being out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, bottled water is running out, and it’s difficult if impossible to find toilet paper or hand sanitizer online right now. Panic is setting in while the stock market is crashing. All over the country stores, especially restaurants and bars, are closing – some by mandate and some by choice. People are working from home, but this is taking a massive toll on the service industry and many other areas of the economy. Welcome to the recession, and maybe the soon revolution. The United States of America has run out of toilet paper.

An Oregon police department is asking residents to stop calling 911 because they’ve run out of toilet paper

CNN March 16th

What Is Trump’s Administration Doing About Coronavirus?

It seems the government is doing what it usually does, which is trying to protect the money of the wealthiest. On Thursday, March 12, the Federal Reserve Bank announced a $1.5 trillion in short-term loan to banks to “address highly unusual disruptions in Treasury financing markets associated with the coronavirus outbreak.” Interest rates have been cut to zero.

Vice President Mike Pence said, “No American worker should worry about missing a paycheck if they’re feeling ill. If you’re sick with a respiratory illness stay home.”But when Pelosi’s coronavirus relief bill was passed it was made so that only small companies have to pay for sick leave. Large corporations were exempted from this requirement.

So companies with 50 employees must provide for paid sick leave, but the companies with MORE THAN 50 employees don’t have to (and you and I know they won’t). So with people in the U.S. dying, it’s politics as usual in Washington D.C. But don’t put someone like Bernie Sanders into the presidency. Gimme a break. And I included the (R) next to Pence’s name because when it comes to issues like these, there are more sociopathic Republicans than sociopathic Democrats.

There’s a Giant Hole in Pelosi’s Coronavirus Bill – NY Times

Trump spent the initial phase of the outbreak trying to convince the public that there is nothing to worry about. Then he slammed the previous administration for how they handled the swine flu.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1238410051758575617

This twitter thread below is a very interesting discussion on how Trump’s administration ignored previous warnings of a potential pandemic and fired the senior staff members with the experience needed to handle such an outbreak.

Trump’s administration has instituted travel restrictions. Trump also said he would suspend interest on federally held student loans, but monthly payments aren’t going to go down at all – payments simply buy down the principle of the loans.

The White House got rid of its global health security team in a 2018. There was no top-ranking White House official to respond to the coronavirus crises. Last month a reporter asked Trump about why he consistently called for “enormous cuts to the CDC, the NIH, and the WHO.” Trump said, “I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”

Trump’s administration is fully responsible for the testing failures.

The government’s incapacity to conduct widespread testing slowed diagnoses, creating chains of infection. It also deprived epidemiologists of a map that could have told them how far and how fast the virus was traveling and where they should concentrate efforts to slow it down.

How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.

America’s shamefully slow coronavirus testing threatens all of us

The Trump Administration is now seeking approval for an $850 billion stimulus package. But don’t forget, we still cannot possibly afford medicare for all.

I find myself wondering if there would be less fear, less hoarding, and less of an economic collapse if Obama was in office right now. 

Outbreak: 10 of the Worst Pandemics in History

HIV/AIDS: This disease peaked from 2005 to 2012 with a death toll of 36 million.

The Hong Kong Flu: The influenza flu pandemic of 1968 killed 1 million people. It was first reported in Honk Kong.

Asian Flu: From 1956 to 1958 this influenza virus originated in China and killed 2 million people.

1918 Flu Pandemic: This influenza pandemic killed between 20 and 50 million people with a mortality rate of around 15%.

The Black Death: The bubonic plague killed somewhere between 75 and 200 million people between 1346 and 1353. Or was it ebola?

For more pandemic history check out Outbreak: 10 of the Worst Pandemics in History

Conspiracy Theories

There’s a lot of good ones. While there is plenty of misinformation, it’s important to know that accidental leakage of the virus by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has not been ruled out.

And while we very much doubt that any pharmaceutical company has a hand in creating or intentionally releasing the virus, that doesn’t mean big pharma isn’t going to capitalize on this pandemic at our expense.

“Pharmaceutical companies view Covid-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity,” said Gerald Posner, author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.” The world needs pharmaceutical products, of course. For the new coronavirus outbreak, in particular, we need treatments and vaccines and, in the U.S., tests. Dozens of companies are now vying to make them.

How Big Pharma Will Profit From the Coronavirus

China Created CoVID-19

Richard H. Ebright, a U.S. molecular biologist, expressed concern in 2017 when WIV expanded to become mainland China’s first biosafety level 4 laboratory. Ebright brought up previous times the SARS virus got loose at other Chinese laboratories. He refuted several conspiracy theories regarding bioweapons research and that the virus was engineered, but he told BBC China that we can’t “completely rule out” that the virus entered the population due to a laboratory accident.

Without a doubt, Covid-19 has emerged as the result of decades of laboratory experimentation with virus technology and vaccines. We do know with certainty that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which specializes in researching Coronaviruses transmitted by bats, formally conducted intensive studies, making alterations to the SARS-Corona viral template in December, 2015. The level 4 bio-lab is situated adjacent to the market epicenter of the recent outbreak, where a majority of serious cases of Corona were first documented. 

VRM: Deconstructing Coronavirus – Viral mutations and 21st century pandemics

In January The Washington Times posted two articles that stated the virus was may have been part of a Chinese biological weapons program. The Washington Post later published an article debunking the conspiracy theory, citing U.S. experts who explained that most countries had abandoned bioweapons as fruitless, and there was no evidence that the virus was genetically engineered.

Iranian Accusations

According to Radio Farda, Iranian cleric Seyyed Mohammad Saeedi says U.S. President Donald Trump is targeting Qom with coronavirus “to damage its culture and honor”. Saeedi claimed that Trump is fulfilling his promise to hit Iranian cultural sites if Iranians took revenge for the U.S. airstrike that killed off Quds Force.

Iranian TV personality Ali Akbar Raefipour claimed that the coronavirus was part of a “hybrid warfare” programme waged by the United States on Iran and China.

Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, head of Iranian Civil Defense Organization, claimed that the coronavirus is likely a biological attack on China and Iran with economic goals.

Ruin China

The CIA created CoVIN-19 to keep take China down a few notches. Multiple conspiracy articles in Chinese from the SARS era resurfaced during this outbreak. Details were alterterd to fit the times. On January 26, Chinese military news site Xilu published an article detailing how the virus was artificially combined by the U.S. to “precisely target Chinese people”.

Population Control Scheme

According to the BBC, Jordan Sather, a conspiracy theory YouTuber supporting the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and the anti-vax movement, claimed the outbreak was done as a population control scheme created by Pirbright Institute in England and by Bill Gates.

They’ve Launched the Zombie Apocalypse!

Buzzfeed News reported on the conspiracy theory regarding the logo of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the “Umbrella Corporation.” The claim is that the logos look similar and so, obviously, the agency that made the virus that started the zombie apocalypse like in the game Resident Evil. The supposed WIV logo was not the institute’s actual logo.

Bill Gates Planned the Coronavirus Outbreak

A video the pushed a conspiracy theory that Bill Gates created the coronavirus was shared by some prominent black celebrities including Cedric the Entertainer, D.L. Hughley, and professional fighter, Derrick Lewis. This video was viewed more than 2.2 million times. “Bill Gates either predicted or planned the coronavirus outbreak,” the video states before playing a clip from a 2015 TED Talk in which Gates explains that a virus could be more deadly than war.

The U.S. Army Brought the Coronavirus To China

A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, Zhao Lijian, tweeted “it might be the US army” that brought the coronavirus to China.

Back To The Gold Standard

QAnon is always good for some mind-bending theories:

The stock market needs to adjust down in order to do a complete reset and move us to a gold-backed currency and get rid of the Fed. The stock market has been falsely inflated for awhile. The CV is the perfect “crisis” to make a lot of it work.

Facebook

https://twitter.com/BabyYodaUSA/status/1239757803113365504

This Is Just a Trick To Get Vaccine Mandates Passed

That’s highly unlikely. But mandates may be the result. There is no vaccine for CoVID-19 at this time, regardless of what some conspiracies allege. But it will probably be developed soon, and it will probably have some issues, and if enough Americans die, this could be the beginning of nationwide vaccine mandates. Only time will tell.

Conventional Treatment Options

A report by the French government claims that NSAIDs — non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs — may cause “grave adverse effects.”

Popular NSAIDs include Ibuprofen, Motrin®, Advil®, Motrin IB®, Aspirin, Naproxen, and Nabumetone.

Roughly translated, Véran’s Tweet:

Taking anti-inflammatories (ibuprofen, cortisone…) could be an aggravating factor for the infection. In case of fever take paracetamol. If already on a course of anti-inflammatories or if you are in doubt then consult your doctor.

Related: NSAIDs Warning – These Drugs Are Not Safe (Motrin, Advil …

At present, there are no specific antiviral drugs or a vaccine for the COVID-19 infection. The only options available are using broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and HIV-protease inhibitors. There are a number of other drug compounds in development.

More research is urgently needed to identify novel chemotherapeutic drugs for treating COVID-19 infections. In order to develop pre-and post-exposure prophylaxis against COVID-19, there is an urgent need to establish an animal model to replicate the severe disease currently observed in humans. Several groups of scientists are currently working hard to develop a nonhuman primate model to study COVID-19 infection to establish fast track novel therapeutics and for the testing of potential vaccines in addition to providing a better understanding of virus-host interactions.

The epidemiology and pathogenesis of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak

Natural Prevention and Remedies For Coronavirus

It may surprise you that my #1 recommendation for preventing the coronavirus, or even for fighting it off, is SF722.

If you want to prevent any kind of infection, the way to do that is to have a very healthy gut microbiome. A healthy gut produces so much beneficial bacteria that it gets pushed out of the gut and circulates throughout the entire body. This beneficial bacterial activity leaves little to no room for infection to set in. Science has not yet caught on to this fact, but they’re close. Regardless, it’s 100% true. A healthy gut is your first and best defense against the coronavirus or any other pathogen.

The number one supplement that virtually everyone needs to help balance the gut and boost the immune system is SF722. It kills any and all things fungal. Almost everyone living in a first-world country has too much fungal activity in their bodies to be healthy. Even if you avoid processed foods and never eat refined sugars, and even if you also avoid all those terrible anti-bacterial products, our fruits and vegetables are hybridized for more sugar and less fiber. SF722 should be in everyone’s home. Anytime you don’t feel well or your body is not healing as well as it should from an injury, you need SF722.

My second recommendation is Mother Earth Organic Root Cider. Like other coronaviruses and influenza, CoVID-19 usually takes up initial residency in the sinus pathways. If you’re a mouth breather, it may set in your tonsils first and then move into your sinuses, but if you breathe through your nose as a healthy person does, it will most likely infect the sinuses first. So while the most important prevention is good gut health, the second most important supplement is the root cider. Sip it a few times a day as a preventative measure and gargle (and swallow) if there is any sign of throat or sinus infection setting in. This stuff is amazingly good at killing anything that shouldn’t be in our body! And it also feeds the most robust infection-fighting beneficial bacteria.

Those are the two most important supplements for preventing a viral infection. If you are fighting it off, or just want to be prepared, I have my usual recommendation list for any virus, including colds and flu, in order of most to least important:

Diet is paramount. Gut health cannot be understated. This is probably not the best time to be eating out at restaurants or eating processed foods at all. Check out Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included and see more diet information here: http://olmag.co/foundational-articles.

The links to the supplements go to Green Lifestyle Market, an online store that I own. If you have any questions, we’ll be available on chat as much as possible.

Sources:



How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is an intestinal disorder that causes pain in the belly, gas, diarrhea, and constipation. Sometimes the condition goes away without treatment, and for some, it ends up being a lifelong affliction. IBS is often associated with stress, depression, anxiety, or a previous intestinal infection. IBS is often referred to as spastic colon or spastic bowel.

What’s the Difference between IBS, IBD, CD, and UC?

IBS: irritable bowel syndrome

IBD: inflammatory bowel disease

CD: Crohn’s disease

UC: ulcerative colitis

Dysbiosis: gut microbial imbalance

With irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), there is an autoimmune reaction to foods, bacteria, or other substances in the intestinal tract. Most conventional medical professionals do not believe that IBS causes inflammation, ulcers, or other damage to the intestinal tract. The digestive system looks normal under x-ray, but it doesn’t function properly. Conventional medical professionals believe IBS has a physiological basis. It is associated with stress, depression, and anxiety. But today, newer technologies are now being used with older methods to reveal specific abnormalities associated with IBS. For doctors keeping up with research, it’s no longer thought of as primarily psychosomatic.

Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are both inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). IBD is not believed to have a physiological basis (it’s not associated with stress, depression, anxiety). IBD can be debilitating and can cause life-threatening complications.

How to Know if You Have Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Doctors call IBS a “functional disease.” A person with IBS will have many or all of the following symptoms, but current medical testing won’t show any physical explanation for these symptoms. IBS is also sometimes called spastic colon or spastic bowel. Symptoms will often fade or even become nonexistent for a period of time.

Symptoms of IBS can include:

  • Abdominal pain
  • Cramping
  • Gas
  • Diarrhea
  • Constipation
  • Alternating diarrhea and constipation
  • Bloating
  • The feeling that a bowel movement may be incomplete
  • Stools that contain mucus, which may be white in color
  • Nausea after eating
  • For women, symptoms tend to flare up during their menstrual period

There is no test to definitively diagnose IBS. Doctors generally look at medical history and perform a physical exam along with other tests to rule out other conditions. If you have IBS with chronic diarrhea, the doctor should also test for celiac disease.

How to Know if You Have Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Inflammatory bowel disease is an umbrella term for disorders that involve chronic inflammation in the digestive tract. Types of IBD include ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD).

UC is characterized by chronic inflammation and ulcers in the innermost lining of the large intestine and rectum.

CD is a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by chronic inflammation of the digestive tract. Crohn’s can affect any part of the digestive tract, from the mouth to the rectum, but it usually affects the small intestine near the connection to the large intestine.

IBD is considered a “structural disease.” This means there is underlying physical damage that causes the symptoms. With IBD, doctors can see physical signs of chronic inflammation or ulcers when they examine the gut.

IBD can cause serious longterm damage to the digestive system, and it will increase one’s risk of colorectal cancer.

New research shows that IBD may be the body’s way of compensating for a “leaky gut.”

“Both have significant overlap in terms of symptoms, pathophysiology, and treatment, suggesting the possibility of IBS and IBD being a single disease entity albeit at opposite ends of the spectrum.”

NCBI

“Irritable Bowel Syndrome may be related to chronic pain, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and may be a strong correlation with Leaky Gut Syndrome.”

Alt Med

Our results suggest that when there is a chronically leaky intestine, defects in the immune system need to be present for the development of IBD.”

Charles Parkos, MD, PhD

Symptoms of IBD can include the previously mentioned symptoms of IBS and the following:

  • Blood in your stools
  • Black stools
  • Weight loss
  • Loss of appetite
  • Fatigue
  • Severe, frequent diarrhea
  • Progressively worsening symptoms
  • Fever
  • Inflammation throughout the body

The Difference Between a Healthy Gut and an Unhealthy Gut

Scientists estimate that there are 100 trillion or so microorganisms in the human body, and they say approximately half of these microbes live in the gut.

“…the number of microbial cells we carry can be as much as 10 times greater than the total cell number in the human body, and their genetic information is at least 150-fold greater than that of our human genome.”

Microbial endocrinology

Dysbiosis (also called dysbacteriosis) is a gut flora imbalance. We now know that such an imbalance profoundly affects our wellbeing. We know that it can lead to neuropsychiatric symptoms and conditions, autoimmune disorders, allergies, cancer, bowel diseases, obesity, diabetes, and more. We know that a gut imbalance can exacerbate every chronic disease. On that note, I surmise that a gut imbalance is the cause of more than 99% of modern chronic diseases.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the importance of gut health and the connection it has with autoimmune diseases. For a naturopath, it’s a pretty interesting time to be alive. While social media giants are censoring natural cures, credible scientists are busy discovering that gut microbes are found all over the body, and how an unhealthy gut may make one more likely to suffer from adverse vaccine reactions, mental disorders, and autoimmune diseases.

Allow me to take some liberties to explain what’s really going on in the gut.

The Gut Microbiome

For a long time, we’ve had this idea that the gut lets certain items pass into the rest of the body and blocks certain items, end of story. Supple, permeable living tissue doesn’t work that way; it’s not so black and white.

A healthy gut has a healthy gut microbiome. A healthy gut microbiome is a gut lining of bacterial biofilm that covers the entire intestinal tract.

We are on the verge of a health revolution. In fact, we’re in the middle of one. Gut microbes are being discovered in various glands and organs and all over the human body. We also have recently come to find that there are not merely hundreds of different kinds of bacteria on our gut, but thousands. This number will keep growing for some time.

Gut bacteria does so much more than just digest food. A healthy microbiome breaks down and removes toxins from the body like heavy metals, glyphosates, and BPAs. Healthy bacteria can also cause an anti-inflammatory response in the gut and throughout the entire body. Our beneficial gut bacteria also produce enzymes we need for good health. The microbiome acts as a shield that lines the intestinal wall and breaks down particles before they pass through the intestinal wall into the body. This process not only allows for nutrient assimilation, but gut bacteria also synthesize vitamin K and B vitamins including cobalamin, folates, pyridoxine, riboflavin, and thiamine. And that’s merely what we now know. There could be many more necessary nutrients that our bacteria produce for us.

Let’s look at B12. It’s been said that B12 is only created in the lower intestine where we don’t absorb the nutrients. I suspect there may be a mechanism for which the nutrients can move up into the lower part of the upper intestine, but there’s no evidence of this. So the consensus has been that humans need to either eat meat, supplement with B12, or eat our own feces. But, a study found that there is actually some bacteria in the small intestine that can produce B12 in some people. This bacteria is less common in people who adhere to the Western diet, and this makes sense because the Western diet and lifestyle stifle bacterial diversity in the gut.

The gut microbiome also houses gastrointestinal immune cells, known as “Peyer’s patches.” These immune cells protect the intestinal tract against infection by releasing white blood cells.

In other words, our gut bacteria contains white blood cells (a healthy gut microbiome contains more white blood cells) and these cells and the gut bacteria together act as a barrier to keep undigested particles (and toxins) out of the rest of our body, and they synthesize nutrients we need. Our gut bacteria also suppresses cancer, helps regulate our hormones, and even affects our DNA! We need a lot of different kinds of bacteria to do right by us. Chronically ill people have less diversity in the gut microbiome. The diversity of gut bacteria helps keep each and every potential pathogen in check.

The Most Interesting Part – THE GUT ALWAYS LEAKS

In my mind, the most important and interesting job of our gut bacteria is how it affects our immune system throughout our whole body. As mentioned previously, there was this belief that our gut bacteria pretty much stayed in the gut, only leaking out of the gut if the gut is “leaky.” This is wholly inaccurate.

The gut “leaks” our beneficial bacteria into our entire body. A healthy gut is a factory that produces a vast array of, and massive quantities of, beneficial bacteria. This bacteria seeps into and all over the body to provide protection from pathogenic activity. But most people in our modern world do not have healthy gut microbiomes.

If you have an ache from an old injury that never seems to heal all the way, you have pathogenic activity infecting that injury, causing inflammation and pain. Damaged or dead cells in the body feed microbes. If the body is full of beneficial bacteria the damaged and dead cells will be feeding beneficial bacteria, and the dead and damaged cells will be broken down and cleaned up by enzymes and beneficial bacteria.

The “bad” bacteria and other pathogenic microbes attack the body, as we all know, and their lifecycle causes off-gassing that damages the surrounding cells while they feed off of the damage they create. With more pathogenic activity in the body, the immune system becomes overwhelmed and begins reacting to allergens.

Have you ever walked by the perfume aisle in a department store, or walked through the cleaning products in your grocery store and suddenly noticed a bad taste in the back of your mouth? This is post nasal drip caused by chemicals damaging the cells in your nasal cavities. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other pathogens feed off of or otherwise benefit from damaged cells. Damaged cells release sugars, starches, and fats that feed pathogens, and they allow the proliferation of viruses. If your body contains lots of pathogens, breathing in chemicals will cause an immediate proliferation of pathogenic activity, which can lead to illness.

A body with massive amounts of a wide variety of healthy bacteria will have a different reaction. The beneficial bacteria will still feed off of the damage like pathogens do, but the vast variety of healthy microflora eliminates the possibility of infection by any one type of microbe. If you have only a few kinds of bacteria in such a situation, one or more are likely to proliferate and become pathogenic, or yeast or other pathogens can take over. Many of the beneficial bacteria within us are capable of causing infection. It is the variety of bacteria that keeps everything in check.

This is a very simplistic way of explaining this concept. Many kinds of beneficial bacteria strains will not ever infect us. Some will only cause problems under very unusual circumstances, and many will cause problems if left to flourish without enough beneficial microbe diversity to keep them in check. Plus, there are also autoimmune reactions and allergy issues that can come into play in this scenario. But the point of this section is to provide an understanding of how important a healthy microbiome is to our immune system. Earlier I wrote, “allow me to take some liberties” because I do not yet see that science has discovered this function of our microflora. So, feel free to take my conclusions here with a grain of salt, but we do know that the gut bacteria work this way (warding off infection) in the gut, and we know how and why variety is paramount to good health (keeps bacteria and yeast in check), and we now know that gut bacteria also is found in the brain and the liver (it’s all over the body, we’ll discover this soon enough). And we know that gut bacteria evolves based on its environment. To understand how to achieve optimum health you just need to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Dysbiosis Causes IBS and IBD and Other Autoimmune Diseases

As mentioned, dysbiosis is an impaired or unbalanced microbiota. An unbalanced microbiome causes poor digestion of food, poor nutrient uptake, a “leaky gut” that leaks food particles and toxins into the bloodstream allowing pathogenic activity. Typically, with our modern, antibacterial world and our limited gut bacteria, virulent bacteria (often antibiotic resistant), viruses, parasites, and lots of fungi are able to flourish in our bodies.

Consider the examples above (the perfume aisle, aches, and pains that don’t heal). It’s easy to understand how chronic inflammation and autoimmune disease works.

Celiac Disease May Be Causing Dysbiosis

If diarrhea is a predominant IBS symptom, celiac disease or another gluten intolerance is a likely cause. Celiac disease is characterized by gluten causing chronic inflammation of the small intestinal mucosa. This causes the intestinal villi (small finger-like projections of tissue called villi which increase the surface area of the intestine) to atrophy (waste away), which leads to malabsorption (nutrition is not absorbed properly). Dysbiosis can cause these symptoms too, so it’s a bit of a chicken-egg issue. Gluten allergies and wheat allergies are also common with gut issues and may be precursors to celiac disease.

Research suggests that many people with IBS and IBD have celiac disease. Medical professionals are starting to see that wheat can trigger IBS and lead to IBD and celiac disease. Research also suggests that many more people have celiac disease than originally thought.

Celiac disease can be diagnosed using simple blood tests, but even if tests come back negative, other gluten intolerances are still likely.

If you have an impaired gut, get off wheat! Even the healthier varieties of breads are problematic until the gut is healed. For more information on why wheat is such an issue for so many, check out Gluten Intolerance, Wheat Allergies, and Celiac Disease – It’s More Complicated Than You Think.

How to Treat IBS, IBD, Dysbiosis

Like almost everything else in conventional medicine, treatments for IBS and IBD focus on relieving symptoms, not on curing the disease. Conventional treatments don’t work because they don’t address the actual cause. Conventional treatments include a wide variety of drugs to manage inflammation (which will make the health problems worse in the long run), minimal (insufficient) diet changes, and a few supplements (often of dubious quality) like fiber and probiotics. For IBS, many doctors also recommend therapy.

In order to manage dysbiosis, one needs to manage their diet. Cut out refined foods, wheat, dairy, and chemicals such as artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, soy, GMOs, and MSG.

How To Cure IBS, IBD, Dysbiosis

Managing disease is for suckers. Ridding the body of disease is a much better option. It takes patience and time, but it will likely take a lot less time than how long it took to develop the autoimmune issues.

Most prescription drugs cause or at least exacerbate gut problems. One can still make the gut much healthier and elevate many chronic conditions while on prescription drugs, but as long as prescription drugs are consumed the gut will not be fully well.

This is also true for over-the-counter medications, recreational drugs, and alcohol. And if you smoke, you’ll have to quit. Smoking wreaks havoc on the gut in a variety of ways. You will never have a healthy gut if you smoke.

One of my favorite quotes:

‘There is only one disease: cellular malfunction. And there are only two causes of disease: deficiency and toxicity.”

Raymond Francis

The key to better gut health is eliminating toxins and getting the proper nutrition. You might be thinking, “If only it were that simple…” And in a way, it is. But in other ways, our modern world complicates things.

Diet for Dysbiosis – How To Build Healthy Gut Microbiota

The best bacteria love the best foods. Nature wouldn’t work right if it were any other way. The healthiest foods are raw vegetables and herbs. A wide variety of healthy bacteria is essential for optimum health. Different bacteria like different foods at different stages of digestion. This means that if you blend your vegetables in a blender before you consume them you’re missing out on feeding some of the bacteria that would have broken down the vegetables to that state. Unprocessed, unadulterated vegetables and herbs are essential for building incredibly diverse, strong, and healthy gut flora. Salads are the key. And not just any salad. I’m talking about huge salads with 15 different vegetables and five different herbs. All fresh. Here’s the salad recipe: Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included. The cranberry lemonade recipe in that article will also help detoxify and bring the body into homeostasis.

Many people can’t digest salads well enough. This may cause discomfort. I recommend starting off with smaller salads and building up while snacking on small amounts of random vegetables throughout the day. But any doctor who tells you that salads are bad for you because your body is different, or because you need more “heat producing” foods, or whatever, is wrong! Most people will benefit from ingesting huge salads right away, and a select few need to work their way up to them, but this is the most important step to building a healthy gut colony in the gut.

Other meals should only include whole foods and these meals should be prepared by you. Do not let a company prepare your meals. Don’t even buy nut milk. Make it yourself. It’s easy and much cheaper, here’s how.

I do recommend grains (brown rice, wild rice, amaranth, montina, quinoa, millet, buckwheat, and sorghum. But avoid oats until the gut is well.), legumes (when soaked and/or sprouted properly), and nuts and seeds (seeds are typically easier to digest than nuts). But these foods will need to be brought into the diet slowly if digestive troubles occur when they are consumed. Once the right kind of bacteria is flourishing in the gut, whole healthy foods are much easier to digest.

Cooked vegetables are also wonderful for you. I eat an 11 cup salad for breakfast and I also usually put tons of vegetables and herbs in my dinner. Dinner at my house usually consists of a grain, a legume, lots of veggies, and lots of herbs.

Meat from a healthy free-range animal is typically fine for people who are healing the gut. So are eggs when they’re from healthy chickens. Like with the aforementioned, these may need to be introduced slowly if stomach troubles occur.

Avoid sweet fruits at first and slowly introduce them later as the gut gets better and better. Most of the fruit that we eat is not what we would have found in nature. We’ve evolved to eat fruit seasonally, and most of the fruit we did eat was not nearly as sweet before hybridization.

The benefits of eating like this also include not having to take a bunch of vitamins and minerals. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies will normalize and the body will take what it needs and discard what it doesn’t. But if you still feel you need vitamins and minerals I recommend Total Nutrition and Liquid Light.

Best Supplements For IBS, IBD, Dysbiosis

Most Important:

The SF722 kills all fungi better than anything else I know of. Abzorb supplies vitamin D, Magnesium, systemic enzymes, and a probiotic. Take Abzorb without food to heal the gut and with meals to help digest the food. Berberine is an anti-microbial pre-biotic with tons of other health benefits, read more here. The MycoCeutics is an anti-microbial fungal complex, and MicroDefense kills non-beneficial microbes including parasites.

Optional (depending on symptoms and budget):

Shillington’s Intestinal Detox is a clay, fiber, and charcoal intestinal detoxifier. It can slow down bowel movements. Shillington’s Intestinal Cleanse kills parasites and restores gut function. It can make bowel movements easier. The two work very well together. Shillington’s Total Healing Poultice Powder is good for ulcers. Syntol AMD is another probiotic enzyme blend. Total Nutrition is a good multivitamin that contains algae, astragalus, alfalfa, seaweed, lots of vitamin C and some B vitamins. Liquid Light is a multi-mineral formula.

If you’re curious about more supplements to help heal the gut here’s a list of 25 more.