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Jonathan: Welcome everybody. Today is the 7th of August 2015. My name is Jonathan. I'll be your host for today. Joining me in our virtual studio from all across the planet are Doug, Tiffany and Erica. Gaby can't be with us today so we'll miss her. Today we're going to connect the dots, so we're going to talk about some topics in the recent news and just draw some parallels between some different things in the health world that are going on right now. We've got GMOs. We've got some stuff about migraines. We've got some new stuff about corporate lobbying. Then we'll talk about gut bacteria and disease outbreaks and a few other things as we go through the show.
Let's start out today with some information about GMO labelling. Doug, do you want to get us started on that?
Doug: Yeah, sure. There was an article published on the SOTT Health and Wellness section on July 27 originally published on Natural Society, an article by Christina Sarich and it's called; Your Votes Don't Count: Politicians Against Labelling of GMOs were huge beneficiaries of BigAg Donations. No big surprise there. I'll quote from the article:
So, no surprise there and the entire house members who voted for this ironically named, "Safe and Accurate Food Labelling Act" were actually paid three times as much as representatives who voted against it. The author goes on to say that it seems odd that the bill would float through congress so easily with 275 to 150 votes when so many AmEricans have expressed a wish to have their food labelled. The Centre for Food Safety said that 93% of AmEricans want their food labelled if it contains GM ingredients and that is just one of many surveys."Shockingly, or perhaps not to the individuals who have been observing the biotech charade, house members who voted to keep the public from knowing what is in their food in the latest land-slide win for Big Food supporters of The Safe and Accurate Food Labelling Act of 2015 (known to its critics as the DARK (Deny AmEricans the Right to Know Act)) were paid three times as much as representatives who voted to give us the right to label or ban GMO foods."
The article goes on to point out a bunch of surveys that have been done in the past. The New York Times had 93% found to be in support of labelling GMOs. MSNBC did a similar survey and 96% supported it; Reuters, NPR - 93% in full support of GMO labelling; Washington Post - 95% a full labelling, etc. etc. There's a whole list here of all these different surveys. It just goes to show how incredibly - it's maybe not that incredible, listeners to this show are pretty familiar with this - all these house members who are supposed to be representing the people. It's such a clear divide here on what is being put through and what AmEricans actually want. It's pretty disgusting but just the way things are going right now.
The article goes on to actually out a lot of the reps who benefited, who got the extra money. I'm not going to go through a list of all of them right now, but I urge people to look up this article or take a look, especially if you're AmErican and see if your representative is actually representing what you want or what the majority of people in your constituency actually want. Some of these reps receive six figure dollar amounts from providers of agricultural services during the 2014 election cycle and other ones were pulling in six figure dollar amounts from crop production and basic industry. Two original sponsors of the legislation, the DARK Act were the top two current house members receiving the most money from the Grocery Manufacturers Association.
It's not really too surprising but I know Erica has some more information on this Safe and Accurate Food Labelling Act. So Erica, did you want to go into that?
Erica: Yeah. One thing that was interesting in the article is talking about the GMA, the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Just this year alone they spent $4.1 million lobbying on these issues. Back in 2012 California was going through a labelling initiative and I had an opportunity to be there and see some speakers talking about it and the tone of the conference was really about "everybody wanted it", like you said, 95% of AmEricans wanted this labelling. The GMA was very forcefully involved in that California bill not passing and it didn't pass, which is surprising since so many people wanted it.
But you see with this kind of lobbying money that really consumers don't have any rights. They really confused the issue in California by saying that putting a GMO label on a product would cost the consumer more, which is total BS. The DARK Act overrides any state and local GMO labelling laws and it also regulates the use of the term "natural" on food labels, which we've talked about in previous shows; things like nano-particles; are those considered natural or not.
Basically the legislation pre-empts any state and local restriction and labelling requirements. So it's obviously a rigged game and Vermont which has been really pushing for GMO labelling, especially this year. One thing that Representative Peter Welch, a democrat from Vermont said is that, "Fundamentally this legislation takes away from your state and mine the ability to do what we believe is right in the interests of our consumers and let them know what they're buying."
So it looks like just another rigged thing. They call it the DARK Act because they want to keep consumers in the dark and just keep pushing through the seriously questionable product.
Tiffany: I think that was one of Obama's campaign promises, that if you wanted to know what was in your food you had the right to do so. But he went ahead and signed the Monsanto Protection Act, which gives Monsanto the right to grow and distribute genetically modified crops even if there is evidence about how damaging it is and nobody can stop them. So in a way I kind of have a problem with this whole labelling thing. I think it's good that people should know what's in their food, whether it has GMOs or nano-tech or anything in there, but it doesn't stop the fact that GMOs are still being grown and still polluting the planet. And even if you do choose to buy it anyway with the label on it, GMOs are still there!
Erica: Exactly!
Doug: Yeah, exactly! In fact there was a recent article on Washington's blog that said that 80% of food in the US contains some form of GMO and that was official testimony. Even if it is labelled, there's going to be some issues there because there's the contamination issue. So if they're not actually doing any kind of genetic testing on the foods, then they're not necessarily going to know if there's GMOs. All they'll know is whether they deliberately put GMOs in there or not.
If you've got 80% of the food that has GMOs in it, avoiding it becomes a greater and greater issue. Even if it is labelled, which I highly doubt it every will be. But this report shows that between 2000 and 2009, 95% of all sugar beets planted were genetically engineered to be able to tolerate high doses of pesticide Roundup. The USDA reports that 93% of all soy and 85% of all corn grown in the US is an herbicide-resistant GMO variety. Ninety-three percent of all cottonseed oil and more than 90% of all canola oil produced in the US is herbicide-resistant GMO. So, just the sheer quantity of it out there is just overwhelming.
Tiffany: Yeah. Like you Doug, I don't think it'll be labelled ever, but even if it does, I think it'll just be something to make people feel better, that they lobbied and they talked to their representatives, the food ended up labelled. But I think it's just palliating or trying to please people and really it should just be banned outright.
Doug: Yes. Absolutely! I know some people have said that the whole movement to have it labelled is actually a distraction. You put the energy of everybody who's against these things into the whole labelling campaign, which is probably a dead end when really what they should be doing is fighting to have these things banned and get rid of them completely.
Erica: Yeah, I agree. Joel Salatin, that lunatic farmer has written several books. One of them is Everything I Want to do is Illegal. He chimed in on this whole thing that it's just more and more regulation and that's what we need less of, not more of, because he's a farmer that raises free range animals. He talks extensively about how this whole labelling thing is, like you said, just a distraction. It's not really dealing with the core issue, which is the fact that these crops are being grown.
Recently on the Science page there was an article; Even More Toxic Chemicals Set to Enter the Food Supply from Alliance for Natural Health. Every month it seems like a new type of herbicide comes out, whether it's 2, 4-D or Dicamba or various different types of Agent Orange and they just keep passing and throwing them into the crops. They just change the name so people don't really know what it is. But I think that is a major concern, that you're not only eating these frankenfoods, but you're getting massive amounts of pesticide toxicity in the process.
Doug: Yeah and they keep on ramping up more and more.
Tiffany: The people out there who eat a bunch of processed foods don't really care what they put in their mouths? Do they even read labels anyway? I mean, really, would they care?
Jonathan: No.
Tiffany: And secondly, if you eat 100% certified organic whole foods, you'd be avoiding most GMOs anyway. That's just another aspect to it.
Doug: It's crazy too because their whole way of approaching the problem is just to go with more and more of their chemicals. They produce these GM seeds that are able to resist Roundup and that just leads to super weeds that can resist the Roundup as well. So then they have to create a new herbicide, or like Erica said, re-label the old one and ramp it up more. So it just leads to more and more of this toxic stuff having to be sprayed to be able to deal with the growing problem of these super weeds. It's like a never-ending escalator. Everything just keeps on ramping up more and more and more. You end up with more and more of these pesticides in your food and more and more toxicity for the end consumer. It's so clear that they don't have any kind of plan for anything. Their approach is just like, "Well, ramp it up! That's it. Things aren't working well so let's just keep doing what we were doing, but more so." It's crazy. It's absolute insanity. The end is going to be a complete and total crash of the ecosystem in general.
Jonathan: It's a convenient metaphor but it makes me think of the movie Idiocracy, if our listeners have seen that. [Laughter] By all rights it's a pretty dumb movie, but it's funny and kind of poignant in some ways. I found myself wondering, "Well when are going to get to the point where we're actually spraying the water crops with energy drink and not realizing that they need water and not soda?"
Tiffany: It's got electrolytes! [Laughter]
Jonathan: But in a weird way we're actually already kind of there, if you think about it. When you really put your mind to the issue, well yeah, it's generating a crop that can withstand more and more pesticides so that when it comes to your table it's ready for dinner time and it's covered in toxic chemicals. You can't wash the stuff off. You can wash your lettuce or your beets or whatever, but it's not coming off. It's in the food. You would think that that would trigger a logical conclusion in peoples' minds but it doesn't.
It makes me think about the point from the first article, the whole voting thing that your vote doesn't matter. Where is this cognitive dissonance coming from where people all year long will say, "Yeah, politicians are dirty, they're sleazy and you can buy them off and they don't have our best interests in mind, they lie" and all these things and then when election day comes around or when there's a bill to be voted on they're like, "Hey, I voted for that!" It's like, "You forgot everything else that you said in the last 12 months.
Tiffany: Or, "sign this petition" or, "write to your congressman to say no to this bill" and none of it works. People have been protesting and signing petitions for years and years and years and things just get worse and worse, so what good does it do?
Erica: Exactly.
Doug: When do people actually clue in?
Jonathan: I have to think that the food itself is contributing to this. We've seen studies and are familiar with the fact that a lot of the food in the modern western diet, the SAD diet (standard American diet) depletes brain function. So is it any wonder that people seem like by and large they're not able to really think anymore or draw rational conclusions between what they perceive and what actions they take?
Doug: There's another interesting article up, posted July 15th from Natural Blaze. It's called; New research shows GMO soy accumulates carcinogenic formaldehyde and depletes glutathione. So this just goes to show, just expanding on your point Jonathan, that it's actually the food itself. You can't wash off the pesticides or anything, but the actual GM foods are tainted in such a way that they're going to harm you if you eat them, even if you could get all the pesticides or herbicides off of them. The article goes into a peer-reviewed journal article called Agricultural Sciences and it reveals that genetic engineering of soy disrupts the plant's natural ability to control stress. It invalidates the FDA's regulatory framework of, "substantial equivalence" used to approve genetically engineered foods (GMOs).
I think this is a really interesting article because of the whole, "substantial equivalence" thing, all the pro-GMO lobbies and things is that they don't need to study the effects of any GMOs or look or conduct any studies at all about how they affect people because they are, "substantially equivalent" to the regular grown crops. So their idea is that, "We don't need to look any deeper into this because these foods are the same thing. A genetically modified tomato is exactly the same as a regular tomato so no safety studies have to be done".
But this article actually points out that there are studies showing that they are not substantially equivalent. So that whole argument that these things don't need to be studied is a complete house of cards. We've known this for a long time. There have been lots of studies that have shown all kinds of different effects from eating these GMO foods. It goes all the way back to when GMOs were first introduced.
The researcher Árpád Pusztai did a study where he was feeding GMO potatoes to mice and found the organ damage fertility issues, all this crazy stuff that was happening. He came forward out of his own conscience and said, "Yeah, this stuff is really messing people up" and he got attacked and his name was smeared and he was completely smeared in the public perceptions. It just goes to show these foods are so damaging and it's a complete whitewash to say otherwise. So I thought that article was very interesting.
Tiffany: Yeah, it is a whitewash. I think I read somewhere - and I don't have it in front of me - but when they say, "substantially equivalent" they're not talking about the foods' affect on your body; they're saying if it looks the same, tastes the same, smells the same, feels the same. Then they just stop there. They consider those things substantially equivalent, not the fact that it turns your guts into a GMO producing factory once you eat GMO foods. They don't even put that into the equation.
Doug: Yeah, apparently the whole term of, "substantial equivalence" comes from back in the 1970s and was used to evaluate medical devices and things like that. So it wasn't even intended for what it's being used for right now.
Erica: And that's the crazy thing too, as I've shared before, there are options to produce food without all these toxic chemicals but it's like our show last week about Big Pharma being mafia, Big Ag is the same way. They have so much control and so much lobbying money and there's so much at stake. But there's been so much research about how organic food can feed the masses, how it can be grown without all these toxic chemicals and those studies are just shot down. Those people are ridiculed. The food may not look the same, you have a deformed zucchini or whatever, but the bottom line is that we don't need this stuff that the research is out there.
We know from being organic farmers for 20+ years that you can produce food without all these toxic chemicals. It's just not a money maker for Big Ag, so they use those same types of mafia tactics to get these bills passed. Just look at that article you started off with; 93% of people don't want it, so why is it still so pervasive?!
Jonathan: Yeah, it's not like changing our tactics here would send us back to the Stone Age, Stone Age being kind of a metaphor, like everybody would have to scrape and get their hands dirty every day to grow their own food and there'd be no time to do anything else. It's totally not true. There are problems with modern agriculture anyway and we've touched on that in the past but we could still have some semblance of farmers producing food for a community so that the community doesn't have to produce all that food for them. This can still be compartmentalized and not be as toxic as it is. It's like you said Erica, it's all about profit and obscene amounts of profit.
The politicians are pulling down sweet money for selling out their constituents. You know they're really just holding up the vaunted history of rats in politics.
Erica: And dare I say it's intended to make people sick? And like Tiffany mentioned, the whole gut bacteria thing. Look at the incidents of Crohn's disease or stomach issues! It's just frightening to see how many people are suffering from these stomach ailments that are obviously connected with diet.
Tiffany: And even if it wasn't on purpose, when you put a bunch of psychopaths together at the head of corporations and you live in a fascist society, even if they don't wake up one day and say, "Okay, let's kill a billion people and totally destroy the earth", psychopaths just screw things up because that's just the way they are. If you put a project in their hands it's just going to turn to shit eventually.
Doug: Yeah. It's true! It's the complete inability for any kind of long-range planning; entirely just profiting in the short-term. So if you keep on that trajectory of only profiting in the short term even when you have this unbelievable evidence of how the current system is unsustainable, just keeping on with it with the attitude of, "Well this got me a lot of money in the past so I'm just going to keep on going with it" is a recipe for disaster.
Jonathan: In the other SOTT shows they've talked about this a little bit too, the difference between people who are ponerized - and I don't want to get too far off topic, if our listeners are familiar with Political Ponerology, ponerized is a term for people in society who are affected by the actions of psychopaths above them. So you know they're not necessarily psychopaths, they begin to act that way and show those characteristics in their daily life and the way they think because that's what their leaders do.
Then you have psychopaths in positions of power who like you said, don't have this capability for real long-term planning. They might have short long-term, like a few years ahead. They can plan something but they're really just planning to rake in more profit. But it makes you wonder - and I don't have any data for this really - but in my mind it makes me think of a certain class of people who are able to plan long-term, 10, 20, 30 years and are just evil. They're not just crazy, "It's all for me" they're actually planning destruction. And I think that there might be a very small class of these people who, whether or not they're psychopaths I don't know, if they have a soul. They certainly don't have a conscience, but there seems to be some kind of difference. They actually are out to screw people over because it's like a sacrificial thing. That's a whole area of speculation, but it makes me wonder.
Tiffany: It's like they benefit in some way from peoples' suffering.
Jonathan: Yeah! Like they're feeding off of it, which of course psychopaths do but they seem to be able to think in terms of 10, 20, 30 years.
Erica: Well definitely the medical industry is profiting off of it, big time.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Erica: People are sick and they need all these medications because their diet is making them sick and it just becomes this treadmill.
Jonathan: Let's see. What else do we have on our list here today? Speaking of headaches, because this topic's giving me a headache [Laughter], should we talk about that a little bit?
Doug: Sure.
Jonathan: We have some natural remedies for headaches here. Doug, do you want to cover one of these articles for us?
Doug: Yeah sure. Probably the most interesting one of them was one that showed from a small study, so you can't necessarily make big conclusions from this, but it seems that a lot of people are being helped with their migraine headaches by supplementing vitamin B2, otherwise known as riboflavin. This article is dated the 31st of August, 2012, so this is going back quite a ways. There was a study where they put people who were regular migraine sufferers on 400 mg of vitamin B2 per day and they found a massive 68% decrease in monthly migraines. These were people who were chronic migraine sufferers and they had a 68% reduction.
So what they are saying is that migraines happen when there is inflammation in the capillaries in the brain. What happens there is that those inflamed capillaries actually rub up against neurons and that is what causes all the different migraine symptoms. So by taking the vitamin B2, you actually make the brain cells work a lot better and it doesn't cause that inflammation. They don't actually end of swelling and pressing on the nearby nerves.
Apparently you have to do the 400 mg of vitamin B2 because people who tried it with 200 mg did not have the same effects. So that was a pretty interesting article and I think that anybody who's suffering from migraines which are completely debilitating and a horrible thing to have to go through, it's worth your while to try this supplementation just to see if it works.
On the one hand, it's not really getting down to the root cause of the migraine. I think what really needs to be done is some research on what is causing this swelling in the first place. My own feeling is that it probably has a lot to do with diet, environmental exposure, immune system response to what's in the diet and what people are being exposed to, maybe EMFs as well, something along those lines. So I think that even if you do find some relief with the vitamin B2, it's worth your while to look at your diet and look at your toxicity exposure and that sort of thing as well.
Tiffany: I don't think I've technically ever had a migraine before because I haven't had the sensitivity to light or the nausea or vomiting or anything like that, but I've had some really hellacious headaches that will last for three days. I remember once I had a headache that lasted for a month. I think it was a sinus-oriented headache. But the thing that caused it was eating gluten. Once I stopped having gluten in my diet, I didn't get headaches anymore, unless I was accidentally gluten-bombed or if I was detoxifying or something like that. The headaches went away. I'd have them quite regularly.
Jonathan: I was going to say, Tiff you had said in a past show that there were a couple of times where you had gluten after you had quit and you got a really bad headache.
Tiffany: Yeah. The headache always lasted for three days. I wouldn't take anything, just to let myself experience it. I could still function and go about my day, but a three-day headache. It was just awful.
Doug: Jeez!
Erica: Yeah, I had a very similar experience Tiffany. I was a migraine sufferer for most of my young adult life and actually it was the recommendation of a naturopath to cut out the wheat and sugar and I tell you, I have not had a migraine since. They can be debilitating, but like you shared, if I eat something and I get gluten-bombed, within 10 hours I start to feel it. It's amazing how quickly it comes on and then it doesn't go away, like you said, for sometimes two or three days. It's almost like a low-grade pain, so you can function but it almost feels like you can't think straight and your perception is off, like you've got inflammation in the brain basically.
Tiffany: And you wake up in the morning and it's still there! You're like, "NOOO!!!"
Jonathan: I can't say I've ever suffered from migraines either. I've had some bad headaches in the past but not like what you said Tiff, where people talk about hallucinations and sensitivity to light and nausea, those kinds of things. But I did notice just as we were talking about gluten, a similar then when I first started on the diet track and was going through all these different things thinking, "There's something here" and not really knowing much about it, the idea that there was inflammation in my brain was a total mind-blower, no pun intended. I had never thought about that before and I think a lot of people haven't touched on that topic. They're like, "Yeah, if I get a haematoma or something like that, then there's inflammation there" or, "If I sprain my ankle there's inflammation" or, "Yeah, my gut can be inflamed and that's IBS" and these different things but the idea that the inflammation can be systemic, can actually get into your brain. I think is something that a lot of people are not aware of.
Doug: I think that that's true for sure. People always have these nagging issues and nobody's really connecting the dots on it and putting everything together, that it can all come back to this same cause. One person might suffer joint pain. Another person might have migraine headaches. Another person might have digestive issues. But really it's all coming down to the same causes. It's the gluten. It's the soy. It's the artificial sweeteners, the MSG, the caffeine, the GMOs, all those different things.
I see it all the time when I'm working in the supplement store. Different people will come in with varying ailments and be looking for different things. I'll suggest anti-inflammatories for something, a natural anti-inflammatory like turmeric or something like that, and they'll say, "Wait a minute! I don't have joint pain. Why would I take this?" Nobody really connects those things. They think that these are just luck of the draw. "I happen to be a guy who gets migraine headaches." Well no! There is actually a cause for this and there's something that can be done about it."
Tiffany: When I was in nursing school many years ago, one of my teachers wrote on the board, "Inflammation is the root cause of all disease". At that time I didn't really take it seriously, but the more I've read and the more I've learned about diet, I feel that that's really, really true. So once you get your diet in order and you wipe out the major causes of inflammation, I think that will go a long way in making you feel better. But then there's other natural remedies and stuff if you get a headache or a migraine once in a while and you don't really know what the cause is, even though your diet is pretty tight.
Doug: And there are a couple of things that can be done for that.
Jonathan: It sounds like you had a good teacher!
Doug: Yeah. There is actually another article here that talks about some natural remedies. It was originally published in Prevent Disease on July 31st. It goes through some things and I think it's a good idea if you're trying to make all the proper changes and you're still getting things like headaches, maybe these things - although they don't get down to the root cause - are some things that you can try just for a bit of relief.
Number one they say is ginger. Ginger is actually a really good painkiller. People don't usually think of it in that way but it's got a couple of different constituents in it that actually helps with pain, gingerols, peradols, shogaols and zingerone. You don't necessarily have to know those, but just know that ginger can be quite good for it. Having a ginger tea or just chewing on a piece of ginger if you can stand the heat can be quite helpful for reducing headaches.
Tiffany: It helps well for menstrual cramps too. Ginger is helpful for that.
Doug: Yeah, I've seen it in joint pain formulas as well. With any kind of pain really, ginger can be very helpful. The next one they talk about is capsaicin nasal sprays. So capsaicin is the constituent you find in hot peppers. It's what actually gives it the heat. The thing is, it is a nightshade, so it is inflammatory. I think that maybe the capsaicin nasal sprays might work through hormesis which we've talked about on the show before; the idea that you introduce a little bit of something that's not so good into your system so that your system's natural reaction to that will kick in. If you have a slight inflammatory reaction to it, the body's natural anti-inflammatory systems will kick in. Capsaicin nasal sprays apparently are quite potent at relieving a lot of these migraine and regular headaches, so that's something that you can try.
Co-enzyme Q10 and magnesium can be a good combo that can take care of it. Supplementing with those regularly is a good idea. Actually magnesium is something that people should be supplementing with anyway because we do tend to have a chronic magnesium deficiency in this day and age mostly because our foods don't tend to have as much magnesium as they used to back in the day because of soil depletion.
They also mention vitamin B2 which we covered already. Essential oils can be quite helpful as well; lavender oil in particular can be really good and peppermint oil. All those things can help to dilate the brain capillaries and help with blood flow and could be helpful. They also mention stress reduction with massage, yoga, tai chi, acupuncture. Our breathing program, the Éiriú Eolas breathing technique can be very helpful to reduce stress and help to deal with migraines.
Tiffany: That's funny that you mentioned peppermint oil. I didn't use oil, I used little peppermint flakes when I used to roll my own cigarettes. I probably used too much, but that would give me a really, really bad headache. So maybe it has the opposite effect for me.
Doug: Possibly, yeah.
Tiffany: But again, I didn't use the oil, I used actual peppermint flakes. It tasted good though. [Laughter]
Erica: I wanted to touch on what Doug said about the E.E., the Éiriú Eolas program. I have noticed in a lot of practitioners who do the program that just doing some pipe breathing, even 10 or 15 rounds and the pressure in the head really starts to subside. It's almost like stimulating that parasympathetic nervous system really relaxes you, so it tames the inflammation.
Jonathan: Well let's get all our natural headache remedies on the table here because we are going to induce a couple of headaches and talk about vaccines. [Laughter] Our next topic in connecting the dots today is the intimidating topic of vaccines; I guess intimidating if you're not informed, but it's just so divisive. Relationships and friendships are being destroyed over this. The whole country is being put into two different camps. Maybe I'm being a little bit melodramatic, but I don't really feel that way, just seeing some of the reactions of people. It's come down to threats, just like we saw with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny who got bomb threats at her lecture that she was going to give in Australia about vaccines information.
But there's this new group now, the American Legislative Exchange Council and Erica has some information on that and how that ties into the new push for mandatory vaccines. Do you want to introduce us to that?
Erica: Yeah, sure. There was an article on SOTT by Brandon Turbeville in July 2015 from the Natural Blaze and it's called; Corporate Lobbying Group ALEC behind the mandatory vaccine agenda. As you were saying Jonathan, they're actually not a new organization but the American Legislative Exchange Council is considered a non-profit organization but it's made up of conservative state legislators and corporate private sector partners. The author says, "This mixture of government officials and corporate agents meet regularly, replete with funding from major corporations across the world. They discuss, plan, write and submit legislation that is beneficial to corporations."
They are a massive corporate lobbying firm. They actually write these possible items of legislation and distribute it among their members. For those who are interested in learning more about this very deceitful organization, Bill Moyers & Company did a presentation back in 2012 called; The United States of ALEC. He does an excellent job just showing the information about them and he states clearly that they're changing the country by changing the laws one state at a time. They draft model legislation with pro-corporate laws and it's been going on for decades and no one really knew about ALEC until the shooting of Treyvon Martin and the stand your ground laws.
That case brought ALEC into the mainstream media and there was a national spotlight on it - kind of surprisingly - and there was this organization called the Centre for Media Democracy. They're a non-profit investigative reporting group. A whistleblower from ALEC had given them hundreds of documents for research and review. It's about a half hour video, but it really shows you, like when we were talking about Big Pharma, these mafia tactics. Their goal he says is to privatize everything and what's so annoying is that they are a 501C3, so they're a non-profit organization. Corporate members get to write off all money that they donate to this organization.
So they get this 501C3 status because their mission is education, allegedly. So it's just so disturbing! But to go on to that article about vaccines, according to this Alan Greenblatt says, "ALEC has been a force in shaping conservative policies at the state level. Today, its impact is even more pervasive. Its legislative ideas are resonating in practically every area of state government, from education and health to energy, environment and tax policy. ... Roughly 1,000 bills based on ALEC language are introduced in an average year, with about 20 percent getting enacted.
It also says that "ALEC is a major pusher of laws regarding medical issues - not merely in the context of the American healthcare system, but also in the context of personal choice. Big Pharma makes up a sizable portion of ALEC's ranks."
They list a few here, like Bayer, DuPont, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer. The article goes on to say that;
...[T]here's no real surprise that ALEC would be one of the driving forces behind the recent spate of "mandatory vaccine bills" popping up all across the country. Its motto should be, "Personal Choice For Corporations. Government Enforced Mandates For People."
I did a little bit of research on them because I remember back in 2012 there was what were called, "Ag Gag" laws being passed. I don't know if our listeners or readers had a chance to read about people who were investigating factory farm abuses. Back in 2011 the FBI decided to go after activists, calling them terrorists. There are a few great articles on SOTT from that time, 2011/2012. One of them is; Business Lobby Moves to Criminalize Filming Animal Abuse on Factory Farms and that were carried by The Raw Story in 2013. Another one was; Shocking: Reporting Factory Farms Abuses to be Considered an "Act of Terrorism" if the Law Passes.
So basically ALEC, this organization, wrote this legislation called the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act designed to protect Big Ag and Big Energy.
"Ag-Gag laws passed 20 years ago were focused more on deterring people from destroying property, or from either stealing animals or setting them free. Today;s ALEC-inspired bills take direct aim at anyone who tries to expose horrific acts of animal cruelty, dangerous animal-handling practices that might lead to food safety issues, or blatant disregard for environmental laws designed to protect waterways from animal waste runoff. In the past, most of those exposes have resulted from undercover investigations of exactly the type Big Ag wants to make illegal."
So people would go to work at these factory farms and they would take pictures or they would document the abuses and these Ag-Gag laws were passed to eliminate people reporting on these factory farm abuses. So they've got their tentacles in so many different areas.
One of the things I wanted to mention about the vaccines and ALEC is Gary Null, who we talked about in a previous show - he did the talk with Bonnie Faulkner about vaccines and they got cut off the air - he wrote an article back in 2014 called; Gardasil and medical torture and child abuse by Big Pharma. He talks about Merck, that very evil corporation that brought the Gardasil vaccine to market in 2006 with great fanfare and proclaimed that it was the first ever anti-cancer vaccine. But it was fast-tracked by the FDA and rushed to market ahead of completed safety studies. When Merck was confronted and criticized for aggressively marketing this product they claimed it was performing a public service by raising awareness about the HPV virus.
Again, you can see this whole pushing of the ALEC agenda. It says; "This lie was revealed when Merck was caught lobbying the 50 states for mandatory Gardasil vaccination prior to FDA approval and by lining the coffers of such groups as Women in Government (WIG), National Foundation for Women Legislators and of course ALEC, Merck was able to influence legislation such that almost immediately after the vaccine was approved, it was part of the vaccine schedule recommended for all girls in all 50 states."
So you can see this alleged non-profit, educational organization has a lot of power, to get these things pushed through. So this mandatory vaccine situation is not really surprising when you look at the organizations like this that are involved.
Doug: One thing about it is that it's so devious. Their methods are so devious in a lot of ways. In the original article that you were talking about there, Corporate Lobbying Group ALEC behind Mandatory Vaccine Agenda, they talk about how they've inserted propaganda through media outlets and things like that to turn this into a partisan issue whereas it used to be that the vaccine debate - if you could even call it a debate - was bipartisan. It wasn't tied to either the right or the left. It transcended all those things. But they've managed to turn it into a partisan issue. And even though it is a conservative group, they have managed to twist things in such a way that it got liberals supporting the vaccine agenda.
They even talk in the article about how if these liberals knew that all these things that they're supporting now are coming from ALEC, which a lot of them consider to be a totally evil organization, they might actually change their minds and start to question what it is that they're supporting.
Jonathan: The partisan thing is such a smokescreen. We're aware of that here on this show, but like you said Doug, they've managed to take people who like to call themselves liberals and shape their opinion to the point where they're like, "Yeah, this is a liberal agenda. This is our government performing a public service" when clearly, if they knew it was coming from conservatives, they would puke and turn and run in the other direction. But it's not like that even matters. This is coming from people (or non-people-and by non-people I mean psychopaths) who are controlling the agenda of the country, trying to push things for profit, for control. The whole partisan thing is just a smokescreen.
Maybe if we could use that somehow unofficially to help people to see some vein of truth in this argument, that would help, but then there's a whole other level of knowledge that needs to come afterwards which is the party doesn't matter. Liberals aren't even liberal anymore and conservatives aren't conservative anymore. None of this has any real meaning in the real world. End of rant.
Erica: One thing that was really interesting in that article - and I want to read it because I highlighted it - it was a statement from Bertrand Russell back in 1953. He says;
So you can see the agenda is just frightening. I know we've talked about this extensively, but oh, it just gets your blood boiling when you look at how evil and manipulative it all is. And as you said Jonathan, this whole conservative and democratic or alternative - people have just so bought into it, it's mind-blowing. I did write an article last year for SOTT about America Vaxxer Nation. The information's out there. I don't have the discussion with people about it anymore because it's such a heated topic."Diet, injections and injunctions will combine from a very early age to produce the sort of character and sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable and any serious criticisms of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible."
Tiffany: It's enough to give you a headache.
Doug: Totally. If you take that quote that you just read, it is very much like that. There are all these things in place to make it so people can't really think. Then they've got two choices; they can be conservative or liberal and they kind of lean one way or the other, not realizing that it's the exact same thing. People are so easily controlled when they buy into an agenda like this, "I'm a liberal therefore I have to support everything that comes forward in the liberal media" or, "I'm conservative, therefore I have to buy into everything that comes forward in the conservative media". So all you have to do is control those two streams of information and you basically are controlling the populace that can't think for themselves.
Tiffany: There's another group besides ALEC. There's an article posted on SOTT from March 2015. The group is called NACCHO and that stands for National Association of County and City Health Officials. Their membership consists of about 2,700 health departments across the USA. They do have membership fees that don't go over more than $4,500 a year, but if you dig deeper into where they get their money from - one of their tax returns they claim $25 million in revenue - they get their money from government and private grants and the biggest agency that gives them their money is the CDC.
So this group NACCHO are involved in lobbying really heavily in Oregon to remove personal belief exemptions for vaccines. One of their proposals is to have immunization from cradle to grave, not just kids but adults as well. They also advocate immunization registries so every time you get an immunization, it's uploaded into a federal registry so you can be tracked and they can contact you if your immunizations are not up to date. So it's not just ALEC. There's this group called NACCHO and what they're doing actually is illegal because if you get grants from the federal government, you're not allowed to lobby congress to pass certain bills, so they're actually violating the law, not that corporations or government-sponsored corporate front group's even care about the law. But what they're doing is actually illegal.
So they drafted a federal proposal to eliminate all these vaccine exemptions and just want to make it really, really, really hard for people to have any kind of vaccine exemptions, whether it's for medical reasons or personal beliefs. They want to make it so you have to jump through numerous hoops to get any kind of exemption. So that's their long-term plan. So it's ALEC and NACCHO and probably other groups that we don't even know about.
Doug: Probably.
Erica: There's another great SOTT article; Mandatory vaccinations are coming: medical fascism approaching fast. It says;
It's frightening! And we see it's been happening over the last two years. It starts slow and then it picks up. Now it's on mainstream media. It's another one of those things that just gives you a headache."NVICAP (National Vaccine Information Center Advocacy Portal) was tracking 58 bills across 24 US states in 2014, ranging from increasing the childhood vaccine schedule to eliminating non-medical (personal, religious or philosophical) exemptions to introducing mandatory vaccinations for children and adults:
Public health officials are joining with lobbyists working for pharmaceutical companies and medical trade associations to pressure state legislators to pass bills that require "vaccine education" and signatures of doctors or other state-designed health workers in order for parents to file non-medical exemptions to vaccination for their children to attend day care or school. Pregnant women are also a target population.
Health care workers, teachers, day care employees and students in NINE states are targets of new legislation that proposes to force children and adults to get federally-recommended vaccines or suffer economic and other sanctions - from denial of employment and education to denial of parental rights to be informed if a minor child has received one or more vaccines for sexually transmitted diseases!"
Doug: And meanwhile, while all this is going on, there was a whistleblower-type situation. On July 29 Cheryl Atkinson wrote an article that we put on SOTT, Congress hears testimony of CDC scientist admitting cover up of vaccine and autism links in black boys.
A senior scientist has made an unprecedented admission: he and his colleagues - he says - committed scientific misconduct to cover up a meaningful link between vaccines and autism in black boys.
The scientist's name was Dr. William Thompson and he says;
Now this scientist actually kept copies of this stuff because he thought that what they were doing was illegal and it's a good thing that he did. So it just goes to show that the whole vaccine - autism connection is basically in the public mind considered debunked at this point. They've had such a press campaign to completely smear Dr. Andrew Wakefield who first put this question forward, who dared to do a study that might have drawn some kind of connection. And now after all this campaign, it turns out, "Well no, there is actually a connection here and we just completely covered it up.""The...co-authors scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study. The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hard copy documents that we had thought we should discard and put them into a huge garbage can."
Mind you, none of this has made the mainstream press, so nobody is actually aware of this. Again, it's enough to make the blood boil. We need to grab some ginger.
Jonathan: I think a big part of this is choice. We don't want to get into a crazy, huge legal discussion about Black's Law and the colour of law and all that kind of stuff, although that would be interesting, but as a society there are certain things that we agree on, like we pay a gas tax and a sales tax to help maintain the roads and those kinds of things, etc. etc. It all is supposed to work together. So people have gotten this sense that they should trust the government.
But as we had mentioned earlier, there's this cognitive dissonance where people say, "Yeah, politicians lie. I understand they're dirty and crooked". There are books of politician jokes for that very reason, because we all have this latent understanding of that. And yet when it comes down to issues like that, it seems as soon as something is into the public mind and they can utilize this sort of propaganda machine that they've got in place where you can create a public opinion and then anybody who goes against that is crazy, it takes choice out of the picture.
We here on the show are not Amish - no disrespect to the Amish, I actually think they're pretty cool - but I'm not saying that all hospitals need to go away, or the medical profession needs to be decimated. That's not my opinion. I think a lot of things need to be changed, but there are benefits to modern medicine. There are benefits to the increases in technology that we've had, yet the problem that comes into play, as we've been talking about, is psychopaths and their influence on the system and how it all gets turned towards profit. If this mandatory vaccine thing goes through, it's not just that a lot of people are going to get sick and then have to get drugs or that a lot of people will have their mental capacity knocked down by being injected with things that are in the vaccines; it's not even all that, it's just that the choice is overridden and some people are going to make a lot of money on this.
I'm kind of losing my point here, but I'm just saying that when they can create a public opinion, use that to override peoples' freewill and then profit off of it is parasitic. It's symptomatic of a larger problem in our society. We are so easily taken advantage of and basically just, "Here, take my money". As Erica mentioned earlier, they were saying that this was a public service, not the vaccine issue, but that Merck had said Gardasil was a public service. The government is saying, "Here! We're helping you. This is a public service but you need to pay for it. You're going to pay with your health. You're going to probably pay with your life in the long run and you're going to pay with the ultimate ability to make a freewill choice about something." It's just like the Obamacare program. If you don't sign up, you get penalized and you're going to get a fee on your taxes for that.
So now if I don't want to get penalized I'm in this system and I have to follow their certain rules, I can't make choices about my own health care. And yet on the public face of things, "Well, it's free health care." Well it's not free. That's bullshit. But everybody's like, "Oh, this is great. This is a revolution. This is such a huge new thing." It's really not. It's just another aspect of the control system in overriding peoples' choice. So I think that's the thing about the vaccine issue that really bugs me. Yes, the contaminants and toxic ingredients are also worth talking about so I'm not discrediting that, but it's this idea that, "We know what's right for you and you're going to do this and if you disagree, shut up or you're going to be called an idiot and swatted off into the corner with all the other idiots and put your tin foil hat on!"
Tiffany: Yeah, it totally takes away peoples' right to self-determination and that's the thing that really gets my goat about it too because there used to be a time where if you didn't want to participate in something people would say, "Okay, that's fine. We still have other customers." But it's like we're being medically stalked. When you're dealing with a psychopath you want to stay away from them. You don't want to associate with them. But these people are taking away your freedom to not associate with their product. You can't just say no. They're going to come after you. They're going to defame you if you speak against them. They're going to take away your benefits. They're going to take away your right to work in some cases, like health care workers being fired for not taking the flu vaccine. How dare they say "I'm going to inject you with this and there's nothing you can do about it!?"
That's the part that makes me mad. I don't care if people want to take a vaccine, that's their business. Non-vaccinators do not force people to not take vaccines, but vaccinators want to force non-vaccinators to take vaccines. That's the part that pisses me off. So I get what you're saying Jonathan.
Erica: This mindset becomes ingrained. Just to use an example, in the state of Hawaii, everyone has to have a TB test to get a job, to go to school and while it's not necessarily a vaccine, they're still injecting you with TB and then doing a skin read and if you come out with a positive, then you have to go have a lung scan. But you literally cannot work in Hawaii or go to school without that TB test. This has been 20 plus years in the works and it's not even questioned at all. Even an exemption is not going to get you out of that TB test if you want to participate in any part of society, really. And that's really frightening because it just becomes normalized in so many ways. "Oh, I want to get a job. I've got to have this TB test." And I fear that that's where this whole vaccine thing is going.
On SOTT recently there was an article about the chickenpox scare that they shut down a hospital. As somebody who didn't have chickenpox as a child, I got it as an adult and I couldn't go into the hospital because they didn't want to infect other people, but they just gave me some sort of antibiotic and I was fine. It wasn't like they went on lock down and, "Oh my god! She's got chickenpox! Keep her out of here!" It was like; okay I didn't get chickenpox as a child so I'm dealing with it now. It's gotten to this heightened state of craziness where everyone's paranoid. That's my little rant.
Tiffany: I've had a couple of situations like that on jobs that I've gone for. They wanted me to get the MMR vaccine. "No, I'm not getting it. I'm taking a titer instead." Or, with the chickenpox because I had chickenpox when I was five and they wanted me to get the chickenpox vaccine. I said no. So I had to pay to go to the health department and get a chickenpox titer. Another time they wanted me to take a TB test and I said, "No, I'm not doing that either. I'll be tested through a blood test for TB, but you're not injecting that into me." I didn't say that in so many words, but I just refused and I had to pay out of my own pocket to get a blood test for TB, which came out negative. But it just gives me a headache. [Laughter]
Erica: Your ability to survive is questioned, them saying that you can't get a job because you're against these kinds of things.
Doug: Or all the parents who aren't allowed to have their kids in day care or in school because they don't want to vaccinate their kids. It's starting to have a huge impact on your day-to-day life.
Tiffany: Related to that, I think in that CDC cover up about autism and black boys, I think I read another article where they tied it to mandatory vaccines to get into Head Start.
Doug: Oh yeah.
Tiffany: So a lot of young black kids go into Head Start and that could explain the high rates of autism found in that particular population because they have to have those vaccines in order to go into day care.
Erica: And it seems since William Thompson came out as a whistleblower they're pushing the MMR vaccine even more. It's almost like, "Disregard all this information and get it! You've got to get it!"
Jonathan: Another thing about this, the tendency towards violence - not just physical violence but verbal violence as well - but also speaking of physical violence, like you said Tiff, people who want to express their opinions about vaccines, easily categorized as either pro-vaxxer or anti-vaxxer, but I think there are problems with that too - we're not saying that nobody should be vaccinated. We're saying look at the truth about it. At least look at this. At least ask immunologists to open their mind and see if there is a different way to do this or is there an argument to be made for the fact that these things don't work at all, which I think there is.
I personally don't have any credibility in the public mind because I don't have a degree in immunology which is another problem, this whole credibility issue. But in seeing the tendency towards violence, it blows my mind. I guess it's not ultimately surprising because we've seen it for thousands of years in humanity; public stoning, public lynching in this country. What made me think of it was talking to a guy almost a year ago who said that anti-vaxxers should be injected with fatal diseases so they can experience what it's like. That's violent. That's a violent opinion. That's like Ted Nugent saying émigrés should be shot.
The way that people can be so easily swayed towards these opinion, people who are ostensibly, at least in my experience, overall good and kind people, give them a public debate like this and just watch them turn into rabid animals, watch the mob mentality take over. I'm not even making this up. I think there was an article on SOTT a while back about how there was an opinion going around that anti-vaxxers should be shot! Get them out of the gene pool because they're stupid!
It's this real quick slide into total non-thinking, non-analytical mind, just go with the mob and the mentality of, "If they're against us, they're weird, they're dumb, so they need to be gotten rid of". It kind of blows my mind. It's not ultimately surprising, but I'm asking myself, "Why is this such an issue?" And coming back to what we've mentioned a few times on this show, the influence of the psychopaths, if they get a chance, people should read the book Political Ponerology by Andrew Lobacziewski, because that touches on a lot of these points; how people who have no empathy for other people yet are not necessarily violent serial killers like Ted Bundy but are much more intelligent, can get themselves into positions of power and wreak their sadistic havoc on the public at large. Then their mode of thinking and their way of acting disseminates down into the public and people start thinking in the same way.
It's just really evident to me in the whole vaccine issue specifically. If you talk about gluten-free you're a weirdo, but that's nowhere near as divisive as this vaccine thing because people have been taught - even just recently, it hasn't been that long, it's been in the last two or three years that people have gotten to this point where if you are against vaccines or if you're trying to express scepticism on the topic then you don't care about other people because you want other people to get sick. That opinion has been firmly cemented in the public mind. It's really frustrating. So I'm going to get my ginger out and get the headache treated.
Erica: If people want to read more about it, Doug, do you want to tell them the name of the article that we worked on together that was very headache-causing?
Doug: Oh no, you're calling me out here. I don't remember what it was called. [Laughter] It was something like; Pro-Vaxxers are the new pro-lifers: Religious hysteria trumps rational discussion in the vaccine debate.
Erica: Thank you.
Doug: And then there was some kind of subtitle to that, but that was definitely headache-inducing.
Erica: We drew some parallels there. It was funny to read the comments because you go back and read the comments that people make and most of it was good feedback and then you get the one guy that's - like you said Jonathan - "Oh I hope you guys get sick and die" or whatever.
Doug: There was one person on there who really seemed to object to the fact that we were talking about them as pro-lifers.
Erica: Oh yeah.
Doug: And clearly identified him as a pro-lifer and was quite offended by that.
Erica: I think Doug had to ask, "Did you even read the article?" [Laughter]
Jonathan: Yeah.
Erica: It was like the headline was enough to just send the guy over the deep end.
Doug: Exactly.
Jonathan: That's totally true. I actually had an experience with a person in the past where I had shared an article on the topic of vaccines and they said - paraphrasing here but almost direct quote - "I don't need to read that. I got all I needed from the title." I was like, "What are you, nuts; quit arguing with me until you've read it!"
Doug: Their mind was made up and don't bother me with the facts.
Erica: In doing the research for the article which includes a lot of great images, I shared with Doug that just looking for images, that everything was just hating on anti-vaxxers, just Google anti-vaxxer images and it's very revealing. I'll just say that.
Doug: It's just illustrative of the whole smear campaign. They were taking all these popular memes and twisting them to promote this pro-vaxxer agenda. That was enough to make my blood boil in a lot of cases. I kind of like memes, so to see them all twisted in this way really pissed me off.
Erica: Touched a nerve there.
Doug: Definitely.
Jonathan: It's like they're seeding the public opinion.
Tiffany: So these are people who say that people should be prosecuted for not vaccinating their children, they should be sued for making their children sick. But if you look back in history, none of this stuff is unprecedented. I think it was back in the UK during the late 1800s or so when smallpox was around and people didn't want to be vaccinated for smallpox, they actually had fines and in some cases they would put people in jail for not vaccinating against smallpox. So there's nothing new under the sun. I believe that this has the potential to come back in the same way and we're going to be seeing the same things. We might see some people with pitchforks and daggers surrounding somebody's house because they're not vaccinated.
Erica: They're coming to get you.
Jonathan: It may sound paranoid, but I don't think that that's that crazy. Whoever is doing it - I'm not sure, is there a "let's screw the public" secret council? I don't know. I do think that there are some...
Tiffany: The council of public screwer.
Jonathan: I do think there are some forces behind the scenes, but I don't claim to know who or what they are. So it's hard to talk about that. But whatever the cause is, as we look at the evidence and we look at what's happening and from what we can see, the public mind is being seeded on this topic and it's very similar to what happened in Germany in the 20's and 30s to where there were good German people who were afraid to speak out because the public mind had been seeded on the topic of Jews in society and they were taught by the Reich or by the powers at the time that this group, the Jews - but just insert "group X" who is outside of the norm, outside of the public - don't have your best interests at heart. They want to screw you over and so they're dangerous.
And then when the police or Gestapo or whoever you want to call them, come through and start prosecuting people and persecuting people, other people, your neighbours or people down the street turn a blind eye to that because of that seed that's been planted in the public mind like, "Oh yeah, I may not agree with it but everybody else thinks these people are bad and if I do say something then I'm going to be in trouble."
You may call me melodramatic for drawing the comparison between pre-holocaust and the vaccine debate, but I do think that there is a conceptual linkage here between these two issues and what's been going on. And also during the slave era in the United States when there were public lynching, I have to imagine that there were many, many people who were around at that time who felt like it was wrong, that it should not be happening, but they were so afraid to speak out because they knew that they would then be lynched, so they didn't speak out. And that I think is starting to happen on this topic.
I myself am guilty of it. I've pretty much quit trying to have any kind of debate with people that I know about vaccines because of how divisive it is and just how heated the discussion can get. It becomes, "Let's talk about something else because you're not going to change your mind and I'm not going to get my point across and we're just totally hitting a wall here." So I think it's working, to the point where people are being segregated.
This is a new form of mental segregation. It's happening in a lot of different areas. We can see it with food. We can see it with medicine, with politics, with opinions about the "war". It's not a war but that's what people call it, all these different things and society being split into these two camps where there are the "normies", the normal's who go along with everything and the outsiders, and the outsiders need to be kept outside and if they try to come inside, then we need to kill them.
Erica: Well I aim to misbehave! [Laughter] The ALEC and the NACCHO are just one way that they're really forcing that "Why not write legislative bills and force these things" and people are exhausted from working and sick from the food and they give up. Its like, "Okay, I'll just go along to get along" so to speak.
Jonathan: Yeah, and keep your head down. Alright, we've got a few other things on our list, so before we get back into another depressing topic, let's talk about gut bacteria for a little bit. Speaking specifically of depression, we have this article here on SOTT; "Anxiety and Depression caused by stress linked to gut bacteria living in intestines, scientists find". Scientists found this, so it's got credibility. [Laughter] The scientists have the final word.
Doug: As long as you've got a white lab coat.
Jonathan: Yeah, exactly.
Tiffany: That only takes you so far. If you speak out against the mainstream, I don't care if you are a scientist; they're going to say you don't have any credibility.
Jonathan: That's true.
Tiffany: So if you have a white coat and you go along with what everyone else says, then you're good.
Doug: Yeah, speaking out you actually risk losing your lab coat.
Jonathan: Yeah. This article says, "Anxiety and depression could be linked to the presence of bacteria in the intestines, scientists have found." I think this is something that at least anecdotally we're aware of and our listeners are aware of this. I've had personal experience with this where it depleted my gut bacteria, got depressed for over a month, a really marked depression that was unmistakable, started taking probiotics, started working on that and felt completely better. So in my mind that's a very clear linkage.
This is a study on laboratory mice showing that anxious and depressive behaviour brought on by exposure to stress in early life appears only to be triggered if microbes are present in the gut.
"The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates a clear link between gut microbiota - the microbes living naturally in the intestines - and the triggering of the behavioural signs of stress.
"We have shown for the first time in an established mouse model of anxiety and depression that bacteria play a crucial role in inducing this abnormal behaviour," said Premysl Bercik of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, the lead author of the study.
The scientists called for further research to see if the conclusions applied to humans, and whether therapies that target intestinal microbes can benefit patients with psychiatric disorders.
Previous research on mice has indicated that gut microbes play an important role in behaviour. For instance, mice with no gut bacteria - called "germ-free" mice - are less likely to show anxiety-like behaviour than normal mice."
It seem to me what they're missing here is the type of bacteria.
Doug: Yeah.
Jonathan: Because it's not just the presence of bacteria, it's which bacteria have overgrown, which ones are active and is there a balance.
Doug: Yeah, I think that was one of the limitations of this study because they did study mice that had some kind of traumatic experience in the early years and they found that they were more likely to experience stress and anxiety later on when they were stimulated in a certain way whereas those with wiped out all of their gut bacteria, didn't have this reaction. It's really an interesting study because there's a lot that can be gleaned from it. I think the danger of the takeaway message is that you should eradicate all of your gut bacteria which clearly aren't the case.
There is a lot of communication that happens between the brain and the gut and it's found that the gut microbiota plays a significant role in this. I don't know if the trauma is actually recorded by these microbes or the trauma is recorded in the nervous system and then the microbes cause you to re-experience it in the same way. It's hard to say just from the current study and obviously a lot more research needs to be done, but I do think that you're right Jonathan, that it's not that you want to wipe out all your gut bacteria. A really interesting part of the study, or maybe it was the second study, was that when they implanted the microbiota from the traumatized mice into the ones who were germ-free, they found that the germ-free mice started to experience stress in the same way and this kind of anxious disposition.
So obviously the gut bacterium plays a very strong role in your emotional state, which is fascinating. I don't think anybody would have predicted this 10 or 15 years ago, so really, really interesting stuff.
Jonathan: Didn't we have an article a while back as well about the link between vaccines and gut bacteria? I'm blanking on the title now but maybe just to tie the two since we're doing connecting the dots. I seem to remember that.
Erica: That was Dr. Wakefield's research, right Doug, if I remember correctly? I think he extensively studied the gut bacteria in autistic children and that's what his findings were, that the vaccines were affecting gut bacteria.
Doug: Yeah, so it can be strong enough to affect something as serious as autism. So it's not just depression, although depression is a pretty serious thing as well, but it can get even more serious to the point of autism. And there are so many different things that can affect your microbiome. Then there are the vaccines and the GMOs. Even to the point of drinking chlorinated water, they've found can have a detrimental effect on your microbiota. Eating sugar and any of these things can have such a detrimental effect and that's going to affect your entire being. It's not just your digestion. So many people just think of it in terms of digestion and that's an important thing as well, but it's your emotional state, your entire being, your ability to connect with higher thinking. All these different things can be affected by this gut microbiome.
So the idea that you need to take care of this and support it with things like eating fermented foods, taking probiotics, staying away from all the things that can have a negative effect, are so important.
Jonathan: I'm not fully aware of all of these, but I am aware nominally that there are certain hormones like serotonin that are produced in the gut. I don't know if all hormones are produced in the gut. Doug maybe you can speak to that a little bit; are the hormones that control your mood and affect this kind of depressive state, if the balance is out of whack, you're either not making them at all or your not making the proper amount. You don't have to have been suicidal to have experienced depression. There are different forms of it, but it's definitely a very real thing, to the point where something is wrong. You just feel off. You can't concentrate and it's not like something that's up to your will power at that moment. You just cannot do it when you're feeling that way.
I think that the key to that is that you don't have the tools. The feeling is not something that you can just turn on or off. You can't just make yourself feel a certain way. There are cases where this is reliant upon the correct balance of hormones in your body to allow yourself to feel a sense of wellness. Your body is a holistic machine and it requires a bunch of different components to function properly.
Doug: Yeah, I think that's true. I think people tend to look at depression and any other psychological state as something emotional and very separate from the physical, but I think that studies like this really illustrate that there is a very real physical component to this. Of course that's not to downplay the emotional side of it. There certainly are things that you need to do to get a better outlook on life and to decrease stress, all those sorts of things, but the physical component often gets overlooked. And people who are going through some kind of issue go into talk therapy or they get pharmaceuticalized or whatever the case may be, when there's a physical reason that they're having this issue, whether that is the microbiota or some kind of chemical imbalance in the organism itself. These things can be targeted with diet and with proper supplementation and all that sort of thing.
So like you were saying Jonathan, there's more serotonin made in the gut than anywhere else in the body. I think that really illustrates the communication that goes on between the gut and the brain and the rest of the body. You need those neurotransmitters to be able to communicate those things. Again, it's illustrating how important it really is to take care of the physical to be able to reach the emotional state.
There's another really interesting article on SOTT. It was called; It takes a village; gut bacteria band together in mixes to combat infections. We had it up on SOTT but it was originally from Science Daily in July. It just illustrates a study that was actually showing that collections of gut bacteria actually do better than any one single strain at fighting off invasive microbes. There was a lot of research here but what they actually found was that it doesn't necessarily matter what mix you have of your gut biome that they actually work cooperatively to fight off these infections.
So when you do have some targeted antibiotic therapy that wipes out certain populations, that can allow more pathogenic populations to start to grow out of hand and then the good bacteria can't really get a foothold, can't start to fight back and it might be because they're all working individually at that point. But that study has found that they will actually band together and fight off invasions. So very interesting especially taking into account the service to others versus service to self. It's not one microbe fighting off an infection, it's a whole village, so to speak, banding together and using their different strategies for fighting these things off.
Tiffany: So that's why it makes more sense to take multiple different strains in your probiotics versus just one. What is that one lactobacillus rhamnosus GG that provides food for all different types of beneficial bacteria that's in your gut?
Doug: Yeah. That one actually is interesting because it encourages the growth of other strains as well. So it might just be that by introducing that strain you're taking on a strategy of building up other beneficial bacteria as well. There are a couple of different strains that do that also. I don't remember the names of them off the top of my head, but there are several different strains that don't just do something beneficial in and of themselves but provide the environment to encourage growth of other bacteria as well. So it's kind of building up that whole village.
Jonathan: I liked your analogy between the service to self versus service to others, the idea that this is like an as above, so below kind of exemplification of community and how it has to work that way. It's just another metaphor that we can draw from the way the body works. Let's dive back into another sort of depressing topic. I suppose it can or can't be depressing, but there have been a number of really interesting disease outbreaks lately. Doug, do you want to cover the first one here? It looks like bacterial spread affecting UTI infection?
Doug: This one was pretty interesting actually because it's talking about a bacterial mutation that actually is causing recurrent urinary tract infections. Sometimes people get a urinary tract infection and they go on a course of antibiotics and that's it. But there seem to be other situations where somebody takes their antibiotic protocol and as soon as they stop the antibiotics, suddenly it comes back.
So they were looking at the genetic profile of the e-coli that's causing the UTI and they found that they have a mutation where when exposed to antibiotics they actually go into this dormant state. They become spore-like. This gets into the whole pleomorphic idea where bacteria and microbes have the ability, or its part of what they are, that they can change from one type to another. This is kind of fringe stuff, but there's a lot of evidence for it, where these microbes actually will change from one form to another. Some even say that bacteria will turn into viruses at some point if the environment is proper to it.
So it's more about the environment that these microbes are exposed to and how they alter themselves to deal with that. They make a distinction here that it's not that they're antibiotic resistant, which is a mutation where the microbes can actually create a protein that destroys the antibiotic. These instead are called antibiotic tolerant. So any of these microbes that have this genetic mutation will actually go into this dormant state, wait for the antibiotic to disappear and then start proliferating again. The researchers called these bacteria persisters. What they suggest in the article to combat this problem is to do pulsed antibiotic treatment, so instead of just doing one course and then moving on with your life, you do it in pulses.
I think a better approach is to use a supplement called d-mannose and it's actually a sugar that's extracted from cranberry. An old folk remedy for babbling UTIs is to take cranberry juice because of this d-mannose. You actually don't absorb much of d-mannose. You just urinate it out and what that does is it sticks to the outside of the bacteria more so than the bacteria sticks to the cell walls of the urinary tract and it makes it so they can no longer stick to the cell walls and they get eliminated. So I think that's a way of combating it because you're not changing the environment so that they will change into this other dormant form. They actually see the d-mannose as food, "Oh good, food!" And they cling onto the d-mannose and then they get eliminated from the body.
So it's a strategy that won't trigger them to go into their dormant state; rather, it just gets rid of them. They don't talk about this in the article, but knowing how d-mannose works; I'm thinking that that's a more logical approach.
Jonathan: We have some other interesting outbreak news that has been happening lately. A mystery stomach bug hits the Swiss watch capital.
Tiffany: Yeah, there were people who had stomach cramps, diarrhoea and vomiting. This is the place where they make the watches. I looked into this a little bit more again yesterday and it turns out that they found Norovirus in the water so it's not such a big mystery after all. The Norovirus has those types of symptoms. At a hospital I worked at they had to shut down the ward once because all the patients had Norovirus and the staff was getting it too so they just closed down the whole unit. Yeah, it was Norovirus.
Doug: There's another one. This was hot off the press actually. One of our forum members wrote about Lancashire in England, 300,000 homes told to boil their water after a parasite was found. This was cryptosporidium which is often found in fecally contaminated water. So there's another outbreak here. They're all being told to boil their water. Interestingly enough, this was an area that was being targeted by the fracking industry. They wanted to start fracking in this area. It didn't go through, thankfully, but interesting parallel there. They're all drinking bottled water right now because of this outbreak.
Jonathan: Another one here I think is pretty interesting is this surge in Lyme disease. The CDC has reported a 320% surge in Lyme disease.
Doug: And it's generally thought that Lyme disease is spread through tick bites, but it's interesting that there are a lot of cases being reported now where people say they weren't bitten by a tick. The response to this is, "You were probably bitten and you didn't notice". I'm actually wondering if either it has mutated or there's a similar disease that isn't quite the same thing as Lyme, but it's actually starting to infect people who aren't exposed to the tick bites.
Jonathan: We've seen mutations of other diseases...
Tiffany: I think that's a valid theory.
Doug: I don't know if any of you guys have any experience with Lyme, but it is a really terrible affliction to have. People who get affected by it go on these antibiotic treatments and sometimes they're effective but it seems like a lot of times they're not. There's some research suggesting that the microbes can actually hide themselves in biofilms or convert themselves similar to what we were saying about the UTI infections. They convert themselves to a more dormant state and then they creep up again later on when the environment is more suited to them and so, a really devious infection.
Tiffany: I think there's something to there being another infection similar to it and they just call it Lyme disease, but there's another article on SOTT about doctors searching for clues to child paralysis. Cases now suspect a different enterovirus, in the opposite direction from what you said. I think that this is similar to polio and they're just calling it acute flaccid myelitis. I think it could be linked to taking polio vaccine. This article was posted from Science Daily and put up on SOTT on the 16th.
There were over 100 children who had these child paralysis symptoms. They called it acute flaccid myelitis and it began in the summer of 2014 and they suspected it was caused by an enterovirus D68 that they tested some of these kids for and it turns out they had a different enterovirus. But to me it just sounds like polio by another name.
Doug: I'd heard somewhere that one of the reasons that polio has dropped so much - and they like to credit that to the vaccine being very effective - but they've actually just labelled it something else. So it's not that it has really disappeared. They're now calling it something different.
Jonathan: I seem to remember hearing something...
Tiffany: I think it was up until 2000 in the US they stopped using the oral polio vaccine but it's well documented that you shed live virus with the oral polio vaccine and you can spread polio that way. So I don't think we use it anymore in the US. But that's another factor to consider.
Jonathan: I'm not entirely certain on this, but I'm just trying to remember because I'd heard something a little while ago that there was a doctor who said he thought that Hashimoto's or Huntington's or one of those autoimmune conditions was actually polio. I wish I could remember the name of which one it was.
Doug: Well I remember when we did the interview with the Dr. Claus Köhnlein, the author of Virus Mania, he had a lot of evidence that the polio vaccine was actually the cause of a lot of these diseases that came later. I don't remember a lot of the details about that, but I don't think we can discount that possibility. There are certainly all these mystery illnesses that are showing up. A lot of times we just think these natural diseases come to the fore, but how much of this is actually human-caused?
Tiffany: Well it's been documented as well that the polio vaccine was contaminated with simian virus 40. So how much of it is manmade?
Doug: A 320% surge in Lyme disease. That's a huge amount! It's like epidemic at this point.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Doug: I had heard of Lyme but hadn't heard much about it five years ago, but now it's not uncommon for me to run into people who are suffering from it. So it really is spreading like crazy.
Jonathan: this makes me think of the effect that the media has on public awareness. When we're talking about disease outbreaks it just made me wonder what happened to Ebola? I know Ebola's still out there, but they were like for a couple of weeks it was going to destroy the entire planet.
Tiffany: It kind of makes you wonder what they were covering up while all this Ebola hysteria was going on. What was going behind the scenes that they wanted to distract people?
Doug: It served its purpose and now they don't need it anymore.
Jonathan: What is still going on, if you want something in the public mind and you have control over certain aspects of the media you can just turn it on and turn it off. So there may still be Ebola coming into the country in certain forms, into the United States but who's going to know about it if it's not in the media?
Tiffany: That's true.
Erica: Until the vaccine comes out. [Laughter]
Doug: Yeah, that's probably it. That's when we'll see it resurfacing again, "Oh, we've got an Ebola vaccine. And oh by the way, it's really, really bad."
Erica: And it's mandatory.
Tiffany: [Bad audio] ... the vaccine is finished.
Doug: Right now they've got all the political debates going on so that's serving as a distraction right now, so they don't need Ebola at this point.
Tiffany: They've got Cecil the lion. That caused enough distraction.
Doug: That's right, yeah.
Jonathan: And Bernie Sanders. I don't know. He may be cool, but if you make it into the final running, I'm suspicious.
Doug: Definitely.
Jonathan: Another interesting parallel that comes to mind while we're talking about disease outbreaks, some of these things might be scary but what is interesting is in the usual discussion of disease outbreaks, what doesn't usually come up I think is the standard condition of western health and diabetes and obesity. Those are two main things that are just blowing up all over the place. Heart disease is the number one killer right now. Tiff you mentioned earlier that your professor in nursing school had said that inflammation is the root cause of all disease and I think a lot of these modern illnesses that a lot of people think you're just going to get, come from inflammation.
It's almost like now as we get older, the attitude is, "well what am I going to get?" because you've got to get something. You can't just live out your life and then die of natural causes. You're going to end up with diabetes or Alzheimer's or cancer, whatever. I think that should also be included in any kind of public discussion about disease outbreaks, just the state of health in our country and the western world especially.
Doug: Even just going back to the gut microbiome, your gut bacteria are your first line of defence against any of these infections. There was a tape here in Canada a while ago where a giardia outbreak where all this well water was infected. It was interesting to see that even though the whole community was drinking the well water, not everybody got the infection. That never really got looked into, but I really wonder how much of that had to do with the state of peoples' gut when they were exposed to those.
So you have this line of defence, all this good bacteria in your gut. If your guts in good condition and you have a healthy microbiome, then it has the ability to fight off these outside infections. It has the ability to deal with a foreign invader whereas if you're on a crappy diet your microbiome is in a horrible state. You've got all these pathogenic bacteria, so taking in something like this just tips the scales and you suddenly succumb to this infection. I think keeping in a healthy state is your best defence against any of these kinds of outbreaks.
Jonathan: That leads us into our last topic in connecting the dots for today, talking about sugar. Tiff do you mind introducing us to this article; Food industry has hidden their knowledge of sugar's toxicity for decades?
Tiffany: This is posted by Dr. Mercola. There's been a lot of focus on how saturated fat is so evil and how it's responsible for heart disease and high cholesterol and all that, but no one's paid much attention to the damaging effects of sugar. Actually "Big Sugar", if you want to call it that, the sugar corporations have known about the damaging effects of sugar since the 1960s or the early '70s. There was a documentary called; The Secrets of Sugar and it tells how the food industry has known about the links between processed food and disease. They had about 1,500 pages of memos, letters and reports that were buried in archives of sugar companies. There also a book called; Pure, White and Deadly, which came out in 1972 and there was decades of research pointing to sugar versus fat as the cause of obesity and diabetes.
I guess over the years there have been all these sugar apologists. One of them was Ancel Keyes who's known for promoting the theory that saturated fat causes heart disease. So he launched a smear campaign against Yudkin, a British nutritionist who pointed out that sugar played a role in obesity and diabetes. So Ancel Keyes smeared Yudkin's reputation and called him a quack and all the sugar research came to a stop at that point.
That's the gist of that article. But nobody's investigating how sugar is so disease-causing. There are about 100 million Americans who are diabetic or pre-diabetic right now and no one's really looking into how sugar causes this. They're all just focusing on saturated fat even though now saturated fat is getting a little less demonized. People ignore sugar still. But some of that has gone away because people are coming to the conclusion that at least high fructose corn sugar is pretty evil, even if they don't raise a ruckus much about table sugar.
Jonathan: I think a lot of it comes from the diet, of course, but looking at the spectrum of the diet, it's not like where your grandparents made lemonade once in a while, that is necessarily dangerous. They were eating a lot differently back then. It makes me think of the movie Super Size Me where he showed at the end that they rail on these fatty, greasy, salty foods as being the cause of this problem, but then he showed that if somebody has a steady fast food diet, they're eating over a pound of sugar a day!! He piled it all up on the table and that was an impressive scene, "This is what I ate in a month, thirty pounds of sugar."
Tiffany: And high fructose corn syrup is found in so many processed foods. I went through this long list yesterday. It's in almost everything, like cereals of course, but then condiments and some pickles even have high fructose corn syrup, which you would never think of being in something like that. And then of course sodas and all that stuff, but it's in everything because it's so cheap because it's subsidized.
Jonathan: I guess we'll bring our show to a second close here today. We still have to go to Zoya's pet health segment and she wants to talk to us today about immunity and vaccination in pets. So let's hear from Zoya on that topic and then we'll be back to wrap up after this.
Zoya: Hello and welcome to the pet health segment of the Health and Wellness Show. In one of the previous shows we already discussed the topic of vaccinations, but I would like to talk about it again especially since August apparently, is a national immunization awareness month and many veterinarians decided to co-opt it. The topic of vaccinations has always been controversial while those who are anti-vaccines talk about criminal deception by Big Pharma and those who are pro-vaccines claim that anti-vaccine peeps are ignorant and lack proper knowledge about how the immune system really works. So who's right?
Well first of all, go over the previous shows because this important topic was already brought up several times. It is indeed true that there is a deliberate obfuscation of the issue and a great push for unnecessary vaccinations by Big Pharma and mainstream doctors who can't hide their contempt toward anyone who questions the need for so many vaccinations, while in reality they are the ones who lack understanding of how the immune system really works, not to mention veterinarians who repeat the annual vaccinations mantra while for several years already the recent official guidelines for vaccinations talk about every three years, or even the benefit of doing a titer before each vaccination.
But as my personal experience of volunteering in a city clinic shows, the doctors there never heard of the three-year rule. And why would they when annual vaccinations constitute the lion's share of their profits? As for ignorance and lack of proper knowledge, this is the gap we are going to try and fill during this little segment. As usual I'm going to use information shared by my favourite natural veterinarian, Dr. Karen Becker.
As I said at the beginning, apparently this month is national immunization awareness month. The goal is clearly to promote vaccinations through the word used to describe the month-long awareness campaign is, "immunization, not vaccination." This is a hugely important distinction. If a dog is already immunized against, for example, distemper, there is no benefit to his health in vaccinating him again against distemper, but there is a risk of adverse side-effects each time a vaccine is given. And so the truth is that if the traditional veterinary community was truly interested in ensuring pets are immunized against disease, they would be promoting antibody titer tests to measure each animal's immunity to the core canine diseases, distemper, parvovirus, adenovirus and rabies and core feline diseases, panleukopenia, calicivirus, herpes and rabies.
Unfortunately the majority of conventional veterinarians prefer to simply re-vaccinate every pet every year without establishing whether the animal is already immune to the disease being vaccinated against. As I mentioned before, the reason they revaccinate each year is because if they didn't it would greatly reduce their profits. For example, removing the one year rabies vaccination for dogs alone would reduce a veterinarian's income 25-30% and this example involves just one type of vaccine and just one type of pet!
One conservative estimate is that over half of dog visits and nearly 3/4 of cat vet visits are for vaccinations! In my personal experience the rest of the reasons, except for emergency cases; have to do with improper diet, especially when it comes to cats. Doctors make fortunes on urinary obstruction in cats including visit costs, treatment and then buying fancy, specialized dry food when it was the dry food that caused the problem in the first place.
In any case, back to our topic. When you consider the mark-up on vaccines, the number of vet visits scheduled only for immunizations and the typically short duration of those visits, the vaccination business can prove very lucrative for veterinary practices that promote it. Veterinarians aren't the only ones making a living off of vaccination shots. The drug companies who manufacture vaccines have enjoyed year over year sales increase for well over a decade. The US is the largest consumer of vaccines by a huge margin over any other country.
Okay, so what is the difference between vaccination and immunization? Vaccination and immunization is not one and the same thing. Immunization is the outcome of effective vaccination against disease and or exposure to a disease that the animal recovers from. The act of administering a vaccine doesn't automatically mean the animal has been immunized against the disease. However, this is the assumption. In order to make sure your pet was indeed immunized, better run titer tests within a few weeks of the last round of puppy or kitten shots to ensure immunity has been achieved.
When an animal is successfully vaccinated against certain diseases such as distemper, parvovirus and adenovirus in dogs and panleukopenia in cats, and become immunized, they receive what veterinarians call sterile immunity. Sterile immunity lasts a minimum of 7-9 years, up to a maximum of lifetime immunity as measured by titer tests. This means the pet cannot become infected nor will they shed the virus should they be exposed. Since the diseases of distemper, parvovirus, hepatitis, adenovirus and panleukopenia are everywhere, the risk of exposure is constant.
Other types of vaccine, typically non-core vaccines, called bacterins against bacterial-derived diseases such as Lyme disease, leptospirosis, bordetella or kennel cough, canine influenza, a virus but one that mutates constantly so a vaccine is not consistently protective, and others do not produce sterile immunity. These vaccines last a year at the most and antibody levels against those diseases as measured by titer tests decrease with each passing year, meaning lifelong protection is questionable.
Dr. Karen Becker recommends to run IFA, immunofluorescence antibody titer tests for parvovirus and distemper because they give a clear-cut answer; either yes the animal is protected, or no the animal is not protected. Serology and other testing methods can be confusing for owners. For example, a low serology or blood score doesn't mean the pet isn't protected against disease. It's possible an animal may still be protected for up to a year or longer, thanks to immune memory cells.
For purposes of comparison, veterinary core vaccines are similar to human polio and MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccines that provide lifetime immunity. Non-core veterinary vaccines can be compared to the human tetanus vaccine, which is also a bacterium and may not last for a lifetime. So how to play it safe and smart with pet vaccinations? Discuss what kind of vaccines your pet needs and how often, with your veterinarian. It is strongly encouraged for you to try and find a holistic vet to care for your pet, especially when it comes to vaccinations. If you can't locate a holistic vet in your area, make sure not to take your pets to any veterinary practice that promotes annual or more frequent re-vaccinations. Also try to avoid any boarding facility, groomer, training facility or other animal service that requires you to vaccinate your pet more than necessary. Look for pet care providers who accept antibody titer tests.
Ensure each vaccine your dog or cat receives meets the following criteria: your pet should be healthy. Animals must be healthy to receive vaccines. So if your pet has allergies, endocrine issues, organ dysfunction, cancer or is a cancer survivor or of another medical issue, he or she is not a candidate to receive vaccines. Another criterion that you need to meet is that it is for life-threatening disease. This eliminates most on the list immediately. Another criterion is that your pet has the opportunity to be exposed to the disease. For example, indoor cats have little to no exposure.
Another criterion is that the vaccine is considered both effective and safe and most aren't. Another one is that shouldn't vaccinate a pet that has had a previous vaccine reaction of any kind. If you do vaccinate your pet, ask your holistic vet to provide the homeopathic vaccine detox. Rabies vaccines are required by law, but insist on the three-year instead of the one-year vaccine and request the homeopathic rabies vaccine detoxifier from your holistic vet. If your pet is young, ask to have the rabies vaccine given after four months of age, preferably closer to six months to reduce the risk of an adverse reaction. Sick pets should never be vaccinated against rabies.
As for the titer tests being expensive, well there are some labs that offer them at a reasonable price. So let's all celebrate national immunization awareness month by remember that the words vaccination and immunization are not interchangeable and that ensuring your pet is immunized against disease does not mean subjecting him to automatic re-vaccinations at regular intervals.
This is it for this segment. Have a nice weekend. [Goats bleating]
Jonathan: Alright, thank you Zoya. I never get tired of those goats. So, that was some really good information there on vaccinations for your pets, what to do and what not to do. We're going to wrap up for today so we'd like to thank all of our listeners for tuning in and all of our chat participants. Just keep your wits about you and don't take what's in the media at face value. Do your own research. Look things up to find out what's going on. We just encourage everybody to do their own legwork and educate you're self on these topics of health and wellness.
Thanks again everybody and we will see you next week.
All: Good-byes.
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