allergy drawing
© Sam Taylor
Do you have allergies? Sneezing, wheezing, burning eyes, or flushing, itchy skin with hives? Do certain foods trigger stomach cramps or diarrhea? Or do you suffer from frequent headaches or migraines, bouts of nausea, severe menstrual cramps, or panic attacks characterized by a racing heart? You're not alone. There are no firms answers as to why we get allergies but whatever the reason, researchers are finding out that food allergies are on the rise with up to 200,000 ER visits each year. Allergies have risen over 300% in just the last 10 years.

Join us for this episode of The Health and Wellness Show where we'll discuss reigning theories about allergies, the differences between allergies and intolerances, histamine and how you can calm your system down and avoid annoying or life-threatening symptoms.

Pets can get allergies too! Stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment to learn how to treat pet allergies in a natural way.

Running Time: 01:23:26

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Erica: Hello and welcome to the Health and Wellness Show. Today is Friday the 13th and joining me, Erica in our virtual studio are Tiffany, Gaby, Elliot and Doug.

All: Hellos.

Erica: So our topic today, Atchoo, Allergies and Intolerances and for those of you who may be experiencing spring - maybe, maybe not.

Tiffany: Spring is upon us.

Erica: This is the time of year when people start sneezing, wheezing, experiencing burning eyes, flushed, itchy skin or maybe even hives. So our topic is going to be allergies. Do certain foods trigger stomach cramps or diarrhoea? Do you suffer from frequent headaches or migraines, bouts of nausea, severe menstrual cramps or panic attacks characterized by a racing heart? Well, you're not alone. There are no firm answers as to why we get allergies but whatever the reason, researchers are finding that food allergies are on the rise with up to 200,000 Emergency Room visits every year. Allergies have risen over 300% in just the last 10 years. So join us as we talk about our own experiences and if you'd like to share, please call in or join us in the chat.

Tiffany: And share your allergy horror stories.

Erica: So what's the theory about allergies? Are there differences between allergies that are intolerances and hopefully someone can explain to me histamine. {laughter} And what we can do to deal with these things because I think at one point or another all of us have had some sort of allergic reaction to something.

Tiffany: Well I think some scientists did a mouse experiment - of course they're always experimenting on mice, what else are they going to do - where they genetically engineered them to not produce IgE (Immunoglobulin) or have any kind of allergic response and they exposed them to some strong toxic allergenic substances and the substance was able to penetrate their bodies and do significant damage to their organs and their tissues. So having allergic reactions is a protective measure. If you're coughing or sneezing or you have hives, it's your body's way of pushing toxins out of your body to protect it so it doesn't go in and create a lot of damage. So having allergies is kind of a good thing even though it can be miserable.

Elliot: So the difference between allergies and intolerances, typically the medical definition of an allergy is something which would initiate the response, something called anaphylaxis, which is a really potent response which occurs within seconds or minutes and it's characterized by typically the throat swells up and the person struggles to breathe. If someone's got allergies, for example a peanut allergy or a shellfish allergy, they know about it. So they will typically carry around an epipen and they could die within minutes if they come into contact with this allergen whereas intolerance is something quite different, or even a sensitivity.

If someone says "I'm sensitive to certain types of foods", that could also be different to "I'm intolerant to certain kinds of foods". For instance, an intolerance, something like a lactose intolerance, if someone says they're lactose intolerant, it could mean is that they don't have the enzyme in their intestine to break down the lactose sugar and so they will typically get diarrhoea or something like that when they consume lactose. So that's a lactose intolerance. It's not something that's life-threatening in the short-term but it can still cause some damage whereas a sensitivity or what some people call intolerances, these are really quite covert things.

These are characterized by no immediate response within the hour. Typically the response takes much longer to kick in and what it means is that it could be a chemical intolerance or I guess for the show we're talking about food intolerances.

Tiffany: We can talk about all of them.

Elliot: Okay. The various things that we come into contact with, as part of the chemical structure of the different substances, they present things called antigens. Our body has been designed to search for antigens. So antigens are things which can evoke an immune response in the body and they can be potentially harmful. Your body has evolved to pick out antigens from the environment and decide whether they're really harmful or whether they're fairly benign. For instance, many of the foods that we eat contain antigens but - touch wood - our body can see that actually this is a food, we don't need to evoke an immune response, it's not harmful and it's actually good whereas pathogens also have antigens and we can identify those, launch a quick immune response and silence or deal with that issue.

So what an intolerance is, is typically characterized by certain immune cells which are called IgG immune cells, immunoglobulins, but it can also be other immune cells as well, but typically what happens in an intolerance is that our body is responding to some sort of antigen and it can invoke long-term inflammatory responses which aren't necessarily part of what you would be consciously aware of. They can contribute to things like chronic inflammation, low level immune responses which are above the ordinary level of immune response and that can significantly contribute to many different diseases.

Tiffany: The reason why some people don't even know that they have certain intolerances is because it doesn't happen right away like with a true allergic reaction. Sometimes it can take hours or up to days to even notice that something is off and people say "Oh, I'm always gassy" or "I'm always sneezing" and they don't link it to something that they ate two days ago.

Gaby: For me the eye-opener was when we interviewed Mikhaela Peterson who has several allergies and she said that she could have a response on the 21st day like clockwork. That's why she would write something down and say "Okay, it'll pass away". I think it's amazing because some people say "Oh no, I can tolerate tomatoes just fine" or any antigen in any food and just because hours later or even one or two days later they were absolutely fine and they started with some symptoms.

Erica: I personally suffered from allergies from being very young. As a child my mom couldn't feed me milk at all and really had a hard time finding alternatives and then at about 5 or 6 I became really allergic to citrus. So if I ate anything with citrus I'd break out with a rash all over my face. I remember seeing kid pictures and it's like a red rosy rash all around my mouth and then I was really allergic to cats and mold. It wasn't until almost my 30s that I finally went to a naturopath and I had chronic sinus issues. I felt every morning like I had a cold. He tested me and he actually found yeast in my sinuses and told me that he had never met anyone that had a yeast infection in their sinus cavity. I was drinking Guinness at the time. {laughter} I loved it. I was a big beer fan. And he said "Don't drink Guinness anymore and see what happens." I think it took two months but I went back to him and the yeast had cleared out of my sinuses. So that was the beginning of realizing...

Doug: The only thing you did was stop Guinness?

Erica: At that time, yes.

Tiffany: Did you drink Guinness out of your nose? Is that how the yeast got in there? {laughter}

Erica: Well we come to find out later that I had a gluten intolerance but this was another naturopath I went to. When I cut out all gluten across the board, my allergies to mold and my allergies to cats completely went away. So I could actually pick up a cat and hold it and not suffer the dire consequences for the next few days. So with what Elliot was saying, when does an intolerance take over and become an actual allergy?

Gaby: That's a good point. I had the same thing. I always had acute allergies, not that it would send me to the emergency room for an adrenalin shot, but I always had rhinitis, where you have the stuffy nose and very itchy eyes and it would be from immediate exposure to a pollen. When I got rid of gluten and dairy, I got rid of all those allergies as well. People will remember me always with a napkin in my hand and kind of groggy from so many histaminics in Costa Rica. I left Costa Rica in 2002 and when I visited several years later after I eliminated gluten and dairy, I was lucid, without a napkin in the hand. Nobody could believe it. They said "Wow! What did you do?!"

Tiffany: I used to get seasonal allergies too with the sneezing. The really annoying part was the outside of my nose would just itch like crazy and that went away when I stopped gluten and dairy.

Erica: I think everybody has a bit of a different experience of it or effect. Some people get really bad eczema or skin issues. I've seen a lot of children that obviously had a milk allergy but their parents don't know what to feed them instead and they may not have the stomach aches or anything, but they break out in crazy rashes of eczema.

Doug: I used to actually get eczema, as badly as some of the cases I've seen but I would get it on my hands, specifically on my right hand and it was super itchy. I had it at a very particular time in my life. It was when I was an adult and a very particular time in my life, when I was working in a restaurant. What I suspect it was, was a reaction to the hand soap that they had there because I was a cook so I was washing my hands all the time. I thought that it might be because of the soap, but it was also a very high stress environment. I was never really able to pin down exactly what it was that was causing it but it did seem to go away.

It was weird too because I would have it come back periodically, particularly in high stress moments of my life, but I think when I really changed my diet and cut out gluten, dairy and all this other kind of stuff, it seemed to go away. Now it's gone but it's weird because once in a while the same spot where I used to have it will get itchy and I'll think "Oh-oh, it's coming back", but it never does.

Erica: I wonder if sometimes it's when you eat out and you're exposed to something in the food that you don't know about because I have similar experiences if I eat out and I inadvertently eat some sort of gluten, my scalp will start to itch really badly. So it might just be when your body is cleared from all those things, even just the littlest bit of it can cause a reaction.

Doug: Yeah.

Elliot: It's interesting that you said when you said you're in high stress periods of your life that they would come up. I think that's a fairly common thing and I think it has to do with the effect that stress actually has on the production and maintenance of various immune cells. So you have one type of immune cell called secretory IgA. This is present in all of the mucous membranes, in your tears. It lines the gut. It's like an antiseptic layer that covers the gut. It's one of the first lines of defence so when anything goes into the body and there's some sort of pathogen or antigen that you come across, if you've got good levels of this immune cell, then ideally what it will do is deal with the issue. But what happens when someone is stressed, going through a stressful time in their life, they found it drastically decreases the levels of the secretory IgA production.

There are various researchers who theorize that that's one of the reasons why people experience old allergies or exacerbations of their symptoms when they get stressed, because of this immune cell down-regulation. So perhaps there's something that you were reacting to or that maybe were dealing with properly but then when the stress lowers the system, then that can then evoke an immune response again. I'm not sure.

Doug: Yeah.

Gaby: The crazy thing is that I had something similar. I had a really bad skin rash, dermatitis, and it was so itchy. I'd scratch it so badly and put cortisone cream on it, which is an anti-inflammatory and it will get even worse. At that time I was highly stressed and it happened that I was receiving my dermatology lessons, skin diseases lessons so I asked the teacher "Look at this. What would you suggest?" And he actually suggested benzo, for my nerves. I thought "Okay, so this is all in my head" kind of thing. Well eventually I finished med school and it got better but that made me think, "Wow! This is all stress."

Doug: Well we've actually got a caller on the line.

Tiffany: Oh, we do! Okay, we can take this call. Hello caller. Are you there?

Lynn: Hello there.

Tiffany: Yes. Who is this?

Erica: And where are you calling from?

Lynn: Can you hear me?

Doug: Yeah, we can hear you.

Lynn: Okay. I thought I'd call in and see what any of you think might help me. I've tried everything. I have a rare disease called Churg-Strauss syndrome. Well actually they changed the name to something I can't pronounce, but that's what it used to be called. I don't know if it's because of that or not, but my sinuses are always stuffy unless I take big bad pharmaceutical, icky, bad stuff.

No matter what I eat, my sinuses plug up and the way that I found that it's no matter what I eat is that for a week I didn't eat anything. I wasn't feeling well. It wasn't an intended fast but that's what it turned out to be. Almost all the stuffiness went away and as soon as I started eating again, just meat, the stuffiness came back. So I can't drink tea, even veggies, yams. Any suggestions that would help me because nothing I've tried has helped.

Elliot: Well what have you tried before?

Lynn: Oh, methotrexate, prednisone. I'm taking Benadryl every day now but that's because if I don't I itch all over really badly and that is part of the Churg-Strauss.

Doug: Huh.

Lynn: That's what I said, "Huh". {laughter}

Gaby: It's an eosinophilic syndrome, it has very high eosinophiles in the blood count.

Lynn: Yes. That's part of the new name.

Gaby: Yeah, eosinophilic syndrome or something.

Lynn: Yeah.

Gaby: It's so difficult to lower down eosinophiles, right? Have you tried iodine.

Lynn: I know Gaby that you've helped me a lot. I was just wondering if maybe something else had come up, Elliot being...

Doug: A genius.

Lynn: ...really interested in all of this stuff, maybe he had an idea. So go for it Elliot! {laughter}

Elliot: Have you ever had any sort of functional testing done?

Lynn: Oh yes.

Elliot: Any gut testing, anything?

Lynn: Well just by mainstream doctors. I think I've gone to a couple of alternative practitioners but they didn't really do anything for me.

Elliot: Okay. How is your digestion?

Lynn: I'm thinking.

Elliot: Sorry?

Lynn: It's okay. I can't metabolize fat real well. Other than that, I do have ulcerative colitis which is under control at the moment. I think that's also part of the Churg-Strauss.

Elliot: Okay. I don't know much about that condition. I'd like to have a look at it. But the first place I would look, if you've tried all sorts of things and you're still suffering from the symptoms, I would try and locate someone in your area who is trained in how to read an organic acids test. I would look at that one and I would also recommend trying to find a practitioner who can read a comprehensive digestive stool analysis test as well because sometimes people can try lots of different things and nothing really comes of it and then if you have some more objective data to see exactly what is going on with your digestion, are you breaking down your food properly, is there some sort of histamine intolerance?

You said that every time you eat you get this sinus issue, so I would be interested in seeing if there is diversity in the gut bacteria. As I've said, I don't know much about your condition but I think a lot of the time with people with histamine-type symptoms, with nasal congestion and all of that sort of stuff, there's generally dysbiosis in the gut. There are types of bacteria which can take food and convert it into histamine and that can cause all sorts of symptoms but then again, I don't know much about your condition so I'm sorry I can't help you any more than that.

Gaby: I think it's a very good point because if it's an autoimmune disease and she has already tried methotrexate, strong immunosuppressants and if it didn't change anything in terms of symptoms, that gives a big clue.

Lynn: No, no. Gaby?

Gaby: Yeah?

Lynn: The Methotrexate did help with the symptoms and so does the prednisone. It just doesn't completely go away.

Doug: Lynn, do you tolerate probiotics at all?

Lynn: I'm taking probiotics, yes.

Doug: You are. Okay.

Lynn: Yeah, I've tried different kinds. I can't do the ones Gaby recommends and I can't pronounce it either.

Gaby: Saccharomyces Boulardi?

Lynn: Yeah, it makes me stuff up really bad. But I figured it was sinus - not sinus. See, it affects my brain too. {laughter} Histamine. I figured it was histamine intolerance.

Elliot: Yeah, and since you've got the diagnosis of ulcerative colitis as well, I would 100% invest in a stool analysis if you can afford it of course, just because I know so many people who've really managed to find out what's going on from doing that. In the meantime, if you can't tolerate the Saccharomyces Boulardi what you could try is one called Mega Spore biotic. There's some really interesting research about that. With ulcerative colitis there's a lot of research which actually links in with hydrogen sulfide-producing bacteria so dysbiosis of the gut, which produces too much of this particular gas which can actually break down the mucosa and cause the ulcerative colitis. I'm not sure if you caught the show that we did with Stephanie Seneff about that?

Lynn: Yes I did.

Elliot: She has done a lot of work in that area but I know there are several autoimmune conditions which have benefited from a low sulphur type of diet. I know people who don't tolerate sulphur very well often have the histamine type symptoms. It's kind of difficult just based on what you've said Lynn, but I hope that you can find something that helps that.

Lynn: Thank you.

Erica: Well thank you for calling in Lynn.

Gaby: Yeah, it's good to hear from you.

Lynn: It's good to hear you guys every Friday too. Take care. Thank you.

Erica: Thank you.

Elliot: Bye Lynn.

Lynn: Bye.

Doug: That's interesting with the histamine connection because some of the stuff we looked into for the show did talk about histamine intolerance. It's an odd one because it's not necessarily an allergy in and of itself. It's just the idea that you're producing histamines and you're getting histamines in your food because it's a component in multiple different foods and some people are not able to actually break down those histamines in the proper way. Some of that can have to do with gut bacteria because there are gut bacteria that will help to break down those histamines but there is also gut bacteria that will produce histamines and there are some people out there who actually can't tolerate certain probiotics because they contain that species. For people who can break down the histamines it's no problem. But for other people they try taking a probiotic and they can't tolerate it, so it's interesting.

Gaby: Do we know more about these species? I think it's something interesting.

Doug: I had a page that actually had all the species on it but I don't have it open now. There are certain species that will break down the histamines. There are actually products out there that are specifically designed to not have histamine-producing bacteria. So when people don't tolerate probioitics, maybe try this one, just to see. There are other supplements too where the enzyme that actually breaks down histamines is called DAO, I think it's...

Tiffany: Diamine Oxidase.

Doug: Yeah, and that can be very helpful too because if you're not producing enough of that enzyme or your gut bacteria aren't producing enough of that enzyme, then taking that enzyme can actually help to break down that histamine and you might actually find some relief. It's not a solution to the problem but it is sort of a Band-aid solution.

Gaby: It's better than histaminex just for the mechanism of action I guess.

Elliot: And if there's polymorphisms as well surrounding the methylation and transsulferation cycle, if people require extra folate or they are low on vitamin B12, that is inevitably going to affect the diamine oxidase because that whole process of recycling histamine is dependent on the functioning of the methylation cycle. And then if you take into consideration the work of Seneff as well, how she says that all routes get diverted towards sulfate then say someone has exposure to glyphosate and let's say a lot of their resources are going toward the sulfation pathway then that is also going to potentially back up the methylation cycle so it's really quite multi-faceted I think.

Gaby: I see. So we have a situation where some people cannot tolerate sulfur rich containing foods because it makes them more itchy or have more allergies, but still we need sulfur to heal the body or for the body to function properly.

Doug: Yeah.

Gaby: I think people would like to know. So how can we approach this? Can we review again the steps to follow?

Erica: I know Lynn has probably tried an elimination diet, which she shared, that she didn't eat for a week and it kind of went away? What happens when you eliminate everything? You just become a breatharian? {laughter}

Gaby: Well she could reset the system, like resetting a computer.

Elliot: In a situation where someone eliminates loads of different foods, or let's say Lynn's situation where they don't eat and the symptoms practically go away, that suggests that there is something going on in the gut or there is something going on with how they are metabolizing different food products. So if someone tries to introduce certain foods and sees temporary benefits - like loads of people who remove all the foods from their diet apart from 10 - and then they see really good benefits but then they start reacting to those foods as well. I was listening to a lecture about this earlier and the guy was saying it's not a problem with the foods per se, as long as they're not inherently toxic foods, it's the problem with the immune system and the gut bacteria and the interface between the gut and the immune system and everything like that.

So if someone has low pancreatic enzyme sufficiency or they have low stomach acid for whatever reason, to make stomach acid you need zinc, vitamin B6, sulfate, creatine. You need quite a lot of nutrients and you need not to be stressed. {laughter} So let's say...

Erica: In a perfect world.

Elliot: Let's say someone is not producing enough stomach acid, well then those proteins that you are ingesting are not going to be fully broken down so when they get into the intestine, you have these dentritic cells and they are surveyors of what's going on in the gut. So if you are not breaking down proteins then the immune system in the gut associated lymphoid tissue can pick that up and they can say "Well actually we do not want that getting into the blood because if the protein gets into the blood then there's a good chance that that could invoke a systemic immune response. So what we're going to do is tag that protein and we're going to say, okay now we are going to be on the lookout whenever we see the protein again we are going to deal with it effectively."

So that's all well and good. Let's say it's a steak or something, you ate a steak when you were stressed and the protein didn't get digested and your immune system picked it up and tagged it for future use. And then the next time you eat the steak you may not be stressed but let's say you haven't got very good stomach acid or something like that or your pancreas is not working well because it's been busted by glyphosate or you haven't got the nutrients to make the pancreatic enzyme, what could happen is you're not breaking down that protein and the immune system sees that protein again and this time it says "Actually we recognize this" and it treats it just like it's a pathogen.

You get to a situation whereby if you're not fixing the root of the problem then your immune system is potentially going to recognize all foods as potentially antigenic. We've all read about it. I trolled through hundreds of forums in the past and I've seen so many cases of people who've gone on elimination diets, seen temporary benefit for a year but then it's gotten to the point where they can't even eat meat anymore because they react to everything so they just live on bone broth.

Gaby: I think when you get very desperate you will be open minded. I was reading an article on fecal transplants. It's been considered as a treatment for allergies. Like wow! The connection is in the gut and also autoimmune disease. It's like something drastic. "No probiotics are working for me. Okay, let's reset the system with a fecal transplant."

Doug: Elliot, you were talking before about going on a low sulfur diet and the question came up "Well you need sulfur so what do you do for that?" Hadn't you recommended in the past the bath - what's it called?

Elliot: Epsom salts.

Doug: Epsom salts, yeah. Magnesium sulfate baths as a way of getting the sulfur in through a different pathway than the digestion.

Elliot: Well yeah, and that seems to be a safe route for many people. Let's say with ulcerative colitis, with Crohn's disease, with leaky gut, the sulfate reducing bacteria are often a big problem for many of these conditions and they've actually shown with ulcerative colitis I believe and with Crohn's, that if they put them on an elemental diet, which is all broken down foods and I think it's fairly low in sulfur, or you can use a low sulfur diet for these clients, it puts them into a temporary state of remission while they remain on the low sulfur. I believe that's because of the imbalances in the gut bacteria. There's the bacteria which produces the hydrogen sulfide gas and it causes the inflammation and stuff and when this happens chronically it can lead to something like ulcerative colitis. But what you can do - and there have been several practitioners who have seen great benefit from this and I actually found great benefit from this as well - is to take Epsom salt baths. Say if you're going to remove sulfur-containing foods from your diet temporarily you do need that sulfate so if you take Epsom salt baths they're absorbed into the skin and it bypasses the gut so it's not converted into that toxic metabolite which is hydrogen sulfide. That can be really good for allergies because that tends to link in with the whole histamine thing as well. That's a good way that you can bypass that if you're looking to do that.

Gaby: That makes a lot of sense.

Erica: There's even magnesium oil that you can use on your body too.

Tiffany: Is that magnesium sulfate

Erica: Does it? I'm not sure.

Doug: You can get magnesium sulfate oil but you have to make sure that it's not magnesium chloride oil because I don't think that would have the same effect.

Gaby: It has to have sulfur, right?

Doug: Yeah.

Gaby: Maybe MSM will work? DMSO even?

Doug: Well with MSM there is an allergies protocol that involves front loading with MSM, so before allergy season. These are mostly people who have environmental allergies like pollen and dust and things like that. So before allergy season, if it is a pollen you're allergic to, you would load up on MSM for a couple of months beforehand. The idea is that because the liver is using sulfur to detox, you're giving your body a whole ton of sulfur so it has the ability to do that. A lot of times when people are having an allergic reaction like the histamine-type reactions, it's because the body hasn't been able to detox it quick enough. So by taking a lot of MSM it allows the liver to process this stuff and get rid of it without you having the overt reaction to it. Again, it's not a solution but it is something that provides some relief.

Tiffany: So here's a question and maybe you people can share their theories. Children have allergies and yet they can grow out of those allergies, maybe by the time they hit their teens or 20s and some adults develop allergies in their 20s or their 30s when they spent their childhood without allergies. What's the deal with that?

Gaby: Personal threshold? I know people who have been diagnosed with celiac disease at 92 years old.

Erica: Did you say 92?

Gaby: Yeah. It was in the local news.

Erica: So 92 years of abuse and then...

Doug: Wow.

Tiffany: I was just wondering what the mechanism is, with the example of children who grow out of their allergies, like milk or peanuts.

Doug: I don't know because I was allergic to...

Tiffany: Do they grow out of it?

Doug: I was allergic to dust and cats and cigarette smoke. I went to the doctor and had the pinprick test on the arm and they said "Okay, you're allergic to this, this and this". So I avoided those things and then when I wasn't a kid anymore, suddenly I wasn't allergic to these things at all. I wasn't allergic to cats, wasn't allergic to cigarettes, dust. Everything just went away. And I don't know. Is it just that the body needs some time before the immune system catches up or something and learns to process these things properly? I don't know.

Gaby: Or the other way around?

Doug: Yeah, or the other way around. The body's breaking down.

Elliot: The whole hygiene hypothesis of allergies, which is one of the reasons why we've seen so many allergies which are more common these days, is because of the idea of someone not being exposed when they're very young to all of these different things. We have chlorinated water and we use antibacterial hand soap and children don't play in the dirt and everything like that, so that may be one of the reasons why children have more allergies. But on to your question Tiff, how a child could grow out of that, I think there is a certain degree of immune maturity that a child does develop when they're a certain age.

I don't know exactly what governs that but there is definitely what they refer to as maturity of the immune system. Maybe it takes some children more time than others. I don't know. But also the question is, is an Ige allergy even like a natural thing to have or is the system just going wrong? You know what I mean?

Doug: Yeah.

Elliot: Is it breaking down just because...

Gaby: It's a red flag.

Elliot: Yeah, because I'm sure in traditional cultures there was no such thing as allergies.

Doug: No.

Elliot: So it's kind of like a new thing.

Erica: That's why I was going to ask about the 300 percent rise in just the last 10 years.

Tiffany: Well if you take vaccinations into account...

Gaby: Exactly. That was my question.

Tiffany: They use soy,...

Erica: Peanut oil.

Tiffany: Peanut oil in vaccines.

Erica: Eggs.

Tiffany: Eggs. So those are a lot of the things that kids are allergic to. Maybe once the effect of the vaccine wears off then their allergy goes away.

Gaby: Yeah, that's my speculation.

Tiffany: If you inject these foreign proteins into you you're going to get allergies.

Doug: Well yeah. That might explain the age thing too because if you look at your grandparents' or great-grandparents' generations they didn't have all these allergies. It clearly is a modern phenomenon.

Gaby: And they didn't have all these vaccines.

Doug: Yeah, there's all these vaccines. It wouldn't surprise me if that was actually part of the problem. There's also just the idea of how much toxicity we're surrounded by and that the immune system is overwhelmed by all the crap that we're surrounded by constantly and that it has to work overtime to be dealing with all this other kind of stuff, so suddenly the littlest thing will disrupt, like food or pollen or any of these other kinds of things. It's like the body is so full of crap that one little thing suddenly makes it overflow.

Gaby: It is very worrisome, the amount of people who are turning up at the emergency room with severe allergic reactions, even middle-aged people. For example a bug bites them and they get the whole leg swollen from the inflammatory reaction but it's also an allergic reaction. It's not that they need an adrenaline shot, you can see that it's pure itchiness inflammation. It's like wow! Everybody's inflamed.

Elliot: I think it's also important to look at the mediators of that major allergic response. Most of them are what's called prostaglandins. You have different types of prostaglandins but the main one that we're concerned with I believe is prostaglandin 2 and that is produced by omega 6, arachidonic acid. So omega 6 polyunsaturated fatty acids in the membranes of cells, there's an enzyme and it basically is activated during this allergic response and this releases these vegetable oils. That's what they are! They're vegetable oils in the cells.

Gaby: It's loads of vegetable oils.

Elliot: Yeah, it's loads of vegetable oils and they are responsible for mediating this massive, unbelievable inflammatory response and it can actually kill you. This is really controversial, but I remember reading Dr. Ray Peet and he was actually citing evidence about how there were cases - and this was to justify his idea with the rise of polyunsaturated vegetable oils that we've seen the allergies and there could be an argument for that. I think it's a mixture of all the things - but his idea that it's mostly the vegetable oils because he's talking about how you can essentially reverse the anaphylactic shock just by giving the patient a can of Coke. {laughter}

Gaby: What? What?

Elliot: Yeah! I know. Or two tablespoons of sugar and he was going through the mechanisms by which it works. So by providing the patient who's undergoing the allergic response with pure sugar, pure glucose, it shifts the cell away from the metabolism of the fat towards glucose oxidation and this is what suppresses the release of these vegetable oils which are causing the inflammatory response. So I'm not recommending you go and drink a can of Coke or something but I'm saying that there seems to be some evidence that it may be the vegetable oils are a part of the problem that we're seeing with all of these additives.

Gaby: I have no question about that. I think people are so inflamed and it's just a bunch of oxidized explosive vegetable oils in their diet and also the glyphosate. But also you can see a lot of mothers bringing their children to the emergency room right after they start introducing wheat into their diets at 6 or 8 months and they start with all kinds of infections and problems. I just think "The obvious thing here is maybe we shouldn't introduce wheat into the children's diet. They have vaccinations, but the bulk of them comes at 4 years old. So many factors.

Tiffany: Well there's GMOs and all the additives that are put in the food like food dyes, colouring, preservatives. Then there's pesticides and herbicides and all the other chemicals that are sprayed onto crops.

Erica: Fungicides.

Tiffany: It's a wonder that we all aren't just dropping dead. {laughter}

Erica: Well kind of like what Elliot was saying too with stress and children no longer going outside or being in the dirt or being in households where there's stress in the family.

Tiffany: Or they're on social media all the time.

Erica: Yeah. And they're not getting sunlight. They're not getting fresh air. They're not getting central elements, aside from food, that would make their immune system strong.

Doug: There is actually a connection with vitamin D. I know for a while there Mercola was really big on vitamin D and he said that vitamin D might be a contributor, if people aren't getting enough vitamin D, they might be more prone to having these kinds of allergic reactions. So I think there might be something to that, the never going outside thing. There's the probiotic aspect of it but there's also the vitamin D aspect.

Elliot: Vitamin D has a really interesting effect on these immune cells called T-regulatory cells. The T-regulatory cells can turn on the immune response or turn it off and they can also govern which branch of the immune system is involved. You have TH1 or TH2. That's really complicated. We don't need to go into that but the vitamin D can modulate those cells which go on to modulate whether the immune system can be turned on or off. So there's certain studies which have shown that sunlight exposure is inversely correlated with most autoimmune conditions. But there's some research showing that people who have higher vitamin D levels who were diagnosed with MS or Crohn's disease or something, had much less flare-ups or they had a lower level inflammatory state and I think they link that back to the mechanistic effects of the vitamin D.

But not only that. There's also vitamin A and this is one thing that gets overlooked; for vitamin D to be able to exert its effects on the immune system, you also need lots of vitamin A and that's not from carrots! {laughter}. That's free form vitamin A.

Gaby: Cod liver oil.

Elliot: Yeah, cod liver oil or liver because if you're one of those unfortunate people like I am, who have certain genetics which means that they very likely can't take carotenoids from carrots and turn them into vitamin A, then it means that you have to consume it in eggs and all that stuff like proper animal foods. So vitamin A is important in helping vitamin D do its job in the immune system. The vitamin A is also actually really important to promote the production of secretory IgA, the immune cell in the mucosal barrier of the gut that I was talking about earlier and this is one of the things that is the first line of defence.

So ultimately, the fat soluble vitamins are wonders.

Gaby: We can speculate actually because there are a lot of people who get allergic types of skin rashes, much worse after sun exposure. They're literally allergic to the sun. Maybe these people have a lot of explosive vegetable oils in their cell membrane. They also have very low vitamin D and E and maybe they have a deficit of sulfur in their skin. I don't know, but it's pretty common. Literally people avoid the sun because it just makes everything worse.

Elliot: I think that's actually a really good point because the UV light is a potential carcinogen in the right circumstances. I'm not saying that it causes skin cancer because I don't believe that, but it's really powerful radiation and if there's loads of vegetable oils in the skin and there's not enough vitamin E - that's a really good point Gaby - if there's not enough vitamin E to be able to mop up the by-products of the oxidation of both rancid oils, then I think it's only natural that there's going to be an inflammatory response.

Gaby: But it's worse, in people increasingly in the last years, especially young people. They're not responding anymore in the emergency room to cortisone shots. Antihistamines usually did the job for an emergency 10 years ago. But right now there are people over-medicated with all kinds of things and they cannot get hold of their symptoms. It's crazy.

Tiffany: Especially if they're taking round after round of steroids, like every time they itch they go to the doctor and the doctor gives them a steroid. Eventually that stuff's not going to work anymore.

Erica: Do you just build up a tolerance to it?

Tiffany: I guess your immune system just learns how to work around it.

Gaby: Like that.

Elliot: There is actually something called cortisol resistance. This is something that you see in obesity or what they refer to as adrenal fatigue. It's where when the cells are under the chronic influence of cortisol much like insulin resistance, they actually stop responding to cortisol. Ordinarily what cortisol should do is suppress the immune response. Sometimes cortisol is good. That's why if someone's got chronic inflammation or chronic back pain they'll usually have high cortisol and that's to suppress the inflammation. But the problem is that when cortisol starts to become resistant and the cells don't listen to cortisol anymore, that is when you've got a really big problem because then you've got really high cortisol but it's not doing what it's meant to do so you get a positive feedback system where you're just continually producing more cortisol and this is how people drop down dead.

Gaby: It's like insulin resistance, but it's cortisol. that's crazy, but yeah.

Tiffany: You could go on a six month fast to totally reset your body?

Gaby: Yeah. We have to change the line of treatment. People cannot just continue going to the emergency room for these shots. They will just have to lock themselves in and do a fast to reset everything and just address every single possible factor.

Tiffany: A fecal transplant fast. {laughter}

Doug: Yeah, it's crazy.

Gaby: Start eating some cod liver? I don't know.

Doug: If you think about it, it seems like the cortisol shots and the cortisol creams and all that kind of stuff are suppressive and if we go back to what Tiff opened the show with, the idea that these allergic reactions actually do have a purpose, your body isn't just messing up. It's doing what it thinks is the best thing to do. So if you just turn around and suppress that, then whatever it is trying to accomplish, it won't be able to accomplish. So you can only imagine that things are going to get worse. It kind of makes sense in a way.

Tiffany: The bad thing is that it's just so uncomfortable. People are miserable and they don't know what to do.

Doug: Exactly.

Erica: That can take a mental and emotional toll for sure.

Gaby: Allergic reaction itself makes you like...

Doug: I've never - thank god, knock on wood here too - actually been one who has seasonal allergies. But I've known some people who have suffered so badly through that and they just have the worst response. Allergy season comes and they're miserable for the entire time.

Gaby: You just described my teenage years.

Doug: Right.

Gaby: Only in Costa Rica, seasonal allergies are like all the year.

Doug: That's terrible.

Gaby: Removing gluten and dairy did a miracle for me in that sense. I stopped having seasonal allergies.

Erica: Same here. It was interesting how the naturopaths blatantly said "Well once you cut out something like gluten your body isn't constantly responding to everything you're eating so those sensitivities just fall away."

Tiffany: And if people have given up gluten and say they still have allergies, they can try a histamine reducing diet. Some of the stuff that we read for the show - which I didn't know - is that histamine is in a lot of aged or fermented or cultured foods, and hard cheeses, which is really sad because cheese is very yummy. {laughter} Red wine, chocolate, nuts. There's a lot of foods that are high in histamines. But the thing is, you read one list that says "These foods are high in histamines" and then you go to another site where they say different foods. So that's where an elimination diet comes in and you have to track it really carefully and make lists and maybe make an excel spreadsheet or something, and keep track of what you eat and how you feel. If you really, really, really want to get to the bottom of what's going on, that's kind of what you would have to do unless you want to go on a six month fast.

Doug: The other thing too that's counterintuitive is that fermented foods that have beneficial probiotics in them, if you're sensitive to histamines, are terrible, like sauerkraut, kombucha, all these things that are supposed to be really good for gut health. People try them and they're like "No! I can't do that!" Well what do you do now?

Elliot: And just to make things worse as well, if you're gut's in a really bad state and it's not only just histamine, you've actually got gut bacteria which can take the amino acid histidine and put it through an enzyme called histidine carboxolase and turn it into histamine. So it doesn't even matter if you're not eating histamines. You can just be eating standard meat which contains histidine and that can make histamines, the same as with tyrosine as well. Tyrosine is found in all sorts of meats and they're typically considered to be safe, but if you've got certain gut bacteria, they can take tyrosine, convert it into tyramine and that's a similar effect as histamines so it can get very complicated.

Gaby: There are more people reporting allergies to meat and it's not like the lone star...

Tiffany: The lone star tick.

Gaby: ...lone star tick. It's not that. It's probably what you're talking about. They're histamine-producing factories. That's why I wanted to learn more about these probiotics.

Doug: Yeah.

Gaby: The histamine-free probiotics.

Elliot: There's a prominent guy in the world of MTHFR and he has a brand, I think, and he talks about it a lot. There's a couple of them and they are supposedly meant to reduce the histamine load. I don't know anyone who's taken them but I know a couple of people who have recommended them and they say that there's good results from them.

Tiffany: Well ascorbic acid is supposedly a good natural antihistamine as well as corsatine and vitamin B6.

Gaby: I've loaded on that for years. Once you have a really severe breakout, it's not going to work. Prevention.

Tiffany: Yeah, you have to front load it.

Gaby: Yeah, prevention is the key.

Doug: In a lot of cases too, the protein-digesting enzymes can be helpful because if you're not breaking down your proteins properly to their individual amino acids, then sometimes you need a little bit of help so they will recommend things like bromelain or serrapeptidase. Those are protein-digesting enzymes that can be very helpful.

Gaby: Glyphosate-free.

Doug: Yeah.

Erica: And the bromelain comes from where?

Tiffany: Pineapples.

Doug: And papaya. Bromelain is pineapple and payaya is papain.

Erica: I know it's really hard to get organic pineapple but be wary. Don't buy Dole pineapple. It's one of the most pesticided crops there is.

Doug: Really? I didn't know that.

Erica: Yeah. And DelMonte.

Elliot: I thought it was the opposite.

Erica: Yeah, it's bad. I don't know if anyone's seen a pineapple. It has a very thick skin but I would imagine with excessive spraying that it would get into the fruit. And if the soil is contaminated as well or if the soil is dead, really. There's no good microbes in the soil that the fruit can absorb. Just a thought.

Doug: Get yourself some organic bromelain. (laughter)

Elliot: Another thing that people can try is short chain fatty acids. You can try to increase them naturally. There's very prebiotic supplements that you can take or if you tolerate things like onions and stuff, they're good sources of prebiotic fibers which can help to increase the short chain fatty acids. But for those who don't know what short chain fatty acids are, they're produced predominantly by gut bacteria and they act as an energy source for the cells that line the gut and they help to maintain a healthy barrier and also help to maintain the immune control of what's going on in the gut.

It very often turns out on most of the stool tests that I have run on people that I know or on myself, I've found that I have low butyrate and this is quite a common thing for many people and it turns out that butyrate is really quite an important one for maintaining the health of those cells. So there are certain practitioners and some amazing research actually, which is showing the benefits of just taking something like calcium magnesium butyrate or sodium butyrate. I think you take it away from meals but I'm not 100% sure about that, but there is some research showing that there are people who have treated various different issues, mainly the inflammatory bowel diseases. But I think it would also help with non-immune, maybe histaminy-type symptoms and perhaps even allergies.

Gaby: I have a confession to make regarding that. I have tried butyrate enemas.

Doug: Ah yeah.

Elliot: Wow!

Gaby: It's hard to retain but it can be done. {laughter} And I think a lot of people were reporting good results with that. That's why I tried it. This was years ago, but it stuck in my mind that butyrate is such a good raw food for the intestines. Because of its odor, some people use it as a substitute for cheese. Don't get me wrong. It's not that bad. It's okay. It's peculiar but it's interesting because butyrate is also the chain in gamma-aminobutyric acid-GABA.

Doug: Yeah, it is.

Tiffany: Were you talking about stinging nettle the other day Erica?

Erica: Yes. I can't remember what it's good for.

Doug: It's good for allergies.

Tiffany: Allegedly you can drink stinging nettle tea, but if you wildcraft it, get it out of the forest, you'll want to pound it down and get rid of all the stinging nettles first before you make it into tea. But you can drink the tea every day during allergy season if you have seasonal allergies.

Erica: Which is funny because if you touch a stinging nettle plant it's hell.

Tiffany: I know.

Doug: Well it's like having an allergic reaction.

Gaby: Yeah. Wouldn't homeopathy work better or does it have to be the tea?

Doug: I don't know. I know people take supplements of it. Apparently 300 mg of freeze dried stinging nettle every day is supposed to be helpful. I haven't heard of a homeopathic. It might be one of those Latin names that I just don't know.

Erica: I've taken Apis homeopathic for insect bites.

Doug: Yeah, that's a bee sting, homeopathic bee sting.

Elliot: I was going to say there are two other things, off the top of my head, that I think could help. One is glycine and this is because if the so-called allergies or kind of reactions are stemming from some sort of defective methylation, then what can happen is that when someone has some sort of methylation defect it doesn't necessarily mean that they will not be undergoing the methylation cycle. It means that they can do it but, without going into any detail, they waste glycine to perform methylation. So you can do it two ways. You can use B12 and folate or you can use glycine and so a lot of people who don't have enough B12 and folate, still get enough methylation done but they just waste loads of glycine.

I think we don't get enough glycine in our diets anyway. You have to drink a lot of bone broth or eat a lot of skin. I don't particularly like eating pork skin. I quite like crackling but I don't eat any beef skin or anything either, so taking glycine - not too much because Stephanie Seneff did warn against it, saying that it could replace alanine in protein synthesis, however I usually take about 5 grams with every meal that contains protein and I found significant benefits to my gut from taking that. So glycine is a precursor to glutathione when it's with other amino acids. So it's been shown to boost glutathione. It's used to secure the gut and it is also used to spare methylation.

There's another one as well which is really underappreciated and this is creatine. Creatine is what loads of bodybuilders take. When I read about creatine it always just made me think of the gym bros standing there in the mirror in the gym, drinking creatine shakes. Because that's the only thing that I knew about creatine but I've learned a lot about it since. It turns out it's actually quite an amazing amino acid. It's been used in several trials to increase brain performance, cognitive performance, memory recall, but also protein synthesis is one of the reasons why a lot of athletes do take creatine. It's amazing for increasing strength and increasing muscle mass and things like that.

But one really interesting thing is that for many people with methylation issues and subsequent histamine issues, what creatine can basically do is it can spare methylation as well. So up to around 40-50% of methylation is actually used to make creatine. So it's theoretically possible and according to several researchers, one of which being Chris Masterjohn, have actually cited evidence which suggests that if you take creatine supplementation that you spare the methyl groups and you can use what little methylation substrate you have to perform the other functions. So it's like a sparing effect.

The dose for creatine is about 5 grams per day and you can get a really cheap version which is creatine monohydrate. There's loads of different versions but creatine monohydrate has been shown to be as effective as any of the versions, if not more effective and possibly cheaper.

Doug: And the side effect is you can get huge! {laughter}

Elliot: Sorry?

Doug: I said the side effect is you get huge.

Elliot: Well I'm not huge and I've been taking it for a while. I'm actually still pretty skinny. {laughter} Another thing that I wanted to say about creatine, and this is something that isn't well known as well, is that creatine is actually used in stomach acid production. So if you get burps, heartburn, gas or bloating and you think you might have low stomach acid, I found that creatine helped massively in that regard because what isn't well recognized but is basic physiology, is that you have a back-up system in your cells to provide them with energy when there's not enough oxygen and that is the creatine phosphate system. This is like a rapid form of energy that creatine can donate to the mitochondria.

So anywhere like in the stomach, it needs to maintain a really high acidity and to do that it requires rapid degeneration of ATP and you inevitably do use the creatine phosphate system. So by supplying yourself with more creatine there's a good chance that that would probably support stomach acid production as well and that's something that I never knew about but I read about it a couple of months ago and I thought wow, that's amazing, tried it and I don't really get any symptoms which are related to low stomach acid anymore. I don't know whether it's to do with the creatine or something else but that might help someone.

Gaby: That's great. Do you know if people report testimonials? Do they take creatine for other purposes and then these other things got better?

Tiffany: And they got bigger.

Elliot: I'm not sure. You can probably look through the body builder forums if you've got the time. {laughter} I'm not sure. But people do take it for the other purposes other than muscle building. It's got some good research behind it.

Erica: Well folks, we're coming up on our time. If you don't have any other possible solutions we'll go to our pet health segment and it's about allergies in pets.

Zoya: Hello and welcome to the pet health segment of the Health and Wellness Show. Spring is here and along with it, seasonal allergies. Listen up to Dr. Karen Becker while she talks about this topic and how to treat allergies and various inflammations in a natural way. Have a great weekend and good-bye.

Dr. Becker: Hi, this is Dr. Karen Becker and today we're going to discuss treating seasonal allergies in pets. Humans who suffer from seasonal allergies usually have symptoms involving the respiratory tract, like sniffling, sneezing, coughing and sometimes breathing difficulties. But when a dog or cat has allergies the symptoms more often show up as a condition called allergic dermatitis, which is irritation or inflammation of the skin. A pet with allergies is usually very itchy. He'll scratch excessively. He might bite or chew on a certain part of his body or be generally irritated. He's probably also prone to rubbing his body against furniture or the carpet as he tries to relieve the miserable itchy feeling that he has.

As the itching and scratching progress the skin could become inflamed and tender and there might be areas of hair loss, open sores and scabs. If your pet is a dog, he can develop hot spots. Although cats can get them it's certainly more rare in kitties, which are inflamed, infected areas of skin resulting from overgrowth of normal bacteria. Hot spots are typically red and very angry looking. They kind of ooze pus and they can develop very, very quickly. Frequently they cause bleeding and hair loss in the patch of skin that the infection is occurring on.

Pets with seasonal allergies, especially dogs, oftentimes will have additional problems with their ears. The ear canals can become itchy and inflamed as a part of the generalized allergic response. They can also become infected with yeast and bacteria. Symptoms of a possible ear infection include scratching at the ears, aggressive head shaking, hair loss around the ears, certainly a stinky odor coming from the ears and of course discharge from the ears.

Another sign to watch for if you would suspect that your pet may have allergies, is generalized redness which means your pet can become red anywhere; red puppy eyes, red oral tissue, a red chin or red muzzle, red paws, a red belly and inner thighs, even a red anus and tail base.

Respiratory symptoms aren't as common in dogs and cats with allergies but they're certainly not unheard of. Much like an allergic human, your dog or cat may have a runny nose, watery eyes, sneezing or coughing. Pets with seasonal allergies to pollens, grasses, ragweeds and mold also tend to develop a sensitivity to other inhaled allergens and animals with a weakness in the lung fields can develop sinusitis and bronchitis just as people do.

The first thing I do for any pet, and especially a dog or cat with allergies, is to address the diet and the possibility of leaky gut syndrome occurring. Oftentimes dysbiosis, which is also called leaky gut, is the reason seasonal allergies get progressively worse from one year to the next. For more information on leaky gut take a look at my video on dysbiosis. Pets with allergies should be transitioned to an anti-inflammatory diet if they aren't already on one. Foods that create or worsen inflammation are high in carbohydrates and your allergic pet's diet should be very low in grain content and absolutely potato-free.

If you adhere to Chinese food energetics or Chinese food theory and the principles then you will also avoid feeding energetically warm or hot foods during the periods of inflammation in your pet. So this means avoiding chicken and beef as protein sources.

Omega 3 fatty acids can decrease inflammation throughout the body. Adding them into the diet of all pets, particularly pets struggling with seasonal environmental allergies is a very beneficial idea. The best sources of omega 3s are krill oil, salmon oil, tuna oil, anchovy oil, sardine oil and other fish body oils. Just a reminder that cod liver oil does not provide enough EFAs for pets. It's only a really good source of vitamin A and D.

I also recommend coconut oil for allergic pets. Coconut oil contains lauric acid which helps decrease the production of yeast in the body. Using a fish body oil with coconut oil before inflammation flares in your pet's body can really help moderate or even suppress the inflammatory response.

Because allergies are an immune system response, it's important to keep your pet's immune function optimal. This means avoiding unnecessary vaccines and drugs. Pets suffering with allergies should not be vaccinated during an allergic flare-up. Vaccines stimulate the immune system which is the last thing your pet needs with an allergy issue. I recommend instead talking to your holistic vet about titers to measure your pet's immunity to core diseases as an alternative to automatically vaccinating.

Pets that go outside regularly are basically furry Swiffers, so they're collecting millions of allergens each time that they run around outside in your yard. Irrigation therapy, which is a fancy word for rinsing your pet off, can provide immediate relief for itchy, irritated skin. Frequent baths also wash away allergens on the coat and skin. It's very important that you use a grain-free shampoo, so no oatmeal shampoos if you have allergic pets.

Foot soaks are also a great way to reduce the amount of allergens that your pet is tracking into the house and spreading all over her indoor environment. If your pet is prone to licking and chewing her feet, this is a great way to reduce the potential for infected nail beds, interstitial cysts and inflamed, swollen pads. I've had dozens of clients in my practice set up foot soaks outside their back doors and do a quick parade through the soothing, disinfecting wash each time that the pets come in from outside and believe it or not, this simple trick has kept many of my seasonal allergy patients off of medications for the entire summer, just by rinsing off feet on a consistent basis.

Eye rinses specifically for pets can provide relief for itchy eyes, but it's very important that you never use a human medicated eye drop without your vet's consent. There is a great over-the-counter all natural eye rinse by Halo Pets that can reduce eye irritation and I would recommend that in place of any type of drug or human drug eye drop for certain.

It's important to keep the areas of your home where your pet spends most of his or her time, as allergen-free as possible as well. Vacuuming and cleaning floors as well as pet bedding is an important part of helping to reduce the amount of allergens in her environment, obviously using non-toxic cleaning agents rather than household cleaners that would contain chemicals is also beneficial. Investing in an air purifier to remove allergens inside the house is a great idea for allergic pets. Covering your pet beds with dust mite covers that can be frequently washed can also help reduce allergen contamination that your pet may be bringing in from the outside.

There are a few supplements that I routinely prescribe for pets with seasonal allergic issues. Quercetin is a bioflavonoid with anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and other wonderful properties. In fact I call it nature's Benadryl because it's very effective at suppressing histamine release and histamine is what causes the inflammation, redness and irritation associated with an allergic response. Bromelain and papain are proteolytic enzymes that increase absorption of quercetin, making it more effective. I like to combine quercetin, bromelain and papain together because they have a great synergistic effect and they suppress prostaglandin release which in turn decreases the pain and inflammation of irritated mucous membranes and body parts.

I also frequently recommend a product called Histaflex AB by Biotics Research. This is a blend of standardized herbal extracts with immunomodulating effects. I also use a lot of Moducare by Thorne Research to help modulate the overactive immune system. Eucalyptus oil can be healing to mucus membranes and diffusing the oil around allergic dogs has proven to be pretty beneficial in most instances. I also sell locally produced honey at my clinic as well. Local honey contains small amounts of pollen from your local area and can help to desensitize the body to your local allergens. So my honey that I sell in Chicago or course has been proven really effective at decreasing seasonal allergic responses to the dogs and cats living in the Chicago area. You would need to visit your farmers market and pick up local honey for your area and give it to your pets.

Pets can also receive desensitization injections, that's the typical allergy shots, like allergic humans do, but many pet owners opt for oral drops instead and studies show that the sublingual, which is under the tongue variety, can be just as effective as the injections. I do use a product that's based off of local allergen load called Respit Therapy and my clients really have appreciated this, especially in light of having to give regular desensitization shots to their pets.

If you're lucky enough to live around an NAET practitioner, they too can offer a non-toxic means of allergy elimination. The more your pet is exposed to the allergen that she's sensitive to, the more intense and long-lasting her allergic response will become. With my regular patients, that means those who have started out as life being a part of my patient, so I saw them when they were very, very young, I certainly recommend beginning to address potential root causes at the first sign of any type of allergic response which usually occurs around six to twelve months of age. I address symptoms immediately and I do this because I want to identify and reduce the risk of an escalating response occurring year after year. Whether your pet is young or an adult, I hope that this video has given you some potentially helpful recommendations as you look for ways to relieve the suffering of your allergic dog or cat.

Erica: Well thank you Zoya. That was super helpful.

Tiffany: Allergy-free goats.

Elliot: I think half of that stuff could be applied to humans as well.

Erica: Yes.

Gaby: Exactly. As above, so below.

Erica: Well thank you all for listening and thank you Lynn for calling in, and to all of our chatters. Be sure to tune in to Sunday's show Behind the Headlines and we hope you have a wonderful Friday the 13th.

All: Good-byes.

ITN - FDA Approves Ebola Pill Makes Brain Small Millennials' Health Declining

4 January 2020

Elliot: Hello everybody and welcome to this week's edition of Objective: Health. First of all I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year. It's going to be an interesting one. So happy 2020. A new decade. We'll see what we've got in store for these next 10 years. It's likely going to be interesting.

I'd like to introduce my co-hosts today, Erica, Doug and Tiff.

[Hellos]

My name is Elliot and in today's show we're going to be going through some of the weird and crazy things that have been happening over the past month or so. This week's show is just a roundup of many of the news items that have caught our attention and that we feel would be useful to discuss. So we're going to be talking about several different things. We're going to be looking at vaccines and a new vaccine which has just come out. We're going to be looking at some of the abhorrent behaviours of the FDA as well as ADHD, whether that's a real thing, whether that's been overblown and a couple of other things today.

So to start things off, should we talk about the new Ebola vaccine that's come out?

Doug: Yeah, I think that's a good place to start.

Elliot: It's been approved. So Christmas eve a new article came out titled, The FDA Approves Merck's New Live Ebola Vaccine Which Says That It Can Shed and Cause Immunosuppression. So essentially, Merck, a big pharmaceutical company, has come out with a new vaccine which is said to protect against the deadly Ebola virus. Now some of you may remember Ebola. There was a massive scare about it a couple of years ago now. It's definitely not something that you'd want to catch, for sure. It can be fatal. But whether this vaccine is going to be of any use or not is a good question.

On December 20, 2019 it was Merck that announced it received FDA approval for the new Ebola vaccine and the Ebola vaccine contains a live form of the virus, the Zaire Ebola virus. So what do we think?

Tiffany: It's going to be a disaster!

Doug: Yeah, I think it will, just the fact that they've admitted that it sheds. Apparently it says right in the package insert, "Transmission of vaccine virus is a theoretical possibility. Vaccine virus RNA has been detected in blood, saliva or urine for up to 14 days after vaccination. The duration of shedding is not known, however samples taken at 28 days after vaccination tested negative. Vaccine virus RNA has been detected in food from skin vesicles that appeared after vaccination."

So in other words, you get the vaccination and then you are contagious with Ebola for at least 14 days.

Tiffany: Yeah, not just in your blood, saliva and urine, but apparently there's a chance that you're going to get some skin vesicles too after you get vaccinated. That sounds fantastic! {laughter}

Doug: Yeah man. Honestly, it's crazy.

Tiffany: This vaccine I think has been used in trials since 2015 in Africa, possibly the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So they've been testing this since 2015. I guess the biggest one that got all the news - I think that was back in 2014 - where they had some foreign people who were in Africa and they brought them to the US and treated them at hospitals near the CDC in Atlanta. So there was a whole big hubbub about that with all the news stories that came out, but apparently this vaccine has been in trials since around that time, or a little after. There have been smaller outbreaks that didn't receive very much news coverage, but I don't think it has ever been eradicated.

Elliot: One of the scariest things about this vaccine is that apparently in the clinical studies when they were measuring the white blood cell count, in the subjects who had had the vaccine, one of the adverse effects was that they found that the lymphocytes count in the blood, which are a certain type of immune cell, had decreased in 85% of subjects. Another type of immune cell called the neutrophil was lower in 43% of subjects.

So the author of the article which is reporting on this said, "Considering the fact that Ebola virus infection causes the death of lymphocytes and neutrophils, the vaccine appears to induce the very same type of immunosuppressive effects that are associated with morbidity and mortality from the disease it's attempting to prevent." So essentially this idea that perhaps if someone becomes an active carrier of the live virus, let's say, one of the ways that the virus is affecting the human body and potentially killing someone is by destroying the count of white blood cells including lymphocytes and neutrophils. So they're saying that this is having a very similar effect to if you were to get the virus itself!

Doug: Yeah. It's insane. The other negative thing about it is that apparently once someone has had the vaccine, it becomes very difficult to tell in testing, whether they have the wild type of Ebola infection or a vaccine strain Ebola infection. It's just going to screw up the numbers. They're not going to have a clear picture of what's really going on with the disease because everybody's who's had the vaccine looks the same as everybody who has the actual disease.

You know, the whole thing with this reminds me of our last show before the break for the holidays where we talked about that New York Times article that was talking about polio and that now more polio cases are caused by the vaccine than by the wild virus. Interestingly, because this story reminded me of that, I went back to the New York Times to look at that article and it appears to be scrubbed. I could not find it on the New York Times site. I tried searching the title, searching for keywords, all those sorts of things. The original link is dead. Fortunately you can still find it up on SOTT because we archive things there. But I thought that that was very interesting, that the New York Times publishes something about more polio cases being caused by the vaccine than by the wild virus and that just disappears.

Tiffany: Well speaking of polio vaccines, I think that they were contaminated with a simian virus that's been linked to cancer and this same cell line is being used in this current new Ebola vaccine.

Doug: Oh my god!

Tiffany: So it's going to be a disaster in a couple of different ways. Say if you caught wild Ebola for some reason - again, I think they're downplaying the fact that in a lot of these areas where Ebola is breaking out, they're very poor, poor nutrition, poor sanitation. So that always plays a big part in any kind of disease outbreak. But say you were to catch the wild Ebola virus, you have maybe a 50% chance of dying from that. I think the death rate is 40-50% if you were to catch the wild virus. But if you were to take the vaccine, not only could you still get the virus, you could probably have a worse course of the illness. People who have been vaccinated against chickenpox as a child and maybe in their 20s might catch chickenpox even though they're vaccinated, it's much, much worse than if they would have gotten it when they were younger.

So you can apply that to Ebola perhaps. Then you can spread it to other people which would cause a spread of Ebola. And then, if you have managed to survive all of that, you have the chance of coming down with some kind of autoimmune or cancer-type disease later in life.

Elliot: Yeah.

Erica: Maybe that's the intention.

Tiffany: Well of course. I think I read in another article that they have maybe 200,000 doses at the ready for use and they're going to start vaccinating the people who had contact with people who came down with Ebola, the healthcare workers, their relatives, and they'll just go in a ring formation and vaccinate people. But I think it's going to cause the spread of the virus. I don't know if this is something that they're gearing up for but it always seems to be, like with polio again, the wild type virus, once sanitation and clean water were implemented, the polio cases went down and then the vaccine was introduced and the polio cases went back up. So it wouldn't be a shock if we saw something like that with Ebola. I'm expecting it actually.

Doug: It wouldn't surprise me at all either.

Erica: Another concerning thing and again, this is another one of those FDA fast-tracked approvals, ten years ago only 10% of drugs were approved in such a speedy way but now over 60% of new drugs are fast-tracked. We mentioned this, like you were saying Doug, in the previous vaccine show about Gardasil, Gardasil was another fast track FDA-approved vaccine. So they haven't taken the time to study all the side effects. It's just, "Let's just get this to market and then we'll use humans as guinea pigs to see what happens."

Tiffany: Mm-hm. Well they'll study the side effects for a couple of weeks or so, just a short time after they start doing the trials on the vaccines or any kind of drugs, but they don't go back years later and do a test or any kind of study comparing people who are vaccinated to unvaccinated people or people who came down with the Ebola wild type versus people who were vaccinated. None of that is going to be done, that's for sure.

Erica: And this is becoming the new normal, to just push these things to market and see what happens.

Tiffany: Well I could see why they would do it in the case of a pandemic or an epidemic. If you believe in the whole science behind vaccination, then yes, it would kind of make sense that they would want to fast track something that's killing a lot of people.

Doug: But they exploit that, I think.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: Especially when you've got something like Ebola which is so scary because it's this thing where if you catch it you start bleeding out of every orifice and through the skin. It's a horrible, horrible sounding thing. So I think they really exploit the fact that this disease is spreading in certain countries and that there have been certain contained instances in the west. They exploit that and ramp up the fear and then push through this vaccine that, given what's mentioned in this article, it seems far from ready, quite frankly. It doesn't seem like this is actually ready to be out there and be used.

But they push it through based on fear. I really hope that it's not going to be some horrific disaster where suddenly the disease just explodes.

Elliot: Yeah. Oftentimes with these vaccines there's not enough groundwork done, there's not enough background checks, there are no long-term studies which are performed and the ones that are performed are usually shams. So if the past is anything to go by, these big companies do all that they can to push something through, to push these vaccines and new drugs through as fast as possible. It's not even like pharmaceutical drugs where you have to have multiple rounds of testing. A lot of the time with the vaccines they just fast track it and the human body has a lot more defense against an oral medication than it does a vaccine.

Tiffany: Well I think part of the reason that they fast track vaccines is because the people at the top of the pharmaceutical industry know vaccines are bullshit. {laughter} They know that no matter how much testing they do, all the results are going to be unfavourable if you really look at the data that they come up with in their studies. So what's the point of taking it slow? They're all crap and they're all going to cause damage. They want to make as much money as they can in as short an amount of time as they can.

Doug: Yeah, it's true. They just get it out there as quickly as possible, make as much money as possible, make as much money off of it as they can and then when disaster strikes, they pay their pittance when they're sued, which is already worked into their costs, probably...

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: ...and then, go for the next epidemic. What's the next one?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Elliot: Talking about vaccines, kind of on the topic of what we've just been talking about, there was an event that occurred at a Texas school not long ago, involving a different vaccine. This one was for whooping cough. The actual disease is called pertussis, if that's how you pronounce it, and this was very interesting actually. It's quite funny to watch because what they found was that you had an outbreak of whooping cough. You had a bunch of children who came down with this illness and yet, interestingly, when you look at the statement made by the school which was sent to the parents, it confirms that every single one of the students at the school were 100% vaccinated. {laughter}

So they had received the vaccine against the disease and they still got the disease. That's a problem right? That kind of highlights maybe the vaccine doesn't work as well as they say it does.

Tiffany: And maybe herd immunity is a bunch of crap! {laughter}

Doug: It really makes you think, is the vaccine actually doing anything? Anything at all? You vaccinate 100% of the students against whooping cough and then there's a whooping cough outbreak?! How does that happen exactly if the vaccines are as effective as we're always told they are through the media?

Elliot: Well interestingly enough, it says here that studies show that by five years after the completion of the series of these vaccines, some children were up to 15 times more likely to acquire pertussis (being whooping cough) compared to the first year after the series. So basically after five years, whether the vaccine does work or not, after five years, the efficacy goes down greatly. So the entire notion that a vaccine provides long-term immunity doesn't seem to be supported in this case. It's kind of ironic because when you read the nonsense that they spout about herd immunity and about the potential dangers, the troubles that the parents have to go through because they're bombarded with this idea that unvaccinated children pose a real, genuine threat to the vaccinated community because the unvaccinated child can harbour this disease. But what this is showing is that that whole idea is a bunch of nonsense. It doesn't matter if you're vaccinated or not.

Doug: I was just wondering because, like you were just saying, the studies show that five years after completion, children were up to 15 times more likely to acquire pertussis compared to the first year after the series. I would be interested to see them compare - which you never see in studies by the way - compare unvaccinated children to the vaccinated ones and see what the actual comparison would be on that front. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if it turned out that unvaccinated children were actually more protected against the wild virus than the vaccinated ones.

Elliot: I don't think there's ever been a study like that. There may have been one a year or two ago...

Doug: Out of Japan maybe? I seem to remember it being out of Japan.

Elliot: Yeah. There was one last year. I'm pretty sure Dr. Stephanie Seneff was talking about it. She was saying there was one study because I don't think it's ever been done in the US. We know why. I'm pretty sure it was showing that kids who didn't receive vaccines not only were less likely to develop the actual illness that they were vaccinated against, but also they had much better health outcomes in terms of allergies, chronic immune function and many different outcomes. I'm pretty sure that they fared well on most of them when compared to the vaccinated children. And I'm also pretty sure that the rates of autism and other neuropsychiatric issues were lower. But don't quote me on that. I just vaguely remember reading that study. So yeah, not looking good.

Tiffany: Well considering that this pretty much shows that 100% vaccination in a school population offers no protection against a disease, I don't think that this is really going to stop the true believers in vaccination. I think when we see this, 100% is high but with a lot of their measles outbreaks and that, the vast majority of the kids in the school were vaccinated. But the true believers of vaccination are probably just going to say - and which they have said before - we just need more and better vaccines, not that vaccines themselves are crap. We just need more vaccines, more research, better vaccines and they'll double down on the whole vaccination philosophy.

Doug: It wouldn't surprise me.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Elliot: So overall it's not impressive. {laughter} It's unfortunate that they don't tell you that about the vaccines having so many potential risks in terms of how they can turn beautiful, young, flourishing child into a cabbage, because that does happen, with all due respect to the parents of these children, it can literally disable kids. That's what it does in thousands of cases. So they don't tell you about the risks and then they also don't tell you that the effectiveness of many of these things is completely overblown and potentially making things worse than they were in the first place.

Doug: Yeah.

Elliot: So just like we always talk about on this show, it's another scam, another scam.

Doug: More or less.

Elliot: More or less. What else have we got in this week's roundup? Moving on, let's talk about the FDA. We were just talking about how the FDA approved this sham vaccine which is potentially going to be spreading Ebola, a nasty virus, but let's look at what else the FDA is doing. Are they doing good stuff? What good stuff are they doing? {laughter}

Tiffany: The FDA in all of their wisdom.

Elliot: Yeah, Food and Drug Administration Agency. They do lots of good stuff. So what good stuff are they doing this week?

Erica: Well this week, more in November, they decided that they are going to go against homeopathy, yet again. So they announced new guidance that could lead to the end of homeopathy in America in less than three months. GreenMedInfo carried this article but they were talking about how under the new guidance, all homeopathic medicines will be considered illegal and this is because the draft guidance declares all homeopathic medicines to be new drugs which have not undergone the agency's pre-market approval process known as the new drug application.

So homeopathic medicines can't be patented and therefore cannot justify the enormous expenditures that this new drug approval application entails and so the FDA insists that they should be put through this process and they will be starting to ban these types of medicines in the US. It's just ridiculous. They've been going after homeopathy for over 30 years it seems, just to try and discredit it and make it seem like it's junk science or doesn't really work. One of the things in the US that you can do is contact the FDA and give your feedback, share information with others. But it looks like it's not only happening in the US. It's also happening in the UK.

There was an article carried on SOTT about how the NHS blacklists homeopathy because of the mistaken belief that it doesn't work and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence said multiple reviews have shown no evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy.

Doug: Which is untrue.

Erica: Yeah. As we've shared many times on this show, it sounds like big pharma is really trying to eliminate this type of alternative medicine. I've used homeopathics for years. It's non-toxic. You can't really overdose on homeopathy.

Doug: I think the main reason they go after homeopathy - and this story could have come from last year or the year before. The FDA has done this multiple times. I had déjà vu while reading this article because I had read one on Mercola last year and the year before that it might have been Mercola again. I don't know. But so many times they do this draft legislation that essentially is calling for defining homeopathic medicines as unregulated medicines and therefore illegal. So far it hasn't actually gone through but the threat is there and is renewed over and over and over again.

What I was going to say before is that I think the reason is because it's actually quite effective and if it got a good strong foothold in the west, like it does, say in India, pharmaceuticals would have a real problem on their hands because who's going to pay thousands of dollars for their bullshit medications when a $10 medication could do better than it does?

Erica: Some believe it's just a thorn in the side of big pharma because it's safe and inexpensive. And it can't be patented. So we see this again. It's kind of like the vaccine thing, as you were saying Doug, it does feel like you're in a déjà vu. We've been doing this show for five years and it feels like every year it's like, "Wait! Didn't we just cover that?!" {laughter}

Doug: Exactly.

Erica: How does it keep coming back. I think it's because people are turning away from big pharma, drugs, and they're realizing that there are other options out there and it's probably why Dr. Google is cracking down on searches. "Oh, we've got to control the narrative here. We can't make people access information that could really take out our bottom line."

Doug: Yeah.

Tiffany: I think that the people who are really firm believers and have used homeopathy for a long time, maybe if they've been following the stories, hopefully they've been stocking up. Maybe there's going to still be some underground practitioners or some people who are so powerful you can't touch them. I've read that the queen of England takes homeopathic remedies and she's pretty old. I'm sure she eats the best food in the world too. But still, I think the people who are really clued in on it will probably find ways to get around it, even if they have to make their own remedies.

Doug: Or get them smuggled in from India.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: Because I don't think it's going anywhere in India.

Tiffany: Do homeopathic tourism, things like that.

Doug: Yeah, yeah. Totally.

Elliot: How many people does homeopathy kill per year? {laughter}

Doug: It's got to be at least zero. Maybe at most, zero.

Elliot: How many cases of autism are caused by homeopathy?

Doug: If I had to guess I'd say zero.

Elliot: How many adverse drug reactions? How many people drop dead from taking homeopathic arnica tincture? It's just an upside down crazy abomination and I think it says more - it's interesting because in these times the FDA shows their true colours. They show where their allegiances are and it's not with the health of the people, for sure. They're gaslighting the population as a whole because homeopathy is accepted and utilized, although not by everyone, by a large portion of the population in general. There are commonly understood benefits which go way beyond modern medicine!

I can kind of equate it to a mass gaslighting, where they're essentially telling people, "No. we don't care what you think works. We'll tell you what works. And then in fact, if you don't believe us, we'll outlaw it!" So you can get locked up for taking some homeopathic arnica. {laughter}

Doug: And the stupid thing is that they can't have it both ways. One of their arguments is that 'We have to ban it because it doesn't do anything. It's a placebo and if people take that then they won't seek out actual treatment that will help them and it will hurt them.' So that's nanny state tactics. You can't do this because it will hurt you. And then on the other hand they will say something like, 'No, these are medicines, so you can't take them because they're unlicensed medicines.' Well which is it?! Is it fake? Does it do nothing? Or is it a medicine? You can't have it both ways.

It either does nothing, which is what the materialists will tell you because they cannot possibly fit into their brain that it might have a mechanism of action that doesn't involve physical molecules doing things, that there might actually be an information level. Or on the other hand, they're dangerous. It's ridiculous.

Erica: Well they're dangerous because they don't have any side effects. {laughter}

Doug: Yeah, that's dangerous.

Tiffany: Well that's why more and more as time goes by, you try to say, 'Well not everything is a conspiracy. They're not all liars.'

Erica: Yes they are!

Tiffany: 'There are some people who really believe in what they're doing.' But as time passes, I feel that everything is a conspiracy because they know exactly what to ban and what not to ban in all cases. They never make a mistake and let something good pass!

Doug: I think that that's true. At the same time though, I do think that there are a lot of people out there who have a philosophical objection to homeopathy, like I was saying, materialists. They cannot get their head around the idea that there might be something going on that involves information or fields, in physics and things like that, that it's actually operating on those sorts of levels. They're strictly materialists and they cannot accept something that isn't a nuts and bolts interpretation of things.

They actually think they're doing the right thing by trying to get through to the brainwashed masses that this thing that saved their life didn't actually save their life, that it was just a placebo. But at the same time, I think if you go high enough up the ladder, there are a number of people there who are like, "Yeah, we know it works but we've got to push this aside because it's going to run us out of business if people figure this out."

Elliot: Well talking about the sham that is the pharmaceutical industry {laughter} we were talking briefly before about how many of the drugs which big pharma push onto people as though they are the one and only solution for their health problems, have awful side effects. Well, this is also the case with a very, very, very common pharmaceutical taken by quite a large percentage of women, and that is the oral contraceptive pill.

Just after Christmas there was an article on quite a well-known website called Medical News Today. It's a relatively mainstream website, if I remember correctly. They were talking about a study that came out not long ago, talking about how birth control pills or oral contraceptive pills, the previous research looking at the effect it had on hormones was only looking at the effect it had on hormones. Now there has been a lot of other research over the past couple of decades demonstrating potentially causal, if not merely just associative links, with a variety of different adverse health outcomes, one of those being breast cancer. That is a very common one, but also cancer of multiple organs. There are neuropsychiatric associations. There are depletions of certain vitamins.

But I've never personally come across this side effect before and it was quite unexpected from the researchers who were doing this study. They did a study looking at certain parts of the brain and comparing them between women who did take the oral contraceptive pill and women who didn't take the oral contraceptive pill and what they found - and they weren't looking for this - but what they found was a dramatic difference in size of the part of the brain called the hypothalamus. So it turns out that the women who took the oral contraceptive pill actually have significantly smaller hypothalamic volume.

Now the hypothalamus is a very special part of the brain. You can think of it as a relay or control center and it has a regulatory or modulatory effect on several different functions involving hormonal balance, energy metabolism. It's involved in the pathways which are said to be related to emotions, to fear, anger, all of these different kinds of things. And what they found was that these women, after taking the oral contraceptive pill - I don't know if they know the mechanism - but they found that it actually reduces the size of this part of the brain! That's pretty interesting, isn't it?

Doug: Yeah it is. You know, it's funny. I always remember, long before I got into holistic health and that sort of thing, it was well known within my circle of friends at the time who were not particularly anti-mainstream kind of thing, they were pretty normal people, but it was common knowledge that the pill made women crazy.

Tiffany: Yeah. {laughter}

Doug: It was not a good idea to do it. You can try it, but everybody knows that it actually makes women crazy. It was known at that time that that's what would happen if women did the oral contraceptive for long enough, I guess. Different people would experiment with it and be like, "Oh no, it turns out you're right. I went crazy on it." So this kind of thing doesn't really surprise me in the least, that it's actually having this kind of negative effect on the brain.

Erica: From my experience with it, because I was on it many years ago, it just tricks your body into thinking you're in a constant state of pregnancy, so that would explain why you have those hormonal ups and downs and then weight gain and weird eating habits, sleep habits and whatnot. But what's really concerning about this article is that they're not only prescribing the pill now for birth control, but they're also prescribing it for a wide range of other conditions. I guess maybe you know Tiff, about the off-label prescribing. They're giving it to women for irregular menstruation, acne, polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis and cramps and they even said that they're giving it to women that want to delay or eliminate menstruation, which is just insane on so many levels.

Tiffany: Well a lot of women do that. Say they have a vacation or something coming up and they don't want to get their period while they're on vacation. They will not take any of the dummy pills. They just continue to take the active pills in the birth control pack. So that's really nothing new, but the fact that doctors are sanctioning this, saying that it's okay, that you should interfere with your natural cycle by taking birth control pills to prevent having your period, that is something new for me.

Erica: Then also there's a whole generation of women who are not being able to get pregnant after taking the pill for extended periods of time too.

Elliot: Yeah, you'd be amazed. I've heard some real horror stories. Young women who have particularly heavy menses when they first come onto their period, or they get acne, or they might be developing some of the symptoms related to polycystic ovarian syndrome, stick them on the pill. They stay on the pill for 20 years and then they want to get pregnant. Then they come off the pill and they wonder why they can't get pregnant. Some women have never had a period! They've never had a period! Because they were stuck on the pill and their body has never gone through a proper cycle!

Now it takes some real time and some real fixing to reverse the damage that that does because you're having so many unseen effects. It really is criminal to prescribe this stuff, getting young children on it for acne, for instance. That is just...

Doug: That is unbelievable!

Elliot: You would be amazed. It's so common. It's normal practice these days! Again, unfortunately they don't tell the teenagers that it's going to increase their likelihood of getting ovarian cancer by the time they're 25, five out of 50 times. They don't tell them that do they?

Erica: That smaller hypothalamus too is connected to that. We'll see where this research goes.

Doug: Pretty depressing. Pretty much.

Tiffany: Whenever we do one of these news shows, it's always, always, always bad news. {laughter}

Doug: Yeah, it's true.

Tiffany: There's never any good news.

Doug: And here we thought 2020 was going to be different.

Elliot: Is there any wonder why millennials who've had these drugs and chemicals and all of this stuff foisted upon them most of their life, is it any wonder why millennials are seeing their health decline faster than ever before? So for the first time what we see is that millennials, which I think means any individual born between the years of 1981 and 1996, this is the typical kind of age range for millennials, as this recent study showed if the forecasting is correct, the way that things are going, the millennials in comparison to the previous generation, called Gen-Xs, it says that millennial treatment costs are projected to be as much as 33% higher than Gen-Xs experienced at a comparable age.

So essentially what we're seeing is that millennials are developing health problems which you would usually see much later on, say 10-20 years down the line. So we're seeing cardiovascular disease appear. If you listen to many of the doctors, you'll actually see that you're having type II diabetics being diagnosed at 15 years old. This used to be referred to as senile diabetes, you develop it when you're in your 70s whereas now you've got 12-year-olds, 15-year-olds being diagnosed with this. You're having people develop dementia at 40 years of age.

So we're having many of these kinds of diseases which were typically associated with older onset or much older ages, they're seeing that people much younger are developing these. Is it any wonder when the Gen-Xs may have been given four or five vaccines when they were babies or when they were in their toddler years whereas we look at the millennials, and it's even worse for the later generation, but the millennials, we were the ones who were really hit with increasing vaccines, more chemicals, glyphosate, more processed foods, more WiFi for instance. I know that when I was below the age of 10 years old I think we had WiFi or we were getting to that. So essentially the millennials have taken a bit of a harder hit I think.

Tiffany: And I think you have to factor in the whole vegan craze that's been going around for the last few years. The poor nutrition, not just if you're eating junk food which is bad enough, but people will think they're eating healthy because they're eating a plant-based diet. That just adds to it.

Doug: It kind of pissed me off because in this article the only reason that they give for why this might be happening is that millennials don't go to the doctor as often {laughter} as other generations do, or they don't have a relationship with their doctor. They feel a little bit more isolated. They don't trust their doctor as much so they don't go. And I thought what a bunch of baloney. That's just ridiculous. I don't think it has anything to do with that. In fact that would probably mean that they would not be getting these diseases as often because they're avoiding iatrogenic causes. But I think for sure, like Elliot was saying, the GMOs, the pesticides, the herbicides, the WiFi, the cell phones and just the poor nutrition.

It always reminds me of that experiment that Pottinger did with the cats where he was feeding them crappy food and he was looking at different generations. When feeding them crappy food, by the third generation I think it was, the cats were no longer able to reproduce because the nutrition had just degraded them so much to the point where they were no longer able to reproduce. Well how many generations now have we been having this processed crap where people have never seen a vegetable? Or meat for that matter? Actually that's a better example.

Anyway, it seems like this generation, the millennials, might be that tipping point where the health just completely collapses because their parents and their parents before them were eating garbage. Or the diets have gotten progressively worse as the ages have gone on.

Erica: And also that cascade effect of not having normal childhood struggles of dealing with schoolyard bullies because everything has become so regulated nanny state and not being able to go outside; the psychological aspects of that too, WiFi, social media, being completely isolated and almost learning life lessons virtually instead of in real time.

Doug: The antibacterial soaps. {laughter} Killing off the microbiome.

Erica: Too many clean kids that are in sterile environments that have no real concept of what the world outside of their domain is even like. I know mental health is failing as well, not just for millennials, but each generation after that.

Elliot: I don't think we're going to need a study to tell us that actually what we refer to as I-Gen, which are the very young 'uns born after say 2000 or something, they're in for a rocky road, pretty sure. I'm sometimes amazed looking at the food that these kids eat. I wonder how they're even still alive. It's just pure, empty trash. It's amazing. It really is amazing. And then they're glued to their iPhone and iPad. Little babies for god's sake! Two year olds have iPads on their face all the time! Because the parents are too phone-eyed to actually be a parent. Just give them a phone. And they've got this WiFi stuff zinging their brain 10 hours a day! There's no hope for a child like that. I would love to think that the human body can adapt, but I really just think that the health of the next generation in the western world is spiralling down and there's not much you can do about it.

Tiffany: If you go out and look at the average person now, pretty much I'd say the majority of the people are fat, whether they're adults or children. Even if you didn't know what was going on with them internally, you just look at them, people just look awful, quite frankly. And it's not just because they're fat. Their skin is bad. Everybody just seems like they're just busted and broken down. I don't know, maybe it's just where I live, {laughter} but people just really look unhealthy regardless of whether they're pre-diabetic yet or anything like that.

Erica: Also that zombie-eyed, not aware of your surroundings, tuned out, attention deficit. Even adults have an attention span that is shocking, to say the least. It's the culminating of, like you're saying Tiff, just this culture of...

Tiffany: Just vapid consumer culture, dumbed-down educational system and the really bad health system. I think we're just screwed.

Elliot: Oftentimes when I walk past McDonalds and take a peep into the people who are sitting in McDonalds, I often think these guys are genetically modified people. {laughter}

Doug: It's true.

Elliot: No offence, but they look like zombies, often grey and slightly yellow and don't really know what they're doing. It's not very nice to look at. Maybe I was just normalized to it when I was a child but it seems like it is getting progressively worse, even in the UK. We don't have the obesity crisis to quite the extent the United States does, but...

Doug: Close.

Elliot: It's getting there. It is indeed getting there. And then you go onto the European mainland, you go through somewhere like Bosnia or Serbia and you take a look at the people and they look pretty damn healthy. They're all very slim, very attractive, beautiful skin, lovely hair. Just as a population you think it's not just down to genetics. It's the countries who've adopted the United States' dietary guidelines and then allowed the big, massive food producers, the fast junk food companies, to infiltrate into their culture, into their supermarkets and things and sell this junk to the people. You see that in places like Indonesia where their previous health was quite good and then all of a sudden when they adopt these horrible junk foods, the incidents of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity just skyrockets.

Erica: But America's the greatest nation in the world! {laughter}

Doug: Well that's true.

Erica: Because of the things we're exporting. {laughter}

Elliot: Anything else come to mind from what we've been talking about? Anything else anyone wanted to cover? We've gone through quite a bit. There were a couple of other things.

Doug: We're already getting on.

Tiffany: Do we want to save the bad news for next time? {laughter}

Elliot: Yeah....

Doug: We're coming up on worse news? {laughter}

Elliot: The worst news?

Doug: No. It's all the same level news. It's all bad.

Elliot: Okay, I'm feeling quite thoroughly depressed right now, that's probably enough for my mental health this week.

Erica: I do think it's important to know these things because it helps you navigate in your world. "Oh maybe it's this. Maybe it's that. Am I crazy? No, I'm just seeing things as they are." All the different things in this show that we've talked about, it's kind of this culminating effect that you're seeing around you and it really can't be denied anymore.

Doug: Yeah.

Erica: Or maybe it's just because we've been doing this for five years and we keep having these déjà vu moments, "My gosh, this is coming back again. Why won't this thing die?"

Elliot: Sometimes you've got to laugh or you'll cry. If it can give you a bit of comedic value every week, just skimming through the news and wondering how far it can go and sit back and watch the show I guess.

Erica: I think it's important, being able to share these things with people, even on a small level. If somebody asks you, "What do you think of homeopathy?" or whatever the topic is, you can say, "Well, there's three sides to every story, right? There's the truth somewhere in the middle and there's this side and that side." I've noticed just in situations work-wise that people are much more open to the possibility that things aren't what the news or the media is feeding them, that there's something else going on and they're interested. They're curious I should say. And I think you can introduce topics without sounding like Tiffany was saying earlier, like a conspiracy theorist.

A great thing is that everyone is getting the flu right now and they've all got their flu vaccines and you're like, "Well, maybe next year try not to get that."

Tiffany: No one ever seems to notice! Every year I see people all around me getting the flu vaccine. Oh man! "I got the flu but I just got the flu vaccine a few weeks ago!" Like, hello! You said the same thing last year. You don't remember?

Erica: Yeah. So maybe in 2020 the time is right for just broaching the subject a little bit now that they've gotten the flu five years in a row after getting the flu vaccine. {laughter} But as always, I'm an optimist.

Tiffany: I'm not. I'm a pessimist.

Doug: Me too.

Erica: I know, I know I'm the solo one here. Somebody's got to hold up the optimism flag.

Elliot: On that positive note, has anyone got any comments or anything that we want to say?

Doug: Any answers?

Erica: We all have plenty of comments but we'll save it for another show.

Elliot: Okay then. That looks like it is the end of this week's show. Thanks to our audience. Thanks to my co-hosts, Erica, Doug and Tiff. Thank you to myself. My name's Elliot. {laughter} Tune in for next week's show, not sure what the topic is yet but we will be doing one, same time next week. If you like this show and you found it helpful, maybe share it on Facebook, share it on social media. You can like and subscribe to our page. We're also on Facebook as Objective Health where we post articles and things. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

Good-byes.