Ever feel hangry when you miss a meal? Imagine waiting 16 or 18 hours before eating again. Or an entire day without breakfast, lunch, or dinner. That's what proponents of intermittent fasting do on a regular basis.

At its simplest, intermittent fasting (IF) means cycling through periods of voluntary abstinence of food (or significant calorie reduction), interspersed with intervals of normal food intake.

Whenever we eat, the body releases insulin to help cells convert sugars (in particular glucose) from food into energy. If the glucose isn't used immediately, insulin helps makes sure the excess is stored in fat cells. But when we go without food for extended periods, as people do in IF, insulin is not released. The body then turns to breaking down fat cells for energy, leading to weight loss.

Even after starving children get enough to eat again, they often fail to grow. Their brains don't develop properly, and they remain susceptible to diseases, even many years later. Two studies in Science this week now suggest fostering the right gut microbes may help these children recover. The work also pinpoints combinations of foods that nurture the beneficial microbes.

Most of the experiments were in animals, but a small group of malnourished children given those foods also showed signs of improvement. "This is an outstanding and extremely comprehensive study," says Honorine Ward, a microbiologist and global health expert at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. Tailoring food aid to foster the microbiome "could be a key to new strategies for improving global public health and human potential," adds David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Tahmeed Ahmed, director of nutrition research at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, in Dhaka, has tried for 30 years to help malnourished children recover better. About a decade ago, he was intrigued by work by Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, linking certain gut microbes to obesity. The two scientists wondered whether the microbiome — the set of microbes living in and on the human body — might also play a role in obesity's opposite number, malnutrition.

Implausible Pro-Vaccine Publications Contrasted Against Ignored Public Health Campaigns and Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trials

Introduction

As an author, presenter, editor, and careful reader of research and public policy, I have been concerned for several years about potentially false attribution of efficacy to vaccines during public health campaigns and major infrastructure investments that concurrently provided access to education, improved sanitation, improved diet (alongside immune-enhancing nutritional supplementation, most commonly with vitamins A and D, zinc, and iron), relocations of millions of people along with changes in their living and working circumstances (which would be expected to change infectious disease patterns, e.g., relocating people away from farms obviously reduces their exposure to Clostridium tetani [the anaerobic bacillus of tetanus] which is found primarily in soil contaminated by fecal material from [especially ruminant] animals such as cattle, sheep, and goats). With the April 2019 publication of several very unusual articles stemming from the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the time arrived to explore some of these concerns in a structured and public format. A legitimate concern is that science and public opinion are being inappropriately manipulated to favor a pharmaceutical/vaccination paradigm while lower cost, more widely available, safer and more efficacious nutritional interventions are being sidelined or intentionally ignored. In the current instance, overzealous endorsement and praise was given to a pharmaceutical intervention while a nationwide nutritional supplementation program supported by double-blind placebo-controlled trials was completely--and perhaps intentionally and strategically--ignored, then blocked by the journal from further discussion.

On June 13, 2019, the New York legislature quickly pushed a bill (A2371) to repeal the religious exemption to vaccination through both the Assembly and Senate in one day with no public hearings.

The unprecedented legislative coup, which cut the citizens of New York out of participating in the law making process, culminated in the Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo immediately signing the bill into law. The Assembly narrowly voted 77 to 53 to approve the bill, after passing with a margin of only one vote out of the Assembly Health Committee, and then the Senate approved the bill 36 to 26.

When medical scientists propagate a false hypothesis, two things happen, and both of them are bad.

First, the wrong idea causes direct harm to those who adopt practices based on that incorrect hypothesis. Second, the wrong idea suppresses any attempts to discover the correct hypothesis. Such suppression occurs as a result of (enforced) scientific consensus.

Anyone who dares to question the false but agreed-upon hypothesis is labeled a "hypothesis skeptic" or "hypothesis denier." Very soon, that individual finds herself a scientific pariah, shunned and publicly humiliated by her colleagues, no longer able to secure research funding. In this way skeptics are conveniently and very effectively removed from the scientific mainstream. This technique is now recognized as academic mobbing (2) and ritual degradation (3). The consequences for the victim of academic mobbing and ritual degradation are usually calamitous.

Having personally traversed this academic minefield for the past nine years, I understand it rather too well (4).

But the reality is that science is never settled, and skeptics will always play a crucial role in driving scientific progress.

Ancel Keys' incorrect diet-heart hypothesis that saturated fat is the direct cause of heart attacks and death from coronary heart disease (CHD) led directly to its offspring, the lipid hypothesis, which holds that an elevated blood cholesterol concentration is the singular cause of CHD. This in turn led to a multibillion-dollar industry focused on reducing blood cholesterol concentrations, principally through the prescription of cholesterol-lowering statins and "aided" by a low-fat, high-carbohydrate (LFHC) diet. This diet recommendation was enshrined in the 1977 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans (USDGA) (5).

The 1977 USDGA and other forms of continued support for the diet-heart and lipid hypotheses have led to at least three dire consequences (4).

On June 22, 2017, Alec Raeshawn Smith, a recently promoted restaurant manager with Type 1 diabetes, left his local pharmacy empty-handed. He'd gone in to pick up a month's worth of insulin supplies, which he assumed would set him back around $1000 — the amount he and his mother Nicole Smith-Holt had budgeted the month before when he turned 26 and, under Obamacare rules, had to drop off her insurance coverage.

For Alec, that price was already steep: Even with his promotion, he was making $35,000 a year with no benefits. He and Smith-Holt had combed through Minnesota's Obamacare marketplace for months in search of a decent plan, but the affordable ones all had sky-high deductibles. That meant that he'd be paying full price for his insulin for months before his junk insurance kicked in, on top of hundreds of dollars in monthly premiums — sucking up some 80 percent of his take-home pay once he paid the rent. So he made a rational decision: He'd go uninsured, save the cost of the premium, and just pay for his meds out of pocket, while racking up work experience that could serve as a springboard to a better position with health insurance.

As it turned out, it wouldn't have made a difference if Alec had been insured or not: The price of his insulin had apparently gone up again to $1300, which was more than he had in his bank account. Perhaps he felt embarrassed, too proud to borrow money so soon after finally moving out of his parents' place. Perhaps he didn't want anyone to worry about him, and figured he could keep his blood sugar down until payday.

So he left. He never told his mother and he never told his girlfriend. Five days later, he was dead.

Lyme Disease. Do you have it?

If you did, you probably would not know, unless you're one of the chronic sufferers that had to visit over 30 doctors to get properly diagnosed. Lyme disease tests are highly inaccurate. They're often inconclusive or false negative. That's because this clever bacteria has found a way to dumb down the immune system and white blood cells, so it is not detectable until treatment is initiated. To diagnose Lyme properly you must see a "Lyme Literate MD (LLMD)", however, more and more doctors are turning their backs on patients due to sheer fear of losing their practices! Why? Because insurance companies and the CDC will do whatever it takes to stop Chronic Lyme Disease from being diagnosed, treated, or widely recognized as an increasingly common issue.

Lyme is considered "only" transmittable by a tick infected with bacteria. However, the CDC itself admits it is under-reported, and believes there are between 300,000 to half a million new cases each year. That makes Lyme disease almost twice as common as breast cancer and six times more common than HIV/AIDS. Where are all of these new cases coming from?

When Lyme isn't detected in the early stages, it becomes Chronic Lyme, a condition which the CDC and IDSA both deny even exists. They will continue to deny it, because if there's one thing insurance companies hate, it's chronic disorders they have to spend time and money treating. Therefore, a panel with ties to insurance companies gathered to write up official Lyme guidelines that assure patients are only allowed a few weeks of antibiotic treatment and are not to be diagnosed with Chronic Lyme Disease even if clear symptoms persist and invade the nervous system.


Over half of the panelists who wrote the IDSA Lyme guidelines announcing that Chronic Lyme is not real — including the panel chairman — have obvious conflicts of interest including financial interests in drug companies, diagnostic tests, and patents as well as consulting agreements with insurance companies. Researchers and scientists with evidence in support of Chronic Lyme were intentionally excluded from the panel. Because of these unjust Lyme guidelines, insurance companies have the "right" to deny coverage for the treatment of long-term Lyme disease. Doctors have even lost their practices for successfully diagnosing and treating Chronic Lyme, as shown in the film Under Our Skin. In the case of Dr. Joseph Jemsek of North Carolina, he not only lost his license but also his livelihood. Dr. Jemsek can no longer practice simply because he gave antibiotics to Chronic Lyme sufferers, and was then sued by BCBS for 100 million dollars, following which he had to declare bankruptcy. You can read his closing remarks to the NC Medical Board just before they pulled his license here.

At his darkest point, Bryan Fant was addicted to vicodin, benzodiazepine, prozac, Xanax and various other powerful medications. All had been prescribed by the Veterans Administration to treat his debilitating pain, anxiety, depression and insomnia.

Multiple deployments to Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait had ravaged him physically. War had ravaged him emotionally.

Fant lived with chronic pain. He underwent no less than seven surgeries to the neck, back and shoulders. He had spent thousands of hours in military helicopters wearing heavy gear. The jarring and jumping had taken a toll on his spine.

At his lowest, his existence played out in a continuous reel of waking up in the morning, dragging himself to the mailbox to collect the new shipment of medications sent by the VA and then crawling to the couch in a drug-induced stupor.

Air pollution could shorten the life of a Birmingham child by up to seven months, a major study on one of the city has suggested.

An eight-year-old child born in 2011 may die between two to seven months early if they are exposed over their lifetime to future models of pollution.

The conclusion was reached by Kings College London researchers who studied Birmingham.

And the impact was considered to be worse than some other major cities in the UK - with the report finding a higher loss of life expectancy in Birmingham than Manchester.

As readers of this blog will know, my primary area of interest is cardiovascular disease, which a big and complex subject, where anyone questioning the 'conventional' ideas gets ruthlessly attacked. However, in comparison to the area of vaccination, the battles in cardiovascular disease pale into insignificance. Mere squabbles in the nursery.

I am a member of an on-line doctors' community in the UK called Doctors Net. Not open to the public. Whenever any story about vaccination emerges, the vitriol, anger and naked rage is quite scary to observe.

Whenever the issue of MMR raises its head on Doctors Net, doctors have stated that Andrew Wakefield should be thrown in jail, and never allowed to earn any money ever again, that he is a crook and a criminal - and those are the nicer comments.

It is clear that, in the medical profession, there is an unquestioned faith in vaccination. That is, all vaccinations, for all diseases, everywhere - for everyone. Anyone who dares to hint that, ahem, there could be some negative issues associated with vaccination is subjected to withering contempt. 'You will be responsible for killing millions of children.' You don't understand science.' And suchlike.

When it comes to the science, it does amuse me that vaccination began before anyone understood any of the science - of anything to do with microbes and the immune system. It all began, so it is recorded, with the observation that milkmaids were much less likely to get smallpox.

This led to the idea that you should deliberately infect people with a bit of cowpox, to prevent them getting smallpox. Bold.

'The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae (smallpox of the cow), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. He used it in 1796 in the long title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.' [from the website that cannot be named... Wikipedia actually]

This was suggested at a time when all doctors thought infections were spread by Miasma. Basically, a nasty smell. No-one had the faintest idea that there were bacteria, or viruses. Somewhat ironically, vaccination - giving a small amount of a substance to cure/prevent a nasty disease - became the underlying principle of homeopathy - which most doctors now angrily dismiss as 'woo woo medicine.'