Dr. Sten Ekberg’s Thoughts on Defending Against Covid

The following is a transcription from a Youtube video by Dr. Sten Ekberg titled, Coronavirus: Your #1 Absolute Best Defense Against COVID-19 – Holistic Doctor Explains.”  

Transcribed by Elizabeth Reedy

0:40
We have learned that most of the victims of the coronavirus are elderly. It’s always tragic when a young person dies.

(Dr. Eckberg shows a CNN news clip announcing Jonathan Coelho, a cancer victim, who died at age 32.)

1:04
But the question is about these young people who are being called normal and healthy and without underlying conditions. Are they truly healthy? Is a person who recently had cancer truly healthy? These are some of the questions we’re going to explore. Before we’re done, you’re going to have a totally clear picture.

Have you ever really, really asked yourself what is the difference if two people get infected and one will live and the other one will die? What is the difference if it was the same pathogen? The difference is that one person’s body had the ability to defend itself and the other one didn’t. That’s called an immune system. Some people get infected, and they don’t even notice. That’s what we’re finding now with this coronavirus, that as many as 20-30% of certain populations already have developed immunity and they didn’t even know it.

When a lot of people talk about an immune system, they’re talking about a cell-based immune system with the white blood cells and the things that support the cell-based immune system. For example, the white blood cells have to have Vitamins A, C & D, Zinc and Calcium to support, to activate, to make possible the activity of the white blood cells.

If we don’t have enough of these, then the white blood cells don’t work the way they’re supposed to. But again, these are nutrients. It doesn’t mean that if you take a thousand times as much of these that you’re going to have a thousand times more white blood cells. It doesn’t work like that.

We also have something called specific immunity. If we’ve been exposed to a specific pathogen, then we can develop antibodies, which is the body’s memory. It remembers what that pathogen looked like and it developed an antibody that fits specifically to that pathogen. This immunity could last for many months, or many years, or even a lifetime. That’s what we’re not quite sure about with the coronavirus. Is it just going to last the season or is it going to give us lasting immunity?

More than just the cell-based immune system, we want to talk about the whole-body defenses. The way they talk about the immune system, it’s not really a system, it’s just certain body parts. Your whole body is the immune system. You are the immune system.

You have 40 trillion cells. If those 40 trillion cells are healthy, then the better it will be for their nutritional status, ability to make energy, to do what they’re supposed to do. The healthier you are, the stronger your defenses will be. Ed: Our emphasis.

Some of these cells provide physical barriers. Your skin is a physical barrier. You can get the virus on your skin and not be infected. You can wash it away and you’ll be okay because you had a barrier. You also have a physical barrier in your intestinal lining and your lung lining, and many other types of physical barriers.

You have cell membranes. A virus can only replicate inside a cell, so it has to penetrate a cell membrane. The healthier, stronger, and better working your cell membranes are, the more difficult it is for a virus to make entry. You have mucus membranes that secrete mucus to trap and move pathogens away. You have chemical defenses.

You have cells that spew out free radicals, toxic substances, and hydrogen peroxide that act as poison on these microbes. You have a detoxification system too. These microbes produce toxins and then you need a liver and a kidney and so forth, to filter out and neutralize those toxins.

You have a spleen that can filter out cellular debris and residue. All of these cells and organs are part of your immune system. You are the immune system. And of course your white blood cells, the cell-based immune system is also super important, but they’re only part of the total defense.

(Dr. Ekberg talks briefly about Fauci and the CDC, their jobs and what they do.)

8:06
What about you? Your job is to listen to the good advice of the authorities on how to stop the spread. Other than that, your job is to get healthy. Your job is to optimize your chances to have a positive outcome to beat the virus if you get infected. Ed: Our emphasis.

What is so astounding to me is that there is no talk of getting healthy. There have been millions of hours and millions of miles of writing on the topic of the coronavirus. Yet I haven’t heard anyone talk about health, about how to strengthen your body to increase your chances.

I think the reason for that is that we have a passive medical model. We are told to just do whatever you do. Eat the standard American diet, eat your processed food, eat your sugar. I haven’t heard anyone say to reduce your sugar consumption, for example. And then we’re told to take pills to compensate for the symptoms and the problems created by our deficient food and our toxic food. Ed: Our emphasis. And we are told to get the flu shot and wait for the vaccine.

That’s a passive model. There is nothing about health in the passive model. Why is it that no one talks about health? I believe that it is because as a culture the entire modern world doesn’t know what health is. We have completely equated health with the absence of symptoms. Ed: Our emphasis.

Once we have a symptom, we think we’re sick. With the medical model, the system is to treat the symptom, not to get you healthy. As a matter of fact, we don’t even have a healthcare system in the modern world. What we have is a sick-care system.

At least where I’m from in Sweden it is called “Sjukvård” rather than healthcare. I don’t think it’s because they’re nobler or anything. It just happens that they call it sick care in Sweden. It’s not called healthcare because it isn’t health. It’s about treating sickness.

That’s not a bad thing, but there are different questions being asked in a healthcare model or a sick-care model. In a sick care model, they’re asking how do we treat this symptom? What sort of chemical or pill or medication do we give to suppress this symptom in this crisis situation. That’s not a bad thing. It can be very useful in a crisis, but it has nothing to do with health.

We’ve all heard that there are certain risk factors associated with the coronavirus or Covid-19. One is obesity. If you have a body mass index over 40, your risk of dying increases dramatically. If you have diabetes or one or more of the things associated with metabolic syndrome, such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, or chronic lung, liver or kidney disease. Most of these are associated with insulin resistance, some of them directly and others more indirectly. Ed: Our emphasis.

We also have people who are vulnerable. We’ve all been told to shelter the vulnerable. These are people who in addition to those other conditions, they might have had chemotherapy, or been weakened from smoking or chronic corticosteroids or any other chronic disease or neurodegenerative disease.

The greatest risk factor of all is to be old, being over 70 years old. Why is that? Because by the time you get to that age, you tend to have a little bit of the above conditions. You have more cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis. You have accumulated a lot more of these. In short, you are less healthy.

12:26
Most of the risk factors of Covid-19 are associated with insulin resistance. What else does insulin resistance do? Every year around the world it claims 17 million lives from heart attacks, seven and a half million from hypertension, 5 million deaths from stroke, 1.6 million from diabetes, and the list goes on. Ed: Our emphasis.

If insulin resistance already kills this many people, is it really so surprising that it would also have a tendency to kill off more people with coronavirus infection? If we want to put it in the simplest possible terms, then I would say that these people die, and the people from the coronavirus die because they are less healthy, and their bodies have less ability to defend themselves.

13:22
Then the question is, what is health? Who is perfectly healthy? Health is like a continuum. How much cellular capacity do you have to defend yourself? On the one end you would have optimal health when everything is working perfectly, and on the other end nothing would be working, and we have death.

Everything in between is a spectrum, a continuum. The large portion in the middle is probably where the majority of the world’s people are, is called functional illness. These people in the middle are not super healthy and they don’t have a disease. They’re just sort of on their way there.

Perfect health would be over on this end. I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who has perfect health, because there are heavy metals, chemicals, depleted foods, hormones and so forth. There is enough interference already that we probably don’t really have perfect health. But the people who do their best to take care of themselves and who are examples of health, I think we are going to be somewhere in this range between optimal health and functional illness.

Over on the other end we have people with a diagnosis. These are the underlying conditions, the cardiovascular, high blood pressure, etc. These are people who have made it far down enough that they have been diagnosed with something. [Note: Dr. Eckberg points to a visual showing the health continuum.]

Then what about the people who don’t have a diagnosis right now but who are being called perfectly healthy. In that news clip about Jonathan Coelho, the news anchor said he was a cancer survivor but otherwise healthy.

If you have had cancer, then you’re already way over on this side [Eckberg points to the right] of the spectrum. Cancer is not something that happens overnight to perfectly healthy people, so even if Coelho was a cancer survivor, then he might have made it across the line and gotten a little bit better. But most of the factors that caused the cancer will probably still be there. He was probably not on the upper end of the health spectrum.

That’s what we have to understand. I’m not saying that anyone is perfectly immune. I would never be arrogant enough to think that I was way over here because there are so many things we don’t know. We do know that there are certain things we can do to improve our chances. In my opinion, I believe that a lot of the people who are called perfectly healthy actually are probably over here in the lower end of the continuum. You can be here even if you are 20, 25, or 30 years old. [He points to the less healthy side of his chart.]

16:16
In our current sick care system, the question they ask is how can we treat the symptom? What kind of chemical can we give and what kind of body part can we remove? Those are good questions in a symptom care system or a sick care system.

Now let’s switch around and start asking health questions. Let’s start asking what is required for health. If we had a five-year-old and we asked what does a plant need to be healthy? What are the requirements of a plant? I think the five-year-old could get it right. I think he would say that the plant needs water. If the water isn’t making it healthy, then it also probably needs some sunshine. If we’re giving it water and sunshine and it still doesn’t thrive, then it probably needs some good soil.

I think the five-year-old could also tell us that it has to have all three of these at the same time. We can’t deprive it of one of these three for any length of time and have a healthy plant. We have to have all the things that are required.

That brings us to the next question. What are the requirements for human health? We have chemical, structural, and emotional aspects to our bodies. There are some of those aspects that will increase life, that will provide more life, that will enhance optimum health. There are some that will subtract or interfere.

When it comes to chemical or nutritional aspects, we need fuel. In addition to fuel we also need essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals. This is called nutrition. Whole food provides it, whereas processed food does not.

On the downside of the chemical aspects, we have sugar and frequent processed carbohydrates that cause insulin resistance. This will clog up the body and has a congestive and toxifying effect. We have pure toxins that are chemicals and pesticides and so forth.

And then drugs are another form of toxins. They are chemicals designed to interfere. It doesn’t mean that drugs are always bad. They can save a life in a crisis, but it means that they can never make you healthier and never create a long-term solution. They can never raise you from a lower health state to a higher one in the long run.

The body is structural. You have a mechanical aspect. Your body moves. Movements are a requirement. Movements provide the majority of the signals to keep your brain alive. There is virtually no physiological mechanism, no system in the body, that doesn’t work better with movement and that works less with a lack of movement. Movement is required for every system in the body.

Good posture is a requirement for proper signals. Good posture facilitates and normalizes movement. If you have poor posture or if your posture is stuck, then you’re not going to get the proper movement or the proper signaling. If you have poor posture, if you have areas of your body that aren’t moving, then chiropractic is a great way to jumpstart that movement. Chiropractic is not a total movement solution. It’s just getting you to the place where you can move and then you take it from there.

The opposite of good movement is a sedentary lifestyle where you don’t move. If you’re trying to move but you have poor posture, or if you’ve had a lot of trauma that restricts the motion, then you also cannot get proper movement.

Humans are also emotional. When we have peace and joy and purpose, everything that feels good makes your body work better. A little bit of short-term stress is fine, but for the most part, we have to have some good emotions. We cannot have only bad emotions because then the body prioritizes to defend itself instead of healing itself.

The opposite would be anything that feels bad like stress, anger, fear, frustration and feeling overwhelmed.

The absolute best way to defend yourself against the coronavirus or any other pathogen is to make your body stronger so it can defend itself. Take an active role in rebuilding your health, in restoring your body and giving your body all the things that it needs, all the things that contribute to more life. Avoid as much as possible the things that interfere with the building of health.

It looks like the coronavirus might be with us for some time. If it goes away, then who knows what will come next in the long run. Your best defense is always going to be strong health. So why not use the current epidemic as a really, really good reason to start doing something about it. End

Sugar Blues–Chapter 3, How We Got Here from There

Note: We have republished this book review and digest with updated comments. You might enjoy reading Sugar Blues in its entirety. To order, please click here.

…Here was something more intoxicating than beer or wine and more potent than many drugs and potions then known to man.  No wonder Arab and Jewish physicians used refined sugar carefully in minuscule amounts, adding it to their prescription with great care…

Dufty explains that our brain is the most sensitive organ in our bodies and the difference between up or down, calm or freaked out, sane or insane, depends to a large extent on what we put into our mouths. The amount of glucose in the body must balance with the blood oxygen.

Ingesting sugar into one’s body drastically increases the amount of glucose in the bloodstream, which then “destroys” the balance of glucose and blood oxygen. Now the body is in crisis.

Hormones pour from the adrenal casings and marshal every chemical resource for dealing with sugar: insulin from the endocrine “islets” of the pancreas works specifically to hold down the glucose level in the blood in complementary antagonism to the adrenal hormones concerned with keeping the glucose level up.

Dufty explains that the process goes too fast and too far. The bottom drops out of the blood glucose level and a second crisis comes out of the first. 

 Pancreatic islets have to shut down; so do some departments of the adrenal casings. Other adrenal hormones must be produced to regulate the reversing of the chemical direction and bring the blood glucose up again.

He continues by saying that we immediately feel “up”, which will soon be replaced be feeling listless and tired. The blood glucose level must be brought up again. Our brain is now vulnerable to suspicion and hallucinations. 

After years of doing this, one’s adrenals our now worn out.  When stress comes our way, we go to pieces because we no longer have a healthy endocrine system to cope with it…we’re always tired, never seem to get anything done. We’ve really got the sugar blues.

Dufty notes that…the cells of the brain are those that depend on the moment-by-moment blood sugar level for nourishment; they are perhaps the most susceptible to damage. The disturbingly large and ever-increasing number of neurotics in our population makes this clearly evident.

My comments: Sugar Blues is 40 years old. I think that most everyone would agree that things in our society have worsened in the last four decades. Just witness the increase in divorce, the rise of gangs, school shootings, and other whacked out things we hear on the news. 

What’s also interesting to note is that Japanese scientists developed high fructose corn syrup [HFCS] in the early 70’s. The latter is now used almost everywhere in conventional, processed foods.

Is the increased sugar and now HFCS consumption causal to much of the deterioration of our social fabric? I believe the answer is, “Yes.”  While there are multiple causes to this societal decline, the increased consumption of these potent and refined carbohydrates certainly hasn’t helped. 

A real eye opener is to note the correlation between obesity rates and the increased portion sizes of soft drinks sold both in containers and those served at the fountain.  Back in the fifty’s, Coke used to come in 6½ ounce bottles. That was followed by 8 ounce bottles and then 12 ounce cans.  That’s all been replaced by the 20-ounce plastic bottles in the coolers seen everywhere including the check-out aisles at box stores. That’s a triple shot compared to the old 6½ ounce serving!  For some visuals of these increased portion sizes, please click here, here, and here. The second two links have visualizations that you will need to scroll down to see.

Continuing: Dufty quotes the late endocrinologist John W. Tintera,

It’s quite possible to improve your disposition, increase your efficiency, and change your personality for the better. The way to do it is to avoid cane and beet sugar in all its forms and guises.”

Dufty spends several pages describing how both the church and the state persecuted natural healers or sorcerers. He tells us that this started with the return of the Crusaders. He describes how some clever beer makers “sophisticated” their beer by adding some foreign substance such as sugar compared to the natural malt and hops. Such offenders were subject to be paraded around the village in a merde* wagon. People knew that the human body and brains could not handle the sweetness of sugar. *French for the vulgar form of excrement or the stuff from the cleaning of privies.

He described shipwrecked sailors that ate their ship’s cargo of sugar and rum with the result that they went bonkers and often died. Soldiers and sailors that were involved in the handling of sugar began to have more trouble with their teeth.

Comments: In the first half of the 20th Century Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist, studied various native cultures, ones that were free from processed Western foods.  He described many of them as having perfect teeth. He also noted that when such people moved into a Westernized culture and were exposed to sugar, refined foods, and canned goods, they started developing the usual dental problems.

Sad to say, I had my share of cavities. Neither my parents, myself, my dentist, or anyone else in my life seemed to understand that the root cause was sugar and refined foods. Weston Price visited with and wrote about people that had perfect teeth.  I can’t think of a better cause and effect relationship of the problems caused by sugar consumption. Not only does sugar consumption play havoc with one’s blood sugar balance, it also rots teeth. 

My dental hygienist once told me about the “Pepsi” kids. Their teeth were rotted more than the kids that drank other brands of pop.

For more information about Dr. Weston A Price and the Dr. Weston A Price Foundation, please click here.

Continuing: Dufty describes ancient civilizations that believed the disorders of the mind and body

“[p]roceed from what we eat. As the Oriental sages phrased it, the mind and the body are not two. The sorceress…wise woman…natural healer believed this too.  However, by the time sugar was introduced widely in Europe, the natural healers were uncovered—practically overnight—as a declared enemy of the church and state. Ailing people consulted them at very real peril.  One literally risked his life and limb having any truck with them. In turn, they risked life and limb to aid you.

He tells us that for centuries uninformed physicians would relegate symptoms of sugar blues to bewitchment. Near the end of the chapter Dufty tells the account of a modern French natural healer, Maurice Mességué. He was hauled into the courts on forty occasions for practicing medicine without a medical license. He was fined one or two francs, and then some of the judges sought him out for his professional services for their ailing wife or mistress. 

Mességué wrote three bestselling books about natural healing where he repeats his prescription: Whole natural food, naturally grown.

Dufty describes his involvement in translating books from a Japanese natural healer, Sakurazawa, You Are All Sanpaku. In Chapter One of Sugar Blues, Dufty mentioned the catalyst for his epiphany. I’m thinking that the “little book” that he referenced must have been from Sakurazawa. 

If you’re sick, it’s your own damn fault. Pain is the final warning.  You know better than anyone else how you’ve been abusing your body. So stop it.  Sugar is poison…more lethal than opium and more dangerous than atomic fallout. Ed: My emphasis

To check it out on Amazon, please click here.

Dufty concludes the chapter by quoting from Sakurazawa again.

…I am confident that one day Western Medicine will admit what has been known in the Orient for years: sugar is without question the number one murderer in the history of humanity.

My comments: What more can you say for an encore? Rereading this book forces me to reminisce about my upbringing. I, too, ran afoul of the problems that Dufty describes of our sugar drenched culture. I so wish that my parents would not have had sugar in the house, would not have made Christmas candy, would not have brought home stale doughnuts from work, would not have had that !@#$%  Betty Crocker cookbook in our house, and would have taught me about the dangers of refined sugar…in all of its guises and disguises. I would have been spared from thousands of dollars in dental work, being overweight, and having ups and downs of my energy level during my adolescence.

What I find to be so ironic in this age of “enlightenment” is this. I meet people that are taking multiple drugs including diabetic prescriptions. I ask them if their doctor ever asked them what they eat or drink.  The answer is invariably negative. Of course, that is exactly what Dufty recounted in Chapter One.

During all that rigamarole, I cannot recall a single doctor [out of the dozens that treated me] whoever displayed the slightest curiosity about what I ate or drank.

I attend an agent-training seminar sponsored by a health insurance company.  Guess what they serve for refreshments?  A fruit and vegetable tray…..are you kidding?  I wish. It’s soda pop and sometimes canned or bottled juice, breakfast rolls, bagels, brownies, and muffins. All SORF.*  They don’t get it!

* An acronym for sugar, oil [the wrong, inflammatory kind], and refined flours

Lastly, Dufty referenced the persecution of the natural healers of old by the “church and state” including the burning of “witches” at the stake. We can look back and think how stupid and backwards society must have been back then.  But then, have things really changed all that much? True, we don’t burn people at the stake anymore, but the power of the state can be used to persecute people and put them out of business. In the last 100 years, what are some of the modern-day equivalents to what’s happened in centuries past?

What about today? What’s happened to doctors, nurses, and others that have opposed masking and Covid shots? Countries like Australia have turned into virtual police states. Aren‘t we witnessing the modern form of “burning people at the stake?” End

 

Fat Heals—Sugar Kills: Chapter 5 – A Weapon of Mass Destruction

Fat Heals—Sugar Kills: Book by Dr. Druce Fife
Digest by Lance Reedy

Recap of Chapter 4, Part 4: Fructose and Galactose

Fructose has been hailed as the preferred sugar for diabetics because it doesn’t raise blood sugar as much as does sucrose or regular table sugar. Fife attributes this misinformation due to clever marketing tactics from the sugar industry.

Fructose has a much greater overall damaging effect on the body than glucose. We normally think of glucose when we talk about glycation, but fructose undergoes glycation about 10 times the rate of glucose and intensifies AGE [advanced glycation end-products] generation and tissue degeneration.

Fructose is metabolized in the liver, which can cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Fife points out that the detrimental effects are very similar to liver disease caused by alcohol consumption. It gets worse:

Fructose is far more fattening that other sugars or fat. Eating foods containing high fructose corn syrup [HFCS] does not satisfy hunger but encourages overeating, which is another reason why food manufacturers prefer to use it in place of other sweeteners. Fructose tricks you into gaining weight by turning off your body’s appetite control system. Fructose does not appropriately stimulate insulin, which in turn, does not suppress ghrelin, the hormone that stimulates hunger, and not activate leptin, the hormone that suppresses hunger. This leads to overeating and weight gain.

Chapter 5 Begins: Part 1: A Weapon of Mass Destruction

Sugar’s Effect on Health

Dr. Fife opens the chapter by quoting the grim statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO) saying that chronic, non-communicable diseases kill 41 million people on an annual basis. 80-90 % of these deaths are diet related, and these conditions are cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. The biggest change in diets over the past 100 years is the added sugar in processed foods including sugary drinks.

He points out that sugar kills but does so slowly. It kills by accelerating the rate of aging and degeneration leading to chronic disease that cause disability and death. The high intake of sugar increases the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, heart attack, senility, mental illness, liver disease, kidney disease, cancer, gallstones, arthritis, and dental cavities.

My comment: It’s worthy to note that in addition to the link between sugar consumption and physical maladies, Dr. Fife also mentions mental deterioration. Additionally, he speaks of organ failure, and he also addresses another issue that affects so many seniors, arthritis.

Continuing: Dr. Fife discusses the addictiveness of sugar, and that leads to an overconsumption which only worsens the physiological problems caused by the sugar consumption.

Dr. Fife mentions that many groups and even governmental entities will speak of the connection of an unhealthy diet and health issues. The problem is that “unhealthy” is not clearly defined. To placate the sugar industry, these groups avoid saying a “high sugar diet.”

Sugar Addiction

Dr. Fife references how sugar stimulates the pleasure center in our brains much like narcotics. Stopping the sugar habit cold turkey can cause withdrawal symptoms. These can include intense carbohydrate cravings, headache, lightheadedness, irritability, irrational behavior, fuzzy thinking, and an overall feeling of tension or stress.

…[R]searchers found that there is a cross-tolerance and a cross-dependence between sugar and addictive drugs. As an example, animals with a long history of sugar consumption, actually became tolerant (desensitized) to the analgesic [pain killing] effects of morphine.

Low-calorie and no-calorie sweeteners don’t help with sugar addiction as these artificial sweeteners are also addictive.

My Comment: Included among these artificial sweeteners are aspartame and sucralose (a.k.a. Equal and Splenda).

Continuing: Dr. Fife points out that just as the narcotic addict ups his dose, so does the sugar addict. Natural foods without the added sugar become less and less appealing. Kids don’t like vegetables because their taste buds are desensitized from eating too much sugar. Adults are the same way. In animal studies, sugar-addicted rats prefer sugar water instead of normal food.

Sub-clinical Malnutrition

Studies have shown that around 60% of the foods eaten in America are ultra-processed convenience foods. The ultra-processed foods are those that have multiple ingredients and additives. These include flavorings, colorings, sweeteners, emulsifiers, preservatives, and many others. The problem with these ultra-processed foods is that around 30% of the calories come from sugar.

The problem with these ultra-processed foods is that nutritious foods get pushed out. Instead of cooked hot cereal made from cracked grains we have sugary boxed cereal. Instead of a homemade vinegar and olive oil-based salad dressing we have concoctions made from soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Instead of an apple or orange, we have sugary fruit juices and juice blends sweetened with HFCS. Instead of real cream for your coffee, we have coffee “creamers” primarily made from sugar and hydrogenated soybean oil, and so on it goes.

Some people erroneously believe that taking vitamins makes up for consuming a highly processed diet. Sugar is actually an anti-nutrient in that it causes the body to use up its supplies of calcium, magnesium, potassium, thiamine, and chromium in the process of metabolizing the sugar.

Overconsumption of sugar can cause a vitamin C deficiency, leading to sub-clinical scurvy…Glucose and vitamin C compete with each other for entry into our cells. But the competition is not equal. Our bodies favor glucose over vitamin C. When blood glucose levels become elevated, vitamin C absorption into the cells is severely restricted.

Dr. Fife stresses that many people are suffering from sub-clinical signs of scurvy. These symptoms include anemia, depression, frequent infections, bleeding gums, loosened teeth, muscle degeneration and pain, joint pain, slow healing of wounds and injuries, and the development of heart artery blockage. The latter leads to heart attack and strokes. He makes this key point:

It is far more likely for you to suffer a heart attack or stroke from eating a vitamin C robbing, high sugar diet than by eating a high-fat diet. Ed: My emphasis

My comment: How many medical doctors, when dealing with patients with the above-listed sub-clinical symptoms of scurvy, explain to their patients the connection that overconsumption of sugar may be the root cause of their problems?

William Dufty in his book, Sugar Blues, recounted how many sailors in the days of the sugar trade on the high seas became ravaged with illness when they subsisted off sugar and rum. If you have experienced any of the sub-clinical symptoms of scurvy as outlined by Dr. Fife, ask yourself how much sugar, HFCS, and white flour products are your consuming.

Continuing: Dr. Fife points out that Vitamin C is just one of the many essential nutrients that is deficient in a diet overloaded with sugar-laden processed foods. He again references the concept of sub-clinical malnutrition, a condition that can remain unnoticed indefinitely.

We eat and even overeat to the point of becoming overweight, yet still malnourished. As a result, the immune system is chronically depressed, the body cannot fight off infections well, and tissues and cells starving for nutrients slowly degenerate and all manner of chronic disease creeps in. Ed: My emphasis.

My Comments: If you want to stay healthy and to minimize your chances of getting sick or to minimize the symptoms of an illness, it is imperative that you maintain your immune system.

I find it rather ironic that very, very little has been said by “health” experts in this regard when it comes to dealing with the flu or Covid-19. There is a dearth of information in this regard. There are likely several reasons for this, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this report.

The very best defense against illness is loving and caring for your immune system. That means you are being proactive and not relying on the medical system and medical “experts” to bail you out.

You are engaged in mental folly if you “eat, drink, or be merry—meaning habitually indulging in ultra-processed ‘foods’” and trash your immune system while at the same time believing that a drug or a shot is going to save your bacon.

A companion article in this issue of Northwest Senior News is a transciption from Dr. Sten Eckberg’s YouTube video, Coronavirus: Your #1 Absolute Best Defense Against COVID-19 – Holistic Doctor Explains.

Continuing: Homocysteine

Dr. Fife discusses the connection between elevated blood levels of homocysteine and heart disease.

Studies indicate that elevated blood homocysteine levels are more accurate in predicting heart disease than high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or cigarette smoking….[P]ublished studies on homocysteine indicates that it is one of the most significant, independent risk factors for atherosclerosis [plugged up coronary arteries].

Please review page 81-82 for a detailed explanation of this problem. The upshot is this. A diet high in animal protein and high in sugar and starch, which is low in B vitamins, leads to elevated homocysteine levels and the development of atherosclerosis. Put another way, a diet that is high in animal protein is okay all by itself but coupling it with a high sugar intake creates the problem.

My Comment: Isn’t this interesting! The Ancel Keys’ dietary lipid hypothesis claimed that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease. I’m sure you have heard for years the usual blather: “Reduce your intake of saturated-fat containing red meat, eat fish more often, drink low-fat or non-fat milk, cut the skin off your chicken, and opt for non-fat yogurt.”

These proponents of the dietary lipid hypothesis just couldn’t seem (or purposely didn’t want to) to get the connection that a high sugar intake was the real culprit. John Yudkin, a British researcher, was vilified by the sugar cartel over 50 years ago for his assertions that sugar was the cause of heart disease, diabetes, obesity and metabolic disorders.

To be continued…

Gary Taubes ‘The Case Against Sugar’, a YouTube video Part 3

transcribed by Liz Reedy

To view Gary Taubes’ 1 hour and 22-minute YouTube video, please click here.

Please click here for our Part 1 transcription.

Please click here for our Part 2 transcription.

Part 3 continues beginning at 28:03

Think about it this way. If I was giving a talk on wealth, I might get a pretty good audience. And afterward in the Q&A, someone would ask me, “Why are Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos so rich?” And I would say, “Because they make more money than they spend.” You guys would leave, right?

If I was giving a talk on climate change, that would probably get a pretty full house. And at the end somebody would ask, “Well Gary, why is the atmosphere heating up?” And I would reply, “Because it’s taking in more energy than it expends.” And if I looked at you like it was a serious answer you would think I was joking.

But in obesity research, if somebody asks why some people get fat and others don’t, the answer is that they take in more calories than they expend. And it’s almost incomprehensively naïve. It has become conventional wisdom. You show me a paper on obesity, and I’ll show you where that belief system is interwoven into that research or that paper.

My geneticist friend at Cambridge University, the BBC host, is not studying the genetics of why people get fat; he’s studying the genetics of why he thinks people eat too much or exercise too little. Part of this goal is to get people to get rid of that energy/balance idea. And the stakes are enormous. I am trying to do a fundamental thing with this book.

Claude Benard, the great French physiologist, said in 1865, “Science is about explaining what we observe.” Fundamentally that’s what you’re always doing in science, whether what you observe is a supernova or a gamma ray burst or something else in the night sky. It could be how a frog behaves or how swallows mate or anything you can name.

Why we get heart disease, why we have obesity, it’s about explaining what we observe. The observation today that is so frightening is these obesity and diabetic epidemics are worldwide. It happens in every population in the world in which they transition to a Western diet from whatever they were eating baseline.

It doesn’t matter if they were Inuits living on caribou and seal meat, or Maasain Africans living on the meat and milk and urine from the cattle they herd, or the agrarian population in the Himalayas, or Native Americans or any population that started eating western diets. They experience these tremendous increases in obesity and diabetes.

In October, the director general of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan, gave a key note address to the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. She said that these epidemics of obesity and diabetes represent a slow-motion disaster world-wide.

They are overwhelming health-care systems. The estimated cost of obesity and diabetes in direct health-care costs in the U.S. is a billion dollars a day. If you look at indirect societal costs and you believe these estimates, it’s a trillion dollars a year.

Margaret Chan said the chances of the public health organizations like the W.H.O. to reign in these epidemics in order to prevent a “bad situation” from getting much worse is effectively zero. Think about that. The director general of the World Health Organization is talking about these slow-motion disaster epidemics, and not only acknowledging that organizations like hers have completely failed to curb them, but predicting complete failure in the future.

One of the things I would do if I were a journalist or in newspapers, I would imagine if this was HIV. In 1985 we understood that the HIV virus causes AIDS. But imagine after coming to that conclusion, thirty years later, AIDS prevalence and AIDS incidents had continued to go up and mortality from this disease had continued to go up.

We would have a task force, committees, think tanks and a team of researchers. We would be spending billions, if not trillions of dollars, trying to understand what we don’t understand about this disease. But in obesity and diabetes we’ve had this same phenomenon.

In the 1890s, on the Eastern coast the estimate was that one out of every three thousand patients in the hospital suffered from diabetes. Today, if you go to a VA hospital, one out of four patients suffers from diabetes. One out of every eleven Americans in or out of hospitals has diabetes today. There’s been this tremendous explosion, and we have to understand what’s causing it.

You cannot stop an epidemic unless you understand the cause. You have to know what to remove, what to get out of the population, whether it’s the HIV virus, or you recommend safe sex and contraceptives and you design drugs that go after the virus. If it’s a lung cancer epidemic you have to know that smoking is causing it, right? So you can tell people to stop smoking.

In this country with obesity and diabetes we have the director general of the W.H.O basically shrugging her shoulders and saying, “Yes, we’ve seen 900% increases of diabetes in the United States in 50 years. And it’s going to go up. But we don’t know what to do about it.” Well, how about you examine your assumptions.

What I’m trying to do in this book is ask the question, “Are we wrong about what the cause is?” If this was a legal case and we have a similar crime being committed in a very similar way in every country in the world, who is the prime suspect? Who should we be targeting? Why should we be targeting? And the answer is sugar.

So, with that long introduction I’m going to do a little bit of reading, and I’m going to hope for the best. I have to borrow a book. The first chapter of this book discusses obesity and diabetes epidemics and why I’m focusing on sugar and why I think it’s the prime suspect. As I say in this book, if this were a legal case this book would be the prosecution’s strategy.

I had trouble writing it. I don’t like writing. One of the reasons I’m such a good reporter, if I am a good reporter, is because reporting is a way to procrastinate on writing. As long as you keep doing the research you don’t have to write…until you run out of money as I said earlier, and then you have to write.

I finally wrote the first chapter, and then I wrote the second chapter, Drug or Food, which I’m going to read from. And I finally had the sense of profound relief that this is a good chapter, that I’m on my way, that I’m going to be able to get this book done. So, I have four thousand words written discussing whether sugar is a drug or a food, and is it addictive?

Then I read a book called 1493, [1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created] written by a friend of mine, Charles Mann. It’s about the history of what’s called the Columbus exchange, which is about the spread of foods and plants around the world after Columbus discovered America. Charles (Cam) is such a beautiful writer that I can’t even read his writing, as it depresses me so much.

But I realized he had a chapter on the history of sugar and knew I should read it. He’s a great reporter and a great writer. I read it and in this chapter, he has a single line made up of seventeen words. He says, “Scientists today debate amongst themselves whether sugar is an addictive substance, and people just act like it is.”

And I think, “Great. I’ve just written four thousand words about this, and here Cam wrapped it up in seventeen.” I could throw away my first chapter and then I’m back to the state of frozen writer’s block that I was in, or I could keep the first chapter and quote Cam, which is what I decided to do. So, you can find Cam’s quote in here.

It begins with two other quotes, two epigraphs. The first is from Roald Dahl, from his memoir, Boy: Tales of Childhood, which was written in 1984. Dahl said, “The sweet shop in Llandaff [UK] from 1923 was the very center of our lives. Thus, it was what a bar is to a drunk or a church is to a bishop. Without it, there would have been little to live for. Sweets were our life-blood.”

The second quote is from Michael Pollan’s, Botany of Desire in 2001, one of the great books Michael wrote before Omnivore Dilemma. He said, “Imagine a moment when the sensation of honey or sugar on the tongue was an astonishment, a kind of intoxication. The closest I’ve ever come to recovering such a sense of sweetness was secondhand, though it left a powerful impression on me even so. I’m thinking of my son’s first experience of sugar, the icing on the cake at his first birthday.”

“I have only the testimony of Isaac’s face to go by, that and his fierceness to repeat the experience. It was plain that his first encounter with sugar had intoxicated him. It was, in fact, an ecstasy in the literal sense of that word. That is, he was beside himself with the pleasure of it. No longer here with me in space and time in quite the same way he had been just a moment before. Between bites, Isaac gazed up at me in amazement (he was on my lap as I delivered the ambrosial forkfuls to his gaping mouth), as if to exclaim ‘Your world contains this? From this day forward, I shall dedicate my life to it.’”

By the way, you should argue the wisdom of starting a book with quotes from two authors who can write better than you can. Your readers are likely to put your book down and say, “I’m going to go get Botany of Desire.”

What if Roald Dahl and Michael Pollan are right that the taste of sugar on the tongue can be a kind of intoxication? Doesn’t it suggest that the possibility that sugar itself is an intoxicant, a drug? Imagine a drug that can do this to us, that can infuse us with energy and can do so when taken by mouth. It doesn’t have to be injected, smoked or snorted for us to experience its sublime and soothing effect.  END at 39:08