walking-sand

Chapter 19 Let’s call it a summary and Let’s say little things matter.

I wrote this article well before the book was even thought about. It’s to some extent a summary, I hope you find it interesting. 

There are lots of little things, and they matter.

Let’s also say that there are three things that are essential to life. 

Certainly, that’s what I was taught at school and university. The three things are

Food Water and Shelter.

It turns out that four things would be closer to the truth. The fourth thing is minerals, most importantly salt, but I will get back to that later. I could even say 5 things, the fifth one being sunshine. Of all of the essentials, sunshine should be my number one. I will get to that later as well.

In my view the shelter bit is pretty well taken care of for most of us.

The water and food stuff is a bit more problematic. The salt is very problematic and the sunshine bit is a major disaster.

This journey of mine started with Depression. I had it for two years 2011 to 2013. I ran heaps of experiments, none of which worked until I found one that did. That experiment was probiotics. They work for just about everyone in my view. I have a really good view because I am an engineer and getting cured of depression, in 24 hours is not satisfactory to me, I want to know why. I know why now, and I am about to tell you, but let’s have some fun first. 

Now anything I say here goes like this: Firstly, I am not making money at it so I have no reason to con you. That is pretty important. Secondly, nothing I say here will cost you any real money. I mean the most expensive thing I might recommend is a water filter costing $50 and I have no interest in it. If I am wrong with my theories or assumptions, and it doesn’t work, the best you can do is be pissed off at me, and I can live with that. 

But there is more. The things I will tell you to fix your depression or whatever ails you are present right now are in your kitchen, or in the chemist down the road and you won’t need a prescription or a big wad of cash.

In the western world there are a few epidemics. Obesity is an epidemic and so is depression. What I have struggled with for years as a concept is how could this be? There must be a common theme.

I thought for a long time it must be the cooking oil. Turns out that’s partly right, again I will get back to that.

A few hundred years ago there was an epidemic called the plague and millions of people died. At the time they thought it was caused by rats and it was, but it wasn’t the rats, it was the fleas that lived on the rats, only it wasn’t the fleas either, it was the bacteria that lived on the fleas. Of course, bacteria were only discovered about 100 years ago so it’s doubtful anyone would have thought of that back then. The point I want to make is that what you have to look at is what changed to cause this disaster. 

Let’s say we went on for thousands or millions of years with no plague and then suddenly there was a plague. I mean rats fleas and bacteria have been around forever. Nothing new there. What may have changed was that people lived in towns and cities, lived indoors more, got less sunshine and lived in crowded circumstances, dumped sewage and garbage in the streets. I don’t think the full answer will ever be known. There was also something called the Little Ice Age which began about 50 years before the plague hit Europe. So maybe it was the temperature change and the spread of the bacteria from Asia to Europe through trade.

If we look at the current epidemics of obesity and depression, we have to look at what has changed compared to the past.

The answer is obviously, everything, but that makes it too hard, so we should focus on the fundamentals because you can’t monitor or modify everything. You can’t live under a rock, and you shouldn’t.

We visited the fundamentals earlier. The fundamentals are food water shelter minerals and sunshine. Again the shelter bit seems ok but all of the others need examination. Lets start with sunshine. I mean that big ball beats down on us for the last 5 billion years if you believe that the world is 5 billion years old which I do.

My wife Monica has a great tan which I love. She gets plenty of sun and plays tennis as well. About 10 years ago she had a blood test showing that her vitamin D levels were low. How could that be? Vitamin D is made predominantly from sunshine and she was getting plenty of that. Well here are a couple of theories, and they are more than just theories.

Sunscreen blocks vitamin D production. There is a new German sunscreen that guarantees not to block vitamin D production but all the others do. Zinc cream is just a blockout (reflective). Apparently only daggy dads like me wear zinc cream. When you put on sunscreen, it gets into your skin and into your bloodstream. That means the vitamin D production does not just get reduced at the place you put the sunscreen on, it gets reduced in your entire body.

There is a chemical in many sunscreens called oxybenzone. Oxybenzone has been banned in parts of Hawaii because it’s killing the coral. Anyway, it’s completely safe for people, at least that’s what the studies show. You can’t drink it though because its poison but it’s completely safe to put on your skin according to the testing/the experts.

Since my lovely wife was already getting enough sun, that was not the answer. What she could do is get a vitamin D tablet. So the strongest vitamin D tablet you can buy in Australia is about 400 IU. IU means International Units, its just a fancy scary name for strength of the tablet. Most vitamins are measured in Milligrams and there is a long story about why vitamins D and E are measured in IU, but I won’t go into it here.

If you go outside in Summer about midday and don’t have too many clothes on, then in 20 minutes you get about 20,000 IU of vitamin D which apparently is the recommended daily amount according to the Vitamin D Council. On the other hand, you can just take a vitamin D pill. Well to get the same dose as you do from the sun you had better take 50 of them because that is the recommended daily dose. Oh, and you had better make sure that its vitamin D3, not vitamin D2, because vitamin D3 is the active one. D2 is sort of useless. In America the milk is fortified (added) with vitamin D2, so I guess you just get your useless vitamin D by drinking milk. Vitamin D3 used to be naturally in milk. Not any more, now it is added. The natural vitamin D is gone, why? Because cows now eat grain, but their natural diet is grass. When cows eat grass they produce vitamin D3. When they eat grain, they don’t. They eat grain because they are starving. If you give a cow the option to eat fresh grass or grain, it will choose the grass every time. Take away the grass option and force them to eat grain. Grain makes them grow big and fat quickly, and you can house the cows in a smaller area.

Now there are plenty of other food sources of vitamin D, like fish and meat. In Australia, all Salmon is farmed. Farmed Salmon eat grain. Farmed Salmon eating grain have a naturally grey flesh, not orange. To make the flesh orange they add an artificial chemical called Astaxanthin. Astaxanthin does occur naturally but the farmed salmon are fed Astaxanthin that is bio identical. It is made out of petrol. I use the word petrol a lot lately. What I mean is oil, but that doesn’t get me any attention. The correct term is that Bio identical Astaxanthin is a petrochemical, but that word is too long so I prefer Petrol. The farmed Salmon in Australia are Atlantic Salmon. That means they are imported from the Atlantic, because we live in the Pacific. What we eat is fish that are not naturally present in Australia, then we force them to eat grain, then we concentrate them in pens, then, because their colour is grey from eating grain, we dye their colour orange with a chemical made from petrol. It tastes ok but you can’t get any appreciable vitamin D from it.

The other source of vitamin D I mentioned is meat. Let’s say beef.

Oh, by the way there are no vegetable sources of vitamin D3 in case you were wondering, its sunlight or meat or fish or any natural animal product, that’s it. Oh, you can get some vitamin D from Kale or some other bullshit vegetable but you had better be prepared to eat a truckload of it. But I digress. Back to beef.

The cows that we eat in Australia are usually fed grain. When cows eat grain they cannot produce vitamin D or omega 3 oils. What’s this Omega 3 stuff? Well Omega 3 is an essential fatty acid. Its essential because your brain is made out of it, but essential actually means you cant make it you must eat it. Well not exactly, your brain is made up of essentially 3 fats (apart from the water). The three fats are saturated fat (yes, I know the evil poison), cholesterol (oh yes, another evil poison) and Omega 3 and a tiny bit of Omega 6. I will explain the omega thing in a minute.

Anyway, your brain is made up of those fats. Your brain is the fattiest organ in your body. And here is the creepy thing, every cell in your body has a cell wall, it’s called a membrane. Water nutrients and salt pass through the cell wall. Every single cell in your body has a cell wall that is made from exactly the same fats that your brain is made from. The proportions change a bit depending on what the cell does, but it doesn’t change much. Here is another creepy thing about cholesterol. Even vegetarians can have high cholesterol. If you don’t eat cholesterol (meat and fish) then your body will make it for you. It is called a non essential fat because your body can make it for you. The only thing that will stop your body making cholesterol is drugs that stop it happening like statins. Let’s say that when you eat a low cholesterol diet, it makes almost no difference to your cholesterol levels. You can go on a vegetarian or vegan diet, eat no cholesterol, and your cholesterol levels will stay almost the same. Why is that? Because cholesterol is absolutely essential to your life and your health. Every cell in your body is absolutely reliant on it. Do you know what is way more dangerous than high cholesterol? Low cholesterol will kill you. Not in 10 years from now, but immediately. So, let’s say your cholesterol level is about 5.5 or 6. That’s about the level where cholesterol lowering drugs will be recommended. It used to be 6.5 or 7 but every few years they lower the level of treatment. 

Oh yes my favourite aunty, Aunty Eve (Evelyn) only lived to 85 years old.

Her cholesterol level was about 13. I know its just an anecdote.

So they keep lowering the cholesterol bar, because that helps sell more drugs. Lipitor is the biggest money making drug the world has ever seen. Not by a bit, but by a country mile. Australia has a wonderful health system, maybe the best in the world, its certainly generous. Along with that we have the PBS or Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. That means instead of paying say $50 for antibiotics, we in Australia pay say $10.

The single largest class of drugs (by cost) are statins (cholesterol lowering drugs) or which Lipitor is the largest contributor. The Australian Government is the single biggest purchaser of Lipitor in the world.

I struggled for a long time with this cholesterol dilemma. Humans are the predominant species on the planet. There are 7 billion of us apparently. But this cholesterol stuff is allegedly poison and many of us take drugs to suppress it. So we have this little poison production plant in our body which is working against us to try and kill us or shorten our lives. It just doesn’t make sense. I mean if a venomous snake wasn’t immune to its own poison, I guess it would die. If we weren’t supposed to have cholesterol, I guess our bodies would stop making it. But we don’t, and if we stop eating cholesterol, our body figures out a way to make its own.

Wait a minute, I started out with sunshine and vitamin D and now I am talking about cholesterol and Lipitor and Omega 3 oils. Funnily enough they are all related. All the foods that contain high amounts of Omega 3 and cholesterol are also high in vitamin D. Vitamin D is liquid sunshine. You have to get your sunshine from the sun or you have to eat it. Many people today do neither and it definitely is a good pathway to depression.

What I am saying is something like this.

We are running experiments on a population scale with many things and we have no long term or epidemiological basis to know if they even work. Just take for example the mobile phone. About 90% of us are carrying one around in our pockets. They arrived on the scene about 10 years ago. They emit microwaves. I am not saying microwaves are bad, but they could be. I have a mobile phone. Before digital mobiles we had analogue phones. They were around for 10 years. Before that we had regular home phones. We had them for about 50 years. Before that we had letters, they were probably around for 500 years. Before that we had I don’t know, cave drawings or whatever. But when you compare that to human history which is 5000, 50,000 or 5 million years old, it’s a pretty short time.

Before, most of the clothes were made from wool leather or cotton. Now our clothes are made from petrol. Synthetic fabrics started less than 100 years ago. Cotton has probably been around for only 500 years (as a commodity) and GMO cotton has been around for 10 years. We just have no idea how this experiment will turn out.

The refrigerator is a huge experiment. Fridges were only invented about 100 years ago and they only became common maybe 50 years ago. Before that (like for thousands of years) the main way to preserve food was Salt. So today not only have we dramatically reduced our salt intake, but salt has been demonised by health organisations and professionals who encourage us to eat even less of it. 

Here’s a list of a few other population wide experiments we are carrying out over the last 100 years and we have no idea of the long term consequences.

Electric light

Electricity

Synthetic Fertiliser.

Motor cars

Radio and television

Vegetable oils.

Veganism.

Vitamin Tablets.

Tablets of any kind.

Hot water.

Chlorinated water.

What I am saying is there are just so many little things in our lives that have changed dramatically in the last 50 years and they all add up to a tsunami and then we wonder why we have health epidemics like depression and obesity.

Bread of today is nothing like bread of fifty years ago. Bread used to be kneaded, risen twice and then took 48 hours to be ready. Today we chuck heaps of yeast at it and its ready in a few hours. That’s one of the reasons for gluten sensitivity. The gluten is digested by the yeast, but it takes time. 

There is a bakery I have heard about in Sydney. They produce Artisan Bread, but only 3 times a week. Apparently there is a 100m line of customers every baking day. I would imagine the loaves are like $8 each instead of the 99c stuff. I suggest there may be a good reason for that. My wife discovered a pizza restaurant at Noosa rated number 4 in the country. It takes 72 hours to make a pizza. Not your pizza, but your pizza base was in production 3 days ago. Then they add fermented vegetables and long fermented salami. You don’t get to be Australia’s 4th best pizza restaurant for nothing. Preparation time matters. 

Vaccinations

I am not an anti vaxxer, but mass vaccinations have only been around for 40 years or so. We know vaccinations save people from Mumps, rubella and measles for example. I don’t know how I managed it, but I had all those diseases as a child and somehow, I survived. I also had chicken pox and the flu and I was not a sickly kid, I was pretty average to good as far as my health was concerned. 

I used to have some advice for people or a saying that went like this. If you want to have good health and live long, you had better get born before 1970. That number 1970 is just arbitrary. I think I picked that year because it was about then that the food supply started being compromised. Mass immunisations started getting popular, antibiotics became the first line of treatment. Vitamins in pill form took off.

There is a vaccination that is popular now called MMR. That’s Measles Mumps and Rubella (Rubella in English is German measles). Apparently, all those diseases are serious. That may be the case. If you live in the real world and you have all three diseases at once then you die. Just like if you had Typhoid Cholera and Malaria all at the same time, I reckon you die. Anyway, apparently you can just inject a tiny bit of each disease into a child (all at once) and they will develop antibodies and nothing else will happen. Then what we do is give it to developing babies. We don’t give it to them after their immune system is fully developed. We give it well before that maturity happens which naturally occurs at about 2 to 3 years. If you think about it a bit you will realise that that is more of an organisational reason than a medical reason. You will find that the average length of time that a mother nurses her new baby is say 18 months to two years and the average time between births is probably 2.5 years. So if you get the child immunised at say 12 to 18 months, there is a lot less organisation required because the mother has her full attention on that child. It has nothing to do with any medical reason. And if you stick it all in one vaccination, then you only have to go to the doc once instead of 3 times.

People will say to me well there must be strong medical research saying that vaccinating 1year old babies with three serious diseases at the same time is safe. I don’t know if there is good research but I doubt it.

The standard for scientific testing is the double-blind placebo controlled test. I wonder how many mothers will give their new babies to participate in a scientific test of a new drug/vaccination on their new baby? Then for a proper test you have to follow the baby for years, not months to see what the longer term effects are. Then you have to have a second group that does not have the vaccination and follow them for years. Then you have to compare the two groups on many different measures. I am suggesting there is a possibility the testing was never done prior to the introduction of these vaccines. They havent been followed for years and the test hasn’t been placebo controlled. If I am wrong, I stand corrected. I mean you can just imagine the conversation in the doctors office.

Excuse me Susan, but would you like your one year old to participate in a study of a new vaccination that combines 3 deadly viruses at once? We have tried it on rats monkeys and Pakistani children and that seemed to work. Hardly any of them died. We followed them for 3 months.

Yes sure, just pump whatever you like into little Johnny. I’m sure that will be fine. Do I get paid?

It just seems implausible that’s all.

In relation to MMR in particular, just to let you know, in the EU, MMR vaccines are routinely separated into single vaccines. Maybe they are smarter than us, I don’t know.

By the way, all of my children are more or less fully immunised, except the Gardasil vaccine (a recent Australian invention), and I will elaborate on that later. Because my wife is so brilliant and has a PhD in microbiology (you know the study of tiny living things), our children were immunised at the last possible moment, giving their tiny bodies time to develop a stronger immune system. As everyone knows there is a vast difference between a baby of 12 months old and a baby of two or three years of age. We got an awful lot of pressure from the government to get the immunisations done earlier though. The government even threatened to cut off our welfare child support payments. That was worrying because we didn’t know how we would get by without those monthly cheques for Zero Dollars!

Oh, here’s a couple of quick fun facts about the Gardasil vaccine.

In the USA they have a sort of slush fund. Its called the 

National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program  (VICP)

They have about 16 different vaccinations on their list that they will pay out on if there is an injury relating to a vaccine. Like for example the flu vaccine, the MMR vaccine, or the Gardasil vaccine. The bar is pretty high though. 

Like sometimes you might get compensated for a death or permanent physical or mental impairment, but not always. Anyway, last financial year the fund awarded just over $100 million to victims of Gardasil. There were about 100 successful claims, so about $1million each.

I mean you don’t get awarded $1million without a truckload of evidence. If you are not awarded damages, then you can still sue in the regular court system but it will probably cost you over $1million in legal fees and take years. Who has that sort of money and time?

Gardasil victims were awarded more claims than all the other 15 vaccines on the VICP list, combined. Gardasil has only been around for about 10 years and Gardasil 9, for 5 years. Gardasil 9 protects you from 9 strains of the human papilloma virus. (HPV). There are about 150 strains of HPV so far identified, but at least you get protected from 9 of them. Oh, I forgot, something like 75% of the human population carries the HPV virus and rather than dropping like flies, there seems to be an awful lot of us these days. Oh, two weeks after a friend of ours, a 15 year old boy, had the Gardasil Vaccine, that his doctor had assured him was safe. He ended up in hospital, massive headache, couldn’t walk and couldn’t talk. He has regained his talking and video playing ability, he can also walk, but he can’t run. Official diagnosis from the hospital; Gardasil injury. If I was 15 years old and I was told that I can have this vaccine and that will mean that MAYBE I don’t get cancer 40 years from now, OR risk never being able to run again, then I know what my choice would be. Oh, sorry something I forgot, Gardasil was so good and so important, it was fast tracked through the approval system.  

Let’s just say that vaccines are another “little thing” that has changed in the world, and again we really have no long- term epidemiological placebo-controlled studies to validate the experiment.

Let me go out on a limb here; again. My estimation is, of the non-medical people who strongly support vaccination, that 50%- 90% of them have no idea what they are talking about. They just swallow the line that they are being fed. They haven’t done any research. But just to prove that I am all for equal opportunity, I also estimate that 50-90% of the anti-vaxxers have no idea what they are talking about either. Many, but not all, of the anti-vaxxers just do it because they are against anything mainstream. I will bet a lot of them are vegetarians or vegans too, and that is seriously crazy, and you have to live with that every day. I am not saying that I have the answers or any one I know does. I am just saying this is a big, new, bold experiment and we don’t know the answers yet, so we need to be careful about vaccinations. There is way too much emotion attached to the issue and not enough science. (even from the scientific community) I have heard that overall life expectancy could be set to reduce over the coming years. Could that be due to mass vaccinations? I don’t know, but neither does anyone else.

When I was a boy it was common when you travelled overseas to get vaccinated for Typhoid, Cholera and Yellow Fever. It seriously bothered me because I would see my parents getting those vaccinations. It hurt them, and they usually got quite sick for a few days afterward. I didn’t care about travelling overseas. I just preferred to stay at home and not get jabbed. Hey what did I know I was just a kid? Well I guess these were adults and they did it willingly and certainly you could die from any one of those diseases in the unlikely event that you got it. Well the question is, why didn’t they just stick all of those diseases together in one shot? I will tell you why, because it may kill you.

Anyway, now because we are so clever, we have worked out how to make all these vaccinations more acceptable to our bodies, so now we can put three allegedly deadly diseases together in the one vaccine AND we can give it to one-year old children. That is super smart. Does anyone ever ask; Yes, but should we? Is there any chance that there could be undesirable consequences? I know a few people that want their children to get some of these diseases like chicken pox. Once your kids get it, it seems to strengthen and mature the children, and it’s over and done with basically for life. There is even such a thing as Chicken Pox Parties where you get the infected kid, and make sure all the other kids get it. These people are not crazy. They are everyday people like you and me. I have definitely seen it with my own children, that after a fever they seem to awaken with newfound maturity.

The chicken pox vaccine was introduced en masse in the USA in 1995. That is not 25 years ago. Therefore it is not possible to have long term epidemiological studies. There are plenty of people who point to the success of the polio vaccine. Fair enough. That doesn’t mean that exactly the same mechanism is at play for all other viruses or diseases. That does not mean you can put three viruses in the one vaccination safely (necessarily). Anyway, I digress as usual. What I am saying is that when it comes to your health, it is worth taking some time and responsibility for yourself and think about these things and do some research. Blind faith is not good enough and access to information is easy today. Take some responsibility for your health and use the internet to benefit yourself.

Framingham Study

There is a study which is longest running population/health study that I know of. It’s an epidemiology study, as in long term. It’s called the Framingham study. Framingham is a town in Massachusetts USA, not far from Boston. The study has run for 60 years and is into its 3rd generation. In other words, the grand children of the initial participants are now participating. The study is a heart disease study, but what has happened is that other people can take or buy the data and look at things other than heart disease.

Here is an example of what has been found using the Framingham data.

People with higher cholesterol tend to live the longest.

People who ate more meat tended to live the longest.

People that ate more vegetables did not tend to live longer.

People with the highest salt intake tended to live the longest.

People with the highest exercise rate did not tend to live longer.

People whose job involved moderate physical activity, especially outdoors did seem to get health benefits.

Higher water consumption did not seem to lead to better outcomes.

How about this one using data from the Framingham Study.

Conclusions:

In the community, alcohol consumption is not associated with increased risk for congestive heart failure, even among heavy drinkers (≥ 15 drinks/wk in men and ≥ 8 drinks/wk in women). To the contrary, when consumed in moderation, alcohol appears to protect against congestive heart failure.

So it would seem that moderate alcohol consumption is protective against heart failure, and high alcohol consumption does not seem to make heart failure more likely.

You could virtually say that every health message we have been told over the last 50 years has been debunked by the Framingham study, except these two.

Smoking is bad for you and so is sugar.

I mean my interpretation is a bit exaggerated, but not by much. Here is my succinct diagnosis. Most people are poisoning themselves daily with what they eat and drink and wear and take as medicines and supplements. They also shield themselves from the sun.  A lot of it doesn’t matter though because the human body is really tough and adaptable.

If you check with the American Society of Dermatologists you will find that the recommended amount of sun exposure is ZERO. So apparently this great ball in the sky that has been beating down on us for billions of years is so toxic you should not go outside and expose yourself to it.

Here’s another one, I call it an antibiotic but strictly speaking it’s an antibacterial chemical called Triclosan. Triclosan is in most antibacterial soaps and in toothpaste. Triclosan kills bacteria. Anyway the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) decided to ban Triclosan from soaps and cosmetics in 2017, presumably because of its toxicity. Its not toxic when you stick it your mouth though so it can be still used in toothpaste in the USA, and its not toxic to Australian hands and mouths either. We must be much tougher than those soft Americans’. 

 What do we do about it? Well the answers are pretty simple.

The answers are to start experimenting again, but you have to run smart and simple experiments. Change one thing at a time.

And while I am thinking of it you have to focus, that means limit your distractions, because distractions are everywhere today. One thing you have to focus on is making your own life better, not everyone elses’.

Focus

Here’s a little experiment you could run based around the idea of focus.

Try turning off your mobile phone for one day. I know how scary and confronting that is but I can be an evil genius at times. It won’t solve your depression though, but if you thought it might, would you do it?

Last week (Feb 2109) I loaned my Laptop to my wife for 3 hours.

I cannot believe how productive I was in those 3 hours.

I have a school friend who is a specialist doctor, he is pretty productive.

His policy is only to look at Emails once a week on a Tuesday.

Two weeks ago, I turned off my voicemail and voice to text service. Not everyone can do this obviously, it depends on your job. Now what happens is everyone chases me, not the other way around. I am so much more productive. I wish I had thought of it years ago.

Anyway, enough Philosophy we will get back to those basics.

The basics are food water sunshine and minerals (salt) as we discussed earlier. And limit your exposure to poisons.

The Sunshine experiment.

I think I have dealt with it more or less above.

Sunshine is of extreme importance and you have to get your vitamin D from Sunshine or you have to eat it. Eating vitamin D means wild caught fish and grass fed meat. This is how the eskimos survived the long cold winter, they didn’t have sunshine for 6 months so they had to eat it. Vitamin D tablets are pretty useless as are most vitamin tablets.

Getting say 20 minutes of unprotected sun exposure every day is the single biggest thing you can do for your health. If you are not good at experimenting, try 5 minutes and work your way up. Then for the advanced experimenters try another little twist, do it without sunglasses or a hat.

If you can’t get sunshine from the sun because of where you live, then you have to eat it. Cod liver oil is the most concentrated source I know of. Cod liver oil was the biggest selling supplement of all time up until about 1950. From Wikipedia (cod liver oil may have efficacy for depression)  Raeder MB, Steen VM, Vollset SE, Bjelland I (August 2007). “Associations between cod liver oil use and symptoms of depression: the Hordaland Health Study”. J Affect Disord. 101 (1–3): 245–9. doi:10.1016/j.jad.2006.11.006

The guy that controlled the cod liver oil supply in Norway/Iceland was like the Bill Gates of his day. One of the richest men in the world. I think it was antibiotics that did the business in but who knows. Regular fish oil and krill oil may work, I don’t know. I prefer the liquid not the capsules because the encapsulation process may damage the oils, I don’t know.

Grass fed butter is a good source of vitamin D too. You can usually tell the grass fed butter and cream from the colour. The yellower the better.

Christin Cronou, Qld based Author of health books eats 100g of grass fed butter each day and she is slim and beautiful and certainly not depressed.

All of the most prized foods in the world are full of vitamin D and Omega 3 oils. Like caviar, sashimi Tuna, oysters, lobster, prawns/shrimp, camembert cheese, parmigiana reggio cheese and most of the fancy high end cheeses. For the poorer of us, its eggs, butter, grass fed beef, lamb fresh milk, cream, unprocessed cheese.

Omega 3 Oils.

Fats/oils have two ends known as Omega and Delta. Omega is the left hand side and delta the right. So the omega refers to a position of the double bond between carbon atoms in the chain of carbon atoms that make up oils or fats. The 3 means the position of the double bond from the left hand side (The omega side). Its just simple chemistry and not necessary to know. What is important is that Omega 3’s are in short supply in the modern diet and Omega 6 oils are over abundant. When the balance gets out then your body doesn’t like it. Omega 3 oils of the right kind are only available in naturally fed animals and fish. There are Omega 3s available in plants, but they are not the kind your body can use.

Its also easy to damage Omega 3s by cooking or processing which is why many of the high omega 3 sources are eaten raw. Like sashimi tuna for example.

Now just a couple of anecdotes about sunshine, but anecdotes are important, especially when they are based on whole populations.

When do most people take their holidays? Answer is summer. Where do most people go for their summer holidays? To the beach, this is not just an Australian thing. How do you feel when you go to the beach, you feel good. Its not just because you are not at work because a lot of people love their work. Its because of the sunshine! Sunshine makes you feel good. Even if you go skiing in winter, its always more fun skiing in the sun and its not just because you can see better. And careful of wearing glasses or sunglasses (a modern invention). The UV rays from the sun (invisible rays) send messages to your brain that tells you to feel good and produce serotonin, the happy hormone. Every single cell of your body has a vitamin D receptor built in. 

Where do people go to retire? In the USA they go to Florida or southern California. In Australia they go to Queensland, In Europe they go south or go to Spain or Southern Italy. They are all going for the sun, not because its warm, but that helps.

Water, whats in it and whats not.

Water should be full of minerals and have a pH (acidity) of around 5.5. I mean you have to have chlorine in the modern water supply, but not fluoride. Dentists say that fluoride is good for your teeth, I doubt it, but even if it is, that doesn’t mean you should drink it. There are no teeth in your gut. My theory is that the reason tooth enamel can improve when fluoride is applied is that the teeth are trying to protect the nerve from this toxic poison. I don’t know I’m not a dentist.

Sodium Fluoride NaF is an industrial poison and a waste product. It wasn’t even invented until 100 years ago. It was originally used as an insecticide. I don’t think it was Rat Poison because rats would not be stupid enough to eat it. If you take a look around at the stockpiles of Sodium Fluoride dumps you will see this stuff kills everything it touches.

I would be pretty sure there is a skull and crossbones on the label of the barrel of Fluoride before they tip it into the water supply. Seems like a high price to pay for marginally better teeth. Oh, and fluoride replaces iodine in the body (I think it has to do with valency) and then it starts calcifying the Pineal gland. The pineal gland controls sleep and serotonin/Melatonin production. Remember serotonin the happy hormone. And if fluoride replaces iodine then that causes a problem with the thyroid gland and the thyroid gland is like the major metabolic and temperature controller. I know, fluoride is only present at 1ppmn (part per million), its hardly any, but I guess your dose depends on how much water you drink. The more water you drink, the more poison you must consume. And since the body has never seen this chemical before the last 50 years, it doesn’t know what to do with it. The body must excrete it or store it. So then if it stores the fluoride, I guess it gets stored in fatty tissue, but then you run out of fatty tissue because the fatty tissues are full, so then you must make more fatty tissue, and we can all see where that one is headed.

It is pretty easy to remove fluoride from your water today with a cheapish water filter. But don’t worry about not getting enough fluoride because there is probably plenty of it in your toothpaste. Just be careful with that toothpaste though, I don’t know how much of it, it takes to kill you but if you swallowed the tube you would be pretty sick for a while. Best thing to do is call the poisons Hotline. They might have some information about the Triclosan as well. I guess the theory with poison is that its fine to put it in your mouth, just don’t swallow it.

Right lets get on to chlorine.

I mean you have to have chlorine or something similar in a modern water supply to purify it, but I prefer to remove it before I drink it. Pretty easy to do with a cheap water filter. Chlorine is in the water to kill bacteria. Bacteria is a huge issue and I will elaborate later perhaps but chlorine keeps on killing bacteria after it enters your body, and a lot of bacteria in your body are beneficial. One thing beneficial about bacteria is that they produce Serotonin, remember the happy hormone or neurotransmitter.

Over the years I noticed a lot of friends who were competitive swimmers who ended up with health problems like depression asthma, glandular fever, Epstein Barr, respiratory illnesses. 

This is my theory. They are swimming in poison. I mean every chemical that goes in to that pool carries a poison warning label. They drink it and they swim in it. The chlorine levels in swimming pool water are way higher than what you drink. Try drinking public swimming pool water for a week and you will see what I mean. That stuff is toxic. I doubt there is anyone reading this article that remembers the great war with any authenticity. But everyone will remember that they used gas or chemical weapons.

What sort of gas was it? It was chlorine gas. So chemical weapons were banned under the Geneva convention, but apparently its ok to put them in the water supply. Just not too much.

Anyway, I might be wrong, but just try running the Water experiment. Use rainwater or filtered water or soda water, or water with a tiny bit of lemon. See if you like it. See if you feel a bit better, even a tiny bit. Do it for a few days. Do it for a week. Then for a month. I mean obviously you have to falter. You are thirsty and the only thing available is unfiltered tapwater. Well drink it. Just don’t make it the default position.

SALT

Salt is the number one mineral that your body needs by a country mile. If you don’t get enough salt everything goes wrong. Depression is one of them. Salt is the way electrical signals are sent around your body. Salty water conducts electricity, fresh water doesn’t. The higher your salt content (up to a point), the easier and faster it is for those signals to get around. Before refrigerators (yesterday) salt was the way food was preserved. That means we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Suddenly someone has done a short term study and demonised salt. I can assure you the evidence is shaky. It would appear that the average salt consumption of the entire worlds population of 7 billion people is 10g per day. That amount also corresponds with the people that live the longest. 

Here is a population anecdote about salt.

The two countries in the world with the highest salt consumption are Japan and Switzerland. The two countries with the longest life expectancy are Japan and Switzerland. The two countries with the highest per capita incomes are Japan and Switzerland. The country with the lowest no of deaths from hypertension is Japan. Switzerland is in the bottom 10%. Japan and Switzerland are also countries in the lowest 10% of deaths due to coronary disease.

The part of the world with the lowest salt consumption is Central Africa. The part of the world with the lowest life expectancy is Central Africa. The part of the world with the lowest per capita income is Central Africa.

I believe there is a message there.

Do an experiment with salt. Get a bit more than usual. Add perhaps a half a teaspoon a day to your water or your coffees. Do it for a few days and notice what happens. I’m not saying do it forever, although I believe you should, but do it until your depression is gone.

Depression is a disease of the Gut, Not the Mind

So, Depression is a disease of the gut and most doctors and psychiatrists agree with me. So does the AMA. They don’t phrase it that way, but that’s what they are saying. How do I know this and why am I so confident? Oh, Hippocrates also agrees with me when he said All disease begins in the gut. (Should I say, I agree with Hippocrates and the AMA?)

The reason I know this about most doctors is that their first line of defence against depression is a pill. The pill is usually an SSRI which means Selective Serotonin Re uptake inhibitor. I can explain about that later which takes us further down the gut idea, but for now just think of it as a pill. Where does the pill go? Well you swallow it, naturally. You don’t put it in your ear! Well if you swallow a pill, how does it get to your head if that’s where depression is? To be truthful, some of it does get to your head, but again that’s another discussion. Anyway, if you swallow a pill, it must go to your stomach first, then your small intestine then your large intestine and then some of it pops out again in your poo. Its like anything you put in your mouth. Some of it becomes you and some of it is expelled. Well if depression was in your head, I guess they would inject you in your head or put a cream in your hair. They don’t because that is not where depression is, its’ in your gut. The SSRI drug modifies a chemical called serotonin. Serotonin is often called the happy hormone. When you have depression, serotonin is low. You probably don’t sleep well because serotonin is used to make Melatonin which is the sleep hormone. So about 90% of your serotonin is found in your gut (Large Intestine). Well why bother modifying serotonin if less than 10% of serotonin is found in your head? The reason is that depression is in your gut.

Depression is primarily caused by lack of serotonin which is made in your gut and stays there. Serotonin is largely made from your food and largely made by the bacteria that live in your gut. You have to have enough of those bacteria, and then you have to feed those bacteria what they like to eat. Then you get enough serotonin and your depression goes away. In my case, my depression was cured in less than 24 hours by improving my gut bacteria and feeding them properly. There was no placebo effect involved, because I had no idea what I was doing or what could happen. I was grasping at straws and trying anything I could. I had mowed through just about every vitamin and combinations, I had tried all the herbs and potions, I had meditated and been counselled and prayed. None of it worked, but probiotics with prebiotics worked within hours. Prebiotics are just food for the bacteria, nothing exotic.

Well because I am an engineer and a boy, I had to know why it worked (I mean after the initial shock of being cured overnight). I devoured every bit of research on probiotics, mental health gut health, digestive systems. I would say that I am now one of the worlds experts in this field. Not THE expert, but one of them.

I also discovered many other important health messages along the research journey and here are three that are really important.

  1. Almost everything we have been told about health and diet are wrong, like for example saturated fat, cholesterol and salt are good for you, in fact essential. Too much water is bad for you. You should eat the most calorie/Nutrient dense foods you can lay your hands on, all sugar substitutes are poison (including stevia), vegetables are ok but be careful of them, they all contain minute amounts of poison, and fruit should be an occasional treat. All vitamins should come from food. Whenever you concentrate something like food for example sugar, you strip out the good stuff and concentrate the bad stuff. Sugar cane is probably a “superfood” it contains heaps of vitamins and minerals and calories, you could probably live off it for a long time, table sugar though is not a superfood at all. Even fruit juice is way less good for you than the fruit that it came from.

Men (Homo Sapiens) became the dominant species and built the Colosseum and the Opera house because they eat meat and animal products and more importantly, they learned to cook. Instead of spending their whole lives finding and eating food and digesting it, they spent their time on more useful and interesting pursuits.

  1. Medicines, including antibiotics and probiotics, and including natural medicines should be used sparingly, and only taken for short periods and certainly not on a daily basis for months or years. If a medicine is going to do you any good, you need to know it and feel it within days or weeks.
  1. Sunshine is probably the most important health-giving substance around, and if you don’t get enough of it you have to eat it. The eskimos survived the long winter by eating their sunshine, in the form of fish, seal, and whale meat all high in Omega 3 oils and vitamin D (Stored sunshine). After sunshine comes salt and iron and calories.

There are many other rules and tips that I have learned but I guess that will do for now. Here is another confronting one, your digestive system is much more like a cat than a monkey. Cats are carnivores (Eat only meat) and Monkeys are vegetarians mostly.

Just a couple of words about the food supply.

When my mother was a young girl they ate bread and dripping. My mother survived until she was 94. That would do me. In my opinion she died from water poisoning, or lack of salt. I only discovered it too late. Official cause of death, kidney failure, but it’s the same thing.

Back to bread and dripping. You need proper bread and proper dripping. The bread should be fermented and proved for two days and the dripping was from grass fed cows. Now, it gets a little harder.

Milk should come from Jersey cows by the way and they should be fed on grass. There is a reason by the way based on chemistry. Chickens should live for a year or so before they are killed for their meat. Most of our chickens are 45 days old. Vegetables should be picked when they are ripe and have reached their full potential, and then eaten straight away, usually after cooking. They can be stored, but transport and refrigeration kills off a lot of their potential. In traditional societies stored food was stored by fermentation (bacterial digestion) and salting.

Obviously in today’s modern world we cannot survive without refrigeration or the supermarket or modern medicine.

Hippocrates also said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” He was right, of course. Its just that its hard today because so much of the food supply has been mucked about with. My personal view is that one traditionally home cooked meal per day, or even every few days is enough to maintain good health. For example, grass fed lamb chops with fresh or frozen peas (cooked) potatoes cooked for a long time with salt, and carrots cooked a long time with salt would do the trick. Ice cream and jelly would probably help too, Jelly is made from beef, and so is ice cream mostly. For the adults, have a traditionally made piece of cheese, once you have unprocessed cheese, it’s hard to go back to the other stuff.

I picked lamb because it is almost always grass fed. And by the way lamb and other meats should be cooked until the pink is gone and there is a reason for that, it is not a taste preference, it has to do with unlocking and predigesting the proteins.

Anyway, I may be slightly off topic with the meat and three veg thing, but not really. It’s a little thing, and little things matter.

I will tell you about a few more little things that matter.

Bacteria are little things, and they matter. Salt is a little thing and it matters. Iron is a little thing and it matters. The sun is not that little, but it matters too. Pay attention to those little things, and perhaps your life will get better. Run some little experiments and perhaps your life will get better, I hope so.

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