“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” Albert Einstein 1901.
“We will remove any medical comments that do not align with WHO advice.” Youtube CEO 2020.
To say these are strange times would be a great understatement. Everybody’s life has been disrupted either by Covid-19 or the Government’s reaction to it. An unprecedented ‘lockdown’ was forced upon us all to ‘flatten the curve’ and ‘prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed’. The newspapers and broadcast media have urged us to ‘stay at home and save lives’ to the exclusion of almost every other topic. Although millions of words have been written about Covid-19 already, I am adding a few more because I believe important information has not been made widely available.
Neil Ferguson is an epidemiologist at Imperial College, London, whose predictions have greatly influenced the Government’s actions. Using computer modelling techniques, he predicted, originally, that 500,000 people would die, in the UK, from this virus unless a severe lockdown was implemented. Before we thank him for his foresight, we should remember that he also predicted that ‘Bird Flu’ would kill up to 200 million people world-wide. It killed 440. He also said that ‘Mad Cow Disease’ would kill 50,000 in the UK. The death toll was just over 200. (He has just resigned from his Government advisory position for breaking the lockdown he recommended.)
Having shut down our lives, the Government needs to justify that action. One of the ways they do this is to count every death as a Covid-19 death if the victim had the virus, or had the symptoms of the virus. Doctors are currently allowed to assume someone died of Covid-19 when completing a death certificate. We will never know how many people died of the virus or died of something else whilst they had the virus. Whatever the death toll turns out to be, it will be nowhere near Prof. Ferguson’s number.
“The coronavirus does not discriminate.” In March we were told this on several occasions and it is true that anyone may be infected. However, when it comes to who dies, the virus certainly appears to discriminate. It almost exclusively takes people who are already suffering from metabolic diseases and old people whose natural immunity is impaired.
These figures, from the NHS, show that 95% of the people who died had a diagnosed, pre-existing condition. The people without a pre-existing condition may have been metabolically unwell without having been diagnosed, so the figure may be even higher. The most common pre-existing conditions are diabetes, obesity and heart disease, which tend to be more prevalent in the elderly. However, these conditions are avoidable with the correct lifestyle and diet. Unfortunately, the NHS advises us all to eat a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet, which directly increases our chances of developing the metabolic diseases which this virus attacks.
Vitamin D. A pre-existing condition, which is never mentioned during the Government’s daily broadcasts is Vitamin D deficiency. Nearly everybody in the UK is lacking vitamin D at this time of year following the winter. It has been shown to be a vital part of our innate immune system and previous studies have demonstrated its ability to tackle respiratory, viral diseases, like influenza. In some places doctors have tested their Covid-19 patients and discovered exceptional results.
This first study is from Indonesia and the second from America –
It is clear from these results that Vitamin D deficiency is a pre-existing condition which greatly increases someone’s chance of dying when contracting Covid-19. If our health authorities were aware of this surely they would encourage us to sit in the sun, whilst social-distancing. Instead, they have allowed the police to move people on, who are trying to improve their immune systems via sunlight. The NHS advises us to protect ourselves from the direct rays of the sun, which is our evolved way of producing Vitamin D. Too much sun can be bad for us, but too little is also detrimental.
In the UK, winter sunshine is too weak to stimulate vitamin production. However, we can get vitamin D from food but the active form, D3, only comes from animal sources like fatty fish and eggs. It is fat soluble and we need fat in our diet to absorb it. The NHS dietary guidelines advise a low-fat diet. They also advise a reduction in cholesterol levels, which is a huge problem because cholesterol is an essential part of the process that creates vitamin D when sun shines on our skin.
Inflammation. In human biology, the term inflammation is used to describe a complex process in which a variety of molecules are released into the blood stream by the immune system to fight infections. The swelling and redness that comes with an infected cut is an essential defence mechanism. However, some people can have a long-lasting, low-level of inflammation which can be harmful. When people die from the coronavirus they often suffer a ‘cytokine storm’. Cytokines are messenger molecules which trigger immune responses but, if too many are produced, the immune system can over-react and start attacking our own cells as well as those of the virus. This can cause death by multiple organ failure.
Having high-levels of inflammation before we are infected increases the odds on suffering too much inflammation during an illness. We can improve our odds by having very low levels of inflammation. The essential omega fatty acids play a role in this process. Omega-3 reduces inflammation while Omega-6 increases inflammation. It is believed that our evolutionary diet had a one-to-one balance of these two nutrients. Modern diets can contain a ratio of 16 to 1 in favour of the pro-inflammatory Omega-6. This has happened because we have all been persuaded, by the NHS Dietary Guidelines, to replace traditional lard and dripping in our cooking with ‘vegetable oils’. These modern, industrially-extracted oils have a very high percentage of Omega-6 and are rife in processed foods. Interestingly, Vitamin D is a potent anti-inflammatory and can greatly reduce the chance of a cytokine storm.
The Lockdown. We have all accepted an extraordinary curtailment of our freedoms and livelihoods because we have been told we have to ‘save lives’. Nobody seems to know how much damage will be done to society, the economy, and other health problems as a result of the lockdown but with tens of thousands of people already made redundant, the consequences will be severe. Recent surveys have shown that many people are too afraid of the virus to want their normal freedoms back.
The evidence here shows that the best way to save lives is to be metabolically healthy with low blood sugar and high vitamin D levels. Why is the Government failing to tell us any of this information? We cannot know their motives, nor the motives of their advisers, but to do so would mean admitting that the official dietary advice is wrong and has been for decades.
The Government never tells us to improve our metabolic health and innate immune systems. Instead, it promotes vaccines, testing and phone-tracking apps. All of these things will make some companies a lot of money. Sunbathing, for a short time, without sunscreen and eating low-carb, high-fat, real food from a farmer or fisherman will not make anyone a fortune. However, we can all do these things and, not only reduce our risk from Covid19 considerably, but also improve all aspects of our health for years to come. The real pandemic here is not so much the virus as the pandemic of metabolic syndrome which the virus has remorselessly attacked.