In the “everything you thought you knew turned out to be wrong” category... which here in 2022 is turning out to be a lot of stuff in a lot of areas.
My bias upfront: the idea that we evolved with sunlight and that it’s some sort of input we must avoid like salmonella—that’s a crackpot hypothesis driven by follow the money, and no credible science can say otherwise.
These are dark days for supplements. Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study.
If there was one supplement that seemed sure to survive the rigorous tests, it was vitamin D. People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of: cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, heart attack, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and more. The vitamin is required for calcium absorption and is thus essential for bone health, but as evidence mounted that lower levels of vitamin D were associated with so many diseases, health experts began suspecting that it was involved in many other biological processes as well.
But today most of us have indoor jobs, and when we do go outside, we’ve been taught to protect ourselves from dangerous UV rays, which can cause skin cancer. Sunscreen also blocks our skin from making vitamin D, but that’s OK, says the American Academy of Dermatology, which takes a zero-tolerance stance on sun exposure: “You need to protect your skin from the sun every day, even when it’s cloudy,” it advises on its website. Better to slather on sunblock, we’ve all been told, and compensate with vitamin D pills.
Yet vitamin D supplementation has failed spectacularly in clinical trials. Five years ago, researchers were already warning that it showed zero benefit, and the evidence has only grown stronger. In November, one of the largest and most rigorous trials of the vitamin ever conducted—in which 25,871 participants received high doses for five years—found no impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke.
How did we get it so wrong? How could people with low vitamin D levels clearly suffer higher rates of so many diseases and yet not be helped by supplementation?
As it turns out, a rogue band of researchers has had an explanation all along. And if they’re right, it means that once again we have been epically misled.
These rebels argue that what made the people with high vitamin D levels so healthy was not the vitamin itself. That was just a marker. Their vitamin D levels were high because they were getting plenty of exposure to the thing that was really responsible for their good health—that big orange ball shining down from above.
One of the leaders of this rebellion is a mild-mannered dermatologist at the University of Edinburgh named Richard Weller... Weller’s doubts began around 2010, when he was researching nitric oxide, a molecule produced in the body that dilates blood vessels and lowers blood pressure. He discovered a previously unknown biological pathway by which the skin uses sunlight to make nitric oxide... Sure enough, when he exposed volunteers to the equivalent of 30 minutes of summer sunlight without sunscreen, their nitric oxide levels went up and their blood pressure went down. Because of its connection to heart disease and strokes, blood pressure is the leading cause of premature death and disease in the world, and the reduction was of a magnitude large enough to prevent millions of deaths on a global level.
Wouldn’t all those rays also raise rates of skin cancer? Yes, but skin cancer kills surprisingly few people: less than 3 per 100,000 in the U.S. each year. For every person who dies of skin cancer, more than 100 die from cardiovascular diseases.
... People don’t realize this because several different diseases are lumped together under the term “skin cancer.” The most common by far are basal-cell carcinomas and squamous-cell carcinomas, which are almost never fatal. In fact, says Weller, “When I diagnose a basal-cell skin cancer in a patient, the first thing I say is congratulations, because you’re walking out of my office with a longer life expectancy than when you walked in.” That’s probably because people who get carcinomas, which are strongly linked to sun exposure, tend to be healthy types that are outside getting plenty of exercise and sunlight.
Melanoma, the deadly type of skin cancer, is much rarer, accounting for only 1 to 3 percent of new skin cancers. And perplexingly, outdoor workers have half the melanoma rate of indoor workers. Tanned people have lower rates in general. “The risk factor for melanoma appears to be intermittent sunshine and sunburn, especially when you’re young,” says Weller. “But there’s evidence that long-term sun exposure associates with less melanoma.”
...So Lindqvist decided to look at overall mortality rates, and the results were shocking. Over the 20 years of the study, sun avoiders were twice as likely to die as sun worshippers.
...Weller’s largest study yet is due to be published later in 2019. For three years, his team tracked the blood pressure of 340,000 people in 2,000 spots around the U.S., adjusting for variables such as age and skin type. The results clearly showed that the reason people in sunnier climes have lower blood pressure is as simple as light hitting skin.
When I spoke with Weller, I made the mistake of characterizing this notion as counterintuitive. “It’s entirely intuitive,” he responded. “Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. Until the industrial revolution, we lived outside. How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, perfectly well. What’s counterintuitive is that dermatologists run around saying, ‘Don’t go outside, you might die.’”
...Meanwhile, that big picture just keeps getting more interesting. Vitamin D now looks like the tip of the solar iceberg. Sunlight triggers the release of a number of other important compounds in the body, not only nitric oxide but also serotonin and endorphins. It reduces the risk of prostate, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It improves circadian rhythms. It reduces inflammation and dampens autoimmune responses. It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of. And it’s free.
...current U.S. sun-exposure guidelines were written for the whitest people on earth... Africans in Britain and America are told to avoid the sun.”... People of color rarely get melanoma. The rate is 26 per 100,000 in Caucasians, 5 per 100,000 in Hispanics, and 1 per 100,000 in African Americans... At the same time, African Americans suffer high rates of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, internal cancers, and other diseases that seem to improve in the presence of sunlight... they have much to gain from the sun and little to fear.
WIND: photobiomodulation is a thing. Stick with the conventional if you wish—FUD sure sells well and how can you . But I’ll be getting my daily dose of sunlight.
Ask your dermatologist about sun exposure. Any intellectually honest one that can do even rudimentary risk assessment should have serious reservations about denying yourself sunlight each day in an amount appropriate for you skin, time of year, altitude, etc. IMO, a doctor who advises avoiding the sun at all costs is a crackpot. Ask them about photobiomodulation, a field barely studied but with more and more being discovered. And all the scientific evidence is against them! But “trained” doctors are just that—intellectual curiousity and objective inquiry are quite another.
Think about that “protect your skin from the sun every day” advice. That is is more about follow the money than any credible science should obvious because of its absolutism, particularly its abominable take on people of color (more on that below).
What exactly happens to your skin when you avoid all sun, and then one fine day, you get a bad burn because your skin has not seen an UV in ages? Versus getting some exposure every day and never burning? Tanning is as natural as anything could be, it’s what we evolved to do. No surface organism exists that has not had to deal with the sun, and with millions of years get the formula right it is outrageous hubris to assret otherwise.
Then there is the “feel good” part. There is so much real evidence that photobiomodulation is how the human organism evolved and that sunlight should be thought of more like a nutrient.
I’ve long felt that right around April I feel better and better as I get more sun exposure. Always, by late April (northern hemisphere), everything just perks up like magic. Just when I am getting a lot more sun. Like clockwork. I’ll be damned if I’m going to slather up with some chemical (or worse, those nasty nanoparticle oxides that cannote be removed from sun things).
I have a deep skepticism of sunscreen, but I do use it to keep from burning (nose and face mostly), but only to avoid excessive sun (altitude, time, granite or snow, etc). Hats and clothing take care of it, excepting the face.
The hype around skin cancers fails to account for the tiny proportion of deadly melanoma. Or nasty stuff like crap-grade-food-in = bad-health-and-cancer-out—things like PUFAs and processed foods and magnesium deficiency, all of which are just too many insults for the body to tolerate.
If the following isn’t blatant malpractice and crackpot medicine to the detriment of people of color, I don’t know what is:
When I asked the American Academy of Dermatology for clarification on its position on dark-skinned people and the sun, it pointed me back to the official line on its website: “The American Academy of Dermatology recommends that all people, regardless of skin color, protect themselves from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays by seeking shade, wearing protective clothing, and using a broad-spectrum, water-resistant sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher.”
Same story, different details
We’ve heard this story (crackpot ideas held up as “science”) from the medical establishment before:
Am I willing to entertain the notion that current guidelines are inadvertently advocating a lifestyle that is killing us?
...Eventually, better science revealed that the trans fats created by the hydrogenation process were far worse for our arteries than the natural fats in butter. In 1994, Harvard researchers estimated that 30,000 people per year were dying unnecessarily thanks to trans fats. Yet they weren’t banned in the U.S. until 2015.
...early sunscreen formulations were disastrous, shielding users from the UVB rays that cause sunburn but not the UVA rays that cause skin cancer. Even today, SPF ratings refer only to UVB rays, so many users may be absorbing far more UVA radiation than they realize. Meanwhile, many common sunscreen ingredients have been found to be hormone disruptors that can be detected in users’ blood and breast milk. The worst offender, oxybenzone, also mutates the DNA of corals and is believed to be killing coral reefs...
I remember the nasty sunscreen I was using in the 1980's and 1990's. Probably disposed me to skin cancer!
If you have children, no matter your political stripe or “team” affiliation, shouldn’t you at least open your mind a little bit to the idea of giving a brand-new and minimally-tested vaccine to your own children? One which has no RCT proving its worth, let alone any risk assessment.
Or are you so committed to your “truth” you heard on CNN/MSNBC/FOX that you choose to be a child abuser by willful ignorance of the issues? Turning a blind eye is criminally unethical. But you’d be in good company with most doctors, apparently.
If you know someone with children, print out the Brownstone article and give it to them.
A new CDC study shows that around 75% of American children have already had covid. That means that they have strong natural immunity that protects them from covid infections as they get older. Despite this, the CDC, the FDA and other government agencies are pushing all of them to get vaccinated.
...Given these numbers, why are the CDC, the FDA and the government pushing hard for all children to get vaccinated against covid? Why are some schools and universities mandating covid vaccines for children and young adults? The majority already have superior natural immunity.
All of them are at minuscule risk from dying from covid even if they have not had it, a risk that is smaller than dying from any of a whole range of other causes such as motor vehicle accidents, drowning, homicide, suicide, drug overdoses or cancer. While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in covid mortality between older and younger people.
To sell a drug or a vaccine, we require pharmaceutical companies to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to show that it works to prevent serious health outcomes or death. Pfizer and Moderna have not done that. For adults they only showed a reduction in symptomatic disease.
...For children, we do not even have this. The randomized covid vaccine trials show that they can prevent mild disease in children without a prior covid infection, but from observational studies we know that this protection wanes rapidly. The RCTs also show that the vaccines generate antibodies in children, but 75% of American children already have superior antibodies from natural infection.
There are no RCTs that show the vaccine prevents deaths or provides any other tangible benefit to children, while there could be harms. All vaccines come with some risks of adverse reactions, and while we know that they cause an increased risk of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) in young people, we do not yet have a complete picture of the safety profile for these vaccines.
The CDC, the FDA, schools, and universities are pushing covid vaccines without having shown any benefit to the majority of children who have already had covid. It is stunning how these institutions have abandoned 2,500 years of knowledge about natural immunity. For the minority of children without a prior covid infection, the RCTs only show a short-term reduction in mild disease.
The CDC could instead focus on catching up with regular childhood vaccines for measles, polio, and other serious childhood diseases. Those vaccinations were severely disrupted during lockdowns, and we now see an increase in measles and polio worldwide. Yet more collateral damage from two years of disastrous public health policy.
The medical establishment used to push for evidence-based medicine as a counterweight to “alternative medicine.” It is tragic how that philosophy has now been thrown out the window. If Pfizer and Moderna want these vaccines to be given to children, they should first conduct a randomized controlled trial that shows that they reduce hospitalization and all-cause mortality. They failed to do so for adults. They should not get away with that for our children.
WIND: doctors giving this vaccine to children should be stripped of their medical license, extreme and thoroughly justified cases excepted.
Various articles including lots of opinion pieces, just a tiny sampler.
Opinions are not facts, but they are often replete with pressing and uncomfortable questions that have gone unanswered and mostly unasked. A necessary and mostly (so far) feeble counterweight to the propaganda tank crushing everything in its path. No simple Javelin missile can take out the overwhelmingly powerful propaganda machine that is Big Medicine+Big Tec+Big Government—we all lose.
We can always expect politicians, parasites that they are, never doing things for us, but to us. But at least a predator that acts like a predator deserves some respect. So the worst of it is actually the scientists and medical professionals abdicating their professional and ethical obligations for money and influence, or at best, cowardice and irresponsibility.
The propaganda machine has destroyed the credibility of science and medicine
Science and medicine have zero credibility any more. Not that they did before for anyone but credulous people (eg most everyone). COVID has been a boon for exposing the false-front of science and medicine. But like most religions, there are still many true believers.
How Panic Spread: Covid in the Early Days
The Triumph of Natural Immunity
The Fragmented Trust in Public Health
Why the Silence on Lockdowns?
Things the CDC Does Not Know
The Political Hierarchy of Infection
A CDC Study Suggests Three-Fifths of Americans Have Been Infected by the Coronavirus
The Epoch times: Most Americans Don’t Want Those Shots
Choice Quotes from Bill Gates’s New Book
John Stuart Mill on Contagious Diseases and the Law
Won’t Get Fooled Again: After the pandemic, Americans should never let public-health authorities deprive them of their liberties
More and more vaccine side effects keep popping up
A lot of people have been badly damaged by the vaccines. Most of it is dismissd without proper scientific explanation—follow the money. The narrative cannot be wrong, so SHUT UP, disinformer! Just a few of the very latest concerns:
Explaining COVID-19 Vaccine-Induced Autoimmunity, Hepatitis, and Healing
Increase in Reactivated Viruses Following COVID-19 Booster Shots: Dr. Richard Urso
While the vaccine fades so fast that deaths are rising massively among the vaccinated. Who did the risk assessment, or what it just not done and all based on follow the money assumptions and fantasies?
Growing Number of COVID-19 Deaths Among Vaccinated People: Reports
Scientific corruption
On the follow the money front, a massive scandal that the press ignores.
Science has been bought-off, with the NIH, NIAID, CDC, FDA, etc all wholly-owned subsidiaries of Big Pharma and Big Food. There is little or no independent objective science any more, it’s all 99% special interests driving at profits or power or agenda.
Nonprofit Watchdog Uncovers $350 Million in Secret Payments to Fauci, Collins, Others at NIH
Acting NIH Director Admits Appearance of Conflict of Interest in Secret Royalty Payments to Fauci, Scientists
SCANDALS IN THE NIH
Democrats Silent as Republicans Rip Into Secret Royalty Checks to Fauci, Hundreds of NIH Scientists
CORONAVIRUS Lockdown Advocate Admits Negative Impacts Were Never Considered
Fauci Sets New Records for Obfuscation
When big money is involved, the appearance of a conflict of interest is never just appearance.
Follow the money will never fail you in life as the best and only reliable starting point for evaluating claims of all kinds.
Sorry greenies, but climate science is even worse, being driven by money and power with no end-game other than suffering by design, making climate change worse (not better), even with the obvious solution at hand (4th gen nuclear plants)—which is doable, rational and can be done quickly. It’s as stupidly evil as COVID has been only worse and long-lasting harm to humanity.
The sacrificing of children
Government schools exist as jobs programs. Their primary and most important function is to destroy young minds, rendering tomorrow’s adults (in name only!) incapable of rational and empirical thought, let alone minds capable of scientific or mathematical or ethical inquiry. Still, there are vestiges of learning remaining, and now the government, ever the destroyer instead of protector of the good, has managed to crush that too.
COVID-19 Policies Wrecked Public School Enrollment and Student Outcomes
The Triumph of Natural Immunity
Coincidence?
The Mysterious Rise in Severe Diseases in Children
Disinformation supports all this
Supporting this cruel and vicious facade of science is the government and Big Tech. Overwhelmingly owerful forces are at play here, with the bulk of the public already under the sway of psyops campaigns. Now they’re making it so obvious that it’s right out of George Orwell’s 1984 @AMAZON—and people are still oblivious.
Homeland Security's "Disinformation Board" is Even More Pernicious Than it Seems
Taibbi: PayPal's IndyMedia Wipeout — A series of moves against media outlets by PayPal shows the next step in speech control: confiscation
CDC: No Documents Supporting Claim Vaccines Don’t Cause Variants
The science is shaky on the alleged benefits of alcohol, with or without potential benefits of trivial amounts of resveratrol and various other compounds in wine, particularly red wine.
Of course, if your water supply is contaminated, it’s better than dying of cholera or dysentery.
I’d like to think that alcohol in modest amounts is beneficial, but at this point in my life and learning, I’m going with this: alcohol is a systemic poison, a way to turn money into pee, degrade your brain and liver, a good way to do things you’ll regret, and for some a way to ruin your life and that of others (or kill them or yourself eg driving), and so on.
I recommend to my daughters to avoid alcohol and never develop the habit. But I wonder if this guy imbibes regularly.
So what do I drink for alcohol? Red wine and a little white wine and (very infrequently) Tequila. I used to be able to tolerate a whole bottle of champagne (after a day of hiking) over the course of 2-3 hours and hardly notice it—seems that my body soaked it up like a sports drink. No more.
Typically I would have two restaurant servings of red wine with dinner*. Which is really one serving IMO, isn’t it great to be able to rationalize like that?
And I can quit it at will**: whenever I travel, I go weeks or longer without it and have done so many times. It’s at home with a routine that it’s much easier to make it a habit.
If you don't like your relationship to alcohol, here are some ways to fix it.
We know how serious alcohol abuse can become, but most casual drinkers feel that it isn’t really harming them.
The truth is that consistent use of alcohol, even at surprisingly low levels, can pave the way for serious health problems.
According to the NIAAA, a standard drink is one of the following:
- 12 ounces of regular beer (5 percent alcohol)
- 8 to 9 ounces of malt liquor (7 percent alcohol)
- 5 ounces of unfortified wine (12 percent alcohol)
- 1.5 ounces of 80-proof hard liquor (around 40 percent alcohol)
According to the Cleveland Clinic, about 90 percent of people who drink 1.5 to 2 ounces of alcohol per day, about two medium glasses of 12 percent wine, or less than two pints of regular strength beer, will develop fatty liver, the early stage of alcoholic liver disease.
“If you drink that much or more on most days of the week, you probably have fatty liver. Continued alcohol use leads to liver fibrosis, and finally, cirrhosis. The good news? Fatty liver is usually completely reversible in about four to six weeks if you completely abstain from drinking alcohol,” the Clinic writes.
...
WIND: I’m calling BS on the claims above: fatty liver already develops and/or predisposes most Americans from a shit-ton of soft drinks and processed food full of PUFAs and chemicals. But alcohol does activate the “survival switch @AMAZON” that causes all sorts of problems, including weight gain and fructose production by the body. So I’ll agree that alcohol is a really bad idea for most people.
Show me credible science that shows that fit people eating a diet free of processed foods and PUFAs, and getting 5+ hours of vigorous excercise will develop fatty liver from the claimed amounts of alcohol. I could be wrong.
See? I want to justify drinking wine because I am exercising again and last time I got down to serious race weight I had one (1) pound of visceral fat. Not that was younger, but even a few pounds is super lean compared to most. How am I doing on the rationalization front?
SEARCH
