Does Elderberry Increase Risk Of Death With CoVID-19?
There are a few articles circulating around the natural-health blogosphere that warn of potential increased risk when consuming Elderberry to avoid or lessen the severity of the coronavirus.
…elderberry also enhances cytokine response, which may not be so good when one of the complications of pandemic influenza is cytokine storm.
But a 2016 study showed Elderberry can inhibit cytokines in people who have a health issue where cytokines were not helpful to the overall situation.
A natural preparation “Inflaminat” based on black elder berries (Sambucus nigra L.), violet tricolor herb (Viola tricolor L.) and calendula flowers (Calendula officinalis L.) possessing anti-cytokine activity was developed using the designed algorithm.
Furthermore, cytokine storms are a consequence of severe infections. A cytokine storm will happen when someone is severely ill with any influenza or any Coronavirus. At this point, when someone is dealing with a cytokine storm, the person should be hooked up to a ventilator.
Conclusion – Is Elderberry Safe with Coronavirus?
Elderberry, as a preventative tonic, without any added sugars, is perfectly safe to consume if someone is trying to avoid or lessen the severity of a virus, including coronavirus. Elderberry seems to suppress viruses and may reduce inflammation. Also, check out other supplements to defend against coronavirus.
Coronavirus – Your Guide to the CoVID-19 Pandemic
Coronavirus is a well-known pathogen that primarily targets the human respiratory system. Previous outbreaks of coronaviruses (CoVs) include the “severe acute respiratory syndrome,” (SARS, SARS-CoV) from 2003 and the “Middle East respiratory syndrome,” (MERS, MERS-CoV) from 2012.
The coronavirus may spread from person to person much more easily then initially thought. Bars, restaurants, and many “non-essential” stores are closed all around the U.S. and the world. Restrictions could last for months. Also, we’re out of toilet paper.
What is the coronavirus? Should you be concerned? What can you do to stay well? Isn’t this just the same virus that causes colds? Did the Chinese government create this virus in a lab in order to quell the protests? Or did the Democratic establishment create the virus and send it to China just in time to have it come back to America to win the election for Bernie Sanders by propping up Medicare for All? Some of those are great questions. Let’s dive in.
Linfa Wang directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. He says the coronaviruses are named so because when seen under a microscope the spiky surface of the virus resembles a crown. The caption for the image above comes from the CDC’s website:
This illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses. Note the spikes that adorn the outer surface of the virus, which impart the look of a corona surrounding the virion, when viewed electron microscopically. A novel coronavirus, named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China in 2019. The illness caused by this virus has been named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).”
Coronavirus – A group of related viruses that infect mammals and birds
SARS – A disease called “severe acute respiratory syndrome” caused by the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV)
SARS-CoV – The strain of virus that causes SARS
MERS – A disease called “Middle East respiratory syndrome” caused by MERS-CoV.
MERS-CoV – The Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus is distinct from SARS coronavirus and the common-cold coronavirus
Coronavirus pandemic – The current pandemic of COVID-19 in 2019 and 2020 caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)
CoVID-19 – The illness caused by SARS-CoV-2
SARS-CoV-2 – Previously known as “2019 novel coronavirus” (2019-nCoV), this virus is behind (2019-2020) coronavirus pandemic (ongoing at the time of publishing)
Zoonotic – Refers to a disease transmitted from animals to people, or more specifically, a disease that normally exists in animals that can infect humans
Pandemic – WHO defines as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people”
Before SARS, the world had little concern for the coronaviruses, mostly known for causing common colds. The 2003 SARS outbreak started a global search for animal viruses that could find their way to humans. For the first time, scientists were aware of a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential.
The emergence of SARS-CoV heralded a new era in the cross-species transmission of severe respiratory illness with globalization leading to rapid spread around the world and massive economic impact3,4. Since then, several strains—including influenza A strains H5N1, H1N1, H7N9, and MERS-CoV—have emerged from animal populations, causing considerable disease, mortality, and economic hardship for the afflicted regions.
SARS-CoV caused 775 world-wide deaths in 2003. MERS-CoV caused 79 world-wide deaths in 2012. As of March 15th, 2020, at 10:20 am, SARS-CoV-2 has killed 5,984. The United States reports 3,046 cases with 60 deaths at this time.
On March 24th Word Meter reports 414,661 coronavirus cases worldwide with 18,552 deaths and 108,293 recovered. Click here for current statistics.
Coronavirus Timeline
Coronaviruses were not worrying scientists before 2003; they were only known to cause mild upper respiratory tract infections.
SARS-CoV emerged in 2003 as a pandemic. It originated in Guangdong Province, China and spread to 37 different countries, causing 8,273 confirmed cases of infection, of which 775 (9%) were fatal. It disappeared as inexplicably as it started.
Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was identified in 2012 in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia leading to 182 total confirmed cases, of which 79 (43%) were fatal. Epidemiologists initially feared it could become a massive, deadly pandemic; the death rate started out at around 30%. But the virus remained geographically restricted.
December 30 – Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, messaged his college-classmates telling them about the “unspecified coronavirus.”
December 31– China alerted The World Health Organization (WHO) to dozens of cases of an unusual pneumonia being treated in Wuhan, a port city of 11 million people in the central Hubei province. The virus was unknown.
January 1– Many who worked at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market were sick, so the market was shut down. The market is known as a “wet wild-animal market.” A “wet market” sells meat, fish, produce, and other perishable goods. A “wild-animal market” sells… you guessed it!
January 2 – Li was summoned to a police station. He was told his warning was illegal and had “severely disturbed the social order.” He signed a statement that he says read, “We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice — is that understood?” Li capitulated and was not detained. He returned to work.
January 12 – the first confirmed United States case was reported in Washington State – a man in his 30s developed symptoms after returning from a trip to Wuhan.
January 20 – President Xi Jinping issued a statement on coronavirus, vowing to “resolutely curb the spread of the epidemic.”
January 23 – China stopped allowing planes and trains to leave the city of Wuhan and suspended buses, subways, and ferries. At this point, at least 17 people had died and more than 570 others had been infected, including in Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, South Korea and the United States. No deaths had outside of China had occurred.
January 30 – WHO declared COVID-19 a “public health emergency of international concern”. Also, the U.S. State Department warned travelers to avoid China.
January 31 – 213 people had died and nearly 9,800 had been infected worldwide. The Trump administration suspended entry into the United States for foreign nationals who had visited China within the previous two weeks.
Dr. Li Wenliang told the New York Times that officials should have shared information about the coronavirus at the beginning of the outbreak. “I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.”
February 2 – A 44-year-old man in the Philippines died after being infected. Officials believe he was the first to die of the disease outside of China. At this point, more than 360 people had died from COVID-19, 359 of them in China.
February 5 – In Yokohama, Japan, more than 3,600 passengers were quarantined aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship. The number of people who tested positive for the virus was the largest cluster of coronavirus cases outside of China.
A total of 621 people aboard the ship were infected.
February 7 – Researchers in Guangzhou, China suggested that pangolins sold at the Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market were a potential source of the coronavirus outbreak. Pangolins were not listed as inventory sold at the market. Pangolin sales are illegal, which could explain the omission. Dr. Li Wenliangdied from contracting the coronavirus. He was hailed as a hero by many for trying to ring early alarms that a cluster of infections could spin out of control.
February 10 – the death toll in China hit 908, with the number of confirmed cases up to 40,171.
February 14 – An 80-year-old Chinese tourist died in Paris – the first coronavirus death outside of Asia.
February 21 – After the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in South Korea was linked to a surge of infections in the country, the government shut down thousands of kindergartens, nursing homes, and community centers and ended all political rallies in the capital, Seoul.
February 19 – Iran announced two cases, then hours later reported that both patients died.
February20 – Global coronavirus cases reached nearly 76,000, according to W.H.O.
February 22 –Iran announced two additional deaths. The source of the virus in Iran is not known.
February 23 – Italian officials confirmed a third death. Local authorities closed the Venice Carnival and suspended sporting events.
February 24 – The Atlantic published an article, “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus. Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.“
February24 – The Trump administration asked Congress for $1.25 billion for coronavirus response. At this time, 35 confirmed cases and no deaths had been reported in the U.S. Iran announced it had 61 coronavirus cases and 12 deaths, more than any other country except China. In Italy, 800 people had been infected. The death toll in China rose to 2,595 with 77,262 confirmed cases. Italy reported its 7th death.
February26 – Health officials in Brazil reported that a man who returned from a business trip to Italy tested positive for the coronavirus. This was the first known case in Latin America.
February27 – Germany had nearly 60 cases and France reported 57. Both England and Switzerland reported additional cases, while Belarus, Estonia, Denmark, Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and Lithuania all reported their first infections.
February 28 – Nigeria confirmed its first case. The patient was an Italian citizen who had returned to Lagos from Milan.
February 29 – South Korea reported 813 confirmed cases, bringing the total to 3,150 with 17 deaths. Iran reported its cases had jumped from 388 cases to 593 in a 24 hour period, with the death toll at 43.
The United States recorded its first coronavirus death as the number of global cases rose to nearly 87,000. The Trump administration issued its highest-level warning, known as a “do not travel” warning, for areas in Italy and South Korea, the areas most affected by the virus, barred all travel to Iran, and denied any foreign citizen U.S. entry if they had visited Iran in the previous 14 days.
March 2 – Saudi Arabia’s health ministry announced its first coronavirus case.
March 3 – Italy announced their death toll reached 77, equalling the total deaths in Iran, and the W.H.O reported that coronavirus has infected more than 90,000 around the globe, killing about 3,000.
March 7 – The coronavirus caused nearly 3,500 deaths and infected another 102,000 people in more than 90 countries.
March 8 – Italy imposed a strict quarantine in the state of Lombardy and 14 other areas, affecting a total of 16 million people.
March 9 – Iran released an estimated 70,000 prisoners, without specifying if or when those released would need to return. Germany reported its first two deaths, with more than 1,100 confirmed cases.
March 14 – South Korea had tested more than 248,000 people and identified 8,086 cases.
A hospital in Seattle area has sent out a note to staff, shared with me, suspending elective surgery and warning that "our local COVID-19 trajectory is likely to be similar to that of Northern Italy." The hospital is down to a four-day supply of gloves.
March 15 – New York reported 950 cases, Washington is the second hardest hit with 769, and California is a distant third with 375. California ordered 7 million residents to “shelter in place”. The White House urged older Americans to stay home and for everyone to avoid groups of more than 10 people.
March 16 – A study shows coronavirus can survive in the air in some settings. And the U.S. death toll rose to 69 across 12 states. The total number of confirmed cases in the U.S. climbed to 3,774. The worldwide death toll was more than 6,500. Restaurants and bars closed around the country. Restrictions could last months. Canada closed its border.
March 18th – Trump Invokes The Defense Production Act to force American industries to manufacture medical supplies. Hospitals and other health workers are running out of M95 masks, gowns, gloves, and ventilators.
March 19th – Trump wants direct payments of $1,000 for adults, $500 for kids in the coronavirus stimulus bill.
March 20th – U.S. Tax Deadline Extended is extended to July 15th, Illinois, New York and California have ordered all residents to stay home, and Washington D.C. reported its first death from the virus.
March 21st –300K cases worldwide, 195,000 Americans who are symptomatic have been tested.
March 22nd – Fifteen states in the U.S. have “stay at home” executive orders in place.
March 23rd – 2020 Tokyo Olympics postponed until 2021 and Trump wants to get the economy moving again, saying he may scale back closures despite worsening outbreak.
March 24th – The death toll in Italy’s Lombardy is around 400 in a day.
Coronavirus Transmission
The Wuhan Seafood Market was believed to be ground zero for the zoonotic CoVID-19. The market sells not just fish, but also snakes, raccoon dogs, porcupines, deer, and more. Hundreds of dead animals were inside cages at the market within close proximity to other food and humans. But now reports are coming in that the market was not the epicenter.
Scientists believed the Wuhan market was where the virus first spread to humans. It should be noted that the Wuhan market was not unusual. There are hundreds of similar markets in mainland China that offer a wide range of exotic animals for many purposes. It is unclear which animal transferred the virus to humans — bat, snake, and pangolin have all been suggested, with the pangolin being the most likely culprit.
These animals have their own viruses. These viruses can jump from one species to another species, then that species may become an amplifier, which increases the amount of virus in the wet market substantially.”
Poon says that when a large number of people visit these kinds of markets, the risk of the virus jumping from animals to humans rises sharply. Poon was one of the first scientists to decode the SARS coronavirus during the 2003 epidemic. That outbreak was linked to civet cats used as food in a Guangzhou market.
China May Have Found Patient Zero
New government documents from China say they found an earlier case of COVID-1. They say a 55-year-old man from Hubei province contracted the virus on Nov. 17, 2019. The documents suggest the disease was spreading, undetected, for weeks before anyone was aware of the impending outbreak.
Chinese authorities have so far identified at least 266 people who were infected last year, all of whom came under medical surveillance at some point.
Some of the cases were likely backdated after health authorities had tested specimens taken from suspected patients.
Interviews with whistle-blowers from the medical community suggest Chinese doctors only realised they were dealing with a new disease in late December.
It seems to be very contagious. With new research, it’s now believed that the virus can spread much more easily then initially thought.
Initially, the experts thought that the virus seemed to be spreading mainly from person-to-person, with those who come in close contact with one another, within about 6 feet. They said that transmission was happening when a previously uninfected person breathes in respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
The virus is transmitted through droplets, or little bits of liquid, mostly through sneezing or coughing. When you do an aerosol-generating procedure like in a medical care facility, you have the possibility to what we call aerosolize these particles, which means they can stay in the air a little bit longer.”
Scientists calculate how easily a virus spreads and give it a “basic reproduction number,” or R0 (pronounced R-nought). This number predicts how many people are likely to catch a given pathogen from a single infected person.
Currently, SARS-CoV-2 (yes, that’s the one causing the COVID-19, the current coronavirus), was estimated to have an R0 at around 2.2. This means a single infected person will infect about 2.2 others, on average. The flu typically has an R0 of 1.3. These numbers are likely to be revised as this article is written.
New studies in several countries along with a large coronavirus outbreak in Massachusetts have shown that the virus does spread much more easily than previously thought. A Massachusetts coronavirus cluster with at least 82 cases appears to have been started by people who were not yet showing symptoms. More than half a dozen recent studies show that people without symptoms are causing substantial amounts of infection.
We won’t know how contagious it is until we have much better testing. More on that clusterfuck of a situation below.
Can Someone Spread the Virus Without Being Sick?
It was initially believed that coronavirus does not seem to be very contagious until a person is symptomatic, coughing and sneezing near others. But now we believe the virus probably does spread before people show symptoms, as there have been many reports of this happening, but it is not thought to be transferred as easily this way.
Of course, this could change at any moment. The virus could become much more virulent and contagious, or it could become less dangerous with a mutation or two.
Can Coronavirus Spread From Contact With Contaminated Surfaces Or Objects?
The CDC believes it’s possible for a person to contract COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, like with gas pumps and the transfer of money.
It’s not the most contagious pathogen we’ve seen, but it is very contagious and can be quite virulent, and at any moment it can become more even contagious by mutating.
Coronavirus Symptoms
Symptoms of COVID-19 manifest after an incubation period of an average of 5.2 days. For those who died, the onset of symptoms to death ranged from 6 to 41 days with a median average of 14 days, depending on the patient’s age and immune system.
The most common symptoms with COVID-19 and SARS are similar. They include fever, cough, sore throat, and fatigue. COVID-19 is unique in that it targets the lower airway, often causes lots of sneezing, and many patients (especially sicker ones) show sputum production, headaches, hemoptysis, dyspnoea, lymphopenia, and intestinal symptoms including diarrhea (few patients with MERS-CoV or SARS-CoV had diarrhea).
Update: Loss of smell and taste could be the earliest symptoms of the novel coronavirus.
Doctor groups are recommending testing and isolation for people who lose their ability to smell and taste, even if they have no other symptoms.
Isn’t This the Same Virus That Causes the Common Cold?
Yes and no. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more serious illness.
Pretty much everyone has heard of E-Coli contaminating spinach or some other leafy vegetable. E-Coli can make us sick and it can kill immunocompromised people, like the elderly. But you also probably have E-Coli in your gut right now. It’s part of your beneficial bacteria.
To say that coronavirus is the same pathogen that causes the common cold is an ignorant simplification.
Is This Just Like a Bad Flu?
It is very similar to a bad flu pandemic in a lot of ways, but the influenza virus should not be underestimated. See the list below of the most deadly pandemics. Two of them were the flu. Coronavirus is more dangerous than the average flu. For instance, it can cause some pretty severe, potentially long-term lung damage.
Flu caused by the influenza virus can be serious one year and relatively inconsequential another year. 80,000 people died from the flu in 2014 (supposedly, but flu death numbers are often grossly inflated).
Who Is Most At Risk and Why?
Update: People who travel and people who are in crowds are more likely to get it. The elderly, people with another underlying illness or a history of illness, and older males are at higher risks of dying from the virus.
The effect of sex on susceptibility to Covid-19 is less clear than the age effect, but preliminary data suggest men might be more susceptible. China CDC found that 106 men had the disease for every 100 women, while the WHO mission found that men make up 51% of cases. A study of 1,099 Covid-19 patients in Wuhan through Jan. 29 found a greater imbalance: 58% were male, the China Medical Treatment Expert Group for Covid-19 reported last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Immunocompromised people are susceptible to more serious symptoms, or death. Younger people are much less likely to die or suffer more serious symptoms. The healthier you are, the less likely you are to contract a coronavirus infection or any other pathogen.
Researchers are looking at the discrepancy of serious cases and deaths between areas within the Hubei Province, where the outbreak initiated, and the rest of the world. In other words, the rest of the world isn’t dying at nearly the rate people were dying in the Hubei Province. It seems the disease is less fatal as it moves away from where the outbreak initiated. And the mortality rate is much lower in healthier and less dense populations.
Severe cases tend to occur in men and many suffer from one or more co-morbidities such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease as well as diabetes. Several sequelae have also have been observed including cellular immune deficiency, coagulation activation, myocardia injury, hepatic and kidney injury, and secondary bacterial infection.
The phrase “one or more co-morbidities” means the person is already very sick. In other words, if you have diabetes or poor kidney function or if there’s anything else not working properly in your body, you are more likely to get the worst symptoms.
That’s not to say that seemingly healthy people have nothing to worry about. People of all ages, some without known previous complications, are dying. But we doubt anyone with a healthy immune system could die from this. Though, keep in mind, there are lots of unhealthy people who think they’re healthy – in fact, that may be the majority of the younger population.
What Can One Do to Avoid Infection?
People who travel and people who are in crowds are more likely to catch it. Avoid traveling, avoid crowds. A mask may be a good idea if you’re concerned. If you are in a public place, make sure you wash your hands before touching your hair, eyes, nose, or mouth. If you’re at home, quarantining yourself and you’re washing your hands every hour, that’s not helping. And neither is hand sanitizer. But it makes sense to wash your hands often if you’re in public places and especially before touching vulnerable parts of your body if you may have come in contact with a contagion.
But mostly…
Stay healthy! The above advice is very important for anyone who spends time with others who may be more at risk but staying healthy is by far the best defense. There are supplements you can take (see below), but if you’re already healthy, you have much less of a chance of getting infected with anything. To understand how this works, check out How To Heal Your Gut. If you are older or otherwise have a weaker immune system, now is not the best time to go out to eat. If you have a weak immune system, now is the time to eat healthy, whole-food, home-cooked meals and take care of yourself.
Does Hand Sanitizer Work?
Not really. The coronavirus has caused a massive shortage of hand sanitizer, but they don’t work nearly as well as washing one’s hands. Click on the image below for more information about how to wash your hands.
Also, just stop buying hand sanitizers! There is mounting evidence that the chemical antimicrobial ingredients are harmful, and they could lead to antibacterial resistance. The best defense is a healthy gut. Everything else, from handwashing to taking supplements, doesn’t compare to the power of a healthy gut.
Yes! If you want to walk around like that, sure. But in Atlanta, they’re not having any of that, as you can see below. Then again, Georgia has the 8th most coronavirus cases in the U.S. at 99 (at the time of this writing) so maybe not such a good idea…
In all seriousness, if you are concerned and want to ensure that you won’t catch an airborne virus, or you want to make sure you don’t transmit it to your more vulnerable loved ones, a mask makes sense, regardless of the B.S. the CDC is saying.
Wearing a face mask is not a guarantee you won’t get catch it. Coronavirus can transmit through the eyes. Also, tiny viral particles, known as aerosols, can penetrate masks, making them much less effective in some situations. Plus, as mentioned previously, the virus is much more contagious than we initially suspected. However, masks are effective at capturing droplets, which is the most likely method of transmission and they may also catch some airborne contagions.
If you think you might be infected, the best thing you can do for others is to wear a mask and change them frequently (don’t touch the face-part of the mask when removing). And then get healthy so you don’t catch this kind of crap anymore. You owe it to yourself and others.
Update: N95 masks are much more likely to stop spread but there is a shortage around the country so we donated all but a few of ours to a hospital. Homemade masks are recommended and being used all over the country including in hospitals.
Elbow Bumps?
Ugh… I suppose it makes sense, but I ain’t doing it! Then again, I’ve never been a fan of touching people anyways.
What Is The Death Rate For Coronavirus?
Some media is reporting that the death rate may be as high as 3.8%, but that’s not accurate. If you look at all of the people who have died and you divide that by all of those who have tested positive for the virus you may get over 3% (though that number is dropping). But this math does not account for the many more people who contracted the disease and did not get tested or did not have symptoms serious enough to warrant medical assistance. Also, the death rate seems to decline when it gets farther away from ground zero.
So far, it appears the coronavirus is more deadly than the flu, but, there’s still not enough information to know the mortality rate of the virus. The annual flu typically kills at around 0.1% in the U.S. CoVID-19, so far, is showing a 0.05% mortality rate within the U.S. this year, according to the CDC as of March 16th. Also, while CoVID-19 numbers are skewed due to poor testing, flu death statistics are radically inflated (when people die for unknown causes the flu is often written as cause of death, and when flu vaccines cause complications leading to death the deaths are often labeled as flu as well).
We probably won’t have good estimates for a while. I think it’s less than 1%, maybe 2% at the highest. But it’s pretty high; it’s probably higher than the average flu death rate. It’s enough to overwhelm hospitals – not because we can’t handle 100,000 people dying, but because we can’t handle an additional 100,000 people dying on top of the mortality we already deal with every day.
Can I Get Tested For Coronavirus?
If you’re in a country with decent medical care, yes, most likely.
If you’re in America, or some other third-world country, the answer is a bit more complicated.
Our testing kits that our country was planning to use did not work properly. We did not have a backup in place. Other countries use test kits that work.
On February 12, the CDC announced that the problem was the result of a faulty reagent. The third primer, the one that picks up the whole family of coronaviruses, wasn’t working properly. CDC officials told labs to sit tight, new kits were coming. As a result, for weeks, only a handful of laboratories in just a few states had the ability to test for Covid-19. Everywhere else, health departments with suspected cases on their hands had to send samples directly to the CDC for testing. And under the CDC’s narrow testing guidelines at the time, only people with symptoms and a history of travel to China were eligible to receive a test. This meant many infectious people were missed during the crucial early days of the virus’s spread to the US, as The New York Timesreported.
As of March 14th, South Korea tested more than 248,000 of its citizens, identified 8,086 cases, and 72 had died (or 0.9% of those infected). In Hubei (ground zero), the fatality rate stands at approximately 4.5%.
As of March 9th, The U.S. has reported testing 8,554 people. Instead of using the template approved by the World Health Organization, the CDC set out to create its own test kit from scratch, and it was “plagued by delay and dysfunction…”
As of March 16th, some states have seen a big increase in coronavirus tests but the “U.S. still lags far behind.”
As some states are ramping up testing, there is an issue of cost:
Going forward, tests will be conducted at sites including hospitals. And those sites will most likely want to bill an insurer, Kates said. So how much will it cost patients to get the coronavirus test? “It is going to be a function of whether or not they are insured and what kind of coverage they have,” Kates said. “They could face the cost of a doctor’s office or hospital outpatient or ER visit — a particular issue for those who are uninsured or have a high deductible.”
That might depend more on the stock market than anything (because our financial system is stupid – obviously, if a little cold can ruin us this badly). Trump indicated that he is just waiting for the weather to get warmer, and it’s true that this could knock out the virus, but he’s starting to come around to the severity of the situation. “Trump says coronavirus upheaval could last beyond August.”
Some researchers believe the virus will infect as much as 80% of the U.S. population. The prevailing “optimistic guess” among the experts is that the outbreak will last about two months. But it could be much worse.
Epidemic experts from around the world conferred with officials from the CDC last month about what might happen if SARS-CoV-2 “gained a foothold in the United States.” The CDC’s worst-case scenarios would be “staggering” if the right actions aren’t taken soon.
One of the agency’s top disease modelers, Matthew Biggerstaff, presented the group on the phone call with four possible scenarios — A, B, C, and D — based on characteristics of the virus, including estimates of how transmissible it is and the severity of the illness it can cause. The assumptions, reviewed by The New York Times, were shared with about 50 expert teams to model how the virus could tear through the population — and what might stop it.
Between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to a projection that encompasses the range of the four scenarios. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.
The true danger of coronavirus will probably not be the death toll from the virus itself. Experts say health systems may be overwhelmed by the number of cases requiring hospitalization. The calculations based on the CDC’s scenarios suggested, 2.4 million to 21 million people in the United States could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. Fewer than a tenth of those are for people who are critically ill.
The number of available beds is not as critical as the lack of equipment. Ventilators and ecmo machines are crucial for critical patients with this disease, and hospitals are not equipped to handle large numbers requiring them. They will be faced with deciding who receives life-saving treatment and who is left to die.
Let’s look at the context. The ebola virus outbreak in 2014 caused 2,337 deaths internationally but none in America. In the 2017-2018 flu season, 80,000 people died from influenza. As of March 17, 2020, the U.S. death toll for CoVID-19 tops 80, but it’s hard to say if things are slowing down or if things are just getting started in the U.S.
As the pandemic spreads and the death toll mounts, more data shows a particular danger to the elderly. A March 4 analysis of the first 105 deaths in Italy had an average age of 81. If 70% of the U.S. population gets it (which is likely by some respected estimates) the United States death toll could reach up to 1.7 million. This is why some are calling it the “Boomer Remover“.
Surgeon general: “If you are a child or young adult, you are more likely to die from the flu, if you get it, than you are to die from coronavirus. So, there is something about being young that is protective.” https://t.co/mwpcexQZkhpic.twitter.com/IepUqFDQXH
Right now, much of the United States is reporting stores being out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, bottled water is running out, and it’s difficult if impossible to find toilet paper or hand sanitizer online right now. Panic is setting in while the stock market is crashing. All over the country stores, especially restaurants and bars, are closing – some by mandate and some by choice. People are working from home, but this is taking a massive toll on the service industry and many other areas of the economy. Welcome to the recession, and maybe the soon revolution. The United States of America has run out of toilet paper.
An Oregon police department is asking residents to stop calling 911 because they’ve run out of toilet paper
What Is Trump’s Administration Doing About Coronavirus?
It seems the government is doing what it usually does, which is trying to protect the money of the wealthiest. On Thursday, March 12, the Federal Reserve Bank announced a $1.5 trillion in short-term loan to banks to “address highly unusual disruptions in Treasury financing markets associated with the coronavirus outbreak.” Interest rates have been cut to zero.
Vice President Mike Pence said, “No American worker should worry about missing a paycheck if they’re feeling ill. If you’re sick with a respiratory illness stay home.”But when Pelosi’s coronavirus relief bill was passed it was made so that only small companies have to pay for sick leave. Large corporations were exempted from this requirement.
So companies with 50 employees must provide for paid sick leave, but the companies with MORE THAN 50 employees don’t have to (and you and I know they won’t). So with people in the U.S. dying, it’s politics as usual in Washington D.C. But don’t put someone like Bernie Sanders into the presidency. Gimme a break. And I included the (R) next to Pence’s name because when it comes to issues like these, there are more sociopathic Republicans than sociopathic Democrats.
Trump spent the initial phase of the outbreak trying to convince the public that there is nothing to worry about. Then he slammed the previous administration for how they handled the swine flu.
…. Their response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now. The changes have been made and testing will soon happen on a very large scale basis. All Red Tape has been cut, ready to go!
This twitter thread below is a very interesting discussion on how Trump’s administration ignored previous warnings of a potential pandemic and fired the senior staff members with the experience needed to handle such an outbreak.
BREAKING: A week before Inauguration Day 2017, Trump team participated in a tabletop exercise with outgoing Obama team about preparing for a "major domestic incident"
One incident discussed was a pandemic. I participated in that exercise.
The White House got rid of its global health security team in a 2018. There was no top-ranking White House official to respond to the coronavirus crises. Last month a reporter asked Trump about why he consistently called for “enormous cuts to the CDC, the NIH, and the WHO.” Trump said, “I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
Trump’s administration is fully responsible for the testing failures.
The government’s incapacity to conduct widespread testing slowed diagnoses, creating chains of infection. It also deprived epidemiologists of a map that could have told them how far and how fast the virus was traveling and where they should concentrate efforts to slow it down.
There’s a lot of good ones. While there is plenty of misinformation, it’s important to know that accidental leakage of the virus by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has not been ruled out.
And while we very much doubt that any pharmaceutical company has a hand in creating or intentionally releasing the virus, that doesn’t mean big pharma isn’t going to capitalize on this pandemic at our expense.
“Pharmaceutical companies view Covid-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity,” said Gerald Posner, author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.” The world needs pharmaceutical products, of course. For the new coronavirus outbreak, in particular, we need treatments and vaccines and, in the U.S., tests. Dozens of companies are now vying to make them.
Richard H. Ebright, a U.S. molecular biologist, expressed concern in 2017 when WIV expanded to become mainland China’s first biosafety level 4 laboratory. Ebright brought up previous times the SARS virus got loose at other Chinese laboratories. He refuted several conspiracy theories regarding bioweapons research and that the virus was engineered, but he told BBC China that we can’t “completely rule out” that the virus entered the population due to a laboratory accident.
Without a doubt, Covid-19 has emerged as the result of decades of laboratory experimentation with virus technology and vaccines. We do know with certainty that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which specializes in researching Coronaviruses transmitted by bats, formally conducted intensive studies, making alterations to the SARS-Corona viral template in December, 2015. The level 4 bio-lab is situated adjacent to the market epicenter of the recent outbreak, where a majority of serious cases of Corona were first documented.
In January The Washington Times posted two articles that stated the virus was may have been part of a Chinese biological weapons program. The Washington Post later published an article debunking the conspiracy theory, citing U.S. experts who explained that most countries had abandoned bioweapons as fruitless, and there was no evidence that the virus was genetically engineered.
Iranian Accusations
According to Radio Farda, Iranian cleric Seyyed Mohammad Saeedi says U.S. President Donald Trump is targeting Qom with coronavirus “to damage its culture and honor”. Saeedi claimed that Trump is fulfilling his promise to hit Iranian cultural sites if Iranians took revenge for the U.S. airstrike that killed off Quds Force.
Iranian TV personality Ali Akbar Raefipour claimed that the coronavirus was part of a “hybrid warfare” programme waged by the United States on Iran and China.
Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, head of Iranian Civil Defense Organization, claimed that the coronavirus is likely a biological attack on China and Iran with economic goals.
Ruin China
The CIA created CoVIN-19 to keep take China down a few notches. Multiple conspiracy articles in Chinese from the SARS era resurfaced during this outbreak. Details were alterterd to fit the times. On January 26, Chinese military news site Xilu published an article detailing how the virus was artificially combined by the U.S. to “precisely target Chinese people”.
Population Control Scheme
According to the BBC, Jordan Sather, a conspiracy theory YouTuber supporting the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and the anti-vax movement, claimed the outbreak was done as a population control scheme created by Pirbright Institute in England and by Bill Gates.
They’ve Launched the Zombie Apocalypse!
Buzzfeed News reported on the conspiracy theory regarding the logo of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the “Umbrella Corporation.” The claim is that the logos look similar and so, obviously, the agency that made the virus that started the zombie apocalypse like in the game Resident Evil. The supposed WIV logo was not the institute’s actual logo.
Bill Gates Planned the Coronavirus Outbreak
A video the pushed a conspiracy theory that Bill Gates created the coronavirus was shared by some prominent black celebrities including Cedric the Entertainer, D.L. Hughley, and professional fighter, Derrick Lewis. This video was viewed more than 2.2 million times. “Bill Gates either predicted or planned the coronavirus outbreak,” the video states before playing a clip from a 2015 TED Talk in which Gates explains that a virus could be more deadly than war.
The U.S. Army Brought the Coronavirus To China
A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, Zhao Lijian, tweeted “it might be the US army” that brought the coronavirus to China.
Back To The Gold Standard
QAnon is always good for some mind-bending theories:
The stock market needs to adjust down in order to do a complete reset and move us to a gold-backed currency and get rid of the Fed. The stock market has been falsely inflated for awhile. The CV is the perfect “crisis” to make a lot of it work.
This Is Just a Trick To Get Vaccine Mandates Passed
That’s highly unlikely. But mandates may be the result. There is no vaccine for CoVID-19 at this time, regardless of what some conspiracies allege. But it will probably be developed soon, and it will probably have some issues, and if enough Americans die, this could be the beginning of nationwide vaccine mandates. Only time will tell.
Conventional Treatment Options
A report by the French government claims thatNSAIDs — non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs — may cause “grave adverse effects.”
Popular NSAIDs include Ibuprofen, Motrin®, Advil®, Motrin IB®, Aspirin, Naproxen, and Nabumetone.
⚠️ #COVIDー19 | La prise d'anti-inflammatoires (ibuprofène, cortisone, …) pourrait être un facteur d'aggravation de l’infection. En cas de fièvre, prenez du paracétamol. Si vous êtes déjà sous anti-inflammatoires ou en cas de doute, demandez conseil à votre médecin.
Taking anti-inflammatories (ibuprofen, cortisone…) could be an aggravating factor for the infection. In case of fever take paracetamol. If already on a course of anti-inflammatories or if you are in doubt then consult your doctor.”
At present, there are no specific antiviral drugs or a vaccine for the COVID-19 infection. The only options available are using broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and HIV-protease inhibitors. There are a number of other drug compounds in development.
More research is urgently needed to identify novel chemotherapeutic drugs for treating COVID-19 infections. In order to develop pre-and post-exposure prophylaxis against COVID-19, there is an urgent need to establish an animal model to replicate the severe disease currently observed in humans. Several groups of scientists are currently working hard to develop a nonhuman primate model to study COVID-19 infection to establish fast track novel therapeutics and for the testing of potential vaccines in addition to providing a better understanding of virus-host interactions.
It may surprise you that my #1 recommendation for preventing the coronavirus, or even for fighting it off, is SF722.
If you want to prevent any kind of infection, the way to do that is to have a very healthy gut microbiome. A healthy gut produces so much beneficial bacteria that it gets pushed out of the gut and circulates throughout the entire body. This beneficial bacterial activity leaves little to no room for infection to set in. Science has not yet caught on to this fact, but they’re close. Regardless, it’s 100% true. A healthy gut is your first and best defense against the coronavirus or any other pathogen.
The number one supplement that virtually everyone needs to help balance the gut and boost the immune system is SF722. It kills any and all things fungal. Almost everyone living in a first-world country has too much fungal activity in their bodies to be healthy. Even if you avoid processed foods and never eat refined sugars, and even if you also avoid all those terrible anti-bacterial products, our fruits and vegetables are hybridized for more sugar and less fiber. SF722 should be in everyone’s home. Anytime you don’t feel well or your body is not healing as well as it should from an injury, you need SF722.
My second recommendation is Mother Earth Organic Root Cider. Like other coronaviruses and influenza, CoVID-19 usually takes up initial residency in the sinus pathways. If you’re a mouth breather, it may set in your tonsils first and then move into your sinuses, but if you breathe through your nose as a healthy person does, it will most likely infect the sinuses first. So while the most important prevention is good gut health, the second most important supplement is the root cider. Sip it a few times a day as a preventative measure and gargle (and swallow) if there is any sign of throat or sinus infection setting in. This stuff is amazingly good at killing anything that shouldn’t be in our body! And it also feeds the most robust infection-fighting beneficial bacteria.
Those are the two most important supplements for preventing a viral infection. If you are fighting it off, or just want to be prepared, I have my usual recommendation list for any virus, including colds and flu, in order of most to least important:
Vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, and vitamin C (vitamin C is sold out almost everywhere right now, and you can and should get most of these vitamins from your foods anyway)
The links to the supplements go to Green Lifestyle Market, an online store that I own. If you have any questions, we’ll be available on chat as much as possible.
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is an intestinal disorder that causes pain in the belly, gas, diarrhea, and constipation. Sometimes the condition goes away without treatment, and for some, it ends up being a lifelong affliction. IBS is often associated with stress, depression, anxiety, or a previous intestinal infection. IBS is often referred to as spastic colon or spastic bowel.
What’s the Difference between IBS, IBD, CD, and UC?
IBS: irritable bowel syndrome
IBD: inflammatory bowel disease
CD: Crohn’s disease
UC: ulcerative colitis
Dysbiosis: gut microbial imbalance
With irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), there is an autoimmune reaction to foods, bacteria, or other substances in the intestinal tract. Most conventional medical professionals do not believe that IBS causes inflammation, ulcers, or other damage to the intestinal tract. The digestive system looks normal under x-ray, but it doesn’t function properly. Conventional medical professionals believe IBS has a physiological basis. It is associated with stress, depression, and anxiety. But today, newer technologies are now being used with older methods to reveal specific abnormalities associated with IBS. For doctors keeping up with research, it’s no longer thought of as primarily psychosomatic.
Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are both inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). IBD is not believed to have a physiological basis (it’s not associated with stress, depression, anxiety). IBD can be debilitating and can cause life-threatening complications.
How to Know if You Have Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Doctors call IBS a “functional disease.” A person with IBS will have many or all of the following symptoms, but current medical testing won’t show any physical explanation for these symptoms. IBS is also sometimes called spastic colon or spastic bowel. Symptoms will often fade or even become nonexistent for a period of time.
Symptoms of IBS can include:
Abdominal pain
Cramping
Gas
Diarrhea
Constipation
Alternating diarrhea and constipation
Bloating
The feeling that a bowel movement may be incomplete
Stools that contain mucus, which may be white in color
Nausea after eating
For women, symptoms tend to flare up during their menstrual period
There is no test to definitively diagnose IBS. Doctors generally look at medical history and perform a physical exam along with other tests to rule out other conditions. If you have IBS with chronic diarrhea, the doctor should also test for celiac disease.
How to Know if You Have Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Inflammatory bowel disease is an umbrella term for disorders that involve chronic inflammation in the digestive tract. Types of IBD include ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD).
UC is characterized by chronic inflammation and ulcers in the innermost lining of the large intestine and rectum.
CD is a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by chronic inflammation of the digestive tract. Crohn’s can affect any part of the digestive tract, from the mouth to the rectum, but it usually affects the small intestine near the connection to the large intestine.
IBD is considered a “structural disease.” This means there is underlying physical damage that causes the symptoms. With IBD, doctors can see physical signs of chronic inflammation or ulcers when they examine the gut.
IBD can cause serious longterm damage to the digestive system, and it will increase one’s risk of colorectal cancer.
New research shows that IBD may be the body’s way of compensating for a “leaky gut.”
“Both have significant overlap in terms of symptoms, pathophysiology, and treatment, suggesting the possibility of IBS and IBD being a single disease entity albeit at opposite ends of the spectrum.”
Symptoms of IBD can include the previously mentioned symptoms of IBS and the following:
Blood in your stools
Black stools
Weight loss
Loss of appetite
Fatigue
Severe, frequent diarrhea
Progressively worsening symptoms
Fever
Inflammation throughout the body
The Difference Between a Healthy Gut and an Unhealthy Gut
Scientists estimate that there are 100 trillion or so microorganisms in the human body, and they say approximately half of these microbes live in the gut.
“…the number of microbial cells we carry can be as much as 10 times greater than the total cell number in the human body, and their genetic information is at least 150-fold greater than that of our human genome.”
Dysbiosis (also called dysbacteriosis) is a gut flora imbalance. We now know that such an imbalance profoundly affects our wellbeing. We know that it can lead to neuropsychiatric symptoms and conditions, autoimmune disorders, allergies, cancer, bowel diseases, obesity, diabetes, and more. We know that a gut imbalance can exacerbate every chronic disease. On that note, I surmise that a gut imbalance is the cause of more than 99% of modern chronic diseases.
Allow me to take some liberties to explain what’s really going on in the gut.
The Gut Microbiome
For a long time, we’ve had this idea that the gut lets certain items pass into the rest of the body and blocks certain items, end of story. Supple, permeable living tissue doesn’t work that way; it’s not so black and white.
A healthy gut has a healthy gut microbiome. A healthy gut microbiome is a gut lining of bacterial biofilm that covers the entire intestinal tract.
We are on the verge of a health revolution. In fact, we’re in the middle of one. Gut microbes are being discovered in various glands and organs and all over the human body. We also have recently come to find that there are not merely hundreds of different kinds of bacteria on our gut, but thousands. This number will keep growing for some time.
Gut bacteria does so much more than just digest food. A healthy microbiome breaks down and removes toxins from the body like heavy metals, glyphosates, and BPAs. Healthy bacteria can also cause an anti-inflammatory response in the gut and throughout the entire body. Our beneficial gut bacteria also produce enzymes we need for good health. The microbiome acts as a shield that lines the intestinal wall and breaks down particles before they pass through the intestinal wall into the body. This process not only allows for nutrient assimilation, but gut bacteria also synthesize vitamin K and B vitamins including cobalamin, folates, pyridoxine, riboflavin, and thiamine. And that’s merely what we now know. There could be many more necessary nutrients that our bacteria produce for us.
Let’s look at B12. It’s been said that B12 is only created in the lower intestine where we don’t absorb the nutrients. I suspect there may be a mechanism for which the nutrients can move up into the lower part of the upper intestine, but there’s no evidence of this. So the consensus has been that humans need to either eat meat, supplement with B12, or eat our own feces. But, a study found that there is actually some bacteria in the small intestine that can produce B12 in some people. This bacteria is less common in people who adhere to the Western diet, and this makes sense because the Western diet and lifestyle stifle bacterial diversity in the gut.
The gut microbiome also houses gastrointestinal immune cells, known as “Peyer’s patches.” These immune cells protect the intestinal tract against infection by releasing white blood cells.
In other words, our gut bacteria contains white blood cells (a healthy gut microbiome contains more white blood cells) and these cells and the gut bacteria together act as a barrier to keep undigested particles (and toxins) out of the rest of our body, and they synthesize nutrients we need. Our gut bacteria also suppresses cancer, helps regulate our hormones, and even affects our DNA! We need a lot of different kinds of bacteria to do right by us. Chronically ill people have less diversity in the gut microbiome. The diversity of gut bacteria helps keep each and every potential pathogen in check.
The Most Interesting Part – THE GUT ALWAYS LEAKS
In my mind, the most important and interesting job of our gut bacteria is how it affects our immune system throughout our whole body. As mentioned previously, there was this belief that our gut bacteria pretty much stayed in the gut, only leaking out of the gut if the gut is “leaky.” This is wholly inaccurate.
The gut “leaks” our beneficial bacteria into our entire body. A healthy gut is a factory that produces a vast array of, and massive quantities of, beneficial bacteria. This bacteria seeps into and all over the body to provide protection from pathogenic activity. But most people in our modern world do not have healthy gut microbiomes.
If you have an ache from an old injury that never seems to heal all the way, you have pathogenic activity infecting that injury, causing inflammation and pain. Damaged or dead cells in the body feed microbes. If the body is full of beneficial bacteria the damaged and dead cells will be feeding beneficial bacteria, and the dead and damaged cells will be broken down and cleaned up by enzymes and beneficial bacteria.
The “bad” bacteria and other pathogenic microbes attack the body, as we all know, and their lifecycle causes off-gassing that damages the surrounding cells while they feed off of the damage they create. With more pathogenic activity in the body, the immune system becomes overwhelmed and begins reacting to allergens.
Have you ever walked by the perfume aisle in a department store, or walked through the cleaning products in your grocery store and suddenly noticed a bad taste in the back of your mouth? This is post nasal drip caused by chemicals damaging the cells in your nasal cavities. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other pathogens feed off of or otherwise benefit from damaged cells. Damaged cells release sugars, starches, and fats that feed pathogens, and they allow the proliferation of viruses. If your body contains lots of pathogens, breathing in chemicals will cause an immediate proliferation of pathogenic activity, which can lead to illness.
A body with massive amounts of a wide variety of healthy bacteria will have a different reaction. The beneficial bacteria will still feed off of the damage like pathogens do, but the vast variety of healthy microflora eliminates the possibility of infection by any one type of microbe. If you have only a few kinds of bacteria in such a situation, one or more are likely to proliferate and become pathogenic, or yeast or other pathogens can take over. Many of the beneficial bacteria within us are capable of causing infection. It is the variety of bacteria that keeps everything in check.
This is a very simplistic way of explaining this concept. Many kinds of beneficial bacteria strains will not ever infect us. Some will only cause problems under very unusual circumstances, and many will cause problems if left to flourish without enough beneficial microbe diversity to keep them in check. Plus, there are also autoimmune reactions and allergy issues that can come into play in this scenario. But the point of this section is to provide an understanding of how important a healthy microbiome is to our immune system. Earlier I wrote, “allow me to take some liberties” because I do not yet see that science has discovered this function of our microflora. So, feel free to take my conclusions here with a grain of salt, but we do know that the gut bacteria work this way (warding off infection) in the gut, and we know how and why variety is paramount to good health (keeps bacteria and yeast in check), and we now know that gut bacteria also is found in the brain and the liver (it’s all over the body, we’ll discover this soon enough). And we know that gut bacteria evolves based on its environment. To understand how to achieve optimum health you just need to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Dysbiosis Causes IBS and IBD and Other Autoimmune Diseases
As mentioned, dysbiosis is an impaired or unbalanced microbiota. An unbalanced microbiome causes poor digestion of food, poor nutrient uptake, a “leaky gut” that leaks food particles and toxins into the bloodstream allowing pathogenic activity. Typically, with our modern, antibacterial world and our limited gut bacteria, virulent bacteria (often antibiotic resistant), viruses, parasites, and lots of fungi are able to flourish in our bodies.
Consider the examples above (the perfume aisle, aches, and pains that don’t heal). It’s easy to understand how chronic inflammation and autoimmune disease works.
Celiac Disease May Be Causing Dysbiosis
If diarrhea is a predominant IBS symptom, celiac disease or another gluten intolerance is a likely cause. Celiac disease is characterized by gluten causing chronic inflammation of the small intestinal mucosa. This causes the intestinal villi (small finger-like projections of tissue called villi which increase the surface area of the intestine) to atrophy (waste away), which leads to malabsorption (nutrition is not absorbed properly). Dysbiosis can cause these symptoms too, so it’s a bit of a chicken-egg issue. Gluten allergies and wheat allergies are also common with gut issues and may be precursors to celiac disease.
Research suggests that many people with IBS and IBD have celiac disease. Medical professionals are starting to see that wheat can trigger IBS and lead to IBD and celiac disease. Research also suggests that many more people have celiac disease than originally thought.
Celiac disease can be diagnosed using simple blood tests, but even if tests come back negative, other gluten intolerances are still likely.
Like almost everything else in conventional medicine, treatments for IBS and IBD focus on relieving symptoms, not on curing the disease. Conventional treatments don’t work because they don’t address the actual cause. Conventional treatments include a wide variety of drugs to manage inflammation (which will make the health problems worse in the long run), minimal (insufficient) diet changes, and a few supplements (often of dubious quality) like fiber and probiotics. For IBS, many doctors also recommend therapy.
In order to manage dysbiosis, one needs to manage their diet. Cut out refined foods, wheat, dairy, and chemicals such as artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, soy, GMOs, and MSG.
How To Cure IBS, IBD, Dysbiosis
Managing disease is for suckers. Ridding the body of disease is a much better option. It takes patience and time, but it will likely take a lot less time than how long it took to develop the autoimmune issues.
Most prescription drugs cause or at least exacerbate gut problems. One can still make the gut much healthier and elevate many chronic conditions while on prescription drugs, but as long as prescription drugs are consumed the gut will not be fully well.
This is also true for over-the-counter medications, recreational drugs, and alcohol. And if you smoke, you’ll have to quit. Smoking wreaks havoc on the gut in a variety of ways. You will never have a healthy gut if you smoke.
One of my favorite quotes:
‘There is only one disease: cellular malfunction. And there are only two causes of disease: deficiency and toxicity.”
Raymond Francis
The key to better gut health is eliminating toxins and getting the proper nutrition. You might be thinking, “If only it were that simple…” And in a way, it is. But in other ways, our modern world complicates things.
Diet for Dysbiosis – How To Build Healthy Gut Microbiota
The best bacteria love the best foods. Nature wouldn’t work right if it were any other way. The healthiest foods are raw vegetables and herbs. A wide variety of healthy bacteria is essential for optimum health. Different bacteria like different foods at different stages of digestion. This means that if you blend your vegetables in a blender before you consume them you’re missing out on feeding some of the bacteria that would have broken down the vegetables to that state. Unprocessed, unadulterated vegetables and herbs are essential for building incredibly diverse, strong, and healthy gut flora. Salads are the key. And not just any salad. I’m talking about huge salads with 15 different vegetables and five different herbs. All fresh. Here’s the salad recipe: Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included. The cranberry lemonade recipe in that article will also help detoxify and bring the body into homeostasis.
Many people can’t digest salads well enough. This may cause discomfort. I recommend starting off with smaller salads and building up while snacking on small amounts of random vegetables throughout the day. But any doctor who tells you that salads are bad for you because your body is different, or because you need more “heat producing” foods, or whatever, is wrong! Most people will benefit from ingesting huge salads right away, and a select few need to work their way up to them, but this is the most important step to building a healthy gut colony in the gut.
Other meals should only include whole foods and these meals should be prepared by you. Do not let a company prepare your meals. Don’t even buy nut milk. Make it yourself. It’s easy and much cheaper, here’s how.
I do recommend grains (brown rice, wild rice, amaranth, montina, quinoa, millet, buckwheat, and sorghum. But avoid oats until the gut is well.), legumes (when soaked and/or sprouted properly), and nuts and seeds (seeds are typically easier to digest than nuts). But these foods will need to be brought into the diet slowly if digestive troubles occur when they are consumed. Once the right kind of bacteria is flourishing in the gut, whole healthy foods are much easier to digest.
Cooked vegetables are also wonderful for you. I eat an 11 cup salad for breakfast and I also usually put tons of vegetables and herbs in my dinner. Dinner at my house usually consists of a grain, a legume, lots of veggies, and lots of herbs.
Meat from a healthy free-range animal is typically fine for people who are healing the gut. So are eggs when they’re from healthy chickens. Like with the aforementioned, these may need to be introduced slowly if stomach troubles occur.
Avoid sweet fruits at first and slowly introduce them later as the gut gets better and better. Most of the fruit that we eat is not what we would have found in nature. We’ve evolved to eat fruit seasonally, and most of the fruit we did eat was not nearly as sweet before hybridization.
The benefits of eating like this also include not having to take a bunch of vitamins and minerals. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies will normalize and the body will take what it needs and discard what it doesn’t. But if you still feel you need vitamins and minerals I recommend Total Nutrition and Liquid Light.
The SF722 kills all fungi better than anything else I know of. Abzorb supplies vitamin D, Magnesium, systemic enzymes, and a probiotic. Take Abzorb without food to heal the gut and with meals to help digest the food. Berberine is an anti-microbial pre-biotic with tons of other health benefits, read more here. The MycoCeutics is an anti-microbial fungal complex, and MicroDefense kills non-beneficial microbes including parasites.
Shillington’s Intestinal Detox is a clay, fiber, and charcoal intestinal detoxifier. It can slow down bowel movements. Shillington’s Intestinal Cleanse kills parasites and restores gut function. It can make bowel movements easier. The two work very well together. Shillington’s Total Healing Poultice Powder is good for ulcers. Syntol AMD is another probiotic enzyme blend. Total Nutrition is a good multivitamin that contains algae, astragalus, alfalfa, seaweed, lots of vitamin C and some B vitamins. Liquid Light is a multi-mineral formula.
Berberine is a yellow alkaloid found in goldenseal root, barberry bark, Oregon grape root, and coptis (goldthread) root. It is an antioxidant that is antibacterial, antiparasitic, antifungal, antiviral, anti-amoebic and has also been shown to:
Decrease insulin resistance
Stabilize blood sugar
Activate AMPK
Increase glycolysis inside the cells
Slow the breakdown of carbohydrates in the gut
Increase some beneficial bacteria in the gut
Reduce triglycerides
Balance cholesterol
Lower blood pressure
Increase mitochondria production
Reduce the risk of heart disease
Reduce fatty liver
Berberine For Weight Loss
Berberine studies produced weight loss and improvement of triglyceride, leptin, and cholesterol levels in obese patients (leptin is a hormone involved in hunger). Berberine has also been shown to inhibit the production of body fat cells.
Berberine is believed to activate the enzyme called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). AMPK, sometimes referred to as a “metabolic master switch,” is an enzyme inside our cells that plays a major role in cellular energy homeostasis, activating glucose and fatty acid uptake when cellular energy is low. This enzyme plays a major role in regulating blood sugar and metabolism.
Berberine For Diabetes
Berberine has been shown in studies to work as well as the most commonly prescribed drugs taken for diabetes, metformin, rosiglitazone, and glipizide, to control blood sugar. Berberine reduces insulin resistance and lowers blood sugar levels. It also increases glycolysis inside cells, signals the liver to decrease glucose production, and slows the breakdown of carbohydrates in the gut. Berberine may also positively affect other enzymes and genes that affect blood sugar.
Berberine For Heart Health
Studies have shown that berberine can improve overall heart function in more than one way. Berberine may help repair and protect heart muscle cells. Berberine seems to improve the quality of life for patients with chronic congestive heart failure by helping to exercise lung capacity and reducing fatigue. Berberine also lowers lipid levels, prevents harmful fat deposition, increases fat burning in the mitochondria, relaxes the arteries, lowers blood pressure, and increases blood flow.
Berberine For Gut Health and the Immune System
Berberine exerts selective antimicrobial action, killing a wide range of harmful organisms without harming the microbiome. In fact, it promotes a healthy gut colony.
Many, if not all of berberine’s health benefits may be more a result of berberine’s effect on the gut microbiome than anything else. Researchers have shown that a very low percentage of berberine is actually absorbed from our gut into the rest of the body. But berberine increases the quantity of Akkermansia muciniphila, a beneficial gut bacteria that has been inversely associated with obesity, diabetes, inflammation, and metabolic disorders. This bacteria is necessary for sufficient mucin thickness, which lines the gut, protects the intestines and the microbiome from damage, and keeps undigested food particles and pathogens from entering the rest of the body.
Without enough of the mucin layer, the gut becomes leaky and inflamed, which leads to chronic inflammation and insulin resistance, and then many more autoimmune symptoms result from this.
Low concentrations of berberine have also been shown to increase other beneficial bacteria including Bacillus subtilis, Bifidobacterium adolescentis, and Lactobacillus acidophilus but high concentrations can inhibit many of these microorganisms.
If you suffer from autoimmune disease or are dealing with an infection it’s probably wise to start off with a higher dosage of berberine and then after a week or two to scale back to a lower dosage to allow more of the beneficial bacteria to flourish.
In an unhealthy gut, fungal activity is virtually always present and proper enzymatic activity is certain to be lacking. In this supplement stack we include SF722 which is the best supplement we know of to kill fungi. There is also the AMD probiotic which is designed not just to supply the gut with beneficial bacteria but also to help the friendly microbes flourish with prebiotics and enzymes. The bacteria in this supplement work well with berberine. The MycoCeutics complex is a mushroom complex. Just like bacteria, there are beneficial fungi and pathogenic fungi. I take the MycoCeutics and the SF722 separately, at least a few hours apart.
Five Ways To Reduce Depression and Improve Your Mental State
When the body is healthy, the brain is healthy. If the brain is impaired it’s pretty difficult to enjoy life. Do not underestimate how your health affects your mind!
For those suffering from depression, there’s situational depression and there’s chronic depression. Situational depression is generally triggered by a traumatic incident like losing a loved one or being unable to find work. Chronic depression often starts with situational depression, but it can also just seem to come out of nowhere. Either way, eliminating depression is much harder and often impossible without a healthy brain. For many who do not address health, the best they can hope for is situational happiness, where sadness or anxiety is the norm and outside influences are needed to trigger positive feelings. Addiction is common for such people.
A healthy gut is necessary to break down food, assimilate nutrients, balance hormones, and supply beneficial microflora throughout the body that keeps pathogenic activity from proliferating. An unhealthy gut prohibits proper nutrient assimilation, causes hormonal imbalances, and leaks unhealthy, infectious microbes and undigested food into the body. Pathogens, undigested food particles, hormonal imbalance, and a lack of proper nutrition balance all lead to inflammation.
If the body is inflamed, the brain is inflamed. Studies have shown that people with depression have higher levels of inflammatory markers compared to people who are not depressed. Chronically higher levels of inflammation due to medical illnesses are also associated with higher rates of depression.
Poor diet hurts brain function in other ways too. The refined sugars found in most processed foods spike insulin and trigger the release of inflammatory cytokines. Pesticides, herbicides, artificial colors and flavors, and other chemicals cause problems in many different ways as well. Each and every toxic ingredient harms our health in multiple ways, which is the nature of toxins. But, gut health usually is the best indicator of overall health.
You can inhibit some of the effects of depression with drugs, for a while, but to truly be well one must heal the gut. Healing the gut requires lots of raw vegetables and herbs along with the elimination of pharmaceuticals and other drugs, as well as refined and processed foods. For more on that check out How To Heal Your Gut.
This is where articles typically go over the benefits of salmon, fresh whole fruits and vegetables, leafy grains, nuts, chocolate, oysters, etc. Readers are expected to pick out a few of their favorite foods that made the list and starting eating more of those foods in a futile attempt to feel better about their lives.
It doesn’t work that way.
Salads are the best thing anyone can eat to heal the gut and the entire body (except for those rare exceptions when someone suffers from things like histamine intolerance, but still, the goal for anyone healing from chronic disease should be to get on daily salads, even if one cannot start off that way). We’re not just talking about lettuce and carrot shreds. Salads should have at least ten vegetables and a few herbs. This article has a recipe for the kind of salads we’re talking about. Other than that, focus on whole foods and diversity. And don’t let corporations make your food for you.
In a nutshell, eat salads, eat whole foods, avoid processed and refined foods, make your own food.
We were meant to squat. And the great thing about squats is you can do them almost anywhere. In nature we squatted to hide, to defecate, to pick things up, and we squatted instead of sitting. In paleo times, if you couldn’t squat you probably wouldn’t be around much longer.
Squatting helps massage and activate organ and glandular function, releases positive hormones, aligns the spine, and helps to get the lymphatic system moving. If you can’t squat, try assisted squats to work on the range of motion, and try “get-ups”, which are done by laying on the ground and getting up. Alternate sides and alternate legs being used each time.
Other exercises that are good for alleviating depression include:
Running: We are also meant to run. The human body should be squatting and running every day. Studies show that aerobic exercise is often as effective as anti-depressants for treating depression. And if you manage to achieve that “runner’s high” you’ll want it again and again.
Hiking In the Woods: Getting outdoors and in nature for some time has also been shown in studies to match or exceed anti-depressants for treating depression. While you’re out there, do some earthing.
Yoga: Studies also show yoga can alleviate depression. We can’t recommend Yoga with Adriene enough.
Resistance Training: Weightlifting and other forms of resistance training have much less research regarding the benefits for depression, but the little bit of research that has been done looks promising. And anyone who can put more than their body weight on their back to squat can attest to how amazing it feels.
HITT: If you want to squeeze the most out of the least amount of time, you can’t beat high-intensity interval training. Try it once and you’ll know why it’s a good routine for alleviating depression.
Most of us are rapid, shallow breathers. We raise our shoulders, pull in our diaphragm, and take a breath that fills only the top portion of our lungs.
When you breathe properly, your diaphragm, your stomach, and your ribcage expand, not the pectoral area. Fully exhaling is important, too. Remember, you are breathing in oxygen-rich air and releasing carbon dioxide and toxins.
Proper breathing dramatically increases stamina and mental clarity, elevates your mood, and helps the body detoxify more efficiently (more toxins are released through breathing than through the pores, urination, and defecation combined).
Supplements For Depression
If you’re looking at supplements to replace a healthy diet, that’s going to work only a little better than skipping exercise for a protein shake. Supplements can certainly help improve symptoms but without the right diet, true health cannot be achieved.
That said, chronic depression indicates a deficiency in the body and pathogenic activity. Most people who suffer from chronic depression also suffer from an abundance of Candida. In fact, most people who suffer from chronic anything have too much Candida. For anything regarding yeast, mold, or fungi, we recommend SF722, second only to a healthy diet with lots of salad. For more on that, see How Candida Leads to Depression.
As stated earlier, healthy gut microbiome is imperative to brain health. Our symbiotic bacteria play a key role in nutrient assimilation, hormone production, immune system functionality, and science has just discovered that our gut bacteria also resides in our brain!
Probiotics can help bring the gut into homeostasis and can help keep pathogenic microbes from flourishing. Probiotics are anti-inflammatory, and some studies have indicated that probiotics may alleviate depression. Be careful though. Don’t just pick up any cheap probiotic and expect good results. A high-quality probiotic along with a prebiotic diet (raw vegetables) can help build a healthy gut biome, while a cheap probiotic can actually feed pathogens and do more harm than good.
Our brain is 60% fat. Our brain, gut, and whole body need a variety of fats to function properly. We need saturated fats, monounsaturated fats (omega 9s), and polyunsaturated fats (omega 6s, 3s). A typical western diet is heavy in trans fats and rancid fats which cause inflammation. Some people don’t get enough fats and most people get too many of the wrong types of fats.
A large Norwegian study showed that people who regularly consumed cod liver oil were about 30% less likely to show signs of depression. The longer the participants took cod liver oil, the less likely they were to have high levels of depression. In another study with 49 patients who had a history of harming themselves, study subjects were randomly assigned to receive either 1200 mg EPA and 900 mg DHA, or a placebo. Both groups also received counseling. The study lasted 12 weeks. In the end, the group receiving the fat supplementation improved significantly more than the placebo group.
Many other studies have shown promise in treating depression and anxiety and other mental health disorders with beneficial fat supplementation. It’s best to get your healthy fats through a healthy diet but supplementation can help speed up healing and have an almost immediate reduction in inflammation and brain health.
Tryptophan is an essential amino acid because it can’t be produced by our body. We need it for anabolic processes and the production of various hormones, including serotonin, and the liver can synthesize niacin from tryptophan. So there’s a lot of competition for tryptophan. For those who are low in serotonin, supplementation may help (but low serotonin levels are an indication of poor gut health). Several studies have shown that low tryptophan levels can lead to a depressive state and cause anxiety.
5-HTP is generally recommended over l-tryptophan because it crosses the blood-brain barrier and gets converted into serotonin more efficiently than l-tryptophan. Studies have shown greater results in alleviating depression with 5-HTP supplementation.
A study looked at selenium and depression with a total of 978 young adults aged 17 to 25. Participants filled out a questionnaire to track their mood daily for two weeks to determine their levels of depression. Blood tests were done to determine their selenium levels. The results showed that when selenium levels are too low or too high depressive symptoms were much more likely. The study also showed that lower concentrations of selenium were found to be more detrimental than higher levels.
Many studies have shown a link between vitamin D deficiency and depression. People with low vitamin D were at a much greater risk of depression. We recommend daily access to sunlight. For those with whom it’s not possible to get enough sunlight, and for those who are overweight, vitamin D supplementation makes sense.
According to some experts, one of the common causes of chronic depression is a lack of or imbalance of B vitamins. Vitamins B3, B6, B9, and B12 are all known to be imperative for proper brain health and hormone production. Taking just one B vitamin for a long period of time can cause an imbalance that can be more detrimental to health than being low in most or all Bs. Poor B vitamin assimilation is a sign of poor gut health.
Laboratory rats were administered imipramine (a common anti-depressant medication) or ashwagandha. The results were almost identical. In another study, ashwagandha was also found to work as well as diazepam with depression and anxiety caused by social isolation. Ashwagandha is an effective anti-depressant without the serious side effects that medication comes with.
Eleuthero has a mild sedative effect and supports the adrenals and inhibits stress hormones. While this herb can be a godsend to some, it also can be overstimulating and is contraindicated in some people, especially those with very high blood pressure.
Holy basil is well known for its ability to reduce inflammation, stress, and anxiety and it can help manage depression. Research has shown that holy basil decreases the amount of cortisol released during stressful events.
Maca root has been shown to help reduce depression and anxiety. A study compared postmenopausal women who took maca root versus those who took a placebo. The study revealed a significant reduction in anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction after Maca consumption.
Dubbed “nature’s antidepressant,” St. John’s wort is a very popular alternative to antidepressant medication for those dealing with depression. Multiple studies have shown that this herb can be as effective as medication for mild to moderate depression. It could likely help with severe depression as well but there have not been enough studies done on this yet.
Conclusion
No medications will work to treat chronic depression forever, and the same is true for supplements. There are also many different nutrient deficiencies that can lead to depression. Taking one or two supplements may help for a little while, but the root cause will not be addressed without lifestyle changes. If you suffer from depression, stop letting corporations make your food for you, heal your gut, get outside, and put in the hard work to get well. I know that’s easier said than done. I’ve been there. I’m prone to depression and I’ve had some catastrophic loses in my life. I recommend baby steps. And for me, personally, I found the products below to be most helpful. But again, gut health is paramount! Be sure to check out How To Heal Your Gut.
How To Stop a UTIs & Yeast Infections Naturally, and How To Prevent Them From Reoccurring
The urinary tract includes the bladder, kidneys, ureters, and urethra. It’s said that UTIs occur much more often in women and usually affect the bladder and urethra, though minor kidney infections are much more prevalent than people realize. Kidney infections often come and go with minor to major lower back pain and very slow, darker colored urination. Diarrhea is a sign of a more serious kidneys infection (fluids are forced out door #2). Gas, bloating, and a stiff lower back is a sign of slow kidney function which may be an indicator of more serious problems to come.
Women may be especially prone to bladder UTIs because they have shorter urethras, which allow bacteria easier access to the bladder, and the female anatomy makes UTI’s and yeast infections easier to contract through sex.
Bladder infections are usually caused by a type of E. coli, a bacteria commonly found in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. However, sometimes other microbes are responsible.
An unhealthy gut microbiome leads to most UTIs and yeast infections. If there isn’t enough of a variety of beneficial bacteria, including lactobacillus, to balance the E. coli, the risk of UTIs increases. Minor kidney infections are also often caused or amplified slow kidney function due to swollen reproductive systems putting pressure on the kidneys (swollen prostates and PMS can cause this). Other common UTI and yeast infection risk factors and causes include:
Dehydration
Feminine products
Antibiotics
Sex
Holding in urine for too long
Hormone shifts
High blood sugar or uncontrolled diabetes
Kidney stones
Contact with stool
Contraception
Soda
Smoking
Gluten
Poor diet
UTIs vs. Yeast Infections
We are avoiding using the V word so as not to trigger social media blocks, but when we are talking about yeast infections here we are speaking of v____ infections. But, you can have a fungal infection anywhere in the urinary tract as well, and bacterial infections of the urinary tract are an indication of a gut with unhealthy microbiome and an abundance of Candida.
UTIs and yeast infections are different infections. Their symptoms may be in the same general area, but they’re distinct. Bladder infections can often lead to yeast infections, but so can conventional UTI treatments. UTI symptoms typically affect urination. They may cause darker, cloudy urine, slower urination, more frequent urination, and a burning sensation during urination. Yeast infections cause pain and itchiness in the affected area, and yeast infections typically produce a thick, milky discharge. Sometimes white patches or red hives can also coat the surrounding area.
How To Eliminate A UTI
In a healthy gut, there are many kinds of bacteria that could become pathogenic if left to their own devices, but a healthy gut maintains homeostasis through diversity. The E. coli that reside in a healthy gut, the same ones that can cause a urinary tract infection, aren’t the same E. coli that cause food poisoning. One key difference is that E. coli from factory farms are resistant to acidity, but our normal gut E. coli bacteria, as well as Candida and most other fungal infections, don’t do well with acidity. This is one reason why cranberry juice is so high up on the following list. Cranberry juice also has tannins that kill urinary infections, and cranberry has anti-inflammatory properties. An infected urinary tract is inflamed, swollen, and constricted, and cranberry juice can help open up the system.
But even more important than cranberry juice is staying hydrated. Cut out the juices and sodas and drink lots of water. Most people who get regular urinary tract infections do not drink enough water.
Diet To Prevent and Help Treat UTIs and Yeast Infections
Diet alone can eventually eliminate a UTI or yeast infection, but without cranberry juice or supplements it is likely to take considerable time. For most people, I recommend this recipe.
Cranberry Lemonade
1 cup of organic cranberry juice, not from concentrate
Mix the ingredients with a half gallon of water. For daily drinking, I would double the water, but to eliminate UTIs I recommend more concentrated.
I also recommend Lakewood cranberry juice, which can be found at most health food stores and lots of grocery stores. Lemons should be organic if possible and freshly squeezed.
I do not recommend Trader Joes cranberry juice. There is something wrong with that juice. Also, don’t be fooled by cranberry blends or sweetened cranberry juice – these will exacerbate the problem.
Not just any salad, this salad needs to be very diverse and big! Vegetables of at least 10 different kinds should be included, and be sure to throw in lots of garlic too. Eating these types of salads regularly will increase the beneficial bacterial diversification in the gut which will radically enhance immune system functionality. Here’s a recipe.
Supplements For UTIs
SF722 – This supplement is an acid that helps eliminate Candida in the gut, kills fungal infections fast, and can also help kill other pathogens that are susceptible to acidity, like the E. coli that commonly caused UTIs.
D-Mannose – D-Mannose is related to glucose and derived from cranberries, peaches, and other berries. It can enhance the effectiveness of cranberry juice.
Probiotic – For yeast infections, see the probiotic below that is specifically formulated for the v___ area.
Berberine – This is a potent antimicrobial. Once you quit taking this, it’s probably a good idea to keep taking probiotics for at least another week.
Vitamin C -Vitamin C enhances the immune system, improves liver function, and inhibits the growth of E. coli. Vitamin C also acidifies the urine, limiting bacteria growth. Vitamin C does come in supplement form, but, for most people, a better way to increase your vitamin C intake is with the aforementioned salads and cranberry lemonade.
Undecyn – This has berberine, betaine hydrochloride, and calcium undecylenate, which help balance the body’s flora.
Woman’s Probiotic – Specifically formulated to help colonize the v____ tract.
Conclusion
If UTI’s or yeast infections are common, or if antibiotics have been used recently, check out How To Heal The Gut. If urination is slow or difficult, or if lower back pain is present, or if diarrhea is present, I also recommend something that I once heard called a “kidney flush.” If you have a partner for this, have them use a hand (the middle knuckles work well for this) to push on you about an inch below the belly button with approximately 15-35 pounds of pressure. You don’t want to bruise the area, but you do want to force some of the stagnant fluid to move through the urinary tract. Do this for about a two to five minutes, several times a day. You can also, if tall enough, pull yourself against the corner of a kitchen counter, or use weights. This is my favorite technique. Lay down and put something heavy on your abdomen, an inch below the belly button, and use your arms to modulate the weight. My wife, who weighs 160 lbs, used a 25-pound barbell plate and I have used a 45-pound plate – I weigh 220 lbs. An inch below the belly button is approximate. Find the spot below the belly button where it is most sensitive, where you feel most bloated, and then apply pressure, gently at first, increasing gradually until you reach your ideal pressure, and then keep it there for about two to five minutes. You should feel the need to urinate soon after, followed with back-pain relief.
Common and Unexpected Causes of Candida Overgrowth
There are more microbial cells than human cells in our bodies. Collectively the microbes are called the microbiome. Many different kinds of bacterial and non-bacterial organisms make up this microbiome. We breathe in and swallow some of them, but most are produced in our gut based on the foods we eat. Most of these microbes are in our gut, but they also reside almost everywhere else in the body. Our gut supplies our body with these microbes. In other words, even a healthy gut leaks. Beneficial microbes crowd out pathogens and help keep infections from setting in all over the body. A gut teeming with pathogenic activity supplies the body with pathogens. It’s imperative that the gut houses a diverse, healthy microbiome for the body’s immune system to function properly.
Candida resides in a healthy human gut, in the yeast form. A healthy gut colony will keep this yeast in check. In an unhealthy gut, yeast is allowed to flourish. It converts into its fungal form, grows filamentous, burrows into the gut lining, and then deposits yeast spores into the bloodstream. This also causes the gut to become “leaky”, which is to say it’s much more porous than it is supposed to be, and consequently, undigested proteins and pathogens leak into the bloodstream. This causes an immune response. If we didn’t live in such an antibacterial world with such an incredible abundance of sugars, candida would not thrive like this, but it is a tremendously versatile and opportunistic pathogen when left unchecked.
If candida is allowed to take over the gut and form its own biofilm, it becomes incredibly difficult to kill. The spores produced are nearly impossible to kill. For more on this, check Why is Candida So Hard To Kill. It’s freaky what these microbes can do!
Inflammation
An abundance of candida in the body is known to cause chronic inflammation, but what’s less common knowledge is the feedback loop this creates.
Pathogens feed off of sugars, starches, and fats (lipids). Our cells are made up of sugars, starches, and fats. Some pathogens prefer one over the other. For instance, Lyme bacteria want starches, and candida loves sugars.
Pathogens flourish in a damaged body and the presence of these pathogens causes more inflammation. When cells die, they also trigger an inflammatory response. Chronic inflammation also causes more cellular damage, leading to more cellular die-off. A chronically inflamed body is a damaged body with a lot of damaged and decaying cells that are feeding pathogens creating a positive feedback loop.
Alcohol kills beneficial bacteria in the gut. It can kill fungi too, but candida spores are virtually indestructible and its biofilm can protect the microbe from alcohol as well. In other words, you’re disrupting your beneficial bacteria which allows candida to flourish. Alcohol can also raise your blood sugar which can feed candida and other pathogens through the body.
Alcohol also damages cells.
Antibiotics
Antibiotics kill bacteria, leaving fungal infections to flourish. Some antibiotics also kill fungi including candida, but nothing adequately kills fungal spores. And even if something did, they’ll be back faster than a healthy bacterial ecosystem could develop to curtail the candida and other pathogens.
Vaccines
Research has shown us that some vaccines will disrupt the gut’s microbiota. In addition to that, one’s gut microbiota affects how the host interacts with vaccines. A less healthy bacterial colony in the gut is more likely to lead to an immune response with inflammation throughout the body, which in turn can also, eventually disrupt the gut microbiota. Intestinal injuries caused by the rotavirus vaccine have been added to the government compensation program for adverse events. With the recent findings of how vaccines are more likely to cause damage with an undeveloped gut microbiome, scientists are very interested in how gut bacteria and vaccinations interact. We should see a lot more scientific discoveries about this issue in the near future.
Amalgam Fillings
When dental amalgam fillings are in the mouth, tiny particles break free and mercury vapor is released, inhaled, and swallowed. Incidentally, the mercury release is 50 times higher for those who have mercury fillings capped with gold. For a multitude of reasons, the body can’t get rid of mercury easily.
Mercury suppresses the immune system and creates an environment that is not friendly for beneficial bacteria, but candida doesn’t mind it. In fact, candida and many other fungi love toxic heavy metals and actually thrive with mercury present.
“Mercury fed Candida become more and more virulent and eventually penetrates the intestinal walls and invades the cells. These fungal microorganisms become quite at home in the cell, and can easily be considered a principle characteristic of cancer.” – Dr. Mark Sircus
Antiacids
Many people are under the mistaken impression that all disease needs acidity to thrive. This is not true. It depends on the disease. Candida likes alkalinity. The presence of candida can help to make the body very acidic, but the areas where fungal candida thrives will be less acidic. Antacids raise the PH (less acidic) of the entire digestive tract. This can cause candida to infect the stomach, which is normally far too acidic for it.
All Pharmaceuticals
Virtually all pharmaceuticals, from vaccines to Aspirin, have toxic properties which cause cellular damage that pathogens including candida will feed off of.
Smoking
Sugar is added to tobacco products. We’re not sure if inhaling the smoke from burning sugar can feed Candida or other pathogens, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it does. Regardless, the toxicity of tobacco products causes other problems that promote Candida overgrowth (and other pathogenic activity).
Smoking adds a plethora of toxic heavy metals into the body, and yeast, as mentioned above, likes toxic heavy metals. Smoking and the use of other tobacco products also affect liver function.
Every time you light a cigarette, nicotine triggers the liver to dump a large amount of glycogen into the blood stream. The blood sugar level is brought up too high, so the body calls on the pancreas to bring it back down.” – Cynthia Perkins, Holstic Help
Smoking affects the entire body, not just the liver and lungs. Smoking damages cells and causes inflammation and constriction everywhere. It also inflames and constricts the intestinal tract (if you smoke, you may notice the need to have a bowel movement after smoking). Some confuse this with “relaxing the bowels” but the truth is there is less room for digestion and so the stool is evacuated before digestion is complete. Smoking also causes rectal discharge. And smoking constricts and inflames the kidneys as well, which has the opposite effect compared to the intestinal tract. Kidneys process fluid at a slower rate and fluids can become rancid and infectious.
Juicing
Juicing has lots of benefits, but that carrot, beet, apple juice can do more harm than good for some people with an abundance of Candida in their gut. Juicing removes the fiber and other nutrients from the fruits and vegetables, and these nutrients are needed to feed a healthy gut microbiome. What’s left are sugars. If you’re just juicing kale, turmeric, lemons, collards, and garlic, or something like that, feel free to keep on juicing. But if you’re sweetening your juices with sweet fruits or carrots or beets, it doesn’t take much to make candida happy.
Fruit
We’re not saying that fruit is bad, but anyone who is suffering from an over-abundance of candida needs to lay off the fruit (not including lemons, limes, cranberries, granny smith apples, and other non-sweet fruits). Fruit is much sweeter than it used to be. Even on an all-natural, unrefined, raw food diet, we have way more access to sugar than our paleolithic ancestors did. Google wild bananas and check out what watermelon used to look like. Not only was fruit seasonal and harder to come by, but it was also much more fibrous and mealy, and much less “fruity.”
Condiments
Many condiments including salad dressings, mustards, ketchup, and hot sauces have sweeteners in them. Even without sweeteners, they are typically refined and processed with the addition of too many unnecessary ingredients. Read the ingredient labels. Better yet, make your own condiments, and use more herbs and better cooking methods to add flavor to your meals.
Organic Junk Food
Refind and processed foods fed pathogens including candida. Let’s take chips for instance. Chips often have sugar in them, including the organic varieties, but even those sugar-free brown rice and bean chips can still feed candida. Brown rice is ok for most people who aren’t very ill. When digesting brown rice, provided the gut has enough bacterial activity to do the job properly, fiber-loving gut microbes get to eat and proliferate first, before the sugar and starch molecules are exposed. But if you grind brown rice into a flour to make chips or pasta with it, you’re exposing the sugars and starches. The digestive process is altered. This is why it’s better to eat, cook with, and chew your own whole foods. Looking at those same chips as an example, the bean flour used is laden with enzyme inhibitors (unless the corporation making the food soaked and sprouted those beans properly, which is doubtful!) Enzyme inhibitors disrupt healthy gut microbiome, inhibit nutrient assimilation, and damage the digestive system. Similar examples exist for almost every single pre-packaged, processed food item in your organic health-food store.
Conclusion
When you’re chronically ill, forget the store-bought cereal, boxed nut milk, nut butters, chips, “healthy” chocolates, and food bars. To build up healthy bacterial colonies in the gut, you a variety of need whole foods. Nothing helps to grow a healthy microbiome like huge, diverse salads. Check out this article, Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting for a recipe for gut-healing salads and be sure to read How To Heal Your Gut.
Fungal Supplement Stack – Knock Out Yeast, Candida, Mold, Fungus
The first three should be plenty for most people, but for really prominent fungal issues or for impatient people with a bigger budget I’d recommend all of these:
