Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published January 9, 2019.

Bacteria live on your skin and nearly every other unsterilized surface. However, not every bacterium is dangerous or harmful to your health. In fact, data have demonstrated the more children are exposed to bacteria the lower their risk of developing allergies.^1,2

Your skin is the largest organ in your body and colonized by a diverse number of microorganisms, many of which are harmless or even beneficial. Your skin acts as a physical barrier to prevent the invasion of foreign pathogens and at the same time provides a home to your microbiome.

Despite environmental variations, the skin microbiota of a healthy adult often remains stable over time. These microorganisms play an important role in the effectiveness of your cutaneous immune system. Researchers have found reversion of an altered microbial state may help prevent or treat disease.³

A break in the skin can lead to local or systemic infection when bacteria are allowed to invade. Data have demonstrated simple household items, such as a smartphone⁴ or kitchen sponge,⁵ may harbor a significant number of harmful bacteria.

Groceries are another way you may bring bacteria into your home. Meat is a suitable growth medium for a host of microorganisms⁶ and produce has been recalled after multistate outbreaks from E. coli contamination. In 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned that avocado skins carry Listeria and Salmonella.⁷

FDA Finds Listeria and Salmonella on Some Avocado Skins

Starting in 2014, the FDA began microbial surveillance, sampling of whole fresh avocados as part of their preventive approach with “the ultimate goal of keeping contaminated food from reaching consumers.”⁸ In an 18-month sampling period, the agency collected just over 1,600 avocados to determine the prevalence of Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes.

They gathered 70% of the samples from imported avocados, and the rest were grown domestically in the U.S. In all, just over 17% of the avocado skins contained Listeria, but less than 1% of the meat of the avocados was contaminated.⁹

Salmonella was detected on only 12 skin samples from domestically grown products; none from the imported avocados had the bacteria. The FDA took these findings to confirm Salmonella could potentially be present on avocado skin. On the FDA website, they recommend consumers take steps to reduce the possibility of microbial exposure via avocados. Foodsafety.gov¹⁰ recommends:¹¹

“[W]ashing all produce thoroughly under running water before eating, cutting or cooking. Even if you plan to cut the rind or peel off the produce before eating, it is still important to wash it first so dirt and bacteria aren’t transferred from the knife into the fruit.”

Salmonella can lead to diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps, which can become so severe they lead to hospitalization. Symptoms of Listeria infection depend on the individual but include fever, diarrhea and muscle aches. Symptoms can show up a few days after eating the contaminated food but it may take as long as 30 days before the first signs of infection begin.

Listeria may spread to the nervous system and trigger headache, stiff neck, confusion, convulsions and loss of balance. Those at greatest risk are pregnant women who may suffer a mild Illness but could experience miscarriage, stillbirth or premature birth, and those with a weakened immune system.¹²

The FDA Is Unclear About What Should and Shouldn’t Be Washed

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)¹³ estimates there are 9.4 million foodborne illnesses each year from 31 known pathogens. This accounts for only 20% of the total number of foodborne illnesses each year. Annually there are just over 3,000 deaths from all foodborne pathogen triggered illnesses and over 125,000 hospitalizations.

One of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) food safety educators says people are still shocked when told not to wash poultry, even though it has been known for at least a decade that washing ends up dispersing food pathogens around the kitchen and increases the risk of foodborne illnesses.¹⁴

According to associate professor Benjamin Chapman, Ph.D., who heads up the North Carolina State University’s agricultural and human sciences department, washing chicken does not remove bacteria; rather it spreads the germs to hands, work surfaces, clothing and even nearby utensils and food.¹⁵ “The washing process can really only increase risk.”

In a collaborative effort between North Carolina State University and the USDA, preliminary results from a multiyear study demonstrate participants spread bacteria from raw meat across the kitchen to spice containers, refrigerator handles and even salads without realizing it.¹⁶

Recommendations from the FDA are confusing though. According to the agency, consumers should rinse their fresh fruit and vegetables with cold water, even though cold water doesn’t reduce the number of pathogens or kill bacteria,¹⁷ but not raw poultry, meat or eggs as this disperses foodborne pathogens.¹⁸

The International Association for Food Protection also states that produce clearly labeled as having already been washed should not be washed again as it doesn’t reduce pathogens, but increases the risk of spreading bacteria around the kitchen.¹⁹ According to Chapman:²⁰

“Pathogens are just so small and the surface of produce is so creviced, that the pathogens do a really good job attaching and hiding where water can’t even get to. There are a lot of myths out there that if I wash, I can wash the pathogens off. You can wash a little bit off, but not enough to significantly reduce your risk.”

Keep Soap and Detergents Away From Your Produce

The FDA also recommends keeping soaps and detergents away from your produce as they leave a residue on the product and likely also affect the taste. According to Kaiser Health News:²¹

“There are no FDA-approved food cleaners on the market, and the agency hasn’t found anything to be more effective at removing bacteria than cold running water.”

However, it’s important to remember bacteria are particularly adept at adhering to surfaces, including your skin, produce, meat and kitchen surfaces. In order to remove all bacteria from your produce, your skin and counter surfaces must first be sterilized. Once you handle the produce, bacteria from the skin of an avocado, or leaf of lettuce may then adhere to your skin.

The process becomes a cycle of cleaning your hands, kitchen surfaces and then produce — and then back to your hands and kitchen surfaces again — all while not truly killing pathogens but only displacing them to another area of produce or the kitchen.

Pesticide Exposure Is Not Harmless

It may seem innocuous to add a few squirts of dish soap to your produce with the intention of removing bacterial pathogens, but of the 232 hand-washing soaps listed on the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) Healthy Cleaning database,²² 58 scored an F. Those receiving the lowest score contained specific toxic ingredients detailed by Treehugger, including:²³

Washing produce helps reduce your exposure to the vast amounts of pesticides and insecticides used in agriculture today. The very same companies that developed chemical warfare weapons during World War II transitioned into agriculture after the war, using some of the same chemicals on food.

Nearly 80% of the genetically engineered crops are designed to withstand herbicide application, most often a glyphosate-based product. As a result, foods contain far greater quantities of pesticides than ever before.

The Endocrine Society Task Force warns the health effects of hormone-disrupting chemicals is so great everyone needs to take proactive steps to avoid them, especially those seeking to get pregnant, pregnant women and young children.²⁴ Even at extremely low levels, pesticide exposure increases the risk of certain diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease.²⁵

According to the pesticide residue report from the USDA, nearly 85% of more than 10,000 samples of fresh fruits and vegetables were contaminated with pesticide residues. A similar report from the FDA also showed a majority of U.S. fruits and vegetables are contaminated with pesticides.

In an analysis from EWG of 48 fruits and vegetables, strawberries have earned the dubious moniker of most contaminated with pesticide residues for the last several years. This year the top 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables are:²⁶

Safe Food Handling

It is safer to separate and clean produce and meat to help prevent cross-contamination. Raw meat and poultry should also be kept separate in your grocery bag, in your refrigerator and during food preparation.

Food safety experts recommend washing utensils and anything else used in food preparation in hot, soapy water to remove food pathogens. Washing your hands properly before and after handling food can help prevent contamination of other kitchen items.

While washing meat doesn’t remove pathogens, cooking it does. Therefore, cooking your pastured, organic meat to the correct temperature helps reduce your risk of foodborne illness. Washing produce presents a different challenge as many times your fruits and vegetables are eaten raw.

Effectively and Efficiently Clean Your Produce

A research team from the University of Massachusetts²⁷ undertook a study to compare three methods of reducing toxins on produce. The team used apples to examine the effectiveness of commercial and homemade washing agents to remove pesticide residue.

They applied two common pesticides to organic Gala apples and then washed them with three different liquids: tap water, 1% baking soda water solution and an EPA-approved commercial bleach solution often used on produce. Using specialized analysis the scientists found surface pesticide residues on apples were removed most effectively using baking soda.

Dr. Philip Landrigan, researcher at the Arnhold Institute for Global Health from the school of medicine at Mount Sinai, advises people to eat organic as often as possible, but to at least wash your fruits and vegetables.²⁸

Organic foods have a 30% lower risk of pesticide contamination,²⁹ but it’s not entirely possible to guarantee organic produce is pesticide-free, as it is sometimes located in adjacent fields to farms where pesticides are used.

The research team believe the alkalinity of baking soda likely degrades pesticides faster, making it easier to physically remove the chemicals through washing. The researchers recommended a concentration of 1 teaspoon of baking soda for every 2 cups of water and gentle scrubbing.³⁰

You may also reduce your exposure to foodborne pathogens from produce by using white vinegar, as the acidic vinegar crosses bacterial cell membranes and kills the cells.³¹ Before misting thoroughly with a blend of vinegar and water in a 1-to-3 ratio, ensure you’ve removed the baking soda, as it will neutralize the vinegar. Let the produce rest for 30 minutes and then wash lightly under cold running water.³²

Through the practice of safe food handling, separating meat and produce, and washing your produce to reduce your exposure to pesticides, you may reduce your risk for exposure to foodborne pathogen illnesses and risks of exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals and known carcinogens.

Articles

Innovative regeneration for handball players

Schluechtern, April 26, 2023 – Reboots equips the national teams of the German Handball Federation with innovative devices so that players can return to their peak performance more quickly. These include the U21 men’s home World Cup, the 2023 Women’s World Cup and the 2024 men’s home European Championship.

Fast starts, stops and turning movements put a lot of strain on the muscles and joints of handball players. The regeneration products from the German company Reboots help the national teams of the German Handball Federation to regenerate more effectively and to achieve long-term athletic success.

Dr. Philip Lübke, chief association physician of the German Handball Federation, says: “Handball has a strong influence on body and mind, challenges and encourages; from youth to senior national teams. An essential part of maintaining and promoting performance is recovery. With Reboots, we have a partner on our side who can support our national teams very well with the high load and the necessary regeneration, so that our top players can maintain and even increase their performance in the long term. The whole team is very happy about the cooperation.”

Diverse products sharing the same goal

The compression massage of the Recovery Pants helps players to eliminate waste products that accumulate in the muscles during high exertion. Targeted compression allows the muscles to recover better and more efficiently. The result: accelerated regeneration, minimized risk of inflammation and injury, and increased performance in the long term.

Reboots also brings expertise in power napping. This can have a profound impact on alertness and athletic performance. With the Reboots Recharge Set, players can give themselves a short rest before competitions to achieve mental clarity and improved concentration.

Press contact: Georgina Gerasimidis, pr@reboots.de, +4915737949504

Source: RealWire

Releases feed from RealWire

In the video above, finance expert Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and president of the Solari Report, discusses coming changes to the banking system, how they threaten our freedom, and what we can do to prevent them.

Fitts was the assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the Reagan administration. She understands the financial system inside and out, having spent decades exposing corruption and fraud, both within the banking industry and government.

Do You Know Your Banker?

This past summer — after Chase bank debanked my business along with two of my top executives and their families — she put out a four-part video series on banking on CHD.TV, where she has a weekly show called Financial Rebellion, cohosted with the Solari Report’s general counsel, Carolyn Betts.

The episode was titled “How to Develop a Successful Relationship with a Great Bank” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) because, as she says, this “makes an enormous amount of difference to your life.”

“Once upon a time, people thought they could just go online or walk into a bank, get any old account, and it would be professional and functional. It’s not that,” she says.

“We’re talking about a significant relationship. It’s very important that your banker knows you and you know your banker. You [need] a relationship where you can pick up a phone and call if there’s a problem and get things handled …

We just took all the questions we’ve gotten since the very beginning and rolled them up into a detailed four-part series that goes through every possible aspect of how you might relate to your bank, how to find a good bank, and how to build a relationship with the bank.

I have a great relationship at a great bank, and it is one of the great joys of my life. Wherever I am, because I travel all over the world, whenever I have a problem, I just pick up the phone and call them. And it’s wonderful. They’re watching my back, and it makes an enormous difference …

It’s the financial equivalent of a marriage. And it’s so important that your basic transactions run on a platform that you can trust. One of my favorite quotes is from a Swiss doctor, who said ‘The currency of the future will be relationships of trust.’

So, when we think about our financial life, we have to think about, ‘What are the personal and professional and institutional relationships that I have? And how can I make sure that they’re trustworthy?’

So, we go through it in detail, and I encourage anybody who’s not satisfied or happy with their bank, or nervous about their bank, to go listen to the whole thing. We have the questions for each part listed so you can skip around if a part … is not relevant to you.”

The Growing Role of Artificial Intelligence

It’s been just about 11 months since the large language model ChatGPT was released to the public. While not at the level of being an artificial general intelligence (AGI), it’s an extremely powerful artificial intelligence (AI).

The global cabal behind The Great Reset — which Fitts refers to as “Mr. Global,” as a metaphor for the families that control most of the world’s wealth — has been enormously successful in brainwashing and propagandizing the public with the existing strategies at its disposal. With AI, their ability to influence people will improve and expand even further, and this is something we need to be cognizant of. As Fitts notes:

“AI is a component piece of a system that’s been very successful at brainwashing, propaganda and mind control … and when you combine it with entrainment, subliminal programming, and software that creates addictions, you create this phenomenal infrastructure of things that really suck people in.

Part of [AI’s] power is … access to tremendous [amounts of] data about what we’re thinking, what we’re doing, what we want. So it’s the surveillance component in combination with the rest of those. And of course, AI just makes it turbocharged.

The movie about East Germany’s surveillance called ‘The Lives of Others’¹ … is a really powerful movie that describes what it’s like to be under 24/7 surveillance, which I experienced when I was in Washington litigating with the federal government.”

There’s a War for Your Mind

The problem is you’re not being surveilled and influenced by a single institution. Hundreds of entities, governments, companies and organizations are collecting and using your data to influence you for their own purposes. The challenge, then, is how to organize and manage your life in a way that optimizes and protects your own interests.

“The system we’re facing, which is very much driven by Big Tech, is trying to harvest or steal our wealth, and we’re trying to build wealth,” Fitts says. “Right now, for example, I think the No. 1 thing stopping anybody from building wealth is what I call the Great Poisoning.

So, instead of me just going in and doing whatever the software bots encourage me to do vis-a-vis food or nutrition or my health, it’s essential that I say, ‘Wait a minute. What are my personal goals, and how do I optimize them?’

And then work your way through this blizzard of online or electronic tools that are trying to talk you into whatever’s good for that institution or organization. It’s a war. It’s the only way I can describe it. It’s a war.”

Control to What End?

As noted by Fitts, one of the globalists’ goals is to capture your wealth and prevent you from building it. The question is why? They own most of the assets in the world already. There must be another motivation behind this wealth seizure, but what is it? Fitts explains:

“Money is simply a management system. Money is a control system. They’re not so much interested in money as [they are] in managing the crowd. And historically, one of the most profitable businesses, and the business that makes it easy to manage the crowd, is slavery.

Unfortunately, my personal experience with the folks within the Mr. Global basket, they believe in and practice slavery. And if you go back and look at why we canceled slavery the last time around, digital technology can solve those problems …

They truly believe they cannot trust the general population in a period of faster learning speeds and change to keep up and make intelligent decisions about the risk management issues they face … What are the risk issues that keep Mr. Global up at night? What are they worried about?

I believe one of the reasons they globalized was because they wanted to create the engineering and other capacity needed to go into space, because you don’t want to bet the ranch on one planet.

So, I think there’s a real push in space for a variety of reasons, but one of them is simply diversification. They are worried about one or more geophysical risks, is my guess.”

Projections for Crypto

In a previous interview, Fitts surprised me with her view on cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin’s creation and development are often attributed to the collective efforts of a group or individual using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, but the true identity (or identities) behind this pseudonym remains one of the most significant mysteries in the cryptocurrency world.

The common understanding is that Nakamoto is the ultimate altruist and abandoned his 1 million Bitcoin for the benefit of humanity. Nic Carter is a well-known figure in the cryptocurrency community, and he doesn’t buy that story and is convinced that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is responsible for creating Bitcoin. He believes Bitcoin was written by NSA cryptographers as a monetary bioweapon.²

Interestingly, after hundreds of hours of studying custodian issues, Fitts agrees with him. The question, then, is what will happen to Bitcoin and other crypto? Fitts weighs in:

“It depends on how their rollout of complete control works … As long as they have the ability to assert complete control and shut [crypto] down or marginalize it, it’s easy for [Mr. Global] to assert control. Until then, they can continue to pull money out of precious metals and real and hard assets by encouraging retail to go into crypto.

But they can also prototype lots of different technologies and methods with crypto. The brilliance of what they did with crypto is they got freedom fighters and hackers in the software world to figure everything out for them, and do it for free, as long as they just poured some money into pump and dump the thing.

So, it was a very, very clever strategy. The important thing to understand, if we had a free world and a world dedicated to freedom, we would absolutely use Bitcoin and cryptos. We would want an analog and a digital system, and we would want private currencies and community currencies both.

If you’re looking at this and thinking about an ideal financial system, your immediate reaction is, ‘Bitcoin’s great. What’s not to love about Bitcoin?’ So my objection is not to Bitcoin. My objection is to an all-digital system because that is what affords control. And I’m constantly seeing Bitcoin potentially used to help advantage the bad guys.

You see a lot of great, wonderful people being harmed with the pump-and-dumps. Every time they pump Bitcoin, I’m saying, please, please, please, if you swap into the pump, you’re creating taxable liabilities.

If you’re a U.S. citizen, please sell some and escrow your tax money because on the dump, you’re going to discover that your tax liability is greater than your entire position is valued. So please escrow taxes on the way up because otherwise, you’re going to be toast. And sure enough, every time we get a dump, I hear the pain of people who didn’t do that.”

Another recommendation by crypto experts is that if you’re going to enter crypto, you’ll want to do something called dollar cost averaging, or DCA, as you’re buying into it, so that you get the best price overall. You also want to do this coming out. So as Bitcoin goes up, you want to be selling. You have to take the profit.

“I have a couple of subscribers who are very knowledgeable financial people, and at the beginning of 2017, they said, ‘This is a scam. I’m going to play it like a speculative scam, and I’m going to make a lot of money.’ And they did,” Fitts says.

So, in summary, the existing crypto market is a prototype controlled by Mr. Global. It’s not what it appears to be. Unfortunately, probably less than 1% of the population understands this, and instead ends up on the losing end.

The Race Is on to Gobble Up Hard Assets

Fitts continues:

“One of the things that was very clear once the financial crisis hit was that the debt growth model was coming to an end and the race was on to get the hard assets.

In other words, you want the land. You want the precious metals. You want the water. You want the minerals … The war is now on for the real assets … So, you have the central bankers around the world buying gold, particularly in the BRIC nations. In 2005, Russia went on a program to completely move their reserves out of dollars and into gold.

In 2008, if you looked at the list of the 100 top landowners in the United States, by 2012 their landholdings had doubled. And so there was a real push by the central banks and the big money to move steadily into real estate and precious metals. Buffet is buying railroad companies; Buffet is buying the big gas producers or energy distribution companies.

And so you see this shift into hard assets. So, it’s a no-brainer that you would want to interest retail in digital assets to keep them out of the market. In other words, you want them to walk away from gold and buy Bitcoin, because the last thing you want is the competition to buy up all that stuff.”

As noted by Fitts, digital technology could be wonderful in helping us decentralize and build new wealth, but it’s not being used that way. Instead, it’s being used to centralize control, which siphons wealth out.

The Engineered Consolidation of Banks

Yesterday I posted an interview with investigative journalist Whitney Webb, in which she discussed the likelihood of a massive cyberattack on the banking system taking place sometime in 2024, which will then be used to usher in a Cyber Patriot Act.

So, for a period of time, the internet may be shut down, and when it’s brought back up, you won’t be able to access anything online unless you obtain authorization for your ISP through your digital identity, which will be tied to a central bank digital currency and social credit score. In short, to have any online access at all, you’ll then have to accept and enter into their digital control system.

“[A cyberattack on the banks] is one of the scenarios they’ve been working on,” Fitts says. “And there is no doubt right now there is an effort to control and engineer consolidation in the banking system. The question in my mind, which I don’t know the answer to is, will they be ready by 2024?

If you look at the Fed bringing up the FedNow system, it’s still voluntary to join it. And I just don’t know if, operationally, they can make this work in 2024. Now, if you look at what’s happening globally, they may be forced to just do it and have it be very organic and messy. But is this a plausible scenario? Yes, it’s a plausible scenario.”

You Need to Connect With Us on Mobile in Case Internet Is Gone

We have no idea how long the internet will be down, but it could be weeks or longer. We will be unable to provide you with important updates if this happens and we only have your email. That is why I am urging you to please sign up in the form below so we can connect with you by messaging your phone. (U.S. phone numbers only,)

Safeguard Important Information

I believe we have a very limited time with the internet as we currently know it. Already, it’s exponentially inferior to what we had previously, before all the censorship was rolled out. It’s getting more and more difficult to access truth, especially pertaining to health.

The resources you’re going need to survive and thrive in the coming times are already being culled out of reach. What this means is that you need to safeguard that information now. Today. Make sure you have hard copies of important health information. Buy books. Save important information on a hard drive that isn’t connected to the internet. Fitts agrees, noting:

“For 15 years, I’ve been making sure I buy everything I need in hard copy on the assumption that everything digital would be censored — that we would need a library of gardening and all sorts of technologies and skills. One of the things I would say to our listeners is, if you don’t have it in hard copy, for heaven’s sakes, print it out or buy it now because you want to have a complete archive of everything you need in analog form.

If you read the stories of who did well in the Depression, what you hear are stories of people in communities that had among each other all the skills they needed for survival. I often talk with people about how to start community currencies or network currencies, and what I say to them is, ‘Look, if you haven’t worked out the health and food, whatever you do in the currency area won’t work.’

‘Pharma Food’ … our latest wrap-up, is on synthetic food and lab-grown meat. It’s the most terrifying thing. Elze van Hamelen did ‘Pharma Food’ and then we had her do ‘Dutch Farmers and Fishermen.’ Both of them show how the Dutch farmer and fishermen are connected to the whole global agenda, One Health, the WHO, everything … So these two pieces really sort of out what they’re doing in the food area.

One of the reasons they’re trying to get complete central control of food is you can’t get central control of the financial system and currency unless you have control of food. They’re two sides of the same coin. So you absolutely want to make sure, in the health and food area, that you are ready to be as resilient as you possibly can be.”

With such an uncertain future ahead of us, I’m putting together a comprehensive 10-module video course that will be available to Substack subscribers. It’s a compilation of the most important information I’ve learned in the last 50 years about health and resilience. Subscribers will then be able to download these videos and the transcripts, so they have access to the information even if they don’t have internet access.

An Alternate Reset Is Possible

Fitts continues:

“In 1991, I came out of the Bush administration, and I said, ‘They’re going to take digital technology and kill us all. We need another plan.’ So basically, I spent the ’90s prototyping how we could do a positive reset … a wealth-building reset that would protect and preserve the middle class, which is very possible even at this late stage.

I was absolutely convinced that part of getting that kind of reset going was a critical mass of people who understood that this push to centralized control was going to go to a place we couldn’t afford to go. I mean, first of all, it’s going to destroy us. They’re trying to steal our stuff and kill us.

I wrote an online book called ‘Dillon Read and the Aristocracy,’ about how they were targeting poor neighborhoods with the predatory lending and the pill mills and the private prison sweeps, et cetera. But I think a lot of people thought, ‘Oh, that’s just poor people. I’m safe.’

What I’m now seeing that I have not seen until now, is a critical mass of people saying, ‘You know something? My doctors are lying to me. I cannot trust them. My government is lying to me. I cannot trust them. And in fact, there is a plan to kill me.’ And it relates to the food, it relates to the spray, it relates to the pesticides, it relates to the injections, it relates to the pharmaceuticals — [nothing] is trustworthy.

This is the first time since 1991 that I’ve seen a critical mass of very capable, well-educated professional people with real skills … coming together and saying, ‘This was a mass atrocity. They’re trying to kill us.’ And that’s a breakthrough because once you have a clear picture of the problem, then you start to use your time effectively.”

Helpful Resources

The Solari Report has a collection of reports and videos that explain the dangers of our current path and how to get out of it. Here’s a quick list:

Fitts comments:

“We’re constantly putting out lists of what people can do, and saying, ‘This is a buffet. Don’t do everything on this list. Do the ones you can do and are energizing and feasible for you to do.’ If everybody does that, it’s a revolution.”

How State Legislators Can Protect Their Residents

The powers not delegated to the federal government by the states are reserved to the states, and as explained by Fitts, state legislators have the power to create independent payment and custodian systems that can protect citizens and stop the Federal Reserve and the treasury from imposing their new slave system.

“If Whitney’s scenario comes through, the next thing that happens is whether it’s the real estate, or the precious metals, or the securities, the bank deposits, they’re looking basically to siphon off and control or steal every asset …

Given that there’s $ 21 trillion missing from the U.S. government treasury, there is legal basis to create common law right of offsets that give the state legislators the power to offset, as long as they have the financial train tracks set up within the state, even if we have to do it by pony express and bicycle.

So, if the treasury and Fed try to steal our pension fund securities, or steal citizen securities, or play games with custodians or the banks, the states have that legal power, so come the time when they cut off your bank account … there is a place to go.

You don’t necessarily have to have a state bank, but it’s very helpful to have a state bank. You would be amazed at the speed at which a state legislator can bring up either a state bank or independent state payment mechanisms, and they would be well-served to do that, because unless they do it they cannot create the conditions of sovereignty for their citizens.

They have the power to create those conditions of sovereignty. My advice would be to do a sovereign state bank if you can constitutionally. If not, put together independent payment systems that connect the state with the state banks and the citizens, and do a bullion depository. You’re going to need a bullion depository, as Texas has done.

If you can get 25% to 30% supporting their state legislators to do that, we have a way to jump the curb and say, ‘No, we’re not going into that system. We have an alternative’ …

If you look at how they control the money at the federal government, it’s controlled one county at a time. If you look at what a wealth building reset would look like, it would be a tremendous decentralization and re-engineering of the money.

Right now, 50% or more of the income in any county in America, the 3,100 counties, goes through the federal government. It has a negative return on investment. It’s being spent invested to get control instead of to encourage productivity.

That could change overnight. If we broke free at the state level, and were free to re-engineer the cash flows, the speed at which we could go from negative return to positive return is astonishing … Tyranny is far more expensive than anybody realizes …

When I was assistant secretary of housing and then when I started my investment bank to help re-engineer communities, we simulated how to re-engineer the money by place, bottom up. Of course, it’s very unique to your place, your skills, your ability and what your geographic and people resources are, so it’s going to be very diverse, but you want enormous global and domestic communication between networks.

You want local optimization … and you want communication going back and forth between communities all across the country and the world. Think of this as every country and every county is full of wonderful people who’ve been going along with a criminal syndicate and it’s like a tapeworm. We need to detox the criminal syndicate and go back to productive living. That’s going to be part local, and it’s going to be part national or global. It’s both.”

Additional Suggestions

In the interview, we also discuss other ways in which you can build your resilience. Here’s a summary breakdown of Fitts’ key suggestions:

Articles

Dealing With Differences in Opinions When Emotions Are High

We have all been in this situation: we are having a hearty conversation, it is flowing smoothly, and then suddenly, a “wrong” opinion is uttered, and all hell breaks loose. Passions and accusations start flying — traitor this, idiot that, how dare you think this way — and it suddenly feels like somebody had hung a dusty coat over the room of well-intended people, the good spirits have left, all bets are off now, etc.

We have gone through a lot of this dramatic community breakdown in the past 3.5 years because of “COVID.” Now, we are seeing another round of it due to the differences in opinion about situation in the Middle East. I experienced this kind of dynamic very viscerally a few years ago when the Russians and the Ukrainians, formerly mutually affectionate members of the Soviet expat community, inadvertently found themselves in the opposite corners of the political boxing ring.

All of a sudden, the people who had partied, drank and celebrated together for years felt uneasy and hostile toward each other, and any “wrong” word on either side easily led to angry outbreaks. Thanks for nothing, international war mongers and intelligence agencies, you succeeded at messing with people’s heads for now, and I know your success is temporary, but jeez, thanks.

We Get Pulled Into Hostilities We Don’t Benefit From

That particular experience from a few years ago was so heartbreaking. It felt like a dead end. It was as if the old camaraderie that had existed among all different Soviet expats “died studently,” and the good vibes said goodbye and left.

It was even more heartbreaking given the fact that modern geopolitical hostilities and big wars are nothing but mob battles and money laundering. They have little to do with what’s good for us, good people on the ground. Big wars happen against our best interests, and they hurt us deeply no matter which side we find ourselves on.

Regular people usually don’t want to be forced to drop everything and go to war just because some cold-blooded jerk upstairs wants to get richer and more powerful. The people on the ground don’t want to be fighting in a war! We don’t want our children to be dying in any war! Only the ones whose children are safe from being sent to war want the war! It has always been this way.

Most of us desire to live our lives in peace, to love our families, to stay out of trouble, and — a few inevitable everyday grudges aside — to get along. The blood-thirsty profiteers of war typically have to resort to tremendously sophisticated trickery and “people squeezing” in order to drag regular people into their dirty wars.

The profiteers know how to do it, though. They are expert liars and squeezers of ordinary people. History is proof that they have been quite successful at creating massive suffering, and then some more massive suffering — and then some more. Shame on them. A million times, in a million heartfelt voices, shame on them.

Here is a short and greatly oversimplified rendition of the story of the Christmas Truce. Even an oversimplified rendition makes the philosophical point.

We Are Allowed to Have “Special Loves”

Let us talk about the cancel culture for a second. One of the major attributes of the cancel culture is that everyone is supposed to toe the line. Everyone is expected to have the same preferences, the same concerns — and to dance to the same drum.

But we, human beings, are all different! We come from our unique and respectable ancestries, we learn different stories growing up — and besides, our souls all have “custom” missions here on Earth that require us to have “custom” loves! Only a tyrant enjoys a world where everyone agrees with him on everything and feels only what he allows them to feel.

Personally, I don’t get “triggered” one bit (what a word!) when people speak from a place of a special affection for their — not mine, their — “tribe.” Why wouldn’t people have affectionate feelings for their ancestry? I have affection for mine, so why wouldn’t they? It is healthy and natural to feel affection toward one’s ancestry and to honor it with love — as long as one’s love for their own doesn’t turn into cruelty and abuse of the people on the outside.

When that happens, when the people go along with the temptation to forego their conscience, we can say that the tricksters who wanted to “guide” the people toward narrow-mindedness and the betrayal of their innate spiritual depth have succeeded for the time being, and the seed of suffering began to germinate. Unfortunately, by the law of physics, the result will follow.

Love for One’s People Is Not the Same as Cheering for Wars or Genocides

It is tragic when that happens but we know that it happens quite a bit. When conniving, power-hungry manipulators transform the natural love and respect that the people have for their “blood family” into a drive for unfair and cruel behavior toward others, the seed of suffering does begin to germinate.

How do the tricksters do it? They use the existing imbalances and the suffering of the ordinary people — often created by the likes of them — to weaponize the people against the innocents. This is the psychological dynamic that makes unjust, devastating, large-scale wars possible. People get so overtaken and blinded by their own suffering that they agree to betray their souls and their own long-term best interests in exchange for the promise of pain relief.

I consider such manipulation to be an act of sophisticated spiritual warfare. Using various lies, the dominators trick goodhearted people into becoming traitors.

When good people do dark things, it weakens their own spiritual protections, walks them over to the dark side, and — as if to illustrate the balance of Yin and Yang — it places them at the start of a long journey, in the course of which they will have to go through new trials and tribulations in order to swim out of darkness and back to light.

In the end, there is always light, and by the time the journey is completed, the souls grow and glow — but the journey out of the darkness and toward the light can be long and trying, and so the tricksters really don’t do the people whom they weaponize against the innocent any big favors — no matter how advantageous it may look in the short term.

This chicanery has happened so many times in history, to so many people, on so many occasions! One would think that we would collectively know to see through this trick by now — but no. We still happily fall for it.

When You Love Someone, You Want Them to Heal, Not to Hurt Forever

Politicians have deep pockets, and their pockets are full of not just bribe money but also wicked tricks. One of the tricks they like to play is making the people obsess with their trauma and pain — and milk that trauma and pain for their, politicians’ gain. Wokism is one example but it is just one of many, and this pattern keeps playing out again and again.

Let us use an exaggerated metaphor. Imagine, you are a parent of a sweet child, the child gets abused by a criminal and develops PTSD. Imagine that as long as your child has PTSD, you get paid. As a parent, would you rather your child leave the dreadful memory behind and completely heal — or stay traumatized for as long as possible so that you receive the aid?

I believe the answer is obvious. Only a parent who is a total mess — and I mean a total mess — would desire for the child’s trauma to linger for a long time. But if somebody — an external party, a manipulator — has no heart and no desire to care for the child, they would make sure to keep the child in a traumatized state. And get paid.

For that reason, in my own life, I don’t trust any political entities milking pain. People’ trauma may be real, and solutions for healing may be necessary — but if anyone is trying to use the existing pain to create divisions, animosities, and new pain — I don’t listen to them.

Weaponizing “Rational” Ideas

As I recently wrote:

“As a general rule, I don’t put a lot of weight on people’s ideas. It has been my entire life’s experience that ideas are the tail that wags the dog. They are just self-directed marketing brochures that the brain reads out loud to us as it works to justify our right to act on our emotional desires.

We, human beings, tend to use all sorts of ideas to “validate” our emotional desires — and so we act on our love, our courage, our jealousy, anger, insecurity, etc. — and then tell ourselves fairy tales about why we did that. If history is any evidence, it seems clear that both acts of outwardly beauty and bloody atrocities have been committed — again and again — in the name of every religion and every ism!

An important caveat is that our brain’s self-directed adverting brochures are often composed by various tricksters who “slip” those ideas into the people’s heads and then convince them that the ideas are their own. It works like metaphorical sorcery. Alongside the ideas, the tricksters often slip “ideas adoption incentives” (economic, psychological, social, and otherwise).

The “advertising” effort is usually made in combination with the effort to disconnect the people from their souls by exposing them to violence, humiliation, fear, lies, distraction, etc. — which sometimes leads the people to lose faith in the sanctity of their own sovereign souls and become perpetually sad — or go toward another extreme, get arrogant, and commit acts of cowardice and betrayal.

Once s person commits an act of cowardice or betrayal, for example, his intellectual mind may be in denial of his act of cowardice but his soul knows — and so his “helpful” brain would double down on defending the fairy tale that “validates” the questionable act.

And that is how a human being starts on a philosophical journey of separation, the destination of which is always remembering and reuniting with the soul.”

It Is Possible to Disagree on Things and Still Respect Each Other’s Souls

Personally, when it comes to discussing opinions — political or otherwise — I separate between the “factual correctness of their narrative” and the intention or tone of the debate. It is fairly easy to talk to the people whose “information” is in my opinion incorrect but whose hearts are in the right place.

If they are willing to accept me and respect as a fellow human being even though I may have a reading of the world that is different from theirs, they are acting in a mature fashion, and I certainly feel the same way about them.

On the other hand, when the other person acts like a hungry ghost and cannot be at peace unless he establishes a “victory,” if his sole intention to be “right,” I don’t invest too much effort into that debate. It is noble to try and there is always a chance of a miracle but at the end of the day, people think what they want to think — and they are entitled to that. At the end of the day, the only person we can legitimately control is ourselves.

There is a lot of trauma in this world, a lot of dogma, and a lot of people who are not themselves. This is a spiritual condition, being dogmatic is a sign of being starved:

“When good people cling to “ideas” militantly and get triggered by the fact that your reading of the world is different from their reading of the world, it’s because their connection to their own soul is weak, and they are under a significant influence by a “handler” ghost.

When they feel an impulse to convert you to their faith against your will, or to humiliate you and then do a little dance on top of their mental hill, it’s not them running the show, it’s their handler ghost.”

Conclusion

We are living history, and in every challenging situation, there is a lesson and opportunity for growth. Learning how to remain even-headed and grounded in spiritual honesty under pressure is a very valuable skill. Once we learn it, we can use it to our own advantage and to move the world a little closer to healing. Nothing we go through gets wasted. Everything is an adventure for our soul.

Each of us is a miracle, we are tiny dots filed with infinite love and courage, moving along the mysterious trajectory of human history that spans hundreds of thousands of years.

And no matter how difficult our journey may be, how many painful or regrettable things we go through, how twisted the route, the destination is always healing, and the point is always love. There is no other point in this mess besides remembering the love.

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

Articles

For decades, the conventional medical establishment and media have downplayed if not entirely ignored evidence showing that sun exposure is a crucial part of a healthy lifestyle that prevents, as opposed to creates, diseases — including cancer.

Is that about to change? It’s too early to tell, but surprisingly supportive scientific papers and mainstream media articles have recently highlighted the benefits of sun exposure and vitamin D optimization.

Scientific Review Highlights Importance of Vitamin D

Among them is a scientific review published in the peer-reviewed journal Cureus, in which the authors highlight “the intricate relationship between Vitamin D and patient outcomes.” An excerpt from the paper, “The Sunlight-Vitamin D Connection: Implications for Patient Outcomes in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit,” reads:¹

“Vitamin D, known for its multifaceted roles in immune modulation, inflammation regulation, and maintenance of calcium homeostasis, emerges as a pivotal factor in the care of critically ill patients.

Our exploration reveals a high prevalence of Vitamin D deficiency in the SICU, primarily attributable to limited sunlight exposure, comorbidities, and medication use.

Importantly, Vitamin D status impacts infection rates, mortality, and length of stay in the SICU, making it a clinically relevant consideration … The prospect of personalized Vitamin D supplementation strategies offers promise for optimizing patient care.”

The paper goes on to stress that vitamin D’s “crucial role in maintaining human health” goes well beyond its classical role in bone health (by regulating calcium and phosphorus homeostasis).

“Emerging evidence suggests that vitamin D exerts a much broader influence on various physiological processes,” the authors note. For example, they point out that vitamin D is “a potent immunomodulator, influencing the innate and adaptive immune responses”:

“In the innate immune response, Vitamin D enhances the production of antimicrobial peptides like cathelicidins and defensins, which are essential for defense against infections.

The adaptive immune response regulates the proliferation and differentiation of T and B cells, two critical immune system components. By modulating the immune response, Vitamin D can help the body defend against pathogens and may be involved in autoimmune diseases where the immune system mistakenly attacks the body’s tissues.”

As such, vitamin D deficiency has been linked to health conditions such as osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. According to this paper, vitamin D is also “crucial for the functioning of the nervous system and has been associated with mental health disorders.”

Vitamin D is also a key regulator of cell growth and differentiation, and “Proper cell growth and differentiation regulation is crucial for maintaining tissue health and preventing abnormal cell proliferation, often associated with cancer,” the authors state.

Sensible Sunlight Exposure Is the Primary Source of Vitamin D

Importantly, the authors accurately stress that sunlight is the primary source of vitamin D, and while sunburn needs to be avoided, this risk needs to be balanced with the need for vitamin D production:²

“When ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation from the sun penetrates the skin, it triggers a series of enzymatic reactions that lead to the synthesis of Vitamin D in the body. This process highlights the crucial role of sunlight exposure in maintaining adequate Vitamin D levels …

Using clothing that covers most of the skin and applying sunscreen can block UVB radiation, inhibiting Vitamin D synthesis. While protecting the skin from harmful UV radiation is essential to prevent sunburn and skin cancer, individuals may need to balance sun protection practices with the need for Vitamin D production.

Strategies such as exposing uncovered skin for short periods or considering Vitamin D supplements may be necessary when sun protection is paramount.”

Vitamin D in Critical Illness

The authors also review the clinical implications of vitamin D in critically ill ICU patients, where the scientific evidence shows vitamin D deficiency:³

• Increases infection rates, including hospital-acquired nosocomial infections
• May increase mortality rates in SICU patients
• Is associated with longer hospital stays

Conversely, higher vitamin D levels in SICU patients have been shown to:

To improve outcomes in SICU patients, the authors recommend taking an individualized approach, where patients with documented vitamin D deficiencies are given vitamin D supplements, with vitamin D3 (the active form) being preferred over D2 (the synthetic version), as it raises levels more effectively.

The authors also accurately recommend assessing the patient’s baseline vitamin D level through blood testing before supplementing, to determine the extent of the deficiency, and to monitor the level during and after supplementation. This is the only way to ensure vitamin D sufficiency, because it’s the blood level that matters, not the individual dose. In conclusion, the authors made the following comments:⁴

“Through our exploration of Vitamin D’s immunomodulatory effects, anti-inflammatory properties, and role in maintaining calcium homeostasis, it becomes evident that Vitamin D is a critical factor influencing the recovery and overall health of SICU patients.

Despite the challenges and complexities surrounding accurate assessment and supplementation, the implications for clinical practice are substantial. Routine screening, individualized dosing strategies, and patient education can help optimize care in the SICU.”

Vitamin D Status Can Predict COVID-19 Mortality Rate

In November 2020, I coauthored a scientific review on vitamin D’s impact on COVID-19. That paper, “Evidence Regarding Vitamin D and Risk of COVID-19 and Its Severity” was published in the journal Nutrients.⁵

Media vilified me for my stance on vitamin D, and one journalist went so far as to claim she “couldn’t verify” that I was the author of this peer-reviewed paper, all in an effort to discredit me.

Since then, the evidence for vitamin D against COVID has only grown stronger. Most recently, an observational study^6,7 from China concluded that vitamin D status can predict your risk of death from COVID-19, as well as the severity of your symptoms in the acute phase.

The study, published in the Virology Journal, analyzed data from 399 COVID patients hospitalized between December 2022 and February 2023. The patients were categorized into three groups based on their vitamin D blood levels at admission (normal: 30 ng/mL or higher, insufficient: 20-29 ng/mL, or deficient: less than 20 ng/mL).

Analysis revealed that vitamin D deficiency was associated with more severe symptoms and having a vitamin D level lower than 36.04 ng/mL was predictive for death.

The predictability of COVID-19 mortality was even greater when vitamin D levels were considered together with levels of interleukin-5 (IL-5) and eosinophil. Patients with vitamin D below 36.04 ng/mL, IL-5 higher than 1.7 pg/mL, and an eosinophil count of less than 0.015 had the highest risk of death.

What’s particularly notable here is that 36.04 ng/mL is within the “normal” range for vitamin D, clearly illustrating that “normal” is far from optimal, and not enough when your life hangs in the balance. Most vitamin D experts consider 30 ng/mL half of what an optimum vitamin D level should be, which is 60 to 80 ng/mL.

‘Unexpected’ Life Extension Benefits

October 1, 2023, The Guardian also ran an article⁸ highlighting some of the “unexpected” benefits of sun exposure, including longer life expectancy and a reduced risk of death from skin cancer. Of course, anyone who has spent any amount of time investigating the matter will not be surprised. That said, here’s an excerpt from that article, written by science correspondent Linda Geddes:

“For decades, it has been drilled into us that if the sun is out, we’d better slip on protective clothing, slop on suncream and slap on a hat to stay safe. There’s little doubt that too much sun exposure — and particularly sunburn — increases our risk of developing skin cancer.

It also prematurely ages the skin. But scientists are increasingly questioning the mantra that sunlight is an evil to be avoided at all costs, and investigating the brighter side of sun exposure.

It’s not just about vitamin D. Though important for strong bones and teeth this sun-induced vitamin is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the physiological processes that are influenced by sunlight falling on the skin. Sunseekers may even have a longer lifespan.

This counterintuitive connection first came to light in 2014, when a Swedish researcher … published the results of a large study⁹ that followed the health of around 30,000 women over 20 years.

It found that, on average, women who spent more time in the sun lived for one to two years longer than those who avoided the sun, even after taking into account factors such as wealth, education and exercise.

This increased life expectancy appeared to stem from lower rates of cardiovascular disease and other non-cancer-related illnesses, including type 2 diabetes, autoimmune disease and chronic lung disease.

Other studies¹⁰ have since identified a similar pattern, including among pale-skinned Britons … [T]hose with more active sun-seeking behavior were 14% less likely to die from any cause during the [13-year] study period compared to sun avoiders, and their risk of death from cardiovascular disease was 19% lower …

Curiously, active sunseekers’ risk of dying from cancer, including skin cancers, was also 14% lower. [A] similar pattern has been seen in other studies too.”

Your Skin Has Built-In Protective Mechanisms

Geddes accurately describes how melanin, the pigment that gives your skin its dark color, protects your skin cells from DNA damage by absorbing ultraviolet sun rays. This is what causes you to develop a tan. She also explains how melanin production is activated by the release of beta-endorphins in response to sunlight, which have stress- and pain relieving effects all of their own.

And, while skin cancer can be triggered by repeated sunburn that damages your skin, people who get lots of sun exposure still have longer life expectancy than those who avoid the sun. So, clearly, routine sun exposure is not a prescription for death by skin cancer. Quite the opposite.

The key, really, is to avoid the skin damage caused by sunburns,¹¹ and the easiest way to do that is by gradually building up a tan. Start by exposing large portions of skin for only five to 15 minutes if you’re fair-skinned, and longer if you have naturally darker skin, around solar noon.

You want your skin to develop just the slightest hint of pink, then cover back up. Each day after that, add a few more minutes. This will allow your melanin to do its job and protect your skin cells from UV damage. If you start in the spring, by mid-summer, you’ll be able to spend hours outside without burning, and your risk of skin cancer will then be minimal.

Vitamin D Supplements Do Not Confer the Same Benefits

Thankfully, Geddes also accurately notes that vitamin D supplements do not confer the same benefits as sun exposure, and that your vitamin D level is a biomarker of sun exposure, which is something I’ve been stressing for quite some time. Never in the history of mankind have we relied on pills for vitamin D production, and there’s no evidence to suggest that it would be wise to do so. Geddes writes:¹²

“Surprisingly though, large long-term trials assessing the impact of taking daily vitamin D supplements to prevent these conditions have produced mixed results, prompting some researchers to question whether they may have been looking at this from the wrong perspective.

‘Your vitamin D level is a biomarker that you have been in the sun, but it is not necessarily the active agent involved in human disease pathogenesis,’ says Prof Prue Hart at the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth, Australia …

As evidence mounts for these potentially beneficial effects of sunlight, so do calls for a rethink of public health advice on how best to stay safe in the sun.

In 2020, Weller, Hart, Lindqvist and 12 other researchers published a review¹³ in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, alerting doctors and policymakers to the ‘significant public health problem of insufficient sun exposure.’

While they don’t dispute that UV exposure is a major cause of skin cancer, they believe the ‘Slip, Slap, Slop’ approach to sun avoidance — originally advocated by Cancer Council Australia, but now broadly adopted in other countries — may be damaging the health of people living in high-latitude countries such as the UK.”

The one drawback with using sun exposure to maintain a protective vitamin D level is that there’s simply not enough sunlight hitting the earth year-round in some areas. If you live north of 37 degrees North latitude, you may still need a vitamin D supplement to get you through the winter.

Cancer Organizations Trade Skin Cancer for Internal Cancers

Indeed, the U.S. Surgeon General,^14,15 the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) and many other cancer organizations recommend complete and total sun avoidance in order to prevent skin cancer. The AAD will not even acknowledge different recommendations based on skin type.

This is a disastrous recommendation, as having a vitamin D blood level of 40 ng/mL or higher is a key prevention tool for all types of cancer, including internal cancers that are far deadlier than melanoma (malignant skin cancer). Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that it can significantly reduce your cancer risk, and increase your chances of surviving cancer if you do get it.^16,17

For example, researchers at the University of California found that women with a vitamin D serum level of 40 ng/mL or greater had a 67% lower risk of cancer compared to women with levels of 20 ng/mL or less.^18,19

The study included ALL invasive cancers, except for skin cancer, and had a follow-up period of nearly four years. Higher vitamin D is also associated with lower all-cause mortality.^20,21 So, essentially, the recommendation to avoid all sun exposure trades the low risk of skin cancer for a far greater risk of deadly internal cancers.

By adhering to sensible sun exposure guidelines and making sure you do not get burned, you can maximize your benefits and minimize the risks of skin damage that could lead to skin cancer.

On the whole, overexposure to the sun, not all sun exposure, is the real problem when it comes to raising your risk for skin cancer.²² Meanwhile, optimizing your vitamin D via regular UV exposure can help decrease your risk of well over a dozen different cancers that are far more common and far more deadly than melanoma.

Brittle Bones Is a Serious Problem

Optimizing your vitamin D with sensible sun exposure will also protect you against osteopenia (brittle bones) and osteoporosis (bone loss), the prevalence of which is on the rise among younger people.

As of 2020, an estimated 12.3 million Americans over 50 were affected by osteoporosis, and an additional 47 million younger Americans were in the early stages.²³ If your bones are getting compromised in your 40s or even 30s, what life expectancy, not to mention quality of life, can you really expect?

Fosamax and other bisphosphonate drugs are not the answer to this, as they are incredibly toxic and can raise your risk of bone fractures, particularly in the thigh bone.²⁴

The reason for this is because these drugs strengthen your bones, but they do that by inhibiting your body’s ability to absorb old bone. As a result, the bone becomes harder, but also more brittle. Truly healthy bone is hard yet flexible.

Other side effects of bisphosphonate drugs include gastrointestinal problems, gastric ulcers, flu-like symptoms, severe bone, joint and muscle pain, and osteonecrosis of the jawbone.

Optimizing your vitamin D and getting sufficient exercise is a far better route for most people. KAATSU, or blood flow restriction (BFR) training is a great option if you’re frail and/or out of shape, as you don’t need heavy weights.

Recent research²⁵ has confirmed that BFR increases not only muscle mass but also bone mass, “primarily through several hormonal pathways at the same time it enhances cardiovascular function.”

As noted by the authors, “The improvements in mobility and gait are indicators of greater health-related quality of life minimizing disability in older adults.” For more details on how BFR works its magic, see my previous article “How to Stay Fit for Life.”

Articles

• Dr Ramin Raouf from King’s College London and Grünenthal strive to develop reliable microfluidic culture models relevant for pain research based on human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons
• Grünenthal has expertise in developing human induced pluripotent stem cells towards sensory neurones and will support the lab of Dr Raouf with a total consideration of more than £350.000.

Aachen, Germany and London, England, 27 April 2023 – Grünenthal and King’s College London announced a 24 months collaboration to develop microfluidic culture (MFC) models based on human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and tailored to pain research. The collaboration aims to build on Dr Ramin Raouf’s pioneering work on MFCs by establishing models using human iPSC-derived neurons that closely mimic the functionality of human nociceptive neurones. Grünenthal will support the lab of Dr Raouf with its competencies in characterising human iPSCs and a total consideration of more than £350.000.

The collaboration aims to address a significant need for better transational models in pain research. Traditional rodent behavioural models have frequently failed to translate into the clinical setting due to fundamental differences in molecular, cellular and genetic mechanisms of pain across species. As a result, there is a high interest in establishing pre-clinical models that can more accurately represent the conditions in the human body. Chronic pain is a considerable burden that impacts up to one in five people worldwide and is the most common reason for seeking medical help. It stresses healthcare systems and economies, while patients frequently experience limited efficacy from available medicines.

“Compared to traditional cell culture techniques, microfluidic cultures replicate more accurately the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. Therefore, they can provide significant advantages in pre-clinical pain research”, says Dr Ramin Raouf, Lecturer in Molecular Neuroscience at King’s College London. “I believe adapting them with human iPSCs will create a transformative platform for generating translatable insights into the mechanisms of pain which will eventually contribute to reducing the attrition rate in clinical development.”

“We are delighted to join forces with Dr Ramin Raouf, a leading expert in microfluidic culture models. Taking this method to the next level may significantly enhance our understanding of how investigational medicines modulate pain”, says Jan Adams, M.D., Chief Scientific Officer Grünenthal. “As a leading company in pain research, our ambition is to play a crucial role in developing such pioneering methodologies. We aim to anchor these competencies in our organisation and to include such models in our pre-clinical repertoire.”

Grünenthal and Dr Ramin Raouf share a common research interest in neuroscience and the investigation of mechanisms of pathological pain. Dr Ramin Raouf is a world-leading researcher in the field of microfluidic cultures who pioneered the use of microfluidic culture models to study nociceptive neurons and established sophisticated rodent models. Grünenthal is a global leader in pain research and management and has delivered six essential treatment options for pain patients in the last decades. Today, the company is dedicated to creating the next generation of innovative non-opioid pain treatments. For R&D, Grünenthal executes a distinctive therapeutic area strategy focusing on four key pain indications: peripheral neuropathic pain, chronic post-surgical pain, chronic low back pain, and osteoarthritis.

About induced pluripotent stem cells
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are derived from a somatic cell that has been reprogrammed back into a pluripotent state by either introducing specific genes coding for transcription factors or adding small molecules that regulate cell identity. Those iPSCs can be differentiated into different cell types with unique characters, including peripheral sensory neurons.

About microfluidic cultures
Microfluidic devices are compartmentalised chips consisting of different chambers, sometimes called ´lab on a chip´ or ‘tissue chips’, allowing cell-to-cell contact via a series of connecting channels. Microfluidic cultures are used in this present collaboration to investigate the effects of analgesic compounds on different cellular compartments of the pain-sensing neuronal network, as well as the communication between neurons involved in pathological pain signalling.

About Grünenthal
Grünenthal is a global leader in pain management and related diseases. As a science-based, privately-owned pharmaceutical company, we have a long track record of bringing innovative treatments and state-of-the-art technologies to patients worldwide. Our purpose is to change lives for the better, and innovation is our passion. We are focusing all our activities and efforts on working towards our vision of a world free of pain.

Grünenthal is headquartered in Aachen, Germany, and has affiliates in 28 countries across Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. Our products are available in approx. 100 countries. In 2022, Grünenthal employed around 4,400 people and achieved revenues of €1.7 bn.

More information: www.grunenthal.com

Follow us on:
LinkedIn: Grunenthal Group
Instagram: grunenthal

About King’s College London and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience

King’s College London is one of the top 35 universities in the world and one of the top 10 in Europe (QS World University Rankings, 2021/22) and among the oldest in England. King’s has more than 33,000 students (including more than 12,800 postgraduates) from over 150 countries worldwide, and 8,500 staff. King’s has an outstanding reputation for world-class teaching and cutting-edge research.

The Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s is a leading centre for mental health and neuroscience research in Europe. It produces more highly cited outputs (top 1% citations) on psychiatry and mental health than any other centre (SciVal 2021), and on this metric has risen from 16th (2014) to 4th (2021) in the world for highly cited neuroscience outputs. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), 90% of research at the IoPPN was deemed ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ (3* and 4*). World-leading research from the IoPPN has made, and continues to make, an impact on how we understand, prevent and treat mental illness, neurological conditions, and other conditions that affect the brain.

www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn | Follow @KingsIoPPN on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn

For further information please contact

Grünentha

Source: RealWire

Releases feed from RealWire

For more than a century, scientists have noticed water has a variety of unusual properties that do not fit within the classic model of it being just a solid, liquid or gas.

Gerald Pollack built upon those observations, and eventually determined that when a negatively charged surface is present, if an appropriate energy source is also present (particularly infrared — which is everywhere), the water will assemble itself into layers of offset hexagonal sheets with the formula H₃O₂ that behave like a liquid crystal.

Note: In addition to light, sound can also generate H₃O₂.

In my eyes, liquid crystalline water is a critically under appreciated area of science as it provides a mechanism to explain many of the unexplained mysteries of the body (e.g., how do so many fluids flow within it despite there being no known pump to move them) and a way to put words into much of what we frequently observe within the body.

What Is Liquid Crystalline Water?

Liquid crystalline water has a significant degree of solidity, and will expel most things from entering it (e.g., polystyrene microspheres), including the displaced hydrogen atoms (as it is H_1.5O not H₂O). These displaced positively charged H atoms (henceforth referred to as protons), in turn assemble immediately outside this lattice, thereby creating a pH and charge gradient which can be measured.

In many cases, these H₃O₂ lattices can be enormous — in favorable conditions, Pollack and others have measured ones ranging from 0.1 millimeters to 0.5 millimeters (100,000 to 500,000 nanometers or nm) in size. Cells depend on this water, so they contain a large number of surfaces from which the water can form.

For example, 20% of the cell is occupied by its cytoskeleton (a protein lattice which maintains its structure), and analysis of high-voltage electron micrographs have shown that within the cytoskeleton, over half of the water present is within 5 nm of a surface it could potentially form H₃O₂ on (for reference a single H₂O molecule is 0.27 nm in size).

Since the surface sites that water can structure on are so closely packed together in cells, it is understandable why liquid crystalline water (also commonly called EZ water) would be so much more apparent to individuals observing living cells under a microscope (which in fact is where much of the early research on H₃O₂ originated from). This in turn raises another question: why are cells designed to create so much liquid crystalline water?

Note: A longer article describing the long history of research into liquid crystalline water (H₃O₂) and its physical properties can be read here.

Mysteries of the Cell

In the previous article, I discussed a common issue I observe within science. When an incorrect model is utilized to explain a natural process, discrepancies between the model’s predictions and reality will inevitably appear.

One would expect that when this happens, it would encourage those espousing the erroneous model to re-examine their model, but instead, since so much has been invested into that model, they instead will denounce any challenges to it, and come up with innumerable creative ways to explain away each failure of the existing model.

Consider, for example, the initial promises of the vaccines (if you get two doses, you were told that you would be completely immune, transmission would stop, and COVID-19 would rapidly fade into memory). Since the clinical trials for the vaccines were fraudulent, none of the vaccines’ promises materialized, and the COVID situation instead became worse.

However, instead of healthcare authorities (and the medical community) admitting their mistake and switching to a different approach for managing COVID-19, they doubled down on the vaccine mandates and moved the goal posts over and over in regards to what mass-vaccination (and boosting) was actually supposed to accomplish.

Likewise, for cellular biology, our knowledge of the cell is surprisingly primitive and the existing models often fail to explain what occurs within the cellular environment. However, since the alternative models are not generally accepted by the scientific community, we have been forced to continually patch the existing models so that they can somewhat account for the innumerable mysteries of life.

At this point, I believe one of the key causes of this situation is scientific research becoming distorted to prioritize focusing on discoveries that industry can profit from.

For example, immunology has a narrow focus on the aspects of the immune system which can be targeted by vaccination or proprietary drugs, which in turn has left many other components of the immune response neglected (the immune system is commonly referred to as one of the least understood systems in the body).

Similarly, since pharmaceutical drugs often work by affecting receptors and channels in cells, cellular biology has adopted a narrow-minded focus on just those aspects of a cell.

In turn, the liquid crystalline phase of water provides a variety of explanations for many of the biological phenomena that the existing models simply do not adequately address. In this article, I will focus upon a few of them.

Note: Much of what is discussed in this article is covered in more detail within these three books (similarly, the majority of the references for this article are sourced from these books, so I will not repetitively cite them throughout the article). If you wish to further study the subject yourself, I would recommend reading those books (all authored by Gerald H. Pollack) in this order:

• The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor (2013)
• Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life: A New, Unifying Approach to Cell Function (2001)
• Phase Transitions in Cell Biology (2008) — this is the most technical of the three

Cellular Integrity

One of the major puzzles of biology is the immense durability that cells have. If you consider the classic model — cells being bags of liquid contained within a fluid mosaic membrane, it should be effortless for external forces to “pop” cells and have all of their contents spill out. Yet in most cases, cells maintain their integrity despite significant stressors.

Cells can survive traumas, including being guillotined in half, drawn and quartered (so specific components can be isolated and worked with — such as when performing in vitro fertilization), or shot full of holes with electrical bullets, each of which one would expect would be sufficient to “pop” them. However, in each instance, cellular integrity of the remaining component persists.

Similarly, if the membrane from a cell is removed, its internal contents remain in place rather than rapidly dispersing. It has also been known for over 50 years that if muscle fibers lose their membranes, their functional ability (creating a contractile force) remains intact.

Three clues help to explain these phenomena. The first is that — as Pollack has shown — water droplets have a remarkable amount of integrity, and like cells, will maintain their integrity (and subsequently fuse back together) if a micro-blade is used to guillotine them in half. The second is that Pollack has also shown water droplets contain a significant degree of liquid crystalline water which likely is what confers their integrity.

The third is that the water molecules in cells predominantly exist within gels, which are composed of that same liquid crystalline water. Put differently, this means that a cell’s stability is largely a property of its water holding it together rather than the external structure which encapsulates it.

Another important aspect of cellular architecture should now be considered. As the conditions for liquid crystalline water formation are present throughout the cell (negatively charged hydrophilic surfaces and ambient infrared energy), the cells should rapidly be filling themselves with liquid crystalline water layers hundreds of micrometers in thickness.

Yet, throughout the cells, the surfaces are often only fractions of a micrometer apart. This means that the structure of the cell depends upon the continual formation of liquid crystalline water, but simultaneously constrains that crystalline structure from growing to its full size.

Tensegrity

Classically in architecture, buildings are created by having strong skeletons upon which the rest of the structure rests. For example, in the old days, we frequently used stone pillars; nowadays, skyscrapers require steel superstructures to meet the needs of these buildings:

This model often does not work within living organisms, because life, unlike those buildings, requires rapid movement, and living organisms simply cannot produce solid structures with the same strength as steel beams. However, an alternative and more complex architectural model has been developed which is frequently utilized by those who embrace complexity within their models.

Tensegrity (short for tensional integrity), was a model first put forward by Buckminster Fuller. It posits that if a series of non-compressible structures are linked together by a lattice of elastic connections (which can store tension when stretched), a much stronger structure is created.

This is because any force the structure receives will be equally distributed through each of those elastic connections rather than concentrating on a single component (e.g., the stone pillar), and thus, much less likely to exceed the breaking point of any single structural component.

Fuller’s work subsequently inspired numerous buildings to be built on the principles of tensegrity. This is a classic picture of him holding a tensegrity sphere he made:

Biotensegrity encapsulates the realization that this same system also occurs throughout nature. For the human body, at each level of organization, a linked tensile matrix is present that confers its stability.

One French hand surgeon, Jean-Claude Guimberteau, has likewise done a remarkable job of demonstrating the presence of linked tensile structures at the level of fascia (a connective tissue present throughout the body many manual therapists work with), through small (magnified) cameras placed in the body during minimally invasive surgeries:

Note: At the magnification scale used here and in his other videos, liquid crystalline water can be directly observed coating these structures. Also note its lubricating quality that allows the structures to slide past each other. Loss of this lubrication appears to create a variety of issues within the body.

As the years go by, there appears to be a greater consensus within the holistic medical field that biotensegrity is a valid model for understanding the body, and that linked networks of tension are present from the largest to the smallest levels of the body (e.g., the cytoskeleton is the elastic connecting unit within each cell). However, while this theory is frequently discussed, there are still two major unaddressed issues with it, which I believe liquid crystalline water can explain.

The first is that in Guimberteau’s work, he had observed that tiny vacuoles (enclosed compartments filled with water) throughout the body form the basic incompressible unit that much of the body’s tensegrity depends upon.

The second is that at an even higher magnification within cells, while a cytoskeleton is present that is under tension, there is nothing that can be seen which creates that tension (and it is highly debatable if the cell’s connections to the extracellular matrix suffice to create that tension). This matters because the structural strength of a tensegrity system only emerges when a structure’s components are under tension.

In the case of the former, I believe that the microvacuoles are filled with liquid crystalline water (which cannot be compressed). In the case of water droplets, Pollack concluded that the mutual repulsion between positively charged protons (pushed to the center of the droplet by sheets of H₃O₂) creates an outwards force resisted by the liquid crystalline boundary of the droplet.

The balance between these two forces results in the droplet assuming a spherical form, and I believe the same mechanism is at work in the microvacuoles throughout the human body.

In the case of the latter, it is important to remember how much expansion is produced by proteins that create gels (many gels are over 99.9% water). Pollack, in turn, has shown that the liquid crystalline water that is constantly trying to form within the cell is unable to reach its full size due to proteins resisting the stretch that would have to occur were the liquid crystalline gel to grow to its full size.

This happens both at the level of the cell (as the cytoskeleton stretches as the cell expands to its maximum size, until it cannot allow further expansion to occur) and within proteins throughout the cell.

At the protein level, the body often relies upon chemical bonds to be made between proteins to constrain the maximum expansion that can occur in response to a gel forming. Additionally, proteins can alternate between a folded and an unfolded conformation (e.g., a helix vs. a coil), something often determined by the tension applied to the protein (such as the expansive pressure of liquid crystalline water within a gel).

There are a variety of importance consequences of this conformation change which will be discussed later in this article (e.g., for the physiology of muscles). Additionally, many other components of the body also appear to rely upon liquid crystalline water:

“Studying collagen, Melacini et al. noted the importance of water in stabilizing its triple helix crystalline structure. They found that water within the collagen helix forms a “semi-clathrate-like structure that surrounds and interconnects triple helices in the crystal lattice.”

Water within the matrix of bone is likewise highly structured, a structuring that has been found associated not only with organic macromolecules such as collagen and proteoglycans, but with the mineral surfaces as well. Water, in fact, seems to play a foundational role in orienting mineral nanoparticles into parallel arrangements within the bone matrix, providing this orientation even in the absence of organic molecules.”

Everyday Gel Expansions

Many technologies we are familiar with (e.g., diapers) rely upon hydrogels which can expand into a semisolid structure which retain water. Similarly, we can directly observe that many larger processes within the body are also dependent upon water’s tendency to assemble into the larger liquid crystalline structures.

Because the normal architecture of protein’s cross-linking behavior limits how much gels can expand (as the proteins which would need to separate to accommodate the growing gel are prevented from doing so by cross links between them), when tissue or protein is damaged, this limitation can be partially removed. As a result, it can be seen on a microscopic scale that human tissue will swell and expand when it is damaged.

Likewise, Pollack has argued that this is most likely what happens when you experience a musculoskeletal trauma. In Pollack’s proposed model, the initial gel formation further expands the existing tear, and this progressive expansion of liquid crystalline water eventually leads to visible swelling.

On a larger scale, one of the major engineering challenges for the body is having weight-bearing joints like the knees be able to maintain their range of motion without becoming damaged by the continual friction they experience on a daily basis.

A remarkable characteristic about liquid crystalline water is that, provided the surface from which it forms remains intact, liquid crystalline water can be destroyed and then reform, along with its almost frictionless surface, over and over again.

Because of this, the liquid crystalline water ends up being the component which absorbs the stress experienced by healthy joints, and provided the joint is healthy, this water can instantly regenerate from that stress. In conjunction with this regenerating layer of negatively charged liquid crystalline water, at the very center of the joint, there is a pocket of positively charged protons which repel from each other and create an expansive pressure (like what is seen in a water droplet).

Since the joint capsule seals this region, those protons are unable to escape and thus effectively function like repelling magnets (e.g., consider a maglev train) that resist the weight of the body and maintain the central space within the joint.

One of the things I consider the most compelling about Pollack’s model for the joints is the specific quality of synovial fluid inside the knee joint. When you view it on a camera during an arthroscopic surgery, diffusion within it is visibly slowed, while if you directly extract it (e.g., during a knee aspiration), you can tell that it has a much thicker and gelatinous quality, something I have learned to associate with the presence of liquid crystalline water.

Pollack likewise argues that his model suggests EZ (liquid crystalline) water’s behavior resembles that of a gelatinous egg white which is semisolid when left alone, yet able to flow in response to an imposed shear force.

Cellular Gradients

Note: A “gradient” describes a difference in the concentration of things in two different areas. This could include electrical charges (i.e. batteries depend upon gradients), electrolytes, or temperatures — and many gradients provide an easily harvestable source of energy.

The existing paradigm of physics asserts the following:

• The natural state of things is to be disordered and evenly mixed.
• Anytime you make something become more ordered (e.g., forming a crystal or creating a gradient between two areas), energy must be expended to create that ordering.
• When an ordered structure becomes disordered, energy is released in the process which can sometimes be harvested (e.g., combusting wood in a wood stove to heat our homes).
• Anytime energy is released from something, if you attempt to capture and store that energy, some energy will always be lost.

These laws, in turn, are used to refute the possibility that any type of “free-energy” system can exist, such as the exclusion zone (EZ) water system Pollack has proposed where numerous harvestable gradients are created. Unfortunately for the existing paradigm, biology often appears to violate these laws, as it is continually moving towards a more ordered state rather than the disordered state the current paradigm predicts.

The current resolution for this paradox (which won a Nobel prize) is that living organisms function as “dissipative structures,” which exchange the order in large amounts of ordered components they accumulate from their environment in return for imparting order to their own disordered contents.

Although to some extent this allows the existing paradigm to sustain itself, I do not believe it is entirely accurate as water, through its liquid crystalline structure, has the ability to store radiant energy that passes through it and convert that energy to order the body can then utilize.

The Sodium Potassium Gradient

One of the things living cells are well known for doing is concentrating potassium inside themselves and reciprocally expelling sodium. Since the concentration inside and outside cells differs, a gradient exists, which, by the existing laws of physics should try to equalize itself and rapidly disappear.

Since this does not happen, the existing model has argued that the cellular membrane prevents the passage of most but not all sodium and potassium (thereby inhibiting the gradient from equalizing itself) and that sodium potassium pumps on the cellular membrane exist which continual swap sodium inside the cell for potassium outside the cell.

Because this exchange is so vital to maintaining the health of the cell, a large focus in cellular biology is placed on the importance of the sodium potassium exchange pump. Unfortunately, there are three fundamental problems with this model (the evidence of each of these and more is presented by Gilbert Ling here):

• The math does not add up — the existing sodium potassium pumps simply do not have the capacity to counteract the natural undoing of the sodium and potassium gradients. For example, in muscle cells, maintaining the sodium potassium gradient with pumps requires between 4 to 30 times the total available energy in the cell.
• Cells are able to maintain a gradient with a variety of other undesirable components they expel (e.g., bacteria expelling antibiotics) and to explain these phenomena, more and more pumps are identified to try to support the model. This is a problem because it is unlikely that cells have the capacity to simultaneously sustain so many different pumps.
• Ling took frog muscle cells whose environment was altered so that they were completely starved of energy (which is needed to operate the sodium potassium pump). Despite this, the gradient was maintained.

This then begs the question of what could be creating this gradient? Ling made the following observations:

• The gradient was maintained if the cell membrane (where those pumps reside) was removed.
• Producing a membrane with sodium potassium pumps that did not contain a cytoplasm (the inside of a cell) resulted in the gradient rapidly disappearing from with the membrane.

This suggests that the gradient is a property of the cell cytoplasm rather than the cellular membrane. Interestingly, the identical property has been found in artificial gels, which like the cytoplasm, also generate large amounts of liquid crystalline water:

“We show that the gel barrier is able to maintain a stable separation of ionic solutions of different ionic strengths and chemical compositions without any pumping activity. For the Na+ /K+ concentration gradient sustained across the barrier, a negative electric potential develops within the K+ -rich side. The situation is reminiscent of that in the cell.

Furthermore, also the advective flow of water molecules across the gel barrier is restricted, despite the gel’s large pores and the osmotic or hydrostatic pressure gradients across it.”

This concentration phenomenon has also been observed by other authors:

“Evidence for such accumulative condensation was produced almost a century ago when Bungenberg de Jong in 1932 showed that even dilute solutions of polymers, when shaken, coalesced into droplets-then called coascervates-in which the organic matter became highly concentrated. The polymer concentration in such droplets could exceed the concentration in the surrounding bath by as much as 10,000 times.

When placed in certain dyes, the droplets became progressively more colored, the intensity often many times exceeding that of the surrounding solution. Thus, gel droplets had the capacity to concentrate certain solutes, as the cell concentrates potassium.”

Since gels independently demonstrate many of the inexplicable characteristics of cells, it is thus reasonable to conclude they might share a mechanism for producing the sodium potassium gradient observed throughout biology.

Barriers

One major challenge for all cells is keeping unwanted things out. Classically, we view the process of pathogenic substances entering cells as being a product of their interaction with matching receptors on the cells (a world view which I believe is emphasized by medical science because drugs can be developed to disrupt this process). I, in turn, believe that this exclusion process by the cell is heavily influenced by existing charges, zeta potential and liquid crystalline water.

Because liquid crystalline water can for the most part only form on negatively charged surfaces (the same way that water molecules each expel half a hydrogen atom and thereby hold a net negative charge due to the lost hydrogens), almost every surface in the body (and many other natural systems) is coated with a negative charge.

Since colloidal stability (which governs the behavior of most fluid systems) largely depends upon the mutual repulsion created by identical charges, most natural colloidal systems utilize negative charges to remain dispersed and only clump together if excessive positive charges are present (likewise most methods of restoring zeta potential operate on this principle).

Pathogenic organisms often impart positive charges to their environment (such as through bacteria decarboxylating the negative charges of amino acids within proteins). This causes proteins and cells inside the body to begin clumping together (the malaria parasite is particularly good at doing this), which both prevents the immune system from gaining access to the microbes and increases the microbe’s ability to gain access to the cells.

One of the particularly interesting observations made by the original proponent of physiologic zeta potential was that bacterial and viral infections (I believe this was the most studied with influenza) would create a consistent degradation of the physiologic zeta potential. This provides an explanation for why viruses like influenza can be so much more dangerous for the elderly.

Someone with a healthy zeta potential can tolerate a minor impairment of their colloidal stability (they will just feel a bit unwell), but for someone who already has an impaired zeta potential (which is a very common consequence of aging), that reduction can be sufficient to pass a critical threshold where severe illness onsets.

One of the earliest distinguishing characteristics of COVID-19 to me was that many patients developed clinical signs suggesting severe zeta potential disruption, something I had not seen with any other respiratory virus. A key reason I was concerned about the spike protein long before the vaccines entered the market, was because I had identified it as the likely culprit for this zeta potential disruption.

This was due to it being a novel component of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (it differed from that of SARS-CoV-1) that was present on the surface of the virus and which had an unusually high positive charge density. It has since been shown that the spike protein directly induces clumping of red blood cells, likely due to its charge distribution having the potential to create a significant disruption of physiologic zeta potential.

One of the interesting comments I have repeatedly seen stated by both individuals who have taken protocols to improve their body’s production of liquid crystalline water and individuals who have done the same for improving their zeta potential, is that they rarely get sick.

This could potentially mean either that the symptoms of infections are much more minor if these physiologic parameters are already in good health (e.g., since you don’t pass a critical zeta potential threshold), or because they directly prevent cells from becoming infected by pathogens.

As many factors which positively affect one of the parameters often affect the other (e.g., earthing improves zeta potential and promotes the growth of liquid crystalline water in the body), it’s a bit hard to say which effect ultimately predominates, and a great deal of my research on this topic was based on trying to answer that question.

Note: The methods of restoring zeta potential and increasing liquid crystalline water within the body are discussed further here.

In this article, we review some of the evidence supporting that barrier hypothesis. The earliest I came across was from the work of Viktor Schauberger (1885-1958), who believed it was critically important for water to travel in a vortexing pattern, something as discussed in the previous part of this series, has been shown to increase the presence of liquid crystalline water.

One of the many discoveries made by utilizing vortexing systems based on his design for water supplies was that it reduced the growth of bacteria within the water system (e.g., on the inside of pipes).

Other research has directly found that the presence of liquid crystalline water prevents the growth and invasion of bacteria, such as this study:

“In a test conducted with E. coli, cells progressively penetrated EZ [liquid crystalline water] over 2 days. Furthermore, EZ-bearing Nafion had 80% less biomass accumulation of E. coli over 2 days compared to an EZ-less, hydrophilic, smooth aluminum oxide surface. This suggests that EZ may represent the first line of defense, spatially and temporally, against bacteria approaching certain hydrophilic surfaces.

These findings could have important implications in developing biofouling-resistant material surfaces for applications sensitive to bacterial attachment and biofilm formation.”

And this study:

“Silk sericin is a globular protein whose resistance against fouling is important for applications in biomaterials and water-purification membranes. Here it is shown how sericin generates a water-exclusion [liquid crystalline] zone that may facilitate antifouling behavior. Negatively charged microspheres were used to mimic the surface charge and hydrophobic domains in bacteria.

Immersed in water, sericin formed a 100-µm-sized exclusion zone (for micron-size foulants), along with a proton gradient with a decrease of >2 pH-units. Thus, when in contact with sericin, water molecules near the surface restructure to form a physical exclusionary barrier that might prevent biofouling.

The decreased pH turns the aqueous medium unviable for neutrophilic bacteria. Therefore, resistance to biofouling seems explainable, among other factors, on the basis of water-exclusionary phenomena.”

Many tissues depend on the presence of liquid crystalline water lining them, and this is likely at least partly, due to the protective barrier they create. Green and Otori in 1970, for example, found exclusion zones approximately 350 μm deep extending from the cornea, and also from contact lenses (it’s important to protect the eye from damage, and liquid crystalline water functions as a transparent, well-lubricated barrier, qualities both critical for the eyes).

Pollack, approximately 15 years ago, also found identical results (the presence of liquid crystalline water) next to polyNIPAM, the gel used to fabricate contact lenses.

One of the most important tissues in the body for providing a protective (but well-lubricated layer) is on the endothelial lining of the blood vessels. There, large amounts of blood creating significant shear forces constantly pass over the blood vessels. To this point, Malcom Kendrick has noted that the areas of circulation which experience the greatest shear forces are the most likely to develop the chronic damage which eventually leads to heart disease.

The protective coating of the endothelium, the glycocalyx, is structured (due to its high sulfate content) to create large amounts of gel (liquid crystalline water) around it and thus protect the endothelium. Additionally, a thin layer that blood cells cannot enter is known to directly line the walls of even the smallest blood vessels.

Similarly, researchers in 2000 observed a 0.4-0.5μm thick gelled layer of water lining the endothelium of healthy capillaries (the smallest blood vessels in the body), and this lining excludes a variety of different substances from reaching the endothelium.

Officially, the vaccine spike protein cannot affect the endothelium because it lacks a functional ACE2 binding domain (whereas the COVID-19 virus has a functional one through which it then enters the cell).

Although this is the case, there are many other ways that the spike protein can still attach to the endothelium (e.g., the spike protein can still attach to the receptor, it directly binds heparin in the glyocalyx, and if it is produced from inside the endothelium by the vaccine, it has effectively entered the endothelium).

Since autopsies of individuals suspected to have died due to vaccination have revealed profound damage to the endothelial layer, this provides strong evidence that the spike protein in one way or another has the ability to penetrate the normally protective barrier there.

Many have suspected that this is partly due to the highly positive charge that the spike protein (and the sometimes positively charged components of the lipid nanoparticles) carries, as these positive charges can penetrate the liquid crystalline water barrier protecting cells like the endothelium.

I believe it may also be due to the spike protein’s disruption of zeta potential, as other states associated with increased blood viscosity (e.g., uncontrolled diabetes) are known to damage the endothelium and accelerate the progression to cardiovascular disease.

Phase Transitions

Although liquid crystalline water is necessary for life, too much of it can also be problematic. For example, if the entire cell was covered with gel-state water, it would not be possible for many things that needed to enter the cell to enter.

To solve this problem, areas of positive charge exist in the membrane (e.g., Pollack argues that this is a key reason for the placement of metal ions within the cell membrane), which prevent liquid crystalline water from forming over the area and thus create an open passage for water to travel through.

Note: Although we are taught to think of the cell as a fluid mosaic of phospholipids with proteins here and there, approximately 50% of the cell membrane is typically composed of proteins (and it can sometimes be even more).

In most cases, however, the body relies upon being able to transform water between its gel (liquid crystalline) state and a sol (bulk water containing colloidal suspensions) state as needed. However, while recognition of the fundamental importance of phase changes in cellular biology has gradually increased over the last 70 years, the majority of the scientific field is still wedded to the fluid mosaic hypothesis, which believes that the cellular membrane is always a liquid.

Briefly, gels (both natural and synthetic ones) typically have a temperature (its transition point) where the gel will undergo a rapid transition from one state to the other (explained further here). As far as I know, in all cases, the hotter temperature will correspond to the sol state (H₂O water with suspended colloids) and the colder one will correspond to the gel state (H₃O₂). Additionally, increased pressure will also promote the gel state:

“Biological activity almost universally requires that membranes be in their fluid state; in many cases, just above the transition point.”

Gels throughout the body, in turn, are designed to have a phase transition point near the normal temperature of the body. This may explain why most mammals and birds maintain their temperature between 35°– 42°C (95°– 107.6°F; the normal temperature for humans is 37°C or 98.6°F), an otherwise curious fact given how much their bodies and environments differ (e.g., a tiny bird in the desert vs. a blue whale).

Additionally, this temperature extends beyond warm-blooded animals. A tuna fish, when active, maintains the temperature of its body at 30°C or 86°F (the ocean is much colder) while many reptiles maintain their body temperature near 40°C or 104°F (by doing things like seeking out the sun). Many insects also cannot fly until they have warmed up to a similar range of temperature (e.g., 38°C or 100.4°F for bumblebees).

Similarly, the phase transition point is heavily influenced by the materials that the gel builds from (e.g., components of the cell membrane). Cold-blooded animals in turn have been observed to change the composition of their cell membranes in response to their environment.

In one experiment, Calotes versicolor (the common garden lizard), were acclimatized to 16°, 26°, and 36°C (60.8°, 78.8°, and 96.8°F) for a period of thirty days. The lizards exhibited dramatic changes in the concentration of major phospholipids (components of the cell membrane) such as phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylinositol, cardiolipin, and sphingomyelin.

Temperature acclimatization has also been observed to vary the lipid composition of carp muscle microsomes along with carp blood cells, and seasonal variation has been observed in the lipid composition of brains of rainbow trout.

Once the gel is held near its transition temperature, it is then relative easy to change exactly where that transition temperature is so water can be kept in the appropriate phase for the current physiologic needs. This is primarily done within the body by changing the electrolyte composition of the area, as strong cations (positively charged ions) destroy gels, while strong anions (negatively charged ions) reinforce them.

As far as I can tell, the effects of these ions correlate to the high valence (charge) anions (-) that most effectively support physiologic zeta potential and those high valence cations (+) which most effectively destroy it.

The primary cation element which the body uses to shift the transition temperature in order to destroy gels is calcium (Ca). To illustrate the effect of calcium graphically (note how a sudden critical threshold of Ca concentration is reached):

These results also showed how the higher valence cations, Ca²⁺, cause smaller gels to form relative to low valence cations Na⁽¹⁾⁺.

Once you put all of this together, you effectively get a situation like this within the cells which allows small secretions of calcium there to shift its water from a fluid to a gel state.

Conversely, if the body can disperse the gels, it also needs a way to recreate them. The primary strong (high valence) anion it uses to build them are the phosphates in adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

When we consider this alternative function of ATP, we should consider some of the ideas first proposed by Ling (see 8.4 on page 178). They suggest that much of the energy obtained from ATP arises not from the energy within its bonds being broken, but rather from it inducing water to form a liquid crystalline structure. In essence, much of the energy generated from ATP ultimately arises from the radiant energy which triggers these polymerizations (gels).

Phase transitions are very common in cellular biology, and while the field does not place a heavy emphasis on their importance, Pollack’s central argument in his first two books is that phase transitions are necessary to explain many functions of the cell.

Note: When I later discussed my articles with Pollack, he informed me that the main oversight with his earlier research was that that they did not yet know that the gels were negatively charged, which in turn explains a variety of the effects they create (e.g., the electrical impulse of nerves).

Expanding Gels

One of the primary uses for gels within the body is from them to rapidly expand and create effects from that expansion. For example, cells frequently excrete small spheres (known as vesicles) containing important components, which upon exiting the cell rapidly expand. Isolated mucin-producing vessels for example undergo a 600 fold expansion in 40 milliseconds.

Prior to exiting the cell, the internal components of the vesicle are cross linked together by Ca²⁺ (remember, higher valence cations, through crosslinking gel proteins, will limit gel formation while monovalent cations like sodium instead tend to expand them).

Once secreted from the cell, Ca²⁺ is removed and the gel rapidly hydrates in the Na⁽¹⁾⁺ solution surrounding each cell. Conversely, gels will not rapidly expand in distilled water, and it has been observed that liquid crystalline water’s formation is also diminished within deionized water.

Note: Some vesicles utilize local environmental factors to change their phase. For example, histamine is a monovalent cation (charge of +1) at a neutral pH, but becomes a divalent cation (charge of +2) in an acidic pH. Researchers were able to show that histamine in an acidic environment (due to its high valence state), causes shrinking of mast cell granules, while histamine in a neutral environment allows their expansion.

Muscle Physiology

Many of the most common problems for which patients seek out physicians originate from the muscles. Because of this, I have looked at a lot of different ways to treat those issues. In turn, I have found quite a few that consistently work but I cannot explain why as the existing model of muscle physiology cannot provide an explanation.

One of the major problems with medicine (and often science) is what I term the “mechanistic trap.” Briefly it means that if there is not a mechanism to explain why something works, then it is assumed to be a hoax and thought to not actually work. I think this compulsive need for a model is quite foolish, especially since many of the models we utilize to explain why drugs work, don’t actually make sense.

Similarly, there are many cases of a previously accepted model for a drug’s mechanism that was discarded and replaced with another, and I know of many more examples where an unorthodox model appears to provide a much better explanation for the mechanism of a therapy.

Note: This also holds true for many alternative non-drug therapies.

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to have the FDA (or many conventionally trained physicians) be open to considering a therapy for research unless a biochemical mechanism for it is proposed. I believe this is a reflection of the fact pharmaceutical drugs, as they are designed to target certain enzymes in the body, fit into our rigid mechanistic paradigm, while therapies with a broad spectrum of action cannot be linked to a specific biochemical receptor nor as easily profited from.

Given all of this, I was overjoyed to discover through Pollack that many aspects of the existing model for muscle physiology don’t make sense, and the expected results of the model do not occur when rigorous experiments on muscles are conducted:

However, an alternative model for muscle physiology also exists. As we consider it, we should keep in mind that muscles are recognized to only be capable of contracting. In the instances where something in the body needs to lengthen, this is accomplished by having a muscle in the right place shorten, and due to its position, create a lengthening somewhere else through doing so (e.g., the triceps in the arm).

From Pollack’s work, I realized that while muscles can only create force during a contraction, this is actually a result of the fact their components can only forcefully lengthen.

Pollack’s model is based on the observation that relaxed muscles contain a large amount of structured water, whereas contracting muscles primarily contain water not in a semisolid gel state. Since it is known that muscle firing follows the nerve signal directing calcium (Ca²⁺) ions to enter the muscle, this suggests a calcium induced phase change may underlie the process.

Conversely, it is also known (from the experiment previously described in the gradient section) that while muscle cells which have been cut open can retain their potassium to sodium gradient while in a salt solution, the parts that lack ATP are unable to.

This suggests that ATP is necessary for the liquid crystalline state of water to be present, as it excludes sodium ions from entering the muscle cells. Similarly, it is also known that without ATP, muscles will remain stuck in the contracted form and be unable to lengthen, something that occurs shortly after death (termed “rigor mortis”).

Note: One of the compelling anecdotal stories I have heard over the years is that when severely vaccine-injured children die (e.g., those with lifelong debilitating autism) rigor mortis sets in much faster for them. Those who observed this suggested that these children had a chronic energy deficit, and their bodies were struggling to make enough ATP to get by. I think this is very possible, but it could also be indicative of poor zeta potential.

I suspect this might also be seen with other chronic debilitating illnesses, but I have not interacted with the people who would have observed if it did in fact occur.

Pollack also observed that muscle changes in response to environmental factors followed a familiar critical threshold being passed. This also seemed to suggest to Pollack that a phase change was occurring within the muscles.

So what is Pollack’s model? The muscles fibers are designed to form large gels around them, and as liquid crystalline water within them expands, it stretches the uncoiled proteins in the fibers into helixes (until protein cross links prevent further stretching). When the muscle needs to contract, calcium ions enter the muscle, eliminating the gels, and the proteins no longer being lengthened elastically snap back to their original uncoiled configuration.

In order for the gel to rebuild, ATP is required to break the cross links created by calcium and thereby trigger a phase shift that reconstructs the gel.

Thus, the strength of a muscle is a product of the potential energy created by liquid crystalline water’s storage of radiant energy being released. Or put differently, the strength of muscles actually lies in their ability to spontaneously lengthen and explains why many effective muscular treatments I have come across work.

Large mechanical shear causes the cytoskeleton matrix [another key structure that expands and contracts in response to phase changes] to fluidize, a phenomenon similar to physical rejuvenation in SGM’s [certain synthetic materials]. This fluidization is followed by a slow scale- free recovery of mechanical properties, a phenomenon similar to physical aging in SGMs.

Surprisingly in response to a transient stretch, the cytoskeleton fluidizes in a pattern that is universal for different cell types. This finding implicates mechanisms mediated not so much by specific signaling pathways, as it is usually assumed, but rather – as we explain below – by non-specific actions of physical forces.

Many other structures also have the ability for their internal gels to cause expansion and contraction, but unlike skeletal muscles, in most cases, this expansion and contraction is not as tightly constrained as what is observed within the heavily cross-linked skeletal muscles.

Smooth muscles, as well as contractile rings, synthetic actin gels (actin is one of the most common contractile proteins in the body), and other organelles with few covalent cross links and semi-random structures are other examples of places where the body uses this principle to sustain life.

Lastly, it has also been observed that changing the surrounding concentrations of salinity around other fibers (e.g., collagen) can cause them to expand and contract to the point they can generate a force yielding contraction similar to that of a muscle fiber.

Conclusion

There have been a few central questions I have sought to address in my exploration of liquid crystalline water. In this series, I sought a mechanism to explain the observation in numerous traditional medical systems that an inherent expansive force exists throughout the body which plays a key role in providing its vitality and that when this expansive force is compromised, a variety of diseases set in.

I agree with this belief and have seen numerous instances where it became possible to recognize where that life sustaining expansion had been replaced with a tight compacted space, and likewise seen methods that sought to restore that expansion also restore a patient’s vitality.

Conversely, I believe the loss of mobility and durability that accompanies aging (and one of the biggest concerns to elder patients) is directly related to the loss of liquid crystalline water we typically experience with age.

In this article, I have tried to illustrate the structural effects of liquid crystalline water within the body, and it is my hope that through doing so, I have provided a mechanism to explain where that expansive force originates from. In the next part of this series, I explain how water’s liquid crystalline state creates a gradient that can be harvested for energy and creates the circulation life depends upon.

In the article after that, I did my best to explain the intertwined relationship between liquid crystalline water and zeta potential, and in the final part of this series I discussed the methods I have come across which appear to restore either.

Each of these topics is quite complex (e.g., this article was a synthesis of numerous books and articles), but in my opinion nonetheless crucial to dive into for unravelling the mysteries of life. In turn, it is my sincere hope the widespread awakening that has occurred in our society as a result of COVID-19 can rekindle curiosity to explore unconventional subjects like this.

I thank each of you for the attention you gave in trying to understanding this relatively complex topic which is near and dear to my heart. I sincerely hope that you too can adopt some of its implications into your daily life.

A Note From Dr. Mercola About the Author

A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician in the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate his exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and I’m grateful to share them. I also respect his desire to remain anonymous as he is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.

Articles

Fareham, UK: 27/04/23. Vuzion, an Infinigate Group company, is rebranding to Infinigate Cloud, fulfilling the role of centre of excellence and expert business unit specialising in secure cloud solutions.

The rebranding is aligned with the newly announced Infinigate brand, reflecting the company’s core philosophy, centred on sparking the connections that foster growth for vendors and partners as well as offering a unique approach, combining leading edge digital tools with a human, personal touch.

Infinigate Cloud benefits from Vuzion’s 25+ years’ experience, Microsoft expertise and born-in-the-cloud deep technical heritage to deliver value-add, secure cloud, award-winning education and go-to-market services to help partners achieve their full potential and grow their businesses faster.

“Vuzion becoming Infinigate Cloud, is the natural next step for the business, merging our obsession for helping partners grow successful cloud businesses with the broader Infinigate values and identity”, adds Michael Frisby, Senior Vice President Cloud Services at Infinigate.

Infinigate Cloud’s portfolio of services brings together cloud, managed and professional services, and an ecosystem of partners to keep customers secure and productive.

“We plan to grow the team by more than 20% in the next 12-months”, Frisby continued, “with most of these new colleagues joining the team in Fareham. We will also see international expansion across multiple European markets. There has never been a more exciting time to join the team.”

Klaus Schlichtherle, CEO of the Infinigate Group says: “Secure cloud is a big area of expansion and focus for us and it presents considerable market growth opportunities. Infinigate Cloud will address this opportunity across multiple countries, enabling the SaaS model, a key opportunity for the channel. Vuzion’s knowledge and expertise in this area will give us a considerable advantage in the market.”

About Infinigate Cloud
Infinigate Cloud is an expert business unit within the Infinigate Group specialising in secure cloud solutions.

As a born in the cloud distributor with a deep technical heritage, we continually invest in our teams and evolve our value add services to ensure we deliver the very best in technical expertise and 24*7 support for our partners.

Our 25+ years of experience in the cloud has taught us that we are only successful if our partners are. Award winning education and go to market services help our partners achieve their full potential and grow their businesses faster.

About the Infinigate Group
The Infinigate Group is a value-add distributor, fully committed to sustainable, leading-edge cybersecurity solutions. Founded in 1996 in Switzerland, it has grown to incorporate the entire EMEA region, with offices in 30 countries and partners in more than 50. Our more than 1,200 dedicated employees, half of them with in-depth technical knowledge, are passionate about best-of-breed cybersecurity, secure networks and secure cloud for SMB and enterprise market segments, for on-premise and cloud-based IT infrastructure. The Infinigate Group relies on strong country organisations, which can adapt to the needs of their respective partners, MSSPs and vendors, by providing technical, marketing, sales and professional services. For additional information visit: http://www.infinigate.com/

Since 2022 Nuvias, Vuzion and Starlink are part of the Infinigate Group. Find out more about our new offerings at www.Nuvias.com, www.Vuzion.cloud and www.StarlinkME.net

ENDS

For further press information, please contact:
Markus Drewes: Markus.Drewes@Infinigate.com

Orietta Sutherberry: +44 (0)7741 149 367 Orietta.Sutherberry@Infinigate.com

Source: RealWire

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