Letters, Summer 2017

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A JOURNAL FOR NEWBIES
I have just finished reading the Spring 2017 journal—what an absolutely wonderful journal for the newbies! I think it should be given to all first-time members. I would like to order a truckload of them! And what a great boost after a membership drive! Way to go!
Mary Walkes
Avon, South Dakota

A TRUE BLUE ZONE
I want to thank Gina Baker for her article “Costa Rica—Land of the Centenarians” (Spring 2017). She set the record straight on what the people in the “Blue Zone” of Costa Rica (Nicoya Peninsula) really eat! She lists these foods as pork, liver, kidney, lard, etc.

As it happens, I had purchased the National Geographic special publication “Blue Zones, the Science of Living Longer” that Baker refers to in her article. The author clearly pushes the vegetarian view in the National Geographic article. But if you read carefully, the author actually mentions that they cooked with a “dollop of lard” on the grill and “fried up some eggs” for lunch and garnished with “fresh cheese” (which I bet was not pasteurized). Even worse, at the end of the National Geographic article, the author lists the “top longevity foods” and purposefully leaves out lard, eggs and cheese, and only mentions squash, papayas and bananas. If you didn’t know any better (as is the case for the general public), you would have once again gotten the message that only plant foods promote health and longevity, while animal products should be avoided. I wonder whether the National Geographic author made that omission on purpose, or was it due to the current general brainwashing?
Jackie Hunt
Lake Jackson, Texas

INSULIN AND WEIGHT LOSS
Tom Cowan’s article “Understanding Weight Gain and Weight Loss” (Spring 2017) repeats—and promotes—a common error when he states the following: “Basically, people gain weight because of insulin. . . Weight gain is not about the calories.”

While it is true that, as he says, “without insulin it is impossible to gain weight and become fat,” Tom fails to point out the additional critically important fact that in the absence of a hypercaloric intake, it is equally impossible to gain weight, regardless of one’s insulin levels.

Although insulin is a necessary condition, it is not—as Tom would apparently have us believe—a sufficient condition for weight gain to occur. A sufficient condition for the occurrence of an event is a circumstance in whose presence the event must occur. Just as with energy intake per se, insulin per se is a necessary but insufficient condition for weight gain to occur.

This matter of “insulin versus calories” was addressed—correctly—by Chris Masterjohn back in May 2016: “…the idea that carbohydrate uniquely contributes to obesity because insulin promotes storage of fat in adipose tissue is also misleading because although that’s true, insulin also stimulates the burning of carbohydrate for energy. So if you have more carbohydrate coming in in the diet and less fat coming in the diet, then insulin is helping shift the fat towards adipose tissue while you burn that sugar and calorically, everything is going to balance in that way. So insulin can only promote obesity in the context of a hypercaloric diet” (chrismasterjohnphd.com/2016/05/02/the-dailylipid-podcast-episode-6-why/).
Billy the K
Tucson, Arizona

SO MANY QUESTIONS
Having read most of the information in the latest WAPF publication, I came up with several questions for which I am having difficulty finding answers.

What is the difference in autism rates in the USA versus other countries? One report I saw online showed that England’s rate of autism had stayed flat since the 2000s. To what is this attributed? Why is the incidence so much higher in the male population?

Is there any way that children can be vaccinated in the “old fashioned” way? My kids were born in the 1960s and had the older vaccines, which appear not to have contributed to autism. I have also been wondering whether the same vaccines are given around the world. If not, what is the variable?

I am constantly at a loss to understand how scientists can fail to investigate such an enormous problem to the greatest of depths—except in the case of such scientists like Stephanie Seneff and a few others, whose findings are not included in any assessments by the CDC and other government agencies.

Thank you for your great efforts to keep us informed on such important matters.
Charlene Stone
Santa Rosa, California

Kendall Nelson, WAPF vaccine point person, replies: Regarding autism rates, a consistent finding is that when countries have high numbers of mandated or recommended vaccines, they tend to have higher rates of autism—as do the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Brazil, Portugal and Hong Kong. In the UK, about one in one hundred people have autism; these rates continue to rise they have not stayed flat. The reason often given for that rise is “better diagnosis,” not greater prevalence. There is definitely a higher incidence of autism in males. However, we need more research to figure out why. A good film to watch about this is Vaxxed, vaxxedthemovie.com. Vaccines have always had serious side effects. Vaccinating “the old-fashioned way” simply means that fewer vaccines were given. There is no such thing as “greening our vaccines.” The nature of vaccines is such that they always contain toxic preservatives and adjuvants. We also don’t know who will be harmed by even a single vaccine. The same vaccines are not given in every case around the world. For instance, the live polio vaccine is no longer given in the U.S., but is still given in less developed nations. And the mercury-based additive thimerosal, while not used as much in the U.S., is still in use in vaccines aimed at Third World countries. Pharmaceutical companies also tend to bring out experimental vaccines in the third world. For more resources, visit the WAPF vaccine page at westonaprice.org/vaccinations/.

CHANGES IN EVERY SPECTRUM OF LIFE
Every aspect of my entire life changed when I discovered the Wise Traditions diet. I understood food in a way that I never had before. I understood what it meant to be truly nourished from the inside out in a way that went against so much of what I was hearing in the media and in other “food journals.” I realized why I was feeling less than great on a then eight-month vegetarian diet. I understood my continuous draw towards animal foods and animal fats in a way that didn’t make me feel guilty anymore. I started eating as close to the Wise Traditions diet as possible and had a dramatic shift in how I felt within my body. From then on, I have felt incredibly happy with my decisions around food, and my body and mind were the proof I could share when anyone asked me about my controversial food choices.

I support this diet philosophy 100 percent while also respecting the way others choose to eat that may be different from my own. At the end of the day, it’s about your body and what makes you feel like you’re thriving from within, able to create and take an active part in your life from a place of full energy, vitality and well-being. I highly recommend the work of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I have seen changes in every spectrum of my life—mood, energy, vitality, spirituality and wellbeing.
Butter.bebe
Montreal, Canada

BINGE LISTENING
The last few days, I’ve been binge-listening to the Wise Traditions podcasts. Each episode features a different guest, and they’re jam-packed with information about eating real, traditional foods. Near and dear to my heart are the episodes that discuss farming, gardening and animal husbandry, but I must say the lessons on healing our bodies through food are absolutely mind-blowing. I can’t get enough! I’m addicted to the way this real food and real living makes me feel! Now it’s time to dig deeper and keep up this momentum!
Emily Dragos
Wilderhomestead, North Carolina

CHANGED MY LIFE
Just a note to let you know how this Foundation helped me. I used to suffer from a stomach ulcer. I went to the doctor and all they did was push pills. I suffered for about twenty years.

In 2007, I was on the Internet researching ways to heal it naturally. I stumbled upon your site, and it changed my life!

I’m a farm girl and I read how good raw milk is for you. I thought to myself, I can milk! So I got a milk cow and milk goats and my ulcer healed. That was nine years ago.

This weekend I went to my first Mother Earth fair and had a blast! I found your booth and want to join. Thank you for all you do!
Robin Sharp
Grafton, West Virginia

SHOULD A CHILD BE VACCINATED?
The current school of medical thought believes that the injection of vaccine ingredients makes children healthier by preventing disease symptoms from appearing. However according to the classical hygienic school of health (which is based on experience rather than belief), the symptoms we associate with diseases are not the diseases, they are the mechanisms by which the body externalizes (gets rid of) toxins (or “disease”). As Hippocrates famously said, “We call them diseases, but they are the cure of diseases.” From that perspective, vaccines do not prevent disease; rather vaccines cause illness.

Childhood vaccination is an eighteenth-century medical procedure that injects toxins such as bacteria, viruses, various drugs and synthetic (unnatural) chemicals deep into a child’s body. This is a bizarre procedure that drives these substances so deep that the child is unable to externalize the poisons—in other words, in most cases, the child has no symptoms. The child becomes sick on a very deep level and as a result is more likely to be weaker, less healthy and more prone to chronic and lifelong diseases.

Research bears out the hygienic school’s approach to wellness: in every study ever done comparing vaccinated to non-vaccinated children, non-vaccinated children are healthier than the vaccinated children, or conversely the vaccinated children are sicker than the non-vaccinated children.

Children who are permitted to get sick naturally with “childhood diseases” as nature intended, and experience the symptoms of acute illness that include fever, vomiting, skin eruptions, diarrhea, etc. which are dramatic, uncomfortable and annoying but almost always temporary when properly managed—have less cancer, less heart disease and less chronic illness as children and as adults.

Why? Because acute disease detoxifies and cleanses the body. Since ancient times, physical, intellectual and emotional growth spurts have been noticed after a child goes through an acute illness.

In our “scientific” arrogance, we have forgotten to respect the wisdom of the body, God-given wisdom, nature, the innate (inborn) intelligence of the body, or whatever term you wish to use. Our incredibly sophisticated body has a reason for generating symptoms, especially in children, and we must respect the natural cycles of life and work with them, knowing they are there for a reason far beyond our limited scientific, intellectual understanding. Simply stated, the choice is clear; in order to have healthier children, do not vaccinate them.

Vaccines make our children seriously sick—the U.S. government has paid over three billion dollars to compensate the families of children who were killed or left seriously damaged after routine vaccination. This number reflects only a fraction (only 1-2 percent or less according to some studies) of the damage that occurs, because pediatricians rarely report vaccine injuries.

Serious damage from vaccination is acknowledged. Just read the pharmaceutical product inserts that come with vaccines—and not generally given to parents—and you’ll read some pretty nasty things observed after vaccination including encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), all kinds of immunological and neurological conditions, plus death (crib death and SIDS). Let us not forget conditions as varied as allergies and autism—which were rare before vaccination.

Do the theoretical benefits of vaccination outweigh the real risks? Absolutely not. Death from diseases of childhood were at least 98 percent gone before vaccines were in mass usage because of improved living conditions. Vaccines never prevented death from childhood or other illness, and that includes the darlings of vaccination proponents—polio and smallpox. Look behind the curtain and you’ll discover the vaccines had no effect on eliminating these diseases, and in fact increased their occurrence.

Do I recommend you vaccinate your children? Only if you want to risk autism, immune system damage, a chronically sick child, mental and brain disorders, and increased chances of heart disease and cancer as an adult—and receive no benefit. In one word–don’t! There are no benefits—only risks. There are zero good reasons to vaccinate a child.
Tedd Koren, DC
Gwynedd Valley, Pennsylvania

TB: FRAUDULENT THEORY AND TEST
Recently here in the UK, a farmer named Ernie Durose had his cows test “positive” to the fraudulent TB test, leading to the slaughter of his herd. Officials blame the TB on infection by a badger. However, I believe that bovine TB is not coming into the body from outside, but rather that it is coming out, and that it is a natural immune response. The mistake that we make is to translate this immune response into a disease, which is not the case at all.

Without even seeing his cows, I would guess that Farmer Durose’s cows were healthy animals, not sick animals. I believe that when we inject a cow with foreign matter (as in the TB skin test), the immune system will detect this foreign matter and will then try to repair it (eating it up or walling it off), which it does by generating bacteria from within, in the sense of an internal metamorphosis. This is the beginnings of TB. This means that it is coming from within, not coming from outside of the body.

They say that the mode of transmission from badger to cow remains unknown, but I claim that it is not only unknown, it does not even exist outside of the body. Cow-to-cow transmission is assumed, meaning it is theoretical, but this does not and cannot happen in the sense of disease-causing bacteria coming from the environment. This is because environmental bacteria are not the same as TB generated from within. If this is so, then to slaughter cattle, based on a test that generates TB through the foreign matter contained in the test itself, is sheer madness. The academics and vets have got this TB process the wrong way around. This is why their thinking and their science is stagnant, and so they have absolutely nowhere to go.

There’s no need to mass-slaughter healthy animals since TB was never infectious. It’s a monumental blunder, but as we all know, the academics cannot turn around and rectify their mistakes. Clearly, the conflicts of interest involved in this issue are a far bigger problem than bovine TB. The main issue is that the science should come before the politics, but in this issue, the politics are driving the science, and that is a recipe for a total disaster. The end product: a pointless war on the natural world.
John Wantling
Rochdale, UK

LESSONS LEARNED
In August last year, I was with my father while he had surgery to explore an aggressive growth on his pancreas. We were not surprised to learn that the growth was, in fact, pancreatic cancer, the “worst case scenario.” Up until this point my dad had been one of the healthiest people I knew, biking ten or more miles every day, rain or shine; felling trees and chopping wood; fixing all manner of things; riding his motorcycle (which he had recently purchased at seventy-eight years young), loving life, and especially loving and caring full time for my mother (she has fallen into a sad state of dementia these last ten years); planning for the future in which he hoped to be free to fly kites and go on bike rides again with his kids and grandkids.

But that day last summer took his life away. The surgeon removed half of his pancreas, a vital organ. But it wasn’t the cancer that killed him; in fact, just four months later he was cancer-free! He had recruited me to help him come up with a plan to beat the cancer using alternative therapies. We found a functional medicine doctor in his home state of Wisconsin who helped him with our protocol which included low-dose naltrexone, high doses of vitamin C, alpha lipoic acid, CBD oil, pancreatic enzymes, and a mostly organic diet rich in high-quality fats and low in carbs, in addition to a few other things. The oncologist within his conventional medical system agreed to track the cancer, and appeared humbled and dumbfounded when in December I sat before her to receive the results of various tests and scans. She could not argue with the answers before her: no sign of cancer!

So what killed him? Well, two months after his surgery he began experiencing severe sciatic pain. No cause could be found, and no chiropractic or other treatment would help. Nothing but rounds of prednisone, which of course he knew he could not continue, and bouts in the hospital when even the highest doses of oxycodone and fentanyl couldn’t cut it. On his last hospitalization, it was noted that he was very hoarse, not from a cold or other illness, but from screaming out in unbearable pain! When my siblings and I think of our poor father in such a state, it drives us to tears.

From the outset, I had encouraged my father to monitor his blood sugar as it just made sense; after all, he was missing half of the very organ that he needed to keep his blood sugar under control! But he assured me that the doctors weren’t worried (they weren’t), and they would test it when he had an appointment. If they weren’t worried, he wasn’t either. And as he was on a fairly low-carb, high-fat diet for the cancer, I dismissed it as well, hoping that the diet would take care of it. (Dad still enjoyed a heavily buttered slice of bread in the morning, a beer in the afternoon, or a very occasional small treat, and I was not about to insist on the deprivation!)

Dad liked for me to attend his doctor appointments when possible, and I often did during those last five months of his life, making frequent trips to be with him to help. So I was with him when his neurosurgeon finally gave the diagnosis, and prognosis, for Dad’s condition: demyelination of the sciatic nerve brought on by high blood sugar. The good doctor told my father that if he controlled his blood sugar, the myelin sheath should regenerate in six to twelve months. He saw this often, he said, and Dad was now declared “diabetic.” It mattered not, as I gently protested, that my father wasn’t truly diabetic, but that he was missing half of his pancreas and thus the ability to control blood sugar was duly sliced in half as well!

I sat with my father while the dietician discussed his new diabetic diet, very high in carbs. My father knew better and took it with a “grain of salt,” which of course was literally restricted in the hospital and rehab, along with fat! And as he spent many weeks in and out of that hospital and rehab, he was doomed!

Should I mention those rounds of prednisone which Dad was given for the sciatic pain, driving his blood sugar into the four hundred range, and holding it there for up to two weeks at a time! So, he was put on metformin. A band aid. Meanwhile, I consulted with the functional medicine doc, who was frustrated that Dad wasn’t working with him on all of his issues. After all, that is what functional medicine doctors do: they work with the whole, not just parts. But as this was not covered by insurance and was quite expensive, Dad chose to stick it out with his health “care” system. Dr. Schwartz urged Dad to continue with the alpha lipoic acid and do several rounds of vitamin B12 shots, methylcobalamin in particular. Dad was okay with this, but wanted it to be within the “system” so as to have costs covered by his insurance and doctors. So, I made phone calls and gave information to the nurses in charge. They were intrigued, curious, but not convinced. Thus, it was declared unnecessary.

On February 10th, my sister took our father to what would be his last appointment with the neurosurgeon, who gave him no hope. None. My sister overheard Dad telling the doctor that if this was what life was to be, it just wasn’t worth living.

Two days later, he was gone.

So what is to be learned from this? If only more people would hear! Our current medical paradigm does not heal people—far from it. It is a system of disease management, of controlling symptoms by slicing and dicing, of prescribing chemical pills for ailments, instead of understanding and correcting the root cause. It is a system that looks at individual parts rather than the whole. And it never actually “cures” anyone of anything! It is a business, and it robs people of not only money but their very lives every single day. This is not to say that there are not many fine people out there truly dedicated to healing, as they understand it, and helping people. It’s just that their understanding is deeply flawed, and literally dangerous.
Maureen Diaz, chapter leader
Linden, Virginia

MEDICAL COMMUNICATION COMPANIES
I recently ran across an important Journal of the American Medical Association article (JAMA. 2013;310(23):2554-2558) entitled “Medical Communication Companies and Pharmaceutical Industry Grants.” It is about a new form of medical propaganda, physician conflicts of interest, the cunning of Big Pharma’s advertising and how most physicians become mis-informed and mis-educated while at the same time pressured to spend less and less time with their patients and to rely on the over-prescribing of Big Pharma’s synthetic chemical drugs. As I often told my patients, it only takes two minutes to write a prescription but it takes twenty minutes not to write a prescription.

The article exposes the under-the-table flow of money that keeps popular online medical communication companies (MCCs) full of plausible (but often misleading) information that is consistently favorable to the disinformational  agendas of Big Pharma. These sites nver mention the multitude of iatrogenic disorders (diseases that are caused by doctors or Big Pharma’s prescription drugs). Iatrogenic diseases are a seriously taboo subject that Big Pharma and the medical establishment want to keep hidden from their drugtaking patients.

These MCC online sites maintain the ignorance Big Pharma desires for us too-busy prescribing physicians and our often “desperate-for-unbiased-information” patients who suspect that they are being sickened by the synthetic chemicals and vaccine ingredients that have been prescribed for them, substances that can be addictive, neurotoxic, dementia-inducing and a cause of mitochondrial toxicity, especially in the case of psychiatric drugs.

The article summarized below reveals the actual names of the biggest culprits: the amoral, for-profit, multinational Big Pharma corporations that annually hand out tens of millions of dollars to their co-opted and obedient MCC recipients who are—unfortunately—trusted by both physicians and their confused patients.

What may be worse is the fact that these for-profit MCCs are responsible for providing dis-informational “content” for the thousands of health “journalists” (who are notorious for having little or no medical science background).

One sees those health journalists all over the newspapers, radio, TV and Internet with their ubiquitous and very plausible articles that are often directly fed to them from the MCCs and their sugar daddy, Big Pharma. The health journalists, in reading the prepared-for-immediate-re-publication content, feel that they are doing research, whereas what is actually happening is deception and indoctrination.

The same thing happens on the nightly news when Big Pharma’s MCC-generated videos are shown on the TV news without the local station ever mentioning the gross conflicts of interest. This common tactic does represent “easy journalism” for our too-busy health writers who have deadlines to meet.

A decade ago, when medical establishment and lobbying groups like the AMA, APA, AAP, AAFP, etc., warned us about getting our information from the Internet, they were afraid, sometimes with justification, of the influence of the complementary and alternative medical community that was out there. Many consumers found out that what was out there was frequently useful and sometimes curative—a big threat to more than one medical establishment group. These self-help sites were often nutrition-based and often provided education and information that could make unnecessary an unaffordable physician visit that usually ended with an unaffordable prescription or two. Real cures—rather than perpetual, lifelong drug or disease “management”—often could be found online. It was only later, when the establishment came to dominate the Internet with their propaganda (and Google’s ranking system, which always puts Medscape and WebMD on top), that I came to agree with their warnings about online medical  disinformation. Only now, we have to be worried about what the medical establishment is trying to convince us to do.

Remember the truism: “Whoever pays the piper, calls the tune.” This has never been more true than at this time of astronomical health care and bankrupting prescription drug costs.
Gary G. Kohls, MD
Duluth, Minnesota

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