Page 70 - Spring 2019 Journal

Wise Traditions Podcast Interviews
INTERVIEW WITH FORREST MAREADY
Hilda Labrada Gore is the producer and host of our Wise Traditions podcast and a Washington, DC, co-chapter leader. An enthusiastic communicator,
Hilda is passionate about wellness on every level, which
is why she is known as “holistic Hilda,” She is a speaker, podcast consultant and the co-author
of Podcasting Made Simple. Hilda lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, children, dog and cat. Subscribe to her blog through her website (holistichilda.com) and follow her
on Instagram: @holistichilda.
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HILDA LABRADA GORE: My guest, Forrest Maready, had an interesting and varied career in the film and television industry before he became a medical historian, researcher and au- thor of the book, Crooked: Man-Made Disease Explained.1 Today we focus on his “crooked” theory, which is the idea that many illnesses leave a visible sign on our faces that something is amiss, like a crooked smile or misaligned eyes. The theory also addresses how seemingly unrelated conditions and neurological and im- munological illnesses like eczema and asthma can be traced back to a single root cause that leaves lesions on the brain stem, wreaking havoc on our mental and physical health. Forrest helps us understand neurotoxins, incorrect antibiotic use and other factors that affect our health—and also discusses what we can do about it. Forrest spoke about the crooked theory at the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Wise Traditions conference in Baltimore (November, 2018), discussing what he believes to be the root cause of most disease.
Forrest, I want to talk about your interesting background. You used to work in the film in- dustry. What made you change from film to the field of wellness?
FORREST MAREADY: Yes, that was my ca- reer for quite a while. I worked mainly behind the scenes and sometimes on the set but never in front of the camera. Then my wife and I started going down rabbit holes doing a lot of research into Crohn’s disease and other chronic illnesses that had affected some of our family members. Through some of that research, I started paying more attention to vaccinations as a potential source of problems. And through some of that research, I started noticing how frequently people seem to exhibit on their face what we now know as cranial nerve damage. That was a fifteen-year journey, which I’m condensing down very quickly.
HG: What is cranial nerve damage?
FM: Basically, people noticed this in the 1800s when children came down with “teething paral- ysis”—something children seemed to get after they were teething—or what they then called “infantile paralysis” and later became known as polio. A lot of children would exhibit something they called “squint” (or being “cross-eyed”), which we now call strabismus. It is where their eyes would not point in the same direction. You might have one eye point inward or one pointing outward. Children with polio would often have eyes that wouldn’t point in the same direction.
If you look a little harder, you notice people saying that a part or side of their face became paralyzed, similar to what we may think of as Bell’s palsy. For many years, this has sometimes been associated with vaccination. The focus was always on the eyes or the mouth, though I think—after a lot of research—that this is actually a problem in the brainstem that affects what we call cranial nerves. The brain is a grey spongy thing with a protrusion, which we call the brainstem, that connects the brain to the spinal cord. There are twelve cranial nerves in the brainstem. These nerves are different than the nerves that come off the spinal cord, which control your arms or legs. Some of the cranial nerves control your face and let you smile. Some control your eyes and the direction they point. They also function as inputs. They control your hearing and sense of taste. There is one cranial nerve that many have heard of called the vagus nerve. That one actually interfaces with quite a few functions in our body, including, most importantly, our gut.
What I started realizing, through much re- search, was that it wasn’t just the mouth or the eyes that were being affected; it was all of the cranial nerves. Often, you see a child who has
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SPRING 2019