The World of Health is Changing—A Thanksgiving Post
It's an exciting time to be researching health and witnessing the numerous discoveries of the healing powers of the human body.
The two lovely Thanksgiving celebrations I enjoyed last week caused me to reflect upon the many ways I am thankful for the moment we are in right now.
Is a human being simply a sack of chemical reactions that can be manipulated by adding specialized chemicals to manufacture health?
This old paradigm, the mechanistic and reductionistic view of the human body, is collapsing under its own weight, and we get to be a part of shaping what rises from the ashes. I’m thankful that I get to be a small contributor to this Copernican health revolution.
And I’m thankful for the brave, outside-the-box doctors and other brilliant people who direct the research I constantly read.
Since Rockefeller centralized medicine about 100 years ago to sell the pharmaceuticals he had invested in, “better living through chemistry” has been the paradigm.
But now it’s so exciting to be a part of a paradigm shift as groups of people are waking up and realizing that modern medicine’s basic model is deeply flawed.
This paradigm shift is taking place through the medium of free speech platforms. This is why I am so thankful for the excellent Substacks I get to read (here and here are two exceptional ones).
The monopoly of one central view of medicine persisted because it controlled medical education and information. I genuinely believe that most doctors want to help people but they’ve been taught only how to use chemicals.
But through avenues such as Twitter, Substack, and Pubmed, new information is emerging that is emancipating the public from the tyrannical racket that is the medical industrial complex. Think for a second about how much of your income is commandeered by health insurance, co-pays, deductibles, and prescriptions, not to mention the tax burden. What if that could change?
I am thankful that we are also living in a time of options. My husband works for a large company that offers its employees four separate medical plans. The most comprehensive plan costs a family $1200/month!
But since we reversed all of our health problems through fasting and came off of all our prescriptions, we are able to choose the high-deductible plan for $300/month. So we save $900/month that we choose to spend on locally raised beef and pork, local raw goat’s milk (legal in our state), farm-raised eggs, and some supplements that are necessary for now as we rebuild our health.
There are ways to break out of the system—and for that I am thankful.
But the primary way to break out of the system is through knowledge. It is the free flow of new health information that I am so thankful for.
Have you ever noticed that if you Google a health topic, you are served up pages and pages of the same standardized info? This is because Google purposely hides alternative medical viewpoints dishing up only the official, pharma-sponsored content. Since the mainstream media is basically a subsidiary of big pharma, they perpetuate the same info as well.
This is why I am so thankful for Substack, Twitter, and PubMed! Doctors and medical professionals on Twitter regularly bring mind-blowing new medical studies to my attention. The Substack doctors and writers regularly amaze me with the quality of their informative content.
I currently have 47 rough posts (almost a year’s worth) queued up as Substack drafts. There is so much exciting health research happening that I hardly know where to begin. Just last month the journal Nature (arguably one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world) published this groundbreaking study as to how Parkinson’s starts in the gut. That correlates with this testimony, and this testimony, and this randomized controlled trial, all showing that the ketogenic diet provides remarkable improvement for those with Parkinson’s (keto greatly alters the gut as well as the brain). So I have a whole post queued up about Parkinson’s.
You can never get this info through Google. But what a great time to be alive. New information is constantly emerging about this incredible human body, and its innate ability to heal itself.
Dr. Chris Masterjohn talks here about how getting enough vitamin A is necessary for the immune system to identify tissues that it should not attack and therefore is vitally necessary for staving off autoimmune disease. He also talks here about how most diseases such as Measles, Mumps, Whooping cough, etc were in decline long before vaccinations because people began using cod liver oil which greatly increases levels of vitamins A and D, vitally necessary for immune function.
This information and so much more has been in some ways neglected and in other ways purposely hidden from us. Yet so much of it is being revealed to us now if we are willing to look.
We now understand why drinking chicken soup when sick actually helps the body heal faster. Among other healing mechanisms, bone broth contains the amino acid glycine. This 2021 study title says, Glycine can prevent and fight virus invasiveness by reinforcing the extracellular matrix. (It also stimulates collagen in skin since every third amino acid in collagen is glycine).
I once heard a doctor disparaging some kind of natural healing and then add, “What’s next, chicken soup for colds?” as if that was the epitome of ridiculous old wives’ tales about healing.
Well, it turns out that the joke’s on this doctor and his medical hubris. The old wives used something so potent that science is only beginning to understand the benefits of. And to top it off, chicken soup has no side effects unlike the myriad of pills this doctor trafficked in.
However, the health of humanity has its enemies. Some hilariously think that meat grown in a climate-controlled florescent-lit lab using all manner of carbon emissions is somehow better for the planet than cows munching on grass in a natural eco-system.
And they claim that cows passing methane gas is bad for the planet while ignoring the fact that the wild plains of the Americas used to have 60 million bison (some estimates say).
So we have our battles to fight for sure. We have to figure how to dodge industrialized seed poison—I mean oils. And our fortified breads and crackers have harmful iron and artificial folic acid and other lab-created chemicals that are detrimental to our health. Our mass-produced milk and eggs are largely devoid of nutrients, our soils are stripped, chemicals such as glyphosate saturate the crops, and GMOs are widespread. We have work to do.
But I believe that the tide is turning. People are waking up. Skepticism about the old paradigm is spreading. People are finding health through fasting. People are coming off of psychiatric meds. People are reversing diabetes and high blood pressure. People are telling their friends what they did.
We have access to podcasts and books as well. The health space can be a tad overwhelming, and I by no means embrace every last alternative voice. But if you learn to be discerning and find the people who aren’t selling products but are interested in the healing powers of the body, you have found a treasure trove.
Out of thankfulness, I’d like to acknowledge the people who have been the most influential in my own radical paradigm shift—a shift that began first in my body and then in my mind as I was amazed that when I set out to heal one thing, prediabetes, all my other problems—migraines, stomach pain, interstitial cystitis, gastritis—resolved as well. Then I set out to find out every last thing I could about this incredible human body, and its radical healing potential.
Dr. Jason Fung pioneered the field of using intermittent fasting and low-carb to reverse diabetes, PCOS, high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney disease, insulin resistance, and so much more. Although there were small pockets of doctors who used fasting and low carb time out of mind, when Dr. Fung began experimenting with fasting to treat diabetes, he wasn’t familiar with their work and genuinely didn’t know if fasting would work—he was flying blind.
Yet he used his knowledge of the human body to think about diabetes from a non-drug approach and happened upon the cure. Fung’s very first fasting patient tells the story in this podcast of how Fung put her on a 6-month fasting regimen that took her from full-blown diabetes at the age of 27 to losing 80 lbs and keeping the diabetes away and the weight off for 12 years and counting. I highly recommend his books The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code, The Cancer Code, and The PCOS Plan and anything of his on his YouTube channel.
Without Dr. Fung, I would have, at the age of 45, started the long, chemical journey of putting multiple diabetes drugs into my body, none of which actually reverse the disease, only attempt to manage it. I would have likely developed kidney disease (I already had some concerning markers), neuropathy, heart disease (which closely follows diabetes) and would still be suffering from debilitating migraines (which are now gone) and be paying for sumatriptan, a pricey migraine med that didn’t fully work. We would have to pay for the $1200/month health insurance option that still had co-pays on top of it which would mean we couldn’t afford the local eggs/dairy/meat that we buy—making us more sick. Thank you, Dr. Fung.
The second most influential person for me is Gin Stephens. Part of the reason I started this Substack and also now coach people one-on-one is because I dappled in intermittent fasting off and on for several years and found no success. And then I finally determined to do this fasting thing for real and did it faithfully every day for 6 months—and didn’t lose any weight or inches or have any health benefits.
If I hadn’t been listening to nearly every episode of Gin Stephen’s Intermittent Fasting Stories podcast, I would have quit fasting saying it didn’t work for me. But the great thing about this podcast is that few stories feature straightforward success. People had to wrestle and tweak their fasting schedules and change what they ate and learn to clean fast and try different things and eventually one day it worked.
As you know if you listened to my guest appearance on her podcast, my body didn’t respond to OMAD (one meal a day) but took to alternate fasting like magic. This is the point that I started to lose weight and heal my body. But without the stories encouraging me to keep trying different types of fasting, I never would have found the only schedule that worked for me. The podcasts got the idea into my head that fasting always works, you just have to keep trying different schedules.
This experience made me realize that people cannot just hear a snippet about fasting and then go on to find great success. People need constant support, encouragement, and information.
If you decide to listen to Gin’s podcast, here are a few of my favorite episodes: 1, 3, 4, 26, 125, 146, 155, 188. If you want to listen to more of them, it’s helpful to start at episode 1 and work forward from there as the first ones are much more foundational and helpful than the later episodes.
The last most influential person I’m thankful for is Dr. Chris Masterjohn who has a PhD in Nutritional Sciences. There are times when I’m reading him or listening to him that I have the distinct feeling of being in a post-doctorate level class. But I’m fine with that because I’ve realized when it comes to science, my superpower is catching up really fast. A super-duper nerdy part of me secretly loves every geeky moment.
When I first found incredible healing after switching to alternate day fasting from OMAD, I didn’t think much about supplementation. However, Masterjohn has opened my mind up to a vast world of the power of nutrients to reverse disease states.
It was through reading Masterjohn that I learned about the aforementioned gene mutation, of which I have the most severe form (most people only have one mutated gene but I carry two of the c677t genes which are more severe than the 1298 polymorphism). He also walked me through how to supplement for this.
Since reading Masterjohn, I have slightly changed my views on supplementation. I’m still not crazy about one-size-fits-all multivitamins that contain chemical forms of vitamins such as folic acid instead of folate. And I still believe that certain supplements, such as iron and calcium, can be dangerous. However, I now realize that depleted soils and years of seed oils and junk food can cause the average person to need certain supplements, at least for a time.
One way I get my supplements is by regularly eating liver, bone broth, glycine, nutritional yeast, smoked oysters (for zinc and B12), and cod liver oil (for vitamins A and D). I also take magnesium glycinat, a B complex for MTHFR, vitamin E for seed oil oxidative damage from my past, and a few other things for MTHFR which I’ll explain in a future post. All this I learned from Masterjohn’s Vitamins and Minerals Masterclass. I’m currently in the process of going through some of his other courses so that I can continue bolstering the content of this Substack with evidence-based, scientific, actionable information.
And last but not least, I am thankful for the Creator. There is no such thing as Thanksgiving without a person to be thankful to. The people I just mentioned above were providentially brought into my life by God’s grace. He created this intricate human body and He gave us the mind to understand how it works. He is an intelligible person who created an intelligible world, and we can learn about how to treat the bodies He’s given us to inhabit during our sojourn through this world. Much has been lost since chemical exploitation took over the professions and media. But I believe that there’s no time like the present to recover lost knowledge and gain new insights into health.
Lastly, thank you to each and every person who has ever subscribed, even if only for one month. Media without advertising has its drawbacks. People constantly ask me why I don’t make use of affiliate links and sponsors. But I want to remain free to write without casting doubt that what I say is commercially influenced. I am so thankful that this platform allows me to write what I think is true without the pressure of a magazine brand to uphold, shareholders to please, sponsors to mention, or editors who put pressure on me to please everyone.
This is a unique platform in a unique time. Thank you for being a part of it.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Leslie
I'm thankful I found your substack, Leslie. Happy Thanksgiving!
Thank you, Leslie for your post. I also started following Dr Fung earlier this year, other than him I also listen to the doctors and experts such as Dr Tim Spector, The Glucose Goddess, watched Dr Chris Van Tulleken's experience of eating UPF, read Dr David Sinclair's Lifespan book, Dr Mark Hyman, Dr Mindy Pelz, Dr Eric Berg, and so on.