What Doctors Don't Tell You Australia/NZ August - September 2021

A few weeks ago, when interviewing ecological medicine pioneer Dr Damien Downing for our company’s Get Well online intensive on gut healing, we were completely floored by the implications of something he said. He was showing a slide from the scientific journal Autoimmunity Reviews with a title that could well set off nothing less than a revolution in medical thinking.1 The paper had the ponderous title, “Changes in Intestinal Tight Junction Permeability Associated with Industrial Food Additives Explain the Rising Incidence of Autoimmune Disease,”and Dr Downing had highlighted a section of the abstract where Aaron Lerner, a respected pediatric gastroenterologist from Israel, and his coauthor Torsten Mattias from a scientific institute in Germany, laid out their thesis, implicating the main culprits of intestinal damage: “Glucose, salt, emulsifiers, organic solvents, gluten, microbial transglutaminase…

Dr Damien Downing, a specialist in allergy, environment and nutrition, is current president of the British Society for Ecological Medicine, on the editorial board of Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, Chief Medical Advisor of cancer charity Yes to Life (www.yestolife.org.uk), and author of numerous books including The Vitamin Cure for Allergies. Dr Michel Odent, a French-trained surgeon and obstetrician, is a pioneer of the natural birth movement, emphasizing home and water birth. Founder of the Primal Health Research Centre in the UK, he has written some 50 scientific papers and 11 books. Dr Sarah Myhill has worked in the UK National Health Service and private practice since 1981. Honorary Secretary of the British Society for Ecological Medicine for 17 years, she is a frequent lecturer and author of Sustainable Medicine and Diagnosis and…

Cholesterol and Covid I found the article“Your Great Immune System Reset”in the Apr/May 21 issue very informative and helpful, but was surprised that there was no mention of the vital role that an adequate supply of cholesterol plays in the successful synthesis of vitamin D. I feel it would be interesting to know if records were kept of the level of this vitamin in the people who have sadly died of Covid, and how many of them had artificially lowered their cholesterol with statins. Patricia Smart, via email A refreshing read I am a chiropractor in Australia who only discovered your magazine last week. I must say it is refreshing to find a health magazine that is not full of conspiracy theories. It’s also good to see a reference for each article. The problem I notice…

Having breakfast before 8:30 in the morning reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes. Blood sugar levels are likely to be lower, and this reduces the chances of insulin resistance, which is an early warning sign for the disease. Starting to eat earlier in the day is the single most important factor in preventing diabetes, and it’s more beneficial than other strategies such as restricted windows of time for eating. Researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago analyzed data from 10,575 people who took part in a survey that tracked their eating habits and health. They divided up the participants into three groups based on the number of hours they ate—with eating ‘windows’ of less than 10 hours, 10 to 13 hours or more than 13 hours a day—and then subdivided those according…

You don’t need to treat depression with drugs. Exercise, massage and touch all work better, especially for patients who are already suffering from dementia. Doctors should be looking more to these nondrug therapies for depression and loneliness because they work as well, if not better, than antidepressants. Researchers from the Cochrane Collaboration concluded that exercise, massage, touch therapy and social interaction all helped dementia patients overcome depression and feelings of isolation and loneliness, and they were more effective than drugs. They took another look at 256 studies that had included 28,483 people with dementia and discovered drugs were no better than standard care, and fared worse when they were matched against other, more proactive therapies. Of the 50 million people around the world diagnosed with dementia, around 16 percent are diagnosed with major depression,…

Nitrate-rich foods such as lettuce, spinach and celery keep your blood vessels and brain healthy. These foods promote ‘good’ bacteria in the mouth, which help regulate blood vessels and neurotransmission, or chemical messaging to the brain. The diet becomes more important as we get older and our natural ability to produce nitric oxide declines, say researchers from the University of Exeter. The foods—together with beet juice, which the researchers used for their experiment—are rich in inorganic nitrate, and bacteria in the mouth convert this to nitric oxide, which helps maintain good vascular and cognitive health. The researchers gave beet juice to 26 healthy adults for 10 days before switching to a nitrate-free placebo juice. They drank both juices twice a day. After drinking the beet juice, the participants had higher levels of bacteria linked to…