Let's me make this clear: Health care as we know it in the US is going to collapse and that collapse is imminent.

Yes, I know, they've "saved" it before.  Obamacare anyone?  But they didn't fix it - they instead threw (printed) credit at the problem, which just made it worse.  If you learned nothing else from Covid this was the lesson you damn well should have learned: No profession in the US gives a wet **** about anything but money anymore -- even if the result is your death.  There is a pile of bodies, over 1 million of them, stacked up at the unholy altar of cash flow from the virus and therapeutic options that we had reason to believe worked, and we later knew did work, were deliberately ignored in favor of very expensive things that did not work.

Ventilators are the poster child for this because we knew in March of 2020 they didn't work.  We knew it because in China they tried them and nearly everyone they used them on died anyway.  Do I need to repost the outcome table from the study published very early on that should have instantly stopped their use?

But they were good for tens of thousands of dollars for each cadaver delivered from the hospital and billions for the companies that made them under the DPA as ordered by Trump.  A worthless "therapy" that simply added agony and expense to your loved one who got shoved in the hole anyway.

We have an epidemic of morbidity in the United States.  All of it is recent.  It is too recent, and too rapid, to be genetic.  It is therefore, with certainty, environmental.  Yet over the last 50+ years we have wildly cleaned up the air, land and water -- and anyone who tells you otherwise either is too young to know or lying.  I'm 61 and lived through the cleanup -- from when the fish were unfit to eat, you couldn't swim safely in said water and the air was foul and full of chemical fumes.  All that is gone.

So that, clearly, isn't the problem.

What is?

We're not sure but we do know what correlates, and there are three, two that are very solid and one a bit less-so: Vaccine administration with adjuvants, specifically aluminum compounds, have exploded in terms of the "recommended schedule" and the per-capita consumption of seed oils and high-fructose corn syrup.  Those three are correlated with the rise of chronic and serious conditions from childhood forward.

Which is responsible?  We do not know.  Quite possibly all three -- or even something else too.  You can't "untake" a shot although there is zero justification (and incidentally this is now confirmed in a few court rulings, so pushback is entirely possible) for any alleged "vaccine" that does not provide sterile immunity -- that is, which does not prevent you from giving the disease to someone else.  Nearly zero of the current shots do this; MMR is one of the notable exceptions that does.  DTaP does not (the original formulation of DTP did -- that was the one they botched and led to immunity from lawsuit), injected polio does not, HPV does not and neither do Covid or flu shots.  Further, Hep-B is a blood-borne disease so giving it to infants is outrageous -- it confers zero benefit in a baby who obviously is neither a sex worker or an IV drug abuser.

What you can do, however, is get the HFCS out of your diet and at the same time get rid of the damned seed oils.

I cannot calibrate the HFCS problem accurately with personal data but on the seed oils I can.  You see, it is virtually impossible to avoid them when eating away from home.  At home its easy since you cooked it and you know what's in it.

An example: I had a box of Granola Bars.  They're part of my "emergency stash" and I took them on a trip because well, you never know.  Calories in a small package, shelf-stable.  So the other day I ate one while driving -- for me, a very low-stress activity (never comes out of the "rest" range except during the few minutes required for me to fill the tank or stop and take a piss.)

My body stress level spiked immediately, within 15 minutes of consuming it, and remained highly elevated for more than two hours without coming back to baseline!  What does it have in it?  Sunflower and/or canola oil.

Then, same day, I went into a Texas Roadhouse and ate "Road Kill" (chopped steak with onions, mushrooms and cheese on top) with the chili and steamed veggies as sides.  That's a full meal and yet I choose it specifically because there are no oils necessary to cook it at all; the fats in the beef are all in the beef itself in both the meat and chili.  That caloric intake, roughly six times the granola bar, barely moved my stress level and within a couple of hours it was back to baseline.

I've also noted that what I thought was a peanut allergy based on a notch test (with a jar of peanut butter) turned out to not be true -- on challenge with dry roasted peanuts (nothing other than them and salt) there was no impact.  There was also no impact with a spoon of "natural" (peanuts and salt) peanut butter as a re-test.  It wasn't the peanuts, in short: Its the damned seed oils in the commercial products.

How do I know all this?  I have a Garmin smartwatch that measures stress levels all day, and in addition gives me overnight HRV which is ridiculously sensitive to the point that I can document the consumption of a mere single beer during a given day.

These results are absolutely, 100% of the time, repeatable.

We must force these "ingredients" to be labeled prominently on packaging for foods, on the front, as dangerous and we further must force them out of all institutional and commercial food production entirely.  That specifically means schools, hospitals and restaurants where they are used because they're cheaper and it is basically impossible for you to know if they're in there or not.  You can't even order an omelet without exposure to them as the restaurant is almost-certain to use them rather than actual butter because these oils are much less expensive.

If you want to consume them in goods bought in a store have at it -- provided they're labeled prominently (they are on the ingredient list panel, so you can read it first.)  But we should mandate that such labeling (e.g. "contains seed oils") be on the face of the package and we must bar them from all "forced" consumption such as in restaurants, including fast food, and commercial production kitchens in both workplaces and especially schools of all types including colleges.

The continued ramp of cost in the medical system is not slowing down and the medical system -- including your doctor personally -- does not give a crap if you live or die; they only care about money.  Get that through your damned head right now and if you don't believe it look back over the last four years and then go ahead and tell me I'm wrong.

You know full well I'm not.

If you think my experience -- and I've repeated it enough times by now to be absolutely, 100% confident in the results when I ingest these things -- doesn't apply to you you're almost-certainly wrong.  Of course you can prove that I'm wrong in your individual case if you have or get one of the Garmins with HRV, wear it for a couple of weeks to get a baseline, then make changes one at a time and see what happens.

But in virtually every case among people I know personally who have some metabolic-related complaint, when I explain this to them, simply do not want to know or argue "well, it might not be accurate for me."

You never find what you refuse to look for and if you don't cut this crap out then who's responsibility is it when you continue to suffer declining health, you're presented a reasonably-inexpensive tool that will nail down the negative impacts of what you put in your pie hole on a specific and repeatable basis, and you refuse?  In addition you believe you can demand that everyone else pay for your deliberate refusal to even identify the source of the problem because then you couldn't deny it anymore?

Well guess what -- this crap is why the nation is literally going bankrupt and you WILL be the one who's screwed when the checks you're demanding be written so you can eat that CRAP cannot be cashed.

That day is coming very soon and it would be wise to excise all of this from your food consumption right now or prove that for you there is no negative impact on your health.

I keep getting asked for this -- how is it that thirteen years ago I did this with no drugs and went from a deteriorating glucose tolerance and obesity to completely-normal glucose control, no high blood pressure problems, no unwanted excess body mass and no need for medications of any sort -- and thirteen years later, its the same other than (obviously) being 13 years older.

This began because of Obamacare.  That was the last chance to address the medical monopolies without some sort of, for me personally, a catastrophic outcome.  Specifically I knew if I didn't get it under control the odds were extremely high that when the system collapsed, and it would as a result of Obamacare being done rather than addressing the monopolists and insane "health care" distortions I'd be ****ed.  At best I'd be infirm and wishing I was dead, and there were good odds I'd actually be dead.

As it turned out the latter would have occurred with near-certainty had I not made those changes when I got Covid.  Had I been insulin compromised and fat the odds of me being dead rather than having a rough time of it are likely near 100%.  So there you go; the payoff of "not dead" came but that wasn't the only payoff -- my health and physical fitness is wildly better than it was even at 40 years of age and arguably better than in my late teens.  Certainly when it comes to exercise tolerance (e.g. capacity to run a 5k and the time in doing so) it is better now than it was then even though I'm more than 40 years older.

What I changed was what goes in my pie hole, or more-specifically, what doesn't go in my pie hole.  When I made the change the rules were this:

• Animal flesh including the fat (no trimming it) of any sort, including any sort of fowl (e.g. chicken, turkey, duck and Cornish hen), beef, pork and fish.  Yes, proto-animals (e.g. eggs) are animals.
  
  
• Full-fat cheeses.
  
  
• All cooking oils were 100% animal oils; butter counts as its from a cow and thus is an animal fat.  No exceptions.
  
  
• No white carbohydrates of any sort, ever, period.  No breads, pasta, rice, potatoes (including sweet potatoes) and similar.
  
  
• The only vegetables were green and if oils were used to cook them they had to be animal fats.  The one exception was olive oil as part of a salad dressing (e.g. oil and vinegar) but never for cooking.
  
  
• No added sugars, period.
  
  
• Spices, provided pure spices (no carbohydrate fillers, check the labels!) used liberally, including salt.  No salt restriction of any sort.
  
  
• Any consumption of alcohol counts toward total carbohydrate, no more than 50g/day total for all sources.

My pants fell off repeatedly.

The first month or so sucked.  Carbohydrates are crazily addictive and withdrawal is just that.  Yeah, not fun.  Tough it out and don't be a pussy.  It will break but it may take a month or two.  Do not keep any of the prohibited foods in the house; you can't eat what's not there.  If it has a seed oil or carbohydrate in it other than green vegetables into the trash it goes.  To have something to munch buy some fresh broccoli, a block of cheese you can cut some slices off or similar.

But what has changed now and what do I eat today?

Here's a typical day:

I usually wake up between 0600 and 0700; no alarm required.  I do set it on Tuesdays and Fridays so as to make sure I have sufficient time for espresso before SNJ, but otherwise generally do not as I don't need to.  I am not hungry when I wake up.  At all.

I get myself an espresso, sometimes a glass of water with an electrolyte tablet (which has a gram or so of carb by the label in it) check my email and if I have an interview to do then that gets done.  If its a nice day and I feel like it, I will go for a run after that.  This is usually 3x/week or more-or-less every other day, usually 3 miles, but its highly weather-dependent.  In the winter I do have a dreadmill but I hate the damn things and have it only because it beats no cardio workout at all for a couple of weeks at a time.

Typically around 10 or 11 AM I'm a bit hungry.  Not ravenously, but somewhat.  I'll make a cheese omelet; usually two eggs, if I have an open package of bacon I'll cook a couple of strips of that and use the grease as the oil for the eggs.  Frequently I'll either saute some chopped onions in the pan for flavor, or if I have some chili (no beans) in the fridge I'll put a bit of that in the pan while its heating for its oil and meat content.  That is usually consumed with another espresso and a glass of water -- sometimes carbonated, zero-cal/zero-sweetener (usually flavored generic such as from Kroger.)

Dinner, my only other "real meal", is usually around 3 or 4.  More animal.  Depending on what it is (hamburgers, steak, pork chops, bacon-wrapped meatloaf, ribs, chili, fish of some sort, etc.) the time I start it varies widely.  In a few cases (e.g. if I'm smoking a whole pork shoulder or brisket) it went into the machine before I went to bed.  I'm not a nazi about BBQ sauces except that I refuse to buy any with seed oils in them.  There are several without; yes, they have some sugar in them (e.g. molasses) but choosing wisely keeps the seed oils out and I am relatively sparse in my portions.

I do not meal plan beyond the next two days, typically how long it takes for something frozen to thaw in the refer.  The exception is very large things like a whole pork shoulder or turkey for thanksgiving, where you have to figure out thaw times 3-5 days in advance.  There is typically something on the refer shelf for the next day or two but that's it.

If I desire a snack later on it follows the same rules.  If I'm home brussels sprouts with a slice of cut-up bacon for the cooking fat (and bacon itself) are one of my favorites to do in the cast-iron skillet; cut up and cook the bacon, cut the sprouts in half the put them in the skillet, add a quarter to half-cup of water and put a lid on it, steaming them in the boiling water, then when that's evaporated off add seasoning (e.g. Lawrey Seasoned Salt) and eat.  Pork rinds are one of the few indulgences that might have seed oils in them -- its hard to know and I do pay attention to my Garmin HRV that night if sampling a new brand because it will show up.  That overnight HRV is extremely sensitive and if you misbehave you will not get away with it.  It will absolutely call out the first beer, the second and beyond that you may as well get ****faced in terms of the metabolic impact - its that bad.  Straight liquor is a bit less evil in that the carbs aren't there but if you do mixed drinks forget it -- same thing.  Booze in any form is conducive to eating things you shouldn't either in type or quantity -- always -- and the damage metabolically is multiplied if you do, so if you are actively trying to ditch excess weight just don't at all.

Can (and do) I sometimes break these rules today?  Yes.  I now have a normal glucose response where I did not before.  But if I go back to what I used to eat the damage will return, so I can't do it other than very occasionally and if yours is damaged now you can't do it at all for quite some time, likely many months to even a few years.

How do you know you've reversed the damage?  When you misbehave for a couple of days your metabolism will shift back and 3-5lbs will immediately reappear (along with feeling like crap.)  But -- within 48 hours of stopping that it will shift back immediately, you will******out the excess water (which is what it was) and you will be back to your former mass.  If you lose ground and it takes a week or two to recover from it you are still metabolically compromised and thus the misbehavior was stupid rather than an indulgence that almost-certainly did you no real harm.

When you resolve metabolic dysfunction you are automatically "fasting" 18 hours of the day without attempting to.  My usual practice, entirely by when I'm hungry, is to eat something around 10 or 11 and again around 4.  That's 18 hours of the day "fasting" yet I made no attempt to do that; its just a function of eating when hungry, and not when you aren't.

It will take months to years to regain reasonable metabolic health. You didn't destroy it in a week and you won't fix it in a week either but the differences will be noticeable immediately and the improvement starts immediately as well.

It is absolutely true that to ditch body mass you must consume and absorb fewer calories than you expend.  There is no such thing as magic food or magic anything else and no, its not that your metabolism is "special."  You are free to lie to yourself but it is still a lie no matter how many times you repeat it.  One Cafe Latte at Starbucks is nearly 200 calories, 19 grams of carbs, statistically all of them sugar and if you drink just one per day you have consumed 13% of a non-exercising person's caloric requirement down your pie hole and at the same time suppressed the consumption of body fat for at least two hours assuming you eat nothing else during that time because carbohydrate is always consumed first.

You cannot outrun your mouth, fork or not.  A mile of walking or running consumes about 100 calories.  It requires two miles of walking or running to balance that Cafe Latte all by itself.  If you add a scone, honey bun or donut to that -- forget it.  It is trivially easy to stuff a half-marathon's worth of food in your mouth in the form of carbohydrates within minutes.

If you are metabolically dysfunctional you will be hungry in the morning.  If you feed yourself with carbohydrate in the morning as soon as that is consumed -- about two hours later -- the excess insulin in your blood will make you ravenously hungry again and you will eat whatever is available favoring more carbohydrate because you have excess insulin in your blood.  This cycle will repeat all day long.  You get fat because you've ****ed up your leptin signaling system which in turn has damaged insulin sensitivity in the cells and thus destroyed the ordinary regulatory function that insulin has in your body.  Seed oils, by virtue of their resistance to being broken down by ordinary bacterial (biological) process, which is why they're used in the first place to make something shelf-stable, make it worse.

Drugs cannot reverse or control this.

The only way to stop it is to stop consuming that which is ****ing up your system.

The seed oils will take months to even a couple of years to get out of your system because they, as a fat, become incorporated in the cellular structure.  All cells are replaced over time in your body and that's what has to happen to completely rid yourself of these.  In the tiny amounts you can and will obtain from eating actual green vegetables they are not harmful but in size they are, and there is no safe amount you can consume from modern use as cooking, taste-promoting and stabilizing oils in restaurants and packaged food products.  The only way to stop the damage is to stop eating them and allow your body to clear them over time.

If you use drugs to try to overcome these problems you continue to accumulate the damage while suppressing the symptoms via the drugs.  This is not only guaranteed to fail it is guaranteed to eventually seriously harm or even kill you and it is not the drugs that kills you it is what you're putting in your mouth that does so because rather than cutting that out you are using the drugs to attempt to hide the negative effect.  The damage still happens and you build tolerance to the drug because you are still accumulating the damage, thus you need more and more of the drug!  The now-common political trope of "$35 insulin" is one of of the most-obscene and abusive examples of this and everyone involved in it should be executed as they literally are damning you to a million dollars of medical expense and a miserable death rather than explain that you can either greatly decrease said spend or even avoid it entirely, plus ALL of the misery and other medical spending, by simply not eating pizza, seed oils and similar.

Further, and this you must clearly understand: YOUR DOCTOR, EVERY PHARMACEUTICAL AND OTHER MEDICALLY RELATED COMPANY AND ORGANIZATION -- ALL OF THEM -- WANT YOU TO SCREW YOURSELF AND IN FACT ADVOCATE THAT YOU DO SO.  Every one of them has a huge financial incentive to get you in a situation where you MUST spend huge amounts of money not only for the temporary relief of symptoms but by deliberately allowing the damage to continue you are GUARANTEED to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars OR MORE with them over the next decades.  THEY HAVE A LITERAL MILLION REASONS TO LIE AND THEY DO -- ALL OF THEM -- because absent those lies none of that money gets spent.  These people are greedy *******s who are perfectly happy to see you ruin your own health and die a miserable death so their paychecks keep coming and they encourage you to do so rather than make the ZERO COST changes that will immediately stop and in many cases reverse accumulation of that damage.

This, and only this, is why the US went from spending 4-5% of its economic output on medical care to 21%, a quadrupling as a percentage of the whole, over the last fifty or so years.  It is why the Federal Government has posted up $35 trillion in debt and the entire federal deficit, more than $2 trillion thus far with one month left to go, is in fact found in CMS -- Medicare and Medicaid.  This is intentional, it is malicious, the people doing it are both in the medical fields and government and it is done for one and only one reason -- profit without regard for the misery and financial destruction you will and do suffer as a result.

This is exactly what someone who is using opiates runs into and the exact same incentives that a drug pusher has to let and even encourage you to get hooked.  Opiates get you high but at the same time they suppress respiration.  Your body has a tolerance response to both but the dulling of the high is much more-profound than the suppression of respiration.  Eventually if you keep using it you die as a result of literally failing to breathe -- so junkies, when this starts to happen (its extremely uncomfortable - think about how uncomfortable it is if you try to not breathe for a couple of minutes!) use methamphetamine to counter that suppression.  This is not a solution in other than the very short term because the tolerance continues to build and eventually you give yourself a heart attack or you can't get the meth one day, your addiction compels you to use the opiate anyway and you die.  This is exactly what happened to Floyd, incidentally and the toxicology report proved it thus if you assert otherwise I bet you're equally lying to yourself about what you eat.

Note: I am not a physician.  I cannot back any of this up against a random controlled trial or even lab testing since I am unwilling to provide "formal" test results into a system that can and will be used to **** me down the road.  Thus, absent emergent need, I permit no such thing to occur, and there have been no emergent needs in my adult life.

As a result I do not know my serum Vitamin D level, for example.  I do know, however, a number of metabolic things about my person that I can test on my own with available and inexpensive items I can purchase over the counter or online, such as blood glucose, A1c, blood pressure and several elements of kidney function (urine test strips are available OTC and provide quite a bit of information.)

Until and unless I can have actual hard, enforceable privacy, with felony criminal and heavy punitive financial damages for any breach, no matter why or how, along with iron-clad and lifetime statutory guarantees that such cannot be abused now or at any time during my remaining life, my position on this will not change.  I am especially concerned, incidentally, with genetic-related information as that is a literal minefield for all of humanity; the potential on a forward basis to use that data in a discriminatory manner is unbounded and that we cannot typically do it today in most circumstances matters not because you can't change your genetic make up no matter what you do and thus once that data is in someone's hands it can be used to **** you up the ass for the rest of your life.  If you are one of the fools who used something like "23 and me" and you, or your offspring, get boned 20 years from now you deserve it -- I've repeatedly warned against this.  By the way that company is in financial trouble if their stock price of roughly 70 cents means anything which in turn means all their data is going to end up in someone else's hands and you have no control over any of it if you previously let them have it.  I warned people of this, and now it is going to happen so bend over and grab your ankles; someone, in the future, is almost-certain to screw you with that data if you gave them a sample.

YOU, AND ONLY YOU, are responsible for your own health.  I sell nothing.  I stand to gain nothing by sharing this information.  It is by definition an N = 1 test on one person (me) with one observer of the results (me) and said observations are limited in time to no further along than the present.  I could easily be wrong, but it is my ass, my choice and this is the set of choices I've made.  If you do any or all of this and get ****ed its on you; this is fair warning that it is not a recommendation or a "prescription."  I've read a lot of medical papers and taken the time to understand them and interpret them, then test against instrumentation I bought with my own money and against my uniquely-DNA-encoded body, which is different than every other human body, to some degree, on the planet.

Faux Snooz is of course at it again with "surprisingly simple ways to keep yourself healthy" which omit the most important -- what you put in the pie hole and your immune system's status.  I do agree that activity is a very good thing and being sedentary is bad.  And yes, digestion is important.  But note that of course they talk about "recommended vaccinations" which of course means flu and covid and if anything those are the opposite when it comes to immunity because they are a crutch.  If you get measles there won't be any question as to whether you have a serious problem or not -- right?

And of course the "crank up the stupid" has to come in through "organic this and that."  These **********s never passed organic chem, I see -- so what are they -- diversity doctors?  Probably.  Why?  Some of the nastiest chemicals on the planet are organic which makes sense if you think about it for five seconds; being organic they can interfere with you as an organism quite easily.  And of course they entirely omit the Granddaddy of immunity that in fact is likely the most-important of all, Vitamin D, which is impossible to get from the sun if you're indoors, it is impossible to get enough of it in winter for most people in the US and if you're black the problem is worse because you absorb less of it through your skin due to your pigmentation.

So pardon me if I have a jaundiced eye toward you when you ignore the biggest issue entirely and then play the "organic food" game.  This is nothing more than a cheap shot at those without a huge amount of money (that "organic" steak is twice as expensive as the not, and if you eschew it for the breaded chicken tenders or the pot pie in the freezer because of cost, well.... yeah.  Eat the damned steak before any of that other garbage.)

With that as a preamble here it is.

Due to the fact that roughly north of Atlanta, more or less, it is not possible to obtain adequate Vitamin D from exposure to the sun for about six months out of the year for a person of generally-white skin (the more melanin you have the further south that line goes!), Vitamin D is fat-soluble and thus in the winter all you have is that stored in the body, specifically the liver, and that during Covid we discovered that even in Central and South America most people are deficient (which was a surprise to me but it does make sense given how often people simply don't go outside these days) along with the extraordinary correlation between Vitamin D levels and fatal coronavirus infections (essentially zero persons who were not deficient died of it before any shots were available) I have taken the following daily since August of 2021:

• 5,000 IU of Vitamin D
• 100mcg of Vitamin K2

It is now nearly 2-1/2 years later and I have suffered exactly zero symptomatic respiratory infections.

The goal is to make sure that I am not severely deficient.  This should do so.  I am 60 and while I spend a lot of time outdoors in summer as we get older it is well-documented that your skin's capacity to make Vitamin D goes down, never mind that nobody likes getting fried and thus we tend to cover up, use sunblock or both.  Statistically-speaking this level is extremely unlikely to cause problems with having too much -- and the K2 is a buffer against that, although the base risk is very small.  Excessive Vitamin D levels are dangerous, including the possibility of precipitating calcium drop-out in the arteries which might be permanent, but there is quite a wide band before that area is reached.  I will note for reference that at one point during the pandemic Fauci stated that he took twice this amount daily.  I am uncomfortable with a higher amount and again, there is risk of possible permanent and serious damage if you go too far -- then again nearly anything is poisonous in sufficient quantity.  Were I younger and active outdoors on a regular basis I would use this only from roughly October to April -- but the key here is both age and regular outdoor exposure, as that study work during Covid in Central and South America showed.

There is, by the way, an argument for adding magnesium.  If you eat seafood, dairy and green vegetables you probably won't have a seriously-low level and too much is not good -- but if not you might want to add it. Just be aware that as with Vitamin D it is possible to overdose.

• Vitamin C, liposomal

I keep a stash of Vitamin C around and at the first hint of any sort of respiratory trouble I gobble it in moderate size.  That is, if I feel a bit "off" at night before going to bed (e.g. a bit of a tickle in the throat, etc.) I will gobble up 3-4 grams of the liposomal form of it in capsules.  I am not concerned about overdosing since it is basically impossible to do in a way that will harm you, although getting the squirts, which will happen if you take too much of it, isn't very pleasant.  When I had covid I used a huge amount of it and never found that alleged "bowel tolerance", so the claims of your tolerance going way up when you're sick are, at least for me, very true.  I also will take 2-3 grams of it at once one time a week simply because I do not eat much citrus and while I do routinely eat green vegetables (and they are an excellent source) they're intermittent enough that I want to make sure I have enough of it.  Humans cannot synthesize ascorbate (Vitamin C) due to an error in our DNA that arose a very, very long time ago similarly to the error in feline DNA that prohibits them from synthesizing Taurine (thus they are obligate carnivores.)  You have to be pretty deficient to get scurvy but there is no downside to having more than you need short of bowel tolerance, so this is a vitamin that I gobble with abandon at any, no matter how small, sign of trouble.

I do not like the "powder" form although I have a big jug of it.  For routine use I am very much not a fan because Vitamin C is ascorbic acid and acid exposure is rough on the enamel of the teeth.  I have crappy genetics in this regard and don't need any trouble there but if I needed extremely large doses in order to fight something off I'd deal with it for a few days.  So far that jug has remained unopened (and I'm not concerned about it "expiring" either.)  For the same reason I would not use chewable tablets; there's no concern about tablets or capsules you swallow as your stomach acid will trivially etch paint so once down the pipe its not a concern.

• Quercetin and Zinc

Quercetin is a flavonoid found in, among other things, grapes.  It has very decent anti-inflammatory properties alone and for a lot of people (myself included) it works as well as OTC allergy meds such as Claritin.  When combined with Zinc it has antiviral properties.  Being a flavonoid in any reasonable amount it has a statistically tiny risk profile and thus I use it without concern, although again -- not without reason.  I used to have severe seasonal allergies before I went low-carb in eating; they are now minor annoyances, but Quercetin is equally if not more effective than Claritin and unlike every OTC antihistamine I've ever tried I do not build a tolerance to it so I choose it instead in the spring, summer and fall months if I'm having allergy issues.  If I have reason to believe I've been exposed to a viral thing or feel any sort of incipient trouble I hit both it and the zinc for a couple of days.  Note that there is some evidence of potential drug interference with this (not significant risk, but non-zero) so if you're on prescriptions check that first.

• Claritin

I rarely use this today but do keep some around.  There was a small retrospective study during covid out of Spain in severely compromised people (nursing home residents) that showed that immediate use of it had a very statistically significant (100%!) positive impact on preventing the infection from progressing -- with no adverse effects from the treatment.  They bundled the antihistamine with Z-pak but of course that is a prescription drug.  This is logical as it is an antihistamine and has a drying effect on the upper respiratory and sinus area, that is, it changes the environment in the nose, sinuses and upper throat.  That appears to be enough to give the body a better shot at attacking the invading virus before it can break through and cause more-serious trouble.  Prior to discovering quercetin I used to use it on a very regular basis during allergy season as part of a rotation (to evade tolerance build) so I have many years of experience taking it and know it doesn't do anything bad to me.  As such it is now part of my protocol for any incipient upper respiratory infection that I feel coming on, although in the last 2-1/2 years I've only used it once for that purpose -- and didn't get actually sick.  Was it a nothing or did it help?  I don't know but the generic at WalMart or elsewhere is extremely cheap and very safe so having a bottle of it around is an easy thing to have on-hand.  Today I would hit any incipient upper respiratory infection with it immediately given the Spanish data and its known safety profile, never mind that its trivially cheap to keep a bottle in your drawer.

• NAC

Were I to get a serious respiratory infection anyway I would hit it with NAC and I keep some on hand.  I do not use it all the time because there is some question as to its safety in long term continual use.  However, it is known as an anti-inflammatory, immune modulator and helps with respiratory symptoms.  Therefore were I to get something nasty I'd use it and have it on-hand for that reason, but would stop when the reason to use it is alleviated.  Be aware that if you are using prescriptions you need to check for interactions -- some drugs have known interactions where there is reason to be concerned.  I have not had reason to use this since got covid -- but I do keep it in the cabinet.

That's it.  None of these are expensive, none of them pose material risk (other than possibly NAC if you are using certain prescription drugs), the Vitamin D and K2 are likely to promote a better immune profile across-the board which may extend materially beyond respiratory viruses.

In addition it is now nearly 2-1/2 years beyond when I got Covid and in the time since I have not had any respiratory virus of any symptomatic note at all.  I have hit a few things that felt "off" or where my Garmin has pegged a low overnight HRV without any obvious provocation (e.g. a few beers at the bar) with the above protocol and none turned into actual illness.  Statistically, for me, this is quite significant as my "usual" in my years on this rock have seen me get some sort of minor respiratory infection once or twice and more years than not a mild to moderate flu (and once in a while, a real ass-kicker such as the first week of 2020) on top of it.  To go nearly 2-1/2 years with zero such illnesses is quite remarkable in my experience, yet there you have it and, given that experience, I have every intention of continuing to do so.

YMMV.

PS: What difference could we have made with this set of recommendations, ex perhaps the NAC, on Covid in the United States?  The cost of having this on-hand is less than one "quick test" package and the cost of Vit-D and K2 supplementation is literally pennies a day.  Between that and the Spanish nursing home data it is reasonable to expect that an enormous percentage, and perhaps statistically all of the people who got whacked by this virus would not have died, and few would have wound up in the hospital -- perhaps 1 in 100 who actually did.  Of course nobody would have made any money and there would have been no fear of anything if that was recommended and had worked -- would there?  Something to think about.

Oh, you thought Covid was bad?

How about a decades-long scam which put a huge percentage of American adults on drugs that are dangerous and do nothing in terms of improving your odds of not having the ultimate bad thing happen -- death?  How would you like it if it was proved that your doctor lied, pharmaceutical companies lied, the government lied with their "recommendations", everyone lied -- and many of your friends and family suffered insane deterioration of their condition and ultimately died as a result?

Well, all of that happened.

You were told that cholesterol -- specifically, non-HDL (that is, LDL) cholesterol, was a cause of death via heart attacks and strokes.  You were given medication and told to take it, specifically statins, which do in fact lower cholesterol.  But statins have serious side effects and while they don't screw everyone who takes them (gee, where we have seen that in the last couple of years?) they do, in every case, result in detectable metabolic damage.  That's true for basically all drugs by the way: The question is always whether the damage from the drugs, and by the way those are averse effects, not "side" effects, and are deliberately misnamed in order to mislead you, is greater or lesser than the benefit from taking them.

If the benefit is zero then it is not a drug -- it is a poison.

Well here we are....

Harmonized individual-level data from a global cohort showed that 57.2% and 52.6% of cases of incident cardiovascular disease among women and men, respectively, and 22.2% and 19.1% of deaths from any cause among women and men, respectively, may be attributable to five modifiable risk factors. 

Wow, that sounds like five things you can change to modify your risk of dying.  That's a great thing, right?

So what were the five things?

BMI, systolic blood pressure (the top number), non-HDL cholesterol, smoking and diabetes.

Two outcomes were assessed: Cardiovascular disease and death from any cause.

I like the latter one far more than the former because dead is dead and why is irrelevant if you're the one who's dead.  We all can wring our hands on the  "why" when it happens, but from the perspective of the "trial of one" it matters not one whit.  In other words I'm not impressed in a "reduction" in cardiovascular disease if the thing that we do to produce it kills you in equal numbers, thus doing nothing has the same ultimate outcome.  Indeed that is a wild-eyed scam as the "something" that a doctor or other medical professional does is never free so unless you can demonstrate all-cause mortality benefit the only person getting actual "benefit" has to be presumed to be the doctor, hospital or pharmaceutical company -- and not you.

Further, this was an extremely large cohort -- roughly 1.5 million people.  Statistical power is greatly enhanced by large numbers, so that they looked at an utterly huge number of people is an excellent factor in favor of the results being valid.

Of the factors, however, only three of the five actually had a statistically significant correlation with being dead: Smoking, diabetes, and blood pressure.

LDL Cholesterol did not; it had a weak association that faded with age with cardiovascular disease but not dying in any of the age groups, which strongly implies that there is no value whatsoever to trying to reduce it in terms of being dead, which is what matters to you.  In addition, which did surprise me a bit, being fat itself was not dangerous in terms of killing you.

Smoking had the expected negative effect and so did blood pressure elevation.  The latter, of course, is highly-associated with body mass but there are fat people with normal blood pressure.

And finally, diabetes was the Gorilla in the room; at all ages it was a serious risk factor, and not a little either, roughly doubling your risk of being dead all the up until you got to be nearly 80, and even then it was good for a 1.6x elevation in risk.  At younger ages the elevation of risk was as much as four times.

Oh by the way one of the documented side effects of statins is CAUSING Type 2 diabetes.

In addition the global nature of this data and study has shown that no, the region of the world and thus the genetics of the person is not statistically relevant to the outcomes.  That is, there is no "magic genetic" or "magic dirt" factor involved; this applies to humans no matter where they came from or where they live.  While there are small differences from region to region there are none that stand out as statistical outliers, which is extremely important because one of the tropes often run is that "well, I'm from and thus I don't have to worry about it because I have magic genes."  No you don't, by the data, and if you keep believing that bull**** you are likely to be dead as a result of your own stupidity.

So what do we learn from this study?

• Your doctor is and has been lying, and so have all the medical "authorities" for decades when it comes to cholesterol.  It is a mild risk elevation for cardiovascular disease but not death, and death is what matters.  The "stomp on that now" approach to medicine in this regard is now proved bankrupt and the billions extracted were at best worthless and at worst poisonous, literally, resulting in an increased risk of mortality.
  
  
• Your doctor in fact raised your risk of dying when he prescribed statins.  Statins have a known adverse event risk of causing Type 2 diabetes, which is proved to be a wild (more than double and as much as four times the risk) of being dead across basically all age groups up until you get to be 80, and even then its roughly 1.6x.  Diabetes kills, period, and anything that increases the risk of diabetes is thus poison, period.  Since lowering non-HDL cholesterol has no mortality benefit at all the consumption of statins has no available benefit to your health, but does have a significant risk of causing a mortal disorder.  You have to be out of your damn mind to consume them given this data.
  
  
• Dietary "guidelines" that include carbohydrates, specifically "fast" carbohydrates such as potatoes, rice, wheat in any form (flour, bread, cookies, etc.) potentiate and worsen glycemic control issues and thus cause diabetes.  So do statins.  We know both of these things are facts.  Any "physician" who, given a lack of body mass or glucose control, say much less both, who does not recommend immediately getting all of that crap out of your diet is making recommendations that raise, not lower, your risk of dying.  This study proves that.
  
  
• While being fat alone does not raise your risk of dying we know being fat raises the risk of blood pressure elevation and diabetes.  If you are fat but not either hypertensive or diabetic the fat alone will probably not kill you and other than the other morbidity factors involved in being fat (joint damage, reduced exercise tolerance and mobility, etc.) since it doesn't make your dead the decision (and yes it is a decision) to be overweight or obese is not likely to give you a dirt nap. However, being fat will, over time, greatly increase the risk of one of the other two things happening and both of those do make it more likely that you will be dead.  The bullet point above, or if you prefer this article, will both control or even possibly reverse Type II diabetes and at the same time make you profoundly less-fat, reducing the risk of both developing or worsening that and high blood pressure and it costs zero dollars and thus makes nobody rich.  In fact it may make you more-rich in that diabetes, in particular, is extraordinarily expensive when it progresses to insulin dependence, amputations, blindness, kidney dialysis and death all of which are really bad for you but make your doctor, the local hospital and others in the medical system extremely wealthy.

Remember the last three years folks.

You were told that "masks prevented Covid-19 transmission."  Did they?  Did you get Covid despite wearing a mask?  Make all the excuses you wish; if a mask prevents you from inhaling a virus how is it that you got a virus if you wore one?  Obviously you were lied to.

You were also told that "taking the shots would prevent getting Covid and also giving it to others."  President Biden said this, the CEO of Pfizer said this, your doctor probably said it, the CDC said it and so did many others.  Deborah Birx admitted that she knew that claim was unfounded when it was made and said nothing, and she's allegedly one of the "experts."  I pointed out that it was unfounded as the original studies never were designed to demonstrate it.  The White House, it is now known, knew within months there were serious safety signals and ignored them on purpose.  Further, as soon as mass "breakthrough" events were reported, which was as early as April and May of 2021, anyone with two nickels worth of IQ points knew damn well that preventing getting it was a lie too, since if there's a 5% failure rate (for example) the odds of all 20 people in a gathering all having said failure occur at once is less than that of being by an asteroid while getting your mail.  Yet exactly that was reported, repeatedly.

Now we know that the claims that cholesterol will kill you, a trope run for decades by damn near every medical provider on the planet and used to promote billions of dollars in sales of drugs, is in fact false.  Its not only false its worse than false in that those drugs do promote a disorder, Type 2 diabetes, that actually does wildly raise your risk of dying.

The only thing worse than that is that we know how to reduce or even eliminate Type 2 diabetes in a particular person at zero cost by doing nothing more than changing what you eat on a permanent, lifestyle basis.

The choice is yours, of course.

Yes, the title of this posting may sound dramatic.

It is also likely.

CMS (Medicare and Medicaid) is one third of the entire Federal Budget.  When those programs were put into place the tax rates for Medicare were approximately equal to the percentage of GDP spent on medical care.  The medical system then embarked on a multi-decade program of felony anti-competitive practices and neither party has or will stop it, so the percentage went from about 3-4% of GDP to roughly 20% today.  The tax rate did not materially change and would have to be multiplied by five to be reasonably coherent which, of course, is politically impossible.

I projected forward in the 1990s when running MCSNet that this would bankrupt the Federal Government by about 2025 and when it did Medicare and Medicaid would be unable to be funded.  The pressure this would place on the medical system since nobody would or will enforce the law means that the ratchet job on everyone will continue and get worse, ending in an effective collapse.  Whether that collapse is complete or partial does not matter if you're the one who needs it and doesn't get it; statistical numbers are all fine and well but meaningless in the example of one -- you.

I have long stated that you better not need the medical system within the next decade or so (going back to the '08 blow-up timeframe) and if you do the odds are you won't get it, thus you will be in serious trouble or dead and there's nothing you can do about it at that point. The only defense is to not need it.

Well, there are times you can't avoid needing it.  A car crash is obviously one of them, but there are more.  Nonetheless knowing when you need it and when you don't is quite important particularly when there is little supply.

But most of the time you can avoid it.  I did during Covid, for example, by being proactive and having on-hand that which I believed would help, fully aware that if they failed I was probably ****ed.  They succeeded.  Someone I knew put his trust in the medical system instead of laying in supplies in advance.  He's dead and that sucks, but it was a free choice.

A few years from now it is unlikely to be a free choice as the system you think you can rely on, even if they aren't being wild-eyed crazy as they were during Covid, will not be there.  If you put your belief in it being there and its not, and needing it was avoidable, you will be dead.  You can't prevent the possibility of being run over by a car, but you can take many steps to reduce the risk of needing the medical system at all, and given what's going on in this country you're nuts if you don't, especially those steps which have little or no cost.

In my opinion you ought to have these things on-hand in any household.  They're not expensive.  Learning how to use one of them in particular will take a bit of time, but learn you should.  They can and will often provide key information -- perhaps critical information to discern between "not a big deal" and "oh crap", never mind quite possibly driving lifestyle changes that can wildly reduce the risk of "oh crap."

Let's go down the list on the what and why:

• Thermometer.  Pick either contact is IR non-contact; doesn't matter, but intended for human use (thus the range of reading is suitable for same.)  The purpose is obvious -- determining if a person (you) has a fever and if so, how bad.
  
  
• Pulse oximeter.  Cheap.  Buy one.  These clip on your finger and are about $20.  Unless you have COPD or similar you should be reading 97%+ all the time.  Sick, not-sick, feeling good, feeling not-so-good, same.  Readings below about 95% indicate serious trouble and if trending downward are very serious trouble.  As I pointed out several times early on during the viral outbreak if you are even in relatively crappy physical condition you have a reserve of several times your resting metabolic demand for oxygen; if you're in good cardio condition you likely have an exercise tolerance of ten or more times your resting demand.  Once your saturation starts to fall you have lost all of that so this is a lot more-serious than you may think it is.  These take seconds to read and are non-invasive.
  
  
• Blood pressure cuff.  Automated, decent ones are under $100.  Some of the cheap Chinese ones are ok but of questionable accuracy because, well, Chinese.  Welch-Allyn makes one that's a few bucks more (~$65 or so), is more-accurate, has a better hose and connector arrangement and is not expensive.  High blood pressure typically has no symptoms until it gives you a hemorrhagic stroke which usually kills you or a heart attack which may also do so.  One reading doesn't mean much as damn near anything can spike your numbers for a few minutes to a couple of hours, but over a period of time this is a very big deal.  It used to be that every drug store and most grocery stores had one of the "sit down and insert arm" machines for zero cost but those are either disappearing or being replaced with ones that want information from you and have cameras in them.  You may be ok with that but you shouldn't be.
  
  
• Glucose and/or ketone meter.  If you are over 65 or have a gut at any age you should have one of these.  Again, high blood glucose, unless extreme, shows no outward symptoms but over time destroys your heart, kidneys, eyes and results in serious neuropathy in the extremities along with circulation disorders that lead to amputations.  Unless you know you're diabetic prefer the one with individual wrapped strips as once you open a container within 30 days the strips are trash, and your use is intermittent.  You want to use this on an every three to six month basis to take both a fasting (before you eat anything) blood glucose level and then just before and on 30 minute intervals after a carb-heavy meal if you eat carbs.  If you are not back to your baseline levels within 2 hours you are insulin compromised no matter what the doctor tells you and thus you should be considering removing all fast carbohydrates from your diet.  Read here for more on this.  Type II diabetes can be stopped and even in many cases reversed without use of a single drug.  Failure to do so will, over time, wildly screw you metabolically and if you think you can just go on the medical roller-coaster, well, in a few years no you won't be able to unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars of your personal money to spend on it.  If you care to monitor ketones as well (e.g. "am I really eating a ketogenic diet?") the KetoMojo meter will tell you both and it has individually-wrapped strips and thus is intermittent-use friendly to your wallet.
  
  
• A hand-held EKG device.  This is relatively new in terms of availability at a reasonable (under $100) price.  Prefer one that does not require a cloud connection or subscription; this is extremely valuable data to insurance companies as cardiac problems are a huge marker for money, of course.  It will take you a bit of study to learn how to read it but most of these will alert you to any gross abnormality.  Be aware that they're not perfect and materially less-sensitive than a full "leads on the chest" EKG, but they do work.  With about an hour's worth of reading you can learn how to interpret the trace with reasonable accuracy.  You won't be a cardiologist but you will be able to spot many things of material concern that might otherwise have no symptoms and, if you do, then its time to talk to someone who really does know.  If you got clot-shotted, in particular, this might spot a potential electrical block that otherwise has no symptoms but can result in a no-warning thud.  You're welcome.

I do not recommend an AED in your own home especially if you live alone.  They're damned expensive (a thousand bucks plus!) and worthless if nobody is there in immediate attendance as if you get hit you won't be able to use it on yourself.  If you live with someone and are almost-always around them, and have any indication of cardiac trouble, then maybe the math works out differently on this but that's a hell of a lot of money that will only help someone else if you're the one using it.  Note that if you go into vFib while you and your SO are both in bed sleeping odds are they're waking up next to a corpse as there is typically no warning before it happens.  A person who goes into vFib when there is no defibrillator available is extremely likely to die even with prompt and well-applied CPR and if someone else doesn't immediately notice (e.g. you and/or your SO/wife/husband are asleep) your odds of survival are an effective zero.

One likely-controversial point: I do recommend a personal wearable device that can do HRV overnight.  Several of the Garmin watches can do so but not all, and the ones that can aren't the cheap options.  This data is unbelievably sensitive and can be used to identify things you don't know are trouble in your particular person; if you see an unexplained deviation it is real so put in the effort to find the cause.  For instance I have recently isolated and proved that I have a very mild allergy to peanuts.  I never knew this and it likely has been lifelong.  It doesn't produce any obvious symptoms but if I eat just one small spoonful of peanut butter a couple of hours before I go to bed it will materially harm my HRV overnight.  Eating a crap-ton of pork rinds and salsa with the same amount of time before bed, on the other hand (e.g. as a snack while watchin a movie) does nothing.  There is no way I could have isolated this otherwise.  I love peanut-butter milk stouts, as just one example -- guess who won't be drinking any more of them?

This sort of knowledge and device makes personal "challenge trials" of that kind, done in a "notch" fashion (that is, do it, don't do it then do it again and see if you get the deviation and then it goes away) very simple.  It will also show you the immediate and immutable impact of things like consuming alcohol and exactly how badly it "gets" you if you go out for a few rounds with your buds.  Finally it will warn you a solid day or more in advance if you're getting something (a virus, etc.) in that you'll see it in the data even though you didn't do anything the previous day to provoke the decline and know it.  If you're into athletic pursuits then this is obviously even better but even for those who are not, in my view this data is ridiculously useful and not obtainable in any other non-invasive way.

This sort of sub-clinical harm is likely a huge deal over time and yet there is exactly zero attention paid to it in the medical community nor will there ever be as there's no money in it.  These sorts of reactions are nasty because being sub-clinical it isn't obvious on the surface. Sub-clinical inflammation is likely responsible for a large percentage of long-term systemic damage including heart attacks, strokes and various and sundry autoimmune disorders of unknown origin or cause.  If you find these things and get them out of your life you avoid clinical exposure and the cost of it, never mind the personal debilitation.  There's absolutely no downside to that sort of knowledge and now you can obtain it with a bit of effort as the instrumentation on a personal basis is now within rational grasp.  I'd like it a lot if the price was lower but it isn't, and unlike the other things in the kit getting accurate data requires wearing the watch for a couple of weeks to get the baseline and then continuing to do so nightly, so its entirely-personal and thus you can't amortize the cost across multiple people in your household.  Garmin brought this to my Fenix 6x in August of last year and I have come to consider it a "must" personally, and well worth the money.

One very-important note: There are stand-alone devices that do this and most require some sort of subscription.  I consider these poor secondary substitutes for several reasons, with the most-serious being that they're not typically worn all the time and the subscription-style nonsense.  In short IMHO if you decide you want to try to exploit this knowledge Garmin, at present, is the go-to for doing so.