About 15 years ago, one of the runners in our training group announced that he was going on a carbohydrate free diet. I thought he was mad. Initially, I thought he was just giving up sugar, but when questioned he said he was also giving up rice, potatoes, pasta, bread – basically all carbohydrate. This simply didn’t make any sense; it was crazy. Where was he going to get his energy from? How would he be able to run?
Skip forward about seven years, and I started to hear a lot more about low-carb, high-fat diets. It seemed that quite a lot of athletes were adopting this, particularly those in the ultra-running community. Perhaps it wasn’t so crazy after all. After doing a bit of research, I came to the conclusion that there may well be benefits, not just for weight loss (which I wasn’t interested in) but for improving the immune system and, better still, helping my running. I was keen both to boost my immune system, as repeated coughs and colds had jeopardised training over the years, and keen to avoid hitting the wall in marathons. So, with this in mind, I stuck to a low-carb, high-fat diet for about a year, just to see how things went and how easy or difficult it was. This happened to coincide with a period of plantar fasciitis, which meant I wasn’t able to run much, perhaps a good thing as it was quite difficult to stick to the diet even without the complication of competitive training. What I did find was that I was not troubled by coughs or colds for most of that year, and when I did catch a bug at the start of my summer holiday, I recovered much more quickly than normal and was able to do some light running by the end of the week.
In all my research and during my own travels into the world of the low-carb, high-fat diet, the fact that this type of diet might also help those with mental illness had fallen below my radar. So, I was interested to read a case report in the Frontiers of Nutrition this month about three people who had achieved full remission of major depression and generalised anxiety disorder on adopting this diet (ketogenic metabolic therapy).
Psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder and binge eating disorder, are neurometabolic diseases involving glucose hypometabolism, neurotransmitter imbalances, oxidative stress and inflammation. These disturbances can be modified by use of ketogenic metabolic therapy (KMT), otherwise known as a low-carb, high-fat diet. So, what you eat can directly affect how you feel. I think that, at heart, we all know this even if just from eating too many travel sweets on a long car journey and feeling a bit rubbish for the rest of the day.
Insulin resistance in the brain results in glucose hypometabolism and a vicious cycle of unmet energy needs. Unmet energy needs in the brain manifest themselves in cognitive impairment (mental fatigue, memory problems, confusion), emotional symptoms (irritability, anxiety, depression) and physical symptoms (headaches, dizziness, weakness). Although the brain primarily uses glucose for its energy needs, it can adapt to using ketones as an alternative fuel.
In a low-carb, moderate protein, high-fat diet, there is a shift from using glucose to using ketone bodies as the primary fuel source. The ketones provide the brain with a more efficient energy source than glucose and may be exerting other beneficial effects on the brain. Studies have shown that a ketogenic diet improves mitrochondrial metabolism, neurotransmitter function and oxidative stress/inflammation, while also increasing neural network stability and cognitive function.
low-carb, high-fat diets can be very strict, with the fat to non-fat ratio as high as 4:1. Interestingly, these diets have been shown to have some usefulness in paediatric epilepsy, and reports of this go back as far as the 1920s. But lower fat-to-non-fat ratio diets, which provide more variety, have also been shown to alleviate many mental disorders. There is evidence that they may be effective in schizophrenia, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder, major depressive disorder, binge eating disorder, ADHD and obesity.
Slide from summary of the Norwitz paper
All three cases in the current study involved complex presentations, including major depression, generalised anxiety, other anxiety disorders, and comorbid psychiatric conditions. The subjects underwent a personalised, whole food, animal-based, low-carb, high-fat diet (KMT) for 12-16 weeks. The treatment plan included twice-weekly visits with a dietician, daily photo journaling and regular blood tests. Additionally, they received support through virtual groups and family and friends. The regimen was complemented by nature walks several times a week, as well as community-building activities.
It is difficult to evaluate how much the added extras in the treatment plan contributed to the results – perhaps if people had more time with family and friends, and spent a bit more time out in the countryside, they would feel a lot better too. The effects of exercise on mental wellbeing can’t be underestimated. In his book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, John Ratley details several case studies involving anxiety, depression, attention deficit disorder and addiction, demonstrating the effectiveness of exercise in these cases. So, the walks in nature are a definite plus in this case. However, this can only partly explain the results, which were quite startling.
In case one, the subject reported “increased mental focus, increase energy, renewed confidence and motivation to return to work. Within four weeks of initiating KMT, he secured a demanding full-time position exceeding his previous experience; after eight weeks, he was given additional responsibilities, handled them well and began three online college courses.”
The second case reported “increased mental focus, more patience with co-workers and family and stated he no longer felt a general pull of anger all the time”. While, for the third case, complete remission of depression occurred. After a total of eight weeks of consistent nutritional ketosis, she said: “I don’t have it anymore. I’ve just noticed, I’m happy all the time, which is funny.”
In this study, the participants were very heavily supported, e.g. they got more than a 5-10 min appointment with their GP and a prescription for anti-depressants. However, the time invested was well spent. When I worked as a community pharmacist, I was shocked by how many anti-depressant prescriptions I was fulfilling. On one occasion, hearing that the price of a popular anti-depressant was about to rise dramatically, I purchased the wholesaler’s entire stock. I didn’t need to worry that I would end up with out-of-date stock; those hundreds of packets of anti-depressants weren’t on the storeroom shelf for long. I felt that there must be something wrong if I was dispensing repeat prescriptions for these drugs; either they work or they don’t. The repeat nature of the prescriptions suggested to me that they didn’t work. But at the time, I didn’t know what the answer was; could something as simple as a change in diet be the solution?
Adopting a low-carb, high-fat diet is not easy. If you go down to the shops on the ground floor of our hospital, you will be hard-pressed to find anything that you can buy for lunch if you are on this kind of diet – perhaps a packet of cheese from M&S, but you can’t eat that every day. I found that you had to be super organised (possibly not something that comes naturally to most of us, especially while depressed) and you have to be quite determined, even stubborn, to stick to it in the face of colleagues birthdays (“come on, have a piece of cake”), restaurant visits (“so you want the burger but you not the bun or the fries?”) and family meals (the kids don’t want to eat that kind of food). It was also more expensive than a normal diet and I found it a little difficult to find the variety of things that I wanted to eat. Maybe I should have done what my husband does and just eat more cheese and nuts, but at that time I was the only member of my family adopting this diet, so I found it quite challenging. If there were a bit more support, as the people in the case studies had, then I think it would be a lot easier for people to stick to the diet and see the benefits. It was notable that at times the subjects of the study required some supplements, e.g. acetyl-L-carnitine, vitamin D and magnesium glycinate, and these additions would not be something everybody would necessarily consider if they adopted this diet without support.
This might not be the solution for everybody. As the authors note: “this case series is limited by describing only three patients, which limits the generalisability of our results as well as the inherent selection bias, as they were interested in KMT after failing standard therapies.” Certainly, without support and without the desire to see change, it will be a non-starter. But for those who are determined to beat their mental disorders, it provides a relatively simple, drug free solution.
The “Patient Perspectives” in this paper are well worth reading if you want any encouragement that this can be an effective approach to treating these mental disorders.
Wouldn’t it be better for the NHS to invest in good nutrition rather than investing in drugs that clearly aren’t working? Major depressive disorder and anxiety are neurometabolic disorders. Doesn’t it make sense, then, to treat them with nutrition rather than medication? The NHS might like to start by changing the Eatwell Guidance, where fats are a tiny slither on the chart, instead of >50% of the dietary intake that they probably need to be.
Dr. Maggie Cooper is a pharmacist and research scientist.
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This was clearly a very poor attempt to justify a policy which has been an abject failure, even before we consider all of the damage caused by vaccine adverse reactions, and to “roll the pitch” for future vaccine programmes.
It’s interesting that another model, created by the government in April 2020, which estimated that 200,000 people may die in the short to medium term from the effects of lockdowns, has received no attention at all and in fact only saw the light of day three months later thanks to dogged work by a handful of Parliamentarians.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/20/coronavirus-lockdown-cause-200000-extra-deaths-13014848/
Some “models” are more equal than others, evidently.
The other point to make that given the tendency ot the virus to be most deadly for the elderly with comorbidities, any lives “saved” by the vaccines are likely to have been deaths delayed by a relatively short period.
Whereas many deaths caused by lockdowns and delays in medical treatment would have been of people with potentially many more years to live.
Exactly. The death count is somewhat meaningless; it’s Life Years Lost that is the only metric of significance. If we compare LYL from people already close to death, but spared a couple of years by being jabbed, against LYL from lockdown, other inane policies, plus adverse reactions to the shot, then the net cost will be extraordinary. I don’t doubt for a second that they already knew that.
Four letters, apparently forgotten by experts, politicians, medics, the lot:
QALY.
Yes, indeed. Let’s spell it out in full:
QALY =
Quality
Adjusted
Life
Year
It’s what the NHS, before it became the National COVID Service, would use to assess whether a new drug or therapy was good value. What is the cost of giving someone one extra year of full quality life, one someone two years of half quality life etc.?
One QALY was worth around £25-30k but when we’re talking COVID one QALY is worth £millions, more than that, there is no measure at all of the cost of lockdowns, “vaccines” and collateral damage.
We also have the problem – probably now intractable – of defining the nature of those excess deaths, given the criteria for a Covid death was so absurdly loose.
Public Health England were caught in 2018 and exposed by the BMJ and The Guardian (no less) for fabricating flu deaths (up to 50,000, and at the very least a few thousand) from thin air.
That they did this is beyond doubt. That the same people would do the same thing again two years later with far greater motivation and easier conditions is hardly farfetched.
Then you have the now universally accepted fact that lockdowns themselves were responsible for at least a proportion of those deaths – from the effect of anxiety on people with serious health problems to the shutting down of large chunks of the NHS – from consultation to treatment for serious and urgent diseases. During a pandemic when the infection rate was likely far higher than officially recognised, a proportion of these people would have tested positive for Covid, regardless of its role in their decline.
Then further down the rabbit hole you have potential deaths from inappropriate use of ventilators. Though ventilation might have saved lives, it is unknown how many it might have cost, especially when done in an atmosphere of panic.
The same with the use of Midazolam, which was in effect a reinstatement of the ‘Liverpool Care Pathway’ – advocated by some corners of the medical profession and banned after being recognised as too open to incompetence and abuse. Covid raised it up again like a zombie, as can been seen in end of life care guidelines for the use of Midazolam by various NHS trusts in England and Scotland.
These guidelines often recommend administration of a dosage of Midazolam (sometimes in combination with opiates) often likely to be fatal in elderly patients suffering from anxiety and breathing difficulties. The key here is that the decision to administer this drug could be made without clinical diagnosis, on the basis of an opinion of an unqualified health practitioner, outside a clinical setting. This was a recipe for catastrophe. While it’s obviously unlikely that medics would have knowingly committed involuntary euthanasia, it’s quite reasonable to speculate that under a cloud of uncertainty, fear, vast pressure and possibly panic, many might have administered fatal doses to patients who otherwise could have survived. This is especially likely as (as the above link shows), a consequence of midazolam is respiratory depression. A practitioner gives the drug to an anxious, elderly patient with breathing difficulties to help calm them. The drug causes severe breathing difficulties that without proper diagnosis are impossible to distinguish from advanced pneumonia, and the patient then enters ‘end of life care’, leading to another Covid death.
It’s likely we will never know how many of the last two years’ excess deaths could be attributed to these factors. We might get some idea by looking at the excess death statistics for the coming years – if they show an sudden significant drop, then it could be evidence that Covid was only ever dangerous for those who were already in a vulnerable position, and that for most other people, RNA vaccines, rather than saving 500,000 lives, might have been a needless risk.
If you believe vaccines are 90% effective you have to believe that in their absence deaths of the vaccinated would have been about 10x higher, this is an article of faith & can’t really be tested. However, we can look at the unvaccinated & see that their rate of death is not 10x greater than that of the vaccinated, in fact it’s about the same, as shown by ukhsa data up to the point when they stopped publishing it, see week 13 HSA weekly vaccine surveillance report.
Imperial didn’t need to model anything, the data is readily available.
Good point
You say they didn’t need to model anything but that sort of assumes they were looking for the truth rather than looking for data to justify previous models and the policies that they were used to justify
Evidence-based Decision Making
became
Decision-based Evidence Making.
“Did the vaccines save 500,000 lives in the UK?”
Nope.
Did the jabs cut short many peoples lives?
Yep.
“The vaccines did save lives in Britain.”
I doubt that. But I am pretty sure that they (the GTs, there/they are no vaccines) cost more already and dead certain that they will cost many more than they might have saved over time.
It is also very obvious, that they killed Western liberal democracies, and that surely is a price we should not have paid for them.
I’m not convinced that the vaccines have saved more lives that they have claimed. And that is without also counting the life changing injuries.
Well indeed. How can they say the 500,000 would have died if they hadn’t been injected?
It’s a total, utter absence of any logic…
Where did the researchers go wrong? They went wrong when they decided to put their bank balance over science – real science, that is questioned and debated and is never settled, not Pfauci’s pfake science.
Yesterday I heard 2 more stories of people in their 60s who had recently had boosters (4 or 5, not sure which) – one was sick in bed, the other had gone to the doctor with symptoms of severe itching and pain in the legs. Two others in their 60s had said they were so sick after the 3rd shot in the spring that that was the last one they were getting. In other words, for some people the side effects get worse with each shot and it is not just younger people who suffer this problem. How in the world did we get to a situation where people are willing to keep on taking a chemical product that a) has only questionable, temporary effect, b) causes worse side effects with each poke, c) makes you feel so bad you take to your bed for several days or have to visit a doctor, all in a vain attempt to avoid catching a virus that for most people will at worst cause them to take to their bed for several days or visit their GP.
By the way, it is not just that the models exaggerated the effectiveness of the vaxx – they also wildly exaggerated the risk of the virus.
I find that the more jabs someone’s taken the more fearful they seem to be about the disease.
The jabs don’t take away the fear but rather seem to enhance it.
That’s why they keep taking more boosters. They are captured by their fear.
For some that is undoubtedly the case – rather than see the failure of the vaxx as the scam that it is, they see the virus as outwitting us mere humans and our fabulous science at every step, like a monster/killer who keeps coming back to life in a horror movie.
For others I think it is a case of trying to put off having to admit they were conned. I think a lot of people were very hesitant to take the vaxx but did so anyways, many because they either genuinely believed it would protect others, that it would protect themselves, that it would lead to zero covid and an end to outrageous lawbreaking and economic destruction of governments.
Convincing yourself to take a risk for a potential meaningful reward is one thing. To then find out that the risk was worse than you initially feared while the reward was close to non-existent, certainly if you do not keep taking the vaxx – we really are in that territory of people who get scammed by internet ‘love interests’. They know deep down they were conned, but admitting that hurts – not only do you have to face up to having been fooled, you have to give up something that gave you comfort and made you happy. I’ve spoken to several people who claim to be okay about having been vaxxed, but don’t intend to take any more – even though they say they’re okay, you can see some underlying doubt and concern.
It literally doesn’t matter what these studies or models say anymore. We are at the point where corrupt parasites like Imperial know that if they brought out a study showing the vaccines prevented ageing, cured all known cancers and made the recipient capable of self-propelled flight, the bought and paid for media would report every detail as fact.
Yesterday, the Germans saw their parliamentary enquiry ‘independent’ ‘expert’ commission present its findings, aka official whitewashing attempt, on all the restrictions etc..
Their conclusion: we had and still don’t have any proper data or clue of what works.
MSM reporting (Tagesschau 8pm, equivalent of BBC News):
“So, we have no data and no clue, but wearing masks indoors surely is just great and must be super important.”
All one needs to say and know, really.
“vaccines did save lives in Britain”
Hmmm
The lives of those who were tasked to push the toxic bioweapon into every man, woman & child which if they failed to do would end in a sudden & unexplained end….
The “leaders” have sold their souls to the devil & if they fail to do the devil’s bidding, it will have consequences…
But btw not plausible to attribute excess mortality in 2020 to Covid given barbaric treatment of the elderly.
Yes, where are Professor Ferguson and his disreputable cronies – AKA SAGE?
Ferguson was shifted when “sacked” from SAGE. Some group called NERVEDEATH or summat.
It seems to me that we had a balance with nature where previously respiratory viruses would mostly come in the winter.
Then we messed around with nature, locked ourselves away for nigh on 2 years and now the viruses are happening all year round.
And there are people crying out for us to do more of the things that created this imbalance in the first place.
Totally agree.
We also used to accept that immunity came from bugs getting around enough. Now we’re determined not to let them get around, which if in any way successful puts off the acquiring of immunity.
We are safest when bugs get around and the collective immunity of the whole population deals with it.
Mo respiratory virus has ever been stopped by any medicine. Nature determines that they must run their course. The hubris of the 21st century mankind suggests we can even stop nature in its tracks.
Good luck with that.
All propaganda bullshit for the sheep.
The real question is how many people will have their immune systems affected to such an extent that they sustain debilitating injuries/premature death :-
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869152200206X
And don’t tell me the bastards are unaware of this and similar.
TRPTB and their pushers are beyond evil.
Please check my maths
80% of adult population vaccinated: 66M – 11M = 55M * .8= 44M vaccinated
If 500k more of this 44M would be dead were it not for vaccination, that’s 1 in 88
So, 1 in 88 unvaccinated adults should be dead from Covid since approx March 2021, or 125,000?
Also, wouldn’t this require that we add 1/88 or 1.13% onto the agreed ifr of covid, so wouldn’t this essentially triple it?
2/3rds – 2 doses
1/3rd – 3 doses
Utter nonsense. How on earth can they make such a claim?
As noted below, the government themselves believe 200K+ died as a result of lockdown.
MHRA count 2k+ – and they state publicly that they believe at most 10% of fatalities are reported.
So 20k+
And how many did Hancock euthanise when sent them untested from their hospital beds (where most caught Covid in the first place) off to care homes to get rid of all of them, with the help of Midozalom?
30k? (and why is Hancock a free man – this was the governmental equivalent of corporate manslaughter).
So that 250k or so who didn’t need to die in the first place.
Worth noting that from Feb 2020 to Dec 2021 less than 10k died FROM Covid (“with” Covid being meaningless. How much Covid? How much did it speed their death from whatever they were dying of anyway? And why did suddenly only those dying from/with Covid become so much more important than any other poor sod dying of whatever).
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021
And quite what we saved the NHS for, I have no idea. It’s collapsing in front of our eyes. My mum-in-law, 87, with many problems, and very poor breathing, got in tough with her GP as her blood oxygen levels keep dropping dangerously low.
A phone call in two weeks was what they offered.
An GPs want a 30% pay rise. For what?
Lancet is lost.
At least the BMJ is fighting the good fight.
My hunch is that they just don’t know. No shortage of those who are making it up as they go along, though. No shortage of vested interests, either; some declared, others not declared, perhaps.
If it were only a matter that they don’t know and could simply say that – after all, they had no problem saying almost every single day for well over a year that it was a novel virus, that it kept throwing up surprises and they were learning something new every day, hence all their nonsense measures “out of an abundance of caution”. How anyone could then believe that, even when they claimed they were still learning, they had found *the* answer in a novel vaxx trialled for 2 months just shows the power of advertising/brainwashing. ‘Safe and effective’ – these magic words managed to get more recruits than the Hare Krishna chant.
But seriously, how are there still people willing to trust the health authorities after one of the top dogs in the US, Dr Birx, said that their reason for sticking a needle (using bribery, emotional blackmail and outright coercion) in the arm of every man, woman, child, dog and cat was based on “we hoped”?
The number of lives saved would be a known non-controversial figure had they retained the integrity of the trial data
But they didn’t ans we have to instead rely upon circular imperial models.
oddly this is not making me any less a
vaccine sceptic
Well worth reading – Doctor’s testimony on the death jabs – few ages down on this substack
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/bmj-investigation-are-drug-regulators
Deleted. Wrong thread
I think you will find the above academic is in fact Professor Denzil Dexter of the University of South California.
Climate change and Covid have demonstrated that basing policy on utterly flawed models is beyond stupid. There is a place for modelling – engineering relies on being able to model structures and test them to destruction. Here we have the substitution of wild projections being treated as reality and real world data.
Doesn’t work, does it?
That Imperial figure can be shown to be wildly wrong much easier than that.
If 80% of the British people had caught Covid between those dates, that would have been around 50 million people. For 500,000 to die, the infection fatality rate would have had to be 1%.
So these researchers are effectively claiming the virus has an infection fatality rate in excess of 1%, which is very clearly utter nonsense.
When I was studying for an Acupuncture degree several years ago I was told that you should always look at who is funding a study. Studies often get funded because the funder wants a specific outcome/result. If the study doesn’t produce this then it gets shelved. Look at who is funding this study:-
Schmidt Science Fellowship in partnership with the Rhodes Trust; WHO; UK Medical Research Council; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; National Institute for Health Research; and Community Jameel.
“The vaccines did save lives in Britain.”
WWII bomber found on moon with Elvis Presley and Shergar inside.
Yeah right.
The beauty of articles like these is that they demonstrates how simple it can be to prove how some so-called ‘experts’ (Imperial College here) can come up with such nonsense. All you need is some basic maths and logic to demonstrate that Imperial College of London have sullied what could have been described as a good reputation some years ago.
They are now becoming a laughing stock. You don’t have to be a comedian to put them down. Just give this article to your average 10 year old and they should see things don’t add up. Kids might look at what Imperial have been up to and wonder whether ‘modelling’ is synonymous with the word ‘abracadabra’ or whether ‘modelling’ is a form of Harry Potter sorcery.
Imperial College of London disgrace the (once good) name of their institution and, to a certain degree, that of ‘science’ in general. They should be utterly ashamed of themselves and either leading academics at Imperial or at other UK scientific establishments must make a stand and call them out. All the team involved in this latest study should face immediate disciplinary proceedings for their own sake, that of the College and, most importantly, to protect the public from being grossly misled.
Always useful to do a quick “back of the envelope” reality check, which, clearly, these pseudoscientists have not done, otherwise they would have dialled it down a bit.
Maybe it’s a good thing. The more ridiculous the claims, the more people will question this tsunami of complete and total b*ll*cks.