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Image by Rakib Al Hasan from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The pagan witchdoctors are out in force —
This time an invisible spooky force called carbon dioxide is stealing away nutrients from food, at least that’s how the Washington Post propaganda team words it. It’s a “surging” culprit causing anemia in pregnant women which can lead to complications and “even death”. Stop the car! Is there no evil this molecule can not do?
This is pure climate-scare porn — carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster, and so it has this “awful” effect where crops bulk up more quickly, and without extra fertilizer, the mineral content and protein levels will be slightly diluted by the extra carbohydrate. And when I say slight, I mean barely measurably — in the last 37 years the levels of zinc in an undisclosed amount of chickpeas has fallen from 22% of our RDA to only 20%!
Let’s be clear: no one in the rich world eats chickpeas to get iron, protein and zinc, not if they can eat steak instead. All these nutrients are far higher in meat, and they are more absorbable too.
So this article is mostly at the concern-troll level. […]
By Jo Nova
Two weeks treatment costs $3.75*
In Tunisia from February to May last year 470 people with Covid were randomly either given 50mg of zinc each day for two weeks or given a placebo. In the zinc group, after 30 days, 6% had died, and 5% had been admitted to intensive care. Meanwhile in the placebo group 9% had died and 11% had gone to the ICU. People taking zinc got out of hospital a few days before the people who didn’t.
Since there were no serious adverse effects in anyone from taking zinc, it’s obvious that good governments were handing out zinc tablets in carparks, schools and shopping malls, thus saving lives, millions of dollars, and keeping hospitals half empty. The rich world looks to healthcare systems like El Salvador. Shame about the other sclerotic swamps and backwaters of crony medicine. Sometimes countries have too much money to get good treatment.
In Australia, the government spent billions on experimental barely-tested vaccines with hidden results and secret contracts. Our TGA told everyone the vaccines were safe and useful but fined someone $8,000 for advertising on their website that ivermectin and zinc lozenges were effective against Covid. But who […]
For anyone who is “vitamined-out” — ponder that the most important theme is not just about personally avoiding hospitalization, it’s Where the hell are our publicly funded universities? Does the Minister for Health serve the People, or Pfizer…
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Vitamin A was allegedly once called “ “the anti-infective vitamin” — a snappy title which didn’t stick with any biochem student beyond the end of the sentence. But it’s needed for your immune system to function normally, so it seems sort of obvious to ask “what if” we don’t have enough. Could taking more prevent people catching Covid or ending up in hospital, or dead?
Vitamin A |
As always, research in prevention and prophylaxis is a wasteland in the the Modern West. No one can profit from it and indeed if everyone got enough it could harm the prospects of shareholders of Pharmaceutical firms and Hospitals. But it appears we definitely don’t want to be short of it. About three quarters of people who end up in the severe ward of Covid hospitals were deficient.
Imagine a Minister of Health who embarked on a program to raise awareness, test and give out free supplements? Lordy! It […]
Maybe getting enough Vitamin B6 will reduce deaths
The main two things that kill people with Covid are blood clotting and an out-of-control inflammation known as a cytokine storm. A group of researchers noticed that both of these were things Vitamin B6 was known to reduce — blood clotting, and inflammation. In particular, there’s a molecule called Interleukin 6 which is a “masterplayer” signal in our immune system and — what do you know — B6 reduces it. Mice that weren’t fed enough B6 got mouse pneumonia more than mice who were fed enough. B6 is anti-inflammatory, anti- and reduces reactive oxygen species (ROS).
The Big Black hole in medical research?
I hoped this paper was report on experiments with Covid patients, but the paper and press release is essentially a literature review of many pre-covid studies and a plea for research into whether vitamin B6 might help stop the deadly cytokine storm.
The bigger, global question they don’t ask, is why despite the millions (billions) going into vaccine design and drug research, hardly anyone is studying the cheap unprofitable and obvious questions? Perhaps we need some government funded research that’s not driven by profits… oh. wait.? What happened to […]
Missing out on the Sunshine Vitamin?
We’re throwing billions at Coronavirus but missing cheap wins.
After masks and soap, the next bargain to reduce the impact of coronavirus is Vitamin D supplements.
Vitamin D deficiency is so common it’s an epidemic affecting a billion people around the world. Ponder that half the population of many western nations are clinically deficient by the end of winter. Add that to a novel virus and consider that higher Vitamin D levels reduce the risk of respiratory tract infections like influenza by as much as 40%.
As Grant et al say:
“Low vitamin D status in winter permits viral epidemics.”
Vitamin D levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern […]
Twelve thousand years of human history show that more energy leads to more people. There is also positive feedback, where more people means more energy too. Growth rates rose faster and earlier in England and Wales than Sweden (see Fig 3), where coal use became dominant about a hundred years later.
Given a constant resource supply to a population, the per capita availability of resources declines as the population grows. As resources become scarce, individuals consume less, driving down birth rates and/or raising death rates.
Although many resources may influence birth and death rates (e.g., water), energy is a uniquely universal currency because all forms of work require energy expenditure. This applies to the metabolic rates of individuals in wild populations [18] as well as to the industrial energy use of modern human populations, as energy is used to harvest food, deliver water, and provide health care [19–22].
Fig 1. Relationship between energy use (W) and population size for the world, the United States, Sweden, and England and Wales through time. The relationships are highly variable, but overall, the slopes are greater than one (that is, the exponent in the power-law function relating energy use […]
Extra carbon dioxide is the wonder fertilizer that has greened deserts and created a global crop boom, but don’t think for a moment that just because plants love CO2 that more of it won’t be an utter disaster come to wreck your dinner! Yet again, we are at the tipping point, and everything is just about to fall apart. How unlucky can one planet be! “There are few winners”.
Wouldn’t you know it — the current rainfall and frost patterns are perfect? But soon you will sweat like a pig, have poorer bread, and heat stressed steak. Worse, you may have to eat more olives and mangoes and drink Merlot from … a different region. This is serious, folks: when a cyclone hits the North West of Australia, some West Australians may even have to eat Queensland bananas.
Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald, “investigates” the news that another government agency has written another long, dire report with prophecies of doom. But unlike the past incompetent exaggerated beat-ups, this one (finally) is going to be right, so he doesn’t bother asking hard questions, or interviewing other experts, or even doing a Google search.
“Hotter, harder times forecast for the […]
Disaster Disaster! Driving a car in 2014 could one day cause 2 billion people to suffer from zinc and iron deficiencies leaving them anaemic and prone to infection, and causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually. This is brought to you from the Annals of Hyped-Science (formerly known as Nature). A sad day indeed.
It’s true that carbon dioxide is plant fertilizer and increases plant yields, so future crops, grown in a CO2 rich world, may not have exactly the same nutrient profile. Presumably future plants will have slightly more useless starchy carbohydrate. It is a kind of dilution effect at work, where plants keep absorbing the same amount of minerals, but spread them out among more carbohydrate.
Before we hit the panic button, lets look the numbers. The new Myers et al study[1] reports that zinc and iron content of rice may fall by, wait for it, five percent. In wheat the iron content could fall by as much as 10%. But no one who has a choice, eats grains like rice or wheat for their iron and zinc content, since both these are poor sources of both. We’re talking about low grade bulk filler food.
Assuming the […]
On the ABC program Catalyst this week, Dr Maryanne Demasi slayed a few dietary myths–like, cholesterol and saturated fat cause heart disease.
She described how medical science was distorted for decades by the influence of money, and how one key researcher networked his way to the top of an influential association, casting ad hom insults at his competitor, ridiculing him, and calling his rival theory about sugar “quackery”. The personal attacks and name-calling worked, and for fifty years people have been paranoid of cholesterol, and scoffing corn syup instead, while study after study showed that that approach was not working.
Everything said about the processes in this tale could be equally well said about climate science: Correlation is not causation. Weak, flawed studies can be cherry picked while good studies are ignored. Associations can be taken over by one activist. Large financial interests distort science.
So the consensus was wrong about cholesterol, but is untouchable on climate? (See Witchcraft on Catalyst — Scary weather is coming, it’s all our fault, be afraid!)
Will it take 50 years for Catalyst to stop repeating the verdict of associations, and start investigating the evidence? The big lesson of the Enlightenment is that […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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