Note: this article is posted twice here due to a Substack email server issue. The current article readers are commenting on can be accessed at this link.

Story at a Glance:

•In early 2023, a private conference attended by heads of the pharmaceutical industry and large investors hosted the head of the FDA as its keynote speaker.  That conference promised that anti-obesity drugs and Alzheimer’s drugs would be the most profitable investment opportunities in the years to come. Since that time the FDA has taken numerous questionable actions to push these drugs on the populace.

•The most popular anti-obesity drug is Ozempic. In the last two years, we’ve seen a relentless push for it to be given to everyone (including children) which has involved a number of shockingly appalling marketing tactics. Remarkably, the stampede for Ozempic is almost identical to what happened with fen-phen, a wildly popular weight loss drug that was eventually pulled from the market due to it frequently causing severe heart and lung issues.

•Like fen-phen, the weight loss from Ozempic is temporary and disappears once the drug is stopped (requiring the patient to become a permanent customer).  Worse still, Ozempic has a variety of common and severe side effects due to it paralyzing the digestive tract.

•In this article, we will review the common causes of obesity (including many which are rarely if ever discussed) and our preferred methods for safely and effectively losing weight.

In 2006, a satirical movie was made to illustrate the inevitable consequences of dumbing down society. Since then, it’s become a cult classic due to how many things it predicted (which seemed absurd then) that subsequently came true. One of the many themes in the movie was everyone mindlessly endorsing a Gatorade-like drink because its manufacturer had bought out the Federal government:

Sadly, this has also happened in America. More specifically, the majority of food consumed in America comes from a few crops (e.g., corn, wheat, soy, and canola).  This is due to nonsensical farming subsidies (which essentially force farmers to mass produce crops and then sell them below cost), making these crops so cheap that for the processed food industry that they are then molded into all the processed foods we consume. This is incredibly problematic because:

•Most of those foods are not good for you to consume and hence create a variety of significant health issues, including diabetes and obesity.

•Since they are not good for you to consume, the body has a natural aversion to them (which makes them hard to sell).

•To overcome that aversion, those foods were mixed with a variety of highly addictive substances. More unfortunately, in the 1980s, Big Tobacco bought out the processed food industry and then, as they had done with cigarettes, prioritized making processed foods as addictive as possible (which is documented here).

•None of the predatory industries have anything to lose from people being hooked on unhealthy foods, which create chronic illnesses, as that simply means more lifelong customers for each industry (e.g., Big Pharma).

Because of this, for years, many activists (myself included) have tried to bring awareness to the importance of natural foods and the critical need to change America’s farming subsidies to something that encourages the availability of healthy foods—but many of these pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Fortunately, the new media climate created by widespread skepticism to the COVID-19 response and the ability for persuasive messages to rapidly disseminate through the independent media (e.g., Twitter) has caused many forgotten sides of medicine to come to the public’s attention, including the systematic failures in our food supply due to it having been bought out by the processed food industry.

In turn, it’s been remarkable and inspiring to watch how a brother and sister duo (which includes a Stanford doctor) has brought an immense degree of attention to this issue. Many of their interviews (e.g., this one and this one) each got millions of views, and they were invited to advise two of the three presidential frontrunners directly.

Two days ago, RFK Jr. announced his decision to support Trump’s election—a move which likely decided the 2024 election. In his speech, he cited his three primary reasons for running—stopping government censorship of free speech, stopping the war in Ukraine, and the catastrophic (but largely invisible) epidemic of chronic illness that is gripping the country. In that speech (which I would highly advise watching), RFK Jr. emphasized that much of our issues are due to the pharmaceutical and processed food industry having bought out our government agencies and that corruption has metastasized to the point that the foundation of our nation is being torn apart:

Note: I’ve done quite a bit to promote RFK Jr’s candidacy (e.g., I worked behind the scenes to help promote his campaign launch). I did this in part because his three reasons for running were also the three most important issues to me. Additionally, due to dynamics at play (e.g., the large number of COVID vaccine injuries), I suspected the presidential race would unfold in a manner where RFK Jr. would gain a platform that would be able to expose the American public to the corporate corruption of government creating  an epidemic of chronic illnesses and that a pivotal window could emerge (i.e., now) where he could leverage his influence to address it.

RFK’s endorsement has already made a much larger impact than I could have imagined. For example, recently he was invited on Fox News to discuss the major issues in our food supply (e.g., the seed oils which are creating widespread metabolic dysfunction and dangers of artificial food coloring), both issues I’ve long believed were essential for the public to know about—but never expected to see receive mainstream news coverage.

Note: I believe that most of America’s food problems originate from Earl Butz (Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture), who held the belief America’s farmers needed to switch to cultivating large (chemically intensive) farms instead of the more traditional small farm model which had previously characterized America’s agriculture. Butz’s mantra, "get big or get out" became a dogma within the US Department of Agriculture and is a major reason why locally grown (healthy) food is so unaffordable and inaccessible for much of the country.

Pharmaceutical Sales

One thing I’ve been immensely curious about is what life is actually like behind the scenes within the pharmaceutical industry. In turn, I’ve shared anonymous accounts of insiders, alongside public testimonials from whistleblowers (e.g., see this article and this article about the sociopathic sales-focused culture within Pfizer).

To some extent, I’ll admit, my impressions are a bit biased by a presentation GlaxoSmithKline gave their sales reps:

Last year, Kim Witczak a pharmaceutical safety advocate, tipped me off about JP Morgan’s annual healthcare conference, a private invitation-only event described by JP Morgan as “the industry’s biggest gathering.” The 41st conference, from January 9-12, 2023, was the first event hosted in person since the pandemic started (it was hosted in San Francisco). Given this event's impact on the year to come (as it’s specifically catered to large investors and hence sets the pharmaceutical industry’s priorities), Kim made a point to glean as much as she could from its website.

Given what she found on public display, I can only imagine what was said behind closed doors (e.g., consider the previous GSK video).

First, consider how enthusiastically they endorsed the profitability of two new types of drugs:

Note: the sound on the second one is a bit off (it sounded more “inspirational” in the actual video), but it can no longer be viewed as Chase deleted it following the publication of the original article on the conference.

In that video, the most important part was Chase’s projections for this new industry:

Note: the GLP-1 drugs include Trulicity, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Byetta, and Ozempic. While there are some distinctions between the drugs, I will henceforth primarily refer to all of them as “Ozempic.”

Second, consider who the keynote speakers at Chase’s conference were:

Note: Califf has long been an incredibly controversial FDA commissioner due to his immense conflicts of interest (e.g., in 2009 he was passed over for the position due to his connections to the pharmaceutical industry, but at the end of Obama’s term and throughout Biden’s tenure, the system became more corrupt he was twice able to secure a nomination).

To repeat—the head of the FDA was a keynote speaker to investors about the incredibly lucrative opportunity they could expect from these new drugs—implying that the FDA would do everything it could to push them through. As it so happened, to quote Witczak:

Interesting to also note, Califf was keynote speaker on opening day and out of the blue, the FDA granted accelerated approval to the second controversial Biogen Alzheimer drug on Friday [three days before the conference] without an Advisory Committee.  How great to be able to announce to the healthcare biotech industry that one of their new drugs was just granted accelerated approval.

Note: an even more controversial approval had proceeded it (where the FDA overrode its own panel to approve an expensive, dangerous, and ineffective Alzheimer’s drug which resulted in three of the experts on the panel resigning with one stating it was “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent US history”). Shortly afterwards, the FDA gave a glowing press release on their approval of the drug—but due to how unsafe and ineffective the drug was, even with the FDA’s endorsement, rather than become the next blockbuster drug, it abjectly failed in the market and is now being discontinued by the manufacturer. For those interested, I discussed the immense scandal with existing Alzheimer’s drugs and the suppression of proven (but un-patentable) treatments for the disease here.

The Rise of Ozempic (semaglutide)

Once I saw this conference, given that it sets the course for the entire industry, I became fairly convinced that Ozempic would be aggressively marketed by the pharmaceutical sector in the coming year and that the FDA would do everything possible to expand the market. This happened so quickly that many began speaking out about it. Here for instance, I excerpted the key sections of Casey and Calley Means describing the staggering corruption that has facilitated Ozempic’s rapid rise throughout America:

In turn, we’ve had our “trusted authorities” wholeheartedly endorse giving this drug for weight loss and a constant slew of marketing to sell it for that (without any complaints from the FTC or the FDA). Given how desperate people are to lose weight, a rush has been created for the drug, and I am now seeing numerous sleazy clinics hang large banners outside stating that they offer Ozempic—something reminiscent of what I saw as the “safe and effective” opioid painkillers spread across America.

In fact, this campaign has been so effective that since 2022, there has been a shortage of these drugs (despite Ozempic’s manufacturer doing everything it can to ramp up production) to the point that many have been seeking out alternative sources of Ozempic (which Ozempic’s manufacturer and “the experts” are of course trying to clamp down on).

In observing this campaign, alongside an aggressive push to no longer treat obesity as a lifestyle disease (as it can then be prevented with something besides a pharmaceutical), three things in particular have jumped out at me as the insatiable industry has moved to expand this market to every conceivable demographic.

1. African Americans—As Calley Means revealed, Ozempic’s manufacturer paid off the NAACP (one of the premier groups advancing the rights of African Americans in the United States) to become a lobbyist for Ozempic and attack any attempts to withhold giving Ozempic to African American community as a vile act that perpetuates systematic racism.

2. Children—shortly before the Chase conference (on December 22, 2022) the FDA approved semaglutide to treat obesity in children 12 and older, while on January 9, 2023 (the first day of the Chase conference), the American Academy of Pediatrics published a set of authoritative set of guidelines for treating childhood obesity which strongly endorsed giving them the GLP-1’s. Specifically it stated:

This recommendation was followed by a tepid endorsement of most of the available weight loss drugs and a strong endorsement of the GLP-1s—in effect having those guidelines serve as a strong promotion for giving Ozempic (or related drugs) to children on the basis of a 68 week study. Given that drastically altering digestion during childhood will likely affect the long-term development of the body, it seems quite questionable to assume a (likely doctored) 68 week study can accurately predict putting children on these drugs will prevent them from developing long-term complications.

Note: the best parallel I can think of to this are the proton pump acid reflux medications, which work by completely suppressing the stomach’s production of acid. As stomach acid is essential for digestion, many leaders in the natural health field predicted the long-term use of these drugs would lead to a variety of significant complications (e.g., depression, osteoporosis, stomach cancer, allergies, and autoimmune disorders). Still, these concerns were largely ignored since the standard medical training omits mentioning the importance of stomach acid. In turn, it took decades for the research to emerge that these drugs do in fact have those side effects (which conveniently happened once they were off-patent). That subject, as well as the natural ways to treat acid reflux (e.g., by increasing rather than lowering stomach acid levels) are discussed further here.

3. The Elderly—One of the major barriers to selling Ozempic is that it is so expensive (1,000-1,500 per month), most patients cannot afford it without insurance. One of the primary barriers to insurance coverage is that the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 specifically prohibited Medicare from paying for drugs prescribed for “weight loss.” In turn, the industry has been aggressively lobbying to have this law overturned, and an “obesity rights” coalition (which is primarily funded by Ozempic’s manufacturer and previously lobbied the American Medical Association to make obesity be declared a disease requiring pharmaceutical treatment) has now successfully gotten a law doing just that through committee (which if passed is expected to cost Medicare between 3.1 to 6 billion dollars annually).

If you take a step back, this raises an interesting question. Why on earth is there a law banning Medicare from paying for obesity treatments?

Note: paying off third party patient advocacy groups to promote the pharmaceutical industry’s interests is a very common practice. For example, I recently discussed the National Multiple Sclerosis society, an organization which has existed for 78 years, now takes in 200 million annual but has failed to produce any meaningful benefit to MS patients. Conversely, many over the years have shown that this organization has ruthlessly suppressed proven cures from MS which cannot be patented by the pharmaceutical industry.

The Rise and Fall of Phen-Fen

A key theme I’ve tried to illustrate in this publication is how often the exact same catastrophe repeats in medicine because each previous incidence of it gets erased. What I find remarkable about Ozempic is how similar it is to the fen-phen saga, except that at that time, the FDA was still willing to upset the industry and (sometimes) remove dangerous drugs from the market.

Phentermine (introduced to the USA 1959) and fenfluramine (introduced to the USA in 1973) were two marginally effective weight loss drugs that never caught on. In 1979, a professor of clinical pharmacology who had recently become a director of an FDA division for approving new drugs believed obesity needed to be treated as a medical (rather than lifestyle) disease and decided to see if they’d work better once combined. He then conducted a four year study of 121 (mostly women) obese patients. He cycled them between that drug combination or a placebo, finding that his combination caused them to be less hungry and lose weight while the placebo did the opposite. Not noticing any side effects besides weight gain and hunger once the drugs were stopped, he then spent almost a decade trying to get his study published, and eventually in 1992, a journal did.

Word of his magic cocktail spread like wildfire, demand surged for fen-phen and before long doctors around the country were converting their practices into pill mills (e.g., this New York Times article about that era cites an infectious disease doctor who paid a chiropractor to hand out blank prescriptions he’d written to patients).

Some, like Dr. Dennis Tison, a Sacramento psychiatrist, devoted his entire practice to fen-phen, buying the drugs wholesale and dispensing them in his office to thousands of patients. Like many doctors, he advertised on the Internet that he prescribed fen-phen. ''I got calls from all over the country,'' Dr. Tison said. ''People would say, 'I want the meds and I will pay anything.' ''

Dr. Tison said he saw nothing wrong in his practice. He criticized storefront clinics springing up overnight in California strip malls, ''like cockroaches,'' he said, handing out the drugs to anyone who walked in. ''A lot of doctors viewed this as a cash register,'' he said.

Note: I also heard of cases of people (e.g., pharmacists) who were desperate to lose weight and lost their licenses after they got caught stealing fen-phen for themselves.

This lucrative market caught the industry’s attention. In 1995, another pharmaceutical company petitioned for the approval of a similar drug. Through their supporters within the FDA’s approval committee, they were able to get it approved despite great apprehension from the panel. In April 1996, the FDA approved what would likely be a lifelong drug despite the studies for it only lasting a year.

A few months later, reports began emerging that fenfluramine caused heart valve damage. After extensive investigation, it was eventually discovered that fen-phen:

•Had already caused one-third of users to develop asymptomatic heart valve damage—which was quite significant given that the drug had only been on the market for a few years and similar damage typically only affected around 1% of the population.

•Had caused many cases of severe heart valve disease (in their initial search the FDA identified over 100 cases).

•Increased the risk of pulmonary hypertension (a fairly severe disease) by up to 30 times, with the risk increasing the longer someone was on this drug.

Given the magnitude of the situation they were facing, the FDA banned fen-phen (or more specifically fenfluramine (as it was suspected to be the main culprit), and a few years later Medicare was outlawed from covering weight loss drugs. Disappointed they’d lost their market, physicians experimented with other phentermine combinations (e.g., they paired it with Prozac, another fluorinated serotonin increasing agent and called it phen-pro). Numerous lawsuits followed, and the manufacturers of fen-phen were forced to spend over 13 billion in settlements.

What is particularly remarkable is what the FDA official who conducted the pivotal trial that showed fen-phen was safe and effective stated after its severe complications were discovered.  To quote the NYT:

''I figured, gee whiz, these drugs have been on the market for 10, 12 years,'' he [the FDA official] said. ''Everything must be known about them.'' 

And certainly it never occurred to him to look for heart valve problems because no drug, with the possible exception of high doses of ergotamines for migraines, had ever been known to damage heart valves.

Note: another interesting parallel with Ozempic from the days of fen-phen is that physicians are experimenting with a variety of different uses of the drug that they believe will lead to weight loss but do not have evidence supporting them.

The Risks and Benefits of Ozempic

Prior to Ozempic and its ilk being marketed as anti-obesity drugs, I was mostly familiar with their uses for diabetes, as many of my colleagues believed they were quite helpful for the disease. Given that some of these colleagues were fairly conservative with which drugs they would use and excellent clinicians, I took their opinions into serious consideration. However, I also noticed that I was repeatedly seeing patients develop unusual gastrointestinal complications from the drugs (including one hospitalization of a distant relative), so I held to the perspective the drugs were too new for it to be appropriate to prescribe them despite the fact they could potentially be immensely helpful for patients with diabetes.

After they started being used as weight loss agents (where their dose is much higher—0.5-1.0mg vs. 1.7-2.4mg—frequently being almost five times greater), we started noticing that we’d see more and more patients who should have never been prescribed the drug and are taking enough of it (often even overdosing) to drive themselves into cachexia. These patients are easy to identify as they don’t look normal and have a somewhat sick and somewhat anorexic appearance.

In terms of the abuse of weight-loss drugs, “nothing compares to the phenomenon that we’re seeing right now with these GLP-1s,” said Melissa Spann, a psychotherapist and the chief clinical officer at Monte Nido, an eating disorder treatment group that runs 50 programs and in 28 states virtually.

I then looked into the data on the GLP-1 drugs and noticed a curious pattern—like fen-phen, the weight lost was rapidly regained once the drug was stopped. To illustrate, here are a few graphs from the pivotal trials of these drugs.

First, a pivotal trial of using the full (2.4mg) dose of Wegovy (which like Ozempic is another name for semaglutide) each week, inadvertently shows that most of the participants could not stay on the drugs for a prolonged period:

Second, the (small) pivotal trial for giving this to children showed they began regaining their lost weight once they stopped the drug (and conveniently only tracked this for a short period as a much greater weight likely would have occurred over time).

Third, when the effects of withdrawing the drug were tested, the lost weight was clearly shown to return (alongside a gradual decline of the number of people who could stay on the drug):

Furthermore, this effect was also seen in a related drug:

In short, I would argue that having to spend 1000 dollars a month for a bit of weight loss, which then disappears once you stop the drug may not be the best deal. Conversely, I suspect a key reason why this side effect has been publicized is because the goal of the pharmaceutical industry is always to have a large number of people perpetually using a high profit margin product (e.g., a monthly course of the thousand dollar Ozempic costs less than 5 dollars to make), so any product which creates intolerable withdrawals when one stops (e.g., the SSRI antidepressants or the PPI acid reflux medications) constitute an ideal product.

Note: while I believe Ozempic is not a good agent for weight loss, I will mention that a few of my colleagues have had success using low doses of Ozempic for a short term period to eliminate specific food cravings they believe are detrimental to their patients as Ozempic removes the desire of the food long enough for the patient to be able to permanently break the addiction (provided they then make an active effort to avoid the specific food).

Unfortunately, in addition to being a scam, Ozempic has a few major issues.

First, as mentioned before, since its primary mechanism of action is reducing the desire to eat, the body can become excessively malnourished. Ozempic malnourishes the body in a very characteristic way (hence why we’ve started being able to spot these patients). Likewise, since this effect is quite noticeable in the face, it has come to be known as the “Ozempic Face.”

Note: since the breasts are largely fat, a similar effect can happen there, with many women developing deflated and sagging breasts after using Ozempic.

Second, the GLP-1 drugs were designed to resist breaking down within the body, so they would only need to be injected once a week (resulting in their average half life being approximately seven days whereas the natural GLP-1 protein has a half life between 1.5-5 minutes). Since the GLP-1 is responsible for slowing digestion in the body, drugs like Ozempic significantly slow digestion and can create a variety of gastrointestinal issues from doing so (e.g., a study of  25,617 real-world patients found these drugs cause a 3.5 times increase in the rate of intestinal obstruction). 

The most comprehensive study I’ve found of the severe side effects of GLP-1 drugs (e.g., Ozempic) sourced from 16 million patient’s medical records found that the drugs were strongly linked to a variety of side effects that frequently required hospitalization. Specifically, when compared to another weight loss combination not typically associated with these effects, GLP-1 users were found to have:

• 9.09 times greater risk of pancreatitis

• 4.22 times greater risk of bowel obstruction

• 3.67 times greater risk of gastroparesis (which means you can barely eat because the stomach is constantly full—and in many cases after Ozempic, ends up being permanent)

• 1.48 times greater risk of biliary disease (e.g., painful gallstones)

Note: the exact risk depended on the type of GLP-1 drug used (e.g., Ozempic appeared to cause roughly 1% of users to develop gastroparesis within a year).

Another theme I’ve emphasized here is that severe adverse events are typically much rarer than moderate or minor ones. Given how frequent these severe effects are, it should come as no surprise that less severe ones are even more common.

For example, consider this study of 175 people on the weight loss dose of Ozempic:

Likewise, consider how many adverse events were acknowledged within a trial sponsored by Ozempic’s manufacturer:

Sadly, these aren’t the only side effects. For example, in addition to lawsuits being filed against Ozempic for gastrointestinal disorders such as gastroparesis, lawsuits are also emerging for other severe conditions such as vision loss. Likewise, evidence is now emerging linking Ozempic to an increased risk of suicidal ideation (e.g., a 45% increase has been observed). Animal experiments are showing it distorts the architecture of the small intestine (which can lead to poor nutrient absorption or chronic intestinal obstructions), and many of the GLP-1 drug labels state the drugs may be linked to thyroid cancer.

Note: in a previous series, I discussed one of the largest issues with the SSRI antidepressants—because they are given at a very high dose, individuals frequently experience severe withdrawals when their dose is changed. These withdrawals, in turn can trigger suicidal behavior, psychosis, or violent behavior, which is sometimes homicidal (and a common theme in most school shootings). A major issue with Ozempic is that since it slows the rate at which the stomach empties, it alters and delays the absorption of psychiatric medications. Since the users are often very sensitive to changes in their dose, many reports now exist online of significant psychiatric destabilization occurring in Ozempic users who were also on psychiatric medications. This may in part explain why the above study found that the 45% increased risk of suicidal ideation from taking Ozempic became a 345% increase in those who were already taking SSRI antidepressants.

One of the things some find fascinating about medicine and others find immensely frustrating is that an almost identical set of symptoms can be caused by very different factors depending on the patient (e.g., while there are common causes of chronic fatigue, there is no single cause which applies to most people).

Since medicine has been transformed into a discipline that revolves around giving the same standardized protocol to everyone, this reality necessitates those protocols utilizing therapies which target the symptoms of a disease rather than its underlying cause—an approach that typically gives a temporary alleviation of the presenting symptoms while the underlying disease simultaneously worsens (which in turn requires more and more symptomatic drugs to “address” it).

Note: while similar diseases typically have a wide variety of different causes, in certain cases, a unifying cause (e.g., poor microcirculation due to a chronically impaired zeta potential) does exist that can explain a myriad of diseases. However, this is never publicly discussed since it threatens too many disease markets.

In America’s case, it’s very clear that obesity has been continuously rising, and that like many other chronic illnesses, we have no explanation for why this is.

The most common explanations were are given include:

•We are eating too much food now and having a sedentary lifestyle.

•The core ingredients of our diet (the monoculture grains like corn) are highly effective at making individuals gain weight and hence should not compose the majority of our diets. For example, excess sugar is transformed into fat and cholesterol. Yet, despite this being well known, due to decades of fraudulent research done to protect the food industry, animal fats are normally blamed for the consequences of eating grain heavy diets.
•Gut microbiome dysbiosis triggers obesity (e.g., see this review).
•There is widespread metabolic dysfunction in society (e.g., due to mitochondrial or thyroid dysfunction), which causes the same amount of calories to make us gain significantly more weight than they otherwise would.

•Specific additives in our foods (e.g., seed oils or high fructose corn syrup) rapidly trigger obesity within the body.

•The estrogen mimicking compounds present throughout our environment (e.g., from plastics, soy, or birth control pills designed to resist degradation and persist in the water supply) are causing widespread obesity.

•A less overt version of type 1 diabetes (where the immune system attacks the pancreas and disables its production of insulin) occurs which leads to a chronic insulin deficiency.  This is in part due to the fact we’ve seen numerous cases where a sensitizing trigger caused an individual to develop diabetes. One of the best examples was a colleague’s relative who went on a deer hunting trip, and then every member of his group (who all ate the same deer) subsequently developed diabetes. We felt the only thing that could have accounted for this cohort example was a vaccine their entire unit got in the military or something that was in the deer (e.g., a parasite or possibly CWD).

Note: there are also other more mainstream explanations given I do not agree with (e.g., that cholesterol heavy foods like animal fats make us gain weight).

The essential challenge with these explanations is that all of them seem to apply in certain cases but not others, and in parallel, weight loss approaches which help for one individual do not help for another. However, rather than acknowledge this, we’re simply being told the true answer is a lifetime of Ozempic.

In the final part of this article, I will discuss the key factors we have found often underlie obesity or food cravings (many of which are almost never discussed) and the most effective ways we have found to lose weight or reverse metabolic dysfunction (e.g., diabetes)—most of which sadly are forgotten sides of medicine—especially because the actual causes of obesity are rarely discussed (rather the focus is simply on lecturing patients or pressuring them to become lifelong pharmaceutical customers).

Obesogens

Since the correlation between sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) exposure and the incidence of diabetes does not match up perfectly, many suspect that it is a contributing rather than a primary factor. This has led to researchers gradually trying to determine if specific environmental exposures (termed obesogens) increase the likelihood of obesity and diabetes.

Joseph Pizorno (a leader in the naturopathic profession), for example, has made a strong case that obesogenic chemicals or heavy metals are the primary cause of the diabetes epidemic. This is because:

•The production of those chemicals matches the rates of diabetes:

•Individuals with higher exposures to obesogens have a proportionally higher rate of diabetes:

•Numerous mechanisms and evidence exist to show how these obesogens contribute to diabetes. Pizzorno then estimated the contribution of each of these obesogens to be as follows:

Note: Pizzorno later published The Toxin Solution, a book (and audiobook) that provides a much more detailed discussion of this subject.

Many of the obesogens are also xenoestrogens, and many different obesogens are found in processed foods. This article provides a detailed list of the obesogens (alongside a comprehensive review of the supporting evidence for them). One of the most important points it makes is how many food additives that are  “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) are only in their infancy for being studied for their contributions to obesity. This is a bit unbelievable, given that many consider obesity to be the single greatest problem with processed food (whereas in contrast many of the additives we use here are banned in Europe).

Note: Ever since the FDA was founded, food additives with significant toxicity have received the GRAS designation (despite it being unjustified). The first chief of the FDA wrote a book detailing how hard he fought to make the agency do its job and mentioned that he was strong-armed into allowing aluminum to be added to the food supply. I believe the widespread presence of aluminum is a key cause of illness in society (due to aluminum’s immense adverse effects on zeta potential), and despite being deemed GRAS, the safety of aluminum has never been studied.

Since there are so many potential obesogens, it becomes quite difficult to determine which ones have the most significant impact. The one person I know who looked at this question in their practice concluded the most influential obesogens were high fructose corn syrup, acrylamides (from potato chips), yellow dyes, and red dyes (which again makes it incredible Kennedy was able to publicly speak about the food dyes on Fox News).

In addition to chemical obesogens, many now believe that factors which adversely affect your normal sleep rhythm (discussed extensively in this article), such as light exposure at night, also trigger obesity. Furthermore, because so many hormonal systems are linked to each other (e.g., the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenals axis), many factors you would not expect to cause issues can rapidly ripple out into the whole body. In turn, fixing one’s sleep cycle often significantly improves weight loss.

Food Cravings:

When I was younger, and I started eliminating unhealthy things from my diet, I noticed that I went through a withdrawal process quite similar to what drug addicts described when they tried to quit. I found this quite disturbing and began researching the topic intently, eventually concluding most of the common processed foods had been modified to be as addictive as possible so people would over-purchase them. Later, I discovered two key points of evidence on this.

The first was a former FDA commissioner David Kessler writing a book detailing exactly how this was done with America’s food supply and in it stating that heads of processed food companies had admitted to him they were deliberately making their foods addictive.

The second, as mentioned above, was learning that Big Tobacco bought out the processed food industry, and then, as they had done with cigarettes, prioritized having their scientists develop chemicals that made processed foods as addictive as possible.

Note: Kessler argues the addictive quality was due to large amounts of fat, sugar, and salt being mixed together, whereas the tobacco data suggests it was instead due to specific chemical additives.

What I found particularly interesting was that whenever I broke the addiction (by essentially going cold turkey from it), if I subsequently ate the food in question, it would taste awful and my body would reject it until the addiction was reestablished, and this reflex to reject the food was overridden. This illustrates what is so insidious that the processed food companies do all they can to get children hooked on these foods at the start of their lives (e.g., McDonald's Happy Meals come with toys aggressively marketed to children on television).

Note: one of the most egregious examples of this are infant formulas (which despite their heavy marketing are radically inferior to breast milk). One of the most remarkable things I learned on this topic is that the infant growth charts pediatricians use to tell parents their child is underweight (and hence needs supplemental infant formula) were created by the formula industry and set the “normal” weight as being much higher than it needed to be, a problem infant formula “solves” because it’s full of processed food (e.g., high fructose corn syrup) which creates metabolic dysfunction and hence leads to rapid weight gain. I previously wrote about this during the “great infant formula shortage” of 2022, when panic hit America since the infant formula ran out and no one could feed their babies—as I viewed it as a testament to how effectively the industry has brainwashed mothers not to realize they can breastfeed their infants. I mention it here because I believe it is one of the primary things that sets Americans up for lifelong obesity.

Because of how addictive these foods are, it is often incredibly difficult to get people to quit eating them (to the point one of my colleagues coined the phrase “it’s easier to get people to change their religion than their diet”) and as a result, I believe weight loss approaches which simply tell patients to “try harder” are unlikely to succeed if they have a strong food addiction (the same of which is also true for diabetes). In turn, I’ve identified a couple of approaches that seem to work.

•Fasting: Provided you can support the patient through the initial withdrawal process, fasting appears to reset the food addictions so that when the fast ends, if the addictive foods are not reintroduced, they are likely not to resume the addiction. While I can’t prove this (rather I’ve only found evidence suggesting it is the case), having watched this happen to both myself and many others, I believe a significant component of food addiction is stored in the microbiome (our best guess is that microbes account for 30-40% of food cravings).

 Specifically, different foods encourage the growth of certain bacteria, and certain bacteria (or parasites) will then release substances which create cravings for foods the bacteria need. As a result, I suspect fasting in part eliminates the addiction because those bacteria die off (due to a lack of their required food source) and hence are no longer present to create cravings for it.

•Ozempic: While I do not like this drug in general, my colleagues have found that when a patient was unable to get over a specific food craving, if they had a brief course of Ozempic at a low dose (0.25mg to 0.5mg compared to the typical 2.4mg dose that people end up on) done in tandem with making an effort to avoid the specific problematic food, it allowed many patients to break specific food addictions they were otherwise unable to do (this allowing them to lose weight).

Note: Drugs that mimic the effects of GLP-1 have been shown to address not only food cravings but also many other addictions. This suggests that if there is widespread impairment of GLP-1 production in the brain (which will be very difficult to study), widespread societal consequences follow from it.

•Replace an addictive food with an effective substitute. This does not always work, but in many cases it does (e.g., I wrote about how to make healthy potato chips here as I found they often could eliminate patients need for actual potato chips and in many cases, a craving for a specific food is due to a micronutrient deficiency such as magnesium that is found in the food).

Additionally, I’ve seen a variety of approaches utilizing some type of psychotropic medication (e.g., naltrexone) to break the craving. As these approaches yield inconsistent results and I do not have extensive experience with them, I am unsure of their merits.

Fat Sensitizers

The nutritional dogma has been that weight gain is a product of calories consumed versus calories expended. While this is the case for some people (e.g., I know people who were obese for decades and then held to a strict low calorie diet and became skinny) in practice I find this does not hold true, and different foods have significantly different effects on weight gain.

In this regard, the most important principle is that individuals will have different foods which serve as “fat sensitizers” that signal the body to store calories as fat (with the signal sometimes lasting as long as 4-5 days), so as a result, eating even a small amount of them more a few times a month will cause the patients to gain weight. Conversely, they will lose weight if the fat-signaling food is no longer eaten, which is why you occasionally meet people who say they lost 10 pounds after giving up gluten (as it was their fat signaler), whereas for many others, doing so had no effect on their weight.

Note: one interesting book makes an excellent case that becoming diabetic and storing fat was an evolutionary mechanism which allowed humans to gain weight over the summer so they could survive the winter and that consuming large amounts of fructose (which are found in both ripe fruit at the end of summer and anything made with high fructose corn syrup) served as the signal for this weight gain.

This dynamic is particularly problematic because the fat-signaling food is often something individuals crave (hence why it is so critical to be able to break food addictions), and in some cases, rather than being harmful, it is otherwise good for them. For example, the person I know who originally discovered this periodically found cream stimulates him to gain weight, but eating cream also helps his body build muscle, so only he has cream a few times a week and consumes it in conjunction with when he lifts weights. As a result, he has a bit of a belly but is also very muscular.

This signaling process helps to explain one of Trump’s well-known tweets:

Aspartame (a toxic artificial sweetener) frequently signals the body to store fat. Its presence explains why individuals who consume Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke often gain more weight than those who drink regular (high-calorie) sodas. Furthermore, this link is common enough that studies have observed it, and a few endocrine signaling mechanisms have been established to explain it (see this review, this article, and this article). Due to its effects on the endocrine system (and possibly its known effects on neurological signaling), patients frequently become partially addicted to aspartame and will not give it up even if advised to by their physicians.

Conversely, this property can sometimes also be life saving:

Cachexia is the weakness and emaciation commonly associated with serious illness, such as cancer [and from chemotherapy], HIV/AIDS ('slim disease'), tuberculosis, and seen after burns, major surgery, or trauma.

In cachectic patients (including elderly individuals who appear to be on their way out), restoring weight is vital for their survival but often impossible to accomplish. One of my colleagues realized the fat-signaling properties of Diet Pepsi after he noticed many of his patients who drank Diet Pepsi became diabetic, and pioneered having cachectic patients consume a small amount of it (after first holding it in their mouths) a few times a week for 3-6 weeks. This addressed many cases of cachexia and in those cases was life-saving for all practical purposes.

Note: irrespective of Trump’s tweet, my colleague found Diet Pepsi to be a much stronger fat signaler than Diet Coke.

At the same time, even though aspartame is one of the most reliable fat-signalers out there, high fructose corn syrup (which is in everything) also is a major contributor due to how it affects the small intestine and the manner in which it triggers a large release of insulin.

So, one of the most important things to identify through trial and error is what foods your endocrine system has become sensitized to (e.g., are you the guy who always gains weight when you eat potatoes, or are you the lady who can’t resist donuts but always gains pounds from them—both of which we have seen in clinical practice). 

To share a personal example, one of the things that was immensely frustrating for me was discovering that my body had become sensitized to avocados (which I suspect was due to how frequently I ate them), resulting in avocados becoming a fat signaler for me. The ironic thing about this was that a key part of why I started eating avocados so frequently (beyond the fact I like the taste) was because, due to being mostly fat, I assumed under the ketogenic diet theory, they would not cause me to gain weight.

There are a few different approaches to addressing this problem. The first is to follow a classical nutritional adage and have a significant degree of variability in your diet so you are not eating the same foods multiple times per week. The second is to consider your potential fat triggers and then experiment with removing them to see which ultimately matters for your weight loss—especially if you are eating a normal (or restricted) amount of calories but not losing weight. In turn, if you find you have a strong craving for a specific food, that is often a clue it’s a fat sensitizer for you.

Note: it is quite common a food allergen someone has an existing sensitivity to (e.g., dairy or gluten) or a plant lectin can be the fat signaler.  However, often it’s something entirely different (e.g., avocados for me, whereas I’ve met individuals who sadly were sensitized to chocolate).  Endocrine Dysfunction

The body’s hormones are responsible for regulating many things, including the rate at which you metabolize food, what you crave, and if your body stores fats. Sadly, our environment is full of many chemicals which disrupt hormonal function (e.g., fluoride which is added to drinking water, and bromine which is added to flour, are both notorious for suppressing thyroid function, while the xenoestrogens present throughout our environment wreak havoc on the entire endocrine system).

To some extent, medicine recognizes this, as one of the classic symptoms of low thyroid function is weight gain, and obesity doctors thus frequently do a basic evaluation of thyroid function. While we frequently focus on thyroid function, our own experience has been that optimizing thyroid function makes patients feel better and provides them with noticeably more energy to function, but it does relatively little to help patients lose weight or control their weight unless they have overt hypothyroidism.

Note: one of the simplest ways to partly restore thyroid function is with supplemental iodine. Dr. David Brownstein writes extensively about it in this book. He advocates for using Lugol’s iodine, whereas we’ve found certain patients respond best to Lugol’s, some respond best to nascent iodine, and others respond best to one of the Standard Process iodine products (all of which can easily be found on websites). Because of this, when asked by someone I don’t know, I tell them to follow Brownstein’s protocol, but in practice, we will muscle test each iodine formulation on them to see which elicits the best response (e.g., I do the best with nascent iodine).

Conversely, we find excessive estrogen levels frequently contribute to obesity (as they give the body a signal to store fat) so we often try to normalize their levels in patients (e.g., by using a natural or low dose aromatase inhibitor).  Unfortunately, balancing estrogen (which is often necessary for improving health) often requires supplemental progesterone, and one common side effect of this is weight gain, so we always make a point to ensure women are comfortable with that before we initiate treatment.

Note: the second most important hormone for weight loss is testosterone.

In my eyes, the least appreciated aspect of endocrine dysfunction are structural issues with the glands. For example:

•We’ve seen numerous cases of individuals becoming diabetic or developing hypothyroidism after a traumatic injury (e.g., a car accident) which then either compressed an endocrine gland or impairs its blood supply. This is particularly common with the pituitary gland, and I know a few people who frequently treat diabetes by using cranial manipulation to decompress it. In turn, while the pituitary gland is rarely considered in diabetes, there is quite a bit of evidence linking abnormal pituitary hormones to diabetes,

•In this publication, I’ve argued that certain harmful agents (particularly vaccines) will cause blood cells to clump together and create microstrokes in the smallest blood vessels, which can be highly problematic if the blood supply is cut off to a critical blood vessel. In turn, many of the classic vaccine injuries (which can be visibly observed) are a direct result of a circulatory impairment to regions of the brain with the weakest blood supply. This has led me to wonder if the same holds true for the endocrine dysfunction that leads to diabetes and weight gain. In the case of the pituitary gland, while I’ve seen a few cases suggestive of it, I’m less confident in this model as the pituitary gland has a rich blood supply.

However, in the case of GLP-1 (which as mentioned before, within the brain regulates both addictions and cravings), in addition to being secreted by the intestine, it is secreted within the nucleus of the solitary tract of the brainstem. As this region has a poorer blood supply (and is in the vicinity of other cranial nerves that get damaged by vaccines), it hence seems quite plausible to me that many individuals with vaccine injuries also have a predisposition to becoming addicted to certain foods.

Note: a strong case can also be made that the hormone cortisol (which is regulated by the pituitary gland and released by stress) is one of the primary agents which signals the body to store fat (particularly within the abdomen). Likewise, a deficiency of growth hormone (which is a common consequence of impaired sleep) can contribute to weight gain (while in contrast growth hormone raising agents such as protein analogs of the hormone or peptides which trigger its secretion are used in practice to convert body fat to muscle mass).  However, while this is a common weight-loss focus within the hormonal field (and often great for general health) in our experience, we’ve found it provides minimal benefit for losing weight.  Finally, one common popular hormonal approach for weight loss is the HcG diet, where the hormone the placenta releases to maintain a pregnancy is injected alongside a calorie restrictive diet.  While this approach “works” we avoid it because we believe it can cause cancers (which again illustrates how careful you have to be when altering the hormonal balance of the body—something which medicine unfortunately rarely does).

Mitochondrial Dysfunction

A general consensus exists that many diseases are due to deficient cellular energy resulting from poor mitochondrial function. In the case of diabetes and weight gain, within this model, they are essentially argued to be a consequence of the fact that the cells can’t process all the sugar being taken in, and it is instead either left in the bloodstream (hence creating diabetes) or stored as fat (hence creating obesity).

While I believe this is generally true, it ignores two major points.

The first is that, in many cases, the body is trying to store fat due to a signaling process at work.

The causes of mitochondrial dysfunction are relatively poorly understood. For example, while a consensus is forming that seed oils and certain pharmaceutical drugs (e.g., statins) create mitochondrial dysfunction, there is a much lesser appreciation of many other facets of the picture. For example:

•EMF exposure inhibits the ability of the mitochondria to synthesize ATP and in effect causes diabetes. This model has been best elucidated by Arthur Fristenberg who collected a significant amount of evidence (much of which was forgotten Russian research demonstrating this phenomenon) to support his contention—all of which I compiled along with a few additions here.

For example, researchers at Kaiser Permanente gave pregnant women EMF meters to wear for 24 hours. The children of women whose exposure exceeded 2.5 milliGauss were more than six times as likely to be obese as teenagers than the children of mothers whose exposure were lower than that amount.

Note: while I find his evidence compelling, my main objection to this theory is that certain high EMF areas (e.g., Japan) simultaneously have low rates of obesity.

•It is frequently quite challenging to treat mitochondrial dysfunction (e.g., sometimes supplementation from a trained functional medicine provider can treat it, but in other cases supplementation is actually counterproductive).

•One of the Forgotten Sides of Medicine I’ve tried to present here is that mitochondria have an adaptive mode, where when faced with a threat, will change a cell’s metabolism to a defensive state which allows the cell to survive (or heal) but simultaneously compromises the cell’s normal functions (e.g., dividing or providing energy to the body). Many disease states are a result of cells being stuck in the “cell danger response” rather than exiting them as they normally should (e.g., due to the danger still being present). In turn, a lesson integrative practitioners eventually learn is that in certain cases, where significant mitochondrial dysfunction is present, it’s actually highly counterproductive to try and stimulate mitochondrial function (e.g., with mitochondrial supporting supplements).

In turn, I’ve written extensively about this response and how it ties into many vaccine injuries, how treating it underlies many regenerative medical therapies, and how systemic treatments for it (e.g., amniotic exosome therapy) can frequently reverse a myriad of chronic disease states.

Other Adaptive Responses

In many cases, we find that storing body fat is a protective mechanism the body uses to prevent something else. Typically, this is due to both toxins and harmful cations (positive charges which impair the physiologic zeta potential) being sequestered and stored in the fat. Because of this, we often find an effective liver cleanse or a longstanding zeta potential treatment protocol (particularly the latter) can help patients lose weight. Likewise, when a patient goes on a weight loss program, they will often hit a plateau they cannot easily pass (either due to reactions they experience or because the weight simply won’t go down). Fortunately, if treatment is done to address the compensation, they can do so.

Typically, that is one of the following:

• Get a micronutrient test to establish which nutrients the individual is deficient in (e.g., magnesium or B vitamins) and then provide that nutrient so they stop craving the related food.

Note: certain mineral deficiencies (e.g., chromium) also often play a key role in diabetes. Typically, we find the best test to evaluate patients for a nutritional deficiency before beginning a weight loss program is the Spectracell micronutrient test panel.

•Low dose (aluminum-free) EDTA chelation eliminates many of the positive ions (e.g., metals) released from fat into the bloodstream.

•IV glutathione—this helps the liver process the toxins released into the circulation from the fat (including the obesogens). Various other approaches also exist to help with the detoxification process, and depending on the case they may be necessary.

•Address underlying emotional stressors or trapped emotional trauma—this is understandably more complex to address than the previous approaches, but in certain cases, it’s necessary (e.g., when patients are chronically stressed elevated cortisol levels make it quite challenging to lose abdominal weight and likewise some patient’s bodies will hold onto abdominal fat as a psychological protective mechanism).

Dietary Approaches

Throughout my life, I’ve lost count of how many different diets I’ve seen proposed which had a strong cult following and then were later abandoned (because they didn’t work as promised). Presently my core principles are:

•There is an immense variation in what type of food each person needs, so no single diet fits everyone (e.g., some people do better on vegetarian diets, some do better on high-carb diets, some people do better on high protein diets, some people do better on carnivore diets, some do better on ketogenic diets, some do better on raw food diets, and what constitutes the ideal diet for each person often varies by season). Because of this, evidence exists to argue for almost every imaginable diet, and people get extremely dogmatic about each one. As a result, it is often necessary to be able to listen to the signals your body gives you on what to eat (provided you’ve eliminated the influence of addictive foods) rather than to listen to any specific diet. Likewise, the best way to avoid foods that are “bad” for you is to simply become able to hear the messages your body gives you that the food is not good (e.g., you don’t feel good immediately after eating it or develop symptoms later in the day).

Note: I wrote much more about this entire subject here.

•In almost all cases, the less processed food you eat, the healthier you will be.

•Quality of food matters. If you have access to fresh locally produced food (where the micronutrients are intact), that typically counts for more than getting the ideal food from far away or a questionable producer.

•The most important quality of the food is its nutrient density (which is largely absent in processed foods). In most cases, when people eat nutrient rich foods, the stomach becomes full much faster and they want to eat significantly less.

•Food prepared at home is typically better than any food you buy (e.g., the pioneer of the zeta potential model in medicine would tell his patients to only eat out at restaurants once a week).

•For most people, if they avoid the typical sugar (or fructose) laden foods that are high in carbohydrates and have a decent degree of exercise, they will lose weight (which in turn requires them to break the addictive qualities of these foods). However, the opposite of that, an excessively ketogenic diet, while frequently highly effective for losing weight (at least initially), does not always work for patients.

•Eating foods close to bedtime (or in the middle of the night) increases the likelihood of them being converted into fat.

•It is generally a good idea to eat heavy proteins and heavy carbs separately (e.g., don’t eat hotdogs).  This is because the an acidic environment is required for the former, while an alkaline one is required to digest the latter, which in turn creates much more work for the digestive system to properly digest a meal. 

•Set meal times (particularly earlier ones) are excellent for reducing the stress on the body’s endocrine system and are often helpful for losing weight. The one exception to this rule is that a certain portion of patients have issues with hypoglycemia (e.g., they get stress and anxiety when their blood sugar gets low or are woken up at night once their blood sugar drops and a stress response kicks in to raise it). In these cases, the diet needs to be structured to avoid that from happening (e.g., having a bit of oatmeal, a slowly digesting carbohydrate, shortly before bed can be immensely helpful for allowing these patients to sleep through the night).

•Eating in a relaxed and stress free manner where you take your time to fully chew each bite  is very important for the digestive system (due to it increasing digestive function and reducing cortisol).  Because of this, many traditions throughout the ages have observed that how you eat is often as important as what you eat.

•In many cases, the body will rapidly accommodate whatever pattern has been set. Because of this, when dieting, it frequently helps to alternate what’s being done. For example, if you consume less calories, the body will burn more fat, but once it does that, it will switch to a lower metabolism to prevent starvation (and hence eliminate the point of eating). Because of this, we frequently find carbohydrate cycling (e.g., two days with a ketogenic diet and roughly 2000 calories, two days with 1000 calories but not a ketogenic diet, and then two days with 500 calories but not a ketogenic diet, followed by going back to the 2000 calorie one) often is very helpful for weight loss.

Note: many resources about carbohydrate cycling exist online.

Fasting

I am a big proponent of fasting, and it has always been my preferred approach for weight loss. It works and has a variety of other incredible health benefits. In turn, what I find particularly frustrating about Ozempic is that much of what it does could be done for free without any of the serious harm it causes, if individuals instead practiced fasting.

However, since fasting is something that helps people, can’t be monetized, and eliminates the need for costly pharmaceutical interventions, the medical profession has continually demonized it as being dangerous and unsafe—something I find incredibly ironic now as Ozempic (the current miracle drug the FDA is fully behind) works by making people stop eating.

From having experimented with fasting extensively, I’ve concluded the following:

•Different patients have different genetic aptitudes for fasting. Some individuals do really well with it, while others (particularly women—but not by any means all women) have immense difficulty tolerating fasting (to the point I just don’t use the approach for patients when I have doubts about their ability to tolerate fasting). When exploring the fasting subject, it’s important to recognize if someone is poorly suited for fasting and not try to force it in those cases.

•Three different common approaches exist to fasting. Intermittent fasting (only eating for 4-8 hours a day), eating once a day, and having extensive fasts. I believe all of these have benefits, but it is critical to ensure the chosen approach is correct for the patient (e.g., I’ve done a 30 day water fast, lost a lot of weight and felt much younger and healthier at the end of it, but I almost never recommend this approach to patients). I personally really like the one meal a day (but nothing else) approach, and I frequently see large successes with it as it keeps the body in a continual state of fat burning but keeps it from tipping over to a low metabolism which stops burning fat.

•Frequently, my body will signal that it wants to fast (I simply stop being hungry when I thought I’d normally expect to be hungry) and once that happens, I can often initiate a long fast. I find this most frequently happens during periods of illness, which I believe ties to a longstanding observation in natural medicine that fasting is important in fighting infections.
Note: this was best demonstrated during the 1918 influenza as those who fasted to varying degrees had much higher survival rates, and when I had a severe COVID infection midway through the pandemic, I ended up being in the middle of nowhere without any supplies so all I could do was water fast and heating the room I was in as high as possible—which worked for me and rapidly cleared a rather intense illness (which I’ve never experienced anything similar to) and developed a robust immunity that prevented future infections.

•One of the greatest challenges with fasting is the lead-in period (especially if you have existing food addictions or dysregulated blood sugar levels which cause you to crash when sugar gets low). While this is something that to varying extents you just have to deal with, if you start a fast when the body gives you the signal it wants to fast, you largely bypass it.

•Once the body starts giving you the signal to stop fasting, you need to stop (which unfortunately Ozempic again bypasses). The challenge with this is to be able to differentiate between the normal withdrawals from addictive foods and the body becoming weak because it’s not getting what it needs. The easiest way to differentiate these is that they feel different. The weakening comes on much later (e.g., on the recent 30 day water fast I did, after the second day I felt great, however in the final week I started noticing I was getting tired and in the last two days my body started giving me signals it was beginning to have difficulty tolerating the fast so I stopped fasting).

•As you do longer fasts, it is critical to gently break them (e.g., initially only have a small light raw meal or only eat liquid foods at first). If you immediately return to a normal diet, it can shock the digestive track, make you miserable for a day or two and erase some of the benefits of the fast.

•With longer fasts, it’s important to supplement the missing minerals (which can typically be done with a little bit of salt and potassium—

such as that found in zeta aid). In my own experience, magnesium (especially if you are drinking reverse osmosis water as that removes magnesium) is often the most important one to replace (e.g., if I don’t do that I will begin to get light palpitations about two weeks in).

•Because of the addictive foods we are exposed to, we habitually overeat (e.g., a lot of eating is done for purely emotional reasons and not because you are hungry).  More importantly, many of the signals we should receive that we are full disappear.  In turn, one of the most effective weight loss measures is what’s known as a “gastric bypass surgery,” where the stomach is essentially cut in half so it can’t store as much food and individuals rapidly get full (causing them to overeat).  I am not a fan of this procedure because it has a massive number of complications.  However, one of the fascinating things about fasting (especially prolonged fasting) is that it effectively gives you a gastric bypass procedure as the stomach shrinks and easily becomes full from a moderately sized meal.  Because of this, I believe one of the primary benefits of fasting is that it brings to stomach back to its normal size (rather than the grossly enlarged one our modern diet creates), so if after fasting you are mindful to listen to what your stomach tells you, it’s very easy to establish to a healthy degree of eating (as opposed to say requiring a gastric bypass).

More importantly, once you revert to a “smaller stomach” it makes you much more conscious of what you chose to eat, and drives you towards only eating things you actually want to eat or make you feel good inside (e.g., nutrient rich food) rather than things you habitually eat because they are presented to you.

Note: many of the current control mechanisms in society revolve around encouraging us to not be conscious of our actions and go through life in a walking daze where our nerves are deadened (e.g., imagine how you experience a day after a poor night’s sleep versus a good one).  Food plays a pivotal role here as the highly processed foods primarily appeal to deadened nervous systems rather than alive and conscious ones (and conversely those foods deaden your nervous system).  In turn, a somewhat analogous point to this is that many ethnic cuisines (e.g., Chinese Food) are very different in the United States versus their home country, and I’ve repeatedly heard chefs complain that they have to switch from the deep subtle flavors in their food to something that is just greasy, salty and sugary to remain in business in America.

In summary, while much can be said about fasting, the most important point to consider is that human beings were designed to only eat occasionally throughout the day and to constantly have physical activity. Our current way of life (having the foods typically only found during summer all throughout every day alongside no physical activity) has disrupted many of the regulatory mechanisms the body evolved around using to sustain itself, and that in essence is why I believe so many benefits have been attributed to fasting.

Note: one of the biggest benefits of fasting is that to varying degrees it reprograms the nervous system. Because of this, if you change a habit during a period of prolonged fasting (e.g., quitting an addiction), it often permanently integrates into the individual. Likewise, as mentioned before, I think fasting is one of the most reliable ways to eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) harmful bacteria within the gut microbiome (and if present, parasites) that help lock in many of these addictions.

Weight Loss Aids

I am somewhat hesitant to recommend any specific supplement for weight loss as each one is so incredibly specific to the individual (e.g., rebalancing the gut microbiome is often quite helpful for weight loss but exactly what each person needs and which probiotic or prebiotic is correct for them varies immensely). Furthermore, in many cases, I find the primary thing dietary aids accomplish is serving as a crutch that allows the patient to avoid doing the basic things required for weight loss (e.g., having a better diet or exercising).

Note: I believe one of the most important aspects of exercising (including for weight loss) is not the energy it expends, but rather that any type of motion eliminates fluid stagnation in the body. For this reason, I always aim to encourage gentle and sustainable exercise (e.g., walking) rather than intense exercise. That said, high intensity interval training is one of the most effective exercise regimens for those who are interested in losing weight and willing to make the effort to do so.

That being said, I have found the following things to be helpful adjuncts for people seeking to lose weight:

•Going on zeta aid (and drinking reverse osmosis water) is one of the simplest ways to partially restore the physiologic zeta potential, which both makes the weight loss process more tolerable and also accelerates it (by undoing the compensatory patterns that cause the body to hold onto fat). There are also more involved protocols for restoring the physiologic zeta potential that can be quite helpful.
Note: the doctor who pioneered using the physiologic zeta potential to treat a variety of medical conditions (e.g., dementia) also frequently used zeta aid for weight loss.

•One widely available (and safe) supplement which frequently helps with blood sugar control and weight loss is berberine.

•As mentioned before, during periods of prolonged fasting, I support taking magnesium. Typically, I use magnesium malate since it can bind aluminum (which is one of the things released into the body during the fasting process).

•Provided it can be tolerated, I always advise taking a bit of iodine during a weight loss protocol, as this is a simple way to address low thyroid function and hence accelerate weight loss.

•Finally, one of the most direct treatments I know for restoring mitochondrial function (besides appropriate thyroid hormonal supplementation) is to provide intravenous ozone autohemotherapy (where blood is withdrawn, mixed with ozone, and put back into the body).

Note: there is currently a movement in the ozone field to use high doses of ozone for treatments. This is not needed when the goal is to restore mitochondrial function.

How Dangerous is Obesity?

Obesity is an area where it’s very easy to have preconceived biases or judgments, and to a large extent I believe they have been swayed by numerous predatory industries marketing the idea that we need to be impossibly thin (e.g., to sell more weight loss programs).  In essence, this situation is similar to many other areas of medicine where a healthy threshold exists (e.g., I previously discussed this regarding blood pressure), but due to relentless marketing, that threshold has been altered into something unhealthy.

When Malcolm Kendrick investigated this question in detail, he discovered that existing evidence actually argues that being slightly overweight is ideal for health, while being underweight or significantly overweight worsened it (with the greatest risk resulting from being underweight).

Note: the argument put forward by this paper may be partially distorted by the fact the elderly often become malnourished and lose weight at the end of their lives. From reviewing the study, I could not assess the degree to which that affected the study’s conclusions.

Because of this, I believe the primary value of watching your body weight is so that it can serve as a warning sign a metabolic dysfunction is present so that you in turn can head off that dysfunction early on rather than allowing it to become a chronic and disabling illness.

Conclusion

There is so much more I could say on this, but if I had to point to a single facet of the Ozempic saga, I believe the government’s decision to wholeheartedly endorse and promote an unsafe and questionably effective weight loss drug for the entire American population illustrates how rapidly America’s growing corruption has metastasized over the last decade.

For example, much in the same way I showed how the government is managing Ozempic, is incomparable to how fen-phen was handled, I’ve also demonstrated that it bears no resemblance to how the government handled previous vaccine disasters. For instance, as I showed here, when clear evidence emerged a new vaccine was very dangerous, even if the government was deeply invested in the vaccine, it still pulled it and apologized to the victims. Whereas now, despite orders of magnitude of more harm occurring, the government is still by and large, insisting the injuries don’t exist and promoting the vaccines (which furthermore don’t work). 

Fortunately, things (and societies) always have a way of equilibrating. Because of how out of order things have become, the populace is now being roused from their complacency and mobilized to speak out against the unacceptable corruption we’re facing. The union between RFK Jr. and Donald Trump both speaking out to seriously go after the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry is something I never expected to see in my lifetime and had the disaster of COVID-19 (and the totalitarianism which followed) not happened, something like this could have never happened.

More importantly, we are all amazed by (e.g., I correspond with many people in this field who have large platforms) how much interest the public has in The Forgotten Sides of Medicine and that it is now becoming possible to expose many of the dysfunctional treatment paradigms we’ve followed and investigate many of the suppressed treatments for highly profitable chronic illnesses (e.g., obesity).

While I always hoped for this day, I am still somewhat in disbelief that it's happening, and I profoundly thank each of you for your role in helping it come to pass.

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