Health
Wellness Revolution
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From Courageous Discourse
Why Nutraceuticals are the Next Big Thing
The New Health Conscious
The revival of health consciousness that has taken place in this decade has changed the way the general public views healthcare—forever. The COVID Operation put health back into the conversation. This elevation in the collective health consciousness has led to a Wellness Revolution, worldwide.
Patients now understand the reality of the state of healthcare systems. The fact is that we are a highly medicated and highly vaccinated society, and the truth is that as the use of these products has increased, so has disease prevalence.
If we take more vaccines and more medications than ever before as a society, shouldn’t we be healthier than ever? Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. The global population is sick and only getting sicker; the toxic injectable products, gene therapy, so-called “COVID Vaccines” made sure that people become permanent clients of the sick-care industrial complex.
A stellar example of this phenomenon is the United States. The United States makes up around 4% of the world’s population, yet it represents around 64 to 78 percent of global pharmaceutical profits. This should mean that Americans are the healthiest in the world by far, right? Unfortunately, no. The United States leads the world in chronic disease prevalence and has a significantly lower life expectancy than most other developed nations.
The current system is fraudulent. People are taking notice of this fraud. In protest, they are looking for alternatives to traditional medicines for disease care. One of the emerging therapeutics in this realm is nutraceuticals.
Nutraceuticals are foods or elements of food obtained from plant or animal origin with significant medical or health benefits utilized to prevent or cure diseases. The medicinal use of food or food elements derives from the beginning of modern medical understanding. Hippocrates is famous for his remarks on this issue. He states, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
As an allopath (Pediatric Allergist/Immunologist), I increasingly shift towards this alternative line of thinking. I am not saying that all medications are bad, but I think we have to be far more selective in the way we use them.
Recently the term “nutraceuticals” has regained relevance. Once brushed off by the medical community as fringe “pseudoscience” with no demonstrated clinical benefits, is now being lauded at the highest levels of healthcare policy. In a controversial tweet, just before the U.S. Presidential Election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared some details of his plans for public health in the United States.
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With RFK Jr. via Zoom in July 2022
I have repeatedly mentioned the significance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. His appointment assures that the official narratives on alternative approaches will change from a tone of “aggressive suppression” as RFK describes it, to one of medical freedom. This will surely accelerate the effects of the wellness revolution.
The Wellness Revolution
This movement represents a change in the public’s attitudes toward their health. This has materialized in several different ways. First, it is in the products that patients choose to consume. Pharma, for example, has taken advantage of this wellness attitude shift by introducing products such as GLP-1s, statins, and other drugs to remediate the effects of the chronic disease epidemic that they caused. Additionally, it’s very common to see these drugs cause side effects, forcing patients to take yet another pill to “alleviate” the adverse effects, resulting in a never-ending vicious cycle.
It all boils down to a social movement that emphasizes disease prevention and longevity. The medical device industry has seen an explosion of growth for these reasons. Particularly wearable medical devices such as health trackers. These functional health trends are transforming patient care.
Probably the most significant way that this wellness revolution is materializing is in terms of diet and nutrition. The dietary supplement and nutrition industry has seen an explosion in growth over the last couple of decades, and with growing demand due to distrust and disillusion with traditional pharma and medical systems, this growth is set to continue. But even in nutrition, we have to regulate how they treat the source with pesticides and fertilizers, etc.
The term “nutraceuticals” is relatively new but has gained rapid relevance in alternative medical spaces. Although the term encompasses a broad umbrella of elements, essentially it refers to natural food products or components found in food that can be utilized for medicinal purposes. This can include components such as prebiotics, probiotics, vitamins, fibers, etc.
This functional approach to health is what will take the medical profession into the future. At the end of the day, these methods are in the best interest of the patient.
The microbiome is another example. A new world of information that explains how bifidobacteria interact and regulate many bodily functions. Dr. Sabine Hazan, an expert in the field, has talked extensively about this issue in her book “Let’s Talk SH!T”, a must-read.
Functional foods and nutraceuticals will be the base of treatment in the foreseeable future. These compounds provide health benefits beyond basic nutrition and contain bioactive compounds that can affect the body in various ways. for example, reduce cholesterol levels and inflammation, including examples such as fermented foods like miso, kimchi, flax seeds, salmon, omega-3 fatty acids, and walnuts. While compounds such as probiotics promote gut microbiota balance, which is crucial for immunity and digestion.
The immense majority of diseases have one common denominator: Inflammation. Considering how functional foods and nutraceuticals have inflammation-reducing benefits, these products can have an extensive range of applications.
I would like to provide a couple of examples of bioactive compounds that have medicinal benefits. Turmeric and Curcumin, for example, have anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant benefits and may also contribute to remediating the effects of heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and depression. Some even cite turmeric’s potential to inhibit cancer progression.
What the shift to these products also represents is an emphasis on prevention. Increased clinical use of these types of natural products will promote a culture of disease prevention rather than disease management.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked in an interview recently with CNBC’s Jim Cramer about his thoughts on GLP-1s. RFK Jr. responded by saying “The first line of response should be lifestyle. It should be eating well—making sure you don’t get obese…”
This represents a fundamental shift in the line of thinking in those leading public health policy. I have never heard anyone in government speak that way.
The ideological change that is set to take place as the new administration takes power will surely flow downstream to medical standards of care, further exacerbating the growth in the market of natural remedies, including nutraceuticals.
I fully support this change. For too long, patients and even doctors have been attacked on all fronts, forcing them to cave to the status quo or face excommunication from the medical religion. If we are sincere, medicine is a religion. Dr. Robert Mendelsohn touches on this topic in his book “Confessions of a Medical Heretic”.
Physicians from all medical orthodoxies, whether they be allopathic, homeopathic, osteopathic, or naturopathic, should unite in consensus about the healing effects of these compounds and their applications in treating and managing disease.
A shift away from over-medication is necessary to reverse the effects of the chronic disease epidemic and the long-term promotion of optimal health.
Nutraceuticals: Bridging the Gap between Nutrition and Medicine. This emerging field has become a cornerstone in the shift towards preventive healthcare, where the focus is not only on treating illness but also on sustaining optimal health. A new awareness in the field of medicine is on the rise, as physicians, we have to be loyal to our Hippocratic oath “Primum non nocere”. In modern medicine, praxis physicians rarely ask the patient about the quality of their sleep, the basis of their diet, and the patient’s social environment.
I’m excited to see what the future holds for this momentous awakening.
FIN
Biopolitiks by Dr. Alejandro Diaz
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From LifeSiteNews
By Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute
The world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing.
The collapse in birth rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every single corner of the globe.
Many nations are already feeling this death spiral, filling more coffins than cradles each year.
Just this past year, Japan lost nearly a million people. Poland lost 130,000.
However, the big story comes from China, home to one-sixth of the world’s population.
The decades-long devastation wrought by the one-child policy has sent that country, for centuries the pacesetter in population, into absolute decline.
China finally admitted that its population was shrinking, but demographers — including myself — believe that the numbers have been falling for almost a decade.
The Chinese government’s official population figure of 1.44 billion also greatly exaggerates its overall numbers, some analysts say by as much as 130 million people.
India, the country that has now overtaken China in population, is still growing, but not for long.
The average Indian woman was having only two children over her reproductive lifetime, the Indian government reported in 2021, well below the 2.25 or so needed to sustain the current population.
The same story is being repeated all over the world, as birthrates in Latin America, the Middle East, and even Africa are not just falling — they are collapsing.
The current total fertility of Tunisian women, for example, is estimated at 1.93.
The result of all these empty wombs is that humanity just passed a major milestone, although not one we should celebrate.
For the first time in the 60,000 or so years that human beings first arrived on the planet, we are not having enough babies to replace ourselves. No wonder Donald Trump has suggested providing free IVF to all Americans “because we want more babies,” he says.
Because of ever-lengthening life spans, the population will continue to grow until mid-century. But when this demographic momentum ends—and it will end—we will reach a second grim milestone on humanity’s downward trajectory:
For the first time since the Black Death in the Middle Ages, human numbers will decline.
The 14th century bubonic plague was the worst pandemic in human history. It killed off half the population of Europe and perhaps a third of the population of the Middle East.
But even as the plague was filling mass graves, the survivors kept filling cradles. And because the birth rate remained high the global population recovered although it took a century or so.
This time around, we may not be so fortunate. All the factors that influence fertility, from marriage rates to urbanization to education levels, are pushing births downward.
Now you may be excused for not knowing about the current birth dearth.
After all, powerful international agencies like the UN Population Fund and the World Bank have done their best to keep it out of the public eye.
Moreover, these agencies, set up during the height of the hysteria over “overpopulation” in the 1960s, like to overestimate births in one country and pad population numbers in another.
For example, the UN, in its annual World Population Prospects, claims that 705,000 babies were born in Colombia last year, when the country’s own government pegs the number at just 510,000.
This is not a rounding error.
Neither is the UN’s claim that Indian women are still averaging 2.25 children, defying the country’s own published statistics, which show that it is now below 2.0.
All this number fudging allows the UN to claim that the global total fertility rate last year was at 2.25, still above replacement
It’s even wrong about replacement rate fertility, which it says is 2.1 children per women.
It’s wrong because in many countries sex-selection abortion skews the sex ratio strongly in favor of boys.
To make up for the tens of millions of unborn baby girls missing in China, India and other Asian countries, those countries need more need 2.2 or even 2.3 children on average.
The UN exaggerates human numbers for the same reason that the Biden-Harris administration exaggerated employment numbers: for financial gain and political survival.
There are billions of dollars at stake, funding that is fueled by a dark fear of mushrooming human numbers.
The population control movement does not intend to go quietly to its grave, even as it continues to dig humanity’s own, so it feeds this fear.
But the world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing. Which is why it’s time to end the war on population.
This article was originally published on www.pop.org on September 3rd, 2024, before being reprinted in the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family’s Academy Review in November 2024. Edited and republished here with permission.
The Greta and Robert H. N. Ho Psychiatry and Education Centre, the HOpe Centre, a health care facility for mental illness and addiction in North Vancouver, B.C. (Dreamstime)
By Alexandra Keeler
The provinces are receiving billions in federal funds to address mental health and substance use. Why are so many spending so little?
The provinces are failing to allocate sufficient funding to addiction and mental health care services, a new report says.
The report, released Dec. 19 by the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health, criticizes the provinces for a “long history of … demanding maximum cash for health care from the federal government with minimum accountability.”
The alliance is a coalition of 18 prominent health organizations dedicated to improving Canada’s mental health care. Its members include the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Mental Health Association.
On average, the provinces have allocated just 16 per cent of $25 billion in federal health-care funding toward mental health and addiction services, the report says.
“Given the crisis of timely access to care for those with mental health and substance use health problems, why are so many provinces and territories investing so little new federal dollars to improve and expand access to mental health and substance use health care services?” the report asks.
However, some provinces dispute the report’s criticisms.
“The funding received from the federal government is only a small part of Alberta’s total $1.7 billion allocation towards mental health, addiction and recovery-related services,” an Alberta Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction spokesperson told Canadian Affairs in an emailed statement.
“[This] is a nation leading level of investment response.”
‘Take the money and run?’
In 2023, Ottawa and the provinces committed to spend $25 billion over 10 years investing in four priority areas. These areas are mental health and substance use, family health services, health workers and backlogs, and a modernized health system.
The alliance’s report, which looks at provincial investments in years 2023 through 2026, says mental health and substance use are being given short shrift.
B.C., Manitoba and P.E.I. have allocated zero per cent of the federal funds to mental health and substance use, the report says. Three other provinces allocated 10 per cent or less.
By contrast, Alberta allocated 25 per cent, Ontario, 24 per cent, and Nova Scotia, 19 per cent, the report says.
The underspending by some provinces occurs against a backdrop of mental health care already receiving inadequate investment.
“[P]ublicly available data tells us that Canada’s mental health investments account for roughly 5% of their health budgets, which is significantly below the recommended 12% by the Royal Society of Canada,” the report says.
However, several provinces told Canadian Affairs they took issue with the report’s findings.
“Neither the Department of Health and Wellness nor Health PEI received requests to provide information to inform the [alliance’s] report,” Morgan Martin, a spokesperson for P.E.I.’s Department of Health and Wellness, told Canadian Affairs.
Martin pointed to P.E.I.’s investments in opioid replacement therapy, a mobile mental health crisis unit and school health services as some examples of the province’s commitment to providing mental health and addiction care.
But Matthew MacFarlane, Green Party MLA for P.E.I.’s Borden-Kinkora riding, says these investments have been inadequate.
“P.E.I. has seen little to no investments into acute mental health or substance use services,” he said. He criticized a lack of new detox beds, unmet promises of a new mental health hospital and long wait times.
The alliance’s report says New Brunswick has allocated just 3.2 per cent of federal funds to mental health and addiction services.
However, a New Brunswick Department of Health spokesperson Tara Chislett said the province’s allocation of $15.4 million annually from the federal funds does not reflect the additional $200 million of provincial funding that New Brunswick has committed to mental health and substance use.
In response to requests for comment, a spokesperson for the alliance said the federal funding is important, but “does not nearly move the yardsticks fast enough in terms of expanding the capacity of provincial health systems to meet the growing demand for mental health and substance use health care services.”
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‘Blaming and shaming’
The discrepancies between the report’s findings and the provinces’ claims highlight a need for standardized metrics around mental health and addiction spending.
The report calls on federal and provincial governments to develop national performance indicators for mental health and substance use services.
“At the end-of-the day you cannot manage what you do not measure,” the report reads.
It advises governments to communicate their performance to Canadians via a national dashboard.
“Dashboards are being used with increasing frequency in the health system and other sectors to summarize complex information and would be one way to effectively tell a story … to the public,” the report says.
It also urges Ottawa to introduce legislation — what it dubs the Mental Health and Substance Use Health Care For All Parity Act — to ensure equal treatment for mental and physical health within Canada’s health-care system.
This call for mental and physical health parity echoes the perspective of other health-care professionals. In a recent Canadian Affairs opinion editorial, a panel of mental health physicians argued Canada’s failure to prioritize mental health care affects millions of Canadians, leading to lower medication reimbursement rates and longer wait times.
The alliance says its call for more aggressive and transparent spending on mental health and addictions care is not intended to criticize or cast blame.
“This is not about blaming and shaming, but rather, this is about accelerating the sharing of lessons learned and the impact of innovative programs,” the report says.
This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.
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