Health
Wellness Revolution
|
|
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.
 |
 |
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
Share and subscribe for critical insights on how health and politics shape our world. Join a growing community working to redefine the future of healthcare and governance.
From the Fraser Institute
By Nadeem Esmail and Mackenzie Moir
Alberta’s health-care system may be set for another positive move away from the failed Canadian model. According to leaked draft legislation by the Smith government, Albertans may soon be able to access physician care in a parallel private sector, with physicians permitted to work in both the public and private systems.
The defenders of the status quo were of course quick to frame the approach as unique in Canada, arguing it would harm our universal system. While this potential change may put Alberta’s policies at odds with those of other provinces, it would more closely align with universal health-care systems everywhere else in the developed world. And most importantly, it will make for better access to health care for all Albertans.
First, it’s important recognize just how unusual Canada’s approach to privately-funded health care is compared to other high-income countries with universal health care.
In every one of the 30 other developed countries with universal health care, patients are free to seek services on their own terms with their own resources when the universal system is unwilling or unable to satisfy their needs. One reason may be to avoid long waiting lists, while others simply want to receive more personalized health-care services, meet a personal health need or access newer medical technologies and procedures.
In the majority of these countries, including those with high-performing systems such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia, physicians are also permitted to work in both the public and private sectors.
Canada’s deviation, and Alberta’s, from this international norm has not served patients well. Despite having the highest health spending among the provinces in one of the most expensive universal health-care systems in the developed world, Albertans endure some of the worst access to health care and wait in some of the longest queues for treatment.
A central explanation for why Canadians spend more and get much much less is the lack of a private competitive alternative to the universal public system.
Again, a private option gives patients an option to select care the government is unwilling to provide, either in terms of timeliness or in ways that may be personally important to them. Faster access could allow some people to expedite a return to work and support their family, or to re-engage in important activities without needing to leave the province or the country as they currently must.
By moving people willing to pay for services out of the public queues, the government can help reduce the wait times for patients in the public queues. It’s not surprising that Canada has the longest waiting lists in the developed world given we’re the only country that prohibits privately-funded health care.
Arguments that the private sector will starve the public system of resources (including doctors and nurses) misunderstand what’s actually happening in Alberta today.
Currently, surgeons spend a good deal of time waiting for access to operating rooms or hospital beds for patients. Meanwhile, nurses are leaving the profession in large numbers. Canada also has unemployed medical specialists who could be employed if new opportunities arose. Allowing private access to care or previously unavailable medical resources would increase the total volume of services available to Albertans.
Even beyond this, the opportunity to earn more by working extra hours in a private clinic could encourage physicians to use some of their now non-working hours to treat patients privately. In this regard, the focus on allowing physicians to work in both public and private sectors is a well-informed policy choice that makes better use of Alberta’s existing medical workforce.
Finally, a private parallel option creates incentives for better service in the universal system through competition. Shackling patients to a government monopoly with no alternative choices results in a more expensive system and lower standard of care than would be available otherwise. When no one is permitted to deliver timelier patient-focused care, there’s no pressure created to do so anywhere else in the system. The outcome is obvious just from looking at how poorly the public system in Alberta performs despite its world-class price tag.
While this new leaked draft legislation may have the defenders of the status quo frantically racing to defend the current Canadian model, it promises a better health-care system for Albertans. This change will more closely align Alberta’s policies with those of every other universal health-care country in the developed world. More importantly, it will improve access to health care for all Albertans, and provide Albertans currently stuck with poor service an option to choose differently for themselves without a plane ticket.
Nadeem Esmail
Director, Health Policy, Fraser Institute
Mackenzie Moir
Senior Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute
By Adam Zivo
We should learn from misguided experiments with activist-driven drug ideologies.
Some Canadian public-health researchers have argued that the nation’s drug dealers, far from being a public scourge, are central to the cause of “harm reduction,” and that drug criminalization makes it harder for them to provide this much-needed “mutual aid.” Incredibly, these ideas have gained traction among Canada’s policymakers, and some have even been put into practice.
Gillian Kolla, an influential harm-reduction activist and researcher, spearheaded the push to whitewash drug trafficking in Canada. Over the past decade, she has advocated for many of the country’s failed laissez-faire drug policies. In her 2020 doctoral dissertation, she described her hands-on research into Toronto’s “harm reduction satellite sites”—government-funded programs that paid drug users to provide services out of their homes.
The sites Kolla studied were operated by the nonprofit South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC) in Toronto. Addicts participating in the programs received $250 per month in exchange for distributing naloxone and clean paraphernalia (needles and crack pipes, for example), as well as for reversing overdoses and educating acquaintances on safer consumption practices. At the time of Kolla’s research (2016–2017), the SRCHC was operating nine satellite sites, which reportedly distributed about 1,500 needles and syringes per month.
Canada permits supervised consumption sites—facilities where people can use drugs under staff oversight—to operate so long as they receive an official exemption via the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. As the sites Kolla observed did not receive exemptions, they were certainly illegal. Kolla herself acknowledged this in her dissertation, writing that she, with the approval of the University of Toronto, never recorded real names or locations in her field notes, in case law enforcement subpoenaed her research data.
Even so, the program seems to have enjoyed the blessing of Toronto’s public health officials and police. The satellite sites received local funding from 2010 onward, after a decade of operating on a volunteer basis, apparently with special protection from law enforcement. In her dissertation, Kolla described how SRCHC staff trained police officers to leave their sites alone, and how satellite-site workers received special ID badges and plaques to ward off arrest.
Kolla made it clear that many of these workers were not just addicts but dealers, too, and that tolerance of drug trafficking was a “key feature” of the satellite sites. She even described, in detail, how she observed one of the site workers packaging and selling heroin alongside crackpipes and needles.
In her dissertation, Kolla advocated expanding this permissive approach. She claimed that traffickers practice harm reduction by procuring high-quality drugs for their customers and avoiding selling doses that are too strong.
“Negative framings of drug selling as predatory and inherently lacking in care make it difficult to perceive the wide variety of acts of mutual aid and care that surround drug buying and selling as practices of care,” she wrote.
In truth, dealers routinely sell customers tainted or overly potent drugs. Anyone who works in the addiction field can testify that this is a major reason that overdose deaths are so common.
Ultimately, Kolla argued that “real harm reduction” should involve drug traffickers, and that criminalization creates “tremendous barriers” to this goal.
The same year she published her dissertation, Kolla cowrote a paper in the Harm Reduction Journal with her Ph.D. supervisor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. The article affirmed the view that drug traffickers are essential to the harm-reduction movement. Around this time, the SRCHC collaborated with the Toronto-based Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre— the only other organization running such sites—to produce guidelines on how to replicate and scale up the experiment.
Thankfully, despite its local adoption, this idea did not catch on at the national level. It was among the few areas in the early 2020s where Canada did not fully descend into addiction-enabling madness. Yet, like-minded researchers still echo Kolla’s work.
In 2024, for example, a group of American harm-reduction advocates published a paper in Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports that concluded, based on just six interviews with drug traffickers in Indianapolis, that dealers are “uniquely positioned” to provide harm-reduction services, partly because they are motivated by “the moral imperative to provide mutual aid.” Among other things, the authors argued that drug criminalization is harmful because it removes dealers from their social networks and prevents them from enacting “community-based practices of ethics and care.”
It’s instructive to review what ultimately happened with the originators of this movement—Kolla and the SRCHC. Having failed to whitewash drug trafficking, Kolla moved on to advocating for “safer supply”—an experimental strategy that provides addicts with free recreational drugs to dissuade use of riskier street substances. The Canadian government funded and expanded safer supply, thanks in large part to Kolla’s academic work. It abandoned the experiment after news broke that addicts resell their safer supply on the black market to buy illicit fentanyl, flooding communities with diverted opioids and fueling addiction.
The SRCHC was similarly discredited after a young mother, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was shot and killed near the organization’s supervised consumption site in 2023. Subsequent media reports revealed that the organization had effectively ignored community complaints about public safety, and that staff had welcomed, and even supported, drug traffickers. One of the SRCHC’s harm-reduction workers was eventually convicted of helping Huebner-Makurat’s shooter evade capture by hiding him from the police in an Airbnb apartment and lying to the police.
There is no need for policymakers to repeat these mistakes, or to embrace its dysfunctional, activist-driven drug ideologies. Let this be another case study of why harm-reduction policies should be treated with extreme skepticism.
Our content is always free
If you want to help us commission more high-quality journalism,
consider getting a voluntary paid subscription.
It should not take a crisis for Canada to develop the resources that make people and communities thrive.
Alberta Offers Enormous Advantages for AI Data Centres
AI Faces Energy Problem With Only One Solution, Oil and Gas
‘Holy Sh*t!’: Podcaster Aghast As Charlie Kirk’s Security Leader Reads Texts He Allegedly Sent University Police
-
Daily Caller2 days ago
‘Holy Sh*t!’: Podcaster Aghast As Charlie Kirk’s Security Leader Reads Texts He Allegedly Sent University Police
-
Crime8 hours ago‘Modern-Day Escobar’: U.S. Says Former Canadian Olympian Ran Cocaine Pipeline with Cartel Protection and a Corrupt Toronto Lawyer
-
Great Reset2 days agoCanadian government forcing doctors to promote euthanasia to patients: report
-
Alberta2 days agoSylvan Lake football coach fired for opposing transgender ideology elected to town council
-
Carbon Tax2 days agoCarney fails to undo Trudeau’s devastating energy policies
-
Business24 hours agoNearly One-Quarter of Consumer-Goods Firms Preparing to Exit Canada, Industry CEO Warns Parliament
-
Daily Caller20 hours agoDemocrats Explicitly Tell Spy Agencies, Military To Disobey Trump
-
Health1 day agoNEW STUDY: Infant Vaccine “Intensity” Strongly Predicts Autism Rates Worldwide