Nora Gedgaudas – COVID19 Special Report (Part 1) Introduction
These last few podcast episodes have been focused on the pandemic and today we are going to continue along that theme. In fact, the next two podcasts, parts one and two. Explore the report, which is attached to this podcast called “COVID19: Special Report”.
My guest is Nora Gedgaudas. Nora is a widely recognized expert on the paleo diet. She’s an experienced nutritionist. She’s a speaker. She’s an educator. She’s been widely interviewed on national and international radio and TV. I was first introduced to Nora through her wonderful book, “Primal Body. Primal Mind”. If you haven’t read it, I’d really recommend it to you.
I first was exposed to it about 10 years ago, and as soon as I read it, I just had to bring her out to Australia, and together with my co-founders, of “Nourishing Australia”, Tim and Vicki Poulter, we introduced Australia to Nora Gedgaudas and Nora then went on to influence many people who are very well-known in the paleo field and it was really Nora who inspired them. I know that for a fact. So, Nora is just a wealth of knowledge. She’s obsessed, absolutely obsessed with research and reading the research and picking through it with a fine-tooth comb.
The “COVID19 SPECIAL REPORT” that prompted these two podcasts runs into hundred pages. And I spoke to Nora firstly on the broader issues surrounding the virus. And we ran out of time, actually. And so, I got her back for part two, which we will have in the coming week. So, I hope you enjoyed this conversation I had with Nora Gedgaudas.
Podcast Transcript
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:06] Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Well, these last few podcast episodes have been focused on the pandemic and today we are going to continue along that theme. In fact, the next two podcasts, parts one and two. Explore the report, which is attached to this podcast called “COVID19: Special Report”.
My guest is Nora Gedgaudas. Nora is a widely recognized expert on the paleo diet. She’s an experienced nutritionist. She’s a speaker. She’s an educator. She’s been widely interviewed on national and international radio and TV. I was first introduced to Nora through her wonderful book, “Primal Body. Primal Mind”. If you haven’t read it, I’d really recommend it to you.
I first was exposed to it about 10 years ago, and as soon as I read it, I just had to bring her out to Australia, and together with my co-founders, of “Nourishing Australia”, Tim and Vicki Poulter, we introduced Australia to Nora Gedgaudas and Nora then went on to influence many people who are very well-known in the paleo field. And it was really Nora who inspired them. I know that for a fact. So, Nora is just a wealth of knowledge. She’s obsessed, absolutely obsessed with research and reading the research and picking through it with a fine-tooth comb.
The “COVID19 SPECIAL REPORT” that prompted these two podcasts runs into hundred pages. And I spoke to Nora firstly on the broader issues surrounding the virus. And we ran out of time, actually. And so, I got her back for part two, which we will have in the coming week. So, I hope you enjoyed this conversation I had with Nora Gedgaudas.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:02:12] Welcome to the show, Nora.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:02:14] Thank you, Ron. It’s always a pleasure to see you. It’s a real treat, actually. It’s been a long time since it has been face to face.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:02:20] Has been. It has been. But look, you had such a huge impact on my education when I read your wonderful book “Primal Body, Primal Mind” which I think was published in 2009. Was it that?
Nora Gedgaudas [00:02:33] Well, so the first self-published version came out in 2009, and then it was much revised and much improved in 2011 when it was taken over by a publishing house. And that’s when it really, really took off. Yeah, you’re right. The first rendition of it came out in 2009.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:02:53] Yes. And then listen. So, I know you’ve got you’ve prepared a fantastic document which if I can, I’m going to share with our listener. It’ll be part of the show notes and we’ll provide them with the link to the book, to my Web site so that they can put in their email and which I’ll never abuse. And then they’ll receive a report shortly thereafter. And we’re going to have links also to the great courses you put on this stuff. But I’m interested to know how you see this is a very obviously challenging time. That’s an understatement if there ever was one. I’m interested to see how you see this pandemic from numerous health-related standpoints. Off you go.
How do you see this pandemic from numerous health-related standpoints?
Nora Gedgaudas [00:03:38] Yeah. Yeah. That’s not a loaded question at all and yet another thing is that I’ve put more than 300 hours of painstaking, meticulous research into this whole thing from pretty well every possible angle. And I was prepared to go wherever the data took me. I truly was.
It was important for me to be objective going into it. But I just thought, well, where does the credible evidence lead? And let’s just say the credible evidence is not necessarily in lockstep with what people are seeing on CNN and whatever other news stations that they’re inclined to watch.
It’s a very concerning time and it’s a bit of a hall of mirrors, you know. Isn’t it just to the point-blank, just sort of describing it in a nutshell, the whole subject matter is a bit of a hall of mirrors. And you have the mainstream orthodoxy we’ll call it, you know, kind of the medical monotheistic and, you know, the mainstream model of this whole thing that nobody’s allowed to question. And then there is a whole big body of data and the whole body of information about how this whole thing started.
You know, the whole testing question and all of that. And then you have there’s a whole faction of people that are just kind of putting out videos and you have the QAnons and you have all these other things that are creating a lot of noise, a lot of static in all of this. And it becomes a quagmire that’s very difficult, difficult to kind of sift through and make sense of. And so, I’ve tried as much as humanly possible to stick to facts and to stick to credible scientific evidence and to stick to credible independent investigative journalism, which is about as rare as moondust nowadays.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:05:35] And you know, every day just gets a little more disturbing. I mean, all of this started out with concerns about a novel coronavirus coming out of China, which, by the way, I went back and I read the first couple of papers that came out, you know, that science published on the whole subject of this thing and both state very clearly, and I believe the same is also stated elsewhere on the CDC Web site, that the virus itself was actually never isolated, never purified and never tested for its pathogenicity, which is a gold standard of what is called an approach to what’s called “conscious postulate”. Right.
That is how viruses are cataloged, new viruses are cataloged and scientifically identified. That never really happened. What they did was they took a little fluid from the lungs of a sick person in China, they sequenced, a nucleic acid sequence. And now we do a partial genetic sequence.
They assumed that was it. And this is the first time ever a virus has not been identified clearly through conscious postulate. This has been kind of piecemealed together. And the RCPT test that, you know, is the big test that, you know, with the big swabs that they use to, you know, collect your, you know, a sample from your nasal passage or whatever. The individual that even developed the test and track, I read all 48 pages of that manual.
I went through its page by page. It is a painstaking, meticulous test, for starters, that any if any, step is missed or is not done perfectly, you can’t rely on the result. And it is not a straightforward just, you know, put the sample in and press a few buttons. And Whiz-Bang, it is step by step by step, you know, a very, very involved process.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:07:43] But it states on the very cover that this is not a that this is a test that is meant to be for research purposes only and is not intended for diagnostic applications. And then as you go into it, they talk about how in order to get an accurate result, you need to take multiple samples from multiple tissues, preferably on different days. And furthermore, if you get a positive result, it does not necessarily mean you have a disease. And even if you are sick at the time, you test, quote-unquote, positive for this, because it’s just it’s a biomanufacturing technique. It’s not a test in truth.
But if you test if you get a positive result and you happen to be ill and it states this right in the manual, it doesn’t necessarily mean that this agent does viral agent is necessarily causing your symptoms. Right. So, what is the what do the results mean? It doesn’t tell you that you have a virus.
It doesn’t tell you that you have a disease. All it’s doing is showing that you are that you’re showing a certain string of nucleic acids that they’re looking for, that they think is associated with this virus. So, it’s it gets very murky and not very reliable. And if you want to get even less reliable than that, then go to antibody testing, which is also it’s absurd because number one the antibody these antibody tests have never been approved by the FDA and they haven’t been because cautious possibilities were never met.
And so, you can’t have an antibody test to a virus that was never isolated and purified, to begin with. But the fact of the matter is that that this so-called antibody test is kind of generalized for coronavirus. And there are many, many, many coronaviruses out there, not just SARS COV2. SARS COV1. There’s MERS. They’re all the ones that, you know, that causes.
I mean, the lay person’s name for coronavirus is the common cold. You know, I mean, that’s so. And then you have all of the people getting diagnosed with this condition who are showing up with kind of vague respiratory symptoms. And there are lists of symptoms that could be due to any one of more than 200 respiratory viruses that are out there that have been identified that make the rounds every single year. I mean, you know, this sometimes gets compared to influenza in terms of its severity and its virulence and, you know, it and its and its numbers. But the fact is that influenza is also a bit contrived. That the majority of the influenza cases are have never been tested for influenza.
These are things that are sort of assumed to be caused by influenza because it’s happening in that certain time of the year. It’s very rare for clinicians to try to speciate a person’s respiratory symptoms except in extenuating circumstances. You know, one of the other questions I asked myself because one of you know, the kind of the lethal versions of this, you know, COVID thing is supposed to be, of course, pneumonia. And I’m asking myself, you know, how many people get pneumonia every year, just as a matter of course.
And I found that in the United States alone, and I don’t know what the statistics are where you are, more than two million Americans get pneumonia every single year and they’re above 50000 that are unfortunate enough to die from pneumonia. But pneumonia is not caused by one thing. There’s viral pneumonia and there’s bacterial pneumonia. Pneumonia can be caused by fungal infections, it can be caused as a side effect of certain medications. It can be caused by aspiration. Right. And the same comorbidities that make pneumonia and that make influenza dangerous are the same comorbidities that are associated with really any respiratory virus that may potentially kill you.
We know that where they decided why they decided to bring artificial ventilators into the treatment of this thing is sort of escapes me because we’re talking about a treatment approach that really isn’t a treatment. I think it’s probably I mean, I sit there and I think, well, I guess if somebody is hooked up to a respirator, they’re not breathing into the surrounding airs so that sort of isolates there, but it’s not doing anything to really help that person. In fact, if you go so far as to get on a ventilator, your risk of dying goes up to as much as 90 percent. The ventilators damage the lungs, and they’re also notorious for harboring these antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can cause severe bacterial pneumonia.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:13:11] And I think they’ve acknowledged that perhaps wasn’t the best approach early on in the whole process.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:13:20] Well, guess what, though? It was a highly financially incentivized approach. And I don’t know, again, what was happening in Australia, but here in the United States, if you went to a hospital or clinic and they decided to diagnose you, however. Oh, I have a headache. I’m feeling anxious and short of breath. I you know, I mean, I you know, I don’t know if I’m breathing very well.
I mean, a lot of people panicked and ran in, everybody panic because there’s a deadly plague on the loose. And, you know, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if I’m breathing right. Or maybe, you know, it was a time of year or all kinds of respiratory things were going around. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard much about the flu or common cold this year or rhinoviruses, or any of these things.
It’s all one thing in a regular, quote-unquote, pneumonia. I mean, just garden variety pneumonia that can come from almost anything. It’s all one thing all of a sudden. So, people went running in. And if they get diagnosed either through a, you know, vague presentation of symptoms, which they were allowed to do by the CDC, what they were allowed to just sort of base, you know, if it’s presumed or suspected, that’s good enough. We’ll call that a diagnosis or if they did some form of testing, which, again, is highly questionable at best. And where that becomes especially important is in the way those test results are being used, which hopefully we’ll get to hear, because of that that is the really, really, really scary thing, in my view, as to where this is all going. So, people get tested, and here in the United States, if you went into a hospital or clinic and you got diagnosed one way or another with this, that hospital would receive thirteen thousand dollars for Medicare for diagnosing you with COVID.
And if they could convince you to get onto a respirator, or an artificial ventilator rather, they would receive a one-time payout of thirty-nine thousand dollars. And that’s well-documented. That is nobody is much denying that. But tell me that that isn’t coloring, particularly where hospitals are having to furlough doctors and nurses because they tried to wipe the slate clean and cancel all the other medical treatments and surgeries and everything else so that, you know, they can handle the throng of people coming in for this.
I mean, at the height of the outbreak, quote-unquote, in Los Angeles, they had like 11 people sick. You know, it’s crazy how overblown this was. So, hospitals were losing lots of money because they’re not getting the floods of people they were expecting. And but guess how they can make money. And I don’t want to disparage, you know, doctors and nurses trying to do their best under the circumstances and who are themselves likely quite afraid and hyper-vigilant about this sort of thing. So, you know, I’m not saying all of it was ill-intentioned or dishonest, but nobody is going to tell me that that didn’t color. You know, how this got handled.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:16:38] What were we seeing in New York early on in the piece. A health system overwhelmed?
Nora Gedgaudas [00:16:44] Well, more than half the people that ended up in, you know, that were testing positive and dying or whatever were elderly were people in elderly homes. One of the criminal things that was done at the time, too. I don’t know what Cuomo was thinking, but he took people who were symptomatic and ill and he started concentrating them in elder care facilities where obviously if somebody, if stuff is going to spread, then that’s the surest way to kill off the old folks in the old folk’s home. So more than half the deaths actually occurred as a result of these elder care facilities and the debacle. I mean, six, seven thousand people they’re attributing to death due to that. Insane error in judgement. I don’t even know what he was thinking.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:17:34] The error in judgement being transferring them?
Nora Gedgaudas [00:17:36] Cuomo telling them to put these sick people into the eldercare facilities.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:17:42] Oh, I see. I see.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:17:44] And you have an. Oh, so again. You have to kind of tease apart all of these different variables, like I say, we’re talking about a hall of mirrors. Now, you know, in Japan, there were so few deaths. It was absurd. And including in Tokyo.
I mean, we’re talking just a few hundred people at most in the entire country. It was like a couple hundred people, like crazy small. They didn’t lockdown. They didn’t mandate masks. They didn’t mandate social distancing. And they did fine. Belarus also did fine.
We know Sweden did fine, better than fine, except the majority of deaths in Sweden were also due to, you know, elderly people dying in elder care facilities. And their health minister actually apologized for his error in judgement and the way that got handled. You know, he realizes he probably could have saved a lot of lives just by not concentrating people in these elder care facilities. But he wasn’t doing what Cuomo was doing.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:18:56] It’s interesting, Nora because we’ve just had a royal commission on aged care. And I was reading in one newspaper a week ago that in one state, whenever anybody displayed serious symptoms, they were transferred to a hospital for care because aged care facilities don’t really have that well-trained staff. Yes. And so, in that state, which happened to be South Australia, where their routine was as soon as someone was seriously ill off, they go to hospital.
I think not one maybe one person has died in aged care, whereas in the other states where they concentrated them within the aged care facility. And I’ve been into aged care facilities and I think the staff there are just amazing. You know. But they’re not often medically trained and they’re asked to do things that they shouldn’t be doing. But to your point and also your other point about there being a very big difference of dying with Coronavirus and dying from Coronavirus. And it’s very easy to lose that distinction, that distinction.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:20:01] Many, many, many. You know, Dr. John Ioannidis is an infectious disease.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:20:07] I am huge fan of his.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:20:10] Me too. Me too. Huge fan. He basically said and of course, I’m paraphrasing here, but he basically said that you know, had this thing snuck into the population and I say this thing popped up. Nobody caught it. It just sort of snuck into the environment, like probably a lot of viruses do, and made the rounds that it would never have been noticed in terms of the statistical impact on morbidity and mortality as compared to any other influenza season.
And so, you know, when you’re talking about more than 99 percent of people getting exposed to this being getting no noticeable symptoms at all or maybe getting mild symptoms, you know, they’re all going to be just fine. There is, of course, a small percentage of people that did not do fine, but it remains to be determined exactly what it was, because, again, we can’t really rely on positive results to tell us the person had COVID19. We don’t know. I’m not saying that there’s no virus.
I’m saying that it’s. The date is very fishy around that. And again, there are more than 200 respiratory viruses that affect us every single year. And it look more than seven, eight thousand people in the world die each and every single day. More than 70 percent of all deaths in the world are due to totally preventable metabolic diseases. We’re talking if you are under if you are 70 years of age or younger, you’re under 70.
Your risk of dying, you know, of, you know, even with a positive result of dying from this thing or like point zero four percent on average. And if you’re over 70 again, it’s going to be variable. I mean, I will take a healthy 80-year-old, you know, who takes care of themselves to a 35-year old that lives on Twinkies and beer.
I’ll give them the older person better odds every day of the week. You know, I. And the thing is, there’s so much that’s happening that makes no sense at all. There are contradictions at every turn. And there’s so much that is so cruel and inhumane that I can get extremely rageful about the way in which elderly people are being left isolated and alone. They don’t get to embrace their loved ones.
A very good friend of mine, a dear friend of mine, her mom. Just a few months ago is one hundred and five years young and just a vital person. I mean, great sense of humor. Totally ambulatory, sharp as a tack. All you know, all the lights were on. Everybody was at home. And she loved being with her family and friends. She was just a total very, very into being social. And she just she lived for that literally. And when all this happened suddenly. Now she’s being isolated. Her friends are not allowed to visit her anymore.
She can’t see her family whenever she wants. And everybody that comes around her is wearing masks. They’re acting afraid. You know, around her, you know, and treating her like she’s a piece of porcelain, which she wasn’t. There wasn’t anything wrong with her. And when my friend went to visit her, she looked at her and she said, I don’t. I don’t know what the point of living is anymore. I don’t feel the point of living anymore. She went into a sharp decline just from the sheer pain and loneliness of her circumstances. And she was never even diagnosed with anything, she didn’t have a respiratory problem. Oh, and of course, she started having pain, you know, which is, of course, oftentimes part and parcel of anxiety.
There was a lot of her pain. Skin was painful to the touch and all of that. It was weird. It just came out of nowhere. And so, they started pumping her full of morphine. And other opioids and you know, she just faded away. And I there’s no doubt in my mind that she’d still be around. I mean, this woman was amazing, you know, amazing.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:24:42] Anyway, I know there would be so many stories like that and so many instances of people going and not being able to share that traumatic moment with family. And I think what’s made this so different from challenges like wars and natural catastrophes is we in the past have been able to come together and give each other a hug. And nothing could be more fundamental than that. Connection.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:25:12] You know, it’s as much a nutrient to us as is nourishing food, air, water, sunshine, humans. We are a social tribal species. And touch is an essential nutrient to our well-being and a lack of touch, a lack of social contact has devastating impacts on the immune system. Absolutely devastating in it. And in fact, you know, when you think of what goes on in torture facilities like Guantanamo and Bagram and, you know, all of these places around the world where they take and they that, you know, people that they choose to detain for whatever being an enemy of the state. And they really want to punish those people. What do they do?
They put them into isolation to human being, loses, you know, immediately just falls into mental illness. It doesn’t take long for a human being to lose their minds being separated from other human beings. Nobody is nobody bothered to take these collateral issues into account when, you know, women shutting down the entire global economy and destroying tens of millions of lives, you know, just to basically somehow preserve us all from some viral spook. And, you know, many of the world’s top scientists, and I’ve got lists and lists of some of these scientists.
I mean, there’s a consortium of German scientists. I mean, they’re a big scientific group. And I forget what it’s called, but I believe I may have alluded to it somewhere on the page with my report. They all agree this is madness. This is insane. There’s no justification for the way that this has been handled. Early on, you know, there were the computer models, right. Coming out of, you know, out of Great Britain. Ferguson, I guess, or whatever his name was, Neil Ferguson who has never been right, by the way, with anything he’s ever done.
But of course, he’s heavily funded by the Gates Foundation. And he decided to create a computer model that blew this thing out of all proportion, talked about millions of deaths worldwide. And, you know, and the World Health Organisation, at the behest of Bill Gates, encouraging them to do so, said, oh, no, you know, we’ve got to shut everything down that we do.
We can’t take the risk we’ve got. And for the first time ever in all of medical history that I’m aware of, they decided to quarantine, quarantine healthy populations, the world over, to shut down businesses, to shut down everything, everything too, you know, to ban social engagement of any kind. And. And, of course, you know, there’s the whole now, of course, there’s forced mask-wearing, which is its own, which is its own issue.
I’m you know, I’ve put quite a bit of information out on a very interesting recent study in Nature Medicine published in May, found that they took people that were knowingly infected with influenza and coronavirus. They were actively ill. They had all the symptoms and they had fevers and they put them under laboratory conditions and attempted to measure the viral shedding into the surrounding environment. They couldn’t find it. Right. And this is the whole thing that mandated mask-wearing has been predicated on, you know. And, you know, it’s they’re like, oh, you know, an asymptomatic person could be asymptomatic and still spread. There’s no evidence of that. There’s literally no evidence of that. And so, you know, and again, I’ve just I’ve gone through study after study after study.
I’ve not found one credible study done on this on the subject of mass worrying that shows these masks to be effective at all or in any meaningful way, cloth masks are actually making more likely to make you worse. Cloth masks and surgical mask both can make you worse. And N95 masks compromise you in ways that may exceed the benefits you get from them because you. And in case of all masks, you are impairing your capacity to oxygenate. Right.
And so, you go into a hypoxic state with these things. Invariably even the face shields lead to some meaningful state of hypoxia and also excessive CO2 levels, which has tremendous implications for your immune function, for the pH of the bloodstream, for anxiety levels, for all kinds of things. So, you’re asphyxiating people with what amounts to a petri dish strapped to your face because you’re creating this warm, moist environment here where everything that’s in you is sort of collecting in the masks and plenty is able to filter through the porous size in these masks is large enough that viral particles in a point, you know, zero four microns, zero six microns can easily sail through if they happen to be there.
Yes, you’re collecting droplets, but guess what’s also happening? You’re creating an environment that is a breeding ground for bacteria. You’re exhaling viruses, which are also likely accumulating on the inside of the mask. Fungal growth could be happening and who knows what. In addition to smothering you, preventing healthy oxygenation. And then what do you do? You rein hale that back into your lungs. And I know people that have gotten serious sinus infections and they get chronic migrant’s chronic headaches from the wearing of these masks because it impairs your brain. Isn’t that convenient? Keep people from thinking clearly.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:31:25] Well, we know that. Do we know that if someone hyperventilates putting a paper bag over your mouth to read, breathe the carbon dioxide is a good thing because you’ve pushed all the carbon dioxide out of your lungs? Right. But if I was doing that all the time, you are changing that. I mean, there was something fundamental about breathing that we, you know, we need. But, look, we could I mean, this is a huge item. Yeah. Yeah. How do you see it all panning out?
How do you see it all panning out?
Nora Gedgaudas [00:31:57] Well, so much of that depends on us because we’re only being having as much imposed upon us as we’re willing to put up with. And if we are going to sit back and be passive about being told that we can’t embrace our loved ones, that we have to wear a potentially unhealthy in a face-covering in in every single environment that may actually make us more prone to infection.
And in an even Fauci, he himself was quoted I have a copy of the video, was sitting there in a televised interview saying nobody should be wearing masks. You know, it might make you feel a little better or whatever, but. No, no, no. You know, there’s no evidence at all that they do anything. And he was actually speaking the truth at that time. That’s what the science says about masks.
But masks actually do form a useful litmus of our obedience, don’t they? They are very symbolic of our acquiescence to unreasonable mandates. All this started as let’s stay home for two weeks and flatten the curve. Right. It all started with two weeks. Now, there are places in the world where, like in Greece where they’re talking, if you violate quarantine, you could be subject to life in prison.
There is I mean, the insane laws being enacted in the United States, none of the mandates or laws being enacted are actually constitutional at all. And that’s something that we in the United States need to recognize, is that the Constitution Bill of Rights, upon which our entire system of government is based, actually has supremacy over any law passed by Congress. Certainly, any mandates or so-called laws passed by created out of thin air by governors who have no such authority to do these things.
And yet, you know, and they’re turning loose felons into the streets at the same time, they’re trying to arrest ordinary citizens who for whatever reason, whether they have a pre-existing medical condition or that they simply cannot tolerate being asphyxiated by a mask. Or maybe they have religious reasons for not wanting to do so. Perfectly decent citizens are being arrested, harassed, detained, fined for.
For just trying to have some control over their physical sovereignty and again, with no proof at all that these things actually protect anybody else. So, but, you know, if people feel better wearing a mask and they feel very protected, that’s fine. If they’re so convinced it’s helpful, why are they so afraid of me if I don’t have one on? You know, if they have something protecting them, why are they afraid of me if I don’t have one on, you know? I mean, it’s just one logical question. So anyway. Yeah.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:35:02] So, Nora, go on.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:35:05] I do think that there is, you know, whether by design or simply by, you know, some form of opportunism. It seems very clear that there is an increasing effort on the part of authorities to come to basically break down or restrict our rights, restrict our freedoms and increase surveillance and all manner of, you know if tracking you in and in every manner, shape or form.
And, you know, restrict travel, restrict, restrict everything, really. It’s only getting worse. Even though. Deaths from all of this on a global scale right now. Are just dropping off for the last 15 or more weeks. It’s been a precipitous decline even before the mask mandates came on board. You know, things went back, kind of started opening up again.
People started trying to go about some of their business again and death rates began declining because basically, you know, we’ve developed herd immunity at this point for the most part. There’s all the evidence in the world to suggest that herd immunity is, in fact, at play. And there is no further reason for alarmist measures. There’s no emergency right now. But you’re not going to think that if you watch the evening news.
Now, they talk about increased cases from diagnosis due to testing, you know, and presumed diagnosis or whatever else, but the deaths are not matching that. In fact, the deaths are moving in the opposite direction, which is where the sign of herd immunity comes in.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:37:10] What I can’t understand and it perplexes me. And I kind of get the response initially because it was an unknown and there were these projections and we were going to be overwhelmed and et cetera, et cetera. But when I see the devastation that is going on, I mean, travel, tourism, education, you name it.
I mean, entertainment, sports. Well, when I see all of these industries suffering, I’m wondering who is benefiting from this? Who is benefiting from this policy and the continuation of it. I come up with. Well, I come up with two one being media are definitely hugely. Hugely.
I mean, you look at what’s happened with Facebook and Amazon and all these other media companies that they are going through the roof. In fact, arguably, they’re what’s keeping the Dow Jones as buoyant as it is. Yeah. And the other is, of course, our old friend, the pharmaceutical industry. Right. I can’t think of everybody else.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:42:43] Which kind of leads me to another thing now, Nora. Because we could go on about this all night. And I think we kind of. Well, we could anyway. But I wanted to ask you if people had the ability to you to improve their lives. And I kind of see this as a huge opportunity because you’ve got a global audience focused on health like never before. We’ve got a captive audience, and this is an opportunity to really turn the disease around. If we were serious about.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:43:14] Well, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that is absolutely not entering into the equation, it’s almost kind of like the, you know, the elephant in the room. It’s like, well, what do we do to actually improve our health? Right. Not what do we do to treat disease? What do we do to combat? And by the way, there are non-toxic, viable treatments that. Ah, that will work. Just about every time.
You know, you have the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and zinc that are being used by hundreds of physicians who are working with individuals in the early stages of showing signs of this illness. Physicians all over the globe who are doing this on an outpatient basis, which they say is the way to do it. And, you know, everybody’s recovering. You know the worst thing you can do is admit yourself to a hospital or clinic with this thing.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:44:12] In your document, you outlined that there are 99000 deaths reported every year from infections contracted in hospitals in the United States alone. Right. And I think, you know, this whole thing it’s funny you should say elephant in the room, Nora because that is actually the podcast that I put together, which I am presenting myself called The Elephant in the Room. And it deals with chronic disease. Where are we at now, the science in medicine, and where to from here. So, stay tuned for that one. But what are some quick things that, you know, like. Because we’re kind of.
Where are we at now?
Nora Gedgaudas [00:44:51] So I’ve obviously gone kind of on the gloom and doom side of this. And, you know, I can be a total buzzkill at parties. Yeah. When it comes to talking about this, because there is a lot to be very, very concerned about and we have a legitimate right to be concerned.
No rational person would not if they were to look at the actual data, OK. And understand that there are vested interests in keeping you afraid. I’m not. Look, the media is doing a better job of scaring you than I am. I’m here and the media won’t listen to the media and political authorities and whatever else, they’ll scare the crap out of you just walk and just look out your window and see, you know, that the police, you know, with riot gear walking up and down the street. About those for.
But at any rate, when I decided to create my first report on this whole debacle, this whole pandemic scare. It went through many, many renditions before I ended up with the one that I did. And I realized that I was going to overwhelm people. I mean, I probably had a couple hundred pages to start with. I mean, this just, you know, if any, I if I do anything, I overdeliver. Right. And it was just going to be too much for people to take in. And so, what I decided to do was focus on.
You know, minimizing fear and hysteria, giving people a thoughtful, rational way of looking at this. Giving them positive information, actionable information, constructive information that they could use at home, you know, to improve their health, and that in the health of their loved ones and steps that you can take that have been shown in numerous studies to be extremely helpful with coronavirus infections and things of that nature, respiratory infections in general. These are things you can do at home. And you know, your best defense against this thing, the degree to which it is a thing is going to be the health and in the healthy functioning of your own innate immune system. Right.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:47:15] Music to my ears.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:47:16] That’s the thing. That is the thing. It’s you know because people with healthy immune systems are not even becoming symptomatic with this thing and they can actually be healthy.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:47:29] What a novel. Totally healthy.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:47:30] In fact, the vast majority of people would look by now. Ron, we’ve all been exposed to this thing. I’m sorry. It’s everywhere. So, the human immune system does not get stronger by her medically ceiling. Getting sealed in a bubble wearing a hazmat suit, mask, gloves and goggles, you know, and face shields and whatever else and cowering under the bed.
You know, the whole point of, you know, of quarantining us it wasn’t it was almost like treating this thing like it was a noxious gas or something like a poison cloud coming through the city. You know, where we just hide behind or, you know, in our hermetically sealed bubble until it goes away and then we can all come out and everything’s good. We have to live with this, whatever it is, forevermore. It’s in our environment.
We’re just simply going to have to deal with it. And the fact of the matter is, ninety-nine plus percent of everybody is dealing with it just fine. Thank you very much. Do we need to destroy the entire global economy? In order to, you know, to take people who are otherwise extremely vulnerable and help them be out of harm’s way, you know, if people are sick, stay home, you know, and you don’t need to make that a law.
People just out of commonsense and consideration for one another are mostly going to stay home, you know, particularly now, you know, under this circumstance, people are going to stay home and they should stay home and get better.
You know, I worry about people that suggests that, well, we have to take the elderly and frail out of harm’s way. What are we doing to them? Possibly against their will? Right. You know, it seemed to me, my friends, one hundred and five-year-old mother had earned the right to determine her own destiny at that point. You know, she had a right to take whatever risks she wanted to have a quality of life. People forget that you know, quality of life is always more important than quantity of life.
You know, I could get hit by a city bus tomorrow, and actually, I’d have bigger odds of getting hit by a city bus and getting killed by a city bus tomorrow than I would this virus. But, you know, I have my health, I have my mental faculties. I have my mobility. I’m not, you know, you know, just feebly walking around with an oxygen tank and not able to take in, you know, the things that make life worth living. Right. So, my quality of life is excellent. And if I die tomorrow. That’s OK. That’s not OK, but you know what I mean, that I, I would rather live two days with my freedom and with my quality of life that I had my robust, you know, health and whatever else.
Then live ten years in a fascist dictatorship, being told that I can’t leave the house. I can’t travel unless I subject myself to dangerous and unproven medical procedures. I have my every move, my every thought virtually tracked by somebody somewhere using algorithms. It’s not that geeks at a computer looking at you. These things are all fit in two information systems that crunch the data and then identify things and make decisions about your life going forward based on that. We have to decide, you know. You know, what kind of a life, what kind of a future we want. As a human species, as these human beings.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:51:09] You know, I think people I think we are reaching a point where people are questioning and I think they see it as an opportunity. And I think if you any if you were thinking clearly about this at all, it’s obvious that our best defense is our own immune system. Absolutely. I mean, it’s just so obvious. And when we look at all these preventable chronic diseases, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions dadda. If we address those, we’re addressing the pandemic.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:51:48] Well, and think, too, of just what stress and fear due to the immune system. Well, by itself. Right. You know, you’re going to crash your immune function by being this terrified. You know what? The number one piece of health advice I have for everybody right now. And it’s so simple. It doesn’t cost you one red cent. Turn off the news.
You know, there was a fantastic article published in The Guardian a couple a few years ago now. I don’t remember what year the article came out, but I. I do have a screenshot of it and you can look it up. Hopefully, it hasn’t yet ruled off the Internet. And it basically in the article, which was based on research that had been done on the subject of how does the news affect your health? It says, in short, that news is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression and it hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether. And, you know, if I don’t know, do we have a couple of minutes for me to read through some of this?
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:52:56] Sure.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:52:58] OK, so in the same article and I’m going to read some of this to you because it is well worth hearing. They showed how the mainstream news misleads and overrides your rational thinking. Mainstream news is irrelevant to anything that has the potential to improve the quality of your life. News has no true explanatory power, right? They give everything to you in soundbites.
News is literally toxic to your body and brain. And by that, it means it constantly triggers your limbic system and cortisol. And that then leads to dysregulation of your immune system and it ravages your brain. I mean, cortisol literally eat holes in the human brain. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High-stress hormone levels impair digestion, a lack of cellular growth and healing, nervousness, and hey, susceptibility to infections. It also leads to brain shrinkage. How convenient.
The other potential side effects include anxiety, depression, aggression, tunnel vision, and desensitization. Also watching the news regularly has been shown to increase cognitive errors and feeds the mother of all cognitive errors, which is corporate and political confirmation bias, not to mention social polarisation. Right. The old divide and conquer thing. News also inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you there like viruses. Wouldn’t you know that? Steal your attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers, but it’s worse than that. News severely affects our memory function, according to at least one Canadian study. News is an intentional interruption system. News works like a drug. It literally alters the structure of your brain.
The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits, the neural circuits in our brain devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those parts of our brain that are used for reading deeply and thinking with any meaningful focus. News wastes our time. News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence, right? It grinds us down until we adopt the worldview that’s pessimistic desensitize, sarcastic, cynical, and fatalistic.
The scientific term, you know, is learned helplessness, which is also associated, by the way, with clinical depression. Another epidemic right now. News also kills creativity. Look, we need independent reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers actual truth, not something that gives us soundbites and corporate vested interest is driven talking points. This is why we have to support the quality of alternative media. And this is also why alternative media is in the crosshairs of the mainstream media right now, because it conflicts with their, you know, with their vested interests. So, I’m just saying, you want to do the number one best thing for your health right now.
Turn off the news. You know how if, God forbid, you’re living alone in isolation, you know, in behind closed doors and you don’t have the ability to reach out and hug your spouse or your kids or, you know, any other loved one that may be apt to be living with you or your friends. You know, get outside and breathe fresh air for crying out loud.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:56:31] But Nora, you mentioned earlier, the dangers of algorithms. And IT and this is a very much a part of what is driving our news to us as individuals, isn’t it?
Nora Gedgaudas [00:56:45] I mean, that’s true. You make an excellent point with that. Yes.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:56:48] Yeah. I mean, we can say that the danger is that algorithms are going to know us better than we know ourselves. And that has all sorts of implications on our freedom. The real freedom or our economic freedom or whatever it is. But algorithms are very much driving our news as well. What we look at in particular, if we’re looking at it online.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:57:14] When they see what works. They’re going to give us more of that, not only in a particular direction.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:57:19] Not only that, but if I like for example, I’m not a huge fan of your president, right, and I don’t read. I don’t read a lot about it. But when there was a negative report on Fox News back in February 2018, 19, suddenly I got the news feed from Fox on my YouTube. I never do. But as soon as they picked up Hey, by the way, he’s a negative story on Fox News. You might be interested in. And there it was.
Nora Gedgaudas [00:57:52] And then that’s the confirmation bias.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:57:55] Well, but that’s also the what algorithms are driving our news to us as individuals, particularly if we access, as many people do, access it on their mobile devices. Right. I mean, it’s a Catch 22, isn’t it?
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:03:14] But I just wanted to say to our listeners as well, that when I read your book, I mean, I love reading your stuff. I love reading your stuff because I can hear your voice. And I and it’s so jam-packed full of the reference, you know, the articles to support it. It’s not just an opinion you might make.
Nora Gedgaudas [01:03:36] I’m very careful about my facts.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:03:38] You are. You are obsessively so.
Nora Gedgaudas [01:03:41] And it’s getting worse with time, really.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:03:44] It is obsessive. You are obsessively so. But it’s what I so love about you. And I really appreciate you. I’m just so looking forward. Look, we could talk more, Nora, and I’d love to have you back to talk more about this.
Nora Gedgaudas [01:03:58] Yeah. Yeah. And I would love to do that. There is one extra point I would like to make and on behalf of my own work, because obviously, you know, I’m not trying to sell stuff. That report that I wrote, which is about 100 pages in length and 300 hours. I’m not charging anything for it. You know, I consider it, you know, kind of unethical to charge for this kind of information personally. Yes. But, you know, the dietary approach that I recommend is one that is designed to be to optimize human health.
It’s not just like a weight-loss approach and that kind of a thing. It’s really about going into the nuanced details and taking all of the little pieces from evolution and from our anatomy and physiology and from longevity research and, you know, from all of the things that go into kind of converge on what can we do to optimize our health and well-being based on all of the available evidence of who and what we are and where we came from. Right. And what longevity research shows us.
You know that the approach that I recommend is actually one that improves the way the body functions on an immune level, but also improves the way the brain functions and the makeup if it is protective in a state of hypoxia. Right. And of your states of hypoxia masks will do that to you as well. And then you know, so hypoxia is one of the things that characterizes both the symptoms of the condition everyone is afraid of.
Nora Gedgaudas [01:05:41] But it also is something that goes hand-in-hand with what we’re being asked to do in a mandatory fashion. With respect to mask-wearing, we’re depriving our brain and every organ in our and tissue in our body of vital oxygen that it requires in order for our immune function, the immune system to function normally. But if you are in a well-adapted ketogenic state, right.
You’re going to automatically deal well with hypoxia. It’s this type of dietary approach has become the darling of alpine climbers, of people climbing Everest, and whatever else because they find they need a lot less oxygen. They’re less likely to go into the develop altitude sickness. Their brains function better, more clearly. They have more physical energy. They’re better able to endure the low oxygen conditions and in a state of effective ketogenic adaptation.
I’m not talking more ketones of bread. I’m not saying that if you slug a bunch of them S.T. oil and you take a lot of exoticness, racemic, ketones, and things like that, that you’re going to get this effect. The idea isn’t more ketones are better. The idea is to be able to healthfully make ketones as you require them and then be able to effectively utilise them. And it takes time to adapt to that. It’s not something you can do by taking a pill or drinking a potion or something like that. It’s an effort. It’s it is making a metabolic transformation. Right. That takes a little bit of time.
I have a program that I created called the Primal Genic Plan. It’s called a three-week meal by meal Total Health Transformation Programme. And it is all about optimizing your health using this particular dietary approach that is highly unique within both the ancestral health genre and also is very unique with indicated genic genre. There’s nobody that is put together and connected the same dots that I have as completely as I have. And so, with that program, it basically handhold you through the process of what it takes to adopt this way of eating. It helps to take into account what your unique situation might happen to be.
You know, if you’re pregnant or if you’re a child or a teen or if you’re trying to gain weight as opposed to lose weight or if you want to lose weight or, you know, whatever I make, I allow for a lot of different potential issues. Also, I go into some of the most common pitfalls that people run into, you know, the sort of the tripping points. I also so talk about the sticking points. You know, what are the things that can kind of derail you right along the way? And what can you do about that? How to recognize where you’re at within that and what you can do to get past it. It’s pretty comprehensive. And there’s just there’s there’s a ton of wonderful information with it. And I’m offering a 30 percent discount on that program to your viewers because I love you man and I love Aussies.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:08:58] Well, you know, I can say quite honestly, with my hand on my heart and I’ve read a lot of nutrition books, and I’m actually president of the Australasian College of Nutritional Environmental Medicine. I think your work is fabulous. And so well research. So, Nora, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m definitely going to get you back to talk a little bit more and dive into some of those highlights on another program.
Nora Gedgaudas [01:09:22] Right. Yeah, there’s so much there’s so much more to talk about. We’re just scratching the tip of the scratching the tip of the iceberg. Yeah.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:09:30] Thanks Nora.
Nora Gedgaudas [01:09:31] You’re welcome, Ron. Thank you.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:09:33] So there it is. Will I. As I said, we only really got started and I will get Nora back. And there is just so much to discuss. And in that next episode, we’ll dive into the detail of how you can boost immune function through various things, nutritional and environmental support. So, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode live review on our tunes. I hope you’ll even going on to our YouTube channel because there is now visuals attached to this audio, and it adds another dimension to it. So, I hope this finds you well through this very challenging time. Until next time. This is Dr Ron Ehrlich.
This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.