What is up you guys? Welcome to another edition of controversial thoughts. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. If you are listening to this on the day after Thanksgiving. I hope that you are spending time with friends and family, that you got lots of organs in your diet over Thanksgiving, that you are celebrating nose to tail November with us. If you need more organs in your diet, check us out at heartandsoil.co. Grass-fed, grass-finished, regeneratively raised.
organs and capsules, fire starter back in the next few days, beef organs coming next week, immuno milk, hopefully coming next week, heart of the warrior, hopefully coming shortly after that. So lots of exciting things happening on the. desiccated Oregon front at hardened soil. This week's podcast was with Peter from Hyperlipid. Do not sleep on that podcast. Peter is brilliant and we...
dove deeply into the molecular mechanisms of polyunsaturated fats and why they break the mitochondria and why creating inappropriate insulin sensitivity is a bad thing in humans. Now, I want to talk more about COVID. Because coronavirus is on everyone's mind again. And let's dig into it. I wanted to talk about the vaccine in this video, my thoughts about the vaccine, run you guys through what I know about this, what I've read about it, and my thoughts and my concerns about it.
Let's start with this. So back in July, there was a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I believe this is the Moderna pharmaceutical group, because yes, it is because they're talking about MRA. mRNA-1273, which encoded a stabilized prefusion SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
So this was the first inclination that we got that we were gonna get an mRNA vaccine. I'll explain what that is in a moment. But this small trial of 45 healthy adults back in, it was published in July, August of 2020. looked promising. There certainly were some side effects. After the second vaccination, serum neutralizing activity was detected by two methods and all participants evaluated values generally similar to those in the upper half of the distribution of a panel.
of control convalescent serum specimens. So what they're saying is, hey, if we inject you with our mRNA, this is mRNA-1273 from Moderna Pharmaceuticals. We'll talk a little bit about Pfizer in a moment. you will get a response of antibodies or serum neutralizing activity, quote unquote, similar to convalescent serum, those people who have been actually sick with the virus. Now.
They mentioned the adverse events that occurred in more than half the participants were fatigue, chills, headache, myalgia, pain at the injection sites. Severe adverse events were more common after the second vaccination. They used multiple doses, 25 microgram, 100 microgram, and I believe a 250 microgram group.
I'm not sure whether the protocol is going to have two vaccinations for people moving forward, but there were systemic adverse events in this small trial. And more than half the group actually got some bad side effects, which isn't necessarily to be... isn't necessarily surprising because you're injecting someone with an mRNA for foreign viral protein, your immune system is going to turn on and your immune system is going to essentially fight a...
fragments of the virus and you are going to get cytokines, you may feel badly, but you are not going to have presumably a virulent viral particle in your body that is going to cause major adverse long-term effects. Interesting, right? It's an mRNA virus. It's the first one of its kind. We don't have any other mRNA viruses used in medicine now. So these will be interesting. Now, the Pfizer vaccine.
is pretty similar. So if you look at the Pfizer press release, it's much more recent. This is from November the 9th at 2020. And they had... 45,538 participants. I don't think Moderna has gone back and done a bigger group. They may have. And 42% having diverse backgrounds. They say they had no serious safety concerns. Safety and additional efficacy data continue to be collected. Okay, so there's still safety and efficacy data pending here.
Clinical trial to continue through the final analysis at 164 confirmed cases in order to collect further data and characterize the vaccines. vaccine candidates' performance against other study endpoints. So this is Pfizer and BioNTech SE, and they have an mRNA-based vaccine candidate, which is called BNT.
162B2 against SARS-2. I would imagine it's fairly similar, that it is an mRNA fragment that codes for part of the S spike. Now, one of the main questions that remains... in this group, which I will talk about in this mini podcast, is though this was an ethnically, quote, diverse group, 42% having diverse backgrounds. We don't know how diverse this group was in terms of their overall metabolic health. And these are very short follow-ups, and we don't know how long this...
immunity will persist. I will discuss those concerns in a moment. Nevertheless, the statement from the CEO, today is a great day for science and humanity. The first set of results from our phase three COVID vaccine trial provides the initial evidence of a vaccine's ability to prevent COVID-19. So these do look promising. What are the potential downsides?
So let's get into this in a moment. No vaccine is going to fix metabolic dysfunction. And unfortunately, a vaccine may protect you or your loved ones. from coronavirus. And let's all hope that the vaccine continues to look, whether it's from Pfizer or from Moderna, safe and effective. Let's all hope that that continues to be the case.
It may protect you or your loved ones from SARS-CoV-2, but if you remember the conversation that I had with Ivor, what is driving susceptibility to this virus? What is driving severe COVID outcomes? It's really not an oversimplification to say it's diet and lifestyle.
Ignorance, essentially. It's people who are metabolically unhealthy and who are not getting in the sun enough and have vitamin D levels that are low. Low vitamin D levels we know can also correlate with metabolic unhealth. Is an mRNA virus... that gives your body a COVID-2 spike protein, which triggers an immune response to COVID-2, going to fix your metabolic health? Absolutely not.
If someone asked me, would you recommend your parents take this? I probably would say yes. My parents are 70 years old. They're both very concerned about coronavirus. If it helps them get back to living normally. The safety data looks okay so far. We'll have to pay attention to that very carefully. But my parents will still be susceptible to everything else they were before, which is the great tragedy of all of this, right?
If your parents, if you are metabolically unwell, if you are obese, if you have insulin resistance, quote unquote, you are still at risk of a heart attack or a stroke or dementia or pneumonia or a severe flu. or a permutation of the coronavirus that may not be covered by this one? What if the S-spike mutates in the future and this virus, this vaccine doesn't have great efficacy in a season or two? These are band-aids.
This is a band-aid. It's really, I fear, covering over the major underlying issue, which is that there is no discussion of how we accurately... characterize metabolic health in humans, nor is there any real discussion of how we achieve metabolic health in general or how we reclaim metabolic health once we have become metabolically unhealthy.
This is why I do the work that I do. This is what's fascinating to me, how we become unhealthy and how we get it back. So let's dig a little more into the vaccine here. I want to make sure everyone understands what we are talking about. An mRNA vaccine. is a fragment of mRNA. And as you can see in this diagram, in normal eukaryotic transcription and translation, there's a double-stranded DNA molecule with an RNA polymerase made into an
that mRNA goes onto a ribosome and is translated into a protein. This is how it works. So essentially, at a very high level, what's going on is we are injecting an mRNA. which mirrors Cov2 DNA for the S-spike protein. Remember that SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, which is then going to be used by the ribosomes in our body to make a protein that is essentially...
This, right? So this is a picture of SARS-CoV-2. These red things are the S-spike protein. These orange and other little guys are different parts of it. If you look at this diagram on Wikipedia, you can see the yellow deposits are envelope proteins, the orange. deposits or membrane proteins, blah, blah, blah. You can see that basically just visually, these red proteins are the spike proteins. So your body is going to make these spike proteins to which your immune system is going to respond.
And presumably the idea is that that will create immunity by activating essentially T cells. And the important thing here is that we want to make... CDA positive T cells that have some memory to this virus. And there are many things that we can think about. In terms of how these are interacting, it's not to get too complicated in terms of the immune system. Remember, there's innate immunity and adaptive immunity. Vaccines work generally through adaptive immunity, through B cells and T cells.
This diagram is quite complex, but I'll show it. It's from a Nature Reviews paper in Immunology. The multifaceted role of CD4 positive T cells in CD8. T cell memory. Again, it's complex. Many cells are involved here. Basically, the gist is that CD4 positive T cells interact with dendritic cells to program CD8 positive T cells. And eventually you want these CD8 positive T cells to become memory T cells, which is...
partially how a vaccine response works. You have some memory to the virus so that if another viral particle shows up in your body, you can respond more quickly with antibodies from B cells or immunologic response from cytokines elaborated by both B cells and T cells. This is what is important. Now, what are my concerns?
about the coronavirus vaccine. My first concerns I talked about already. It's not going to fix anyone's metabolic health. And in fact, I fear that it's going to do the reverse, that it's going to give people a false sense of security. into thinking, Hey, I'm well, all of this talk about being healthy and losing weight. I don't have to really think about that so much anymore because
I've got a coronavirus vaccine. I can go back to living my life. Now that kind of pokes us back to square one where we were back in February of 2020. So that's not the end of the world, but. Really, the underlying pandemic is metabolic unhealth. And we're missing a fantastic opportunity to talk to people about why they're susceptible to COVID and who should be worried about it in this situation. You give them a vaccine, they go back to normal. They're never going to change their life.
Second concern, there is a good amount of evidence that in those with underlying metabolic dysfunction, vaccines are not likely to work as well. So this is the part that really no one is talking about. This is a paper that I discussed previously, the effects of obesity, metabolic syndrome on the immune system. This is table one from... This paper, which is titled, The Impact of Obesity and Metabolic Syndrome on Immunity. No surprise there. Many papers here in both mice, rats, and humans.
showing connections between phenotypes of metabolic unhealth, diabetes specifically, obesity, and problems with vaccines. And I'll show a few of these papers in more detail, but just look here. Type 2 diabetic patients decreased phagocytic activity of peripheral blood mononuclear cells. That's not good. Diet-induced obese mice decreased dendritic cell engine presentation. Well, that's part of how vaccines work in humans. Lactin deficiency, which are OBOB mice, decreased cell-mediated immunity.
obese and diabetic mice, increased lung cancer metastases, decreased NK cell function and early cancer stages, diet-induced obese mice, obese, glucose intolerant rats, blah, blah, blah. Let's get to humans. Type 2 diabetic hemodialysis patients, increased risk hepatitis B vaccine failure. Overweight children, increased risk tetanus vaccine failure. Obese human subjects, increased risk influenza vaccine failure.
Hmm. Are we worried about this? I think we are. Diabetic patients, increased risk of influenza-related complications and hospitalizations. Basically, the problem here... is that those who need the vaccine the most are less likely to have an immune system that functions well, that does all of that complex orchestration between... CD4 positive T cells, dendritic cells, CD8 positive T cells to generate a robust and long-lived immune response. And that's a problem.
because that's what we're banking on here, guys, is that those people in our population who are most susceptible will have access to a vaccine which will be protective for them, except what if it's not as protective for them as the rest of the population? And we inevitably needed to have the conversation with them from the beginning that their metabolic health is paramount. And that conversation continues to not be had.
Obesity is associated with impaired immune response to influence a vaccine nation in humans. We don't have an article that says this on COVID-2 vaccine. Gonna bet you dollars to donuts, it will happen. I gotta stop using that expression. Come up with like dollars to liver, dollars to thymus. You get the idea. Dollars to Denver stakes. Dollars to Denver stakes.
We're going to see a paper in the next year that says obesity and metabolic dysfunction is impaired, is associated with impaired response to the COVID-2 vaccination in humans. It's going to happen. And we're going to be right back where we are now, which is... The vaccine is a Band-Aid. It's going to harm people because it's going to create a lot of people who ignore the underlying problem.
And it's gonna create a lot of forgetting of what people should be doing in their lives. It's gonna create a lot of lackadaisical people who are not worried about anything and are not gonna change their lifestyle. Maybe they weren't changing their lifestyle before, but. I fear that it's going to create some misleading messaging. So this was a sample in response to the 2009-2010 inactivated trivalent influenza vaccine.
in healthy weight, overweight, and obese participants. So they looked at three groups at 112. At one in 12 months post-vaccination, again, they looked at activation of CD positive T cells, like we talked about, expression of interferon gamma and granzyme B, which are cytokines elaborated within that. innate immune response in response to antigens, which is what's going to happen in response to a vaccine.
And even though this is an MRI, mRNA vaccine, it's going to happen in the same way because your body's going to make an antigen as opposed to us injecting you with an antigen. A flu vaccine is a series of antigens. So what they say is that. Body mass index correlated positively with a higher initial increase in IgG antibodies. So the fatter you were, you had more IgG antibodies. Well, that sounds good. However, 12 months post-vaccination.
Higher BMI was associated with a greater decline in influenza antibody titers. Peripheral blood, mononuclear cells, PBMCs, challenged ex vivo with vaccine strain virus, demonstrated that obese individuals had decreased CD8 T cell activation and decreased expression of functional proteins compared with healthy weight individuals. That is bad. That is bad. You can see the graphics later on here. Percentage of subjects with a fourfold decrease in their influenza titers, healthy open bars.
obese, dark bars, much higher in the obese, percent decline. There's a correlation between BMI. with a pretty small p-value, the r-value that says 0.29, which isn't a super impressive r-value, but it's there. P-value is less than 0.01, or it is 0.01. You can see the CD3, CD8, CD69 cells going down as you go from heavy, healthy to overweight to obese. So the more fat you were, the more obese you were.
the more presumably metabolically unhealthy you were, the less your immune system responded to the influenza, the trivalent influenza virus. There will be a paper just like this with coronavirus in a year. and people will be shocked and chagrined, and hopefully your family will have made dietary changes. The evaluation of immune response to hepatitis B vaccination in diabetic and non-diabetic hemodialysis patients and the use of the technosotoxide.
Present studies showed that diabetic patients on hemodialysis, probably those who are most sick, may carry a greater risk of non-seroconversion than non-diabetic ones for the antibody response to the hepatitis B vaccination. Uh-oh. So same kind of problem here, guys. Not going to convert well with a hepatitis B vaccination if you have diabetes or metabolic dysfunction.
Why is this? Because the immune system is linked to your metabolism. Alterations in T-cell subset frequency, in peripheral blood, in obesity. Obesity is associated with alterations in the frequencies of peripheral CD4 and CD8 T cells, aberrations in the expression of CD95 among CD8 positive T cells. These data suggest both CD4...
positive and CD8 positive T cell compartments, as well as the regulation of CD95 expression on CD8 positive T cells as targets for further study into obesity's effects on the immune system. An obese... Person, sadly, does not have an immune system that functions, quote, normally, that responds well, that is spry, that can spring out of bed and do a CrossFit workout, obviously, metaphorically speaking.
And that's a problem. So who needs the vaccine the most? People who are diabetic. People who have metabolic dysfunction, the majority of which is undiagnosed. This is an iceberg fit for the Titanic, you guys. the majority of metabolic dysfunction is undiagnosed. One simple blood test could change this. I talked about it in my newsletter this week. You can subscribe to that at heartandsoil.co. That simple blood test is a fasting insulin. How often is it ordered?
Very rarely, very rarely. What are the parameters? You better be less than five. Less than eight isn't horrible, but if your fasting insulin is greater than eight, you got work to do. Plain and simple. It's an oversimplification, of course. No one test is gonna be perfect for making these medical predictions. Let's just make it easy. Go to your doctor, get a fasting insulin, and tell me what it is. If it's less than five, probably in good shape.
Presumably. If it's greater than eight, you got problems. How often are we doing that now? Almost never. Insurance is, quote, won't pay for it. They don't want to do it. Who needs the vaccine the most? People who are metabolically unwell. Who's going to respond least well to the vaccine? People who are metabolically unwell. Is there a problem here? You bet there is. Is the vaccine going to fix metabolic health? No. How do you fix metabolic health?
You guys all know the answer to this. Start with seed oils, process carbohydrates, and go from there. If you have diabetes, either type one or type two, get rid of carbohydrates in your diet. the majority of them or all of them. Get rid of them, especially if you're type two, as I talked about with Peter in last week's podcast. Do not miss that one, you guys. You will regret it.
Type 1 diabetes, absolutely get rid of all carbs. Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes, which are formal definitions, cut them down. Cut them down significantly. If you're metabolically healthy, you can eat. non-toxic sources of carbohydrates. I do, doesn't make me diabetic, but those of you who are need to cut out carbohydrates in the short term. You need to cut out seed oils. That's the first step to metabolic health.
Those are the important conversations. This is why I do what I do. If you don't know what causes you to become metabolically unwell, how are you going to fix it? Who is telling you the answers to this? Who's giving you answers about how to fix your metabolic health other than eat less, move more?
Works to an extent, but no one is talking about food quality. And in fact, many people in the health, quote, nutrition, medicine space are completely ignoring food quality. This is why calories in macro counting fail. They don't take into account food quality at all, at all. So I'll close with this because this is a really cool study that I found this week. And people often say to me, there are no studies on the carnivore diet.
Well, this study's pretty darn close. Marked improvement in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism in diabetic Australian Aborigines after temporary reversion to a traditional lifestyle. Pretty freaking cool study. This is from September 1983. You guys, this study has been around a long time. Basically, they had a number of individuals who were living in the city. They were middle-aged, 53.9 years. They were overweight. And they had seven weeks where they went back into the bush, right?
In conclusion, the major metabolic abnormalities of type 2 diabetes were either greatly improved or completely normalized in this group of aborigines by a relatively short reversal of the urbanization process.
At least three factors known to improve insulin sensitivity, weight loss, low-fat diet, maybe, and increased physical activity were operating in the study and would have contributed to the metabolic changes observed. I'm going to disagree with them on the low-fat diet, but you can see what they ate right here. The face of the study, traveling coast inland, beef, kangaroo, turtle, bream, yams, and honey. That's basically a carnivorous diet.
10% of the diet has carbohydrate, 50% is protein, 40% is fat. That's not a low-fat diet. They did appear to have some degree of caloric restriction though, which is good at the coast. 80% fish, birds, kangaroo, crocodile, less than five. That's a totally carnivore diet. That is a carnivore diet, okay? Less than 5% carbohydrate.
80% protein, 20% fat. I find that a little hard to believe for their macros unless they're eating extremely lean crocodile, but those are some pretty lean game animals, right? Inland, kangaroo, freshwater fish, yams, honey figs, birds, crocodiles, turtles, and yabbies. I don't know what a yabby is. If anybody knows what a yabby is, email me. Pretty sure it's a small fish or a land animal. Who knows?
They say 33% carbohydrates, 54% protein, 13% fat. I don't care as much about the macros other than to say that's a really low fat diet and it can't sustain that long-term or you could with you have more carbohydrates, but. This one is probably not sustainable. That's essentially a carnivore diet, guys. The only thing that's not carnivore is figs, yams, and you could say honey, but I think honey is definitely carnivorous for sure. So this is carnivorous.
pretty darn carnivore for these seven weeks in the Aborigines. So here's a fantastic study of diabetics going into the bush, eating essentially an animal-based diet. and getting way better, significantly better. No carbohydrates of any garbage quality. They didn't eat leafy greens. They didn't eat nuts or seeds. They didn't eat the rainbow.
They just eat a bunch of crocodiles and yabbies and birds and fish and kangaroo and wallabies and beef. That's really cool. That's essentially a carnivorous diet reversing diabetes in these urbanized. Aborigines. We've got very close studies to carnivore, carnivorous diets that have already been done. We know this works in humans. We know this works. We know these are healthy diets for humans.
That's what I'm gonna close with. If you guys need more notes to tell nutrition in your life, check us out, heartandsoil.co. I know this past week on Joe Rogan's podcast, a bunch of people have been messaging me about John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods and his vegan craziness. Believe me.
I've been talking to a lot of people about it and I would love to debunk it. I will debunk the blue zones next week. I've done tons on the blue zones, you guys. There's a whole chapter in my book about meeting cancer, meeting the blue zones. If you have a question, I've probably already answered it. in that book right there. So check out my book. If you have questions, email me drpaul at heartandsoil.co. If you have questions about our supplements,
or how to construct a nose-to-tail carnivore diet. I cannot be your doctor that email. Get more nose-to-tail nutrition in your life, increase your nutrient quality, which will improve your satiety, remove processed carbohydrates, remove seed oils, and you'll thrive. That's how you become metabolically healthy. You gotta be lean. You can't be obese. Sure, if someone in your family is unhealthy and the vaccine is safe, consider the vaccine. Consider the vaccine.
it's not gonna fix long-term. Not gonna fix long-term. I always think about my dad, my mom. My dad is improving his health. He said he's lost weight this year, which is great. I texted him yesterday and I said, dad. Stop the wheat. And he said, oh, you must be psychic. I know what my dad eats. He just won't get rid of the wheat. He's probably got too many seed oils in his diet too. Is my dad going to take the coronavirus vaccine? That's his decision.
but it might be good for him, but it's not going to fix his metabolic health. And he knows that. And I know that. And I know that just like I talked about with Ivor, this concept of the old and frail, they will remain. There will still be susceptible individuals in the population who will die. Cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia. Coronavirus vaccine isn't going to fix any of that. It's not going to fix any of that. If you don't die from coronavirus.
You're likely going to die from something else in the next year if you're that metabolically unwell. It's a vaccine that is a Band-Aid. Don't get lost in that. Is it terrible? I don't know. We don't know yet. It's not gonna fix the underlying problem, which is metabolic health. Do that and you will thrive. That's where the conversation needs to go. Thanks for being part of the remembering you guys. This is what it's all about. Remembering where we have come from as humans.
how we live, how we play, how we work in community, how we do things that are meaningful, how we eat, predominantly animal-based diets, nose to tail. Check us out at heartandsoil.co if you need more nutrition like that in your life and stay radical.