A recent Harris Poll commissioned by the Samueli Integrative Health Foundation found that 80% of the more than 2,000 representative adults surveyed in the U.S. say they intend to become more mindful about practicing self-care as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It seems that COVID-19 has been a wake-up call for most Americans. For many years the medical-pharmaceutical establishment has cultivated an unhealthy dependency on doctors and their prescriptions or surgeries to get us well when we get sick.  What patients can do for themselves in terms of building health with good diet and healthy lifestyle is often minimized and even actively discouraged by doctors.  Thus, cancer patients are told it doesn’t matter what they eat—that they can eat sugar, and they’ll be fine as long as they get their chemotherapy or radiation.  Heart patients are told by their doctors to skip vitamins and rely instead on harmful medications.  But with COVID-19, w…

A few months ago, we wrote about the five supplements we felt were the most important supplements to be taking at this time to support immune health.  They are: A high-quality multivitamin, like our Beyond Health Multi.   Vitamin C (either powdered or in tablets), 6 grams a day or to bowel tolerance, in divided doses.  Enough Vitamin D3 to achieve a high-normal level on a 25(OH)D blood test. Beyond Health Cell Repair Formula or Beyond Health Quercetin Pro, 2-4 tablets daily. Zinc.  Under age 40, 25 mg per day from Beyond Health’s Multi.  If over 40, an additional 25 mg from Beyond Health’s Zinc Formula for a total of 50 mg per day.  Most health-minded people today are aware that a multi, vitamins C and D, and zinc are good for the immune system.  But quercetin? Some people haven’t even heard of it.  So what is quercetin (pronounced kwer’-si-tin)?  And why do we believe it&rs…

Most people have heard of Louis Pasteur, a famous French biologist and chemist who lived during the 19 th century and invented “pasteurization.” As a proponent of the “germ theory of disease” (the belief that disease is caused by germs), Pasteur is one of the fathers of modern medicine.  However there were equally well-known scientists in Pasteur’s day who didn’t agree with him. Germs, they argued, couldn’t gain a foothold in a truly healthy body.  Chief among these critics was physiologist Claude Bernard. Bernard held that our body’s “inner terrain” (or immune system) determines our health. He is unknown today because his ideas lost out to the germ theory. But Pasteur himself is reputed to have said on his deathbed, “Bernard was right. The microbe [germ] is nothing; the terrain is everything.”  So it’s dismaying that the advice given to the public regarding COVID-19 seems to be based on the theory that “the virus is everything; the terrain…

Although hand sanitizers and other antiviral cleaning products are disappearing from supermarket shelves, you may already have all the products you need to combat COVID-19, and they’re non-toxic and cheaper. Much of the information here is taken from a recent article in Consumer Reports. COVID-19 is enveloped in a coating that allows it to merge with our body cells and infect them.  If you can disrupt this coating, you can deactivate the virus.  Fortunately, this is pretty easy to do. Soap and water do this job very well. The friction from scrubbing a surface with soap and water can break the virus’s protective coating. The operative word here is “scrub.”  Don’t just wipe the surface lightly; bear down as if you’re removing dirt or something sticky.  Leave the rag you’ve used in a bowl of soapy water for a while to destroy any remaining virus particles.  (A note of interest, if the virus makes its way inside your body, vitamin D…

Government policies that throttle natural medicine are causing real harm right now by hampering our ability to take control of our own health during this pandemic. — Alliance for Natural Health “Some physicians would stand by and see their patient die rather than use ascorbic acid [vitamin C] because in their finite minds it exists only as a vitamin.” — F. R. Klenner, MD We invite you to add your voice to that of the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) in speaking out about the harm being done by our government’s single-minded focus on finding a pharmaceutical treatment for the COVID-19 virus while restricting what supplement manufacturers may say about the potentially life-saving abilities of vitamins and minerals supplements. Current law makes it illegal for manufacturers to claim that their supplements can help to prevent or treat disease even when good science backs up these claims.  Bedazzled by Big Pharma’s money and power, our government’s position inflates…

Although these stressful times can lead to sleepless nights, it’s important for all kinds of health reasons to make the effort to get enough good quality sleep.  But the most pertinent reason right now is that it helps prevent viral infections. But how much sleep do you need to avoid getting a cold or perhaps COVID-19? According to a 2015 study, the answer is more than 6 hours a night. While poor sleep and not getting enough sleep had been implicated before in increased susceptibility to infectious illness, prior studies relied on subjective measures—that is individuals’ own assessments of their experience.  This study was different in that it used an objective measure called wrist actigraphy to assess occurrences of the common cold after the researchers gave 164 healthy participants nasal drops containing the rhinovirus.  Like COVID-19, the common cold is a coronavirus that infects the respiratory system. The study’s conclusion? Less sleep increased ris…

Doing nothing is better than wasting time – Viktoras Kulvinskas Feelings of anxiety and stress have become an unavoidable aspect of life in this new COVID-19 era. Yet stress reduction is something we are advised to include in our antiviral lifestyle—a real Catch-22! But there are simple ways to reduce our stress overload, and they’re free and close at hand.  It just means making the time to include them in our lives.  What exactly is the problem with stress?  Well, for one thing it promotes the release of adrenal hormones that knock out immunity!  A good example of this is the increase in the number of colds college students get during exam time.  Stress can also activate latent viruses we usually carry around with us without a problem, as someone who experiences Herpes I and II outbreaks can attest.  Stress can also interfere with sleep—so important for strong immunity, and it can nudge us into unhealthy habits like overeating, eating the…

Roberto Assagioli MD was an Italian psychoanalysis who was a contemporary and student of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.  But he was also deeply influenced by his mother, a serious student of Eastern religion.  He wound up combining Western science with Eastern spirituality in a new type of psychotherapy called psychosynthesis.  But more than his credentials, Roberto, as he was known, exhibited a calm sense of joyfulness and kindness that was quite independent of external events.  People reported feeling happy just being around him. So he can be considered an expert on the subject of serenity. In this anxious COVID-19 time, we might benefit from the following exercise he advocated for cultivating serenity, copied from his book, Psychosynthesis: EXERCISE FOR EVOKING SERENITY Assume a physical attitude of serenity: relax all muscular and nervous tension; breathe slowly and rhythmically; express serenity on your face with a smile.  (You can hel…

While many factors determine whether or not you will get a coronavirus infection, how bad the infection will be, and how long it will take to recover, there is one all-important factor—the state of your immunity.  Beyond Health’s protocol for building and maintaining a strong immune system includes having your vitamin D blood levels tested with a 25(OH)D test, and getting them up to 40-60 ng/mL (100-150 nmol/L) or more depending on your medical situation. Your immune system requires adequate amounts of vitamin D to function the way it’s supposed to. If you’re low on D, it’s like fighting the coronavirus with one hand tied behind your back. You can raise your vitamin D levels with sun, food and supplements. SUN Sunlight is an inexhaustible source of free vitamin D! The sun’s UVB rays convert cholesterol in the skin into vitamin D. However, since these same UVB rays cause sunburn, light-skinned people need to build up a protective tan gradually. The best approach is…

Certain populations have borne the brunt of COVID-19 illness and deaths; and they all are especially likely to be deficiency in vitamin D.  Older folks don’t fare well with the virus. Adults over 65 years of age represent 80% of hospitalizations & have a 23-fold greater risk of death than younger people. The elderly are likely to be vitamin D deficient due to inadequate diet and also because as we age we become less able to manufacture vitamin D in our skin from sunshine. Almost everyone who has died of COVID disease had co-morbidities, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, high blood pressure, cancer, lung disease, neurological disease, kidney disease or obesity. Scientific studies have associated all of these conditions with vitamin D deficiency.  Now it has become apparent that significantly more people of color are contracting and dying from COVID-19 than their white counterparts.  Although black Americans repre…

While the world’s attention is riveted by COVID-19, pervasive magnesium deficiency has been an ongoing health crisis for at least sixty years, causing death, disease, and reduced quality of life. Magnesium plays many important roles in heart health, and a deficiency of this important mineral is a major risk factor for having a sudden, fatal heart attack! As one of the body’s most significant anti-inflammatory compounds, magnesium also helps to prevent the chronic diseases that plague our time, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other “co-morbidities” that increase chances of being hospitalized with and dying from COVID-19. In fact, virtually every known illness can be associated with magnesium deficiency.  Magnesium plays many essential roles in the immune system. It contributes significantly to anti-viral immunity, and has other properties that may make it especially useful for COVID-19. Meanwhile, low magnesium levels can seri…

It was an apocalyptic experience to wake up on the morning of September 9th in San Francisco, California, to a darkened sky with an eerie orange glow. And it became stranger still when by mid-afternoon the sky hadn’t changed, as if the day had never begun.  This was a San Franciscan’s eye view of the effects of the worst fire season the West Coast has experienced ever. The air was darkened for two days by a blanket of smoke that stretched all along the coast and more than 1,000 miles west over the Pacific Ocean as wildfires raged from Washington down to Southern California.  Even those who haven’t been in the direct path of the fires leading to loss of property and life have experienced some of the worst air pollution in the world, comparable, according to a study done in Berkeley, to smoking 25 cigarettes a day.  And it didn’t help to know that the consequent lung irritation and inflammation made us more prone to lung infections, like COVID-19. What c…

Last year in an article on vaping we concluded that although it might be a slight improvement over cigarette smoking, vaping was far from safe. Since then thousands of vapers have become ill with a serious disease called Evali (e-cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury), and a recent study found that vaping greatly increases the risk of contracting COVID-19.   All the more reason to “just say no” to vaping.   A New York Times article gave a harrowing description of 20-year-old Janan Moein’s experience of Evali. After vaping regularly with a cannabis-laced brand for 6 months, Mr. Moein found himself hospitalized with a collapsed lung and in a medically-induced coma. Diagnosed with Evali, he was given a 5% chance of survival. He lost nearly 50 pounds in 2 weeks and now recalls, “My lips were blue. They had to tape my eyes shut. I was hallucinating the entire time that the nurses were trying to kill me, that the walls were made of human skin.  It was a…

Uncontrolled diabetes increases risk for severe illness with COVID-19. If you are diabetic, or pre-diabetic, your doctor may have recommended taking metformin to lower your blood sugar.There is almost always a better natural alternative to pharmaceutical medications, and metformin is no exception. According to renowned alternative doctor Jonathan W. Wright, MD, berberine, a botanical found in plants like goldenseal, barberry and Oregon grape, can do everything metformin can do with far fewer side effects.Like many pharmaceuticals, metformin has its origins in botanical medicine; it is derived from goat’s rue, also known as French lilac. Like berberine, metformin activates AMPk (5' adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase), an extremely powerful enzyme in every cell in the body that’s been called the “youthinizing enzyme.” AMPk is a “master regulating switch” for energy metabolism. Want more energy? Boost your AMPk! Want to reduce body fat, especially belly fat? Boost your…

The new COVID-19 world is a world beset by fear. Unseen viral particles can be lurking anywhere. Should one find us, we don’t know for sure how we would respond. And with social patterns dramatically altered and the economy collapsing, we are losing our sense of comfort, safety and being in control, leading to a stressful sense of chronic uncertainty and anxiety. We know from many scientific studies that stress negatively affects health. But although there may be little we can do to avoid stress in a COVID-19 world, we can use self-care to decrease and minimize the negative effects of stressful feelings. For example, you can pray or meditate.  Or you can simply bring calm and non-judgmental attention to how you’re feeling.      We’ve talked before about a helpful exercise called Body-Feelings-Mind. In this exercise, you find a comfortable position in a quiet place and, with eyes closed, check in with how you’re feeling, first ph…