COVID-19 Update 03.21.2020

Welcome back. Today is Saturday, March 21st. I promised everybody that I'll keep on doing updates as things change. And over the last 24 to 48 hours, there have not been any major updates. A lot of y' all have been seeing about the new antimalarial medications, which we've already briefly talked about in the past on social media and put some things out there. The biggest thing going on right now is just the governments, local governments, as well as national government in the United States responding to what is going on. So what I want to do today is to take a step back while we have a little bit of a breather. It may not feel like a breather to everybody out there, but it's a breather in data as far as I'm concerned. The numbers are continuing on their current trajectories, and not a lot's changed. So the step I want to take back is just to kind of go back to the idea of boosting your immune system. How do you boost your immune system? And from a functional medicine or an integrative medicine perspective, that is a multimodal, diverse. It's a very, very big topic. One of the concepts in functional medicine is that everything is interconnected. Everything connects with everything else. Diet affects your health, sleep affects your health. And so what I want to do is I want to take a massive, massive macro. Look, take a big step back. Bear with me just for a second as I walk through this. This might not seem applicable, but it is. And just give you all a concept about how everything is absolutely associated with everything else. For example, and this is just one example of many, many that I could go through. I could talk about this for literally hours. But, okay, let's talk about brainwave activity very briefly. Bear with me for a second. I'm going somewhere with this. Okay, Brainwave activity, your brain's alpha wave activity is roughly about 8 hertz, plus or minus. Now, the Earth's electromagnetic fields resonate at 7.83 Hz, called the Schumann forces. So if you take a compass and put it in your hand, a real compass or an old school compass, you'll see the hand shake and it vibrates at about 7.83 Hertz. Okay, no big deal. Well, that's also the brainwave activity of every mammal on the planet. Okay, interesting. Well, the Earth's electromagnetic fields resonate at 7.83 hertz. And the Earth's electromagnetic fields are made by the magma or the iron underneath the surface of the Earth that moves and the movement of the liquid iron Actually causes the Earth's electromagnetic fields. Now, how does this relate to health? A little bit. Well, the earth's electromagnetic fields actually energize your bones. It's called a piezoelectric effect. So literally, the Earth's electromagnetic fields hitting your bones help make them stronger. It also energizes your muscles. It energizes your mitochondria, which are the powerhouse of your cells. Well, okay, so where am I going with this? Astronauts, which are taken out of the Earth's electromagnetic fields actually develop osteoporosis, muscle weakness. If any of you all remember the pictures from the Cosmox coming off of the Russian space little capsule, Things being taken out on stretchers. That's what happened to their bodies being separated from the Earth's electromagnetic fields for however many hundreds of days. NASA figured this out years ago and started making these electromagnetic suits that actually help maintain the body's muscle mass. Now we're actually using devices called RTMs to treat depression, anxiety. There's research with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. I've actually used a device in my clinic from Germany and over in Europe. They've been using this technology for 20 to 30 years, using electromagnetic fields pulsing at the same level of the earth to treat fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. Okay, so, okay, where am I going with this? During the coronavirus epidemic, literally, your body's health is so intricately connected to the earth, Literally the magma and iron underneath the crust of the earth is affecting your health right now. So just think about that. How does that apply to absolutely everything? You know, sleep, food, diet, rest, relationships, the house you're in, the economy, the environment, all these macro, macro things. So what I want to do with that is bring it back to one thing today and just talk about food. Food is medicine. Right now, there's no toilet paper. Toilet paper is not medicine. Okay, food, but food. And you know, it's really interesting Data from Florida saying that half of all chronic disease in our country can be directly attributed to eating processed foods. Information from the Harvard School of public health saying 80% of heart disease and 70% of cancer can be prevented by diet and lifestyle alone. Back in the 20s and 30s, we knew about tuberculosis, vitamin D levels. You know, the sanitariums of the late 18, early 1900s were places where people went to de stress out in the sun. And lo and behold, their tuberculosis started going remission a lot of times. So environment, food, all these things have massive impacts on our immune system. And the food you eat will also affect your immune system as well. I mean, we've known for years that eating lots of sugar, for example, actually can feed inflammatory cells and feed cancer cells. You know, if you have breast cancer, for example, and you do a ketogenic diet, you decrease the risk for recurrence 25% just by doing a ketogenic diet. That's a pretty profound intervention. So right now we're in the situation. We have this worldwide pandemic, so what food, what's the big deal? You know, this is a way you can start leveraging things at home to boost your immune system. The reality is, the peak in this, I'm in Virginia in the United States. The peak in this is probably, depending on what you look at and read, anywhere from nine to 13 weeks out. Right now. That means we're at the beginning of things. And right now with the quarantines and everything, we're just trying to figure out what we're going to do over the next one to two to three months. This will probably surge again in the fall. Things you do now and you continue can have a massive impact on your health. So right now, looking at real food, how do you eat your food sitting down as a family to eat food? If you have like three meals a week as a family, it decreases your children's risk of being criminals, of getting involved with drugs, dropping out of school affects their risk for chronic health in their adulthood. Just eating three to four times a day as a family, well, guess what? We have a big opportunity to eat together as families three times a day now or more. The kind of foods you eat. It's very interesting. There's a Polynesian culture in the Pacific that 80% of the population smokes, so crazy smoking. But it's a more like rural, agrarian culture. They eat what they can catch out of the ocean. They have close family ties, and there's almost no heart disease and no cancer in that population. So diet, stress, these things can be so powerful, they can actually mitigate something as bad for you as smoking. That's how powerful these foundations of functional medicine are. For those of you been following as well know, I've put a couple podcasts out on diet. Those are out there to be looked at. Take a look at them. If you want more in depth information about this concept as food is medicine, this whole coronavirus kind of stopped some of my, my informational podcasts. So I'm focused on this right now. But food is so huge now, the grocery stores are out. What can you do about getting real food? What's really interesting we still did a food pickup on Thursday. We are using local farms. It's really kind of interesting. The food you buy in the grocery store travels about 1500 miles before it gets to your grocery store. Just think about that. It's coming from California, all the way from Virginia, all the way on the other side of the country. Mexico, Chile, other places in the world. Not there's anything wrong with that. But that affects the nutritional content of your food. You have to do things to food. You have to pick it early, you have to. For bananas, you have to spray them with a gas to slow their ripening down. Getting something that far away affects nutritional value. And here in central Virginia we have tons of farmer's markets. Well, let me rephrase it. We have tons of farms that can be accessed either through farmer's markets or this one thing called fall line farms where you order it. And literally I had a patient this past week ask me, how do I get chicken? Where do I get chicken from? And I was like, here, go to this website, order your chicken, you can pick it up next week. It was literally that easy. One of the big issues in our food system has been the centralization of food production to a few major states into the country. For those of you familiar with CAFOs, which are contained animal feeding operations, know all about this, know about how mass having, you know, hundreds of cows in one place, tens of thousands of chickens in one place, requires anabolics, requires a lot of really unhealthy thing for the animals, creating unhealthy food for us. Well, there's been a movement towards local food, towards real food, towards local sourcing food. And we're seeing as an exponential explosion in people's interest in that. Think about this for a second. Half of all the world's food rots or degrades in transit. If we could literally stop food waste food that rots in transit, there would be no more hunger in the world. Just think about that for a second. We could double our food product productivity just by not shipping food all around the world, having it rot. How do you do that? You decentralize and re localize food sourcing. So this might be a chance for your family where you're at. On my website as well, I have a food sourcing guide that has been made available under the podcast on food on food on food pack cost two and three, I believe. I think three is the one that has the guide. And, and if you're somewhere else in the United States, in North Carolina, Florida, we have people in Washington State Actually had someone from Cambodia asking me questions about the coronavirus. Not sure if I can help them, but at least in the United States, there's a web resource on there where you can download and find out where is your local. Where's your local food source? Right now the farms are exploding. Lots of spring produce is going crazy. There's a place called Newcastle here in Goochland where literally they say if you go on Facebook, find them, you can order it, they'll pick it for you and you just drop, pick it up. Look at this as an opportunity. I've been talking with patients this week as well about. This is an opportunity for us to reground and resettle ourselves. We have, you know, going here to there for all your kids, sports practices, going to New York for your kids, you know, all your kids arts and audition things. This is. We're forced now to refocus on ourselves, refocus on our family, refocus on our children. This opportunity for us to do that. And so what I want to do between the chaos of, you know, does your blood type affect, you know, your risk of getting this. And tomorrow on the question and answer session, I should have mentioned at the beginning, we'll be answering questions. There's gonna be a live, live question Q and A session tomorrow that will be answering questions people posed to us on social media. And then when we finish that, if there are additional questions, we'll answer those as well. We're gonna keep on doing that, but interposed when there aren't crazy, you know, there's nothing in my opinion, in my humble opinion, that requires update as far on the medical side. I just want to come back and say what are things you can, that can empower you to take care of yourself and your family now? Because there are a lot of things you can do. Food is one again. The website has lots of good resources on that. You find what your local source is. We'll talk about sleep, we'll talk about exercise. You know, as you can see, my background's a little. It's a little dreary today, but I can still went for a run yesterday, I can still go for a run this afternoon. Sleep is huge. We'll talk about those things because the reality is this is here for a while and even if we abate this now, we'll have an upsurge in the fall. And those are things that I've been talking about again on these videos. I'm getting lots of questions in regards to that as well. Please look at the videos there's so much information I've done to date. I don't know how many hours we've done today, but we've done probably, I don't know, 10, 15 videos talking about this. So lots of good information out there. But again, find a reliable, dependable source of information and stick with it. Literally, as I was scouring the stuff yesterday, I was almost getting anxious looking at all the craziness, looking at all the craziness and just had to recenter myself and go, what's most important for my wife and myself? It's them hunkering down at home. I still have to go out and take care of patients. So I literally have separate clothes, a separate entrance, I walk through the house. How can I keep my people safe while I do my job? How can you keep your people safe while you do your job as a mom, dad, brother, sister, cousin, community, person, whatever. This is a time for us to become more human. I have a theological degree as well. And so a lot of what I do is thinking about implications of stuff. And one implications of society. And this is something I may talk about later on as well, is one of the implications of technology and society is we become less human in many ways, become less connected. So we try to create artificial means of connection, like I'm doing right now with social media and video. We become less dependent on others and more dependent on technology and less become less human in many ways. And this is just forcing us to focus on the things that make us human. Relationships, interaction with those around us, our family, first and foremost, those close to you. These are some things we'll be talking about as well. I'm looking at this as an opportunity for us to reconnect with ourselves, the world around us. And again, something else I'll probably talk about a little later on is when we have major things like this, major disasters. Now, I'll give you a little teaser for it. Actually, if we look at the greatest generation and those of you who know who the greatest generation was, those were my grandparents, my wife's grandparents. One fought in the Japanese front and one fought in the. Well, he was in India, but different front in World War II. My grandfather was in World War I. And one of the effects of World War I was the kids that were born during that time had their parents go off and fight, you know, the war, the war to end all wars. They came back and were faced with the dust bowl, with the Great Depression. That changed that whole generation's perspective. You know, waste not, want not to become the greatest generation. In American history, the generation who literally went around the world to protect our freedom and then came back to build back our economy. There's going to be some kind of change in the generation that's going through this right now. How can we engage that, realizing it's going to happen? There was a change in the generation with 9 11. There's a change with the crash, the 2008, 2009 economy crash. How is this going to change our culture and our society? How can we engage it now to have it make us better people, better individuals, better, better connected? Those are things we'll be talking about in between the news. Okay. Of course I'm a medical doctor. That's my. I'm a clinical researcher. I have three different practices, which two are not really doing a whole lot right now. But the point is that how can we engage those around us and become more human? And if that resonates with you, awesome. I'll be talking about that between news updates. I've been talking that between some of the numbers updates and Q and A sessions, so hopefully I can give you all some actionable, useful information. I'm getting to the 15 minute mark, so I'll stop there. But have a great day. Stay safe, stay well, and hopefully we'll see you all tomorrow at the Q and A session and if not, later on. But find reliable information. And for some people this means just disconnecting and just maybe step away for the weekend and just have a time to kind of gather yourself. So take care and we'll talk to you soon.