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This article is part of a series on free healthcare tools that you can use to increase your well-being, your resilience, and your ability to recover from life’s challenges.

 

In our society today many unhealthy behaviors have become completely normalized. It is not strange to eat fast food every day, to experience anger or fear more than just occasionally, or to sacrifice sleep to try to be more productive (see a larger list below). If we don’t think about it and simply do the conventional things that are advertised to us and considered “normal,” we run the high risk of having “normal” health too: being stressed out or depressed, sick often, and fatigued; having heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and/or digestive issues; weighing more than we want; etc. If we want to achieve vibrant health, we need to start questioning what is normal. How do we feel as we go through life? Can we start looking after ourselves and our well-being with more care? While doctors, health coaches, nutritional specialists, and other practitioners can help support us, the ultimate accountability for our own health lies within each of us individually. We suffer from lifestyle-based health issues and we have the power to change our lifestyle! I like Paul Chek’s simple definition of “health:” taking responsibility for oneself.

 

Our bodies are actually extremely strong and resilient if we let them be. Our natural state is vibrant health. Unfortunately in today’s society we are bombarded with forces that lead us away from, rather than toward, our natural state of health. But if we get rid of just a few of these forces – and better yet crowd them out with some simple nourishing tools that I’ll explain in this series – then our health will be able to shine through!

 

Luckily, taking care of ourselves does not necessarily need to involve restrictive diets, expensive supplement regimens, and spending hours upon hours exercising every week. There are actually a lot of steps we can take to support our health that do not cost any money! These include sleep, sun exposure, exercise and movement, breathing, fasting, forest bathing, meditation, grounding, cold exposure, laughing, and much more.

 

You might be wondering why someone with training in nutrition is writing about all these other non-food “nutrients” we need for health. Well, it turns out that chronic stress trumps diet. We can eat the best quality foods, but if we are stressed out all the time we aren’t going to be digesting very well, we are going to have excess inflammation despite eating anti-inflammatory foods, and we can still experience health problems. Most of these tools will reduce the amount of chronic stress we experience in our lives so that we can we get the full benefit of a delicious and nutritious diet. In the first part of this series, let’s go into more detail about sleep.

 

Sleep

Getting enough good quality sleep is essential for health. It is a time for rest and rejuvenation, brain cleaning, immune enhancement, and dreaming! (And much more…) Getting less than 6 hours a night on a regular basis increases your risk of cancer, messes up your blood sugar, makes you more susceptible to poor food choices, is bad for your heart and brain, and in general is a complete drag. Sleep requirements and timing are somewhat individual characteristics, but most everyone needs at least seven hours of good sleep a night. Your optimal sleep schedule can be more individualized. Dr. Michael Breus came up with the following four sleep chronotypes and you can find out which category you align with the most using his questionnaire.

• Bear – most common, tends to follow the sun, able to work well within normal office hours and also can socialize in the evening
• Lion – the early bird, most productive in morning, has a harder time with later evening socialization
• Wolf – the night owl, most productive later in the day and evening, has a hard time waking up early in the morning
• Dolphin – the insomniac, has trouble sleeping, racing mind

 

Your optimal sleep schedule can also change depending on your age. Children and teenagers tend to need more sleep and to sleep later than adults, which is why it is a travesty (and biologically inappropriate) to make kids go to school and expect them to learn any earlier than about 8:30am!

 

If you are having trouble sleeping, try the following tips for improving your sleep hygiene before resorting to sleeping pills (which unfortunately tend to only produce a sleep-like state and not the deep sleep important for healing and immune enhancement). In addition to strategies that have helped me to sleep better, this list draws from SuperWellness by Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan, Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker, and this MedlinePlus article.

• Get enough sunlight exposure during the morning and throughout the day (an hour or more if you are having sleep problems) by being outside as much as possible. Even overcast days send the proper signals to your body. Then at night, turn down the lights an hour before bed (and/or wear blue-blocking glasses or use apps like f.lux).
• Stick to a sleep schedule and go to bed and get up at the same times every day (even weekends!) It is preferable to get a few hours of sleep in before midnight to maximize deep sleep, although we each have our unique chronotype.
• Avoid caffeine (especially later in the day) and nicotine. Caffeine has a half-life in your body of around 6 hours and as Dr. Walker says, drinking a cup of coffee at 4:00pm is the same as chugging a half cup of coffee at 10:00pm and then expecting to go to sleep without problem!
• Avoid alcohol before bed, since it tends to rob you of REM sleep, impair your breathing, and cause disruptive excessive urination.
• Exercise regularly but not too close to bedtime.
• Don’t eat a large meal too close to bedtime. Ideally you should stop eating three or more hours before you go to sleep.
• Investigate if any prescription drugs you are taking might disrupt your sleep.
• Avoid napping after 3:00pm.
• Relax before bedtime – meditate, listen to calming music, read, but for God’s sake don’t check your email one last time – it can wait! 4-7-8 breathing is a great way to relax – breath in for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, breath out over 8 seconds, and repeat this pattern for several minutes.
• Take a hot bath/shower before bed. The cooling of your body after you get out can help induce sleepiness. Also, keep your bedroom at a cooler temperature if possible.
• Make sure your bedroom is very dark and free of any electronics and anything else that could distract you from sleep. Unplug your wi-fi router if possible and turn your phone off or to airplane mode. Sleeping in complete darkness (using a face mask if necessary) makes sure you are getting all the benefits from melatonin production as possible. These include boosting immunity, lowering inflammation, reducing cancer risk, protecting your neurons, preventing cardiovascular events and type 2 diabetes, and relieving heartburn/GERD symptoms.
• Don’t lie in bed awake for hours. If you can’t sleep, get up and do something relaxing until you get sleepy. This helps to avoid setting up an association between being in bed and not being able to sleep. Just be careful not to expose yourself to any bright lights or electronic screens, since this can lower beneficial melatonin production.

 

Sleep is one part of the many rhythms of life. It syncs up with the day and night rhythms of the sun. Getting natural sunlight exposure in the morning and throughout the day not only tells your body that it is time to be awake and productive, but is critically important for your sleep later that night when the sun goes down. Indoor lighting doesn’t quite cut it – you need the real thing, the sun! (One second-best option to look into if needed is a sunrise alarm clock that uses a full spectrum light bulb to simulate the sunrise in your bedroom to wake you up gently.) And sleeping in complete darkness tells your body it is time to rest, regenerate, and recover from the stresses of the day. I wish you restful and satisfying sleep. Sweet dreams!

 

 

 

List of Normalized Unhealthy Behaviors (too many of these in combination will go against your health!)

• eating huge amounts of processed junk food and drinking huge amounts of soda(pop)
• wearing thick rubber-soled shoes at all times when outdoors
• driving to work every day
• staying out of the sun at all times
• regularly sacrificing sleep to get more done
• eating and snacking at all hours of the day and night
• using air conditioning and heating to continuously maintain comfortable environments within a narrow temperature range regardless of the outside weather
• being serious all the time
• watching a lot of TV every day
• always hiring people to do our hard labor for us
• constantly judging or hating people that have different opinions than we do
• using harsh chemicals to “solve” countless “problems”
• drinking alcoholic beverages often
• using coffee to get going every morning
• spending most of our living time inside rectangular cuboid enclosures
• washing our bodies every day with strong, oil-stripping soaps and shampoos
• breathing through our mouths a lot
• being connected to email and texts through constant smartphone use
• looking at screens incessantly
• habitually suppressing our emotions and our creativity
• bathing in non-native electromagnetic fields 24 hours a day
• taking antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals at the drop of a hat
• giving birth in hospitals

The idea that we need a vaccine in order to get back to normal has been repeated so many times lately that people are starting to accept it as the truth [1]. But there are many problems with relying on a hypothetical vaccine to allow us to continue our culture. For one, it does not exist yet. And a safe and effective vaccine may never exist. Past coronavirus vaccine attempts have failed to make it to market because of serious safety issues [2]. The new type of vaccine technology used by some vaccine developers, mRNA and DNA, has never been proven safe or effective enough to be used in human vaccines. The virus may mutate too much – like annual influenza viruses – for a vaccine to ever be sufficiently effective [3]. Enough people to create “herd immunity” may refuse to take the vaccine once it is developed [4] due to legitimate concerns over rushed and insufficient safety testing (i.e. starting human trials before animal studies are complete) [5] and/or the lack of legal recourse in the event the vaccine causes an injury (see the PREP Act) [6].

 

And then there is the logic problem. Despite scaremongering from the mainstream media, current data shows that only a small minority of people with preexisting health problems will have negative outcomes from the virus [7]. Using the current best data, the CDC estimates the symptomatic case fatality rate (CFR) to be 0.4% (which does not include the estimated 35% of people with asymptomatic cases which would bring the CFR to below 0.3%) [8]. This is higher than the estimated seasonal influenza CFR of 0.1%, but well below initial estimates of 3.4% by the WHO in March. The large majority of people that contract the virus will either not have any symptoms or survive with mild to moderate symptoms [9]. I do not see the logic in spending billions of dollars to develop a vaccine designed for all humans to take – one that, if indeed taken by the majority of the world, will create hundreds of billions in profit for pharmaceutical companies – when only a small minority is negatively impacted by the virus. Shouldn’t we focus our attention on helping that small minority, virtually all of which have one or more preexisting health conditions that weakens their immune system? [10] Shouldn’t we focus on helping that minority improve their health, their resilience, and thus their immune systems? Shouldn’t we spend billions on targeted treatments and recommendations instead of a one-size-fits-all approach?

 

Logically, I think we should start with the basics of human health: air, food, water, stress, movement, sleep, nature, sunlight, social support. Our health authorities, politicians, and media outlets either do not notice or do not acknowledge the fact that places with higher death counts – Wuhan, northern Italy, New York City – do not have clean air for residents to breath. And this has been a huge problem prior to the pandemic – our leaders don’t seem to know or care that pollution kills close to 10 million people every year [11]. They do not emphasize the fact that the vast majority of those dying of COVID-19 have other serious health conditions – obesity, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes – that are directly related to diet and lifestyle factors that we can help each other change. They do not highlight the emerging science about preexisting nutritional status such as low vitamin D levels – resulting mostly from being indoors away from the sun – being correlated with more severe outcomes from the virus [12]. And they forget that humans are social creatures that need to feel at peace, creatively satisfied, and intellectually fulfilled for their immune systems to work best [13].

 

We need to abandon the militaristic paradigm of the world as a war between humans and pathogenic microbes from nature that we must eradicate. Granted, this paradigm has been hugely successful (at making money) for a small number of pharmaceutical companies and their leaders that offer “solutions” to health problems that do not actually cure disease but create drug customers for life. But it has not bettered our health. In fact, our health is deteriorating fast as we spend more and more on healthcare (drugs) and get sicker and sicker [14]. Living in an environment devoid of all microbes is not only impossible, but it is probably highly lethal [15]. Our genetics expect an environment teeming with microbes. I suspect that – like astronauts losing bone mass due to low gravity – our immune systems wither in an overly sanitized environment. In my view, germs are not the main problem. Rather, disease is caused by an imbalance in one’s being or an insult on the body by pollution or toxins from the environment. If germs were the sole cause of disease, everyone who tested positive would be sick with the same symptoms. But there are asymptomatic COVID-19 cases over a third of the time. And there is a range of manifestations from mild to severe for the people that do show symptoms. The idea that one virus causes one disease just does not make sense. Also, fear of an invisible virus tends to encourage anti-human behaviour, like distrusting other people in your community [16], wearing masks that may reduce blood oxygen as well as hamper highly important nonverbal communication [17], not gathering together to sing [18], and staying isolated indoors [19]. Therefore we need to focus on strength and health as our main concern during this time.

 

The best way forward, in my opinion, is to shed the fear and to realize that we humans have the potential to be incredibly resilient. As long as we provide ourselves with the basic, foundational health requirements, our immune systems can rise to the task. Health does not come through a needle that costs billions to develop and expects more in remuneration. Health simply requires that we provide our bodies with the environment that our genetics expect. We need to eat fresh, uncontaminated, nutrient-dense food. We need to drink clean, life-promoting water. We need to breathe fresh air free from pollution. We need to feel at peace, unburdened by chronic stress. We need to fulfill our potentials and move our bodies, spend time in nature and sunlight, and sleep soundly. And we need to feel love, gratitude, and caring for other human beings.

 

Will you join me in helping ourselves and those around us in prioritizing our health?

 

Leave a note in the comments if you feel like it. Do you agree or disagree? What are you doing to be proactive about your health and wellness?

Notes:

[1] Bill Gates has been especially vocal in perpetuating this idea. He said in an April 9 CNBC interview, “We’re gonna have this intermediate period of opening up, and it won’t be normal until we get an amazing vaccine to the entire world.” He is understandably biased towards vaccines as the best solution to many of the world’s problems because he contributes billions of dollars towards their development. For a thorough exploration of Bill Gates’ influence on world health and mainstream news, see the excellent Corbett Report videos How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health and Bill Gates’ Plan to Vaccinate the World.

 

[2] Peter Hotez, vaccinologist and usual defender of vaccines, testified about these safety issues to the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Hearing on Coronavirus on March 5: “One of the things we are not hearing a lot about is potential safety problems of coronavirus vaccines. This was first found in the 1960s with Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccines done in Washington with the  NIH and Children’s National Medical Center. Some of those kids who got the vaccine actually did worse, and I believe there were two deaths as a consequence of that study. Because what happens with certain types of respiratory virus vaccines, you get immunized and then when you get actually exposed to the virus you get this kind of paradoxical immune enhancement phenomenon and what—and we don’t entirely understand the basis of it. But we recognize that it’s a real problem for certain respiratory virus vaccines. … But when we started developing coronavirus vaccines—and our colleagues—we noticed in laboratory animals that they started to show some of the same immune pathology that resembled what had happened 50 years earlier.”

 

[3] In the Nature article entitled Don’t rush to deploy COVID-19 vaccines and drugs without sufficient safety guarantees author Shibo Jiang writes “The virus behind COVID-19 might well mutate in ways that would make previously effective vaccines and antivirals useless.”

 

[4] MSN article: Data Point: 23 percent say they won’t get a COVID-19 vaccine

 

[5] From a STAT article Researchers rush to test coronavirus vaccine in people without knowing how well it works in animals: “As they race to test an experimental coronavirus vaccine, researchers aren’t waiting to see how well it prevents infection in animals before trying it in people, breaking from the usual protocol.”

 

[6] In a March 17 notice from the Department of Health and Human Services entitled Declaration Under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act for Medical Countermeasures Against COVID–19, under Section VI: Covered Countermeasures it defines what types of countermeasures are declared free from liability: “Covered Countermeasures are any antiviral, any other drug, any biologic, any diagnostic, any other device, or any vaccine, used to treat, diagnose, cure, prevent, or mitigate COVID–19…”

 

[7] For example, from the preprint article Population-level COVID-19 mortality risk for non-elderly individuals overall and for non-elderly individuals without underlying diseases in pandemic epicenters: “People <65 years old have very small risks of COVID-19 death even in pandemic epicenters and deaths for people <65 years without underlying predisposing conditions are remarkably uncommon. Strategies focusing specifically on protecting high-risk elderly individuals should be considered in managing the pandemic.” And from a Bloomberg article Italy Says 96% of Virus Fatalities Suffered From Other Illnesses: “The most recent ISS weekly study, based on a sample of about 10% of fatalities until May 21, also showed that just 124 victims, or 4.1% of the total, had no previous pathology. Almost 60% of victims suffered from at least three prior illnesses and about a fifth had two conditions. More than 68% had high blood pressure, about 30% had diabetes and 28% suffered from heart disease, according to the report.”

 

[8] COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios from May 20. Their best case scenario puts the CFR even lower at 0.2%.

 

[9] Coronavirus: 81% of cases are ‘mild,’ study says

 

[10] A study from the JAMA Network entitled Clinical Characteristics, Comorbidities, and Outcomes Among Patients With COVID-19 Hospitalized in the NYC Area reported that about 88% of those hospitalized for COVID-19 had more 2 or more comorbidities like obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.

 

[11] See these studies linking air pollution to COVID-19 mortality: A national study on long-term exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States and Assessing nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels as a contributing factor to coronavirus (COVID-19) fatality. And about the global pollution problem in general, see the The Lancet Commission on pollution and health which shockingly reports: “Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today. Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015—16% of all deaths worldwide—three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence. In the most severely affected countries, pollution-related disease is responsible for more than one death in four. Pollution disproportionately kills the poor and the vulnerable. Nearly 92% of pollution-related deaths occur in low-income and middle-income countries and, in countries at every income level, disease caused by pollution is most prevalent among minorities and the marginalised. Children are at high risk of pollution-related disease and even extremely low-dose exposures to pollutants during windows of vulnerability in utero and in early infancy can result in disease, disability, and death in childhood and across their lifespan.” [emphasis added]

 

[12] For example, the preprint study Vitamin D deficiency as risk factor for severe COVID-19: a convergence of two pandemics concludes that “vitamin D deficiency is a prevalent risk factor for severe COVID-19.”

 

[13] From the National Institute on Aging: Social isolation, loneliness in older people pose health risks 

 

[14] See this article from the Harvard Health Policy Review: Increasing Mortality and Declining Health Status in the USA: Where is Public Health? Also see the 2000 commentary by Barbara Starfield entitled Is US Health Really the Best in the World? which estimates 225,000 annual deaths caused unintentionally by the practice of medicine (including 12,000 deaths per year from unnecessary surgery, 7,000 deaths per year from medication errors in hospitals, 20,000 deaths per year from other errors in hospitals, 80,000 deaths per year from hospital-acquired infections, and 106,000 deaths per year from adverse effects of properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs). Another report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices calculated that in 2011 prescription drugs were associated with two to four million people in the US experiencing “serious, disabling, or fatal injuries,” including 128,000 deaths and that prescribed medicines are “one of the most significant perils to human health resulting from human activity.”

 

[15] Life in a World without Microbes: “In short, we argue that humans could get by without microbes just fine, for a few days. Although the quality of life on this planet would become incomprehensibly bad, life as an entity would endure.”

 

[16] An extreme example of distrust and fear of others who may be harboring disease from PennLive: Shots fired at Pa. Sheetz after man coughs, doesn’t cover mouth amid coronavirus epidemic: report

 

[17] For some of the issues with wearing masks, see Masks Don’t Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy by Denis Rancourt, PhD, and Preliminary Report on Surgical Mask Induced Deoxygenation During Major Surgery by Beder, et al. Also, facial expression is a very important part of nonverbal communication. See Role of facial expressions in social interactions.

 

[18] See an article reviewing a National Association of Teachers of Singing presentation: NATS Panel of Experts Lays Out Sobering Future for Singers: “No Vaccine, No Safe Public Singing” in which author Zach Finkelstein writes, “In a presentation that sent shockwaves through the singing community, Dr. Lucinda Halstead, the president of the Performing Arts Medical Association and the Medical Director of the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of South Carolina, concluded that there is no safe way for singers to rehearse together until there is a COVID-19 vaccine and a 95% effective treatment in place, in her estimates at least 18-24 months away.” I assume that this presentation was working with the estimation of a much higher case fatality rate than the latest CDC number of 0.4%. Also, keep in mind that there is scientific precedence that singing increases immune function: Recreational music-making modulates natural killer cell activity, cytokines, and mood states in corporate employees.

 

[19] See [13] above.