Don't You Know There's A War On?

'What did you do in the war Daddy?
'I shopped our neighbours on social media for having a glass of wine with a friend on their balcony son.'

We are at war it seems.
Which brings out both the best and the worst in people.
We are told we're all in it together. But actually we have to stay apart.

The enemy is invisible. We are told we need to hide from it.

No one seems to know a lot about this invisible enemy. Is it a killer or can an individual recover with just a few restive days in a handy Scottish castle? Are those it kills just about to die from other causes (aka Eddie Large in the final stages of heart disease)? Do the small percentage of apparently healthy victims have underlying health issues they didn't know about? It's odd that their healthy status seems to be declared on the same day as the death rate for that day, which wouldn't allow time for a full post mortem.
Anyone recall that months after David Frost died, his apparently healthy 31 year old son collapsed and died while running a marathon of an undiagnosed heart condition? My own family suffered the tragic loss of an apparently fit and healthy 10 year old niece the same year, who collapsed and died while warming up on a sports field one Saturday, another hidden heart condition.

Even the means of contraction is argued over with no clear information on whether it is airborne or otherwise.

As for the advice on staying safe, that just seems to concern 'social distancing' and personal protection equipment, not solid commonsense advice on what we can do to boost our own immune systems by optimising our nutrition and lifestyle or what else we should be cleaning apart from our hands. Would a daily temperature check before leaving the house be just as useful as locking a whole country down?

How many die in hospital? How many die at home? Hospitals in themselves are dangerous places and known to generate more than 20,000 UK deaths a year from hospital-acquired infections including sepsis. It doesn't help that most hospitals have sealed windows nowadays, forcing all staff and patients to inhale the same recycled air circulated via air handling units, which may or may not be serviced on a regular basis, and use outsourced cleaning and maintenance, over which they have less control and accountability. Many staff also arrive and go home in uniform kit which potentially transports germs in and out of the hospital.

All we know for sure is that we are dealing with germ warfare, but is it natural or was it created in a laboratory? The means certainly exist and the use of germ warfare has been both possible and, at various times and in various conflicts, employed since WWI. We also know that sometimes natural viruses come along or mutate from more harmless ones, hence the caution against prescribing too many antibiotics, so they still work when we really need them to.

They say the first victim of any war is truth. But what is truth anymore?
Fake news is everywhere. But the 'fake' label seems to exclude sponsored news, news owned by media goliaths or news angled to further political agendas, if not conspiracy ones. There's no such thing as news without spin any more. Even the timing of the Queen's special speech was apparently carefully timed to be neither too early nor too late in the crisis.

Perhaps follow the money is the best advice that can be given in any crisis. It is clear that many millions will financially lose in this situation (largely the middle and working classes, who are likely to be squeezed past breaking point in many cases), but who will gain? Who gained from the last (conventional) war when Iraq needed re-building and large contracts were ripe for the picking?

Meanwhile;
'Put that light out!' was the cry all over the land in WWII.
'Put that human freedom out!' could well be the cry for this war, if we are not careful.

Ah well, at least I've stocked up on my bread and circuses for the week. Now for my prescribed hour's exercise on a deserted bit of shoreline.

Four Vitamin B12 Tablets A Day Keep The Grey Away!

Not that red hair goes grey as such. It fades and fades to strawberry blonde, ash blonde and then white.

Mine was beginning to fade at a rate of knots. Then I read that Vitamin B12 was good for hair. I took a couple of tablets a day for six months and noticed my hair was getting darker. I upped it to four a day (like Vitamin C, you cannot overdose on Vitamin B12 as the body exudes what it doesn't need). Now a year later my hair is back to the shade it was when I was a teenager. With the help of Silica and Biotin vitamins, it is growing stronger and thicker again too.

I am not on any sort of retainer from a vitamin supplier for sharing this with you. I merely share it because I am a nice person who likes to share what I find helpful. Similarly I find that Kelp tablets are good for regulating hormones (we have a dire shortage of Iodine in the modern western diet), Iron tablets give me nice rosy lips and enhanced circulation, Vitamin C shortens colds and hastens healing.

Vitamin B complex helps prevent ladies' troubles, Zinc, men's. Biotin can help non-insulin dependent diabetics from deteriorating to injectable diabetes. Vitamin D is good for depression. And bone strength.

All this is from friends' anecdotal evidence as well as personal experience, so of course it counts for nothing in provable terms.

Then again there will never be any in-depth medical research carried out on vitamins as it is impossible to patent them so drug companies are never going to spend millions on food supplements that they cannot own and profit from. Though they obviously perceived vitamins as enough of a potential threat to drug sales to try and get the EU to ban them for public sale more than once and I have signed a slew of petitions against this outrageous infringement of consumer freedom over the years.

Rather it is up to each of us to be our own guinea pigs to see what helps our own body to function at optimum level and what doesn't. And really, unless you are determined to overdose on a substance to a ridiculous degree, you can easily decrease a vitamin dosage if you notice any adverse effects. Indeed there is less risk of side-effects than there is with pharmaceutical drugs, not all of which obey the doctors' Hippocratic oath of 'First, do no harm.' Which isn't to say pharmaceutical drugs do not have their place in treatment and healing, obviously.

I once watched a ridiculous TV debate about the Bristol Cancer Centre where one cancer sufferer had overdosed on carrots to the point that she had assumed an orange hue and was blaming the clinic for her own stupidity (or desperation). However much to my surprise no one challenged her as to whether this was her own personal choice or she was actually following the Clinic's guidelines on how many carrots she should eat (clearly not, judging by the way the show seemed weighted against giving the same debate time to those advocating the use of alternatives, no matter that those trying the alternatives had often exhausted conventional options and were at the end of the line, so any improvement would be tantamount to a miracle).

So there is no regulating for common sense whatever people imbibe, which is the only sure means of guaranteeing safety.

However with natural vitamin content in our food having declined by 45% since WWII owing to intensive and unnatural farming methods, supplements have become an essential item for many of us, no matter how healthily we try to eat. Simultaneously as we age our bodies synthesise what vitamins we consume less effectively meaning we can become even more deficient. For example many men no longer absorb enough zinc to keep their prostate healthy so may need to take a supplement to help. In old age the individual's diet may also narrow in variety which means there are increasing numbers of false/positive tests for dementia when actually the individual is vitamin-deprived.

Personally I am mystified as to why so much attention is devoted to calorific and fat intake when vitamins and minerals are at least as important, yet their levels are seldom listed on foodstuff labels. Indeed if one eats food of low vitamin/mineral content, that is the very time the body creates an artificial hunger to induce one to eat more to compensate. I therefore maintain that if all food were of high vitamin/mineral content and food value, we would automatically eat less of it, so there would be no need for diet foods (not all of which are of high nutritional value, even if they are low-fat).

On a final note, if you want to try the Vitamin B12 as an experiment for yourself, do let me know how you get on. I'd be fascinated to know it if works for you as well. Let's conduct a mass experiment (for humans on humans) here.