Sunlight Causes Skin Cancer!
Vitamin D Deficiency Epidemic Hits the Nation!
Fish Oil Prevents Heart Attacks!
Fish Oil Causes Prostate Cancer!
Every day, news stories warn us of the latest danger… whether it’s real or not.
During an email discussion with our senior health editor, Brad Lemley, about the pitfalls of stumbling through health-related headlines, I sent him this quote:
“Nine times out of 10, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered.”
— H.L. Mencken
Maybe I’ve been living here too long, but the more I look through studies that contradict each other, the more this wisdom by a former Baltimore local rings through my head.
Here’s the thing: It’s easy to blame reporters, whose top concern is an eye-grabbing headline.
But the supposedly objective studies they reference can actually be just as biased.
More evidence of this hit our inboxes when Dave Gonigam, editor of our flagship newsletter The 5 Min. Forecast, sent us a disturbing article. It highlighted this quote:
“The case against science is straightforward: Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
One might be tempted to think these are the grumblings of some disgruntled holistic hippie healer. But they were penned by Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of The Lancet, one of the most respected health journals on Earth… the kind your own doctor learns from.
And the consequences of this turn toward darkness can often be deadly. A few months ago, Spy Briefing Today’s tireless editor Chris Campbell detailed how the FDA and one of the most massive pharmaceutical companies on the planet lied about a flu drug’s dangers and put millions at risk for possibly suicide-inducing hallucinations for no good. (Gee, don’t you just love that government oversight and regulation? Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, right?)
So if you can’t trust the media… or the government… or the companies making the drugs… what do you do?
That was a tough question we faced when we formed Living Well, Spy Briefing’s nutritional supplement branch. Part of our answer was bringing Brad Lemley on board. With almost four decades of investigative journalism under his belt, he’s waded knee deep through slimy lies from both the public and private sectors.
Discovering the truth wasn’t just a professional mission for him — it became personal. When Brad experimented with diet protocols flying in the face of the government’s party line, he dropped 30 pounds of fat at the age of 51.
Part of his secret was to study the diets of ancient civilizations. Many mainstream health authorities pooh-pooh this as “unscientific” or somehow beneath the lionized standards of medicine.
I asked Brad about this. Here’s what he said:
“It’s common to regard health remedies used since ancient times — herbs, foods, meditation, acupuncture, etc. — as unscientific. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“First, such remedies have, indeed, often been subject to modern, sophisticated scientific scrutiny, especially in Asia and Europe, where medical research is often funded by universities and independent agencies, rather than drugmakers.
“Those agencies are looking for remedies that work well and are inexpensive. German investigators, in particular, have found that many natural remedies, such as St. John’s wort for depression, fit the bill.
“American researchers, conversely, are often funded by pharmaceutical manufacturers and focus on patentable synthetic molecules that represent high profit potential. They tend to tweak and torture the clinical trials until the most expensive remedy is shown to be ‘best.’
“Second, thousands of years of continuous use of a healing herb or food is the best kind of science. The Chinese, for example, have formally and informally observed the effects of millions of administrations of ginseng for a variety of diseases over the last five centuries. It’s a massive body of evidence showing efficacy and lack of dangerous side effects — if the stuff did not work or was dangerous, it would have been abandoned over four centuries ago.
“I’d like to see Lipitor or Prozac survive that kind of trial.”
When Brad joined our team to form Natural Health Solutions and Living Well, we made sure to honor this standard for our products and formulas.
Yes, we examine the latest in science, but always with a skeptical eye. And we balance that information with what cultures worldwide have been practicing for centuries, if not millennia.
It’s working so far with Enza-Soothe, our formula for relieving joint discomfort, as well as our heart health-enhancing VitaOlive.
And in just a couple weeks, we’ll be releasing something with traditional ingredients used for thousands of years in Japan. Not to give too much away, but I can’t help myself: With this, you’ll never have to worry about sleepless nights again.
Until then,
Nate Rifkin
Underground Health Researcher
