Episode 020 - Clarity on COVID-19, avoidance, prevention, treatment and more

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Seekardo podcast.

We’ve got an extra, extra special episode today because we are super excited about hitting the milestone and that is we’ve now received over 4,000 downloads as we get to episode 20.

Just by luck or serendipity, we have the first episode as episode 20 where we will be joined by guests and we have two amazing people with us today and actually quite timely guests and quite a timely conversation based on what’s going on.

So Ro hi and I’ll allow you to welcome these guests as you know them personally as well.

Thanks Harms, hi everybody, thanks for listening.

We are unbelievably pumped; we made a decision that we wanted to start bringing some guests onto the podcast and we had to think very carefully across all the people that I know and Harminder knows. I think the decision was that we know that we’re driven more than anything else by the need to make sure that we live a healthy and vibrant and spiritually balanced life.

It is very much about the focus on what we do here on GrowthTribes. So there’s really only two people I can bring to the table that we felt would fill that space and that could actually give you some incredible value.

That’s are two guests today and that is Dr Rob Verkerk and Melanie Aldridge. Two people I’ve known for some time now hi both for joining me. Thanks a lot for coming onto the Seekardo can you hear me okay?

Hi Ro, we can hear you perfectly, thank you. It’s a privilege to be on here by the way.

This is an unusual circumstance we’re all recorded in different locations. We can’t see each other because bandwidths are a little bit upside down at the moment on the Internet.

And self-isolation.

Yes, we are socially isolated and digitally connected and connected in lots of other ways as well.

I’ll introduce both of them in just a moment. Rob and Mel are here really to represent a much bigger message than I think very few people can get across in this current global climate and they’re both here representing the alliance of natural health. I’m going to use ANH, alliance of national health. Can I just use ANH, is that okay as we talk through this?

Absolutely.

I think it’s important for those listening to understand actually what ANH is about. I think Harminder is going to tackle that. But before we do that, I’d like to talk into the space and get a little bit more understanding about Rob and Mel, so that those of you listening get a really strong sense of who they are as people.

We are in genuinely an unprecedented time in history. I sat with my daughter today who is 11 and had that very same conversation again with her today and explained to her that in years to come we are going to look back at this moment in time as a defining time.

I think it’s how people respond to the circumstances that are going on around us that will define who they become through that, and trying to explain that a little 11 year old brain and saying to her that it’s not what happens to you that makes a difference in who become it’s actually how you react to it that defines who you become in the future.

I think a lot of that is about the message of health, vitality, how we can support our immune system and tonight is very much about that. Both Rob and Mel are absolutely out there leading this field in so many different ways.

So thank you both for coming on, I’m going to give an introduction to the two of you first then I’m going to step back.

I’m used to being quite a strong voice on this so it’s nice for me to step back and if it’s okay with you because I’ve known you for so long as well, we are going to do this as a bit of a fireside chat. Those of you listening you’ll hear us talking, maybe interrupting, there’s passion, there’s enthusiasm jumping into add lots of different things. Having been around these two before Harminder knows, I can talk, but trust me when I’m in the presence of Rob and Mel, I shut up.

They ooze with passion; knowledge and we are talking about a combined experience here of almost 60 years in the field. It is very unusual to have two people with that much knowledge with that much passion and the ability to articulate it. I’ve been around a lot of very educated people who can’t articulate it but the two of you just have that passion.

Dr Rob Verkerk when I first met him I one of the first things that caught me with this kind of steely glint in his eye, Mel is probably laughing when I say that, but he’s got this youthful passion, albeit I believe we’re knocking on the door of 60 this year Rob, is that correct?

Correct.

But you have the soul of a 30-year-old maybe even younger.

I feel like a 12-year-old most of the time.

I’m looking at Rob’s picture on Skype here and that is not a 60-year-old, that is certainly somebody in their mid-30s. Put it this way the last time I saw them they were cycling off into the sunset with an Olympic Paralympian cyclists Jaco Van Gass. He’s actually been nominated to go off to Japan, which is amazing hopefully this will go ahead, but they were literally just shooting off to do some incredible cycling together, the three of them. So the both of them keep their energy incredibly high with what they’re going to talk about tonight as well.

Rob’s background I’m going to just read some notes for you all so that you understand a little bit about this for both of them. Internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary sustainability scientist. Have I got that right?

You’ve got it right.

That’s a subject I think would be good to get you to expand on that. I know when I first talked to you that fascinated me as to how far back you’ve gone on this journey. There’s a lot of people on it now you’ve been doing it for three, nearly four decades. 35-year background in environmental, agricultural, food, nutrition, health sciences, which for a lot of people might think okay well, this is just an academic.

Actually no, Rob’s worked both in the academic field, commercial field, non-for-profit sector and because of that his credibility has risen.

Often when somebody is an academic a lot of people go yeah but you’re just an academic. He has crossed that boundary, which I think certainly when I met him stood out massively. He is also a fellow of the American College of nutrition and the founder of the alliance of natural health.

I think when you hear him talk just be appreciative of this is a man that’s been interviewed in various media spaces. I think you’ve got over 60 papers in different journals, is that correct?

Yes.

That’s quite a profound thing to do and I’ve got I think 10 from my background in my PhD, 60 is just another level.

I was postop for seven years and you’ve got to keep pumping them out and I was going to commit my whole life to academia until I realised there’s something wrong with the direction we’re going in and then I flipped to the non-profits. My publication rate has been slower in that space but it has massively increased in other areas.

Yeah, I think that’s the point that and when I look back at Rob and when I first met him I started to look at his publications is they’re spread. A lot of people you’ll see especially academically like myself, you look at my publications in my field, they were just in one area when I was in that particular period. But you’ve maintained that throughout and that to me is about having a lifelong commitment to a vision.

Mel said the other day, Rob the difference in the way that you write these days, compared with 18 years ago is that people can actually understand what you’re writing.

That’s brilliant. Even the likes of Harminder who is a young millennial.

No scientific language whatsoever and I must admit, when I read the blogs in research and preparation for the podcast I had to read the blogs about three times for it to digest. So I’m very excited for this conversation.

Let’s flip to Mel you know what is lovely is this male-female dynamic.

Mel Aldridge, when I met Mel I wasn’t quite sure how this was going to work when I first met her. But she’s got this lovely energy that she comes into the room and Mel arrives into the room before Mel arrives in the room. I think Ro knows what I’m talking about there. There’s this kind of aura that she brings with her.

I think Mel because of your huge belief in the spiritual healing each of us carries as well I think the fact you crossed that over into what you do in a practising way is very unusual and very rarely do you get somebody that has that balance between science and the spiritual healing that goes on around all of us. The fact you can communicate in a way that makes sense that’s a gift. I want to complement you on that.

Your background, you’ve literally immersed yourself in the field of integrative medicine for close to 30 years and this is going to be a mouthful for me but I’m going to say it, you’re a practising clinical psychoneuroimmunologist. Do you want to just explain what that is just briefly and for anyone that hasn’t seen the word just go look it up but it is a heck of a work.

Just explain in a nutshell for somebody listening thinking what does that mean.

Okay so people are used to hearing a lot about functional medicine but psychoneuroimmunologist started out as being a much more drier investigative and academic research science.

When researchers started to look at the connections between our immune system, our whole neurology and the way our mind actually functions within all of this and then it’s grown and grown in interest because there’s an awful lot of evolutionary biology in this. For know how we developed and came out of the primordial soup. This complex hierarchy of systems, cells and organs now makes up we are as human beings.

I’m trying to remember how many years ago it was now, the feeling is it’s recently within the last 10 years. A Dutch group have actually taken this and turned it into practical applications for clinicians, so there’s actually very few of us around.

There are quite a few academic psychoneuroimmunologists, but there are not very many clinical psychoneuroimmunologists who are actually taking this pathway medicine and using diet and lifestyle modifications to bring change and to rebalance somebody’s body again.

We say that it’s a lot of soft skills encased in very hard science using pathway medicine to actually allow the body to bring itself back into balance and into homeostasis again and bring healing back. We use evolutionary biology and how that informs us to be able to do that and, quite literally, you realise how miraculous the body is.

Even the term evolutionary biology could be a subject for a one-hour conversation. I remember the last time I saw you we talked about this. I’ve written it down because it might be that we come back and revisit that. You’re also a functional medicine practitioner, certified metabolic balance coach, explain that because that’s another, you don’t hear that term very often. What’s a metabolic balance coach?

That is actually a practice that originated from Germany and there was a doctor there who unfortunately passed away. He pioneered away being able to rebalance the metabolism and obviously, you will be aware and many of your listeners will be aware that what is the basis of so much chronic disease these days is actually metabolic dysfunction. We see that in type two diabetes, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, obesity and cancer and all chronic diseases. They have a core of metabolic dysfunction and.

So what this doctor actually uncovered was away of being able to use food and the timing of food. He was so before his time and it was before intermittent fasting. It was before anybody knew about keto before any of these things and then he developed a way of able to use somebody’s own personal blood tests, to inform the type of nutrients that they needed. Actually it’s a pretty keto although it’s low fat in the beginning you reduce it. It’s low-carb and you do a lot of intermittent fasting.

I am passionate about it because it healed me and my own autoimmune condition that I’ve been struggling with most of my life.

My own journey has been an amazing journey being led by my body into different places in order to bring healing and the metabolic balance led into the psychoneuroimmunology because even the people teaching the metabolic balance couldn’t actually explain why it worked. And yet when I started my we call it CPI for short, which is a lot easier. So I started that and I started learning it was like all the lights turned on and I suddenly understood why metabolic balance actually worked. And you know, everything comes full circle.

I think at some point it would be quite good for us to maybe take a look back into your story, you talked about what happened with you there. I’ve made a note maybe if you can share that a little bit later if that’s okay.

Also you lectured I believe it was Saint Mary’s College for 11 years,you’ve got an experience of sharing, sports rehabilitation sharing the message and I guess for you that was a place, a journey in your life where you just wanted to get the message out there prior to then going on working with Rob with ANH.

It was actually quite remarkable because as anyone who meets me knows you are not your standard academic and how I landed up there and I still look and I think the universe is quite remarkable, because if you take the first step and you allow the next one to be revealed in front of you your journey through life is just phenomenal. That’s how I landed up at the university.

I was a practitioner and so I went in as an academic but as a practitioner and the very enlightened programme director for the sports rehabilitation course decided that she really didn’t want her graduates coming out without learning something holistic. She decided she wanted it to be aromatherapy, she wanted to be hands on and she wanted somebody who really understood the alternative and complimentary world and could come in and teach her medical students about client handling skills and people.

So I went in and I really was the token touchy-feely person on the whole team but actually I really loved it and I ended up doing so much in terms of taking care of the students.

I taught numerous things through my 11 years there and I carved out my own niche basically. I meet the students today and I’m so grateful because I was learning and I was on a journey and it was utterly terrifying for me in the beginning but you know, we created this and when I meet past students today they still remember and I think, that’s fantastic. Because I may not have come at it like all the other academics in the team, but yes, I really wanted them to take something away in terms of the human connection because they’re going out to be practitioners working with people and so I was just able to share a little bit of me with the students in those years.

What I love there Rois it’s so counterintuitive to what people try to do, which is being universally guided by the next step.

Just allow the next step to take you rather than the trap that many of us fall into, which is I need to see the entire path, I have to see start to finish before I take this journey on. Whereas Mel’s story there is fascinating because she’s allowed each path to just open up as she’s taken and in this conversation we will discover what that was hopefully start to finish and exciting bits in between.

And what’s incredible about the two of you because I know both your stories, I want to come back to Rob to expand. Both of you have had that almost natural inner compass that is driven you to the point you’re at today just knowing your different stories. To some extent almost Harminder you and I have had the same thing in the journey that we are on and I actually have a personal belief that the current global situation has given everybody a chance to do that.

I think it’s a massive reset button for a lot of people because we are being forced into a situation that most people never have, which is a complete stop everything, reflect, be present in the moment and it’s how we choose to take that moment forward.

I rather like the idea of nature leaving its calling card, I put that in the cover of last week’s newsletter and one lady came back on Facebook and said that’s an outrageous thing to say.

But sometimes people only see things from a human perspective and where I come from is totally, I come from a biological perspective. I’m looking at the big picture, I’m looking at evolution, I’m looking at processors and you know you can just as easily say that the arrival of this coronavirus is incredibly timely. It is reminding people they need to take a pause. They need to rethink.

We have had a very public explanation of the climate change emergency that we are in and yet people barely lift a finger. The minute the human being, one species that is actually causing all the problems on our planet is under threat from something that’s roughly as hazardous as you know, common garden influenza the world stops. that in itself is deeply ironic also there are some many, many positive things that are happening. The degree of connection, the support the communities are giving each other, the time the people are taking out to rethink their lives and how they respond to each other.

I think we will as you were saying to your 11-year-old Ro, I say the same to my six children that it’s a very similar kind of scenario that we will look back at this time and life will never quite be the same.

The landscape has changed now right under out feet.

Exactly.

There is so much value you want to add to that but just briefly Rob take us back to your journey will take us back from start to finish what has brought you to this point.

Let me give you a couple of snapshots growing up in East Africa in the middle of the guerrilla war and my parents were in Mau Mau war in Kenya. Then we moved across to West Africa where there was a guerrilla war between local tribes, seeing bullets flying over your head and not understanding as a white person the conflicts that were going on, but being incredibly strongly connected with the natural environment there with the animals we had. We grew up with about 30 different animals in our house.

I then came to the UK for my education and left for Australia and very quickly connected with aboriginal communities with indigenous communities. That really set the next 10 years of my life on a track because I was in regular communication with the elders. I had a very good ecology degree from the UK and they recognised there weren’t many people in Australia that time who had ecology degrees. These white fellas are really screwing up the land, they do not understand, let alone land rights let alone, how to respect the land and not just treat it as a resource.

I then became very involved with an NGO for the entire 12 years I was there and called the total environment centre and we basically were involved in protecting wilderness areas. We were very involved with chemicals in the environment. We were able to get some significant size grants, we basically helped ban, we were primarily responsible for the banning of multiple pesticides that were causing major environmental problems, both in agriculture and in urban areas.

I then wrote a book about it. I had the cover painted by well-known aboriginal artist and it was written for aboriginal people and I then felt I needed to go back and do the master’s degree that I was meant to have done 11 years earlier. But I ended up having this huge decade-long diversion in Australia.

What was the name of the book Rob?

It was called Building out termites.It turned into something of a textbook and because it was a complete game changer. In fact, this was related to one part of my work which was the fact that some chemical companies were applying very persistent nasty chlorines that were building up in people’s bodies and causing health problems. They were spraying them over the houses every year.

We were very aware that these compounds could have a persistence of 30, 40 years in a single application. So why on earth were they spraying them every year.

We then started measuring with our friends at Sydney University Prof John Pollock, who is a dear friend and mentor, would do all the analysis for us and we would take samples and we discovered that they were scary levels of these compounds in houses. Pregnant women were not being told about it and there was a whole growing community of people who were developing sensitisation, chemical sensitisation from these compounds.

Essentially we use science and campaigning together and basically were able to get rid of those chemicals. In the process once you do that you have to find ways of coming up with a solution and the solution was about not using chemicals at all and essentially adapting your constructions, your buildings to the presence of the termites, hence the name building out termites. It’s called manual socially, environmentally responsible control.

Once I’d done that and then many of the concepts that we had developed over a decade were then put into an Australian standards so the building industry was changed. I wanted to go back to academia I did my master’s degree. I got a distinction for that back at Imperial College and then went back to Australia armed with this very good master’s degree, only to get a request by Imperial saying Rob we love you to come back and do a PhD.

I said guys I’ve got three kids I can’t do a PhD; I need to get paid; I’ve got a family to run. I can’t do that on a studentship. They sad no we’ll give you postdoc contract we really want you.

I then did my PhD in record time; I actually completed my PhD in just over two years.

That was quick.

Just put that into context for me, if that’s record time what’s a typical PhD?

It’s normally about three to four years and in facts there was only one person who had done it before in that time and it was because I had a whole year of fieldwork in Malaysia scheduled and the head of my group said Rob, you know that you have enough data you’ve been so productive, you can submit.

So I did and I got my PhD and I then went out to Malaysia and then essentially went into seven years of postop, hence the papers. But at that point things were getting very interesting, I was doing a lot of work increasingly moving the science into areas that would really make a difference.

We were dealing with the organic cotton system in Uzbekistan behind what was the fourth biggest cotton producing area in the world that produces most of the cotton for Russia.

The agrochemical companies wanted to come in and just get rid of all the organic systems that none of us knew even existed because it was all behind the Iron Curtain and we ended up doing three seasons of work to understand the biological mechanisms that were going on to demonstrate that actually you just needed to do the biological control the nonchemical control naturally.You need to do what the original Russian scientists had tried to do before they lost the resources when Uzbekistan became independent when the Soviet Union broke down in 1991.

I was also doing work in Kenya and Zimbabwe where Mel spent most of her childhood and again dealing with smallholder farmers and trying to get them off the pesticide treadmill in sustainable agriculture. At that point I got offered a permanent position at Imperial, and it was really that juxtaposition a dear friend of mine is still one of my closest friends, gave me the courage when he heard my frustration that if I became a full-time academic then I would have to shrink down some of this game changing, world changing consultancy work I was doing.

I felt like the blinkers were coming around my vision. So I really set up ANH as the work environment and we called it an alliance, so it could be an alliance of like-minded people and organisations to do the rest of my life’s work. That’s why it still has anacademic element but it has got a campaign element, it’s got an educational element. It’s got a change element and that’s why Mel has not left us since she joined us back in 2005.

Amazing and for those listeners at home the ANH part we’ll ask Rob and Mel the question for that in a moment.

Yeah, what’s nice is you’ve brought Mel in there. Mel just bring us up to speed your journey so that we can understand that, it’s good for the listeners because there’s so much information to follow it’s nice to see the both of you and how you got to the same point.

I guess my journey started in Malaysia actually. I was born in Kuala Lumpur where my mum was born in Singapore and my mum’s family had always lived in Malaysia. Although my dad was British but had been brought up in South Africa the minute he graduated as a chartered accountant, he saw a sign saying accountants wanted in Kuala Lumpur.

So he got on a boat and headed over there and then he met my mum and that’s how we landed up out there,but my mum was determined that I wasn’t going to go to boarding school the way she had and so they ended up leaving when I was a fairly small child. They were heading back to South Africa where they were going to set up in Johannesburg. Unfortunately, in the time that my dad had been away apartheid had strung out.

Although people see my picture I look fairly European but I do have some Asian history in me and my mum’s family are Eurasian, even though my mum has a throwback to the Scottish heritage and she was very pale skinned and green eyed. We realised that none of her family will ever be able to come visit us, so we landed up going up to Redija at that stage just to take a holiday and thinking what are we going to do now because all our entire belongings are on the ship on the way to South Africa and we can’t stay there.

That’s how I landed up in Zimbabwe because Redija back then we are talking along time ago now, was the breadbasket of Africa really and it was absolutely beautiful before war broke out. So we decided that we would stay there and of course war broke out and about two years after we had settled. I actually grew up as a child all the way through the Redijan war. A bit like Rob, both in Africa experienced what wartime Africa was like.

I think my international background has given me a very different feel of the world because the world has always felt quite small to me, and I always knew that I was going to end up leaving that Zimbabwe wasn’t going to be it for me.

So as soon as I could I was 20 when I came over to the UK, we still had sanctions and I arrived in the UK, knowing no one. I had £300 to my name and also this is where I’ll mention that if people are wondering that my voice is sounding a bit croaky I had vocal surgery in early February and I’m recovering from that at the moment. Actually if I end up talking a bit more about myself it actually harks back to the reason why I do what I do basically.

But back when I came to the UK in 1987 I just had a total thyroidectomy as a result of an autoimmune disease, and they had paralysed a vocal cord in that surgery. So arriving in the UK with no money and not knowing anyone I also couldn’t speak either but I was just driven and I just knew that I had to get over here. I’m very, very lucky that I’ve always had a British passport and the world has really been my oyster and that’s how I landed up over here.

My whole journey has really been driven by my experiences and I had a great deal of ill health as a child and so I think I came to do something very important and I realised at that very young age of 20, at that crossroads that we can make life whatever we choose it to be. I did very much at that point, at one very dark moment I did very much want to end it all. I then chose to make a change and then to go my own way and basically, I realised that medicine could take me no further and was going to be down to me alone.

We do have a real mixed group of listeners. We have those that are the younger group who tend to want to listen to Harminder and those who listen to me. For the younger ones just briefly what kept you on that point as there will be people here that are sitting on the edge of that contemplating that, maybe self-harm or not maybe disillusioned.

Actually Ro, you’re right as in the last couple of days after we’ve done a live recently based on what’s happening at the moment I’ve had a couple of people message me saying I am in a dark place.

These are people 25, 26, 27 years old so, in another universe that was Mel at that time. I think just to add to your question that is very real at the moment so Mel, I think what Ro is going to ask is what helped or what happened in that moment to take you from that dark place into what you’ve explained in terms of actually I need to do this myself.

What I didn’t understand back then but I can see so clearly now about what happened to me in that moment is that whenever we land up in that really dark place it is actually incredible because, actually the light is all around you.

We may feel that there is no light around us at all and we are completely at the depths of despair and honestly I had a nervous breakdown, I then was told that there was no further hope in terms of the medical profession. They left me hanging in the middle of nowhere with no ability to speak either and I just thought that there was absolutely nothing more I could do in life.

But there is always a tiny spark somewhere and you need to search to find that and you need to just take that next step and so my decision just in that moment was I had no idea what else to do, but I know that I want to take this next step.

If you can stay open in that moment honestly life and the universe will smooth your path for you. But what happens when we contract and we go into that very dark place we lower our vibrations, so our entire vibrational resonance falls out of sync with the resonance of the earth that we stand on and we live on. We then fall out of sync with the people around us and that makes us feel incredibly alone, incredibly isolated and then feeling like there is actually no reason to carry on living.

What we really need to do in that moment is find one tiny thing in your life that you can appreciate, it might be your dog or cat. It might be the spring bud that you can see coming on the plant outside.Whatever it is it might be the ray of sunshine find something that you can appreciate and spend a few moments in appreciation, because the most incredible thing about the feeling of appreciation is that feeling is in the same resonance as the resonance of our mother earth.

I’m sure Ro you’ve talked about this a lot, but what happened to me as I crossed the car park that day when I made that decision I just thought, I chose to expand and I chose to just look outwards instead of in my darkness and then everything rolled from there.

What people don’t always realise is that’s when the alignment happens because anyone outside you vibrationally that tunes into that they’d drawn to you. Whereas if you go into a dark place, you repel anything that’s got light because you’re getting darker and darker. That shift in you I’m assuming you started to notice things that happened around you.

The path revealed itself and the path revealed it was taking me to England.Everyone says oh my gosh,you must have been so brave. But the thing is that honestly, for me it was life-and-death.I could see I was quite blinkered;I still had a great deal of anxiety and I still had depression and mental health issues going on, but I had something I could focus on and that just pulled me to the next step and the next step and the next step.

I think we are tribe animals. I mean you know that, that’s why you created a tribe. When we isolate ourselves and our own emotions we actually create so much distress it does make us want to leave and it brings up all of that fear of separation that we have when we actually come into this world and we leave spirit and we leave our homeland.

That separation that wound of the separation is the thing that we fear the most, but actually if we realise that we are never separate we’ve always got this alignment with the earth and the people around us. It allows you to unravel from the contracted place and open to allow things back into your life again.

This is of the wisdom of a woman many years down the line. So what were the steps then that got you to this place now?What brought you and Rob together where you connected and then the journey into ANH. What were those steps then?

So for me at that time even though I was still so ill I had a gut instinct that I had to heal my spirit and my heart before I could heal my body. I know people do things very differently with my clients I am really keen that they follow their own instincts and then I can help guide them.

I actually went fully down the spiritual path initially and I spent most of my 20s in that path and not really in life as we know it. I got a lot of understanding and I healed a huge amount of my soul basically in order to then come and do the healing work in the physical.

It was not long after all of that when my friend said to me there’s another meeting going on all about water I think we should go to it and I said, oh it’s Sunday I have done one meeting I want to go home. She said no we’ve got to go to this meeting, so I said okay. We went to this meeting and the man who was arranging it just happened to come to me in the audience and say at a certain time when the speaker calls for it can you take this glass of water up won stage.

I was like sure.

The speaker happened to be Rob and as soon as Rob walked into the room and stood on stage, I looked at my friend and I said I’m going to know that man and that’s it basically. I took the glass of water to him on stage and we didn’t really communicate that day but when we talked afterwards he had an awareness of me in the room as well. And then the man who had put the meeting together ended up putting us together as consultants on a project and we got to be friends and we’ve known each other almost 20 years now.

Amazing and that comes across in even just the way you are as people, there’s this balance between the two of you. Sometimes you see people and there’s a bit of an ego battle going on, but there is just this lovely flow I see certainly when I’m around you.

Ro I tried to ask her to work with me when I was taking a major case through the European Court of Justice, taking the government to court as we do a lot of legal stuff as well to try and sort out justice issues around natural health and Mel was a great follower. I think you will find from Mel, even from those days she is still paying a monthly donation.

I am.

That is commitment.

I knew that she had a skill that could be very, very valuable to our mission and I have one problem is that I didn’t really have any money to pay her. So when she eventually came on three years later she took the reins of fundraising and everything else and strangely enough, we’ve managed to put the food on the table for the last 18 years.

Incredible, I think that leads nicely into the mission Ro for us to talk about ANH. Are we good to go there?

It is a lovely lead into that.

Yeah, so Alliance of Natural Health International and I believe founded by Rob.

Let me just start by reading out the mission statement for the listeners. So ANH’s International’s mission is to promote and protect our right to sustainable natural health around the world, by working with nature, not against it and using the tools of good science and good law.

And then there’s another part which goes into we engage in campaigns, activism, research and education across a wide range of fields relating to natural approaches to health and care, including freedom of choice in healthcare, healthy eating and lifestyles.The interpretation and development of evidence, the effects of technology for example, genetic modification or electromagnetic fields on health and the environment. The use of foods, herbal and other natural products in the management of our health and resilience.

Rob or Mel either want to jump on this first just to expand on that and possibly you spoke about some legal things that you take to court, if you can include potentially any challenge that you overcame as part of the journey to create ANH International.

For me personally what jumped out to me was just wanting to understand what is good science and what is good law.

What does that actually mean?

The starting point is really understanding that in a highly technological society we have forgotten these incredibly sophisticated natural systems on which we rely, whether it’s the way that the planet works the climate works we see all sorts of problems there through our interference but also how the human body works. And the magic that is in producing the food that we rely on or the magic involved in the way in which the sunshine is essential as the energy source for the whole planet.

Or our interaction with the microbes in which we are entirely dependent on and it’s quite ironic we should see the world stop because one of them.

We’ve king of really lost our way in terms of understanding the interdependence and the systems that interact with one another to create life, to turn Stardust into this extraordinary package of life that we see on this little rock that is spinning around the sun in our solar system.

Essentially we use this idea that science is about progress, which is about technology and there’s the first problem in terms of that rational why should science which is just a way of looking at things, only be involved in technology. And of course one of the problems we confuse science with the business model, the business model we rely on, on our planet.

That business model is about creating new products, new technologies that consumers buy that puts the oil in the machine that runs society. The very thing that’s currently being shut down for a while.

We’ve got a bunch of people coming back to covid19, we’ve got a bunch of people who have been taught to believe that they can’t do anything until an antiviral drug or vaccine comes along.

Nowhere on the newspapers are we seeing the fact that 99 percent of the time the human immune system is doing a phenomenal job and why don’t we look at what happens in immune compromised people who are more vulnerable? Why don’t we see if we can provide resources or environments for those people to allow this incredibly sophisticated system to work better.

I keep coming back to the present but going back to the starting point with ANH it was the recognition that science isn’t bad, science doesn’t automatically mean you have to create new drugs of your medicine or you’ve got to create new agrochemicals of your agriculture.

Science allows us to look at anything that we want to look at and to solve problems in a rational manner and the same thing applies to law. Law is a great system. It is a fundamental tenet of so-called civilised societies and yet so many ways in which the law gets used prefers corporations for example that are doing a lot of damage to the planet or to the less privileged members of society. Its preferring Donald Trump’s friends dare I say it.

We mustn’t give up on this legal system because it does allow us to ensure that justice prevails. But let’s use it properly so the very issue that took me out of my lab at Imperial and made me question whether I should continue my life as an academic was the fact that there was a bunch of natural sources of nutrients that occur in foods that were going to be banned by an EU directive.

That’s the issue that we ended up challenging the UK government on because they were implementing EU law. We then got an expedited reference to the European Court of Justice and sorted out the problem with the bunch of 13 very intelligent lawyers. They said guys there’s something wrong here you can’t just ban these natural sources, they are outside the realms of this EU food supplement directive list and they sorted it out without having to abolish the directive.

Rob just to jump in just to simplify this for a listener then what we’re talking about here is these are natural food sources that can help the body that were looking to be banned.

Correct and today we’re involved in a very similar problem we haven’t gone legal yet, but we are working with one of the biggest law firms in the UK and it’s completely under covers, but we are working very much on the CBD issue.Which is the fastest growth area in natural health supplements that any of us have seen over the last couple of decades.

I’m loving the teas by the way, I have it regularly.

Yeah they’re great, so the governments are turning round and coming up with all these various excuses to have it all pulled off the market and only allow the biggest corporations to be able to get through the regulatory door. They set up an obstacle course that is tricky for any of the small players.

It’s the big farm minefield, it’s like how do we control anything natural in such a way. So going back to the philosophy which we talked about as a culture globally, we have become disempowered and were always reliant on being told what we need to do in order to heal ourselves. That’s really in simple terms what you’re saying, this is the challenge.

Covid-19, I think if I can put it in the simplest possible terms what we do at ANH is help people to connect or join the dots.

And take responsibility as well.

When I looked through the website it’s like and for those of you listening if you’ve got kids there’s some great stuff for children there as well. It’s giving people back the power to say okay, I did not know what to do, I didn’t know I could do this. I thought I’d have to take this tablet actually no, there are other things you can do.

Yeah and looking at covid-19 you know the fact that so many people recover at the moment we’ve got a figure as of today, I’m looking at today’s data 123,322 people, 84% of cases we’ve seen full recovery and you know that’s being the immune system.

That very process of them becoming sick, ill, having fever and coughing is the immune response. Even the people that die it is the immune response that is over responding and this is to be expected at the early stage of a new virus that has basically arrived and found its way to access the human being. We will see an overall response within a year or two it’ll become part of the circulating viruses that we’re all exposed.

Wow, okay that’s fascinating.

In fact this is such a massive subject and for those of you listening I think the best thing to do is to go and have a look on the ANH website and read the blog that was written just recently. I was going to jump into that but actually the immune system I think is the subject. we really need to shift the focus to as we go through because a lot of people listening to this may want some practical tools.

For anyone listening tonight or whenever you listen to this over the coming weeks, go and read the blog that was written because there are some really great steps in there that are presented and I think the terminology was citizen empowerment, I think is the word that was used.

Let’s remember a couple of things democracy has been put on the backburner.

So we have not had a chance as citizens to interact with our parliaments that we elect in so-called democratic societies to see if this is the right way of doing it.Which is why they have to come up with these various packages to try and give us some money, so if you can’t actually get to work you get some cash. And one day you have to pay for that,society is going to have pay for it.

If you’re a young person haven’t been asked if you like this particular way of going about it, but you run the risk of spending the first few years of your employment, essentially digging yourself out of a hole that you never really asked to be put in the first place.

Obviously we’re not being told on a regular basis it’s very, very difficult to get detailed information about individual cases, the exact ages, the exact underlying conditions of those people have.

As Niall Ferguson, Professor Neil Ferguson from my ex-University, Imperial College said this morning on radio four, when he was asked that same question he doesn’t even have the data. He said know from what we can gather about two thirds of the mortalities are people who were very close to death anyway and were going to die anyway pretty soon.

I think that’s been an eye-opener for many people and to me every time I hear it I just keep my unconscious brain says immune system, and this is what we are talking to our kids about is making sure and you know this is a passion of ours anyway, but the conversation in the house is the keeping immune system strong. I’ve got a five-year-old I haven’t got quite as many as you Rob, but five and an 11-year-old, I want them to have that real culture of the house. Work on your immune system and then it gives you a chance to resist things that come at you.

If we can talk into that space it would be great. For those listening go read the blog because I’m conscious of Mel and Rob’s time as well and I know Harms has some other questions he wants to pick up.

Can you talk to us both about the immune system.

I think that’s a great place, what reduces it? What depletes it? What really hammers the immune system and then maybe you can switch to what empowers it?

On that note, Mel has got some work she’s been doing on fear and without Mel maybe realising it’s a subject I’ve been talking to quite a bit on Facebook and in my lives. Mel please could you whilst we are in this space talk about that because I 100% agree with you that’s a major issue at the moment as well affecting people.

Sure.

The important thing is the body has had this tug-of-war between microbes, ones that can cause harm since the day we were created. It’s always been there when you get a so-called zoonotic that’s a microbe that has jumped from an animal to adapt to enter the human body.

It gets a bit more lively early on because the human immune system is basically very, very good at getting rid of bugs that can threaten it, but ultimately what happens in this relationship between the bug in this case the virus and the host, this case, the human is that they adjust to each other.

The reality is this is not the bit that’s well appreciated is actually it’s both of them benefit. If you look from a systems biology or evolutionary biology point of view there’s a lot of science on this that actually it is part of the process by which we actually strengthen our resilience and there are benefits for the pathogen and benefits for the host. Early on and we are at that very early stage it’s all a bit messy and that’s why people are in despair at the moment.

But in essence, the initial barrier when the pathogen say if someone coughs and you have airborne droplets of it and you touch the hard surface where the virus may be viable for a day or two or three, in certain circumstances, particularly away from sunlight.

Imagine a banister going down into a tube for example, you touch that you then make contact with your mucous membranes the pink wet bits in your mouth and your nose, your eyes and that’s how it gains access.

So rule number one try and avoid touching your face. We are doing this at home with the kids, guys don’t touch your face and learn not to do it because it’s really going to be very, very helpful. The interesting thing is you tell something or someone listens to a nasty bit of news particularly on covid-19 right now because people are absolutely stuck on the news, which I think Mel will explain is not necessarily a great thing to do. And the first thing they do is put their hands in their mouth or they rub their eyes and that’s how the virus goes in.

These wet bits, these mucous membranes do have chemicals that make it harder for viruses to enter the body. You see all those lovely pictures of the SARS covirus two that particular virus that causes covid-19 and you’ll see those spiked proteins. Those beautiful spike proteins that come up at the very end of that is basically a system that can determine whether the host is the right host to penetrate.

Remember a virus is not really a whole organism it’s a variant that carries either DNA genetic material or RNA the replication material that we use to create more cells. These guys contain RNA and they need to know whether they can get that RNA into a host and then hijack the RNA replication machinery of the host, of the human.

These spike proteins determine via the particular ace two inhibitors to the very angiotensin inhibitors that are used to manage heart disease, for example.These ace two receptors bind with the spike proteins if they’re there and of course we have a lot of them in our airways. Then they can get in.

Now if you’ve got a lot of high expression of these ace two receptors they are more likely to go in if you’ve got low expression they are less likely. So this is one of the reasons the kids are more resistant than adults. That’s also why if you’ve got a tendency towards heart disease you’re going to have more. If you’re an ace inhibitors the drugs, one of the important categories of drugs that are given to people with heart disease, you’re going to have more still.

So again, very important information when you look at the older people who are getting very severe symptoms from covid-19 and are dying, what we are starting to see creeping out there is a lot of them have heart disease, metabolic syndrome, and a lot of them are on ace inhibitors that accelerating the amount of ace two that is being expressed.

Once in the body they hijack the RNA replication machinery and you get new viruses being produced and that’s when the viral load starts going up.

Once that starts happening not only do the non-specialised white blood cells have a really good go at trying to stop them getting any further, that may be something that also protects children because they have a very, very strong innate immune response.That’s the immune response we’re born with that keeps out bugs, what they haven’t got what kids don’t have is a highly developed cell mediated or cellular or adaptive immune response.

Which is the one that we learn as we get older and adults have learned how to adapt to this. This is exactly the system that we use to develop immunity. Whether it’s from natural infections or from vaccines, you get exposed to the antigen you get left with T cells and B cells that go after it. The B cells in the adaptive immune system basically release antibodies that tag the viruses, the T cells go after that and nail them either successfully or unsuccessfully. Memory T cells get retained.

We don’t know how long these are retained after infection, but they explain the fact that we know there will be immunity, probably for at least several months after infection.

Is this like a bell curve? Are there two ends of the bell? Because my brain’s trying to understand if we’ve got an adaptive immune system, is there an argument to say that the older you get, then you’ve developed more immunity?

Whereas you’ve got the innate immune system at the younger generation and you’ve got 30, 40, 50-year-olds is there are a range where the immune system then depletes again?

What happens in the adaptive immune system it’s programmed to very, very specific antigens. The marker compounds that are associated with the particular pathogen, it might be a tiny part of molecules that are associated with the pathogen not the whole thing, and so, what it does is remember to nail using very sophisticated affected T cells in the case of this particular new coronavirus. Let’s remember that coronaviruses aren’t always that nasty, 20% of all common colds are actually caused by a type of coronavirus.

These effector cells will go after the either the virus particles themselves or the cells within them and then try and nail them. Essentially once you have antibodies for that particular virus the system will work and you won’t even know about it.We call people like that immune because they don’t have a massive flareup.

If you haven’t been exposed to it the communication chemicals we call cytokines that essentially the innate part of our immune system starts to release to help the adaptive immune system to learn what it needs to do. There is a delay there of a few days. Those cytokines can create what is called a cytokine storm. They can essentially over respond because they go, we need to get on top of this thing let’s go crazy and that whole process is a delicate balancing act between either trying to nail the infection, and then not creating too much collateral damage to tissues.

Of course it’s the cytokine storm and all the free radicals that are associated with it that when it occurs deep in your lungs and the little aviole sacks were where most of the oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange occurs, that’s when you can do damage. That’s when the fibrosis comes in and that’s when your lungs fill up with fluid and you can’t breathe and you get organ failure and you pass away.

That’s really what the ventilators are all about. That’s why governments are so crying out to have more ventilators.

That’s fascinating and I have made a whole bunch of notes in the background.Off the back of that something you mentioned was we have a potential to have an immune system and please correct me if I’m phrasing this wrong, but for about seven months we are then immune? Or do expect us to be immune thereafter if we’ve caught it?

Harms so far we’ve got three months’ worth of experience on this thing and so we don’t know, we don’t have antibody tests being dished out and left, right and centre yet. In the next month they will be commercially available, they’ll be given to frontline health workers.

They will also be available say in the UK, Boots and Amazon are selling them for a small fee you can do a pin prick test and determine if you have antibodies for it. If you do you’re going to be immune.If you test yourself six months down the line or a year down the line you can do the same test and you will determine if you still have immunity and we just don’t know because it is a novel coronavirus.

Understood.

Wow okay, so I’m just thinking out loud here can we take the jigsaw pieces which lots are scientific ones, can we give them some big jigsaw pieces for the people listening to say right, these are the things.

Absolutely let me just first say we have lived; human beings have been walking the earth for about 200,000 years in our physical and genetic form that we are in now. The thing that’s enabled us to get this far is our immune system so it’s actually a pretty amazing piece of kit.

Let’s not forget it plays such a central role in our protection and it does it all below the level of our consciousness. So suddenly it’s been taken out and everyone is forcing themselves to look at the immune system and suddenly it’s becoming this whole scary thing that you know everyone’s thinking is going to fail on them.

What I’d really like to say is that there is a lot you can do to help your immune system to function the way that it’s built. Rob’s already explained that you’ve got your innate immune system which is your first line defence and then you got your adaptive immune system and in order to have that kind of flexibility that enables us to rise to the challenge, we really need to work on our psychological, metabolic, hormonal and immunological flexibility.

All of those things in concert together give us the kind of resilience to enable us to meet challenge. That actually means that if the other things that you do in your life the food you eat, the quality of the sleep that you have and the amount of sleep you have. It’s the nutrients that you take in if you’re giving yourself concentrated sources of nutrients in the form of feed supplements. If you’re going to be juicing, if you’re going to be taking extra herbs, the activity that you take, and so much.

It’s also to do with the thoughts that you’re going to think and for your more mature listeners, they may remember a very well-known book that was out in the early 80s called ‘You can’t afford the luxury of a negative thought’.
Yes.

I mean really that comes back to me time and time again, and in order to really understand why you can’t afford to go down that route it is because anything that activates the sympathetic, adrenal medulla system in your body, it’s going to affect your immune system.

Because it is going to affect your entire hormonal access.The minute you put yourself into an anxious or fearful place, your body is already putting you into fight and flight and that is already putting your immune system on a high red alert. Because when we had to run from the sabretooth tiger we had to be ready to do that in that moment, but of course all of our stresses, our fears and our challenges in those days, they tended to be resolved fairly swiftly. Either you survived or you didn’t.

These day sour stresses are largely emotional rather than physical in the same way that they used.

And constant.

Constant, they don’t turnoff.

So, one of the reasons we’ve got this this huge problem with chronic disease is because the whole inflammatory cascade is ignited when your immune system up regulates to meet a foe doesn’t turn off.

That’s that chronic regulation that causes the problem. But that’s a subject for another conversation right now, with the level of fear that the media is pumping out across the airways, people who are glued to their phones, their radios, televisions are literally soaking up nothing but doom and gloom messages. Nothing but fear and I have been speaking to people who are literally paralysed by fear and can’t do anything and that is when fight and flight mode gets into freeze, because the fear is actually so great that the body shuts down.

Now when that happens you are actually detracting from your innate immune system’s ability to deal with any pathogen that comes your way. And so what you really need to be doing is trying to get yourself into a much calmer state so that you can keep your immune system locked and loaded ready for when it does maybe need to be released, so that it can do its job and come back again.

Because otherwise you set off this whole suite where you trigger your brain starts and you trigger your adrenals into releasing hormones. Your HPA axis goes into full flight. And suddenly you’ve got the full chemical orchestra being released and yet there is no pathogen.It’s a sterile inflammation that is very bad for the body to keep going.

Just on that note for somebody listening to this what can they be looking for to know when they’ve hit that point where the stress levels have now lowered the immune system to a point where they’re vulnerable. What tell-tale signs can they look for?

For it to be chronic over a period of time to really affect your immune system it’s going to be going on over a period of weeks and months. But if you find yourself daily in that space where you’re finding it hard to breathe because your chest is tight, your stomach has contracted and you’re not sleeping as well as you should do, your brain is going round and round in circles.

All you’re focused on is negative, negative, negative you’re feeling that fear, you’re feeling clammy. It’s like you’ve got butterflies in your stomach you’re literally just feeling totally ancy all of the time.

Mel why I love this and why I think this is so important is because you said, weeks and months there. If the media continue to pump out the same kind of news and our listeners or friends of listeners, or whatever are inducing this fear because they’re reading this news, then potentially they could end up in a situation where they are feeling the effects of that.

Absolutely, because you know yourself when you’ve been through a stressful situation it’s exhausting. You’ve got no energy for anything else because all of your energy is going there.

I’ve been trying to encourage people to definitely you have to keep abreast of what’s happening but try and check in once a day and spend some time in connection. Do your mindfulness, breathing is fantastic. Your sympathetic nervous system is the one that’s full on when you’re in fight and flight.Your parasympathetic is your rest and digest and that turns everything off and you only have to do a minute to three minutes of breathing exercise with your eyes closed to take yourself out of that sympathetic place and into parasympathetic. This is all within our control every day.

So if you find yourself flying into that stress place do some breathing.

And for the listeners that doesn’t mean.

One of my favourites for that is clock breathing because you just want to breathe in slowly and deeply from 12 until six, and then you breathe out from six until 12 and you just slow it right down and keep that continuous breathing going.

There are many, many ways you can do this, there are tons of things on the Internet you can have a look at for mindfulness and breathing techniques. Your breath is one of your most powerful tools to be able to bring balance back to your entire hormonal and immune systems. Because there is no difference between that reaction that’s happening when you feel fear and stress, and that reaction that is happening when a pathogen comes into your body.

It’s your immune system that’s rising to both.

Where should they focus on getting the information from?

Because this is something my community has really had a challenge with, the millennial’s have had a challenge with this because they’re bombarded on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube it’s constant.

I’ve not seen anything off my feed which is un-coronavirus related. So where should we be getting that information from in a small dose so that we’re informed, but we can continue to empower our immune system in the way that you’ve described?

Great question by the way.

I know that is a great question and my answer may not be that easy because I do believe that within each one of us we all have a very well honed, intuitive system and even though many people don’t like to listen to their intuition it’s not to say that they won’t have an instinct of it some way.

I do think that when you read something you have a deep-down gut instinct that lets you know whether you are actually reading something that is in resonance with you or not.

The first point is try and stick with the sources where you feel that resonance and try to get a balance of evidence. You absolutely have to keep abreast of what the authorities are saying because there are changes coming on all the time. I’m obviously going to speak for our organisation because I know that we’ve done 18 years of work where you don’t get any knee-jerk emotional reactions from us, it’s all based in science.

There are many other organisations out there that are also able to speak lucidly and credibly that maybe are going to give a balanced approach that tells you things that you aren’t getting off the media.

So Mel you have a newsletter is that correct? Can they sign up? Do you have updates?

We do a weekly free newsletter on the homepage so ANH International.org, you can sign up for our weekly free newsletter and what I would say at the moment is that I do know that the millennial’s and the younger crowd don’t like to sign up for emails.

I would encourage you to do it at the moment because we do know that the power on the Internet and social media are downgrading all the information that isn’t towing the party line. Anything that is referring to natural medicine for some reason they do not want you to know that you can actually modulate your own immune system by diet and lifestyle.

You’ve got two people that totally support that philosophy. Harminder back that from science of social media and the stuff you see in the background, correct Harms?

Yes through the digital marketing company we know what we are allowed to advertise and what we are not allowed to advertise. If we were to advertise something that you just mentioned, we would literally get blocked and the severe case of that is having your advertising account closed down.

So for those listening at home I will put the website ANHInternational.org into the show notes. Go and subscribe to the newsletter go and find a different source of information versus what you’re finding in the media in terms of social media really, that’s really just driven there to get your click. Once they’ve got your click they’ve got your data so they can readvertise to you. We know this. You’ve heard this from me before.

It’s back to emails, it feels like the dark ages I know but it is back to that. I do know two very large national health organisations in America, which is the Mercola.com and GreenMedInfo. Both of them are off social media altogether because they’ve been so blocked and so challenged and you need to actually sign up for their emails as well to receive information.

And yet there are readily available adverts telling me I can go buy a drug in the drugstore and for £1.99 it’s going to cure everything.

The crazy thing as well is the problem with the hand sanitisers being sold out, they are shocking for your skin and what you’re actually absorbing as well. But now they are trying to tell you that you can’t make any at home because they don’t work. If you are using alcohol and aloe vera gel and essential oils and everything, anybody who knows anything about disinfectants knows that alcohol is pretty good at that.

The first thing is if there that an immediate reaction breathing is obviously one of those things and we know that calms the systems. Is there anything else on that front?

Yes, the other part of fear, one side of it is what’s it’s doing to your immune system. The other side is what it’s doing in your brain. We’ve got three parts of our brain. We’ve got our forebrain, the midbrain and hindbrain. The forebrain is behind your forehead it’s your higher executive function, it’s your cognitive, it’s where all your decision making your problem solving and it’s the stuff that makes us humans meant to be responsible.

Which some people are not quite using at the moment.

Exactly, it gets hijacked doesn’t it?

It gets hijacked because the minute you’ve gone into fear you’ve pushed yourself right back into your lizard brain, in your hindbrain which is all about survival.

It’s the primordial element that is actually how to survive, but you can’t make good decisions when you’re stuck in that place. It totally derails your ability to be empowered and that’s not a good thing because fearful citizens are also controlled citizens, and we actually in order to fulfil our destiny as free will beings in this universe able to co-create what we are here to actually achieve. We need to be empowered citizens to be able to do that, so fear is not your friend it’s a very low vibration.

The breathing and the other thing I would say is visualisations, using your intent. I’ve got some of my clients using this time to create vision boards and to actually be manifesting what they want for the rest of their lives and raising their vibration through dreaming about their own creations.

On that note for anyone listening if you’ve not heard of him there is a fantastic book, I love the audio by Dr Wayne Dyer, sadly passed away two, three years ago. But he wrote the book probably 10 years ago now and the audio to that is incredible. It just talks about the power of intention at every level of our life, not just dealing with fear, but also redirecting yourself from an inner source. He has always been one of those inspirational people that takes a higher level of thinking. So if anybody has not read that it’s a great, great book to read just on the back of what Mel is saying.

It’s a great book and I would say so many people say to us, they look at the outputs on ANH and they look at what Rob and I achieve and they say how do you do it?Actually we’re using a lot of intent.We are using this amazingly creative universe that we live in to be able to help us to move forwards.

But Mel it’s intent from a pure place without driven by fear isn’t it? I think that’s an important factor to make here.

It’s also driven without ego.

Yes.

It should actually come from that pure heart place and your desires will lead you there.Not if your desires are about amassing material gain and all that kind of thing. I don’t mean that but I just mean we all have desires for what we want to achieve in this life.

I think that at this reconnection time that we’ve been given let’s look at it as a gift, let’s allow us to actually breathe into it, reconnect with ourselves or some people, for the first time connect with themselves. Connect with the earth,connect with what you want, connect with how we can all come together as a community to actually heal this planet and move us forward.

There is a great phrase Tony Robins said years ago, nothing has meaning a part from the meaning that you give it. I think we are in that moment in time where we can give this a different meaning and as you’re saying add a different intention behind it as well.

Ro I want to now shift the focus slightly because I think that’s incredible how if you allow fear to enter your life wherever it’s from, it’s going to leave you either with a depleted immune system or by acting in a certain way it’s going to empower the immune system.

That is my big takeaway but I wanted to bring Rob back in the conversation because we were talking just before the phone call about three things he wanted to make the public aware of that I wasn’t even aware of in terms of where the focus is around immunity and the immune system.

Thank you Harms.

The three simple processes that we need to look at. It’s always helpful and I apologise being a scientist, I tend to break things down into compartments, but if we think of the avoidance aspect as one of the goals.

Obviously all the social distancing that is being imposed on us is about trying to avoid exposure. But I want to remind people that because there are so many people who are not necessarily going to find it that easy, particularly not in a month or two time.

It’s all very well, we are recording this are on day four of lockdown in the UK. When you’re looking at a month or two down the line when we still know there is going to be some fairly big numbers out there, there’s a very real risk that people will start mixing more freely.

The bottom line is if you are fairly healthy, you are fairly young, you can become a carrier, an asymptomatic carrier. But when you then want to finally see your grandma that you haven’t seen for a couple of months because of lockdown you think, hey this whole thing has calmed down we haven’t seen anyone with symptoms recently. I’ve got to see her it’s her birthday coming up, that’s when the risk occurs.

To understand how you avoid getting the virus the idea of sanitation, hand washing is pretty important because simple soap removes the virus from the hands. The virus doesn’t go through our skin it has to go to our mucous membrane. So stress again the importance of then not touching your mouth, your nose and your eyes. You can make a game of it, you can have a lot of fun and say hey, I spotted you touching your nose you’re not getting points or you are getting points whatever. You know sit in the naughty corner or whatever it’s going to be.

Great one for parents.

Yeah, exactly. So really try and help kids in particular who could become the most, that’s why the schools are closed.They could become the most important transmitters of this and the people they love most often their grandparents that are actually most at risk.

So avoidance is one that is really important to think about.The second one is there is a big difference we don’t have any drugs available there’s no known antiviral drugs that are really going to work. There are over 100 clinical trials in process with everything from repurposed drugs from malaria through to HIV AIDS and nearly all of those have some pretty nasty consequences.

What we know from the Huawei experience the province in China that had the primary issue. The majority of the Chinese were actually using Chinese traditional medicine and it hasn’t been widely reported but it has been reported in scientific journals.The majority of them were and in fact they’ve already got data on and two or three Chinese herbal compounds that were delivering some very positive results. Of course most of the health authorities are very keen for that not to get out.

But the bottom line is that human nature says, in the absence of a drug people will use natural products. It’s really important to understand that within that we know a lot about the resources that this incredibly sophisticated and amazing system we call the immune system needs. One of the reasons that vitamins and minerals about 30 of them are considered essential is because we cannot live without them and one of the big reasons that we need them is to allow our immune system to function.

When you start to look at dietary surveys and you look at what the average person eats, you see there are some consistent patterns with things that people are just not getting enough of from their average diet.Let me just mention three.

The first one is vitamin A. You can convert carotenoids particular beta-carotene that’s in coloured fruits and vegetables to vitamin A in your body. That conversion process is very variable between different individuals and it is pretty inefficient, you lose a lot somewhere between six- and 24-fold loss during the conversion. It is better to take vitamin A in its preformed form and the two ways of doing that is either by eating rich sources of vitamin A.The richest sources are animal livers, beef liver, chicken liver or even cod liver, there’s a lot of vitamin A is cod liver oil.

If you are a vegetarian or vegan that’s going to be a problem, but you can then take vitamin a in a supplement. Retinol palmitate is a great form of vitamin A that the body absorbs pretty readily and just having about two and a half thousand micrograms of that a day is pretty good for the immune system.Don’t have screamingly high doses, but that kind of dosage which is around the upper level of what we might get from our food if we ate food that is rich in vitamin A would be a good idea.

Can I just jump in on the supplements because we will have people Harm’s obviously included in that and myself who are primarily vegetarians. Supplements is there a specific, I know you can’t name brands but any sort of form that should be taken in?Tablet or liquid?

You normally find that it’s either going to come that form of vitamin A will either come in a capsule, liquid or tablet. The more important thing is that it’s a reputable brand and if you look for the form, you will see that sometimes you’ll see vitamin Abut it’s actually come from carotenoids. It will say something like beta-carotene or mixed carotenoids as the source, try and get it as Retinol Palmitate and you can look that up and buy it online very easily.

Fantastic.

Just to let your listeners know that our website on the 12th of March we actually produced an article entitled build your immune resilience as nature intended.

There’s more information there on the top 10 tips for immune resilience. It’s by no means the only supplements and herbs out there for immune resilience, but they’re some of the more easily available ones that are there. So people can read a bit more on that.

The vitamin D and zinc would be the other two that I’d really stress. Vitamin D again, you want to be taking about 4,000 to 8,000 international units a day which is considerably less than you would get if you had 80% sun exposure on a midsummer’s day in the UK, where you would be producing the amount of circulating vitamin D that’s equivalent to about consumption of about 20,000 international units.

It’s not a screamingly high level of vitamin D, one of the reasons that we develop these respiratory infections in winter and we don’t tend to get them in the summer. Again, look at the pattern of infections around the world at the moment, you’ll see that they’re generally occurring in cold climates at the end of winter when peoples vitamin D levels are very low.

Rob coming back to vitamin D the question that came at me recently because I was talking getting up and get some sunlight, the question that seems to come up a lot is, do I have to be half naked? Is it okay if it’s just my head, my face?

No, it really doesn’t help very much just to have your face or your arms, your legs even in the midsummer. At the moment the angle of the sun in the middle of March 2020 and the angle the sun in the UK roughly the latitude of London is still too low, even at midday to give you significant capacity to build Vitamin D in your body. You would have to sit there for two or three hours which you know if you’re in lockdown maybe it’s the best thing you can do. But you’d have to be almost naked underpants only in order to do that.

You will get about the equivalent of 20,000, i.e. you’ll hit your target levels if you spend just 20 minutes with 80% of your body exposed and obviously the darker your skin the and more sun you need. Which is why people with darker skins in northern climates are often the most vitamin D deficient, it’s really important to be taking a vitamin D supplement.

Zinc is crucial both for innate and adaptive immune function it really helps to modulate. Historically humans have got most of their zinc from fish or animal foods obviously if you’re vegetarian you’re not going to get any. But sadly, even those who do choose to eat some animals are getting very little from fish and other animal foods.

Most of the zinc supply in the human diet is now coming from fortified foods and fortified breakfast cereals. If you measure the consumption from fortified foods it doesn’t look too bad, if you then look at the circulating levels of zinc it’s really horrendous. And the reason for that is we are consuming most of the zinc in fortified foods either they are wheat-based or grain-based, full of folic acid that complexes it out, or we consume a multivitamin tablet with the zinc in it and then we have a slice of toast or bowl of cereal. That process again puts the acid in and we lose most of that zinc we don’t absorb it.

So you want to try and consume your zinc away from food and you can take it as liquid and drops. Or you can take it as a lozenge that you suck and you get really good sublingual delivery underneath the tongue and you can very quickly just by taking the recommended daily allowance the nutrient reference value, that’s 15 mg a day, you can easily go up to 30 mg a day.

But don’t go much over that because if you consume too much you actually undo all the benefits of taking it and you get this u-shaped curve where it starts to destabilise. If you take more than about 50 mg a day regularly, you will start to destabilise your immune system, It won’t modulate typically between Th1 and Th2 cells, the T lymphocytes.

For the listeners at home I have the blog up on my screenwhilst Rob was talking there and all of that information is on there, plus seven more types of methods to build an immune resilience as nature intended. We will put that on the show notes as well so listeners can quickly access that article. It is fantastic, I was having a read in the background.

I know we are conscious of time but I’m going to ask a personal question, what’s your view on supplementing with vitamins C and magnesium as well?

They’re on our list.Vitamin C is critical for our immune system. One of the most well-established vitamins for immune support and the magnesiumis critical for multiple reasons, including facilitating the absorption of vitamin D. Also another reason magnesium is so important is that people are very, very deficient in it in the population, so they are on the list.

What is really encouraging is that we are now hearing that some of the hospitals in New York are actually using vitamin C, IV to treat coronavirus patients.

Because our children aren’t vaccinated I read a couple of books early on in this subject and I was fascinated to see massive sections of the book dedicated to vitamins C and how people have been turned around from real extreme situations where intravenously, no other treatment worked, but the vitamin C seemed to bring them back into life.

I mentioned there are three things one is avoidance. The second is prevention. The third is treatment. I personally if I had severe respiratory disease as a result of infection I would personally want to go onto IVC.

That’s very interesting to hear that.

Yes, so we’ve got avoidance, prevention and treatment, those are the three messages.

For people practicing this on a day-to-day basis, eating,can we throw some stuff in there and I know there’s content on the website, but whilst we’ve got you here you and I have talked about this a lot in the past Rob, different colours of food during the course of the day. Any pieces we can add in here?

On our website the health guide if you can put that in the show notes it’s a comprehensive way of eating. We’ve got a vegan version, we’ve got an omnivorous version, but it is all about…

and we’ve got a kids version.

But it’s all about ensuring that there is diversity in the diet, that there is minimal amount of processed foods and if you do have processed foods they are minimally processed themselves. It’s about getting six different coloured groups into your food every day so that you are getting this diversity of plant nutrients. It’s based around the very expansive scientific view that actually diversity in the diet is an essential requirement for human beings.

If you look at the receptors and the enzyme systems and expression systems within the human body, they are designed to work with a diverse range of plant nutrients and amino acids and other components of food.

Food is essentially the way that we apply the external environment into our bodies so that we can derive the resources that we need along with sunlight. This idea of eating a regular kind of processed food approach to diet is actually what underpins most of the burden of the healthcare crisis that we’re currently in. It’s also one of the reasons that if you look at the kind of patients who are suffering from covid-19 at the moment most severely, a very large proportion of them have metabolic syndrome are overweight, have heart disease as well.

That’s what makes them so susceptible, so we need to be leaner. We need to have diverse diets and the ANH food for health guide is available in its multiple forms, and it’s all there.

Every single stage of the immune process is actually driven by nutrients and this is a message again that is not getting through. I talked to Rob about it the other day because I’m so passionate about the fact that we could be using this current situation to change the health of nations. But unfortunately our doctors in med school are not taught anything about the nutrient interactions with the immune system. They know all about drug interactions but not nutrients that.

If your listeners take one thing away, it’s that every stage is nutrient dependent. If you’re deficient in anything from omega-3 oils all the way through to your arginine and nuclear tides, you’re not driving an appropriate immune response and it’s something that’s really easy to correct at home.

The other the other thing I’d like to say is obviously whilst we are in lockdown I wonder if anyone has considered the fact that they don’t actually need as much food as normal because, we really don’t want to disturb our metabolism because we need our metabolism and our immune system to be working optimally. We’re not as active even if you’re doing your one load of exercise day that we’re allowed in the UK, I’m not sure what other parts of the world are allowing.

Even if you are active in the day, it’s not quite the same as being out and about in your daily life. So think about your portion sizes and how much food you are actually putting in, so you don’t overload.

That’s a very interesting point because one of the things that has come out over the last week or so is people saying, oh my gosh I’m starting to eat more and the fear puts people into this emotional lockdown.

It does.

And then of course the comfort is they go eat crap, often sugar based.To me it’s like we’re stood at a fork in the road one is if you go down a really healthy choice, or the other one is you go into an emotional shutdown and eat whatever you can. They’re going to the shelves and I see people grabbing heaps of coke from the shelves and white bread and all the stuff that is processed.

Harminder and I were laughing because he went to do some shopping yesterday and all of the fresh vegetables are still full, whereas the rest is stripped off the shelves.

It is dire because I’m thinking about what we are going to be reaping from this in the next six months, 18 months and then when you add on the stress we still have to go through in terms of people’s jobs and the economy. Get a handle on your emotions now learn to be flexible, learn how to get yourself out of that state, so that even if people around you are losing their heads you’ll keep yours.

Yes and to bring a soft but philosophical message here to all the listeners, this is a chance to actually enjoy a meal around the table as a family, whereas one of you might traditionally be coming in late, rushing out for a meeting or eating whatever. This is a chance to come to the table and rejoice food. Enjoy it, prepare it together if you’re doing kale, wash it and feel it because a lot of people eat so much processed food they don’t even associate what they’re putting in their mouth. It’s just a functional thing whereas this is a whole experience of eating and enjoying it as a family.

Exactly.

I’m just conscious of the time because you’ve got to do your newsletter tonight.

The only other question I’ve got is the treatment side, so just to recap so we’ve talked about distance, handwashing, diet. We’ve talked about the fear trying to preventing it from an emotional level the mental level. Started to look vitamins, eating some more natural foods go and have a look at some of the recommendations on the ANH website. Treatment is there anything else that you want to just touch on their Rob.

I do think that probably vitamin C intravenously is likely to be one of the most effective treatments.The great thing is it is currently in trial, it is also being used. Yeah, we know historically it is have a very potent effect. The kind of levels that we’re looking when they’re used intravenously you cannot achieve by consuming capsule, tablets.

No because we’re talking about large amounts here.

Yes so gram quantities being delivered directly not through your gut but straight into the bloodstream.

Viruses are very sensitive to acid so you see lots of people and we shouldn’t underestimate the fact that there is a lot of unsubstantiated and probably erroneous or misleading information out there on the internet as well, so you’ll find a whole bunch of recommendations for all sorts of products where the only testing has come from in vitro. In other words test-tube studies and essentially use a little bit of acid and you’ll wipeout coronavirus.

The thing is that if it doesn’t go into the stomach acid it can bypass that, it hits the mucus layer and if they’re the right receptors it goes into the cells. You really need some evidence from human studies and the beauty with vitamin C there’s been a long history of its usage, it has been used around other viruses. It is already the results are beginning to filter out we happen to know some of the key players who have been right at the helm of intravenous vitamin C therapy for cancer and other treatments, it’s looking really promising.

I would choose to have that any day over taking high doses of antimalarials like hydroxychloroquine.

And just in terms of treatment as well as please keep your feet on the ground and if you do contract coronavirus in the majority of people it’s like a moderate to serious flu. Go to bed, drink lots of fluids, make sure that you’ve got fresh air.

Let your body cleanse itself and let your temperature do what it’s meant to do and burn out the bugs and be with yourself in the disease process. Trust your body and trust your immune system, if you do get into real respiratory crisis, then you know there’s the IVC and there’s a different way to go.

But just to remind people that the majority of people our having asymptomatic to mild symptoms to moderate symptoms and just feeling like they’ve had a really serious flu.

That’s a great pointactually, because I think that’s the challenge we’ve got at the moment is if we didn’t have this on the table, most people would be like I think I’ve just got the flu. Even the differentiation of that between that and covid-19 at the momenta lot of people are confused.

Just to make sure there’s no confusion there for the listeners when I talk about treatment it was specifically for people who have got serious respiratory disease. For most people treatment equals no treatment and that means also coming on to what Mel said, it means no paracetamol, no ibuprofen. Why?

Because they suppress the body fever reaction which is actually very much part of the process of going through the disease and actually that increase in body temperature is something again viruses don’t like at all. Which is why we get fevers in the first place and you’ve just got to go through that process.

Which is why hydration really plays out here.

It foes, fluids are absolutely essential.

If anyone is lucky enough to have an infrared sauna at home, then make use of it. It really helps to move things out and the coronavirus doesn’t like heat either.

I need to have that conversation with you separately Mel because you dropped that bombshell on me about seven months ago when I saw you and I’m still talking about it, because I said to my other half because we were thinking about getting one I said, I need to Mel as she keeps talking about infrared.

I know I’m just very envious as I’ve got no space and I’m not able to do anything here.

We talked about fear as being one of the preventions in terms of managing that I don’t know if you’re in a space to say what we should and shouldn’t eat, but I’m just conscious that there might be people that are genuinely ignorant about certain food types or processed food types that can lower the immune system, create acidity and make blood vulnerable. Can we throw some of those out without saying brands?

Sugar, processed carbohydrates are the big thing.

So pasta, white bread.

Yeah the very thing that people have been bulk buying, the polished rice, the very processed rice, bread and anything like that is a process carbohydrates, simply get rid of those things and replace them with a diverse range of vegetables. A lot of people will tend to put fruits and vegetables into the same category.

They are incredibly different beasts.By definition, fruits do contain a lot of fructose, sugar. So while having a small amount of fruit particularly after you’ve actually consumed a main meal so that you manage your blood sugar spike is fine. You cannot treat vegetables and fruit interchangeably the way in which we tend to when we say just eat more fruit and veg.

What we would need to do is eat a lot more veg and make sure that we are eating a diversity of fruits and not necessarily the sweetest ones, or the least nutrient dense ones like bananas, which is incidentally the most popular fruit eaten in the world and certainly in the UK.

But we should try and get again colour in there, so even if we’re choosing apples, choose a type of apple that isn’t loaded with sugar. A jazz apple is not a great apple in the sense that it is the sweetest apple out there.So again, choose something like granny smith and it’s a great thing to have after a meal, it’s full of fibre, it’s not very high in sugar and it delivers a whole bunch of different compounds the body really loves, helps to digest foods better. The microbes in your gut love it.

Try and get those vegetables in and just substituting out those refined carbohydrates for above ground, non-starchy vegetable is a great way to go and that’s very central to our food for health guide.

And with all this time on people’s hands in lockdown it’s a perfect time to get in the kitchen and learn to cook if that’s not your thing. You can watch YouTube videos. You can experiment with different recipes but just make friends with food.

That’s a nice way of putting it actually.

Absolutely so Ro I had a question and just to put a fun spin on this, which is you guys have busted a whole bunch of myths from myself as well, but I thought is there something that you within your profession that you hear from non-scientists that is so common, but it’s just not true?

Because you spoke about Rob the misinformation out there and it seems to be growing immensely. Is there some common maybe one common thing that you’ve noticed that you constantly get told that people believe to be true, but it’s just not true.

The one I’m going to throw in just to be a little awkwardis the fact that we can do nothing until the vaccine comes. Let me just explain that we know that a vaccine is going to take, Dr Anthony Crouchy from NIH in the US is very consistent with his view that it will take more than 12 months to produce a vaccine.

If we are supposedly meant to do nothing which is a pretty crazy idea given the fact that our immune system is working on this all the time, working around the clock on it. It’s going to be rather awkward when we find that depending on which particular mathematical model you choose to look at we would expect probably somewhere between a quarter and three quarters of the global population to have been exposed to coronavirus in a years’ time.

What that will mean is that say half the world population to take the average, will already have natural immunity, they will have done exactly what vaccines try and do using vaccine -like particles with adjuvants that themselves may be harmful, which is why we need to have such a delay to test if these things are safe. When in fact we know that the vast majority of people are going to have been exposed to it and will have natural immunity.

You could argue the market then even though many people will be forced to take the vaccine it will be largely unnecessary, so natural immunity is a process that is going to happen regardless.

Which is why everything we’ve talked about is so important. It’s starting to work towards getting the body in that space to protect and to move forward.

That leads me into what I wanted to say because what I’m hearing repeatedly is that you can’t do anything to change your immunity and that that there is nothing natural, that can help the coronavirus.

Whilst I am never going to make a claim that a vitamin or mineral is going to cure your coronavirus, what I absolutely say is that we’ve actually survived through evolution this far because of what’s in the natural world and because of how it engages and talks to and informs our immune system.

Absolutely we need to be doing those things and in that instance it’s good to learn from people who have come either functional medicine, natural medicine and all the herbal medicine because we are the ones who get taught this. We actually understand what is happening at that level and it may not come from your doctor but it is absolutely so.

Can I just ask you personally both is there a word of wisdom or a personal share from both of you to our listeners, just something from the heart, just to give them a sense of because there’s going to be fear and nervousness.

I think today more than anything would have made them feel a sense of empowerment and I think the tools you’ve given would help them. But any personal share?

What I would like to explain to people if there’s one thing that they take from this and we’re using it really as the catch cry for a lot of the work we are doing around this, is don’t fight it. Just adapt, we could be celebrating the arrival of this this new bug that is going to make us more resilient. We can also celebrate the fact that it is in a strange way while we are socially isolating people are starting to become more neighbourly again. We’ve got ourselves into a very, very difficult corner.

If you look at the elections, recent elections in the UK and USA and you look at the kind of individualism that is being portrayed by Donald trump and Boris Johnson and you know we are seeing it certainly more from Boris than we are from Mr Trump.

There is now a kind of collectivism that is part of really where we need to move to understand that we are one. We are not just one amongst each other as human beings we are one with nature and the planet. We have a shared responsibility for it, we don’t need to fight it because it is part of us. The whole of nature is full of tensions that exist between positive and negative between things that are sharp and things that are smooth, between things that hurt and that don’t hurt.

It’s what creates our orientation towards things that are better, that’s what drives evolution. That’s what drives progress and we have been getting very, very lost and if we continue to think that technology is the only thing that can rescue us we are looking in the wrong direction, we need to change that.

Powerful message.

I think I’d really like to say that I’ve learned in my life that every challenge brings enormous potential for change and that change should never be frightening because life is uncertain. Uncertainty has been our partner in life throughout evolution, we all know how to deal with uncertainty and we will have the resilience and flexibility within us to be able to actually flex and move with what life throws at us.

Use this time to connect more deeply to yourself, connect with the earth, connect with the world around you. Breathe, be mindful and take some time with nature every day where you can, and above all, remember that we’ve got the power to refrain anything we don’t like.

I really believe that we are immensely powerful beings and we have free will and we had a choice in this universe. Also we don’t need to move anywhere to harness the power of intention. In this time of lockdown make it your creation time.

Beautiful message, thank you both.

Thank you so much Ro, thank you Harms.

Thank you to both of you.

Absolute pleasure, Ro any final words before I signus off.

Well you know I am just going to be silent because I think what everybody’s just heard there is immense.

I think they’re going to need to sit and process it. What I would ask is, I’ve written down a couple of things just at the end there because I think it’s a beautiful way to finish this podcast interview.

But if you’re listening to this and you have anybody close to you that you love to spread the word, send them the link to this. We’re on iTunes, Spotify. This is the very first interview we’ve done outside myself and Harms talking and wow, I mean talk about impact, incredible content.

Thank you so much and I’m pleased we spent the time at the beginning as well getting to know you, because I’ve known you for years this is the first-time Harms has interacted with you.

I wanted our listeners to hear you because I have a funny feeling that we’re going to get you back on because certain things have come up today that we can’t not talk about further, and if you’re okay to do that it would be lovely to have you back on again.

Absolutely would be wonderful, thank you.

Fantastic, what a milestone episode 20, 4,000+ downloads and what incredible guests we’ve had join us on the first ever guest interview GrowthTribes podcast.

We are truly grateful, so Ro thank you.

Thank you, Mel and thank you to the listeners at home. As always we will put all the links and the transcription on the show notes.

We look forward to you joining us on the next episode of the Seekardo podcast.