A dog’s life, Angelina Jolie and more monkey business

Or 4 window panes to help us step outside the matrix?

My ears pricked up this morning when I heard a London vet on the radio explaining that the lifespan of a golden retriever dog has plummeted from around an average of 16 to 17 years in the 1970s, through to around just 10 years today.

Pane 1: A dog’s life

This soundbite piqued my interest for two reasons.

First, my family and I are 6 months into life with a one-and-a-half-year-old mixed breed Romanian rescue dog who’d clearly suffered some early life trauma in her home country and possibly in her transportation to the UK. That’s her in the window frame above, by the way. But she’s doing amazingly well now in her new home of the last 6 months, and we’re trying to do everything we can to ensure she flourishes in terms of her diet, lifestyle and environment. In that regard, I’ve been quite shocked by what’s available as dog food in the pet stores, that some still, with some basis, suggest might be more nutritious than human junk food!

The second reason for my interest is the plummeting lifespan of retrievers, and that domestic animals might provide us with an ongoing experiment over how genes and environment interact, all in a compressed lifespan. When they live with us, they share the same environment, the same air, the same electromagnetic frequencies, they absorb our stress and emotions, and some even share some of the same food.

But most don’t eat the diet they evolved to eat. Some, gifted with a digestive system tweaked over millennia of evolution have gone vegan. Most rely on the food sold at pet stores – by a pet food industry that specialises in making foods for animals comprised of bits that humans don’t like to eat. Then this booming industry prepares and packages this so-called food in ways that make it viable, meaning free from ravaging infectious pathogens (but often far from healthful), for two or more years on a shelf. The wonders of food technology!

After hearing this disturbing statistic which equates to an average 40% shortening of lifespan in the humble ‘goldie’, I did what I often do. Sense and fact check it against other data and information. It turns out to be pretty accurate. Relatively recent peer review papers that have large datasets typically put a retriever lifespan at 11 to 12 years, and that’s not using the latest data that vets are tracking. Even the ‘official golden retriever’ website cites this dramatic drop in lifespan from 16 or 17 down to 10 years over the last 40 years.

Losing 10% of an average lifespan per decade should be a massive wake up call. Obviously some of it might be linked to downgraded genetics through increased inbreeding. Some 60% of retrievers now get and often die of cancer. But as we know from lots of human and animal research, genes are only ever partly responsible. There’s always a play-off between genes and environment; the genes load the gun, while the environment pulls the trigger.

Pane 2: Angelina Jolie

That’s why, for some women, having a double mastectomy à la Angelina Jolie because you’ve been identified to be a carrier of the BRCA1 (or 2) gene doesn’t make sense. I personally think it’s a choice, and that choice should be respected – on the grounds the choice is made on the basis of properly informed consent which in turn relies on the most recent and relevant information that has been provided to the consenter well in advance of the life changing decision being made.

Very few people on this planet likely know what Angelina Jolie was told by the medics around her at the time. Let’s also not forget what was known back in 2013 is in any event considerably less than what we know today. But when the media picked up the story nearly ten years ago, it was no surprise they, including the BBC, took the absolute upper end of the ‘calculated risk’ suggesting Jolie’s breast cancer risk was a very scientifically determined and scary 87%.  But this is a population risk, not an individual risk, and it was in any event calculated from misrepresentative studies that were laden with ascertainment bias that comes from studying highly selected families with family histories of very high breast cancer rates. The specific genetic variations (polymorphisms) in Jolie’s BRCA1 gene, how other genes and alleles might interact, or how her diet, environment, body weight or fitness might play off her specific ‘book of life’ (i.e. her epigenetic playbook) were almost certainly not factored in to the modifiable risk factor menu.  

Long story short, the actual risk for a BRCA1 or BRCA2 carrier is now considered closer to 50%. And that’s still a population average, not taking into account those who opt for anti-inflammatory cancer preventative diets and eating regimes, including intermittent fasting, those who opt for few or no mammography screens, minimise their chemical exposure, get out into the fresh air, are physically active – and the rest of it. Others, it seems, were issued with a figure of 86%, such as a 27-year-old Essex woman who discovered she was a BRCA2 carrier, presumably feeling empowered to walk in Lara Croft’s footsteps - while others profit from the lie.

But like with the retrievers, cancer prevalence – including breast cancer in women – is rising. For example, Antoniou and colleagues (2013) found that a human female BRCA1 carrier born in the same year as myself (1960) has a nearly 8-fold greater risk of suffering breast cancer than one born in 1920. That’s before we really understand just how much more insidious today’s environment will be when today’s youth reach middle age. It’s another signal that our increasingly high tech environment is getting ever more effective at pulling that deadly trigger. 

Back to retrievers. What’s making them die earlier than their recent ancestors other than more inbreeding (something my rescue isn’t a victim of)? Is it also their environment? And, as I’ve argued for years, the most intimate way we experience our environment is via the food we eat. That’s why we wrote the book Reset Eating – which is all about how you can individualise your relationship to food to achieve metabolic flexibility which sets up your metabolism and physiology for maximum resilience and healthspan. Developing a good relationship with the right kind of food at the right time and place turns out to be the biggest thing within our control that will improve our healthspan – and likely our lifespan too.

The people who hail from the most technologically advanced societies are now beginning to die earlier. Yes, I speak of our American friends. Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that life expectancy of Americans started to plateau around a decade ago. Then it dropped a year and a half since the SARS-CoV-2 became part of our lives. Many are also getting sicker earlier in their lives, and kids are now more obese and developing diabetes – something that was rare when retrievers commonly lived to 17 in the 1970s. Then there’s the future impact of ageing populations on long-term care – the less healthy, less able-bodied and able-minded among us will face a much tougher time of it in our twilight years.

A meta-analysis out of Griffith University has shown comorbidities, in particular kidney disease, cancer, diabetes and heart disease, greatly contribute to risks of serious disease and death among those infected with SARS-CoV-2, and likely therefore most other circulating infectious diseases. That’s a risk that faces pretty much everyone in most highly populated places in temperate and sub-tropical latitudes. Yet society seems happy enough to indulge in the fantasy of the likes of Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, that repeated shots of their new-fangled genetic potions will stop this virus transmitting from person to person. And if that fails, we’ll be happy to consider it the primary therapeutic approach to help prevent serious disease. And if that fails, we’ll be happy to let them play around the with the formulas and see if they can make them work better. While we ignore the costs and harms they incur.

All the while, will we just accept that efforts to make us more resilient in the face of infection won’t work, or are a waste of time or resources? I sense this might be the gravest societal error of the last 3 years – but fortunately one that we don’t have to play along with if we choose to step outside the matrix.

All these years later, so many people around the world – no thanks to the revolving door between the pharmaceutical industry and government authorities – appear to be still enthralled by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory. And seemingly blind to Antoine Béchamp’s terrain theory, Claude Bernard’s view of the milieu intérieur, and Walter Cannon’s fully developed concept of homeostasis which should, in my view, really be the primary focus of doctors and practitioners when helping their patients or clients to maintain or restore health.  

Pane 3: WHO monkey business

Let’s jump from retrievers to that monkey business going on at the World Health Organization (WHO). Confirmation of the intensifying totalitarianism that is attempting to govern the 8 billion of us on planet Earth occurred just 5 days ago, when Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, declared monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) i.e. the highest level of global health emergency. Tedros made this determination unilaterally, discounting the majority views of the emergency committee on this virus. Five people are reported to have died, and the virus currently appears to afflict only a subsection of the population, primarily men who have sex with other men – MSM. Monkeypox becomes the third health threat to have current PHEIC status, along with Covid-19 and polio. Zika and Ebola previously held this status.

Malaria, that the WHO estimates gives rise to 241 million cases and 627,000 deaths annually, is, it seems, not worthy of being a PHEIC. It doesn’t quite make the carefully constructed criteria, including not being an “extraordinary event”, as spelled out in the International Health Regulations. Let’s face it, drugs and vaccines against malaria haven’t been huge money spinners. Surely the WHO and the IHR aren’t set up to benefit those in richer, industrialised countries? Is the return on investment when targeting the main victims of tropical diseases like malaria and tuberculosis that meter out huge death and morbidity tolls year in year out seemingly not worth the effort? Surely the WHO wouldn’t discriminate? After all, they were worried about the term monkeypox being discriminatory…. 

Let’s get real. A WHO-declared Public Health Emergency of International Concern or PHEIC is a carefully contrived passport to creating fast-tracked vaccines and drugs – and piles of money for their makers. It’s a green light to skip arduous clinical safety and efficacy trials, instead making members of the public experimental guinea pigs for pharma’s new tech. A PHEIC also grants pharma companies immunity against damages, that we, the taxpayers pay for, even if the novel gene therapies don’t give us immunity to the target virus and they cause some of us unpredictable and irreparable harms. It doesn’t stop there. A PHEIC also paves the way for more and more gene sequencing, surveillance and control. Looked at through this non-rosy-spectacled-mass-formed hue, there’s not much going for it. Yet it’s going from strength to strength – courtesy of creeping totalitarianism that so many appear to either enthusiastically embrace or just silently accept.

I’ve taken you to three frames of my window: Ms Jolie, my dog (who also stood in for retrievers whom she loves playing with in our local park), and the WHO’s monkey business.

Pane 4: Nirvana

Now to the bottom right frame of our window.

That’s the nirvana that awaits any of us who make the choice, and guess what? It’s within reach for all of us, just the other side of the window pane.  You can choose to be there with or without your dog. But to get there, we do need to detach from the madness (= matrix) around us. We literally need to get on with life, and try to unhook ourselves as much as we can from the industrial food system, the industrial health system, the global financial system, and the increasingly globalised corporatocracy that seeks to coerce and control us.

People who feed their dogs unprocessed foods that are closely related to the diets of their pets’ canine ancestors, that include probiotics, natural sources of vitamin and minerals, amino acids, nucleotides from offal and fermented foods, antioxidants, healthy omega-3 fatty acids, fibre and other goodies – that haven’t been heat damaged by industrial extrusion processes that hit a de-naturing 200 degrees centigrade – tend to do very well. Maybe regaining the lost 40% of healthspan or lifespan.

Perhaps human’s best friend, the dog, is a good proxy for what’s wrong or right with our world? Perhaps it’s not coincidental that when humans adopt the same healthy practices around the way we eat, sleep, relax, recreate and socialise, they also do remarkably well. In the process we also reduce our dependence on the systems that increasingly attempt to coerce and enslave us.  

Instead of fighting the bifurcation of our species that appears to already be well underway, let’s celebrate whichever route we choose. Those of us who’ve chosen the less signposted route can revel in the fact that this route has more in common with our evolutionary past, cherishing our relationship with nature.

But let’s be prepared to build new structures to, amongst other things, help us manage our health and educate our children. Structures that are untainted by the darkness that continues to drive the still dominant, totalitarian, technocratic super-tanker towards a transhumanist horizon.