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from
GreenMedInfo Website
Didn't the modern miracle of vaccines eradicate the plague and pestilence our Paleolithic ancestors succumbed to? Think again...
Paleo-oriented researchers, foodies, and clinicians seek to honor a wisdom in evolution that has been forsaken in the modern food era.
The human genome is best expressed under conditions of plentiful macro and micronutrients, an absence of food-borne and manmade toxins, and an acknowledgement of our co-evolution and inextricable interdependence with other animals, plants, and microbes.
If we get out of our own way, and follow ancestral practices, we can hope to optimize the genetic potential of our bodies to produce a robust and sustainable state of health and vitality.
Paleo Immunity
Our present dietary trajectory was initiated around 10,000 years ago in the transition from 2.5 million year old Paleolithic to the so-called Neolithic periods.
Our Neolithic predecessors were the innovators of today's grain-based, animal breeding and milking, sedentary, city-dwelling mode of subsistence, whose glorious technological innovations (written language, science, engineering, pyrotechnology, pottery, etc.) came with an ultimately steep price:
Our radical departure from sugarless, low-starch, high-nutrient, and mostly raw foods, to cooked grains (and their secondary reiteration in grain-fed animal products) marked a transition that had profound implications, affecting not only human physiology, but the very structure of human consciousness itself.
Plenty of evidence now exists that far from being an optimally healthy part of the human diet, or a so-called "staff of life," grains are like a crutch - highly addictive,[1] life force draining - which while capable of supporting population growth by getting bodies through the critical reproductive window in one piece, end up contributing to chronic, degenerative disorders that profoundly reduce the quality of human life. [2] [3]
The 'Paleo approach' is based on acknowledging that our body is the product of a deep metabolic pre-history - millions of years of foraging, hunting, living off the land in such a way that - nutrigenomically - the genetic infrastructure of our very cells hungers daily for the dietary compounds that had nurtured them for eons.
Our genes are not expecting to see oxidized 'vegetable' oils, sugar, grains, or lectin-infused legumes. Paleo respects this fact.
What does this intention to preserve a relationship with the natural world teach us about our immunity?
Through exposure to soil, fermentation, the elements, and each other, we engaged in an epic journey of evolutionary adaptation - one marked by a countless responses to the microbial world. We birthed vaginally and breastfed to communicate what a mother's body had learned about its bacterial and viral friends and foes, and we preserved our own microbiome with respectful integrity.
When we got sick, our bodies formed a memory of the experience, and brought that memory to subsequent and related encounters.
The exact details of our immunologic evolution are something we, even with our modern minds, techniques, and resources, have not come close to fully elucidating.
Has vaccinology misconceived immunity?
Is it possible that vaccinology has applied a reductionist - one disease, one drug/vaccine - model to an evolutionarily adapted system with built-in complexities we have barely begun to appreciate?
Is it possible that we have misapprehended immunity, or are still fundamentally learning about its most basic principles?
If we are to accept that billions of years have gone into priming our physiology for interface with pathogens, as enemies, but also as commensals, then we must acknowledge that there is more to immunity than antibody response.
In fact, we have only begun to understand the most fundamental processes at play within our immunity, with some researchers claiming:
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We only have a keyhole view of what comprises a lasting immune response, and recently the very notion that antibody-mediated responses to infection are necessary to ward off infection has been called into question.
If the native immunologic posture emphasizes cell-mediated or TH1 immunity,
According to a study published in Vaccine titled, "Consequence or coincidence? - The occurrence, pathogenesis and significance of autoimmune manifestations after viral vaccines":
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Didn't vaccines eradicate infectious disease? Isn't that why we're living long healthy lives?
Our collective consciousness around infectious disease has been programmed with the alluringly reductionist perspective that vaccination has helped to save us from major deadly diseases, irrespective of the radical changes in sanitation and hygiene that marked the early to mid twentieth century.
This line of rhetoric, of course, also ignores the fact that the ~3.4 billion year long struggle of the living cell to perfect itself into our present day organism required the development of a sophisticated immune system - one that successfully interfaced with a virtually infinite number of infectious challenges along the way, and kept us alive and well before the nanosecond old (in biological time) shift into modern medical interventions began only 100 years ago.
Perhaps the most emblematic example of oversimplified benefits and dismissed risks is the darling of vaccine enthusiasts the world over: Polio.
An exploration of the true natural history of this dread disease reveals more than iron lungs and crutches cast aside by valiant needles. After the live Salk vaccine paralyzed hundreds of adults and children, strategic redefinition of polio in 1955 eliminated labeling as "poliomyelitis", all of the cases of acute flaccid paralysis caused by myriad viruses and also toxic exposures such as DDT.
In fact, what would have formerly been called,
...are increasingly common today.
Ironically and tragically, the only US cases of confirmed polio since 1973 have been vaccine-associated polio paralysis, prompting the acknowledgement of infectious risks associated with the live vaccine still imposed upon third world citizens.[11]
Indeed, In 2012, just when the Global Polio Eradication Initiative claimed 'mission accomplished' in India, with no reports of naturally transmitted (wild-type) polio infection in the 2011, over 47,000 cases of polio-like "acute flaccid paralysis" were reported [12] in the same year in children by The National Polio Surveillance Program (TNPSP) in populations fully immunized with bivalent oral polio vaccine.
TNPSP conveniently renamed these cases "non-polio acute flaccid paralysis" to avoid connecting them to the polio vaccines, describing them as "mild cases," and "...of little consequence," despite the fact that they were shown to be twice as lethal as naturally transmitted polio.
Additionally, not only has a far more deadly strain of vaccine-strain polio virus now displaced naturally circulating strains, but amazingly, modern technology has now made it impossible to fully eradicate it, as a fully infectious, replication competent form is now entirely synthesizable in a laboratory.
In other words, even if polio could be rendered extinct, it could be resurrected through modern technology at any point in time, making the rallying cry of 'global eradication' disingenuous.
An extensive record now exists in the biomedical literature of vaccine failure and outbreaks blamed on the non-vaccinated that were later proven to have occurred within the fully immunized.
More fundamentally, if vaccines worked, and protected life by improving upon our immune system's presumably flawed design, why does the U.S. have one of the highest infant mortality rates (IMRs) in the developed world (33 nations have lower IMRs), while at the same time having the most infant vaccines in the world (26 vaccine doses for infants aged less than 1 year)? [23]
Beyond the clearly immune disruptive properties of vaccines, are the presence of "hidden" viruses that contaminated the master seed stock of cell lines used to produce the original live and "attenuated" vaccines, e.g. simian virus 40 (SV40), long before virus detecting technologies like polymerase chain reaction (PCR) were available, or even reverse transcriptase - the enzyme used by retroviruses to infect a cell - was known to exist.
These so-called adventitious viruses, including endogenous retroviruses, are still present in many of the vaccines used today and may be gaining direct entry into the human host, without any regulatory oversight, or clear understanding of their true adverse effects on health.
Talking to our genes
Why take human or foreign biological material and co-culture and pass it through infectious materials, combining the resultant vaccine with chemicals like formaldehyde, antibiotics, phenol, anti-freeze, etc., and inject it directly into a presumably healthy body to "improve on immunity" or "protect" against a future theoretical risk of infection?
What Paleo-oriented scholar would consider this in line with our evolutionarily determined health needs?
In the ancestral health community, we know to question the goods peddled by corporate food companies, in bed with the FDA, and in gross and belligerent neglect of our best health interests. We know to take matters back into our own hands - to liaison with farmers, to share a cow with neighbors, pasture our own chickens, and ferment vegetables on our countertops.
Agenda and profit driven influence has sabotaged our relationship to our very sustenance. Don't take those highly sophisticated and empowered lenses off yet, though. Take a look through them at the pharmaceutical industry.
Acknowledge their criminal-level corruption and their thorough lack of interest in or appreciation for your lifestyle, for your genome. Understand that the faulty premise of injectible immunity has no place in evolutionary medicine.
Appreciate the enormity of this enterprise and its thorough lack of checks and balances - 69 doses of 16 vaccines by age 6, no matter who your child is or of what health status.
We have no means of risk stratifying for whom they are what, and are making absolutely no effort to do so through individualized screening.
You can sue McDonald's for your E.Coli ridden Big Mac, but when you develop neurological dysfunction, autoimmunity, cancer, or even die after an acute or longer-latency vaccine reaction, you can't sue anyone.
Your case can enter a bureaucratic holding pen where an estimated 1% are assessed for damages, but that nonetheless has already paid out 2+ billion dollars to injured citizens.
Ancestral health enthusiasts know that immunity cannot be manufactured, that buoying us with synthesized antibiotics and steroids - best left to emergency medicine - is a practice that is only necessitated by neglect of nutrition-based immune support.
Let's use our frontal lobes to revisit rhetoric we have been forced to accept, to examine the evidence base disproving the very premise of vaccination - a premise that offends our Paleo sensibilities.
References
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