Date:22 February 2024
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New York-based Dr Ron Hoffman MD CNS is recognised as one of America’s foremost complementary and integrative medicine practitioners. He was founder and Medical Director of the Hoffman Center in New York City, and now maintains a private practice in New York. He is also President both of our US arm, ANH-USA, and the Board for Certification of Nutrition Specialists (BCNS). He’s authored numerous books and articles for the public and for health professionals, and is host of the Intelligent Medicine podcast.
On this week’s podcast, Dr Hoffman speaks with Rob Verkerk PhD, ANH founder and executive and scientific director of ANH-Intl and ANH-USA just before Rob left for New Orleans, where he’s presenting at the Inflammaging Conference organised by the International College of Integrative Medicine (ICIM).
In a fascinating two-part conversation, Ron and Rob cover a lot of ground discussing the work of the ANH, in the US, UK and Europe. Their discussions included ANH’s work protecting access to supplements and natural health therapies, including homeopathy, which is coming under increasing attack in the US, UK and European Union. They also zoned in on the acute need to challenge increasingly stringent censorship of communications about natural health options that many expected to be relaxed post-pandemic (and have actually increased in intensity and scope).
Enjoy the first of many conversations (a full transcript of their conversation can be found below) between these two natural health leaders—and please share with your networks.
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Transcript
Dr Ron Hoffman
Welcome to today’s Intelligent Medicine podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ronald Hoffman. Today, what I’d like to do is acquaint you or bring you up to speed on an organisation that is dear to my heart. I’m President of that organisation. It’s the Alliance for Natural Health. ANH-USA.org. With me today is the executive director of the Alliance for Natural Health. He has been a frequent contributor here on intelligent medicine and he is Rob Verkerk. Rob is an internationally acclaimed expert in health, agricultural and environmental sustainability, and he is one of these jack of all trades guys who has deep knowledge in medical and health topics as well as environmental topics. And he is the founder of ANH International, the Alliance for Natural Health International, which is based in the UK. And in a recent move, we’ve consolidated our efforts with ANH International. You can find them at anhinternational.org. It’s a pan European and international NGO, quote, “dedicated to promoting and protecting natural approaches to health care, as well as helping to shape the scientific and regulatory framework affecting such approaches.” ANH, the Alliance for Natural Health is all about safeguarding your access to healthcare policies and procedures of your choice, access to healthcare practitioners, and to supplements.
And so without further ado, here is Rob Verkerk. Rob, it’s a pleasure having a conversation with you once again. And a shout out to you over there in the UK.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Ron, absolutely fantastic to be with you a day before I actually set foot back in the US again. So don’t ask me about my carbon footprint at the moment, but it’s considerable.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Okay, well, I know if you could, you would probably bicycle over here because you’re a stupendous cyclist and athlete, but it’s a little hard to traverse the Atlantic Ocean that way.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Yeah, if you got any hints on that, Ron, I’m totally up for it.
Dr Ron Hoffman
I don’t know, maybe a pedal boat. You could establish the world’s transatlantic record on a pedal. Maybe that. Maybe that would be a little too time consuming.
Rob Verkerk PhD
We can talk to Elon Musk and have the Starlink, so we can actually do podcasts mid Atlantic. That would be great.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Okay, so tell us a little bit about what’s happening on the ANH front and perhaps acquaint our listeners with the mission of ANH now that you’ve got dual roles as head of ANH international, also executive director of ANH USA.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Well, Ron, we live in a fascinating world, one that is changing extremely rapidly. And if you look at the subject of healthcare, we have a peculiar situation where when people think of healthcare, they tend to think of hospitals and clinics. And you will know there have been multiple studies that show that the net impact on health outcomes of clinical care is around about 20%. So 80% of it happens outside a clinical environment. A very large part of it has to do with our behaviour, the behaviours that we engage with. And that does include what we put into our mouth, what we put into our skin, but it also includes how we respond to the world around us, and how many chemicals there are that we are exposed to. And if we live in an inner city area or out in a rural area, if we’re consuming pesticides or not. And it actually also has a large part to do with our socioeconomic status, which is an interesting problem for health care. Pretty much 50% of health outcomes are correlated very, very closely with how much disposable income we have. And that tells a rather sorry story that if we need to do the things that are good for us, one would imagine that those things are not readily accessible through Medicaid, Medicare.
They are not at the cheap end of the supermarket. And there’s this illusion that you need a lot of money to manage your health properly. Now, at ANH, we are very interested in challenging that whole spectre. And of course, what we’re seeing is a pharmaceutical industry that’s kind of controlled the clinical care environment for the last 80 or so years. It has largely used a biochemistry lens to look at the human body. And because it’s used a biochemistry lens, it’s come up typically with biochemical solutions. And post-World War II, we saw the morphing of a kind of pre-pharma industry that was busy making synthetic vitamins and minerals, that then birthed what we know today as orthomolecular medicine. And then they decided to start patenting molecules with probably around about 75% of all pharmaceuticals having some link with natural products. Much more recently, we’ve seen since 2012, the patent cliff for big blockbuster drugs. And we’re in this really interesting period. This is a key time for natural health, because the drug companies are going, actually, we’ve got a huge amount now to learn from nature, and we’re going to start looking at this area of biologic products, biosimilars. We’re going to look at nanotechnology. People think of nanotechnology as something brand new. Nature has been doing nanotechnology for billions of years.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Just for our listeners define nanotechnology.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Yeah. A nanomaterial is simply something that is between one and 100 microns in one of its lengths. So it is purely a size related feature. You can add the word technology to nano. And essentially all you’re saying is that it has somehow been manufactured. And of course, we can take natural products and put them through a technological process and call it a nanotechnology. But the bottom line is, what we’re seeing is essentially drug companies using these techniques that nature has been using to get specific molecules inside cells, sometimes even in complex cells like human cells, eukaryotic cells, getting them into the nucleus so that they can start to interact with nucleic acids, with DNA. And so this whole chapter of, if you like, synbio, synthetic biology is now happening. And in the US, you’ll see one of the first synbio products has actually hit the market. It’s called Bored Cow because the cows are so bored, because they’re not involved in making this vegan milk. And it’s called a milk because essentially what they’ve done is bioengineer fungal protein to be able to produce whey protein.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Wow.
Rob Verkerk PhD
And of course, Ron, you know, that milk has got a whole bunch of…
Dr Ron Hoffman
Immune suite of nutrients and they’re trying to substitute just one constituent for just one. Yeah.
Rob Verkerk PhD
When I was in Florida three weeks ago, I met with John Fagan, who you may know has done a lot of work, ex-genetic engineer who’s kind of switched sides. And John has done a detailed analysis on this Bored Cow milk. And it’s scary because they’ve got it through the FDA as a equivalent of milk. So it hasn’t required any kind of pre market testing. And the thing is it’s missing a whole bunch of the immune factors that we would normally get in milk, because he’s compared it with biodynamic milk and organic milk. But more disturbingly, he’s also found very, very clear toxins and allergens within it. And then he’s found another 92 compounds that are entirely new to nature.
Dr Ron Hoffman
So would it be fair to say that ANH and ANH international is about waving a bit of a caution flag on the ascendancy of a biochemical pharmaceutical model of health care? Where we welcome the innovations? I mean, there’s no question they’re incredible innovations that can vanquish killer diseases, prevent diseases. We now have weight loss drugs. It’s amazing the developments here, but on the other hand, we are not doing that well with chronic diseases. I don’t know what the situation is in the UK, I presume it’s similar to the United States, but life expectancy is declining. The incidence of cancer in young people is dramatically increasing. These are disturbing trends. And even in the face of incredible expenditures of our gross natural product for pharmaceutical, expensive pharmaceutical fixes, we’re not addressing some of the fundamental health problems that face us.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Exactly. There are multiple issues. One is in terms of the fact that the pharmaceutical industry and the biotech industry have developed such close links with the regulators, they’re getting fast tracked through the system, as we see with Bored Cow. But what we’re seeing as a whole.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Series cronyism or crony capitalism.
Rob Verkerk PhD
It is cronyism. It’s exactly what it is, yeah. And yet, at the same time for products that have been around, NMN would be a good example, where there are slight modifications.
Dr Ron Hoffman
That’s the NAD nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Which is a potent antiaging compound. It’s got very specific effects that are protective of DNA. It can reduce the rate at which telomeres, the ends of chromosomes, are shortening. So it has a direct role on life expectancy. And so we’re now seeing this playoff between investigational new drugs and new dietary ingredients that are essentially creating an obstacle course for the natural product industry. Basically, pharma is saying, look, we’ve by and large, cleared a space where we can go to market with our friends that we fund in the agencies like FDA and its equivalent around the world. And they want to do it at a lower and lower cost. So they want a fast tracking system. You can see it with mRNA vaccines. Now, once they’ve sort of proven the concept of it, and I do think that in itself is somewhat controversial, to suggest that they have been proven safe when there’s still some questions on the transparency and even the amount of the data. But essentially, they’re always looking for the shortcuts.
Dr Ron Hoffman
I think an interesting example of that is the fast tracking of Alzheimer’s drugs, some of which have been proven pretty dangerous. The efficacy is questionable, the expense is astronomical, and yet the expenditure on lifestyle factors that may impact the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease is negligible compared to the multibillion dollar efforts to promote these drugs.
Rob Verkerk PhD
100%. Roughly with ANH, we can divide what we do into sort of four main sectors. One is campaign areas that we really focus on to draw attention. That often involves kind of two parts. One is creating awareness of a problem and then looking for that solution. And that solution often involves political change. So we are extremely involved, as you know, with our action alerts. We have a very strong voice on the Hill, particularly with federal policy, but we’re also directly involved with state policy. So that’s the campaign side. We have an action side where we are, again, getting people increasingly involved in all sorts of actions that are about change. And they may be political actions, but they also may be actions in the community where people can help support one another through education. And that links to the third part, which is about education. So we’ve now launched a health creation faculty, where we’re actually running courses, bringing people together, experts around the world together to be able to deliver key courses that are really about filling information gaps. There are some fantastic education offerings around, but there’s also some significant gaps.
And one of the gaps that we really are filling is where we use a sort of a super big picture, holistic view, looking at specific areas. So if we’re going to look at the chronic disease problem, let’s look at some of the big picture problems. For example, the fact that we have a siloed system of medicine, where all the different specialisms are so siloed that they barely communicate with each other. They even use different vocabularies. And when you look at the interaction between that mainstream allopathic medical community, which has problems understanding itself, then you see this complete division to this other side, the alternative and complementary medical world, that, again, is also pretty siloed, because you actually have more than 400 or so alternative medicine modalities. Again, people speaking different languages. So we’ve got to find a way that works for the citizen, for the individual. So one of the things we’ve been working on with our Blueprint for health system sustainability is how do we develop a new language that everyone can use, that everyone can understand, that is built around function? Because we’re not going to start resolving some of these problems. And I’m going to be speaking at a meeting in New Orleans next week, where we’re going to be looking at small molecules like nucleotides and peptides.
And incidentally, these are molecules that the FDA and the drug companies have got their eyes on as well. So we are already starting to see a fight developing with the FDA having.
Dr Ron Hoffman
A fight essentially, over natural compounds.
Rob Verkerk PhD
They’re going to say, we want to stop compounding pharmacists from making these small molecules, these peptides, which are just combinations between generally two and seven or eight amino acids, that, if you like, offer a very specific language to the body. These are all protonaceous molecules that are the key signalling molecules for all of life on this planet. And they have pronounced effects, many of them occur in natural forms, but we essentially have stopped consuming the kind of foods that deliver them. And one good example of that would be organ meats, ever since we decided to, usually because of something like the.
Dr Ron Hoffman
BSE crisis, the bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the so called Creutzfeldt-jakob disease, brain rot with prions.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Yeah, you’ve got it. Exactly. So that shifted the dietary pattern to consuming muscle meats, largely. And offal meats were taken out of the equation. And yet the offal meats contain vast numbers of signalling peptides and signalling nucleotides that are critical for one, carbon metabolism, for communication in the body, for triggering stem cell regeneration in different organs.
Dr Ron Hoffman
For listeners, that’s offal, not awful. As much as many of you may disdain liver, one of the most maligned foods, perhaps along with tofu, in anglo saxon culture. Let me just mention the impact of the Alliance for Natural Health, because we have had significant impact. We compiled some statistics for last year and it’s on our website ANH-USA.org. 40,000 new activists. Look, this is a grassroots movement. This is not a movement, an elitist movement. This is not a movement of healthcare practitioners. Although we have many healthcare practitioners across the many disciplines, MDs, DOs, nurse practitioners, PAs, naturopaths, chiropractors, health coaches, you name it. But we also have a lot of citizen activists because it’s a grassroots movement. It’s like, how are we going to lift this? Because we’re not getting a lot of top down support for these initiatives. So it’s really people demanding, voting with their feet, consuming natural products and joining organisations like ours. 535 congressional offices contacted because we have lobbyists in place and I’ve been on the Hill and I think you have as well. We’ve gone to members of Congress and we’ve stated our positions and sometimes with a sympathetic ear, sometimes with a sceptical ear, because a lot of these folks were outgunned by big pharma.
Their contributions are enormous to legislators. But we too wield some influence because we have a lot of voters behind us. 248 laws impacted because we will sometimes block a law that’s restrictive for access to health care or health care products. Or we’ll advocate for a law that is say for example, the PFAS campaign that we did on something that is deleterious to the environment. We want federal agencies and Congress to be aware that this is a hazard that’s impacting our children or our grandchildren. And it’s a terrible legacy for the future. And 122 campaigns initiated. And if you go to ANH-USA.org, you can see what some of our campaigns are about and I’m sure that some of them will be directly in your wheelhouse. If you’re a listener to Intelligent Medicine. Go ahead, Rob.
Rob Verkerk PhD
I think it could be said that we punch way above our weight because we are the largest grassroots organisation involved. And that’s one of the reasons we have such a significant voice on the Hill. We also live in a time, as I said, that is changing so rapidly. So we have to deal with the way in which the US constitution now is being distorted by the authorities, by government. And one of the campaigns that we’ll be unleashing, a very big campaign that we’re coming together with pretty much the lead doctors and clinicians in the keto intermittent fasting camp is going to be on censorship, is on the use of AI in censorship, because essentially what’s happened is that the whole thing has been handed over to the bots. And the bots now based on a change that was made on the 15 August 2023 in YouTube’s medical misinformation policy, they basically said, we’re going to disallow anything unless it’s in line with what the NIH is saying or what the World Health Organization is saying.
Dr Ron Hoffman
And by the way, that’s up for discussion at the level of the Supreme Court. I believe next month there’s a big case which is going to involve this notion of can social media, at the behest of the government, restrict access to truthful information, because the kind of information that they were suppressing was that covid itself, the covid virus, was not of natural origin. There was an active effort to suppress that notion. Now, it’s quite plausible that it was a man-made organism that escaped from the Wuhan lab. There was suppression of the notion that perhaps the vaccine was not that effective, that it was a little leaky. There was suppression of the notion that the vaccine did not really prevent transmission to a significant degree. There was suppression of the side effects of the vaccine. There was suppression of the risk benefit equation, especially in younger individuals, about the vaccine. And all this is coming to light. But this was the quote, “misinformation or disinformation”, Individuals were shadow banned and outright banned.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Deplatformed often. You see, Ron, the bottom line is, I think everyone would be accepting of excessively stringent restrictions on speech if it was temporary, during the period in which the pandemic was running, when it’s very easy in hindsight, to look back and say, yeah, well, that was the wrong thing to do. There was a lot of confusion about what the right thing to do was at that time.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Right. Understood.
Rob Verkerk PhD
The reason that we have to launch this campaign now is that there has been no relaxation of that censorship. And the very fact that the censorship now has shifted gears away from covid and pandemic related issues and has now hit fair and square the whole keto intermittent fasting camp. When, yes, we all know that different people mean different things when they use the word keto diet. They mean different things when they talk about intermittent fasting. But the bottom line is that we believe very strongly under the First Amendment that people should be able to talk pretty openly about that subject without interference. And of course, the question that will need to be resolved in the court is, can a private platform determine privately as a company, to control what is on its platform or not? The difficulty they have, increasingly, is that these decisions are not made by these private social media platforms in isolation. They’re made in cahoots with government agencies. And that is why we believe that it is probably a breach of the first amendment in the US constitution. So it’s going to be an interesting time. The bottom line is, a lot of people don’t know that shadow banning outside pandemic related matters is going on.
Rob Verkerk PhD
And that’s because shadow banning is a pretty clever approach. You don’t see anyone losing their platform. Essentially what happens is that you don’t get referred. If you’re already a subscriber to a particular channel, you will see that channel. There will be no change, so you will not know. However, if you weren’t aware of it and you were interested in learning more, let’s say, in the keto intermittent fasting area, what will happen is that you won’t be shown the most popular videos on that subject, which were the people who had the greatest numbers of hits. Those guys will be relegated deep down in your list. And suddenly what you’re seeing is this combination of de-amplifying the people who really are the experts and then amplifying in its place people who are very critical of intermittent fasting and keto diets for someone who doesn’t.
Dr Ron Hoffman
And paradoxically, if you’re the parent of a teenager, you may glance at their cell phone and discover that they’ve gone down a rabbit hole in TikTok on the corpse diet, something that is unquestionably an unhealthy way to go. And yet it is viral and highly promoted by algorithms within social media. So there’s quite the paradox there.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Look, this is the world we have to navigate, and as always, we do need a judiciary. One of the reasons that at ANH we’ve always had two fundamental strands. One is what we call good science and the other is good law. And both of them are very strongly correlated to civilised societies and the difficulties we’re seeing. More and more distorted science and more and more distorted law. So what we do in ANH is attempt to shine a light on the problem and then present solutions. And that solution often involves not only a change in our own behaviours and attitudes and improved understanding of what’s going on in the world, but also political change.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Folks, if you are a listener to intelligent medicine, as evidently you are, because you’ve sought out this podcast, I think it’s in your interest to cheque out the Alliance for Natural Health. ANH usa.org is the place to go for advocacy, for information. Please join and take part in what we’re trying to accomplish, because I think it is an organisation that reflects your priorities and is going to be very, very instrumental in safeguarding your access to freedom of choice in healthcare. I’m Dr. Ronald Hoffman. Today our guest is the executive director of ANH International and also ANH USA. Recently we’ve come closer and merged together in our efforts, and we’ll be back with more with Rob Verkerk, I’m Dr. Ronald Hoffman.
PART TWO
Dr Ron Hoffman
Welcome back to today’s intelligent medicine podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ronald Hoffman. We’re talking freedom of choice in healthcare, freedom of choice for practitioners that you would like to work with, and freedom of choice in supplements, and also freedom of choice in obtaining information about, shall we say, innovative ways of meeting your health care challenges. That’s all at stake in our current environment. Also, the environment itself is a big issue. One organisation that’s tackling, that is an organisation that I am proud to say that I’m President of, it is the Alliance for Natural Health. You can find them at ANH-USA.org. With me today is the executive director of ANH, also Head of ANH International, based in the UK. It’s a global effort in these areas. Rob Verkerk. Rob, it’s a pleasure. Let’s keep going on the subject of what we call informed consent, I think that’s an important issue because you go for like a medical procedure. It’s a routine medical procedure. But then there’s pages and pages of fine print about what could go wrong, what could happen, and then you have to sign off. But what does that mean from the standpoint of ANH’s perspective? Informed consent. Why is that so important?
Rob Verkerk PhD
Informed consent is a fundamental principle of medical ethics. The principle has been around for thousands of years. It has been kind of pushed under the umbrella of autonomy. Again, medical autonomy is a concept that Beauchamp and Childress to the key authors of current contemporary medical, accepted by AMA, the American Medical association in the US. They will say there are four fundamental principles that should follow in terms of a doctor patient relationship. So autonomy is one of them, where essentially the individual is empowered with information to make suitable choices that are relevant to their needs and their circumstances. And it’s very interesting when you look at how, in the event of a public health emergency of international concern, a PHEIC, the term that the World Health Organization use, what we’re seeing increasingly is that autonomy being stripped from the individual, and ironically, it’s even being removed from the physician. So the physician is now in a position where he or she is having to look over his or her shoulder at what the institutions are saying. So it’s the exact opposite of it. So within that whole issue of autonomy comes this notion of informed consent, and that is about having the relevant information for making a specific health care choice.
Written into all of the background in medical ethics on that is also this idea of being able to weigh up relevant alternatives. So say you have, for example, knee osteoarthritis, and you approach your physician. The physician would not be offering informed consent if they said, look, we’re just going to give you oral steroids or injected steroids or whatever, they would need to weigh up all of the situations. So one of the things that we see in a non-holistic health system is, particularly in a world where we see metabolic syndrome off the scales, excuse the pun. But if that individual, for example, is carrying too much weight, Ron, you know, as a doctor, that weight in that individual is going to be aggravating the problem. And so in order to offer informed consent, they would have to also address the morbid obesity, for example, if that was the case of that individual, and they would need to look at a range of science based alternatives. And this complexity, particularly when we see it in the window of a seven or a ten minute consultation, is just not happening. And of course, in addition to that, we’re seeing a shift away to a kind of a tram track approach, which is basically diagnose, look at the symptoms, diagnose a disease and offer a pill for that ill.
Dr Ron Hoffman
From my perspective as a physician, what we’re seeing is the advent of EMRs, electronic medical records, and basically, when you encounter a patient, you’re spending more time staring into a screen. I have forgone the EMR in my practise, so I’m a pen and paper practitioner. What happens when you stare into a screen? You actually can plug in some information and with the advent of AI, you may get a series of options, option A-B-C and D, or a directive that such and such is the correct therapy. Initiate statin therapy immediately, or initiate pharmaceutical blood pressure control immediately. And these suggestions may be warranted were it not for a wealth of natural alternatives that may preclude the necessity for this, what I call paint by numbers medicine. And that, I think, is increasingly threatening informed consent. Because we really have to lay out all of the above approach for our patients, and because of the dictates of modern medicine, the time constraints and the mechanisation of the process, there’s less and less of that. And that’s what we are struggling to uphold.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Yes, that happens because the medical system has been captured. It’s been captured by a corporate lobby that has a particular set of products it’s got in it. And that is one of the fundamental priorities in ANH, is to shed a light, to be able to show. I mean, it’s one of the reasons I just quoted the stats saying that an individual’s socioeconomic status is close to 50% of all of the outcomes are related to that. It was interesting when Lance Armstrong set up Livestrong, a lot of people were somewhat perturbed. This is, of course, before he was found to be involved in blood bags and doping and everything else. But he set up Livestrong specifically for families who had cancer in order to provide some continuity of their financial circumstances. Because if the main income earner has been taken out with cancer and cancer treatment, when we look at a health problem, we look at it so deeply within that health silo, even though we know that the social and environmental determinants from all of the public health work that’s been done are probably much more important than the medical determinants. And yet we just remain in that trap, that wheelhouse of pharmaceuticals.
And so once we blast that door open and say there is a really good body of evidence, once you start bringing in psychology, that looks at behaviour change, behaviour change is an extremely complex subject. And again, we’ve seen it used amazingly effectively during this pandemic period. In many ways, this pandemic between 2020 and 2023 has been an eye opener in terms of what’s to come. It’s fast tracked a bunch of processes that might have taken 15 years to come. And because we’ve seen it happening so rapidly, we can see the bits that we think might really be useful. AI needn’t be all bad. It’s just if the kind of programmes that underpin AI in the example that you’ve just given only relate to offering options that are pharmaceutical, that doesn’t really reflect the overall body of the science when we know that social, environmental, dietary, lifestyle, determinants of health are absolutely crucial.
Dr Ron Hoffman
For instance, I was just in Costa Rica and I did a marvellous tour of the tropical rainforest with a couple of very gifted naturalists. And one of the things they were saying is that one of the reasons for preserving the forest is, yes, it’s very aesthetic and it’s a nice thing for tourists. And yes, there is carbon capture, and there’s also a great deal of moisture retention within the forest. So it’s very important for the health of the planet, but it’s also a repository of nature’s secrets. And I think, as you mentioned earlier, a lot of the medicines we rely upon are actually based on nature. And with AI, what we can do is we can more rapidly look at the chemical structures of, say, honey. There’s a species of bee that make a honey that is renowned for its antibiotic properties. The fur of the tree sloth that is indigenous to Costa Rica. It has a microbiome which contains potent antibiotics and antifungals. And with AI, we can sometimes rapidly screen for properties within these variegated chemicals. Because they’re usually not solitary chemicals, there’s usually a suite of chemicals that can provide us with answers to some of our more challenging medical conditions.
So, yes, AI is a mixed bag. What I wanted to say though, is for people who may say, well, okay, ANH is an organisation that basically is protesting encroachments on our access to healthcare, and that’s fine, but ANH is also about offering people helpful lifestyle advice. And what are some of the themes that we’re talking about these days? News that our subscribers to ANH-USA.org can use in their daily lives.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Diet is a great place to start from a dietary point of view
Dr Ron Hoffman
You’ve written a marvellous book about that.
Rob Verkerk PhD
We’ve written a book called RESET EATING that’s all about how you kind of reset your metabolic setpoint. Essentially, there are so many aspects of our lives now and our genome that is maladapted to the modern environment in which we live. And it’s interesting if you look at even something like uric acid, everyone knows about uric acid and elevated uric acid being associated with gout. When you form these uric acid crystals, that can be incredibly painful. But we’re seeing this rise of uric acid levels and what do we do about that when we see that high levels of uric acid are not just a product of having metabolic syndrome. They’re actually a driver of insulin resistance.
Dr Ron Hoffman
And metabolic, thanks to the works of Dr. Perlmutter in the book Drop Acid, who has been a frequent guest, we know that high uric acid, it suppresses the metabolism. It is actually the thing that rises dramatically in hibernating animals before the long winter so that they can store fat. And when we drive up our uric acid, we, in effect, become hibernating bears with accumulation of body fat. But there’s no winter hibernation to let us draw down that.
Rob Verkerk PhD
What’s really interesting is that there’s also a hormetic response. So if you look at, say, someone who has Alzheimer’s, tell me, have you ever seen an Alzheimer’s patient with gout?
Dr Ron Hoffman
No. And I agree with you. It is a potent antioxidant. Thank you. Thank you for pointing that out.
Rob Verkerk PhD
The other side of it, as we see, if you look at the people who suffer from too lower uric acid.
Dr Ron Hoffman
They have neurological diseases. I’ve noticed that.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Exactly. So it’s a neuroprotectant, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, absolutely related to very low uric acid. So when you look at plant secondary chemicals, the same thing applies. There is this particular sweet spot that we have evolved to be exposed to. And our lives today basically, increasingly take us away from that kind of sweet spot in terms of these things we call plant secondary compounds that we used to think of in terms of my research as a scientist, we thought of them as natural pesticides. In fact, one of the reasons that I set up ANH is because I took an interest in the work, particularly looking at plant compounds from brassica vegetables, the cauliflowers, cabbages, broccoli, et cetera, and could see that they had very pronounced anticancer effects. We could also see that they were very strong signalers. What we like to think of them now as ecochemicals, they have this ability to communicate at specific dose ranges to the world around us. And so one of the things that we need to really understand if we want to be healthy is what kind of levels and what kind of form do these compounds need to be in. And the more we understand about chemical compounds, the more we understand that nature does something really clever with the way it forms molecules.
They’re not just a collection of atoms that sit in a particular form. The way we see them, when we look at the structural chemistry of these molecules, they have a specific resonance and a specific feature. As we move now into the realm of biophysics, we start to see biochemical molecules and natural molecules in a very different way. So we know this even in conventional science, if you change the physical configuration of an aspirin molecule, it behaves very, very differently. So that configuration change comes with a change in the resonance. And that resonance, every single piece of matter vibrates and resonates to a specific tune.
Dr Ron Hoffman
You’re verging into one of our campaigns because over there across the pond in your fair country, Bonnie Prince Charles, now King Charles is in trouble with an unspecified cancer. We can speculate about what that is, and he is a big fan of homoeopathy, and he is much maligned in the national health system, the NHS or the National Health Service, because he’s espousing what is termed quackery. But one of our campaigns at ANH is to support a robust homoeopathic practise arena, because we believe that it is of value. So what say you that because you’ve actually laid the groundwork for an understanding of how that might.
Rob Verkerk PhD
You know, homoeopathy is a form of frequency medicine. There’s no doubt. When we look at the evidence base, this is the astonishing thing. If you ask chat GPT what it thinks about the evidence base on homoeopathy, it comes up with an answer that’s entirely incorrect. It says there is no evidence to support it. Actually, if we use the most well established rule for evaluating evidence based medicine through the evidence based medicine hierarchy, and look at randomised controlled trials and then meta-analyses and systematic reviews of these RCTs, you’ll see that actually there is a consistent tendency for a positive effect that’s greater than placebo, which is actually more than you can say for the majority of pharmaceuticals. I mean, there was a journal, a BMJ spinoff journal called Clinical Evidence that they had to shut down, that was busy evaluating, you may remember it, they’d basically evaluated over 3000 treatments. By the time they closed the whole thing down, they’d found that only 9% of them show clear benefit. So let’s remember that there are a lot of drugs on the market and a lot of treatments out there that are claimed to be effective when actually the evidence is wanting.
So homoeopathy, surprisingly comes out pretty well when you look at the high quality studies. There was one big study, Shanghadal, in 2005, that had one particular trial in it that biased it, that was not positive. But four out of five of the meta-analyses have been positive.
Dr Ron Hoffman
The biggest knock on homoeopathy, is that from critics of homoeopathy. Is that it might dissuade people from seeking proper, quote, “proper medical care”. But I have not found that in consumers of natural products generally, they’re very attuned to both areas, arenas of medicine, the high tech medical realm as well as the natural medical realm. It’s just that they are selective and they want to sometimes avoid the side effects, the downside of conventional treatments. And they’re not going to be shy about visiting a doctor for a healthcare problem that doesn’t respond to some natural intervention. I don’t think there’s great peril there.
Rob Verkerk PhD
No, look, exactly. It is a matter of choice. The evidence is there. I think the problem that the mainstream critics of homoeopathy tend to have is that they cannot cope with the, if you like the logic of it. So you’ll see them consistently repeat and repeat. Rather than going to the meta-analyses, which is really what they should be doing, they go back to look at the fact that there is no active molecule, that the dilution has occurred to such an extent that if you run a gas liquid chromatograph off it, you might find that you don’t find the molecule at all. And therefore they assume that it cannot work because they’re still lost within a classic toxicological, pharmacological model of understanding biochemistry. The difference, as Montagnier was amongst the first to show, is that there is memory.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Actually the discoverer of AIDS, Luke Montagnier, who has since become controversial because he actually is an advocate of homoeopathy.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Yes, I did actually speak at a meeting with him at the Royal Society of Medicine when we were looking specifically at the science of water. And that also a kind of blends into homoeopathy. So we had people like Montagnier there. We also had Gerald Pollack, who you may know from Washington University in Seattle, who’s been done all the work on easy water, structured water, showing that basically water within biological systems behaves in a completely different way and has the capacity to retain huge amounts of information. Silicon Valley is kind of onto this already. Maybe we’re going to call Silicon Valley one day water valley, because they already have determined that water has a much greater capacity to retain information than silicon does. And so future computers may be water based. And it’s no surprise that all living systems are basically majority water, because water really is a matrix that carries information with it. Even if we look at the way in which nucleotides assemble in terms of how one, carbon metabolism, how life is formed, and DNA and nucleic acids are formed. The attraction of CT and GA, the four key nucleotides that make up the code of life, put them in a Faraday cage and you’ll find that they are attracted to each other independent of any environmental stimulus.
Dr Ron Hoffman
There’s more to H2O than two molecules of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, a whole lot more. So, in conclusion, I know this is a challenge. In the remaining couple of minutes we have left, how could we take back our healthcare system? What can empowered listeners to intelligent medicine do?
Rob Verkerk PhD
I think the first thing we can do is actually kind of live the dream. We need to be able to make sure that we are able to make choices that we want to make. We have to have autonomy as the first choice. And I think anyone who’s struggling to be able to make that choice because a product or a service is no longer available or an agency, has said, sorry, guys, you can’t do this, you can’t say this, you can’t have that. That is a signal to say, you’ve got to become an activist. And if you look at how systems become ever more authoritarian, that is a general trend that we’re seeing around the world. It only happens when people sit on the sidelines and watch it all happen. So we would really appeal to people to say, if you’re having a problem making the choices that you want to make for yourself, your loved ones, your families, your friends, you need to stand up and be counted. You need to engage in the action alerts that we’re putting out. We’d ask that people subscribe to our newsletter. We have nearly every week an Action Alert of one form or another.
That’s a key way in which our voice is heard. So we’ve actually just got together with a group of seven other organisations in America in order that we can have more of a common voice. So we’re one of the key grassroots organisations. Some of the others are involved in more the trade side, in products or services. Natural grocers, which has 70 natural grocer chains. Organic products, very heavily involved. Yeah, very concerned with what’s happening. This is part of a kind of boil the frog slowly process. So you may think you’re okay now or you’re okay last year, but you’ve got to look at what’s in the wings, and that’s what we’re looking at. It is really disturbing, the kind of plans in our view. There is no doubt that they are trying to remove an increasing number of fundamental freedoms that will make it ever harder for us to make those natural choices. And we believe those are a fundamental right. We have a fundamental right to connect with nature and use the products of nature to maintain our health. And frankly, we’re going to have to fight for it.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Well, that is very well and eloquently stated. And so a reminder to our listeners, go to ANH-USA.org and the website for ANH International is linked, but give it out, please.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Yeah, it’s ANHinternational, no dash, anhinternational.org.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Okay? And there you will find peculiar spellings of words like labour. L-A-B-O-U-R. There’s not that much difference, except for the idiosyncratic spelling that some people persist.
Rob Verkerk PhD
You’ll find a very big repository of health-related information on the international one. US we’ve been very involved in the political domain. Part of that is because you already have a very well-established integrative medicine community that does lots of education, that already has the R&D capital, if you like, for natural health in the US. So we’ve been much more involved in the political system. For International, where we’re based in Europe, the system has already wreaked havoc and has already broken up and prevented a lot of doctors from practising integrative medicine. So we’ve taken a much bigger role in the educational area. So if you want information, ANH International is very useful.
Dr Ron Hoffman
On the other hand, I will point out that Europe has a very deep tradition of reliance on natural medicine in countries like Switzerland and Germany and throughout Europe.
Rob Verkerk PhD
And then, of course, frequency medicine and even homoeopathy. But just last year, the German government have been pressured to prevent mainstream doctors, if they want to keep their licence, they’ve got to stop practising homoeopathy.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Yikes.
Rob Verkerk PhD
They’ve been practising it for over 100 years, closer to 200 years, and they’re now being told they can’t do it. So the pressure is really on in Europe as well. They’re shortly about to bring through legislation that we’ve been at the forefront of stopping to try and limit levels of micronutrients of vitamins and minerals. And to give you an idea the kind of level they want to bring B6 down to a level that’s substantially less than ten milligrams a day.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Some bureaucrats and legislators in the United States are envious of this draconian European model and they want to bring it stateside. And we’re saying that’s not what America is all about.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Yeah, we’d say when it comes to environmental chemicals, because of this precautionary attitude, some of this goes back to the history of the precautionary principle. When there is scientific doubt, take the measure that is the most stringent. So kind of works quite well. When you’re looking at environmental chemicals, you’re looking at, we have very high population.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Densities, dioxide industry like.
Rob Verkerk PhD
Exactly. Or even PFAS. But you then should not apply that very restrictive approach when it comes to things that are patently safe, healthy and really good for us, that we should be eating in larger amounts not smaller.
Dr Ron Hoffman
Well, Rob, that’s one of the reasons why we succeeded from the British Empire back in 1776. We found that your regulations were too onerous for us. So we hope.
Rob Verkerk PhD
And your founding fathers built the most remarkable constitution, and now is the time to fight for that constitution because the current administration doesn’t appear to have a great respect for it in certain areas.
Dr Ron Hoffman
All right, well, thanks Rob very much for joining us. And we’re going to bring you back frequently because you always have so much to contribute. You are a point and shoot expert on a wide variety of topics and we want to bring people updates on the activities of an important organisation, the Alliance for Natural Health. Thanks very much for all that you do. You are a human dynamo and bon voyage as you travel to yet another exciting conference to disgorge your knowledge in NOLA in New Orleans.
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