I’m always trying to stay up to date on the latest health info and occasionally I find things that take me down the “rabbit hole” and I learn something completely new. This happened last night, and it’s so mind blowing that I felt like I had to get it out to everyone I could ASAP!
I became aware there is an adenovirus, AD-36 that causes one of many common colds in humans, and it has been linked in many studies to developing obesity in humans and animals. If you want to learn more, just google AD-36 and prepare to be shocked.
Now, I will say that not every study has proven that having AD-36 antibodies cause obesity in humans. That said, many studies have shown a correlation between higher rates of the antibodies to this virus in adults and children considered obese. They do not know how the virus could cause humans and animals to change the way they store or release body fat, but it seems like a HUGE discovery to know that possibly 22% of the population will always have a harder time losing weight or keeping it off.
BUT, all is not lost for these people. There was one study of children that I will link, that found that adequate levels of vitamin D in the blood negated the prediction that people with AD-36 antibodies would be more obese.
Importantly, the study also found that 92% of children in the study were vit D deficient.
As a society, our lifestyles have changed significantly from that of our ancestors who used to mainly work outside during the daytime. This is how humans have made vit d. Now, we spend most of our time indoors and if we are outside, we slather ourselves in sunscreen.
Now that there’s more sunlight, it’s crucial to get outside and get your kids outside. But if you can’t be outside most of the day, or you live further away from the equator, or if you have darker skin, you probably NEED to supplement with vitamin D.
Vitamin D is protective against cancers and viruses, including Covid. Now, knowing that it can help prevent obesity in children and adults that have been exposed to AD-36 virus, it’s one more reason to get your vitamin D levels up!
This is part 2 of my writings on the shot for Covid. You can read the first part here.
To understand how the shot works, it’s necessary to understand the immune system. I am not a doctor, or an expert but all of the information I provide is from my own search for understanding and I encourage everyone to find this information yourself.
The immune system has two basic parts, the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system.
The innate immune system is best understood if you think of what happens if you step on a nail. There’s pain and redness and swelling that happens at the site of the injury. There are many things happening in the area, and all together it’s described as inflammation. This inflammation is protecting you from any number of bacteria or viruses that were on that nail when it broke through the skin. It is non specific, meaning, it doesn’t care if it’s virus or bacteria or what particular kind. It’s there to get to work on any foreign invaders that can do you harm.
The next part of the immune system is the adaptive immune system. This is the system responsible for creating specific antibodies to defend against specific invaders. It’s more complex than that of course, but I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole just yet. The innate and adaptive immune systems work together to keep you safe and healthy.
So to understand a virus like Covid, and how it attacks you, it’s important to understand a bit about these parts of the immune system.
These viruses are so small they are aerosolized, which means you can inhale the virus just by breathing around someone who has been infected and is exhaling these particles.
So if you do happen to inhale these particles into your lungs, they have a spike protein we’ve all heard so much about that is able to bind to your cells via ACE2. This means the virus is able to enter any cells that have this receptor. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32418199/
Once the virus has gained entry into these cells it’s able to hijack our own cells and use the virus RNA to get our cells to produce copies that then leave the cell to go on and infect more cells and create more copies of itself so that eventually the new host is breathing out these viral particles too.
But it’s not as though your body just sits there and allows the virus to slowly take over. Your immune system is actually AMAZING. It’s so complex that there are still things we don’t fully understand about it.
Like when your cells get highjacked by the Covid virus, even then they are sending out SOS signals that your body picks up on and reacts to. Your innate immune system and adaptive immune system work together, like all forces of our National defense work together to fight a foreign invader. You have the Army, Navy, Air Force, National Guard and certain special forces, all with different goals and operations with ultimately the same goal of keeping you safe.
Amazingly, everyone has the ability to make antibodies to pretty much any virus. The way your cells can rearrange their proteins to make these specific antibodies is nothing short of amazing. It’s kind of like a lock and key. Your B cells are trying to attack Covid and trying different combinations to find just the right mix. Once they do find the right combination, there is a positive feedback loop that sends out signals telling your immune system “this is working!” And so those B cells start proliferating and producing more and more. Once your adaptive immune system gets going on this, it works with the innate immune system to neutralize the threat.
Even after the threat is neutralized you still have a lot of these specific antibody B cells floating around in your blood. If the same invader tries to attack again, your body is primed to neutralize it much more quickly, often before you even have symptoms.
Vaccines have worked based on how the immune system works. People figured out that milkmaids who encountered cowpox, which caused blisters but was not very deadly, we’re not getting sick with smallpox, which was much more dangerous. Farmers were found to have purposely exposed their families to cowpox blisters and it was effective at keeping them from getting smallpox when outbreaks occurred in their communities.
This was effective because cowpox and smallpox viruses were so similar that the specific antibodies that cowpox produced were also effective at neutralizing small pox.
Eventually, many vaccines used either dead or weakened strains of the actual virus and found that with the right additives they could effectively produce an adaptive immune response without the host having to go through the risk of the actual sickness. And thus, in developed parts of the world, many of these illnesses that caused great injury and death have mostly been eradicated. But it hasn’t been exactly a perfect road. I won’t get too deep except to say that you should look up what happened with the polio vaccine sometime just for a bit of interesting knowledge. Oops. Yep, just like with anything in life, vaccines are not risk free.
Along with some of the best inventions, there has been great cost. Think about the invention of the car and how it forever transformed the way we move. Yet auto accidents remain one of the highest causes of death. Antibiotics, of which the discovery was by pure accident (another fun story to look up) have saved countless numbers of people from early death, yet they have also caused some death by giving rise to antibiotic resistant bacteria.
So when I talk about risks with shots for Covid, it doesn’t mean that I am against the shot. It means I believe in people making informed decisions taking the risks and benefits into account. That is not at all what is happening with these shots and as a result, people are no longer trusting in people and institutions that have had much of the public’s trust for years.
So why is this Covid shot different from other shots? I’ll get into that more next.
Filling Up the Cup 