That Agent 131711, Vitamin D article pegged my B.S. meter immediately, and I just bypassed it. But Modern Discontent gives detailed reasons why it should peg everyone's meter :-D
Lots of people get big clicks from fear porn in medicine, environment, investing, etc. It's lucrative. Lots of people pay big bucks to be scared, because life is too easy, they're bored and they need some adrenalin stimulation. They go to freeking horror films.
People could get some real thrills and natural irradiation by working in agriculture, construction or responding to disasters.
Agent comes across as aggressively hyperbolic, while Tim appears to need to create a tale of woe, where none may actually exist.
As soon as someone becomes all shouty and preachy, the off button is employed, so I have no plans to listen to either of them.
The Methylene blue "story" needs more examination, but I have little doubt that there are many important details that have been concealed and context removed, in order to enhance the effect of his fear porn.
Thanks! Although personally I probably wouldn't consider agent hyperbolic. I think the framing says something else rather than exaggeration, as it seems to point readers to only one conclusion which is why I find it rather frustrating that so many people just believed it.
I haven't been paying some attention but what exactly is the methylene blue story? I covered methylene blue maybe a year or more back when it popped up on TikTok because of a bunch of influencers. Is it that many people have taken to using methylene blue for therapeutic purposes?
That recommendation might well have come from me, via the Substack algorithms. I subscribe to that blog, but I share some of your concern, and have commented about my own concerns over there. Knowing its limitations, I find the work being reported there very useful. Others, I know, may go nuts with it, claiming all sorts of things. Oh well.
I understand, however, that the nutrients in food are not simply "ingredients" mixed together with other "food materials". They are tightly integrated within their environments. Separate them out and then reconstitute them within processed food or as supplements, and they are not the same thing.
What's the difference? I don't know and I don't want to find out.
But I did learn something. I inadvertently performed an experiment with personally prescribed or recommended supplements, recently, from which I am still recovering. That drives the point home for me.
I don't know if this is really relevant or not, but I typically order my groceries and have them delivered. More recently, it has become more difficult to obtain high-quality food. Staples are often out of stock. Eggs are especially unpredictable, and I keep a backstock of them as a buffer.
For some unknown reason, for one of my orders a few weeks ago, the eggs I ordered and the substitution I specified were both out of stock, and the shopper substituted -- for premium organic pasture-raised eggs, an "egg substitute" ultraprocessed food concoction, with potato starch as its first ingredient.
I explained, in my refund request, that eggs and potato starch are not the same thing, and the word "substitute" on the package label did not mean that one actually can substitute for the other. The store returned my money, as they have before.
This isn't quite the same principle as what I mentioned above, but there's a resemblance, and I found the whole thing rather humorous. The store was out of my eggs again yesterday, and the substitution this time was MUCH better.
Interesting ClearMiddle! I personally don't care what other Substacks readers subscribe to, and in reality most writers on this platform shouldn't be concerned with such matters anyways since people should subscribe to whoever they see fit. So it popping up on my recommendations isn't an issue, but rather the fact that the content there is questionable.
To the point of nutrients I would generally agree. I think there's a lot of aspects to whole foods that won't be captured by supplementation alone. That being said, when we make that argument we are entering into an apples-to-orange comparison. I think Dr. Berg (is that his name?) was commenting on how a molecule isn't really a molecule since there are cofactors, coenzymes, etc. from natural foods. This is true, but also that's a wholly separate argument being made. Vitamin D3 is Vitamin D3 irrespective of its source and that was the main point I was getting at. When we tag on different systems or compounds then are talking about something entirely different- it's not longer about just Vitamin D3.
Your scenario with food delivery is unfortunate since it at least suggests people aren't aware of what constitutes a "substitute"- no something yellow in a carton isn't the same as an actual egg. It's not really the same principle since, as you mentioned, when it comes to substitutes there are many factors that you are looking at to explain why the substitute isn't the same as real eggs. Again, with Vitamins when looking at them structurally they are similar, otherwise we wouldn't give them the same name.
I try to get multiple sources for any information I am seeking and not to blindly follow the first information presented to me. I am a sceptic by nature and this helped me during the covid fiasco but I find I can still be caught out so I verify first before trusting. I cannot help but be amused when I hear about the best way to obtain Vitamin D is from the sun, I live in Scotland and I would defy anyone to get sufficient Vitamin D here, the sun barely shows itself in the summer, you catch the sun for 1 day if you are lucky and then it disappears for a month!
That's the most I can hope of people if I'm being honest. No one is above criticism, and if we just begin to blindly trust people then it makes it easier to become deceived.
Ah, sorry about the Scotland predicament! The sun seems to hate you guys as much as you guys hate everyone else! 😂
This is true science, as opposed the "scientism." Everything you write is objectively true and derived from reproducible experiments. Science like this should guide us in making informed decisions personally. And, it should guide our leaders in making policies that effect us. It is sad to see the level of science illiteracy in the general population that provides a fertile breeding ground for both these ignorant authors and readers, and provides a market for financial success.
Thanks Richard! I at least wanted to pointed out points where readers could use critical thinking to raise criticisms. The fact that we know of food sources with Vitamin D should point out that we have to have isolated or found it, otherwise how would we know what it is? Most of us are likely to be scientifically illiterate- I'd argue there are many things that I don't understand and would need to research extensively. But I think the main issue is that we have people who have become far-too cynical of science and are throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and so they sort of do as they see fit with bits of information and are then drawing conclusions from this mangled concept that is "science". This is where having some degree of skepticism but knowing what to be skeptical of is important.
I was actually looking up the controversy over nitrogen gas being used in executions and was going to make a comment that we probably shouldn't be consuming anything with nitrogen! Man, those dang elements trying to kill us all!
The oil and chemical process industries use nitrogen or argon to prevent fire in some enclosed facilities. When I used to get Chemical & Engineering News in the 1980's and 1990's it would report fatal accidents in which workers failed to use self contained breathing apparatus, and suffocated. Usually the first unresponsive victim prompted several other workers to enter the facility and also succumb.
The recent nitrogen execution seems to have been botched, as it was reported to be slow and painful, which is contrary to the real life results. Fake or real, who knows.
Well, that video's a bit hilarious. I guess science should never be updated? Why is "new science" such a problem? The iodine comment is also funny. We need iodine, we shouldn't have too much-sort of like with everything. It seems like videos such as these are capturing people's attention without having them stop and actually think about what they are watching.
Wish this were spread far and wide. I am always laughing when people use the "it's rat poison!!!" scare tactic. Humans are not rats and I could probably eat the bag of rat poison with little effect as it's all about dosage. My only concern with using said Vit D rat poison if if the quantity would cause a problem for other predators. IMO, it's a safer "poison" to have around kids than the strychnine of old. We should start a scare tactic with chocolate - "it's dog poison!!" -- and see if people can connect the dots.
Thanks for the shout-out! I’ve been directed to the source you critique here in reader comments and just looked at it for the first time yesterday, having some of the same issues. Really good to see someone make the distinction between healthy mistrust of institutions that have misrepresented science via corrupt mechanisms and those who are charismatic but painting with too broad a brush and not taking care with the facts and details.
It probably wouldn't mean much if I didn't see it circulating to the extent that it did, and paired with the fact that so many people didn't seem to question it I thought it at least pertinent to provide some pushback.
I think overcorrection is likely going to become a bigger issue over time. It doesn't really seem like much of the vaccine stuff will really take off at this point, and so people are likely turning to other avenues to still keep reader's attention, and what better way than to try and poke holes in anything health/medicine related, even if the approach is faulty itself.
There were positions one can take for supplements. The person in the TimTruth video at least makes a valid point that most companies are likely sourcing their vitamins from the same place, but then it goes off into this tangent of somehow acting as if vitamins aren't real? It's strangely concocted when there are things that people can criticize. Purity, allergies to additives, actual dosage are things that people should question, but you don't need to go down the weird "everything you believed is a lie" pipeline that so many people are pushing.
Please read the research cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ . It would be ridiculous for me to try to reproduce discussion and citation of all the most important research in a comment such as this.
Agent131711's Substack https://chemtrails.substack.com has over 3000 subscribers. "Chemtrails" is a 100% bogus theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory that " long-lasting condensation trails left in the sky by high-flying aircraft are actually "chemtrails" consisting of chemical or biological agents, sprayed for nefarious purposes undisclosed to the general public". Long-lasting con-trails have been around for decades. There was an episode of the 1957 - 1959 Zorro TV series my siblings and I watched in the mid 1960s in which my father spotted a con-trail.
Here are some comments on Modern Discontent's article:
"In short, the UV rays from the sun are providing the energy to convert the structure of Vitamin D into the form Vitamin D3". This is incorrect.
7-dehydrocholesterol is not vitamin D. The UV-B light around 297 nanometre wavelength breaks a carbon to carbon bond and so breaks one of the carbon rings. The resulting molecule then changes its shape, but not its atoms or bonds, to settle down as the final molecule, vitamin D3, AKA cholecalciferol. The change of shape is driven by thermal motion, and warming it up causes the change to happen faster. It would occur naturally even at cold temperatures. I don't recall how long it takes at various temperatures, but this is not an important matter. What matters is that no-one has figured out how to make vitamin D3 except by starting with 7-dehyrocholesterol and breaking that carbon-carbon bond. This can't be done by chemical means - UV-B light is the only way. Exactly the same thing happens in our skin as in the very few factories in the world which make vitamin D3. (None are owned by major pharmaceutical companies - it is an energy and capital intensive business with competition, so there is not much money to be made from it compared to a patented drug.) You can read about industrial production of vitamin D3 and D2 in https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/B978-0-12-381978-9.10006-X . https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#2.1 has some pictures of a factory in India, which is one of the few which produces pharma-grade vitamin D3 with all the certification which enables it to be sold for human use in many countries. Most of the vitamin D3 this plant makes is not purified so much as is required for pharmaceutical use. The less purified form is used for animal feed, which is a much bigger market, by volume, than what is used for humans.
Ljubic et al. 2021 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.algal.2021.102472 (which I had not known of until searching to write this comment) states that algae produces vitamin D3 cholecalciferol by the same mechanism: UV-B exposure of 7-dehydrocholesterol. Vitamin D3 from algal sources can not be purchased.
Ergosterol is not vitamin D. It is derived from yeast. The synthesis steps apply and the resulting molecule, vitamin D2, functions similarly to the natural vitamin D3, but not quite as well.
". . . why is it that people who should be aware of this method of obtaining natural Vitamin D3 are so quick to fall into this fear over irradiation" Here in Australia, we have very high levels of skin cancer. The exposure happens in summer and unless people are supplementing vitamin D3, their 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels will be far lower in winter than what their immune system needs to function properly (50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass.
"And note that even though most food sources contain Vitamin D it is generally in the form of precursors such as Ergosterol and Vitamin D2 rather than the much-revered Vitamin D3,"
There is very little vitamin D3 or D2 in food, fortified with vitamin D or not. No practical amount of such food will raise 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels (made primarily in the liver from vitamin D3, or D2, though the D2 version is not so beneficial) to anywhere near the 50 ng/mL needed for proper immune system function.
Ingesting ergosterol wouldn't be any use, since we can't convert it into vitamin D2. Vitamin D2 is not a precursor, it is a molecule which behaves similarly to vitamin D3.
Cholecalciferol is apparently a waxy material. Very few people would ever see it. For agricultural and most human use it leaves the factory as a very dilute powder. It is mixed with hydrogenated vegetable oil which has a melting point well above room temperature. This is sprayed into fine droplets, which cool mid-air and settle, with starch and other compounds to stop them sticking together. There is no such thing as pure cholecalciferol powder. All such powders sold on the wholesale market are highly dilute "spray dried" powders. The real cost of pharma grade vitamin D3 is about USD$2,500 a kilogram, ex-factory.
A good intake of vitamin D3 for an average weight adult is 0.125 milligrams (5000 IU) a day, on average. This is a gram every 22 years. A sheet of A4 office paper weighs 5 grams. If this were pure vitamin D3, this would last 110 years. It would have cost about USD$12.50 ex-factory.
Many governments recommend only 0.015 or 0.020 milligrams a day (600 to 800 IU a day). This is far too little to sustain immune system health.
The impurities in pharma grade vitamin D won't be a problem, since we take such small amounts of it.
I've added some corrections to my article. Thanks for pointing out some of the error as I shouldn't have been conflating some of the molecules above. I left some of the technical jargon out of the article since that wasn't necessary to get the gist of the issues.
In his comment to my first comment, he wrote that ivermectin is used in cockroach poison such as RAID. I had not heard this, but in my second comment I chase the details and find that this is very close to the truth. The two compounds which make up ivermectin are the same as those used in RAID, except that ivermectin has been modified to be more effective by changing a double bond between carbons 22 and 23, by adding an OH group to C23 in place of an H.
My second comment there describes my recent interaction from a leader of the "There is no such things as a virus", New Zealand medical doctor Sam Bailey:
> I was a subscriber to Dr Sam Bailey's Substack and responded, in a comment, to her article https://drsambailey.substack.com/p/viruses-dont-exist-and-why-it-matters in which she stated that viruses do not exist and lamented that "there has been no direct response to the overall thesis". I wrote that the reason she doesn't get much in the way of response is that most people think her hypothesis is stupid. I added that I am one of those people and wrote, reasonably briefly, why her hypothesis is wrong. In short, if it were true, then we would have to be able to show reliably that every one of the invariably highly detailed journal articles on virology (I guess there are hundreds of thousands at least) over the last century or so, such as this one on the complex mechanical operations of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-021-00418-x, are all the product of some mixture of fraud and delusion.
> I later found (there was no notice of any of this) that she had deleted my comment, unsubscribed me and banned me from subscribing again. This is not the sort of response which a person would make if they were really interested in scientific debate.
I thought that just using the term "stupid" was being polite. It is an egregiously stupid, directly health-harming, ignorance-fostering, violation of reality to state that viruses do not exist, as if this were a scientifically testable hypothesis (which it is) which had so far remained standing due to no-one presenting a disproof.
It is all very well for a person to plaster the inside walls of their mind with wallpaper of a design which they find comforting. Plastering over the windows is another matter, which enhances the effect, but it is a personal choice of no real consequence except to the extent that it alters the person's behavior in ways which harm others. This includes blasting the blinkered impressions the person has from their mind-bunker to other people in ways which claim to be scientific and which constitute proper debate on matters of substance.
There seems to be a growth in these themes being presented urgently as if they were well based in reality: "There are no viruses". "There was no pandemic." "Supplements are poison."
It doesn't help that people who get paid to work as scientists sometimes - far too often - do such a lousy job of it.
If the majority of virologists stood together and told the world that the evidence for the lab-release (leak or perhaps deliberate) hypothesis of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was overwhelmingly strong (see links and documents at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/), and that there were no concrete reasons for supporting the zoonotic transfer, or direct from bat, hypotheses, then all governments would be forced to accept this. Then, governments should (and probably would) strongly regulate all gain of function research with viruses and other pathogens.
However, the majority of virologists have not done this. How can we think of this majority of lab-leak avoidniks as scientists? Their behaviour is profoundly unscientific, in ways which harm and kill millions of people - just by enabling continued GoF research which could just as easily cause another pandemic as it did the COVID-19 pandemic.
I believe all such virologists who have not openly supported the lab-leak hypothesis (which is their duty, as professionals charged, in part, with caring for the welfare of all humanity) now, or even by 2021, should be permanently disbarred from any kind of work involving pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites.
When scientists harm and kill us like this, and are still regarded as experts, it is tricky to tell some people what the scientific process really is (a method of inquiry, research and debate which is imperfect, but is the best we know of for eventually arriving at a good understanding of clearly observable aspects of Nature) and why they should use this approach, or at least tentatively follow the current views of people who adhere to proper scientific principles, in favour of those who flout them.
why do the big pharma concerns are buying out the natural food/herbs/vitamin producers?
Also how convenient, that Agent131711’s Substack got 346 likes, lets wait how much you will get....
My gut feeling is, the majority of Substack crap is written by AI, censored by AI and self-awarded by AI's... Exactly like most of the covid19 injections posts across the entire platform of digital devices (Iphones, computers, TVs with their 'no real face' MSM's, etc., etc....). Not for nothing google started so early with 'sharing information' and 'searching for it'...
Not really sure what was meant with the reference to the "likes" portion, but if it's a commentary on how many likes this post will receive I personally don't care. I'm not in the business of receiving likes. I want to put out my perspective and raise criticisms to things that don't seem to make sense. If I was concerned with likes I would just fall in line with whatever is popular. There are plenty of ideas that seem incorrect but get a ton of traction, and I don't want to fall in-line with those ideas just because it will get me more traction.
Or that big companies just like to monopolize the field. It doesn't seem implausible to think that most companies want a large control over most of the things we purchase or consume.
All the big ones do. And they collude with government to invent regulations to stymie the newer, potential competition, and literally to prevent startups. For example, the new MOCRA, which buries new soap and cosmetics makers in FDA regs that the agency can't even oversee properly. I limit Amazon purchases because that company controls too much supply chain. I will not buy food or meds from Amazon. And I look elsewhere first for most other purchases.
That Agent 131711, Vitamin D article pegged my B.S. meter immediately, and I just bypassed it. But Modern Discontent gives detailed reasons why it should peg everyone's meter :-D
Lots of people get big clicks from fear porn in medicine, environment, investing, etc. It's lucrative. Lots of people pay big bucks to be scared, because life is too easy, they're bored and they need some adrenalin stimulation. They go to freeking horror films.
People could get some real thrills and natural irradiation by working in agriculture, construction or responding to disasters.
😂
Cheers MD.
Agent comes across as aggressively hyperbolic, while Tim appears to need to create a tale of woe, where none may actually exist.
As soon as someone becomes all shouty and preachy, the off button is employed, so I have no plans to listen to either of them.
The Methylene blue "story" needs more examination, but I have little doubt that there are many important details that have been concealed and context removed, in order to enhance the effect of his fear porn.
Thanks! Although personally I probably wouldn't consider agent hyperbolic. I think the framing says something else rather than exaggeration, as it seems to point readers to only one conclusion which is why I find it rather frustrating that so many people just believed it.
I haven't been paying some attention but what exactly is the methylene blue story? I covered methylene blue maybe a year or more back when it popped up on TikTok because of a bunch of influencers. Is it that many people have taken to using methylene blue for therapeutic purposes?
That recommendation might well have come from me, via the Substack algorithms. I subscribe to that blog, but I share some of your concern, and have commented about my own concerns over there. Knowing its limitations, I find the work being reported there very useful. Others, I know, may go nuts with it, claiming all sorts of things. Oh well.
I understand, however, that the nutrients in food are not simply "ingredients" mixed together with other "food materials". They are tightly integrated within their environments. Separate them out and then reconstitute them within processed food or as supplements, and they are not the same thing.
What's the difference? I don't know and I don't want to find out.
But I did learn something. I inadvertently performed an experiment with personally prescribed or recommended supplements, recently, from which I am still recovering. That drives the point home for me.
I don't know if this is really relevant or not, but I typically order my groceries and have them delivered. More recently, it has become more difficult to obtain high-quality food. Staples are often out of stock. Eggs are especially unpredictable, and I keep a backstock of them as a buffer.
For some unknown reason, for one of my orders a few weeks ago, the eggs I ordered and the substitution I specified were both out of stock, and the shopper substituted -- for premium organic pasture-raised eggs, an "egg substitute" ultraprocessed food concoction, with potato starch as its first ingredient.
I explained, in my refund request, that eggs and potato starch are not the same thing, and the word "substitute" on the package label did not mean that one actually can substitute for the other. The store returned my money, as they have before.
This isn't quite the same principle as what I mentioned above, but there's a resemblance, and I found the whole thing rather humorous. The store was out of my eggs again yesterday, and the substitution this time was MUCH better.
Interesting ClearMiddle! I personally don't care what other Substacks readers subscribe to, and in reality most writers on this platform shouldn't be concerned with such matters anyways since people should subscribe to whoever they see fit. So it popping up on my recommendations isn't an issue, but rather the fact that the content there is questionable.
To the point of nutrients I would generally agree. I think there's a lot of aspects to whole foods that won't be captured by supplementation alone. That being said, when we make that argument we are entering into an apples-to-orange comparison. I think Dr. Berg (is that his name?) was commenting on how a molecule isn't really a molecule since there are cofactors, coenzymes, etc. from natural foods. This is true, but also that's a wholly separate argument being made. Vitamin D3 is Vitamin D3 irrespective of its source and that was the main point I was getting at. When we tag on different systems or compounds then are talking about something entirely different- it's not longer about just Vitamin D3.
Your scenario with food delivery is unfortunate since it at least suggests people aren't aware of what constitutes a "substitute"- no something yellow in a carton isn't the same as an actual egg. It's not really the same principle since, as you mentioned, when it comes to substitutes there are many factors that you are looking at to explain why the substitute isn't the same as real eggs. Again, with Vitamins when looking at them structurally they are similar, otherwise we wouldn't give them the same name.
I try to get multiple sources for any information I am seeking and not to blindly follow the first information presented to me. I am a sceptic by nature and this helped me during the covid fiasco but I find I can still be caught out so I verify first before trusting. I cannot help but be amused when I hear about the best way to obtain Vitamin D is from the sun, I live in Scotland and I would defy anyone to get sufficient Vitamin D here, the sun barely shows itself in the summer, you catch the sun for 1 day if you are lucky and then it disappears for a month!
That's the most I can hope of people if I'm being honest. No one is above criticism, and if we just begin to blindly trust people then it makes it easier to become deceived.
Ah, sorry about the Scotland predicament! The sun seems to hate you guys as much as you guys hate everyone else! 😂
That blue glow your skin takes on, sure saves on woad though.
Problem is Amat, people
Spend all their time indoors.
How do you think the Scots have survived and thrived here for millennia? They’re all so ill now because they stay indoors!!
This is true science, as opposed the "scientism." Everything you write is objectively true and derived from reproducible experiments. Science like this should guide us in making informed decisions personally. And, it should guide our leaders in making policies that effect us. It is sad to see the level of science illiteracy in the general population that provides a fertile breeding ground for both these ignorant authors and readers, and provides a market for financial success.
Thanks Richard! I at least wanted to pointed out points where readers could use critical thinking to raise criticisms. The fact that we know of food sources with Vitamin D should point out that we have to have isolated or found it, otherwise how would we know what it is? Most of us are likely to be scientifically illiterate- I'd argue there are many things that I don't understand and would need to research extensively. But I think the main issue is that we have people who have become far-too cynical of science and are throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and so they sort of do as they see fit with bits of information and are then drawing conclusions from this mangled concept that is "science". This is where having some degree of skepticism but knowing what to be skeptical of is important.
nicely put. Salt is to put on your food, NaCl is made up of sodium, a flammable metal, and chlorine, a toxic gas. Never put NaCl on your food!!!!!
I was actually looking up the controversy over nitrogen gas being used in executions and was going to make a comment that we probably shouldn't be consuming anything with nitrogen! Man, those dang elements trying to kill us all!
The oil and chemical process industries use nitrogen or argon to prevent fire in some enclosed facilities. When I used to get Chemical & Engineering News in the 1980's and 1990's it would report fatal accidents in which workers failed to use self contained breathing apparatus, and suffocated. Usually the first unresponsive victim prompted several other workers to enter the facility and also succumb.
The recent nitrogen execution seems to have been botched, as it was reported to be slow and painful, which is contrary to the real life results. Fake or real, who knows.
Thanks for the article I remember people sharing the video on twtr https://x.com/Agent131711/status/1678128490967715840?s=20
Well, that video's a bit hilarious. I guess science should never be updated? Why is "new science" such a problem? The iodine comment is also funny. We need iodine, we shouldn't have too much-sort of like with everything. It seems like videos such as these are capturing people's attention without having them stop and actually think about what they are watching.
Wish this were spread far and wide. I am always laughing when people use the "it's rat poison!!!" scare tactic. Humans are not rats and I could probably eat the bag of rat poison with little effect as it's all about dosage. My only concern with using said Vit D rat poison if if the quantity would cause a problem for other predators. IMO, it's a safer "poison" to have around kids than the strychnine of old. We should start a scare tactic with chocolate - "it's dog poison!!" -- and see if people can connect the dots.
Thanks for the shout-out! I’ve been directed to the source you critique here in reader comments and just looked at it for the first time yesterday, having some of the same issues. Really good to see someone make the distinction between healthy mistrust of institutions that have misrepresented science via corrupt mechanisms and those who are charismatic but painting with too broad a brush and not taking care with the facts and details.
It probably wouldn't mean much if I didn't see it circulating to the extent that it did, and paired with the fact that so many people didn't seem to question it I thought it at least pertinent to provide some pushback.
I think overcorrection is likely going to become a bigger issue over time. It doesn't really seem like much of the vaccine stuff will really take off at this point, and so people are likely turning to other avenues to still keep reader's attention, and what better way than to try and poke holes in anything health/medicine related, even if the approach is faulty itself.
There were positions one can take for supplements. The person in the TimTruth video at least makes a valid point that most companies are likely sourcing their vitamins from the same place, but then it goes off into this tangent of somehow acting as if vitamins aren't real? It's strangely concocted when there are things that people can criticize. Purity, allergies to additives, actual dosage are things that people should question, but you don't need to go down the weird "everything you believed is a lie" pipeline that so many people are pushing.
Please read the research cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ . It would be ridiculous for me to try to reproduce discussion and citation of all the most important research in a comment such as this.
Agent131711's Substack https://chemtrails.substack.com has over 3000 subscribers. "Chemtrails" is a 100% bogus theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory that " long-lasting condensation trails left in the sky by high-flying aircraft are actually "chemtrails" consisting of chemical or biological agents, sprayed for nefarious purposes undisclosed to the general public". Long-lasting con-trails have been around for decades. There was an episode of the 1957 - 1959 Zorro TV series my siblings and I watched in the mid 1960s in which my father spotted a con-trail.
The article https://chemtrails.substack.com/p/vitamin-d-is-rat-poison-the-fraudulent is infuriating. However, to comment on it I would need to take out a paid subscription for a month, and spend an hour or more responding to the article's numerous falsehoods.
Here are some comments on Modern Discontent's article:
"In short, the UV rays from the sun are providing the energy to convert the structure of Vitamin D into the form Vitamin D3". This is incorrect.
7-dehydrocholesterol is not vitamin D. The UV-B light around 297 nanometre wavelength breaks a carbon to carbon bond and so breaks one of the carbon rings. The resulting molecule then changes its shape, but not its atoms or bonds, to settle down as the final molecule, vitamin D3, AKA cholecalciferol. The change of shape is driven by thermal motion, and warming it up causes the change to happen faster. It would occur naturally even at cold temperatures. I don't recall how long it takes at various temperatures, but this is not an important matter. What matters is that no-one has figured out how to make vitamin D3 except by starting with 7-dehyrocholesterol and breaking that carbon-carbon bond. This can't be done by chemical means - UV-B light is the only way. Exactly the same thing happens in our skin as in the very few factories in the world which make vitamin D3. (None are owned by major pharmaceutical companies - it is an energy and capital intensive business with competition, so there is not much money to be made from it compared to a patented drug.) You can read about industrial production of vitamin D3 and D2 in https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/B978-0-12-381978-9.10006-X . https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#2.1 has some pictures of a factory in India, which is one of the few which produces pharma-grade vitamin D3 with all the certification which enables it to be sold for human use in many countries. Most of the vitamin D3 this plant makes is not purified so much as is required for pharmaceutical use. The less purified form is used for animal feed, which is a much bigger market, by volume, than what is used for humans.
Ljubic et al. 2021 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.algal.2021.102472 (which I had not known of until searching to write this comment) states that algae produces vitamin D3 cholecalciferol by the same mechanism: UV-B exposure of 7-dehydrocholesterol. Vitamin D3 from algal sources can not be purchased.
Ergosterol is not vitamin D. It is derived from yeast. The synthesis steps apply and the resulting molecule, vitamin D2, functions similarly to the natural vitamin D3, but not quite as well.
". . . why is it that people who should be aware of this method of obtaining natural Vitamin D3 are so quick to fall into this fear over irradiation" Here in Australia, we have very high levels of skin cancer. The exposure happens in summer and unless people are supplementing vitamin D3, their 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels will be far lower in winter than what their immune system needs to function properly (50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass.
"And note that even though most food sources contain Vitamin D it is generally in the form of precursors such as Ergosterol and Vitamin D2 rather than the much-revered Vitamin D3,"
There is very little vitamin D3 or D2 in food, fortified with vitamin D or not. No practical amount of such food will raise 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels (made primarily in the liver from vitamin D3, or D2, though the D2 version is not so beneficial) to anywhere near the 50 ng/mL needed for proper immune system function.
Ingesting ergosterol wouldn't be any use, since we can't convert it into vitamin D2. Vitamin D2 is not a precursor, it is a molecule which behaves similarly to vitamin D3.
Cholecalciferol is apparently a waxy material. Very few people would ever see it. For agricultural and most human use it leaves the factory as a very dilute powder. It is mixed with hydrogenated vegetable oil which has a melting point well above room temperature. This is sprayed into fine droplets, which cool mid-air and settle, with starch and other compounds to stop them sticking together. There is no such thing as pure cholecalciferol powder. All such powders sold on the wholesale market are highly dilute "spray dried" powders. The real cost of pharma grade vitamin D3 is about USD$2,500 a kilogram, ex-factory.
This powder: https://www.bulksupplements.com/en-au/products/vitamin-d3-cholecalciferol is 0.125 mg of vitamin D3 per 50 mg of powder. So it is 1/400 (0.25%) vitamin D3. This is a common form of powdered vitamin D3 - "spray dried" powder.
A good intake of vitamin D3 for an average weight adult is 0.125 milligrams (5000 IU) a day, on average. This is a gram every 22 years. A sheet of A4 office paper weighs 5 grams. If this were pure vitamin D3, this would last 110 years. It would have cost about USD$12.50 ex-factory.
Many governments recommend only 0.015 or 0.020 milligrams a day (600 to 800 IU a day). This is far too little to sustain immune system health.
The impurities in pharma grade vitamin D won't be a problem, since we take such small amounts of it.
The roles of the three vitamin D compounds are easily understood. Please read https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ .
I've added some corrections to my article. Thanks for pointing out some of the error as I shouldn't have been conflating some of the molecules above. I left some of the technical jargon out of the article since that wasn't necessary to get the gist of the issues.
I haven't yet had time to read the above article.
Please read the research cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ and https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/how-much-vitamin-d3-to-take .
The scatter-gun dismissal of vitamin D seems to be related to some other equally mistaken patterns of thought.
I just responded in the comments twice to the self-styled "Chief Justice of Nuremberg 2.0" (more than 7000 subscribers - this is Chris Edwards https://nurembergtrials.net, sometime singer https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/info48248/episodes/2024-02-13T19_38_04-08_00 (imperfect pitch trigger warning)) who wrote, in https://nuremberg2.substack.com/p/google-doodle-casimir-funks-140th some obviously false statements, including "Every vitamin, additive, preservative and pesticide is poison." He also stated that there is no such thing as the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
In his comment to my first comment, he wrote that ivermectin is used in cockroach poison such as RAID. I had not heard this, but in my second comment I chase the details and find that this is very close to the truth. The two compounds which make up ivermectin are the same as those used in RAID, except that ivermectin has been modified to be more effective by changing a double bond between carbons 22 and 23, by adding an OH group to C23 in place of an H.
My second comment there describes my recent interaction from a leader of the "There is no such things as a virus", New Zealand medical doctor Sam Bailey:
> I was a subscriber to Dr Sam Bailey's Substack and responded, in a comment, to her article https://drsambailey.substack.com/p/viruses-dont-exist-and-why-it-matters in which she stated that viruses do not exist and lamented that "there has been no direct response to the overall thesis". I wrote that the reason she doesn't get much in the way of response is that most people think her hypothesis is stupid. I added that I am one of those people and wrote, reasonably briefly, why her hypothesis is wrong. In short, if it were true, then we would have to be able to show reliably that every one of the invariably highly detailed journal articles on virology (I guess there are hundreds of thousands at least) over the last century or so, such as this one on the complex mechanical operations of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-021-00418-x, are all the product of some mixture of fraud and delusion.
> I later found (there was no notice of any of this) that she had deleted my comment, unsubscribed me and banned me from subscribing again. This is not the sort of response which a person would make if they were really interested in scientific debate.
I thought that just using the term "stupid" was being polite. It is an egregiously stupid, directly health-harming, ignorance-fostering, violation of reality to state that viruses do not exist, as if this were a scientifically testable hypothesis (which it is) which had so far remained standing due to no-one presenting a disproof.
It is all very well for a person to plaster the inside walls of their mind with wallpaper of a design which they find comforting. Plastering over the windows is another matter, which enhances the effect, but it is a personal choice of no real consequence except to the extent that it alters the person's behavior in ways which harm others. This includes blasting the blinkered impressions the person has from their mind-bunker to other people in ways which claim to be scientific and which constitute proper debate on matters of substance.
There seems to be a growth in these themes being presented urgently as if they were well based in reality: "There are no viruses". "There was no pandemic." "Supplements are poison."
It doesn't help that people who get paid to work as scientists sometimes - far too often - do such a lousy job of it.
If the majority of virologists stood together and told the world that the evidence for the lab-release (leak or perhaps deliberate) hypothesis of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was overwhelmingly strong (see links and documents at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/), and that there were no concrete reasons for supporting the zoonotic transfer, or direct from bat, hypotheses, then all governments would be forced to accept this. Then, governments should (and probably would) strongly regulate all gain of function research with viruses and other pathogens.
However, the majority of virologists have not done this. How can we think of this majority of lab-leak avoidniks as scientists? Their behaviour is profoundly unscientific, in ways which harm and kill millions of people - just by enabling continued GoF research which could just as easily cause another pandemic as it did the COVID-19 pandemic.
I believe all such virologists who have not openly supported the lab-leak hypothesis (which is their duty, as professionals charged, in part, with caring for the welfare of all humanity) now, or even by 2021, should be permanently disbarred from any kind of work involving pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites.
When scientists harm and kill us like this, and are still regarded as experts, it is tricky to tell some people what the scientific process really is (a method of inquiry, research and debate which is imperfect, but is the best we know of for eventually arriving at a good understanding of clearly observable aspects of Nature) and why they should use this approach, or at least tentatively follow the current views of people who adhere to proper scientific principles, in favour of those who flout them.
why do the big pharma concerns are buying out the natural food/herbs/vitamin producers?
Also how convenient, that Agent131711’s Substack got 346 likes, lets wait how much you will get....
My gut feeling is, the majority of Substack crap is written by AI, censored by AI and self-awarded by AI's... Exactly like most of the covid19 injections posts across the entire platform of digital devices (Iphones, computers, TVs with their 'no real face' MSM's, etc., etc....). Not for nothing google started so early with 'sharing information' and 'searching for it'...
Not really sure what was meant with the reference to the "likes" portion, but if it's a commentary on how many likes this post will receive I personally don't care. I'm not in the business of receiving likes. I want to put out my perspective and raise criticisms to things that don't seem to make sense. If I was concerned with likes I would just fall in line with whatever is popular. There are plenty of ideas that seem incorrect but get a ton of traction, and I don't want to fall in-line with those ideas just because it will get me more traction.
So they can jack the price and make big bucks, then create false shortages whenever they want to sell the next jab?? :-D
(Learn your weeds.)
Or that big companies just like to monopolize the field. It doesn't seem implausible to think that most companies want a large control over most of the things we purchase or consume.
All the big ones do. And they collude with government to invent regulations to stymie the newer, potential competition, and literally to prevent startups. For example, the new MOCRA, which buries new soap and cosmetics makers in FDA regs that the agency can't even oversee properly. I limit Amazon purchases because that company controls too much supply chain. I will not buy food or meds from Amazon. And I look elsewhere first for most other purchases.