Thanks for clicking on this tongue in cheek headline, but seriously here are some things where the science differs from the mainstream “ScienceTM” narrative.
Sunlight is a Nutrient
Sun exposure does these things for you:
- Regulates your circadian rhythm
- Generates Vitamin D
- Replenishes melatonin in the mitochondria – an antioxidant that is critical for protecting mitochondria from damage
- Infrared light from sunlight causes vasodilation and improves circulation throughout your entire body
- Increases collagen synthesis – critical for healing and rebuilding tissues
- Reduces blood pressure
- Regulates neurotransmitter production
- Modulates cortisol responses
- Modulates the immune system
If there was a drug that did everything sunlight does for you, you would need a prescription for it. The sun doesn’t give people skin cancer, in fact it prevents it in many ways. The best way to make sure the sun doesn’t cause cancer is to avoid seed oils, eat a diet rich in essential phospholipids, nutrients and polyphenols.
People are slathering themselves in chemicals, covering up with hats, and UV protective glasses, all because they don’t want the sun to age them. Sun exposure stimulates collagen production, so if your taking in the right nutrients such as collagen, vitamin C, and glycine – sun exposure is better than any treatment you’ll ever get from a lab or dermatologist.
Melanoma in Southern Sweden (MISS) cohort study, published in the Journal of Internal Medicine in 2014 by Dr. Pelle Lindqvist and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute determined that all-cause mortality was inversely related to sun exposure habits in a dose-dependent manner. Specifically, compared to women with the highest sun exposure, the mortality rate was doubled (2.0, 95% CI 1.6-2.5) among avoiders of sun exposure and increased by 40% (1.4, 95% CI 1.1-1.7) in those with moderate exposure.
Plain in simple, women with the most sun exposure had the best outcome, while women with the least had 2x higher risk of death. Women with moderate exposure had 40% higher risk.
Getting sun exposure on your skin is critical to health, but burning is still bad for you. People who burn easily usually have diets high in polyunsaturated fats, these fats get incorporated into the tissue and are easily damaged by heat, light, and oxygen. Consuming monounsaturated and saturated fats instead over time helps protect from burns, but really 15 or 30 minutes a day of sunlight is adequate for sun exposure.
The earth is also a source of free electrons and if you touch the earth with your bare feet while tanning, you become connected to the ground electrically and absorb free electrons into your entire body.
Free radicals damage the body by stealing electrons, so while UV radiation does create free radicals, you can in theory mitigate the damage by touching the earth while tanning.
The full spectrum of light is necessary for health, but even in lower UV periods when the sun is beginning to dip from the horizon, infrared light is abundant. UV is essential for circadian rhythm modulation, vitamin D production and more but infrared light is anti-inflammatory, and penetrates deeply into tissue and replenishes the mitochondria with melatonin and aids the process of creating energy. Infrared light from the sun is the spectrum of light that creates warmth, so going out into the hottest part of the day to get warmed up by the sun is a good idea. Usually this is the late afternoon between 2 and 6 pm depending on the time of year.
You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Choline
Choline is a nutrient found abundantly in liver, brain, and other organs we no longer consume in our modern diets. The last remaining source of concentrated choline is egg yolk. Scientists say it’s probably safe to eat 1 egg per day, but without liver, egg yolk, or other concentrated sources of choline you will never get enough from food. For example, if you tried to get all of your choline (525mg for men, a little less for women) you’d need about 40oz of 85% lean beef or turkey. It would take 14.6 cups of skim milk.
Choline is important for building cell membranes but it also is important for brain function, such as the neurotransmitter Acetylcholine. It’s also a backup to the methylation process which is a critical process in the body that’s involved in maintaining homeostasis and creating new DNA. It’s also important for producing bile which is needed for digestion. Crucially and most importantly choline is essential for the liver where it is used to help shuttle fats out – without adequate choline, fat accumulates in the liver. Over time the liver becomes more and more burdened, consumes the body’s antioxidants, becomes scarred and fibrotic, and develops cirrhosis. In fact without choline the body begins to experience gradual organ dysfunction that over a long span of time becomes irreversible.
People can make choline through a backup system in the body called the PEMT pathway. Unfortunately they can’t make a lot of it. Worse, about 85% of people have one or more genetic variants that impair this backup system. This means that most people need significant amounts of choline in their diet. The adequate intake guideline for men is about 525, if their PEMT pathway is functioning optimally. If it’s not functioning properly they may need 700 or in some studies – even 2200mgs of choline per day for optimal health and liver function.
When you get choline from your diet it is in the form of phosphatidylcholine – this means it is a special kind of fatty substance that makes up cell membranes. It’s fat, but it isn’t triglyceride which is the storage form of fat. This type of fat is called a phospholipid. There are other phospholipids that contain inositol or other beneficial substances, but choline is the moat important. Additionally, phospholipids can be made with different fatty acids, saturated, monounsaturated, or polyunsaturated. That means that Phosphatidylcholine can come in a mix of fats and still be Phosphatidylcholine – but that doesn’t mean they’re all equally stable or beneficial for building cell membranes.
When you get choline in a supplement it comes in the form of a salt – without any fat at all. The choline is quickly liberated and gut bacteria begin to compete with your system for it. When the gut bacteria consume it, they produce a substance called TMAO, which is toxic and increases the risk of diabetes and heart disease. The takeaway is that consuming the supplement long term is not a good idea, but it may be necessary during pregnancy or correcting a deficiency.
It turns out there is a substance called lecithin which is made from sunflower or soy, and it is rich in phospholipids, including phosphatidylcholine – the primary source of dietary choline – but unlike egg yolk, this form of phospholipid is contains extremely high levels of polyunsaturated fat, and the worst part is its omega 6, not omega 3 – which is not only prone to oxidizing in the membrane but is also inflammatory and already too abundant in the modern diet.
Phosphatidylcholine is important for building cell membranes but also mitochondrial membranes. It is here in the mitochondria where these membranes must be exposed to an intense environment, as mitochondria produce energy and a lot of free radicals which damage membranes made from unsaturated fat more easily than membranes made from monounsaturated fat – or the most stable fat. Saturated fat.
Egg yolk’s phospholipids including phosphatidylcholine is made with primarily monounsaturated fat, which is much more resilient to damage caused by the mitochondria. Eggs from chickens fed a diet free of soy and corn have the lowest PUFA (polyunsaturated fat) content in their eggs, but even eggs from commercial chicken farms have a much better fat profile than lecithin supplements.
When consuming phospholipids in the diet, they can be directly incorporated into the cell membrane, and into the mitochondrial membrane, so people who consume a diet rich in polyunsaturated fats are building membranes that are more prone to oxidation, which overtime can increase inflammation and other negative health risks.
Which fat is best? When we talk about fat in the body, there are primarily two kinds to think about for this discussion. Triglyceride is the form of fat that is stored for energy, phospholipids are the form of fat used for building membranes and neurotransmitters.
For membranes, saturated fats are the most durable but they’re also more rigid and according to the best science we have, membranes made with too much saturated fat can become problematic, so the safest fats to consume as phospholipids are most likely monounsaturated. The membrane is a mix of phospholipids and it is impossible to consume only one kind of fat and probably not beneficial, but when we are weighting our fat intake using supplements, personally I would not use lecithin heavily, unless for a short time due to its ease of use.
I prefer egg yolk, but for someone like me, that means I need 6 of 7 a day. I’m going to be using soft boiled eggs but also egg yolk powder – 3 tablespoons will get me from 4 to 6 eggs a day.
Putting it all together
Without adequate choline intake the body cannot produce a plethora of substances vital to health. Without eating an adequate amount of choline, the body will rely upon the PEMT pathway, but for many people this pathway operates sub-optimally. For a smaller percentage, maybe about 40% of people, they will slowly develop chronic, life long issues that will ultimately shorten the healthy years they have remaining .
The only way to ensure adequate choline intake without the harms of supplements is through a whole food approach that is centered around either liver or eggs. Vegetarians are especially at risk of trouble, even with optimal PEMT genes.
Scientists have waged a war on eggs for probably 70 or 100 years, telling us that it raises cholesterol. Today, scientists say it’s “probably” safe to consume a maximum of 1 egg per day.
ScienceTM got this one wrong, eggs don’t raise your cholesterol, the high content of phospholipid rather than triglyceride in egg yolk helps improve fat metabolism and lowers cholesterol by blocking cholesterol absorption in the lower intestine. The harms were over stated.
You are made of trillions of cells – the risk of not consuming enough choline and the phospholipids that are critical to building cell membranes and mitochondrial membranes is far greater than consuming too many eggs.
If you have a sub-optimal PEMT genetic variant then the risk of not consuming enough choline is actually quite serious and will dramatically shorten health and life span – as it causes liver disease that subjects the person to an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes which will be fatal if liver cirrhosis doesn’t kill that person first.
Nicotine Has Legitimate Medicinal Uses:
Nicotine has gotten a bad rap because it’s used in cigarettes to get people addicted – except that it’s not in itself that addictive. When people smoke cigarettes they’re doing three things that increase the addictive qualities of nicotine:
- Putting anything in the mouth habitually is addictive, this is called oral fixation.
- Inhaling nicotine delivers it much more rapidly to the system than other delivery methods
- Nicotine is just one chemical in tobacco, smokers are actually addicted to 15-20 other compounds in tobacco that are addictive.
Taking nicotine by lozenge in low doses is not addictive to the majority of people, the pouches contain too much nicotine – and it seems people do have trouble with those. If choosing to use it, people should be advised to be cautious, use a low dose lozenge designed for smoking cessation – as it releases slowly, and to monitor for addiction.
Nicotine does the following things:
1: Converts white fat to brown fat, brown fat being important for health and vitality because it regulates blood glucose, improves insulin sensitivity, provides direct cardiovascular protection, enhances exercise performance and longevity, and provides comprehensive protection against disease.
2: Increases weight loss. Even 1mg of nicotine per day can increase weight loss through nicotine’s thermogenesis effects.
3: Nicotine has shown positive effects for people with schizophrenia, depression, ADHD, and anxiety disorders.
4. Nicotine can prevent and be used as a treatment for ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, sepsis, and endotoxemia by regulating immune cells, suppressing inflammatory cytokines like TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, and IL-17, and activating the vagus nerve’s anti-inflammatory pathway.
5. It can be used to prevent and treat Parkinson’s and has therapeutic potential for both Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. It works by activating brain receptors that protect neurons and increase neurotransmitter release.
6. It has anti-parasitic properties. It kills helminths (intestinal worms), and ticks.
7. Controversially it is protective against certain respiratory viruses but scientists are working hard to overturn the earlier studies which showed that smokers had better outcomes against covid than non-smokers.
8: Nicotine is a nootropic that increases vigilance and reaction time. It also enhances attention processing and speed, working memory, and information processing. Nicotine appears to help manage cognitive demand by optimizing resource allocation. During challenging cognitive tasks, nicotine activates brain regions involved in executive control and working memory, potentially reducing the subjective experience of cognitive load.
Vaping and Smoking are two of the worst things anyone can do, and that’s not because of the nicotine necessarily, it’s because inhaling smoke or glycerine – or whatever else is in vape particles is extremely bad for the body in several ways.
So that’s it, my list of 3 things science shows the narrative got wrong. I have a lot more, a LOT more to write about but I will save it for another day.