Day: November 22, 2022

• Within weeks of Elon Musk taking over Twitter, information gatekeepers and controllers are panicking about rising engagement on posts from people accused of spreading misinformation

• According to NewsGuard, the Mercola Twitter account saw the largest increase in likes and retweets out of those that have previously been most heavily censored

• Two weeks before Musk’s takeover, we had 932 engagements in a seven-day period. During the first week after Musk’s takeover, we had 19,259 engagements, a 1,966.4% increase, which NewsGuard claims is proof that dangerous falsehoods are again proliferating

• Even if Twitter allows free speech, censorship stakeholders span every major media conglomerate, online payment provider, college and university, hundreds of think tanks, NGOs, international regulators and watchdog groups. Censorship is also the policy of the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence services

• What we face is a corporate stronghold over media combined with a state-run propaganda machine. Countless private-public partnerships between government and corporations bind the two camps together in a pact to dictate “truth” to the public, and they’re on the same page, because their interests are identical. The goal is a One World Government

With Elon Musk now behind the wheel at Twitter, will the platform become a safe haven for free speech? Time will tell, but for now, things seem to be moving in the right direction. Of course, information gatekeepers and controllers are already going into convulsions over the fact that engagement on posts from sites like mine have gone up from near-nonexistent to negligible.

November 11, 2022, self-proclaimed arbiter of truth, NewsGuard, wrote:1

“In the week following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the most popular untrustworthy accounts enjoyed a 57.04% increase in engagement in the form of likes and retweets, according to a survey undertaken by NewsGuard …

In the week after the acquisition (Oct. 27, 2022-Nov. 3, 2022), tweets posted by the 25 most-followed Twitter accounts that are tracked by NewsWhip, a social media monitoring company, and linked to publishers that NewsGuard has assessed as repeatedly spreading false information garnered 3,115,664 likes and retweets …

Two weeks prior to the acquisition, Oct. 13-Oct. 20, 2022, those same accounts received 1,983,953 likes and retweets. (Likes and retweets constitute overall ‘engagement.’) That accounts for a 57.04% cumulative increase post-Musk. (Note: These 25 accounts are in the top-50 most followed NewsGuard-rated untrustworthy accounts …)

For example, the interactions of the Twitter account linked to Mercola.com — a website of healthcare hoax purveyor Joseph Mercola that has published numerous false claims about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic — rose from 932 to 19,259, a 1966.42% increase in engagement and the largest increase measured by NewsGuard. At the same time, the account’s tweet volume rose from 6 to 23.”

Oh boy, a rise in engagement from 932 likes and retweets to 19,259! Nineteen thousand people engaged with my articles, and the roof is caving in on propaganda headquarters. That’s how fragile their house of cards is. To be clear, 19,000 engagements in a week are nothing compared to the reach and engagements we used to have.

Even more ridiculous is NewsGuard’s panic over the “explosion” of exposure of Dr. Christiane Northrup, whose weekly engagement tally rose from 63 to 704 after Musk’s entry into the wheelhouse. Just incredible. How are they ever going to keep the brainwashing going when 700 people are exposed to the likes of Northrup?! In a single week!

Sarcasm aside, this just goes to show how desperate the propagandists are. To top off their indignation, Musk has not replied to the emails and calls made by NewsGuard in November “asking about its handling of untrustworthy accounts and the boost in engagement for misinformation spreaders.” The nerve.

That said, some analysts predict Musk’s Twitter takeover will have little effect on censorship, on or off Twitter. Writing for Townhall in early May 2022, columnist Mike Benz noted:2

“As a former State Department diplomat in charge of the ‘Big Tech’ portfolio, I have had a privileged glimpse into the myriad forces driving modern Internet censorship.

Having seen what Musk is up against first-hand, I feel little elation at the arrival of the Deus Ex Muskina. From 2006 to 2016, censorship was an act. In the five years that followed, censorship became an industry.

Its powerful stakeholders now span every major media conglomerate, every major online payment provider, every major US and UK college and university, hundreds of think tanks, NGOs and pressure groups, international regulatory and watchdog commissions, and is now firmly interwoven with the policies and operations of the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence services …

Last week [end of April 2022], tech investor and Facebook board member Marc Andreesen tweeted that online censorship will become increasingly standardized, moving ‘up the stack’ into cloud platforms, email clients, browsers, and operating systems.

It’s already happening. Just this week, Google embedded AI censorship into its Google Docs word processor to add friction for users engaged in wrongspeak.

Microsoft already changed its Windows terms of service in 2019 to ban PC users engaged in undefined ‘hate speech’ … Inevitably, the censorship industry will promote rule-of-law pretexts to force Musk to crush a free speech Twitter.”

In addition to those listed by Benz, additional censorship stakeholders and promoters are detailed in “The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth.” A key hub within this vast network are PR firms that represent the corporatocracy (the economic, political and judicial systems controlled by corporations).

The role of the free press is to counter industry propaganda. Over time, that role was subverted through advertising. This is why news outlets rarely, if ever, touch on anything that might damage their advertisers.

In addition to that already powerful incentive to censor the truth, there’s the fact that the U.S. government legalized the use of state propaganda against American citizens in 2012.

So, what we face now is a corporate stronghold over media combined with a state-run propaganda machine. Countless private-public partnerships between government and corporations bind the two camps together in a pact to dictate “truth” to the public, and they’re on the same page, because their interests are identical.

The goal is to sacrifice United States’ sovereignty to a One World Government, using the need for global biosecurity and the impending threat of climate change as justifications for doing so.

To that end, we have centralized propaganda hubs like the Publicis Groupe, one of the largest PR firms in the world, which represents a long list of major companies within the technology, pharmaceutical and banking industries AND is a partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Google,3 4 AND funded the startup of NewsGuard.

Those connections alone give Publicis the ability to direct and control censorship through fact checkers and online search engines.

NewsGuard, in turn, is partnered with the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, the World Health Organization5 and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a dark money group with extensive ties to government and global think tanks that is calling for the weaponization of intelligence and national defense against citizens who see through the propaganda.

The WEF, meanwhile, is leading the call for a “reset” of the global economy and a complete overhaul of our way of life, and its partner Publicis appears to play an important role, coordinating the suppression of information that runs counter to the WEF’s technocratic, transhumanist narrative.

Incidentally, Publicis began investing in artificial intelligence technology in 20176 and partnered with Microsoft in 2018 to develop a global AI platform.7 It also purchased the data firm Epsilon in 2019,8 thereby establishing ownership of first-party data — a crucially valuable resource when it comes to the use of AI. Of course, AI is an indispensable tool in the digital surveillance and control structure the globalist cabal is trying to erect.

While it’s easy to dismiss Publicis as just another ad agency, I believe it would be foolish to underestimate its power to organize the kind of coordination required to shut down vaccine concerns, anti-lockdown proponents and people trying to educate their fellow man about the dangers of The Great Reset, which is being brought forth as a “necessary” post-COVID step.

While these things may seem unrelated, they’re really not. The Great Reset involves all aspects of society — including health, education, government, economics, business practices, environmental “protections” and much more.

With forces this formidable against us, is it even possible to rein in the tyranny, push back the censorship and reclaim our rights? I don’t know, but we have to try, and using what power remains within the judicial system is the first option.

So, in late 2021, I filed a lawsuit against U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, both in her official and personal capacities, for violating my First Amendment rights. In early September 2021, she had sent a letter9 to Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.com, demanding an “immediate review” of Amazon’s algorithms to weed out books peddling “COVID misinformation,” stressing that Amazon’s sale of such books was “potentially unlawful.”10 11 12

She specifically singled out my book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” co-written with Ronnie Cummins, founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), as a prime example of “highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures” that she wanted banned.

There’s no doubt our book is constitutionally protected speech, and that Warren’s letter was calling on Amazon to suppress protected speech. As a government official, it is illegal for Warren to violate the U.S. Constitution, and pressuring private businesses to do it for her is not a legal workaround.

Then, in September 2022, I sued YouTube, Google and Alphabet Inc. for breach of contract. September 29, 2021, Google deleted my YouTube account for “violating community guidelines” they’d implemented that same morning. YouTube unilaterally amended the contract without notice, which is a violation of its own terms, and then used this last-minute amendment to remove my content.

YouTube’s terms of service also include a “three strikes” policy, where users are supposed to be given three warnings and opportunities to remove content that violates the guidelines before being banned. I had no “strikes” against my channel on the day I was deplatformed and deleted, which is, again, a breach of contract.

I’m also suing YouTube for unjust enrichment, as for the last 16 years, my video content, having generated in excess of 50 million views, has been of great financial benefit to YouTube, allowing them to increase advertising revenue on the site. Both of these lawsuits are still winding their way through the corridors of justice.

Others have also taken the fight to court. The New Civil Liberties Alliance and the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry) sued the federal government in May 202213 for violating Americans First Amendment rights by colluding with social media companies to censor on the government’s behalf.

In early October 2022, 47 additional defendants were added to the lawsuit, bringing the total number of named defendants to 67.14 15 As reported by the New Civil Liberties Alliance September 1, 2022:16

“… scores of federal officials … have secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech federal officials disfavor. This unlawful enterprise has been wildly successful.

Under the First Amendment, the federal government may not police private speech nor pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas. But that is precisely what the government has done — and is still doing — on a massive scale not previously divulged.”

Discovery documents obtained have identified upward of 70 federal employees across more than a dozen federal agencies, engaged in illegal censorship activities, including officials from:

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Election Security and Resilience team

• Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Intelligence and Analysis

• The FBI’s foreign influence taskforce

• The Justice Department’s (DOJ) national security division

• The Office of the Director of National Intelligence

• White House staff (including White House lawyer Dana Remus, deputy assistant to the president Rob Flaherty and former White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt)

• Health and Human Services (HHS)

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

• National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

• The Office of the Surgeon General

• The Census Bureau

• The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

• The State Department

• The U.S. Treasury Department

• The U.S. Election Assistance Commission

Emails from the strategic communications and marketing firm Reingold17 also reveal outside consultants were hired to manage the government’s collusion with social media to violate Americans’ Constitutional free speech rights.

Notable tech participants in the censorship meetings include Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon Media, Pinterest, LinkedIn and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Not surprisingly, the White House has not cooperated with discovery and have fought to keep communications secret — especially with regard to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s correspondence — claiming all White House communications as “privileged.”

However, executive privilege does not apply to external communications, so the plaintiffs called on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana to “overrule the government defendants’ objections and order them to supply this highly relevant, responsive and probative information immediately.”

September 6, 2022, Judge Terry Doughty rejected the Biden administration’s claim of executive privilege and ordered the White House to hand over any and all relevant records,18 19 including correspondence to and from Fauci, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and many others.

October 21, 2022, the court also authorized20 expedited depositions of eight key federal officials named in the AGs case: Fauci, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, director of White House digital strategy Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, CISA director Jen Easterly, FBI supervisory special agent Elvis Chan, chief of the digital media branch of the CDC Carol Crawford, and principal deputy coordinator of the Global Engagement Center at the State Department Daniel Kimmage.21 22

The DOJ, clearly worried about the fallout, asked the judge for a protective order to keep videotaped depositions under seal. With that, the DOJ has tipped its hand, proving it is onboard with these unconstitutional activities. As of this writing, there’s no word as to whether the judge will grant the DOJ’s request to keep the depositions secret.

“This case has garnered substantial attention from the media and the public,” the DOJ wrote.23 “Some of the individuals whom Plaintiffs intend to depose are career civil servants who did not sign up to become public figures when they joined the federal ranks.

Other deponents who have served in more public-facing roles have already experienced, and continue to experience, significant threats and harassment directed at them and their families because of their public positions; those harms are very likely to increase if recordings of their depositions may be publicly circulated and then misleadingly edited by third parties.

Under these circumstances, all these individuals have legitimate privacy interests in limiting public dissemination of audiovisual recordings of their depositions.”

While the U.S. Constitution guarantees certain rights, including the right to free speech, this inviolable law of the land has not been able to prevent encroaching tyranny, thanks to the fact that those charged with adhering to it and upholding it aren’t doing their jobs. They’re blatantly snubbing their noses at it, pretending as though it doesn’t exist.

In response, three Republican House Representatives on the House Oversight and Reform, Judiciary, and Commerce committees — Reps. James Comer of Kentucky, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington — have introduced the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act24 (HR.8752), specifically aimed at preventing federal employees from using their positions to influence censorship decisions by tech platforms.

“While the U.S. Constitution clearly forbids government censoring and restricting free speech, HR. 8752 could be a helpful enforcement tool, as people might tend to think twice when they know there’s a real price to pay.”

The bill would create restrictions to prevent federal employees from asking or encouraging private entities to censor private speech or otherwise discourage free speech, and impose penalties, including civil fines and disciplinary actions for government employees who facilitate social media censorship.

While the U.S. Constitution clearly forbids government censoring and restricting free speech, HR. 8752 could be a helpful enforcement tool — and we clearly need enforcement — as people might tend to think twice when they know there’s a price to pay, both personally and financially.

The Great Reset is moving full speed ahead, and those who disagree are being silenced for the simple reason that if people knew what was in store, the plan would get thwarted. They need the cooperation of the masses, or else it won’t work.

The answer, then, is to continue exposing the machinations that allow this agenda to be pushed forward. Understand, each and every one of us has an important role to play in this process. We must expose their plans, goals, networks and battle strategies, and we do that by sharing what we know in whatever capacity we can, be it through social media posts, emails, texts, phone calls, face-to-face encounters, groups, clubs or at church.

Share articles such as this one with everyone you know so that people can start to understand how and why they are being manipulated. This will effectively “immunize” them against the propaganda.

Secondly, encourage your friends and family to subscribe to this and other newsletters to keep abreast on the next steps that will be necessary to defeat the tyrants who are hell-bent on global control. Right now, that would include calling on your representatives to back HR. 8752.

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Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. The subscription fee being requested is for access to the articles and information posted on this site, and is not being paid for any individual medical advice.

If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.

• The World Health Organization announced that it’s working with Big Tech to combat misinformation online

• As a result of WHO’s “policy updates,” 850,000 YouTube videos related to “harmful or misleading COVID-19 misinformation” were removed from the platform from February 2020 to January 2021

• Lest you see all sides of an issue and form an educated opinion of your own, WHO intends to carefully control the internet so you only see what it deems as the “truth”

• To accomplish this, WHO is working closely with master manipulators in their own right, including YouTube, Google, Facebook and NewsGuard

• WHO has dedicated a webpage to reporting misinformation online, with direct links to social media platforms, making it easy to snitch on those who go against the status quo

• Significant portions of regulatory agencies’ budgets around the globe come from the pharmaceutical industry that these agencies are supposed to regulate

You can sleep easy tonight. The World Health Organization announced that it’s working with Big Tech to combat misinformation online. It didn’t define what “misinformation” it’s targeting, or even what “misinformation” is, but if you see anything that looks suspicious, WHO wants you to report it right away so social media platforms can flag it or take it down.1

Sound disturbing? More like a nightmare, but it’s one that is, unfortunately, not a dream. As John Campbell, a retired nurse and teacher based in England, said in the video above, “It’s almost as if they want to have an influence over all parts of social media.”2 Yes, indeed, and they’re quite open about it too. WHO states that it’s “changing social media policy and guidelines,” and:3

“WHO works with social media policy departments to ensure company policy and guidelines for content providers are fit for purpose. For example, WHO worked with YouTube to enhance their COVID-19 Misinformation Policy and provide guidelines for content providers to ensure no medical misinformation related to the virus proliferates on their platform.”

As a result of WHO’s “policy updates,” 850,000 YouTube videos related to “harmful or misleading COVID-19 misinformation” were removed from the platform from February 2020 to January 2021.4 As justification for its rampant censorship, WHO explains:5

“WHO and partners recognize that misinformation online has the potential to travel further, faster and sometimes deeper than the truth — on some social media platforms, falsehoods are 70% more likely to get shared than accurate news. To counter this, WHO has taken a number of actions with tech companies to remain one step ahead.”

Lest you see all sides of an issue and form an educated opinion of your own, WHO intends to carefully control the internet so you only see what it deems as the “truth.” And it’s working closely, “on a weekly basis,” in fact, with master manipulators in their own right, including YouTube, Google, Facebook and “several other partners such as NewsGuard …”6

Ah yes, NewsGuard, another self-appointed internet watchdog that sells a browser plugin to rate websites on nine criteria of credibility and transparency. NewsGuard received much of its startup funds from Publicis Groupe, a giant global communications group with divisions that brand imaging, design of digital business platforms, media relations and health care.

Publicis Groupe’s health subsidiary, Publicis Health, names Lilly, Abbot, Roche, Amgen, Genentech, Celgene, Gilead, Biogen, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi, Bayer and other Big Pharma giants as clients. In fact, the PR firm that created and ran Purdue Pharma’s deceptive marketing campaigns for the opioid Oxycontin is none other than Publicis.

At the beginning of May 2021, the Massachusetts attorney general filed a lawsuit7 against Publicis Health, accusing the Publicis subsidiary of helping Purdue create the deceptive marketing materials used to mislead doctors into prescribing OxyContin. We’re going down a rabbit hole, but you know you can tell a lot about an organization by who its friends are.

WHO is also enlisting the help of basically anyone who will listen and fall for their blatant propaganda to report “misinformation” about COVID-19 and COVID-19 shots that goes against its policies. According to WHO:8

“Social media platforms have … granted WHO access to fast track reporting systems, which allows us to flag misinformation on their platforms, speeding up the reporting and removal of content that breaks policy. WHO also works with Member States such as the Government of the United Kingdom to raise awareness of misinformation around COVID-19 and vaccines, and encourage individuals to report false or misleading content online.”

Conveniently, WHO has taken the guesswork out of how to report said misinformation. They’ve dedicated a webpage to reporting misinformation online, with direct links to the following social media platforms, making it easy to snitch on those who go against the status quo:9

• Facebook

• YouTube

• Twitter

• Instagram

• WhatsApp

• TikTok

• LinkedIn

• Viber

• VK

• Kwai

WHO won’t stop at controlling the internet. It’s also aiming to “save the world” from infectious diseases, food system failures and more by creating a globalist organization with synchronized plans — and the potential for ultimate control and power.

This was revealed in October 2022, when WHO announced a new initiative called One Health Joint Plan of Action. The plan was launched by the Quadripartite which, in addition to WHO, consists of the:10

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

• United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

• World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, founded as OIE)

WHO already has too much power. This new initiative will only give it more. It’s important to understand that Bill Gates is WHO’s No. 1 funder, contributing more to WHO’s $4.84 billion biennial budget11 — via multiple avenues including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as GAVI, which was founded by the Gates Foundation in partnership with WHO, the World Bank and various vaccine manufacturers — than any member-state government. In short, Bill Gates is essentially the owner of WHO.

In 1992, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) was created, which allows the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to collect fees from the drug industry. “With the act, the FDA moved from a fully taxpayer-funded entity to one supplemented by industry money,” a BMJ article written by investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi explains.12

Now, significant portions of regulatory agencies’ budgets come from the pharmaceutical industry that these agencies are supposed to regulate. In 1993, after PDUFA was passed, the FDA collected about $29 million in net PDUFA fees. This increased 30-fold — to $884 million — by 2016.13

It’s also revealing, as noted by Campbell, that at the FDA, 9 out of 10 of its former commissioners between 2006 and 2019 went on to work for pharmaceutical companies.14 But it’s not only U.S. regulators who are captured by industry; a similar trend occurred in Europe. In 1995, industry fees funded 20% of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). This rose to 75% by 2010 and now, in 2022, it’s 89%. According to Demasi:15

“In 2005 in the UK, the House of Commons’ health committee evaluated the influence of the drug industry on health policy, including the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

The committee was concerned that industry funding could lead the agency to ‘lose sight of the need to protect and promote public health above all else as it seeks to win fee income from the companies.’ But nearly two decades on, little has changed, and industry funding of drug regulators has become the international norm.”

How do regulators from different countries compare? “Industry money permeates the globe’s leading regulators,” Demasi wrote, demonstrated as follows:16

• Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration — 96% of budget derived from industry

• Europe’s EMA — 89%

• U.K.’s MHRA — 86%

• Japan’s Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency — 85%

• U.S. FDA — 65%

• Health Canada — 50.5%

“Are these the official bodies that we want to adjudicate over what health information we are given, over which drugs are good for us and which drugs are bad for us?” Campbell said. “Is this really who we want to make these decisions, given the amount of funding they’re receiving from, what some people might consider to be, vested interests?”17

“We’re talking about large amounts of money, which have no influence on decision-making,” he says sarcastically. “And yet these official agencies are going to decide what health information you and I are going to receive.”18

Access to information as it once was has been fundamentally changed. WHO and other world leaders are now working together to silence information that doesn’t correspond with its common agenda. Even information that was once fact, such as definitions in dictionaries and on official government websites, have been altered in real time.

Examples of definitions that have been changed include those for pandemic, herd immunity, vaccines and anti-vaxxer. Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson is among those who have explained that virtually everything you see and hear online has been coopted, or taken over to serve a greater agenda. Attkisson reiterates:19

“Virtually every form of information and sourcing that can be coopted has been. That includes the dictionary definitions, that includes everything because these are important ways to influence thought. Language is very powerful. People don’t want to be affiliated with certain names and labels.

It reminds me of 1984, the George Orwell story about the futuristic society, under which history was being rewritten in real time to jive with the version that the government wanted or the party wanted it to be. Definitions now are being rewritten and changed in real time to fit with the vision that the establishment wants people to think.”

Campbell also quotes “1984,” which stated, “It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.”20 “Let’s hope it doesn’t get there before that,” Campbell said. “I kind of like Oldspeak. It’s the one I was brought up with.”

Orwell wrote, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the ruling party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”21

“The C vocabulary [a component of Newspeak] was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings.”22

And then there are the three slogans, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength,” which are contradictory yet widely accepted by the people. It’s food for thought, as WHO and other regulatory agencies become increasingly blatant in their censorship and suppression of freedom. “Make of that what you will,” Campbell says.

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Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. The subscription fee being requested is for access to the articles and information posted on this site, and is not being paid for any individual medical advice.

If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your health care professional before using products based on this content.

• The older you get, the more important your muscle mass becomes. Not only are strong muscles a requirement for mobility, balance and the ability to live independently, but having reserve muscle mass will also increase your chances of survival during illness and hospitalization

• Age-related loss of muscle mass is known as sarcopenia, and if you don’t do anything to stop it you can expect to lose about 15% of your muscle mass between your 30s and your 80s

• While declines in muscle mass and strength are relatively well-synchronized in the 35- to 40-year-old group, strength dramatically drops off as you get into the 75-year-old and over groups, with 85-year-olds seeing dramatic declines in strength and function relative to the decline in muscles size

• Research shows the strongest one-third of the population over 60 have a 50% lower death rate than the weakest

• Research shows aerobic exercise in isolation reduces your all-cause mortality by 16% and strength training-only reduces it by 21%, whereas if you do both, you reduce your all-cause mortality by 29%

The older you get, the more important your muscle mass becomes. Not only are strong muscles a requirement for mobility, balance and the ability to live independently, but having reserve muscle mass will also increase your chances of survival1 when sick or hospitalized.

Muscle is lost far more easily and quicker than it’s built, so finding ways to continuously promote and maintain your muscle mass is really crucial, especially as you get older.

Age-related loss of muscle mass is known as sarcopenia, and if you don’t do anything to stop it you can expect to lose about 15% of your muscle mass between your 30s and your 80s.2 An estimated 10% to 25% of seniors under the age of 70 have sarcopenia and as many as half those over the age of 80 are impaired with it.3

In the lecture above, Brendan Egan, Ph.D., associate professor of sport and exercise physiology at the School of Health and Human Performance and the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology at Dublin City University in Ireland, reviews the latest research on exercise training for aging adults, which places a significant focus on building and maintaining muscle, and the nutritional components that can help optimize training results.

While it’s true that larger muscle is indicative of stronger, more functional muscle, it’s not a true 1-to-1 relationship. As noted by Egan, “you can have situations where you can gain back function without necessarily gaining muscle size.” To illustrate this point, Egan presents data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which looked at leg strength and lean muscle mass.

While declines in muscle mass and strength are relatively well-synchronized in the 35- to 40-year-old group, strength dramatically drops off as you get into the 75-year-old and over groups, with 85-year-olds seeing dramatic declines in strength and function relative to the decline in muscles size.

One way to measure functional capacity in older adults is gait (walking) speed, which is a strong predictor of life expectancy. Data suggest that if you have a walking speed of 1.6 meters (about 5.2 feet) per second (approximately 3.5 mph) at the age of 65, your life expectancy is another 32 years, meaning you may live into your late 90s.

Having a walking speed at or below the cutoff for sarcopenia, which is 0.8 meters (about 2.6 feet) per second, your life expectancy would be another 15 years, which means you’d be predicted to live to 80. At this speed, you would not be able to make it safely across a typical pedestrian crossing before the light changes to red.

Strength can also tell us a lot about an individual’s chances of survival. Egan presents data from a study in which people’s chest and leg press strength were measured to arrive at a composite score of whole body strength. The pattern is quite revealing, showing the strongest one-third of the population over 60 had a 50% lower death rate than the weakest.

Exercise guidelines recommend getting 150 minutes of aerobics exercise and two strength training sessions per week. As noted by Egan, you need both. It’s not just one or the other.

Research shows aerobic exercise in isolation reduces your all-cause mortality by 16% and strength training-only reduces it by 21%, whereas if you do both, you reduce your all-cause mortality by 29%.4 Disturbingly, U.K. data suggest only 36.2% of adults over the age of 30 meet aerobic guidelines, and a minuscule 3.4% meet strength training guidelines.

Part of the problem may be that many don’t want to go to the gym. But there’s little difference between doing gym-based strength training and doing bodyweight resistance training at home.

As noted by Egan, enforced bedrest, such as acute hospitalization, can have a dramatic impact on your muscle mass. For example, a 2015 review5 in Extreme Physiology & Medicine notes you can lose 2.5% of your muscle mass in the first two weeks of bedrest. By Day 23, you can have lost up to 10% of your quadriceps muscle mass. As explained in this review:6

“Skeletal muscle mass is regulated by a balance between MPS [muscle protein synthesis] and MPB [muscle protein breakdown]. In a 70-kg human, approximately 280 g of protein is synthesized and degraded each day.

The two processes are linked … as facilitative or adaptive processes, whereby MPS facilitates (allows modulation of muscle mass) and MPB adapts (limiting said modulation).

When exposed to an anabolic stimulus, MPS rises. MPB rises too, but to a lesser amount, resulting in a net synthetic balance. In response to an anti-anabolic stimulus, MPS decreases and MPB decreases to a lesser degree, resulting in a net breakdown.

The interaction between critical illness and bed rest may result in greater muscle loss compared to bed rest alone. The musculoskeletal system is a highly plastic and adaptive system, responding quickly to changing demands. Relatively short periods of immobilization decrease MPS, with no effect on MPB.

Furthermore, this altered balance is relatively resistant to high dose amino acid delivery … Immobilization has significant effects on peripheral muscle aerobic capacity, contractility, insulin resistance and architecture.

Microvascular dysfunction occurring in severe sepsis is associated with immobilization and may have an additive effect on reducing MPS. In critically ill patients, MPS is reduced even with nutritional delivery, with increased MPB seen, leading to a net catabolic state and thus muscle wasting.”

Research7 has shown even healthy young subjects in their 20s can lose 3.1 pounds of muscle mass in a single week of bedrest. This is why it is so important to have a reserve in case you wind up in the hospital and lose this much muscle mass. It may take you the better part of a year to regain that muscle, as gaining muscle mass is hard work and many elderly fail to do so.

The loss of muscle mass also significantly decreases your insulin sensitivity. One of the reasons for this has to do with the fact that muscle tissue is a significant reservoir for the disposal of glucose. Your muscle tissue also produces cytokines and anti-inflammatory myokines that play an important role in health.

While three to five sessions of aerobic exercise and two or more strength sessions per week may sound like a lot, for many, the lack of time is a restricting factor. However, some of these sessions can be done together. “That’s called concurrent exercise training,” Egan says.

He goes on to cite research looking at time matched concurrent exercise in the elderly, 65 and older, where an aerobic training group and a strength training group were compared to a group that spent half of their session doing aerobic exercise and the other half doing resistance training. All groups spent the same overall time exercising (30 minutes, three times a week for 12 weeks).

In terms of leg strength, the concurrent training group had better responses to training than aerobic or strength training alone. There was little difference in lean body mass, meaning they didn’t necessarily bulk up, but they had a 50% increase in strength nonetheless. They also lost more body fat around the trunk area. In short, concurrent training appears to give you more bang for your buck.

One of the reasons I’m so passionate about blood flow restriction (BFR) training is because it has the ability to prevent and widely treat sarcopenia like no other type of training.

There are several reasons why BFR is far superior to conventional types of resistance training in the elderly. Importantly, it allows you to use very light weights, which makes it suitable for the elderly and those who are already frail or recovering from an injury. And, since you’re using very light weights, you don’t damage the muscle and therefore don’t need to recover as long.

While most elderly cannot engage in high-intensity exercise or heavy weightlifting, even extraordinarily fit individuals in their 60s, 70s and 80s who can do conventional training will be limited in terms of the benefits they can achieve, thanks to decreased microcirculation. This is because your microcirculation tends to decrease with age.

With age, your capillary growth diminishes, and capillary blood flow is essential to supply blood to your muscle stem cells, specifically the fast twitch Type II muscle fiber stem cells. If they don’t have enough blood flow — even though they’re getting the signal from the conventional strength training — they’re not going to grow and you’re not going to get muscle hypertrophy and strength.

BFR, because of the local hypoxia that is created, stimulates hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF1a) and, secondarily, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which acts as “fertilizer” for your blood vessels. VEGF allows your stem cells to function the way they were designed to when they were younger.

What’s more, the hypoxia also triggers vascular endothelial growth factor, which enhances the capillarization of the muscle and likely the veins in the arteries as well. Building muscle and improving blood vessel function are related, which is why BFR offers such powerful stimulus for reversing sarcopenia.

In short, BFR has a systemic or crossover training effect. While you’re only restricting blood flow to your extremities, once you release the bands, the metabolic variables created by the hypoxia flow into your blood — lactate and VEGF being two of them — thereby spreading this “metabolic magic” throughout your entire system.

It should come as no surprise that there is an important synergy between nutrition and exercise. When it comes to muscle building and maintenance, amino acids, the building blocks of protein, are of particular importance.

In the podcast above, Megan Hall, scientific director at Nourish Balance Thrive delves into this topic at greater depth and reviews the current recommended daily allowances of protein compared to the optimal levels needed to support muscle mass and strength in at various life stages.8

Research9 looking at post-prandial protein handling and amino acid absorption shows 55.3% of the dietary protein of a given meal is in circulation within five hours after eating, which significantly increases muscle protein synthesis.

Research10 suggests healthy young adult men “max out the protein synthesis signal from a given meal” at a dose of 0.24 grams of protein per kilogram of total bodyweight, or 0.25 grams of protein per kilogram of lean body mass.

The current U.S.-Canadian recommended dietary protein allowance is 0.8 g/kg/d (0,36/grams/pound/day), but healthy older adults may actually require about 1.20 g/kg/d or .55 grams/pound/day. According to this study:11

“Our data suggest that healthy older men are less sensitive to low protein intakes and require a greater relative protein intake, in a single meal, than young men to maximally stimulate postprandial rates of MPS [myofibrillar protein synthesis].

These results should be considered when developing nutritional solutions to maximize MPS for the maintenance or enhancement of muscle mass with advancing age.”

Amino acids also act as signaling molecules that trigger muscle growth. Leucine is a particularly potent signaling agent, although all of the amino acids are required to actually build the muscle. The richest source of leucine (which helps regulate the turnover of protein in your muscle), by far, is whey protein. In fact, it can be difficult to obtain sufficient amounts of leucine from other sources.

The typical requirement for leucine to maintain body protein is 1 to 3 grams daily. However, to optimize its anabolic pathway, research shows you need somewhere between 8 and 16 grams of leucine per day, in divided doses.1213

To reach the 8-gram minimum, you’d have to eat nearly 15 eggs.14 Eighty grams of whey, on the other hand, will give you 8 grams of leucine.15

One of the problems with Egan is that he’s not very literate on time-restricted eating. During the question and answer portion, an audience member asks him about it and he admits he hasn’t studied it.

This is important because restricting your eating window to six to eight hours, which means you’re fasting 14 to 18 hours each day, would make it far easier for each of the meals to be over the leucine threshold. It will also activate autophagy, which is another factor essential for optimal muscle growth.

Autophagy is a self-cleaning process in which your body digests damaged cells, which in turn encourages the proliferation of new, healthy cells. The harder your workout, the more autophagy you will activate.

So, I recommend fasting for as long as you can before your morning workout, and then, shortly thereafter, have your largest meal of the day with plenty of high-quality protein, making sure you get several grams of leucine and arginine, both of which are potent mTOR stimulators.

The mTOR pathway is an important key for protein synthesis and muscle building. As explained in David Sabatini’s excellent review paper “mTOR at the Nexus of Nutrition, Growth, Ageing and Disease,” published in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology:16

“Over the past two and a half decades, mapping of the mTOR signaling landscape has revealed that mTOR controls biomass accumulation and metabolism by modulating key cellular processes, including protein synthesis and autophagy.

Given the pathway’s central role in maintaining cellular and physiological homeostasis, dysregulation of mTOR signaling has been implicated in metabolic disorders, neurodegeneration, cancer and ageing.”

In summary, fasting activates autophagy, allowing your body to clean out damaged subcellular parts. Exercising while fasted maximizes autophagy even further. In fact, exercising while you are fasting for more than 14 to 18 hours likely activates as much autophagy as if you were fasting for two to three days. It does this by increasing AMPK, increasing NAD+ and inhibiting mTOR.

Refeeding with protein after your fasted workout then activates mTOR, thus shutting down autophagy and starting the rebuilding process. These two processes need to be cyclically activated to optimize your health and avoid problems.

As noted by Egan, “Hopefully I’ve convinced you that muscle health is central to active lifestyles. There’s been this increased awareness of muscle size, but I think we need to emphasize the idea about strength and function. These are the things that are easiest to change with the right type of training.”

In short, if you want to increase muscle size and strength, then there’s no getting around resistance training. It simply must be part of your exercise prescription, and concurrent training, where you’re combining aerobic and strength training in a given session is a time-efficient model.

BFR is also a particularly excellent way to ensure you’re getting effective strength training without the risks of conventional strength training using heavy weights, and is easy to combine with exercises such as walking and swimming. You simply wear the BFR bands while walking or exercising as normal.

In my February 2020 interview with Ben Greenfield, author of “Boundless: Upgrade Your Brain, Optimize Your Body & Defy Aging,” we discuss the importance of strength training and getting the appropriate amount of protein to build and maintain your muscle mass and optimize mitochondrial density and biogenesis.

In summary, Greenfield recommends a fitness program that includes the following types of exercise in order to target the main pathways involved in health and aging:

• High-intensity interval training once a week to boost mitochondrial density and biogenesis — Brief spurts of exercise followed by longer rest periods. Greenfield recommends a 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 rest-to-work ratio.

• Muscle endurance training two to three times a week to improve lactic acid tolerance — An example is the classic Tabata set, which has a 2-to-1 work-to-rest ratio.

• Longer training sessions twice a week to improve your VO2 max — To target and improve your VO2 max, you’ll want your training sessions to be longer, about four to six minutes in duration with four to six minutes of recovery in between, for a 1-to-1 work-to-rest ratio.

  Examples include The New York Times’ seven-minute workout17 and bodyweight training done in a fast explosive manner or with a very light medicine ball, sandbag or kettle bells.

• Long walk once a week to improve your stamina — Greenfield recommends taking a 1.5- to three-hourlong walk, bike ride or paddle session — anything where your body is engaged in chronic repetitive motion for a long period of time — preferably in a fasted state. Alternatively, do 20 to 30 minutes of fasted cardio followed by a cold shower.

• Super-slow weight training once or twice a week to improve muscle strength — Alternatives include elastic band training systems and blood flow restriction (BFR) training. You can also combine BFR with super-slow training.

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