Will the Fallout from “Qatargate” (and now also “Moroccogate”) Splatter the European Commission?

Naked Capitalism | Dec. 16, 2022

As the Qatargate scandal widens, questions are being asked as to whether its reverberations will reach the Commission, the EU’s executive branch. Recent revelations suggest the EU’s Chief Diplomat Josep Borrell could be implicated.

Since erupting last weekend with police raids on MEPs’ homes and offices in the European parliament, the Qatargate scandal has done nothing but mushroom. What began as a criminal probe into current and former MEPs and parliamentary assistants implicated in a bribery ring aimed at burnishing the public image of the current World Cup host has widened significantly — not only in terms of the number of people involved but also the number of organizations and third countries, which now also include Morocco.

As the scandal grows, both the Parliament and the European Commission are locked in a frantic damage control mission. European Parliament president Roberta Metsola on Thursday (15 December) pledged to unveil a “wide-ranging reform package” in January, which will include  measures to bolster whistleblower protections, a ban on all unofficial parliamentary friendship groups (groups of MEPs discussing relations with non-EU countries) and a review of enforcement of code of conduct rules for MEPs.

(***)

“The Great COVID debate” at 9am PST Monday is postponed

Interview with Mario Nawfal, CEO of International Blockchain Consulting  (IBC). - TechBullion

Mario Nawfal will be host to “The Great COVID debate” on Monday at 9am PST

I’ll was going to be in the “Great COVID debate” Monday at 9am PST, but that event is now postponed.

Peter McCullough will be joining me on “our side.”

Dr. Drew will be in the middle.

On the opposing side will be Jeremy Faust and Daniel Wilson aka “Debunk the Funk.”

You need to join from your MOBILE app. It’s the icon right in the center on the bottom.

Just to be clear, I didn’t create the title of the room. I think the great debate will be between the CDC, FDA, and NIH and the experts on our side.

I’ll keep you apprised when I learn more.

I just got word of some new research being done showing that the vaccinated are 5% more likely to report a serious adverse event than the unvaccinated. The result is statistically significant.

This isn’t surprising since the V-safe number was nearly 8%.

Still, it is nice confirmation.

A source inside UCSF estimates that 25% of the faculty are red pill, 25% are blue pill, and 50% are in the middle (not sure who is right).

Bob Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine, is squarely in the blue pill camp.

In other words, the good news is that we are now at parity in terms of what people are thinking at a top medical school.

Also, the source noted that medical students have very poor critical thinking skills, even after they try to teach it. Are you surprised?

For example, they will believe that getting the vaccine will reduce COVID hospitalization and death, but getting the virus will not. When they are asked, “So how do you think a vaccine works?” only then will the wheels start turning.

If the CDC doesn’t accept our offer to resolve the misinformation problem, a well-known billionaire with a lot of Twitter followers has offered his assistance to get them to the debate table. It turns out, he’s not fond of censorship as a way to resolve scientific disputes.

It will be embarrassing for the CDC if it has to come to this, but we will get our debate or they will be a national embarrassment for declining to defend their policies.

Stay tuned…

I expect to make a very very positive announcement on Tuesday that I’ve hinted about before. We will literally be turning the tables on the pro-vax people. They are NOT going to be happy.

Today was a very good day.

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I will be on the Twitter spaces “The Great COVID debate” at 9am PST tomorrow

Interview with Mario Nawfal, CEO of International Blockchain Consulting  (IBC). - TechBullion

Mario Nawfal will be host to “The Great COVID debate” on Monday at 9am PST

I’ll be in the “Great COVID debate” Monday at 9am PST.

Peter McCullough will be joining me on “our side.”

Dr. Drew will be in the middle.

On the opposing side will be Jeremy Faust and Daniel Wilson aka “Debunk the Funk.”

You need to join from your MOBILE app. It’s the icon right in the center on the bottom.

Just to be clear, I didn’t create the title of the room. I think the great debate will be between the CDC, FDA, and NIH and the experts on our side.

I just got word of some new research being done showing that the vaccinated are 5% more likely to report a serious adverse event than the unvaccinated. The result is statistically significant.

This isn’t surprising since the V-safe number was nearly 8%.

Still, it is nice confirmation.

A source inside UCSF estimates that 25% of the faculty are red pill, 25% are blue pill, and 50% are in the middle (not sure who is right).

Bob Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine, is squarely in the blue pill camp.

In other words, the good news is that we are now at parity in terms of what people are thinking at a top medical school.

Also, the source noted that medical students have very poor critical thinking skills, even after they try to teach it. Are you surprised?

For example, they will believe that getting the vaccine will reduce COVID hospitalization and death, but getting the virus will not. When they are asked, “So how do you think a vaccine works?” only then will the wheels start turning.

If the CDC doesn’t accept our offer to resolve the misinformation problem, a well-known billionaire with a lot of Twitter followers has offered his assistance to get them to the debate table. It turns out, he’s not fond of censorship as a way to resolve scientific disputes.

It will be embarrassing for the CDC if it has to come to this, but we will get our debate or they will be a national embarrassment for declining to defend their policies.

Stay tuned…

I expect to make a very very positive announcement on Tuesday that I’ve hinted about before. We will literally be turning the tables on the pro-vax people. They are NOT going to be happy.

Today was a very good day.

Share

El Paso Mayor Finally Declares State Of Emergency After Mass Invasion Of Migrants

Zero Hedge | Dec. 18, 2022

Better late than never?  Democrat Mayor of El Paso, Oscar Leeser, has been refusing to declare a state of emergency in El Paso for weeks as illegal migrant caravans flood into the city across the southern border, but it would seem that he has finally seen the light.  Leeser’s announcement comes at the same time as a declaration of emergency from Denver Mayor (and Democrat) Michael Hancock, who now admits that the city cannot continue to support migrants transported there from El Paso.

El Paso has run out of funding to accommodate the 2400+ people entering the city every day from Mexico and is asking for outside assistance to deal with the influx of “asylum seekers.”  While the Biden Administration continues to ignore and even obscure the crisis on the southern border, leaked videos of enormous migrant groups lining up for entry at El Paso gates are beginning to circulate, debunking the claim that the White House is taking action.

Biden’s Press Secretary, Karen Jean-Pierre, was recently mocked for her assertion that Biden has been “doing the work from day one” to secure the border.  Clearly, the evidence shows that she is lying:

(***)

Bill Gates Plans for New Catastrophic Contagion

  • Over time, it’s become clear that the globalist cabal seeking to implement a one world government repeatedly tell us what they’re about to do. Table top pandemic simulations, for example, are a form of dress rehearsal

  • In 2017, Johns Hopkins Center of Health Security held a coronavirus pandemic simulation called the SPARS Pandemic 2025-2028 scenario. In October 2019, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with Johns Hopkins and the World Economic Forum hosted Event 201

  • As in the SPARS Pandemic scenario, Event 201 involved an outbreak of a highly infectious coronavirus, but the primary (if not sole) focus of the exercise was how to control information and keep “misinformation” in check, not how to effectively discover and share remedies

  • October 23, 2022, Gates, Johns Hopkins and the World Health Organization cohosted “a global challenge exercise” dubbed “Catastrophic Contagion,” involving a novel pathogen called “severe epidemic enterovirus respiratory syndrome 2025” (SEERS-25), which primarily affects children and teens

  • Enterovirus D68 is typically associated with cold and flu-like illness in infants, children and teens. In rare cases, it’s also been known to cause viral meningitis and acute flaccid myelitis, a neurological condition resulting in muscle weakness and loss of reflexes. The virus they modeled in the Catastrophic Contagion simulation appears to be something similar to enterovirus D68, but worse

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Over time, it’s become clear that the globalist cabal seeking to implement a one world government repeatedly tell us what they’re about to do. They hold dress rehearsals in the form of tabletop exercises, and they’ve revealed their plans in various reports and white papers through the years.

I have been subscribed to the channel that posted the video above for some time now. She only has 10K subscribers but really gets some amazing content. I have no idea how she was able to secure this video as it is not widely circulated. Even more surprising is that her channel is not being taken down.

For example, in 2017, Johns Hopkins Center of Health Security held a coronavirus pandemic simulation called the SPARS Pandemic 2025-2028 scenario.1 Importantly, the exercise highlighted and stressed “communication dilemmas concerning medical countermeasures that could plausibly emerge” in a pandemic scenario.

In October 2019, less than three months before the COVID-19 outbreak, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with Johns Hopkins and the World Economic Forum hosted Event 201.

As in the SPARS Pandemic scenario, this exercise involved an outbreak of a highly infectious coronavirus, but the primary (if not sole) focus of the exercise was how to control information and keep “misinformation” in check, not how to effectively discover and share remedies.

Social media censorship played prominently in the Event 201 plan, and in the real-world events of 2020 through the present, accurate information about vaccine development, production and injury has indeed been effectively suppressed around the world, thanks to social media companies and Google’s censoring of opposing viewpoints.

We now know this censorship was illegally directed by U.S. government officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was recently deposed2 about his role in the online censoring of COVID information.

Both of these simulations, SPARS and Event 201, foreshadowed what eventually occurred in real life during COVID, so, when Gates hosts yet another pandemic exercise, it’s worth paying attention to the details.

October 23, 2022, Gates, Johns Hopkins and the World Health Organization cohosted “a global challenge exercise” dubbed “Catastrophic Contagion,”3 4 involving a novel (and as of now fictional) pathogen called “severe epidemic enterovirus respiratory syndrome 2025” or SEERS-25 for short.

Enterovirus D685 is typically associated with cold and flu-like illness in infants, children and teens. In rare cases, it’s also been known to cause viral meningitis and acute flaccid myelitis, a neurological condition resulting in muscle weakness and loss of reflexes in one or more extremities.

“The virus they modeled in the Catastrophic Contagion simulation appears to be something similar to enterovirus D68, but worse.”

Enteroviruses A71 and A6 are known to cause hand, foot and mouth disease,6 while poliovirus, the prototypical enterovirus, causes polio (poliomyelitis), a potentially life-threatening type of paralysis that primarily affects children under age 5. So, the virus they modeled in this simulation appears to be something similar to enterovirus D68, but worse.

Tellingly, the Catastrophic Contagion exercise focused on getting leadership in African countries involved and trained in following the script. Participants included 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India and Germany, as well as Gates himself.

African nations just so happened to go “off script” more often than others during the COVID pandemic, and didn’t follow in the footsteps of developed nations when it came to pushing the jabs. As a result, vaccine makers now face the problem of having a huge control group, as the COVID jab uptake on the African continent was only 6%.7

Not surprisingly (for those in the know), Africa has fared far better than developed nations with high COVID jab rates in terms of COVID-19 infections and related deaths.8

Now, the Catastrophic Contagion exercise predicts SEERS-25 will kill 20 million people worldwide, including 15 million children, and many who survive the infection will be left with paralysis and/or brain damage. In other words, the “cue” given is that the next pandemic will likely target children rather than the elderly, as was the case with COVID-19.

This is an interesting coincidence, seeing how rates of toddlers and young children hospitalized with influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is already spiking.

Coincidentally, over the past year, researchers have been warning that the COVID jabs may be dysregulating and destroying people’s immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to all sorts of infections. According to a study9 posted on the preprint server medRxiv in May 2021, the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID jab “reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses, causing immune depletion.”

In August 2021, a French group of pediatric infectious disease experts also warned that “immunity debt” caused by a lack of exposure to common viruses and bacteria during COVID lockdowns and school closures might predispose children to suffer more infections in the future.10

They predicted the decrease in viral and bacterial exposure that train your child’s immune system may result in a rebound of a variety of infectious diseases, including influenza and RSV) which is precisely what we’re now seeing. If a modified enterovirus gets added into the mix, it’s not difficult to see how parents might get spooked enough to start lining their kids up for more shots — including parents in African nations.

At this point, it’s quite clear that “biosecurity” is the chosen means by which the globalist cabal intends to seize power over the world. The WHO is working on securing sole power over pandemic response globally through its international pandemic treaty which, if implemented, will eradicate the sovereignty of all member nations.

Ultimately, the WHO intends to dictate all health care. December 13, 2022, the WHO announced Sir Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust — who colluded with Dr. Anthony Fauci to suppress the COVID lab-leak narrative — has been chosen as its new chief scientist.11

The WHO’s pandemic treaty is the gateway to a global, top-down totalitarian regime, a one world government. But to secure that power, they will need more pandemics. COVID-19 alone was not enough to get everyone onboard with a centralized pandemic response unit, and they probably knew that from the start.

So, the reason we can be sure there will be additional pandemics, whether manufactured using either fear and hype alone or an actual bioweapon created for this very purpose, is because the takeover plan, aka The Great Reset, is based on the premise that we need global biosecurity surveillance and centralized response.

Biosecurity, in turn, is the justification for an international vaccine passport, which the G20 just signed on to, and that passport will also be your digital identification. That digital ID, then, will be tied to your social credit score, personal carbon footprint tracker, medical records, educational records, work records, social media presence, purchase records, your bank accounts and a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Once all these pieces are fully connected, you’ll be in a digital prison, and the ruling cabal — whether officially a one world government by then or not — will have total control over your life from cradle to grave.

COVID Is a Global Propaganda Operation

In the video above,12 13 initially published in August 2021, professor Piers Robinson, Ph.D., an expert on communication, media, world politics and the role of propaganda, spoke to Asia Pacific Today about propaganda in the age of COVID.

As noted by Robinson, COVID-19 is unquestionably the largest, most sophisticated propaganda operation in history. Psychological techniques were extensively used during 2020 to incite fear in the population, while other persuasion strategies were used to get people to support and defend COVID measures such as masking, isolation, social distancing, lockdowns and jab mandates.

Indeed, propaganda is what allowed for draconian and unscientific COVID measures to be implemented. Without propaganda and simultaneous censorship of opposing views, little of what we’ve been through would have been possible.

As noted by Robinson, while the use of state propaganda could initially be justified as a necessary means to achieve a public health objective — protecting people from COVID-related illness and death — it quickly became apparent that this was not the case, and likely never was.

COVID-19 has instead been used to suspend and strip us of Constitutional rights and civil liberties, and is still being exploited to further social, political and financial restructuring objectives, entirely outside democratic processes and public scrutiny. We also know it’s not about public health since:

  • COVID is now nothing more than another endemic respiratory infection, much like the common cold, and

  • The COVID jabs don’t prevent infection or spread of the virus, which negates the entire premise for vaccine passports, yet they’re being pushed anyway

In related news, Politico recently published a special report14 detailing how Gates, who has no medical expertise whatsoever, ended up controlling the global COVID response with no oversight to speak of.

In the earliest days of the pandemic, four nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) banded together to identify vaccine makers and make “targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots,” Politico explains.

These NGOs were the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gavi (a Gates organization that provides vaccines to developing nations), the Wellcome Trust (a British research foundation led by Farrar, now selected to be the WHO’s head scientist) and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international vaccine research and development group cofounded by Gates and Wellcome in 2017.

In collaboration with the WHO, these four NGOs — three of which were founded by Gates — then set out to create a global distribution plan for the tests, drugs and injections they’d invested in.

Incidentally, Gates at that time was also the largest donor to the WHO, as then-President Trump had pulled the U.S. out of the WHO and stopped funding. It’s hard to imagine a situation with greater conflicts of interest. The four groups also greased the wheels of governments.

Collectively, they spent more than $8.3 million to lobby lawmakers and officials in the U.S. and Europe. A number ofU.S. and EU officials, as well as WHO representatives, have also been employed by one or more of these NGOs, which helped solidify their political connections.

A number of civil society organizations that are active in developing countries, including Doctors Without Borders, have objected to Western-dominated groups making life-and-death decisions for poorer nations.

“‘What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?’ asked Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy adviser for the Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign,” Politico writes.15

Politico’s special report continues:16

“Now, critics are raising significant questions about the equity and effectiveness of the group’s response to the pandemic — and the serious limitations of outsourcing the pandemic response to unelected, privately-funded groups. ‘I think we should be deeply concerned,’ said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University professor who specializes in public-health law.

‘Putting it in a very crass way, money buys influence. And this is the worst kind of influence. Not just because it’s money — although that’s important, because money shouldn’t dictate policy — but also, because it’s preferential access, behind closed doors.’

Gostin said that such power, even if propelled by good intentions and expertise, is ‘anti-democratic, because it’s extraordinarily non-transparent, and opaque’ and ‘leaves behind ordinary people, communities and civil society’ …

[M]any global health specialists question whether the groups are capable of performing the rigorous post-mortems necessary to build a stronger global response system for the future.

‘No one’s actually holding these actors to account,’ said Sophie Harman, professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. ‘And they’re the ones that are really shaping our ability to respond to pandemics’ …

Without governments stepping in to take the lead on pandemic preparedness, the four organizations, along with their partners in the global health community, are the only entities that are in a position to lead in the world’s response to a devastating outbreak — again.

‘They’re funded by their own capabilities and or endowments and trusts. But when they step into multilateral affairs, then who keeps watch over them?’ a former senior U.S. official said. ‘I don’t know the answer to that. That’s quite provocative.'”

So, in the final analysis, we already have a pseudo-one world government, in the form of Gates’ NGOs. They are making health care decisions that should be left to individual nations and/or states, and they’re making decisions that will line their own pockets, regardless of what happens to the public health-wise.

They coordinate and synchronize pandemic communication during these simulated practice runs, and then, when the real-world situation emerges that fits the bill, the preplanned script is simply played out verbatim.

African nations failed to follow the script during COVID, which is why they’re focusing on African leaders in the latest simulation. They need to get rid of the African control group by getting them onboard with mass injection and all the rest. It’s basically a recruitment effort.

Lastly, between the G20 declaration to implement an international vaccine passport under the auspice of the WHO, and the WHO’s pandemic treaty, everything is lined up to take control of the next pandemic, and in so doing, further securing the foundation for a one world government.

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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.

Vitamin D Could Help Extend Your Life

vitamin d could help extend your life

  • People genetically predisposed to vitamin D deficiency are 25% more likely to die from any cause compared to those with different genetics conducive to healthy vitamin D levels

  • Researchers with the University of South Australia also revealed that vitamin D deficiency increases the risk of chronic diseases like heart disease, respiratory diseases and cancer

  • The more severe the vitamin D deficiency, the greater the risk of mortality became

  • For the study, low levels of vitamin D were defined as less than 10 ng/ml (25 nmol/L), which is a severe deficiency state; higher levels of 60 to 80 ng/ml are likely necessary for optimal health and longevity benefits

  • Strive to get your vitamin D from healthy sun exposure; higher levels of vitamin D may serve as a marker for sun exposure, which in turn may be responsible for many of the beneficial health effects attributed to vitamin D

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What are your vitamin D levels? If you’re not sure, getting tested — and then optimizing your levels — could help you live longer. While low vitamin D levels have long been associated with increased risk of death, data on severely deficient individuals are lacking.

Now, it’s been shown that people genetically predisposed to vitamin D deficiency were 25% more likely to die from any cause compared to those with different genetics conducive to healthy vitamin D levels.1

The data came from researchers with the Australian Center for Precision Health at the University of South Australia, who also revealed that vitamin D deficiency driven by genetics increases the risk of chronic diseases like heart disease, respiratory diseases and cancer.2

To find out vitamin D deficiency’s role in mortality, researchers used data from 307,600 people included in the U.K. Biobank, a cohort from England, Scotland and Wales containing data about genetics and health. Study author Josh Sutherland explained in a news release:3

“Vitamin D deficiency has been connected with mortality, but as clinical trials have often failed to recruit people with low vitamin D levels — or have been prohibited from including vitamin deficient participants — it’s been challenging to establish causal relationships …

We used a new genetic method to explore and affirm the non-linear relationships that we’ve seen in observational settings, and through this we’ve been able give strong evidence for the connection between low vitamin D status and premature death.”

In addition to increasing risk of all-cause mortality by 25%, people genetically predisposed to vitamin D deficiency also had a:4

  • 25% greater risk of dying from a heart-related illness

  • 16% greater risk of dying from cancer

  • 96% greater risk of dying from a lung-related illness

Further, the more severe the vitamin D deficiency, the greater the risk of mortality became.5 It should be noted that low levels of vitamin D were defined as less than 10 ng/ml (25 nmol/L), which is a severe deficiency state. I would consider 20 ng/ml as a bare minimum level for health.

“While severe vitamin D deficiency is rarer in Australia than elsewhere in the world, it can still affect those who have health vulnerabilities, the elderly, and those who do not acquire enough vitamin D from healthy sun exposure and dietary sources,” Sutherland said. “Our study provides strong evidence for the connection between low levels of vitamin D and mortality, and this is the first study of its kind to also include respiratory disease related mortality as an outcome.”6

Optimizing your vitamin D level is one strategy that can boost your health in myriad ways. A deficiency in vitamin D has been implicated in such problems as multiple sclerosis7 and Parkinson’s disease,8 for instance. The link between Parkinson’s and vitamin D is so strong that one study found people with high vitamin D levels had a 65% lower risk of Parkinson’s compared to those with low vitamin D levels.9

Vitamin D also significantly reduces oxidative stress in your vascular system, which can prevent the development of heart disease.10 And, based on data from 191,779 American patients, people with a vitamin D level of at least 55 ng/mL (138 nmol/L) had a significantly lower SARS-CoV-2 positivity rate compared to those with a level below 20 ng/mL (50 nmol/L).11 In addition, optimizing your vitamin D levels is one of the absolute best strategies to slash your cancer risk.

Previous research found that a vitamin D level of 47 ng/ml was associated with a 50% lower risk of breast cancer.12 Further, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine reported that raising your vitamin D level to at least 40 ng/ml can slash your risk of all invasive cancers by 67%.13

Another analysis — this one conducted by GrassrootsHealth and published June 2018 in PLOS ONE — showed women with a vitamin D level at or above 60 ng/ml (150 nmol/L) had an 82% lower risk of breast cancer compared to those with levels below 20 ng/ml (50 nmol/L).14

An earlier study, which looked at women in the U.K., found having a vitamin D level above 60 ng/mL resulted in an 83% lower breast cancer risk.15 16 As for how vitamin D fights cancer, GrassrootsHealth explained:17

“Vitamin D may play a number of roles in the prevention of breast cancer development and progression.

The biologically active form of vitamin D, 1,25(OH)2D3, binds to the vitamin D receptor (VDR) in normal breast epithelium and this complex regulates the cell cycle, promotes differentiation, increases cell-to-cell adhesion, protects cells from DNA damage, regulates cytokines, activates immune cells, and suppresses inflammation, all of which may act to reduce malignant transformations.

In breast cancer cells, this complex also activates apoptosis and other mechanisms to suppress tumor growth.”

In another study utilizing data from the U.K. Biobank, University of South Australia researchers revealed that vitamin D deficiency may lead to dementia.18 Those who were deficient had an increased risk of dementia and stroke, with the strongest association found for people with vitamin D levels below 10 ng/ml (25 nmol/L).19

Low vitamin D levels were also associated with lower brain volumes, and genetic analyses suggested there’s a causal relationship between vitamin D deficiency and dementia. Further, the researchers found that up to 17% of dementia cases in some populations may be prevented if people raised their vitamin D levels to 20 ng/ml (50 nmol/L).20 Study author Professor Elina Hyppönen explained:21

“Vitamin D is a hormone precursor that is increasingly recognized for widespread effects, including on brain health, but until now it has been very difficult to examine what would happen if we were able to prevent vitamin D deficiency.

… Dementia is a progressive and debilitating disease that can devastate individuals and families alike. If we’re able to change this reality through ensuring that none of us is severely vitamin D deficient, it would also have further benefits and we could change the health and wellbeing for thousands.”

In a separate six-year study that followed 1,658 people, vitamin D deficiency was also associated with a substantially increased risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.22 In fact, people who were severely deficient in vitamin D had a 125% increased risk of developing dementia, whereas those who were moderately deficient were at a 53% greater risk.

For Alzheimer’s disease specifically, being severely vitamin D deficient was linked to a 122% increased risk compared to a 69% increase for those who were moderately deficient.23 In addition:

  • Higher intake of dietary vitamin D was associated with a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease among older women24

  • Among the elderly (including the “oldest-old”) in China, low vitamin D levels were associated with increased risk of cognitive decline and impairment25

  • Low vitamin D levels among older women in the U.S. were associated with a higher risk of cognitive impairment and decline26

I’ve long recommended a vitamin D level of 60 to 80 ng/ml (150-200 nmol/L) for optimal health and disease prevention. A level upward of 100 ng/mL also appears safe and beneficial for certain conditions, especially cancer.

Remember that the only way to determine how much sun exposure is enough and/or how much vitamin D3 you need to take is to measure your vitamin D level, ideally twice a year. The D*Action Project by GrassrootsHealth is a cost-effective way to do this, while simultaneously progressing valuable research.

To participate, simply purchase a D*Action Measurement Kit and follow the registration instructions included. When supplementing, also remember to take synergistic effects with other nutrients into account. If you take high-dose vitamin D, you may also need to increase your intake of:

  • Magnesium

  • Vitamin K2

  • Calcium

These four nutrients — vitamins D and K2, calcium and magnesium — all work in tandem and rely on sufficient amounts of each to work optimally. Once you’ve confirmed your vitamin D levels via testing, remember to retest in three to four months to make sure you’ve reached your target level.

If you have, then you know you’re taking the correct dosage and/or getting the right amount of sun exposure. If you’re still low (or have reached a level above 80 ng/ml), you’ll need to adjust your dosage accordingly and retest again in another three to four months.

I strongly recommend getting your vitamin D from proper sun exposure if at all possible. This is because not only will adequate sun exposure naturally raise your vitamin D levels to healthy levels, but it will provide numerous other benefits, many of which are only beginning to be understood.

It’s quite possible that having higher levels of vitamin D serves as a marker for healthy sun exposure, which in turn may be responsible for many of the beneficial health effects attributed to vitamin D — including increased longevity and lower cancer risk.

Many people are not aware that only 5% of your body’s melatonin — a potent anticancer agent — is produced in your pineal gland. The other 95% is produced inside your mitochondria — provided you get proper sun exposure. So vitamin D is more than likely a biomarker or surrogate for sun exposure, which is intricately involved in melatonin production.27

During the day, if you get enough sun exposure, near-infrared rays from the sun penetrate deep into your body and activate cytochrome c oxidase, which in turn stimulates the production of melatonin inside your mitochondria. Your mitochondria produce ATP, the energy currency of your body. A byproduct of this ATP production is the creation of reactive oxidative species (ROS), which are responsible for oxidative stress and free radicals.

Excessive amounts of ROS will damage the mitochondria, contributing to suboptimal health, inflammation and chronic health conditions such as diabetes, obesity and thrombosis (blood clots). But melatonin essentially mops up ROS that damage your mitochondria.

So by getting plenty of sun exposure during the day, your mitochondria will be bathed in melatonin, thereby reducing oxidative stress28 29 and offering a host of health benefits. In short, while vitamin D is important, for optimal health and longevity strive to get it from the sun, not by swallowing it.

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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.