USPS whistleblower tells Project Veritas he was ordered to backdate late mail-in ballots in Michigan
RT | November 4, 2020
An anonymous tipster with the Postal Service in Michigan has alleged his supervisor ordered mail carriers to backdate ballots mailed too late to be counted, Project Veritas revealed – and the service is reportedly investigating.
The self-professed mail carrier – whose voice and identity have been disguised by the conservative muckraking operation – claimed he and his colleagues were “issued a directive” to “collect any ballots we find in mailboxes,” collection boxes, and “outgoing mail in general” on Wednesday and “separate them at the end of the day so that they could hand stamp them with the previous day’s date” in an interview with Project Veritas posted on Wednesday night.
The ballots retrieved from general mail circulation were then put in “express bags” to be sent “wherever they needed to go” after being stamped, the tipster alleged. Under Michigan law, mail-in ballots must be postmarked by 8pm on Election Day – this past Tuesday – in order to be counted in the 2020 election.
The tipster claimed he worked for the Barlow branch of the Traverse City post office and that he had also spoken with a carrier at another branch who “watched the postmaster [stamping ballots with the previous day’s date].” Normally, “it would be clerks that would do it up at the distribution center,” he added.
Project Veritas founder James O’Keeffe allegedly called the tipster’s supervisor, Jonathon Clarke – the man who supposedly told employees to separate out the ballots – to inquire about the order, only to be hung up on. However, it’s not clear the other party was actually Clarke.
O’Keeffe later claimed a “Special Agent within the Office of Inspector General for the USPS” had contacted his organization after seeing his interview with the whistleblower and was “assessing whether an investigation is appropriate.” While the carrier told PV he had had whistleblower policies “backfire” on him in the past, he said the directive was “sketchy” and “scream[ed] corruption.”
“Knowing the post office’s leaning politically, it didn’t seem quite right,” he told O’Keeffe.
President Donald Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit against Michigan over alleged electoral malfeasance on Wednesday, charging Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was allowing absentee ballots to be counted without a team of bipartisan observers. The campaign has filed several lawsuits as the vote count has piled up in apparent favor of Democrat Joe Biden. Georgia was ordered to separate late-arriving mail-in votes on Wednesday night after a Republican poll-watcher claimed to have seen 53 late-marked votes mixed in with legitimate ballots.
Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. was among the president’s supporters who quickly picked up the story, retweeting it while asking why the Department of Justice wasn’t looking into the issue. President Trump has been denouncing mail-in voting as fraudulent for months.
Angelina Jolie’s MI6 Interview Shows Just How Connected Hollywood Is To the Deep State
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | November 4, 2020
With election fever still gripping the U.S., talk of rigging or interference in the democratic process is reaching new levels, high enough that even Hollywood legend Angelina Jolie is talking about it. In an extraordinary interview in Time magazine, the star of “Wanted, Maleficent, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” sat down with the former head of the UK’s MI6 spy network, Sir Alex Younger, to ask how worrying the threat from Russia or China really is.
“Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the current environment, the quality of our democratic institutions. It sets out to denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious problem, and we should organize to prevent it,” the British spook told the actress.
Younger also went on to discuss the rise of China, and how the West must act to challenge the supposed threat Beijing poses. “We are going to have two sharply different value systems in operation on the same planet for the foreseeable future. We mustn’t be naïve. We need to retain the capacity to defend ourselves,” he told Jolie.
Never challenging him, Jolie even asked the head of perhaps the world’s most notorious spying agency how we can protect ourselves from fake information.
To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state have always been intimately intertwined. And as much as Jolie presents herself as a leading humanitarian, even being appointed as a Special Envoy for the UN Commission for Refugees, she has spent an inordinate amount of her free time rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s worst human rights abusers.
At World Refugee Day in 2005, Jolie shared a stage with then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice was a key player in the Bush administration, responsible for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, two of the world’s worst humanitarian and refugee crises that continue to plague the planet to this day.
Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed Council on Foreign Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a joint op-ed in The New York Times with John McCain two years ago calling for U.S. intervention in Syria and Myanmar. “Around the world, there is profound concern that America is giving up the mantle of global leadership,” they questionably asserted, decrying America’s “steady retreat over the past decade” that has, “dangerously eroded the rule of law,” and condemned the Trump administration’s inaction in Syria that could have “deterred mass atrocities,” and reduced the refugee crisis.
Salt
Jolie’s collaboration with high-level government officials is not limited to her personal life, however. The 45-year-old Californian has also worked closely, and openly, with CIA officials as part of her movies. A case in point is the 2010 blockbuster Salt, where Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. The movie was released at the same time as the real-life Anna Chapman scandal, where the Russian national was caught spying for her country inside the U.S., and marked the beginning of hardening American relations with Moscow, ending up at the point where some have declared the beginning of a new Cold War.
“Salt was the first big cultural product reflecting this geopolitical change, for most of the 2000s Hollywood had no interest in evil Russians,” Tom Secker, an investigative journalist with SpyCulture.com told MintPress. “If you watch the film the Russian politicians are clearly based on Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.”

Jolie, playing an evil Russian spy in Salt, chokes out an NYPD officer
“We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA,” said Jolie of her experiences preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing but admiration for the organization; “One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women that you can’t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really are,” she added. Salt even hired a former CIA officer to be an on-set technical advisor.
A CIA document Secker shared with MintPress highlights the extent of CIA involvement in Hollywood and their reasons for doing so. “In an effort to ensure an accurate portrayal of the men and women of the CIA,” it reads. “For years the Agency has worked with creative artists from across the entertainment industry. [The CIA Office of Public Affairs] interacts with directors, producers, screenwriters, authors, documentarians, actors and others to help debunk myths and provide authenticity, and of course to protect Agency equities,” it adds. But perhaps the most important reason stated is, “to help prevent inappropriate negative depictions of the Agency,” in mass media.
Propaganda on an enormous scale
The level of state involvement in Salt is far from abnormal. In fact, Alford and Secker’s book “National Security Cinema” details how, since 2005, documents they obtained showed that the Department of Defense alone had closely collaborated in the production of over 1,000 movies or TV shows. This includes many of the largest film franchises, such as “Iron Man,” “Transformers,” “James Bond,” and “Mission: Impossible,” and hit TV shows like “The Biggest Loser,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Master Chef” and “The Price is Right.”
In general, the military or the CIA will offer free services to productions, such as the use of prohibitively expensive military equipment, or technical direction, in exchange for editorial control over scripts. This allows the agencies to make sure the power, prestige, and integrity of these organizations are not challenged. Sometimes entire movies are radically rewritten.
“The Department of Defense actually apologized in their covering letter to the producers of “Hulk” (2003), since the changes they required were so extensive,” Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath told MintPress.
“But really the disturbing thing here is the pattern and the scale… What I suggest is that we focus on the deliberate, major, secretive pressures that rewrite scripts — and we find they’re all on the side of the national security state. Systematically scrubbed from the screen is an unsavoury century of military history including war crimes, illegal arms sales, racism and sexual assault, torture, coups, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction. It amounts to the airbrushing of an entire mediated culture.”
Thus, the large majority of big-budget productions featuring military or intelligence services have been greenlighted by the national security state, who have negotiated for control over the message in order to better propagandize both Americans and the global public. However, serious antiwar content rarely makes it to network TV or Hollywood drawing boards, so wholescale interference is usually unnecessary.
In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote that his organization “has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors.” Many of America’s most familiar faces have visited the organization’s headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise.
In recent years, collaboration has become even more overt. The Department of Defense even tweeted out during the Oscars how proud it is to work so closely with Hollywood to further its own image.
Meanwhile, the latest series of the hit spy show “Jack Ryan,” for instance, has the eponymous CIA hero travel to Venezuela to help overthrow tyrannical dictator Nicolas Reyes (a clear allusion to current president Nicolas Maduro). John Krasinski, who plays Ryan, said that he worked closely with the Agency in order to make the show more realistic. Krasinski also described the CIA as amazingly “apolitical.” “They’re always trying to do the right thing,” he said of them, claiming they “care about the country in a bigger, more idealistic way.”
Last month, a real CIA agent, Matthew John Heath, was arrested outside Venezuela’s largest oil refinery carrying explosives, a grenade launcher, a submachine gun, and stacks of U.S. dollars.
“Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don’t know it. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all to discover that this was extremely common,” said “Batman” star Ben Affleck in 2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps jokingly, as a CIA agent himself.
Propaganda works
The effect of years of propaganda has been to improve the standing of the deep state and make the American public more conducive to supporting the tactics of the CIA and the military. One academic study found that showing torture scenes from the hit spy series “24” to liberal college students made them far more likely to support the use of it against anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
Democrat-aligned voters’ opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA).
Thus, while the entertainment industry might be liberal in that it largely opposes Trump and donates to the Democratic Party, it works closely to support and uphold the national security state, promotes ultra-patriotism and American aggression throughout the world. While Jolie might present herself as a champion of human rights, working with the very institutions responsible for destroying those rights around the globe undermines this assertion.
Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent.
In Unprecedented Move CDC Stops Tracking Influenza for 2020-21 Flu Season

By Brian Shilhavy | Health Impact News | November 4, 2020
I have been covering the fraud that happens every year with how the CDC tracks incidents and deaths due to the annual influenza for almost a decade now.
The numbers used each year to scare the public into getting the flu vaccine are based not on actual data, but estimates of number of people who die from the flu according to the CDC. Basically, anyone dying from “influenza-like” symptoms are all lumped together into supposed flu deaths each year. Autopsies are seldom performed to prove cause of death.
The CDC has admitted publicly in the past that these numbers are just “estimates.” If the real number of those infected with the influenza virus, and resulting deaths, were vastly lower than what the CDC reports based on their “estimates,” the public would have no way of knowing it.
So this has presented quite a dilemma for the CDC for the first couple of weeks of the 2020-21 flu season, which have just passed.
Because “flu-like” symptoms could also be attributed to COVID-19, and they have the now widely known ineffective COVID PCR test to back up these claims, which also kicks in federal funding for hospitals to treat COVID patients.
As one might expect, with the media widely reporting that cases of COVID are now increasing just as flu season starts, reports of flu cases have dropped dramatically during the same time period last year. Across the globe, it has been reported that incidents of influenza have dropped by about 100%. (Source.)

Source
Whoops! How did the CDC allow these numbers to be published?
In an apparent response to media reports about the fast declining flu cases here at the beginning of the 2020-21 flu season, the CDC did what any corrupt agency would do which doesn’t want the public to know the truth: They decided to “suspend data collection for the 2020-21 influenza season.” (Source.)
To my knowledge, this is unprecedented, and has never happened before.
There is a screen shot here in case they take this down due to public awareness (thanks to Patrick Wood).

Correlation Between Flu Shot and Senior Deaths Allegedly due to COVID
It is important to remember that most of the deaths in the U.S. attributed to COVID have occurred among those over 70 years old, with co-morbidity factors.
Another factor to consider is that seniors over 65 in the U.S. get a different flu shot than everyone else each year, one that is much stronger.
Most of the initial deaths attributed to COVID in early 2020 occurred in nursing homes or assisted care facilities for the elderly, where the flu vaccine is routinely given every year as a matter of policy.
Deaths in these facilities are common every year just after administering the flu vaccine, but never reported in the corporate media.
Health Impact News had a nurse whistleblower contact us in 2014 to report that 5 seniors in a Georgia assisted care facility died the same week the flu shot was given. We were threatened with a lawsuit for reporting this. See:
5 Seniors Die after Flu Shot at Assisted Care Center in Georgia
A recently published study out of Mexico confirmed the correlation between senior flu shots and COVID deaths.
A recently published study in PeerJ by Christian Wehenkel, a Professor at Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango in Mexico, has found a positive association between COVID-19 deaths and influenza vaccination rates in elderly people worldwide.
According to the study, “The results showed a positive association between COVID-19 deaths and IVR (influenza vaccination rate) of people ≥65 years-old. There is a significant increase in COVID-19 deaths from eastern to western regions in the world. Further exploration is needed to explain these findings, and additional work on this line of research may lead to prevention of deaths associated with COVID-19.”
To determine this association, data sets from 39 countries with more than half a million people were analyzed. (Read the full article.)
Verified Death Statistics Will Tell the True Story
Once 2020 is complete, it will probably be seen that total deaths that have been recorded will be similar to previous years.
The difference will be the number of deaths attributed to COVID to justify all the government fear and tyrannical actions, as deaths by other causes will drop so that the end result will be about the same.
These kinds of stats are becoming more and more difficult to find, but here is one projected total compared with total deaths from the previous 3 years.

I am not sure of the original source of this graph (it is most likely a compilation of available health statistics), but the graph was published here.
Twitter Doubles Down On Censorship With Renewed Warnings On Trump Tweets

By JonathanTurley | November 4, 2020
We have been discussing the rising private censorship on the Internet demanded by Democratic leaders and meted out by companies like Twitter and Facebook. The original purpose of the Internet as a free and robust space for political and social expression is under attack as politicians demand greater levels of control to combat “disinformation.”
Indeed, Biden adviser Pete Buttigieg on Election Day demanded more penalties for companies not stopping “inciting material,” a subjective term left intentionally undefined. This drumbeat for censorship was amplified on Election Day when Twitter again hit tweets from President Donald Trump with warnings of disinformation. The tweets were pure political speech and Twitter again showed that it is now fully committed to biased regulation of speech between users of its service.
I have criticized President Trump’s rhetoric in the election about “stealing” the election. However, that is hyperbolic political speech. Biden supporters, including leaders like House Whip James Clyburn, have been saying that Trump was stealing the election through voter suppression. They have not been hit with Twitter warnings. Yet, Trump was immediately hit when he sent a Twitter post that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”
I have previously objected to such regulation of speech. What is most disturbing is how liberals have embraced censorship and even declared that “China was right” on Internet controls. Many Democrats have fallen back on the false narrative that the First Amendment does not regulated private companies so this is not an attack on free speech. Free speech is a human right that is not solely based or exclusively defined by the First Amendment. Censorship by Internet companies is a “Little Brother” threat long discussed by free speech advocates. Some may willingly embrace corporate speech controls but it is still a denial of free speech.
This is why I recently described myself as an Internet Originalist:
The alternative is “internet originalism” — no censorship. If social media companies returned to their original roles, there would be no slippery slope of political bias or opportunism; they would assume the same status as telephone companies. We do not need companies to protect us from harmful or “misleading” thoughts. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not approved speech.
If Pelosi demanded that Verizon or Sprint interrupt calls to stop people saying false or misleading things, the public would be outraged. Twitter serves the same communicative function between consenting parties; it simply allows thousands of people to participate in such digital exchanges. Those people do not sign up to exchange thoughts only to have Dorsey or some other internet overlord monitor their conversations and “protect” them from errant or harmful thoughts.
The actions by Twitter and Facebook on Election Day were reprehensible and wrong. What is so disturbing is that so many Democrats have become enablers of such corporate speech controls by the giant tech companies.
Voters in New Jersey and Arizona Say ‘Yes’ to Legalising Recreational Marijuana
Sputnik – 04.11.2020
While Americans went to the polling stations to cast a vote and decide if the near future of the United States will be “red” or “blue”, New Jersians turned “green” on Election Day.
Voters in New Jersey have approved a ballot measure to legalise the use of marijuana for recreational purposes.
According to preliminary data, more than 60 percent of New Jersians who voted said “yes” to the measure.
Democratic Governor Phil Murphy took to Twitter on Tuesday night to congratulate his fellow residents on the happy news, calling it a “huge step for racial and social justice” and for the state’s economy. Murphy had earlier failed to gain enough votes in the state legislature to legalise recreational marijuana use, and put the issue to a statewide referendum vote. The legalisation of recreational or medical use of marijuana, or both, were on the ballot on Tuesday in Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota.
More than 70 percent of Democrats in the state reportedly spoke in support of the measure.
New Jersey has become the twelfth US state to legalise recreational marijuana; at the federal level, however, it remains illegal. Prior to New Jersey, Illinois was the latest state to allow the recreational use of cannabis. Arizona also voted to legalise recreational marijuana on 3 November.
The use of cannabis for medical purposes is legal in 33 states and the District of Columbia. In comparison, US’ neighbour Canada legalised cannabis throughout the country in 2018.
US election update
OffGuardian | November 4, 2020
Trump held leads in five undeclared states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina – when all five stopped (or dramatically slowed) counting votes. Since then, a surge of postal votes wiped out Trump’s lead in Wisconsin, giving Biden the state by as few as 6,000 votes.
Pennsylvania’s governor has stated there are “over a million” postal votes yet to be counted.
Trump has declared that he should have won the election by now, and has hinted at a Supreme Court challenge. It certainly looks like we will see a “red mirage” – an appearance of a Trump win and then sudden Biden recovery, entirely due to postal ballots. Needless to say, rather suspicious.
In this context it’s a good time to revisit the “Transition Integrity Project”, a series of exercises carried out over the summer of 2020 backed by the Protect Democracy foundation. Their alleged aim was to “ensure a peaceful transfer of power”, but it doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines here.
Especially when you see the list of names involved – all current/former DNC employees and/or vociferous Trump opponents: Donna Brazille, John Podesta, Max Boot and Bill Kristol to name a few.
In this document, released August this year, they lay out their conclusions. Including (bold in the original):
The concept of “election night,” is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous. We face a period of contestation [sic] stretching from the first day a ballot is cast in mid-September until January 20. The winner may not, and we assess likely will not, be known on “election night” as officials count mail-in ballots.
Remarkably prescient of them.
Protests of more than two people will be ILLEGAL under updated rules for UK national lockdown
RT | November 3, 2020
Protests are no longer exempt under the UK-wide coronavirus lockdown that begins Thursday, and police plan to enforce that rule, unlike during the previous lockdown, according to UK media.
Demonstrations consisting of more than two people will be made expressly illegal under the second national lockdown, which is expected to take effect Thursday. Police allowed large protests, in particular for the Black Lives Matter movement, during the first lockdown even as individual British families were barred from getting together – a situation many found unfair.
A Home Office spokeswoman avoided ruling protests out completely, telling Yahoo News UK that “the right to peaceful protest is one of the cornerstones of our democracy,” but added that “any gathering risks spreading the disease, leading to more deaths, so it is vital we all play our part in controlling the virus.”
Police have reportedly received instruction from Home Secretary Priti Patel to break up any protest involving more than two people from Thursday on. However, a government source told The Times that protests would not explicitly be prohibited in the lockdown legislation which is scheduled to be voted on Wednesday and take effect the following day. Instead, the loophole that allowed protests while families were prevented from gathering will be closed.
Nevertheless, some officers fear that people will be more inclined to take to the streets because of the restrictions, as one police source told The Times, adding that “this is going to cause a lot of trouble.”
“People are going to be extremely angry and there are concerns they’ll protest the fact they can’t protest.”
News of a second lockdown has already triggered protests in the suburbs of London, where hundreds of people took to the streets over the weekend to denounce the proposed national shutdown. The demonstration was organized by the group StandUpX, which warns that the pandemic is being weaponized to permanently deprive UK residents of their freedoms. PM Boris Johnson has insisted this second national lockdown will end in December, though that is likely cold comfort to those who remember the original “two weeks to flatten the curve” that instead stretched on for months.
New study shows low-carb diets would save BILLIONS currently wasted on drugs. But will Big Pharma allow it?
By Dr Malcomb Kendrick | November 3, 2020
If you want to avoid dying of COVID19, one of the most important things you can do, if you are overweight, is to shed the pounds
‘…. in the first meta-analysis of its kind, published on 26 August in Obesity Reviews, an international team of researchers pooled data from scores of peer-reviewed papers capturing 399,000 patients. They found that people with obesity who contracted SARS-CoV-2 were 113% more likely than people of healthy weight to land in the hospital, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 48% more likely to die.’ 1
Why? Well, the ‘why’ centres around the damaging effect of raised blood glucose on endothelial cells and… it gets complicated.
For now, though, the most important thing is not to understand the complex metabolic and physiological pathways involved, it is simply to help people to lose weight, and this is where Dr David Unwin comes in.
For years now he has believed, as I do, that the main driver of weight gain, leading on to type 2 (T2) diabetes, is a high carbohydrate diet.
This, of course, is the exact opposite of what we have been told for decades by the ‘experts’ who demonise fat and promote carbohydrates. We have the ‘eat-well’ plate, and the ‘food pyramid’, and hundreds of thousands of dieticians around the world, all promoting carbohydrates as the ‘healthy’ option.
Dutifully following this advice, the entire population of the western world has become fatter, and fatter… and fatter. By the way, this is not a coincidence; it is cause and effect.
Getting back to Dr Unwin, years ago he despaired of ever getting any of his patients to lose weight. It was so disheartening that he furtively studied his pension plan, and dreamed of retirement, so fed up was he becoming. Then one day a patient came in who had lost a lot of weight and kept it off.
At first this woman was reluctant to say how she had done it, as she feared the inevitable criticism. In the end, she told Dr Unwin that she had lost weight, and kept it off, by eating a low carbohydrate diet. In Dr Unwin’s own words:
‘A few years ago, I was interested to find out how a patient had improved her diabetic control. She confessed she had ignored my advice and learnt a much better way to look after herself, from the internet. I suppressed my wounded pride and looked at the Low Carb Forum on Diabetes.co.uk There were thousands of type two diabetics on there ignoring their doctors – and getting great results (now that is just not allowed).’ 2
Yes, Dr Unwin did not criticize, instead he was intrigued. Could this possibly be true? It went against everything he had been told about healthy eating, and weight loss, and T2 diabetes. Fat has twice the calories, per gram, as carbohydrates and suchlike. Eating fat, he believed, makes you fat, and then you develop diabetes, and heart disease.
Dr Unwin did more research, then he made the decision to work with patients, mainly those with diabetes, to see if a low carbohydrate diet could be beneficial. Lo and behold, it was … very beneficial. It was like a miracle cure.
In 2014 he published a paper on his results on a small number of patients.
‘Low carbohydrate diet to achieve weight loss and improve HbA1c in type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes: experience from one general practice.’
‘It was observed that a low carbohydrate diet achieved substantial weight loss in all patients and brought about normalisation of blood glucose control in 16 out of 18 patients. At the same time, plasma lipid profiles improved, and BP fell allowing discontinuation of antihypertensive therapy in some individuals…
Conclusions Based on our work so far, we can understand the reasons for the internet enthusiasm for a low carbohydrate diet; the majority of patients lose weight rapidly and fairly easily; predictably the HbA1c levels are not far behind. Cholesterol levels, liver enzymes and BP levels all improved. This approach is simple to implement and much appreciated by people with diabetes.’ 3
Now, he has published results of a much larger study, on nearly two hundred patients over a six-year period. It is called. ‘Insights from a general practice service evaluation supporting a lower carbohydrate diet in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and prediabetes’ Published in BMJ nutrition 4.
Here are the main findings, which I nicked directly from the press release:
- 46% drug-free T2 diabetes remission
- Significant improvements in weight, blood pressure and lipid profiles
- 93% remission of prediabetes
- £50,885 annual saving on the Norwood GP practice NHS diabetes drug budget
- If every GP practice in England spent the same on drugs for diabetes per patient as Norwood the NHS could save £277 million!
- Older patients can do as well as younger ones with a low carb approach.
- The participants who started with the worst blood sugars saw the greatest improvements in diabetic control
- Four individuals came off insulin altogether
- Total weight loss for the 199 participants was 1.6 metric tons!
This paper will be attacked, of course. There are massive financial interests involved here. As stated, if every GP practice in the UK used the low carb approach, the NHS could save £277 million (~$350m) in drug costs. Scaled up to the US, with much higher drugs costs, one could be looking at around $2Bn/year. Around the world, who knows, but vast sums of money.
So, you can imagine the joy that this paper will be met with in pharmaceutical company boardrooms around the world. The words ‘lead’ and ‘balloon’, spring to mind. Equally the massive low-fat, high carb food manufacturers will be throwing their hands up in horror – ‘my bonus, my bonus… nooooo.’ You can take your low carb yoghurts and….
As for the rest of us. I can assure you that Dr David Unwin has only ever been interested in one thing. Working out how to help people lose weight and control their diabetes. He has achieved this.
Will his research now be taken up by the authorities around the world? Will we move away from promoting a high carbohydrate diet? You have to be joking. There is far too much money to be lost by companies who exert tight control over the world of medical research, and whose lobbyists swarm around the politicians in rich countries.
Which is a damn shame, because more than ever in this endless COVID19 pandemic, obesity represents a health crisis. This paper, and the tireless work by Dr David Unwin, clearly tells us what we need to do, now, urgently. His approach won’t work instantly, and it won’t work for everyone – nothing ever does. However, it represents hope. It could save hundreds and thousands of lives. Better than any vaccine?
Thank you, once again, Dr Unwin. A man who I think of as a friend. Your research should be shouted from the rooftops. I can only do my bit.
1: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/why-covid-19-more-deadly-people-obesity-even-if-theyre-young
4: https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/02/bmjnph-2020-000072

