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Finding safe and truly effective weight loss drugs has long been the Holy Grail of Big Pharma. Along with cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other scourges, a panacea for obesity ranks high among its priorities. With over half of Americans exceeding optimal weight, and amid a worldwide trend of surging pounds, a breakthrough would be a big deal.

Previous attempts have foundered. Drugs were minimally effective, or if they worked, they did so at the cost of unacceptable GI symptoms, cardiovascular danger, or speedy jitters.

The humble Gila monster spawned a revolution. Able to fast for long periods of time in harsh desert conditions, its metabolism yielded to researchers the secret sauce that resulted in GLP-1 agonists like the semaglutides, drugs that reverse insulin resistance, slow gastric emptying resulting in a feeling of fullness, and trigger satiety in the brain.

Originally intended only for diabetics, the new class of drugs had a fortuitous side effect: Patients reliably lost weight, on the order of 15% of their bulk, within a year or so on average. Soon, their potential as weight loss drugs was realized.

I’m seeing it in my practice. The other day, one of my regular patients, who lives in Europe, came in for her annual. I was taken aback by her appearance. For years she had struggled to shed an extra 15 or 20 pounds. I had counseled acceptance, since she was otherwise healthy. But now she was transformed. I said: “You look amazing! Don’t tell me—you took . . .” “Yes,” she cut me off, “Ozempic.”

All told, she dropped 35 pounds in just under 18 months. She related how she had felt sick and exhausted when she started the weekly shots; she was nauseous all the time and alternated between diarrhea and constipation. But so determined was she to lose weight that she persevered. Fortunately, the symptoms mostly abated after a few months.

I asked her how she got a hold of it, given that it’s approved only for diabetics, people with a really high BMI, or those whose medical conditions urgently call for weight loss. Merely shaving off a few undesirable pounds for aesthetic reasons is still considered an “off-label” indication for Ozempic. Besides, there are worldwide shortages caused by intense demand. When not covered by insurance, these drugs retail for around $1400 per month.

She said she has a connection in Europe, where Ozempic costs only $300-400 per month. She’s well off, so the prospect of staying on it for years doesn’t daunt her.

But she illustrates a fundamental problem with these drugs: with such dramatic weight loss, you’re bound to use significant lean body mass. And muscle reserve is an important hedge against sarcopenia, the process by which the aging physique inexorably marches toward frailty.

Read the full article.

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You work hard to serve your customers, including over half a million of our members. ANH-USA defends the right of Americans to choose natural healthcare options, including dietary supplements, homeopathic and compounded medicines, and the right to free speech about the benefits of natural products. Let’s explore a synergistic partnership that amplifies natural health.

What We Believe

The Alliance for Natural Health USA (ANH-USA) is the largest organization in the US and abroad working to protect your right to utilize safe, effective, and inexpensive healing therapies based on high-tech testing, nutrition, dietary supplements, and lifestyle changes. We believe a system that is single-mindedly focused on “treating” sick people with expensive drugs, rather than maintaining healthy people, is neither practical nor economically sustainable. We work to promote whole system health for people and planet as a means of regenerating the health of both. 

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This week, we’re proud to announce that multi-disciplinary scientist Dr. Verkerk has been appointed Executive Director of ANH-USA. Dr. Verkerk, who founded ANH International in 2002 in the United Kingdom, and has acted as its executive and scientific director ever since, brings decades of experience and passion as a pioneer of the natural health movement, ultimately aimed at changing the current healthcare paradigm to embrace the principles of regenerative health.

He succeeds Gretchen DuBeau, Esq, who, after overseeing remarkable growth and expanded reach at ANH-USA for 15 years, has decided to transition to the Board of Directors, where the organization can continue to benefit from her unique and wide-ranging experience.

ANH-USA would not be the organization that it is without Gretchen’s tireless leadership. The ANH teams on both sides of the Atlantic are all so grateful for her impact on the important work of protecting natural health for all Americans. ANH-USA is strongly positioned for continued success because of what she has built and accomplished.

In accepting the new position, while retaining his existing position heading up ANH International, Dr. Verkerk said, “I’m thrilled to take the reins at this critical time when governments and big corporations are attempting to negatively influence public perceptions of natural health while, with no adequate justification, tightening the noose on its regulation.”

“Perversely,” added Dr. Verkerk, “this is happening at the very time when all the evidence says natural health should be put front and center of healthcare. This is based on its enviable track record of effectiveness and safety, coupled with its public popularity for self-care which is crucial if we’re to see the chronic disease burden reduced.”

Apart from the well-known attacks on dietary supplements and compounded hormones, the gamut of threats to natural health continues to grow. These include the risks associated with pharmaceutical over-dependence, mandatory vaccination programs, unpredictable risks associated with mRNA vaccine and drug platforms, the erosion of long-standing principles of medical ethics, the suppression of free speech on science, the lack of safety studies on technologies associated with the Internet of Things (IoT), and the growing toxicity burden from new-to-nature chemicals, from glyphosate to PFAS.

The ANH-USA Board’s decision to appoint Dr. Verkerk as its new leader took into account Dr. Verkerk’s extensive experience dealing with some of the most draconian threats originating within the European Union. These, if not extinguished, are increasingly likely to land on US shores given the ever more authoritarian, globalized and coordinated function of national and international agencies and institutions.  Such concerns have also motivated the decision to closely integrate the operation and function of ANH-USA and its international counterpart.

In reflecting on her time as ANH-USA’s Executive Director, Gretchen said, “Looking back over the last fifteen years, I’m so proud of all that ANH-USA and the natural health community were able to achieve. There have been many victories: last year alone we stopped Durbin’s supplement attack, saved compounded glutathione, and stopped anti-supplement bills on the state level, to name just a few.”

Ms. DuBeau also stressed the tectonic shifts that have occurred during her tenure. “The landscape has completely changed,” she said. “I have seen a significant shift in the level of consciousness and awareness around natural health and health freedom. Most people didn’t even know what genetically modified organisms were when I started at ANH-USA back in 2008. This movement is building momentum and growing, and our wins are multiplying.”

“It brings me great joy to have been a part of the grassroots movement fighting for our freedom to live freely and naturally, locked arm in arm with our fellow freedom fighters over the past 15 years,” she continued, “and I’m honored now to pass the baton to Rob Verkerk for the next, exciting era of the organization’s growth and development.”

Under Dr. Verkerk’s leadership and in response to the scale of the challenges ahead, ANH-USA will be diversifying its strategic approach in 2023 and 2024, expanding the scope of its lobbying work in Congress, and is planning to initiate or support targeted legal actions.

ANH-USA is excited to enter this new chapter with Dr. Verkerk at the helm. The challenges before us are many, but we greatly look forward to working alongside you, our grassroots activists.

History tells us freedom isn’t something we should take for granted. Typically, it must be won. With that in mind, we so look forward to working alongside you to help win back a world where we can choose to stay healthy, naturally, free from suppression, coercion, and the diktats of conflicted regulatory authorities.  

If you have friends, family or others in your network who share our interests in natural health, we ask that you share this article with them and ask them to sign up to our free newsletter with the hope they will join our grassroots army that was able to impact 248 laws in 2022 alone.

Look out in the coming weeks for additional information on the RESTRICT Act, the latest threat to free speech and open expression. 

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Lately, there’s been a buzz over hydrogen in the media. Hydrogen-powered vehicles appear to be the next big thing after electric vehicles (EVs) inevitably run their course. Unlike EVs, they won’t require charging, nor will they depend on the energy-intensive and environmentally destructive mining of rare earths like lithium and cobalt. Upon combustion with oxygen in the air, they simply discharge clean water vapor—a miraculous energy source!

The only problems to surmount: Making hydrogen is very energy-intensive, and that energy has to be produced somewhere—windmills, solar panels, and geothermal won’t soon supplant fossil fuels as a source of electrification. And then there are memories of the Hindenburg, a hydrogen-filled airship that famously blew up. You don’t want that happening after a minor fender-bender during your daily commute on the 405!

So now there’s talk about hydrogen water. My initial impression was: “Scam Alert! This is gimmicky, another way to market expensive water—I’m already paying enough for the health aura of pricey mineral waters from branded spas.”

But I’ve come to realize there actually may be something to the concept of imbibing hydrogen, and the latest article on that subject—from no less a source than the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition—hit me with the impact of a Lakehurst, New Jersey zeppelin explosion.

Read the full article.

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Suppression of unwelcome or unwanted views is nothing new, but there are several indications that the censorship that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic took on a new character. A new study aims to shed light on the features of this censorship, and it hits on many of the themes we’ve been reporting on for some time. Efforts to stifle free speech are culminating in state-level bills that threaten doctors’ medical licenses if they spread medical “misinformation” relating to the pandemic. We cannot allow these efforts to stifle the speech of doctors to succeed.

An ”orthodox” position on key issues of the pandemic has coalesced. Broadly speaking, this position is in favor of mask mandates and lockdowns, against the use of re-purposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for early treatment of mild- to moderate COVID, supports COVID vaccines as unequivocally safe and effective, and supports COVID vaccine mandates and vaccine passports as ethical measures to protect public health. Anyone calling any of these positions into question immediately becomes a target for censorship and suppression carried out by government, tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and special interests like pharmaceutical companies.

Sometimes this censorship was a coordinated effort. For example, on March 7, 2022, the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on tech companies to report “health misinformation” to the federal government and to ramp up efforts to remove it. Emails released from legal proceedings have documented the ways in which government officials coordinated with Big Tech to censor doctors, scientists, and journalists.

The newly published study mentioned above documents the tactics used by the censors that, for many of us, have become all too familiar. Those who take a dissenting view from the orthodox positions are excluded, for example, from contributing to or making appearances on media outlets where they were previously welcome guests—they stop getting interviewed or getting opinion pieces accepted.

Derogatory labeling is another tactic: those who don’t toe the orthodox line are labeled ”anti-vaxxers,” “COVID deniers,” or  conspiracy theorists. Third party sources claiming to be neutral or non-partisan (like the “fact checkers”) are used by the media to further discredit the heterodox positions taken by some scientists and doctors.

The study’s authors note key differences in this current wave of censorship that set it apart from previous examples:

• Intensiveness and extensiveness. Regarding COVID, not only did the government, media, and Big Tech engage in censorship; medical and research institutions and scientific journals also took an active role in suppressing and discouraging alternative views. Journals rejected peer-reviewed scientific papers; institutions threatened not to renew contracts if dissenters mentioned their affiliation with that institution; if you took the wrong position on COVID issues, you could be dismissed or disqualified from prestigious positions on health or scientific committees, without due process or transparency; and doctors’ medical licenses were threatened if they took the wrong view on COVID-related topics.
• Going outside the fringe. A unique and troubling aspect of the censorship wave we are experiencing is that highly respected and credentialed scientists and researchers have become targets for censorship. These are leaders in their respective fields with hundreds of publications, heads of academic and medical departments, and/or editors of medical journals. For example, the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized government lockdown policies, was created by three epidemiologists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford universities and signed by many notable scientists,  including the Nobel Prize laureate Michael Levitt; Google altered its search algorithm to reduce exposure to the Declaration. These aren’t cooks on the fringe whose work and views are being suppressed, de-platformed, and defamed. The message is, no one is safe from the censorship brigade.

The wave of censorship is likely to continue. California just passed a law that makes it easier for the state medical board to target doctors who disseminate “misinformation” related to COVID; other states have introduced similar legislation. The CEO of the Federation of State Medical Boards said that “the largest threat next to the spread of the virus itself is the spread of disinformation and misinformation.” The FSMB recommends that state boards should “consider whether there are options that do not involve disciplinary action that could help a licensee understand the ethical basis of their duty to convey accurate information to patients and the public.” This is eerily reminiscent of authoritarian “re-education” camps for doctors. A group called No License for Disinformation has put up a webpage containing “everything you need to report a doctor for COVID-19 related disinformation.”

The free-speech stifling effects of this censorship would be bad enough, but it also costs lives. Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the victims of this censorship, was a frontline doctor who has spoken out forcefully and convincingly about the failure of public health officials during the pandemic that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. While the government was telling us to isolate and wash our hands, he was figuring out how to treat patients with combinations of re-purposed drugs; Studies that utilized this approach showed an 85 percent reduction in mortality. How many lives could have been saved if the media, government, and Big Tech were more concerned with the science and less concerned with censorship and suppression?

Scientific censorship bestows power to Big Pharma and the one-size-fits-all paradigm.  Natural medicine is predicated on the idea that each patient has individual needs based on unique biology and genetics. If doctors aren’t allowed to discuss alternatives to the mainstream medical approach, not only are the legal requirements of informed consent not being satisfied, but integrative doctors’ ability to treat individual patients will suffer.

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