On Tuesday, 1st March, Dr Armin Schwarzbach, Director of Armin Labs in Germany, gave a fascinating lecture to the Academy of Nutritional Medicine (AONM) about the subject of Covid and viral co-infections. In a nutshell, Dr. Schwarzbach summarised the main infections that have been seen to cause damage in Covid and Long Covid situations. It’s not just Covid!

What is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and why are we seeing so much of it in children as well as adults? Fatty liver occurs when the cells in your liver are replaced with fat cells. This means there is fat deposited within your liver. This means your liver can’t work as well as it should because it doesn’t have all the liver cells doing the jobs they should. Fatty liver is the number one cause of liver transplants. We all know that alcoholics end up with fatty liver. However, there are thousands of people who don’t drink alcohol who also end up fatty liver and this we call non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). And most of them don’t even know they have it until disaster strikes in the form of diabetes or a heart attack.

Chronic dental infections are often a missing part of the illness puzzle that keeps people chronically sick. One of the most common dental infections is the root canal filling. This occurs when a tooth dies, and your dentist fills it with preservatives, like the ancient Egyptians preserved dead bodies by mummification. It is essentially a dead organ. In fact, it is the only dead organ that the medical profession encourages you to keep in your body. If you had a gangrenous toe or infected appendix, you would be whisked into the operating theatre to remove the diseased organ to save your life. What effect does keeping a dead tooth in your mouth have on the rest of your health?

Early on in my clinical practice, I realised I would not be able to help the majority of people get well unless I addressed their chronic infections. One infection stands head and shoulders above the rest as regards numbers of people who test positive for it - Coxsackievirus. I have kept statistics on the infections I have seen in my clinic over the years and have seen a whopping 97% of patients with active Coxsackie infection!

The challenges that we have all faced on so many fronts in the last two years are testimony to the fact that the better the condition we are in, the better we are able to cope with what life throws at us. This includes both spiritual and physical health.

Happy New Year and best wishes for your health in 2022! At the beginning of the year, people are most likely to consider making dietary adjustments, if only to get over the excesses of Christmas. But what is the right diet for you? What should you really be eating? The amount of dietary advice out there is conflicting, confusing and sometimes downright harmful to health. Labels can be meaningless. For example, a vegetarian diet to some people may mean pizza and doughnuts; to others, plant-based foods, beans and lentils.

Your best defence against infections is something that is frequently forgotten - your immune system. That is why it is worth looking after. People tend to know more about their cars and houses than their immune system and certainly put more effort into looking after the former than the latter.

Quite a few people coming to see me tell me they are taking iron supplements for fatigue. Have you been diagnosed with iron-deficiency anaemia or done any iron level tests? I ask. No, they reply, I just thought it would help me feel better. Taking iron supplements is a risky strategy because iron metabolism is more complex than you may think. You may do some serious damage if you don’t need them.

An important tenet of Functional Medicine is that if you don’t address the root causes of a disease, it will keep coming back, no matter what treatments are given. Using medical drugs to suppress chronic symptoms is like putting sticky plaster over the warning light in a car. It postpones the day when the machine stops but does nothing to address the root cause.

With the exception of butter, no food has been demonised as much as red meat in recent years, particularly beef. However, according to food activists, beef causes cancer, osteoporosis, mad cow disease, heart disease, impotence and much more. I see people who proudly tell me they have given up eating red meat, however they aren’t feeling that well and their lab results often tell me they are anaemic and running on low hormones. So, what’s the beef about beef?

Patients often ask me about things they find in the internet. Part of my practitioner hat is to help people educate and empower themselves to take control of their own health, so I always take this seriously. Sometimes people alight on something useful and sensible. But there can be a real downside to surfing the net that can seriously impair a person’s progress in navigating their way towards better health.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia and is the leading cause of death in England and Wales. Already, 850,000 people are estimated to be living with dementia in the UK. Over half the UK public know someone who has been diagnosed with some form of dementia. Statistically, a woman in the Western world has a greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease than breast cancer. The number of people with dementia in the UK is expected to rise rapidly in the UK over the next several decades, so things are not looking so good. Is there anything that we can do about it?

Everything in your body affects your immune system and the foods you put into it are no exception. Here are a few ways foods drive immune reactions…

We get so focused on the underlying biology of healing that we often forget the most important part of the healing process - the person themselves and their mindset. The mind is either in the right place to facilitate healing - or it isn’t. And when it isn’t, this acts as a major brake on recovery.

As many of you know, specific immune support supplements are key tools for improving chronic infection and inflammation conditions. The immune-specific supplements I recommend are made by Pure Encapsulations and specially formulated by Dr. Sam Yanuck, Assistant Professor of Functional Immunology and Integrative Medicine at the University of North Carolina.

It is natural to want to help family and friends when they are struggling with their health and current health interventions don’t seem to be working. However, it is equally frustrating when your well-meaning (and often well-researched) advice seems to fall on deaf ears and the person in question settles into a slow steady decline. Here are a few observations gleaned over the years in clinical practice on how to talk to friends and family about their health.

Autism is on the rise. Approximately 6% of British schoolchildren are on the autistic spectrum. One in 20 children in Northern Ireland has a diagnosis of autism, in New Jersey in the US, this is one in 14 children. At the same time, mortality rates from neurological diseases has now overtaken mortality from other diseases. Without going into the triggers for autism, there are a few tools below for families coping with autism.

Unlike your other organs, your immune system is everywhere in your body and is designed to protect you from illness. If your immune system is strong and flexible and your nutrient status is good, it puts you in a strong position to combat passing infections.

What you eat and drink is the single most important factor influencing your physical (and sometimes mental) health. The standard western diet, which is choc full of inflammatory wheat, dairy, refined sugars and chemicals, is also the single most important thing that can wreck your health.

Fatty liver disease is probably the fastest rising medical condition in the western world. I am certainly seeing lot more of it. Its origins are linked to western processed diets, the increased number of environmental toxins and ubiquitous wi-fi.