The Outside View of Wellness

Our colleague, neuroradiologist Dr. Cyrus Raji, has just published a paper on the neurological effects of COVID-19, such as stroke and seizures. Occurrence after occurrence serves to remind us of the parallels between COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s disease, and serves to remind us that many of the risk factors for both diseases are part of one common, recurring theme: we as a species seek to live in a fashion that is at odds with that dictated by our evolutionary design — and it’s killing us. The latest example is from COVID-19 studies, which showed that indoor gatherings are a key risk for spread — it’s not so much the surface contact, it’s the aerosols, but when you are indoors, simply keeping a six-foot distance is not good enough, because spread may be via ducts or air conditioning or general air movement, since there is little room for dissipation, unlike in the great outdoors.

We are repeatedly seeing the same phenomenon—albeit over decades instead of days—in Alzheimer’s: indoors is where the mycotoxins are, where the mold is, where the inactivity is, and thus where the Alzheimer’s is. One of the reasons for the COVID-19 pandemic is that we humans were not designed to spend much time in large gatherings indoors — this is where tuberculosis spreads, where Legionnaire’s disease spreads, where influenza spreads, and where coronavirus spreads. It’s also where we are exposed to many dementogens such as trichothecenes, ochratoxin, and gliotoxin. In fact, we have built our homes of the very materials that molds feed on — we are literally living in homes of mold food.

COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s will be curtailed by more outdoor time and less indoor time — more virus-free and mycotoxin-free air time, more sunshine vitamin D, more movement and blood flow, better metabolic health, more adaptive immunity, less severe innate immune system-associated cytokine storms, and overall, greater adherence to ancestral health.