9 thoughts on “Q & A”

  1. Dayna

    Awww, Thank you for answering my question!!!! I do feel mollified hearing John’s response. I should have specified: My neighbor uses chemicals on his lawn — weedkillers I assume, so that’s where the runoff would be coming from. If he is using RoundUp, for example, I wouldn’t want that in my garden. Do I need to be concerned?

    I didn’t think it was possible to love you guys more— but I do!!

    Thank you for soothing my nerves. XOXOOXO

    Dayna

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  2. lynn

    thank you both for addressing the Mask question.. I heard John laugh when you said I was struggling with it… – that totally made my day… I know its a hard thing to address with all the confusion and government issues… but my goodness do I hate wearing that thing – immunity is the key… thank you both for all you do – you are loved by many!!!

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    • Dayna

      I have to admit: I am angry about the recommendation to mask healthy individuals. There is no great evidence for masking asymptomatic people. I found a single case study in NEJM, and the covid cases were mild, resolving in a day or two. Why – in the process of containing a disease with a high survival rate – are we making healthy people sick? My sister gets a headache within 30 minutes of wearing a mask. Some statistics say 1 out of 3 people get these headaches, slightly more females than men. Others get rashes around the mouth, sore throats, rhinitis, just a “gross” feeling, etc.. When I was deployed to the proactive swabbing clinic, we were told to conserve PPE and wear disposable masks UNTIL VISIBLY SOILED. No one was using these masks correctly, and they were constantly being touched, thrown into purses and worn the next day.. And this at a major medical center!!! Imagine the situation for the lay public. How does that prevent sickness? I wish there were more verbal opponents to universal mask wearing — it’s time to shift our healthcare philosophy and values to promoting health rather than allowing our perspective to painfully narrow every time a threat appears.

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  3. Marianne

    John and Mark, you often cite data showing a high incidence of diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegenerative disease in the US, and you look to populations where that is not the case (e.g., Blue Zone populations, Hazda) for guidance about best lifestyle practices. Many or most of the practices de jour you advocate are not backed by double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials that establish causation.

    The Johns Hopkins website lists for 163 countries the COVID deaths per 100,000 people (this represents a country’s general population with both confirmed cases and healthy people). https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality . The US has the 9th highest COVID death rate! And of course death is not the only bad outcome of COVID — emerging data suggest that COVID has a long tail that continues to wreak havoc on the organs and systems of many survivors after “recovery.”

    Developed countries on this list with death rates only 1/10 that of the US include Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. Other countries with less than a quarter the death rate of the US include Germany, Denmark, Austria, Finland, and Norway, among many others.

    Query what we can we learn from evaluating the practices in these other countries that have fared so much better than the US — and doing that ASAP, knowing that ideas may change over time as more data are accumulated. (Witness that I first came across John in a program he taught with Colin Campbell, whose work has since been thoroughly discredited).

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  5. Marianne

    “With more than 150,000 cumulative COVID-19 deaths, the US leads the world. The US has reported more than 3 times as many deaths as every country except Brazil. The US represents 22.5% of the global COVID-19 deaths—and 26% of the global cases—despite accounting for only 4.3% of the global population. The US is #9 globally in terms of per capita cumulative deaths—but will likely surpass France as #8 in the coming days.”
    Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, 7/31/20

    More and more data are suggesting that COVID negatively impacts the health of some survivors over the long-term. See the very informative UCSF article at https://www.ucsf.edu/magazine/covid-body?fbclid=IwAR0WeXX0v-dSTzTsGgv6HkIL8p_XfRZ1sGTG-yY1xIbgCBE7C0r7AWRuX7Y.

    Mark, your professional focus is Population Health. Your integrative approach and depth and breadth of knowledge and experience distinguish you and give you a unique ability to translate the science to lifestyle applications. I’d be interested to know what you believe should be done to improve the truly dismal situation in the US, which presents one of the biggest (if not the biggest) threats to population health in our lifetimes.

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  6. Marianne

    Kansas counties with mask mandate show steep COVID-19 drop
    https://fox4kc.com/news/kansas-counties-with-mask-mandate-show-steep-covid-19-drop/, 8/5/20

    BELLE PLAINE, Kan. — Kansas counties that have mask mandates in place have seen a rapid drop in cases, while counties that only recommend their use have seen no decrease in cases, the state’s top health official said Wednesday.“Do masks work? Here in this natural experiment called Kansas where we have essentially — not due to any great design, but it has worked out that way — some counties have been the control group with a no mask mandate and some have been the experimental group with masks,” Norman said. “The experimental group is winning the battle. All improvements in case development comes from those counties wearing masks.” . . . .

    It is important to understand, he noted, that the 15 counties with mask mandates represent two-thirds of the state’s population and include the more urban cities with greater population densities. People in those counties rely more on mass transit there and tend to have more racial and ethnic minority populations that are more likely to be infected by COVID-19.

    The declining coronavirus cases per capita in those more urban counties suggest the improvement in the trend lines could be even steeper in rural counties if they had mask mandates in place, he said.
    ______
    160,000 deaths from COVID so far in the U.S. and rising fast — much worse on a per capita population basis than all or most other developed countries. What are we waiting for U.S.A? This is not going to just disappear on its own. Vaccines have a whole host of issues and risks, as the U.S. experience in the 1970s clearly showed.

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