The battle against medical misinformation is gathering pace. The World Health Organization calls it an infodemic that needs to be fought as aggressively as a pandemic, while the head of the European Commission, Ursula van der Leyen, declared misinformation and disinformation as global threats more serious than war and climate change.  

ANH founder, executive and scientific director, Rob Verkerk joined New York-based Dr Ron Hoffman MD CNS on his Intelligent Medicine podcast this week to discuss the #FreeSpeech4Health campaign.

Dr Hoffman is recognised as one of America’s foremost complementary and integrative medicine practitioners. He was founder and Medical Director of the Hoffman Center in New York City, and now maintains a private practice in New York. He is also President both of our US arm, ANH-USA, and the Board for Certification of Nutrition Specialists (BCNS). He's authored numerous books and articles for the public and for health professionals, and is host of the Intelligent Medicine podcast. 

In this two-part podcast, Rob Verkerk reveals how repressive policies are impacting our health choices and takes a deep-dive into the importance of safeguarding natural and sustainable healthcare options, highlighting the current FreeSpeech4Health campaign that focuses in on YouTube's draconian (but as yet not fully implemented) medical misinformation policy.

Amidst a backdrop of increasing censorship and control over health-related information, particularly on social media platforms, Drs Hoffman and Verkerk touch on the implications of WHO's pandemic policies and the violation of medical ethics and informed consent. The conversation critically examines how misinformation policies on platforms like YouTube threaten the diversity of health information, emphasising the significance of informed public discussion on natural health and environmental concerns. They also underscore the pressing need for a balanced, honest representation of health information to empower personal healthcare decisions.

Join the conversation

 

>>> Find out more about Dr Hoffman's work

Transcript

Dr Ron Hoffman

Welcome to today's intelligent medicine podcast. I'm your host, Doctor Ronald Hoffman. A discussion that I'm very much looking forward to because we're going to tackle a crucial issue, freedom of choice in healthcare. And specifically, our theme today is the current campaign by the Alliance for Natural Health, FreeSpeech4Health. So let me tell you a little bit about the Alliance for Natural Health. The ANH stands as a guardian of your right to choose natural, sustainable healthcare options. I became a board member of ANH because I feel it's very consonant with my personal mission, which is to get out important health information both to patients one on one, but also to the public. ANH is the guardian of our access to natural health care, to natural health products, to a safe and clean environment. And I can think of no person better qualified to talk to us about the subject today than our guest, my good friend and colleague, Rob Verkerk. Now, Rob, I downloaded your CV, or I attempted to download it, but then I said, I don't want to jam up my printer because it is too long and lugubrious. So I'm just going to hit some of the top lines.

To me, Rob is just a great guy to have a discussion with over dark beer and to recount exploits about our cycling, at which he very, very clearly surpasses me because he's up and down the hills of his native England on those kind of scary two lane roads where they drive on the left. And he is outstanding in that regard. But he's also, in 2002, the founder of the Alliance for Natural Health International, ANH International, which is UK based, but covers the entire world. With the exception of the US. We have our own organisation, which is anh-usa.org. Recently, Rob became executive director of ANH-USA. Is that even legal, Rob? You're a UK citizen and you run an organisation.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Absolutely, totally legal. Ron, would I ever do anything illegal? No, no, absolutely. You can be a director of a 501 c four. No problems. I do not hold, and I'm backwards and forwards far too often.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Okay. Yes, indeed.

Rob Verkerk PhD

I should just fix myself in the states.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Yes, you deserve your own private plane, but I know you want to keep your carbon footprint low. So Rob has numerous degrees. He's the author of over 60 articles in the fields of natural medicine, but also in relationship to the environment. And lately, his cause celeb, is freedom of choice in terms of our access to reliable, truthful healthcare information. And this is not just, by the way, Rob, you're situating yourself within a bigger controversy because we're talking about our realm, which is natural health and the environment. And there's so much that's happening in regard to these campaigns about misinformation and disinformation. These have become buzzwords. They're organisations like the World Health Organisation and universities and the media and social media that have set themselves up as arbiters of the truth. And so why is it that you feel this campaign is so important?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Well, let me give you a quote from. And by the way, Ron, just great to be on Intelligent Medicine podcast again. But Elon Musk famously tweeted not so long ago that free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy. And he said, without it, America ends. If you take that general view. And of course, it is a view that not everyone subscribes to as we move into an ever more authoritarian kind of shift transition in governments around the world. Only 8% of the world's population, according to the Economist Democracy Index, currently live in true functioning democracies, we're told. But free speech is not only the bedrock of democracy, it's also the bedrock of good self-care. If we don't have freedom of expression for the people, people can't make informed decisions, and they can't exercise one of the most fundamentally important principles of medical ethics, which is informed consent. So if you choose to, if you like, distort and limit and moderate the information that people get, and you particularly favour certain types of information, such as information about pharmaceutical medicines or vaccines, and then you limit information about natural health. The public doesn't get a fair shot at the available information.

Of course, what really got our attention was the change in the YouTube medical misinformation policy on the 15 August last year. And what we suddenly started to see is a big change in how content was being moderated. And it was essentially what the policy says is, guys, if you want to post videos on the biggest video platform in the world, you have to make sure that your content basically complies with either what are termed local authorities. Read that as national authorities, in other words, national institutes of Health, CDC, etc in the United States, equivalents in other parts of the world. Or, and the or is really important here, or the World Health Organisation. As we move towards this big decision at the end of this month, where the 77th World Health assembly will determine whether sovereignty, in terms of health making decisions, particularly during pandemics, that can be declared unilaterally by the World Health Organisation if that sovereignty has been ceded to the WHO. So essentially what happened on the 15 August last year is that they started to really change the way in which different users start to see content. And of course we were contacted by some of the leading doctors in the field of keto diets and intermittent fasting and say, hey, we've gone from hundreds of thousands of views per day.

These are people who've got over 10 million subscriber base. So the data becomes really pretty clear to see, because you see this massive drop in numbers from hundreds of thousands of views per day to only a few hundred. So it's not the deplatforming that we were seeing during the covid era. I mean, loads of people just lost their platforms was a binary censorship system. And of course we were very alive to what might happen because they told us all about it in May 2023 at the Nobel Prize summit that was held in Washington DC, that we followed during the three or four days of it. We followed every part of it and we wrote extensively about what was going on and essentially what they said, look, we need to now initiate a war on disinformation, because the airwaves are alive with all these conspiracy theories and people are getting very confused and they going to be hurt as a result of it. And we're going to be working together with leading universities and the big tech companies in order to stop it happening. And by the way the system we will be using is going to be AI based.

And that in itself was pretty interesting, because if you look at what even the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab have said about AI, it is, on one hand, it could be one of the biggest assets in certain areas, but it also could be one of the biggest threats. So any new technology always comes with pluses and minuses. So we now have entered this post Covid era with no real public discussion of what's going on. We all recognise that social media is the new digital town square. But where on earth is the public discussion on this, and how are we going to navigate it? Our only interest in a and h is to make sure that people do receive balanced, honest, truthful information about natural health. But we know for sure that the WHO and most of the institutes within NIH and the national academies of sciences, they are not able to be expert across the board on all these issues. And also, most of these issues are not just black and white issues where we know the answer that's relevant to every single person on the planet. We're all individual. There is a huge amount of uncertainty involved in most medical interventions, including the use of pharmaceuticals.

And discourse itself has been a really, really vital part of the scientific process.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Moving the science forward.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Yeah, traditionally, right, we have this idea of promoting a hypothesis, getting it out there, experimenting it, having detailed enough methodology so that others can repeat the experiment, and eventually, over a period of time, through discourse. It is the stuff that really sticks, the stuff that can withstand dissent, that becomes what we call solid intelligence. It's no longer this fluid intelligence that is moving around as the science and that becomes the knowledge base, the thing that people like to call truth. Personally, I'm kind of surprised that Nobel Prize committee are using the term truth around science, because it's almost ironic or.

Dr Ron Hoffman

It's almost an oxymoron. It is to talk about scientific truth, because science is in flux, continually developing. Hypotheses are developed, critiqued, some stand, some fall, some are revised, and that's the basis of scientific progress throughout the ages. What's interesting to me is that I was just in Europe and there was an argument that was brought up that in regard to scientific consensus, we're actually moving backwards. We're moving backwards to the days of Copernicus and Galileo. Remember when they proposed that the earth revolved around the sun based on their mathematical calculations? That this was contrary to the teachings of the church. And we actually had science that was at the behest of the church, it was at the behest of an ideology. And to have objective science, which is, look, our mathematical calculations. Sorry, guys, shows that the sun really does revolve, that the earth does really revolve around the sun. It went against religious dogma, and the result is that the scientists were persecuted, incarcerated and sometimes burned at the stake.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Literally 100%. Yeah. Heliocentrism. I mean, what a wild idea. You know, we live in a world in which now there are a group of universities that have become extremely well-funded who are playing a particular tune that seems to me to be deviating ever more from this kind of notion of objective science. It is nearly all corporate funded, or it's funded by, you know, Gates. My old University, Imperial College London, is the biggest single funder, as is Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So we're seeing this complete change in the academic environment, and as we have kind of heard that number of academic institutions are going to be involved. Johns Hopkins, obviously, is well known for its work on the coronavirus project, but Cambridge University is pretty involved in the UK, and there is one particular department, the Cambridge social decision-making lab, headed by Prof Sander van der Linden, who I've had the good fortune of listening to live in a debate three weeks or so ago. I've just written a piece about it, and, you know, I'm really disturbed by the lack of objectivity and the bias that creeps into their view. Essentially what we learned in the talk.

I've also read most of his papers in this subject. He is one of the key academics that's developing the tools that can be used in the war on misinformation. It's what the World Health Organisation called an infodemic. So we moved on.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Let's double click on that subject, because you just wrote an article that appeared in Substack. It's also available via anh-usa.org and ANHInternational.org, which is a fascinating article, because there is a current campaign to, quote, immunise people against misinformation or disinformation. What they say, basically is if we protest that this information is bogus, that it only makes conspiracy theorists more vociferous in their support of these theories. So what we need to do is we need to, quote, inoculate people against misinformation. And they've created a series of clever games or simulations which enable people to learn how to debunk conspiracy theories. And it's really quite a clever campaign, but it's rather insidious. Could you take us down the dark rabbit hole on those?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Yeah, exactly. It's actually to not just debunk, but it's to prebunk.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Prebunk?

Rob Verkerk PhD

So you prebunk. Sander van der Linden and his team were very much involved in the development of this concept. Now, guess where they got the ideas from?

Dr Ron Hoffman

This bit, I would say George Orwell, 1984.

Rob Verkerk PhD

I think he must have read some. But how about this. How about extremist terrorist organisations? I was really shocked, to be honest, that that is where they looked. They looked at the techniques that they used by extremist terrorist organisations to radicalise their public and then they've applied those and what they do is that they expose them to the opposite kind of information. So you can imagine that people like Biden and Trump and leaders in the west would all feature in those, so that they can start to develop a hatred for those people. But in essence, what they do is expose you to small amounts of the misinformation.

Dr Ron Hoffman

So homoeopathic misinformation?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Yeah. So essentially, they've got two major games, because they've also done the research that shows that it is the youngsters, young people who are most susceptible to this kind of misinformation. And it is strange, I think even that is slightly odd in terms of my anecdotal observation of people I know who have partaken in rallies, that have protested against the mainstream narrative during the covid era. What I saw was not a huge number of young people there and quite a lot of older people, perhaps slightly wiser people, or people who are prepared to take a risk in relation to their careers, because if you look at it, also, the medical doctors that have stood up and said, hey, we need to do early treatments, we need to use hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and quercetin and vitamin D and vitamin C and all the rest of it, these tended to be older doctors.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Let me submit a slightly different interpretation. Is our generation, the baby boomer generation, I'm speaking of myself, perhaps not you, because you span the generations. We were a generation that was thoroughly disenchanted with the status quo. We grew up in the 1960s, in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy, in the wake of the war against drugs, in the wake of the Vietnam War, which were incredibly challenging and decredibilising to the popular narrative. And so we learned to challenge authority. Many of us, we kind of were reared in an environment where the authority actually had very paltry credibility, ultimately. And so applying that same attitude towards edicts, say, from the World Health Organisation, the CDC, and experts, health gurus who tell us that keto diets will kill you. And low carb diets are long term harmful. We're very ready to challenge that narrative and say, show me.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Well, I think you've hit it bang on the head. And that would immediately. I mean, your observation is the same as my observation. I don't have the data. I think we should question the notion that young people are most swayed by misinformation, and therefore all the techniques should be geared towards young people. So if you develop, for example, a game that is an online game, I mean, I've played it myself, I've done all the misinformation tests. The peculiar thing is that what they do in their games, the two main games, one is called Bad News and the other one is called Go Viral. Go Viral is completely supported by the UK Cabinet Office, by the World Health Organisation, and funded.

Dr Ron Hoffman

And funded because this is a considerable undertaking, right?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Oh, it's a massive undertaking. But I also played it last weekend with my 19 year old daughter, who said it actually made her feel physically sick it was so denigrating. The doctors, the scientists, you know, including her own father, who have spent four years of our lives standing up against this. They have such a low perspective. We could hear with van der Linden during the talk that he would be saying very regularly, the problem with these conspiracy theorists, and a conspiracy theorist in their definition, is anyone who has a view that is not consistent with fact checkers like Politifact, run by the poor.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Snake oil salesman, you don't seem that wild eyed. You're not wearing striped pants, barking your recommendations from the back of a travelling wagon in the village square selling snake oil potion to the unsuspecting inhabitants of the village.

Rob Verkerk PhD

But Ron, that's what they think. That's the kind of mindset that they are entertaining, where they're getting these young people to start to develop, literally, a hatred for these conspiracy theories, because they're putting. They're calling themselves experts. There was no, even in the initial evaluation profile where you give your name, nothing about what your background might be, that you might be a scientist or a doctor, and you might know a thing or two about these issues. Essentially what they're saying is that do not consider being an expert. One of the learnings is that you must never try and be an expert. Leave it up to the people who know most, which is the government and, dare I say, the fact checkers. The fact checkers are really held there as the arbiters and there is no peer review system going on amongst the fact checkers. There's often a real distortion of information, that if you look at, say, information around the origin of the barras, they will take a tiny element of it and say there is no proof that it was a lab leak. But there's no mention of the Department of Energy report. The fact that you got two major us governments departments saying that, guys, it's highly likely.

Rob Verkerk PhD

But of course they use the concept of proof and of course, proving it is pretty difficult, categorically proof, it's hard.

Dr Ron Hoffman

To prove a negative. So what are some of the lessons of covid that has sort of highlighted this issue? Because I cannot think of a moral panic more severe than happened during covid I mean, we were scared, we were uncertain. But the backlash against any intimation that, say, vitamin D or vitamin C might be helpful in covid, or that perhaps masked or what they were cracked up to be, or perhaps there was a. A lab leak from Wuhan lab. Or perhaps it didn't quite make sense for us to stand two metres or 6ft away because they put stuff on the sidewalk. So if you're waiting to get into a store, you had to stand on your mark that these might not have had, or the plexiglass, all the plexiglass that they installed, or the visors that people were putting over their faces, all these things that ultimately did not stand the test of time, much less the vaccine campaign which was said, you know, to stop the spread, didn't really stop the spread. Possibly mitigated some of the severity of symptoms in the beginning. Unclear, no side effects. Well, that didn't pan out very well.

All these issues kind of highlight the fact that, quote, conspiracy theories were actually reasonable challenges to the party line.

Rob Verkerk PhD

That is the problem with the use of language and semantics is that what has now become misinformation is information that may well be plausible or valid based on available information, but it is purely information that challenges the predetermined doctrine that the mainstream, you know, narrative is using. So, you know, this is, this is, you know, if we look at the restrictions, the behavioural restrictions that we face during the pandemic, you know, from masks to lockdowns, etc, we're now seeing a restriction that's occurring at a different level. It's a restriction about what we can speak about, you know, and this becomes really important in the United States because going back to your history, what the founding fathers did was understand that there was a need to rein in governments because governments could impose. The British government could impose these massive limitations on your freedoms. And that's why there are so many freedoms that are protected within the us constitution. The challenge we have now is that the governments have, if you like, hived off that responsibility for controlling free speech to the mainstream media and the big tech platforms when these are now digital town squares.

So we may say, well, hell, every platform, every private corporation should have autonomy. But we need to rethink this when, and of course, Murphy versus Missouri, the case that's going through the Supreme Court at the moment, is absolutely critical in this.

Dr Ron Hoffman

It's the one about collusion between the government and the social media and how, in effect, there were governments directives and coordination. Could you please suppress this information? Correct. And they just went along to get along. They said, well, look, we don't want to get our nose out of joint with the government. The government requires us to do this. So let's just throttle down on some of this information.

Rob Verkerk Phd

There are only seven parties that took that challenge, but they're quite important. Seven parties. Two of them are states. One is Missouri, the other is Louisiana. Two whole states. And then the five human beings that are involved include two that were involved in the great Barrington Declaration, which collected nearly a million signatures and basically provided a scientific public health case for, if you like, a light lockdown approach. Probably akin to the approach that Sweden.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Used earlier, the Swedish paradigm, which they were vindicated for ultimately. I mean, initially, they had a few higher cases, a little higher mortality, but ultimately, the flattening the curve actually caused more havoc than an initial bump, followed by some degree of herd immunity and less economic devastation and social devastation to the society.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Absolutely. So, in essence, what we're going to see is how the Supreme Court judges will rule on that. As I said in another article, I've written about the case. I read the whole case and read the evidence. It is fascinating. And I've been party to thinking about this idea of collusion and coercion has been widely used in discussion around the case. Having read it, I have to read the evidence, the foundation stones of the whole case, and seen the email correspondence and slash correspondence that was occurring between officials within the Biden administration and the big social companies, including Facebook and Google, Alphabet, etc. I mean, it is a whole lot more coercion than collusion. These tech companies were being told, I mean here I am defending the tech companies. I shouldn’t be doing that. But the tech companies were told, if you do not remove that Robert Kennedy jr post, by the end of today, were going to hold you responsible for x, Y and Z. And so they were put under massive pressure. The bottom line is judges are as susceptible as the rest of us to this drip feed of compliance or resistance.

As you said, some of us have no problems in resisting it. I've been doing some work with the World Freedom Alliance, talking with some colleagues in Greece, you know, the two who are leading the campaign in Greece. When we were chatting about it, when I said, look, my mother's family were raised in Greece. They were part of a Dutch group that had been thrown out of Turkey and they sailed out to Greece and that's where my mother was born. But all of my family were involved in the second world war, in the resistance, as were my father's family in the Netherlands. So I think, you know, epigenetically, I've kind of taken on this notion that it's okay to resist because, you know, if you look historically, there is always this kind of change in, you know, between humans want freedoms, but we never get them without fighting for them. So, you know, as sisters or as.

Dr Ron Hoffman

It was once said by a famous luminary, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Rob Verkerk Phd

Exactly.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Yeah. That's a great aphorism.

Rob Verkerk Phd

Exactly. Leonardo Da Vinci, he said, nothing strengthens authority so much as silence, you know, so, you know, we cannot afford to be silent. Indira Gandhi, you know, the daughter of Nehru, the first prime minister of. Of India, she said, the power to question is the basis of all human progress. And these are the very things now that are under threat if we don't sort out this digital town square. And we're not talking about allowing hate speech, we're not talking about allowing information about terrorism, we're talking about just reasonable, uncertain information around health so that people can use these privatisations.

Dr Ron Hoffman

If you're publishing information about how to assemble a pipe bomb, perhaps that's something that we ought to throttle down. But our call to action today, let me just summarise, because we're going to continue our discussion because there's more issues I want to broach with you in part two. I just want to mention that we're conducting a campaign, Rob, Verkerk as executive director, and I as President of the Alliance for Natural Health, anh-usa.org, we have an action alert about our Freedom of Choice campaign, FreeSpeech4Health campaign. You can find out about it at anh-usa.org. And we're also trying to raise money for this cause. So let me just say that if you have been the beneficiary of some of the health information here on intelligent medicine or in general, you know, if you are someone who's experienced the benefits of diet, the benefits of supplements, the benefits of herbs, the benefits of homoeopathy, the benefits of a profession of, say, naturopathic medicine or functional medicine, please take the time to make a small contribution according to your means to the ANH, go to DrHoffman.com.

Welcome back to today's Intelligent Medicine podcast. I'm your host, Dr Ronald Hoffman. Part two of our discussion with Rob Verkerk, who is executive director of the Alliance for Natural Health, he's also executive director. What title do you have at ANH-USA?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Both executive and scientific.

Dr Ron Hoffman

You’re scientific director. Okay. So what we've done is we pooled our resources because ANH International is a great organisation, our sister organisation across the pond, and we pooled our resources to work internationally because this is, you know, there are local issues in the United States that pertain to the United States, there are local issues that pertain to the UK and EU. But we have a lot of common ground, and a lot of our common ground centres around this campaign to push back against claims of misinformation. The campaign is FreeSpeech4Health. You can find out about it at anh-usa.org. An example, Rob, as we speak, I've just written an article, actually, I'm in the process of writing an article entitled the War against Keto. War against Keto. Now you've mentioned keto as a realm in which social media is trying to throttle down on keto. Full disclosure, I will tell you that I do not follow a keto diet. I don't have to, because I'm pretty metabolically fit. I don't have high triglycerides or some of the issues that call for a keto diet, overweight, hypertension, prediabetes.

Nor do I prescribe it generally for my patients, but it is a very useful tool. And there's a campaign that's ongoing that has tried to impugn low carb and keto diets. And the antecedent is the campaign against Dr Atkins. I am well aware, having been on the New York scene and practising medicine since the 1980s and being a student of diet since the 1970s, that there's been enormous pushback against low carb diets. Basically, the narrative was, okay, they may help you lose weight, okay, they may help you with your blood pressure, they may help you with your diabetes, but they'll kill you. That was the take home and fast forward like 50 years, half a century, and in effect, they're still saying that. So an example of which, and you may have seen it, the latest article, which is entitled Ketogenic Diet induces p 53 dependent cellular senescence in multiple organs. You may have seen the article. The headlines that were generated were keto diet may accelerate organ ageing. A long-term ketogenic diet accumulates age cells in normal tissues. New study shows keto diet may accelerate organ ageing. Now, you know this because you're an academic, you've authored well over 60 papers, you can't rely on press accounts of articles, so you have to look behind the article, behind the headlines, behind the clickbait headlines, because basically what this does, it tries to poison the well against keto dieting, which is ever popular.

Millions of Americans are following keto diets, losing scores of pounds, normalising their metabolism, even helping their mental health. There's a whole trend now towards the benefit, the mental health benefits, even in very challenging conditions, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder of keto diets. The results are preliminary, but strong anecdotal evidence and preliminary scientific evidence of the benefits. And yet there's a campaign to discredit it. I looked at the study and then I had to look. There's this thing called materials and methods in a study, you're very familiar with that because it means, like, what are the details? How do they do this study? Well, what they fed. They fed rats a keto diet, and they found that the rats develop problems in their organs over time. But under materials and methods, I said, well, what do they feed the rats? Because, you know, in some of these studies, they claim it's a keto diet, but its 60% fat and 40% carbs. Well, they did feed them a diet that was a high fat diet. It was 94% fat. What was the source of the fat? It was Crisco, it was hydrogenated fat. In fact, you’ve got a study and you made a great deal of play out of it, is that a keto diet kills you.

But actually the study should be entitled, eating hydrogenated fat kills you, kills rats. Anyway.

Rob Verkerk PhD

It's so important to look at the detail. And when we even talk about a keto diet, what do we actually mean when we talk about a low carb diet? There are no hard and fast definitions. The pure study called anything that is less than 40% of energy from carbohydrates, regardless of the source of that carbohydrate, a low carb diet. And so what it, and because it was multicenter and global, it compared, you know, for example, the low carb US, the biggest numbers of people, as a meta analysis from the United States who were on a low carb diet were also the people who ate the largest amount of junk, industrial produced meat with lots of desserts, eggs, pastries and all the rest of it.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Fatty diet in the west is synonymous with a diet that includes a lot of, as you might say in your country, bangers and mashed sausage, processed meat, along with plentiful carbohydrates and perhaps some lifestyle factors that are not the greatest either. It's hard to sort out.

Rob Verkerk PhD

The other bias is that in China, you're looking at the poorest people who are eating nothing much more than a bowl of rice with virtually nothing in it. I right in front of me. I've just brought up the biobank dataset in the UK, which is one of the biggest databases in the world, looking at a sample of 208,200. If you look at the top ten sources of fats, number one, in terms of contribution, is a category called desserts, cakes and pastries. Number two is high fat cheese. Number three is high fat spread. Number three is egg. Number four is egg and egg dishes, then biscuits, then processed meat, then beef, then dairy, desserts.

Dr Ron Hoffman

So how can you possibly draw conclusions based on that.

Rob Verkerk PhD

And carbohydrates is bananas and other fruit were the number one. Number two is white bread. Number three, desserts, cakes and pastries. Again, number four is white pasta and rice. So again, what the conversation, what the discourse is so often missing is this notion of what in science we call metabolic flexibility. And there are a lot of people who are getting stunning results who say they're using keto diets, but actually they are kind of flexy keto. They are lower carb. They are choosing much, much more carefully, not insufficient number that you actually see it being mapped out in national statistics when you look at nationwide data. But that's where people are getting really stunning results. When they start to be much more careful about their carbohydrate sources, they're starting to move away from ultra processed foods, they're starting to cook more at home, whether, if you look at their fats, I mean, people who are on these so called keto diets, you would expect to see things like olive oil and even coconut oil, a form of saturated fat. But obviously, MCTs in particular, high up on the list, they don't appear when you look at these big national surveys.

Rob Verkerk Phd

So the data is entirely confounded by people who are eating junk food diets. And we have very few data on the people who are eating healthy versions of lower carbohydrate diets, that are also less processed diets, who are also cooking a lot more or preparing foods at home. It's very interesting when you look at the data on home prepared foods, that's one of the biggest factors, as is people's socioeconomic status, because relates to how much time and effort and money people are prepared to put into sourcing and preparing the foods that are actually good for them.

Dr Ron Hoffman

So when we talk about these findings in a nuanced way, why is it that you and I can publish articles you publish often on Substack? I publish a newsletter. How is it that we don't rise to the top of the algorithm? On Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram? Why is it that the views of the gatekeepers of dietary verity have their views filtered to the top and become the prevailing views? Take home message for most people is the keto diet can help you lose weight, but in the long run, it'll kill you. I think that's the prevailing view.

Rob Verkerk PhD

What is fascinating is the change has occurred just in the last year. This is all about the war on misinformation, particularly on health information. What who calling an infodemic. So in the last year, if you look at the, the way in which content moderation is going on, it is actually creating these completely random, totally unknown individuals who are critical of a particular approach that is not supported by the mainstream. It may be a non-drug based approach, such as low carb, or perhaps.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Perhaps they're in the pay of, say, Kraft Foods or Nestle's, in some cases.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Do, you know, we've been looking at. Some of it is working through AI systems, and it's not even doing that. It's purely taking people who've kind of bought in by the work of Sander van der Linden is so important. They're people who have just bought into the idea that, for example, low carb and keto diets are killing people. Now, once you have that belief instilled in you, you really feel like, you know, if social media is your thing and you post dozens of posts all the time, before you know it, you're going to have produced a lot more posts than you and I, who might occasionally put these really carefully put together treaties on it, that look at all this science. But, you know, that's just one article every now and then. So as far as the algorithms are concerned, you know, we're sitting on our backsides and, you know, Mister or Miss X out there who is, you know, posting all the time, this. This kind of anti keto, low carb information. So that that's happening across the board. It's happening for people who are challenging the use of ivermectin.

You know, there's interesting information now suggesting there may be an association with ivermectin use and even cancer, because that's being jumped on from great heights. So, yeah, we're seeing, in other words.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Protective effect, not a causative effect.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Yeah. So even the games that van der Linden's group has developed bad news and go viral take you into an important concept that the public should understand. It's this idea of philtre bubbles and echoed chambers. So filter bubbles are basically this kind of online space that we exist in that is both pre-selected by the platform according to our interests, and subsequently also selected by the user according to the likes and the things that they comment on. So that creates a filter bubble that a lot of people think, well, I'm subscribed to Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all the rest of it, and I've got some pretty broad interests, but they won't realise that the information they're receiving on their feed is completely different from someone who, for example, has never questioned the narrative, who's only ever said that drugs are the solution to all healthcare problems. And it sounds like siloing.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Our confirmation bias is that we're all becoming more embedded in our preconceived notions and we're being fed information that supports whatever we have decided already.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Yeah, it's starting to distort you see, once you remove. This is why free speech is so important. Once you remove the ability for us to challenge each other over these ideas the way that we did in the real town square and we're just stuck in our own echo chambers, what happens is you have a very, very divided society, a highly polarised society that is the perfect setting for a drift towards tyranny. And, Ron, that's the direction that we're going.

Dr Ron Hoffman

In all of the Weimar Republic analogy where the communists and the Nazis engaged in street battles, that is, until the Nazis prevailed.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Yeah, exactly. We've seen it in history. And that's why we cannot be silent. Irvin Staub, the great psychologist, I think I mentioned his work on genocide before. He's done phenomenal work around the bystander effect. And he basically says, when you try and understand what creates genocide, how so many people in the prevailing governmental authority that perpetrates the genocide, how that happens is because people buy into a false ideology, that ideology becomes imprinted as a kind of truth. And that's the danger of this term, truth, because people say, well, I'm a truth seeker. Well, I can tell you that the Sander van, Der Linden guys, they think they're truth seekers as well. So let's sort out what the hell this truth thing is. Which is why I come back to this notion of objective science being one of the most important areas that we need to defend. And of course, we see this deviation in even how the peer review system is working.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Now, you know, an excellent critique on this, along these lines was offered by a recent guest here on intelligent medicine. I'm sure you're familiar with her, Cheryl Atkisson, who was a distinguished journalist at CBS, in fact, an anchorwoman who became disenchanted with the networks, or they became disenchanted with her because she began to probe into the pharmaceutical industry and looked at some vaccine controversies. And that was the tripwire, that was the third rail that basically got her excommunicated from conventional journalism. She became an independent journalist and she wrote an excellent critique along the lines of what you're talking about, called, ironically, follow the science in Doctor evil quotes, which talks about how people are being stampeded into scientific silos by influencers, by people who ghost write scientific articles on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and then adduce the names of distinguished scientists who take it on for mercenary purposes for pay, and that this is shaping our whole scientific consensus.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Look, absolutely, she's doing incredible work. And there is a growing literature, believe it or not, that is managing to get through challenging the notion of follow the science. I mean, there's so many errors that were made when we were told we should be following the science. But what's also really interesting is that what's happening, if you look at the Cambridge social decision-making lab's work, van der Linden's work, it's making the youngsters in society the goal, remember, it's supported by the World Health Organisation into the people that are herding people into these echo chambers. They're saying, look, we don't look at the science itself because that's only for people at Imperial College and Harvard and Yale and, you know, a few.

Dr Ron Hoffman

We can't look at what the rats were fed. In other words, we'll just take the top line of the studies, just trust.

Rob Verkerk PhD

What they say and because those are the experts. But we will use the public to make sure that there is a high degree of conformity. And we're going to make your life really uncomfortable and we're going to call you all sorts of nasty names like conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxer if you dare deviate from that norm. And that is a really sad state.

Dr Ron Hoffman

And they have tonnes of young people with idle fingers who are sitting at the ready in their mothers basements, ready to chime in along the party lines. It’s kind of a digital Hitler Jugent.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Yeah. And if they don’t, we see it in the political setting as well, that there’s a British MP who’s spoken out rapidly on mainstream approach, and he's particularly talking now about excess deaths and the possible role of vaccines in enhancing that. And he's talking with a lot of scientists around the world, but whenever he talks in the UK parliament, the place is empty. It is empty.

Dr Ron Hoffman

He's being pilloried.

Rob Verkerk PhD

No one, well, because the whole thing is televised, no one wants face and camera. So this In Group/Out Group war that goes on in this highly polarised environment. The in group is almost like a scared rat in the corner that's getting pretty aggressive and quite dangerous.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Can we clarify something? Are you personally or is the Alliance for Natural Health either the International or the USA version of it? Are we antivaxxers? Do we come down definitively against the use of vaccination? Okay, let's clear that up.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Yeah. The concept of being anti any medical treatment is a non-starter from my point of view. One of my good friends has become the vaccinologist Geert Vanden-Bossche. Right now his priority project is working on an innate immune vaccine because he says, look, the problem is that we, and he's been very involved with the Gates foundation and others, they have been preoccupied with this notion of trying to elevate neutralising antibodies, which is something that takes at least six days or so to happen. And we ignore the sophistication of the innate immune system. Yes, it might be less specific.

Dr Ron Hoffman

So what you're saying is that we're in favour of safe, pragmatic vaccines also, we're against the frivolous use of vaccines, because they could use vaccines for all and sundry things that don't pose necessarily a peril to the public, but may enrich the pharmaceutical industry if we use the.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Let's. We talked about semantics and the importance of terminology and even definitions earlier that, you know, the definitions of a vaccine have changed. Vaccine now is defined as any product that exerts an immunological effect on the body. So we're all up for vaccines. They don't necessarily need to be delivered in syringe form and delivered intramuscularly or into the bloodstream or anything else. And the vaccine companies are working on multiple different administration systems for them. But the bottom line is that we've got to do it better and we've got to do it in ways. I mean, from the ANH perspective, we are focused on natural health.

Dr Ron Hoffman

That is our inherent bias. And I think it's a salutary bias, because I think first things first, and then eventually, you wage war with diplomacy, and then slingshots, bows and arrows, run up conventional, ultimately, and then nuclear weapons, ultimately.

Rob Verkerk PhD

If I wouldn't call it a bias, I'd call it just a specialism. That's our focus there. And I think bias is a really important negative word term. One of the things good science and good law are the tools that we've used for over 20 years now. It's one of the reasons we're so interested in what happens with Murthy versus Missouri. You know, good science is absolutely critical. It's one of the reasons we need to have free speech. We need to ensure that there is discourse, we need to ensure that scientists and doctors who challenge a particular view aren't immediately character assassinated. They're not challenged by their medical boards and losing their licences. This is a dangerous place to be.

Dr Ron Hoffman

So tell us about the campaign specifically, what is ANH doing? And what happens when we have action alerts around this, like, get involved. We want people to support ANH, we want people to read our missives. But what can ordinary citizens do to push.

Rob Verkerk PhD

This is an interesting campaign that we've initiated. We call ourselves the initiators of it because we've been following this space very, very closely. We've designed a campaign that anyone can use. The goal is to get a million signatures. So one of the reasons that you look for FreeSpeech4.org and yes, it pings to our ANH-USA website and then takes you to our Voter Voice petition page to actually sign it, is because we have assets there that anyone can use. You can also become a supporter. We're doing it in association with two organisations that have a lot of traction in this space, bearing in mind that given the World Health Organisation now plays such a prominent role, and we're going to just see how prominent a role it will take after the 77th World Health assembly meeting goes at the beginning.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Of June, which you're representing us at.

Rob Verkerk Phd

We're going to be there. I'll be speaking at a rally there. The Inspired Network have invited a whole group of us. Robert Scott Bell will be chairing our meeting over there. So there'll be a big. Yeah, there'll be a big presence of people who are going to be, if you like, sensibly speaking out about it. But at the same time, the campaign that all of us have been involved in to raise attention to the problems with the International Health Regulations and the Pandemic Treaty have really bitten. Now, we have a situation where the UK government has said, we're not playing ball with this, we're not going to sign on in the United States.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Kind of like an extension of Brexit. It's sort of like independent minded people in the UK have said, hey, there's these sort of monolithic recommendations coming out of the EU parliament, the European Union parliament, but we want to maintain our character, our independence, our economy.

Rob Verkerk PhD

I think it's the first major win of Brexit, but I worry that if Keir Starmer gets in, say, next January, it will be reversed, because he's a WEF young leader, he's gone through the whole World Economic Forum young leadership programme.

Dr Ron Hoffman

He wants UK inside baseball Tory candidate. I'm sorry, he's the Labour candidate. He's the Labour candidate.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Rishi Sunak, as the Conservative incumbent, has decided against it. And in the US, as you know, Ron, we've had 22 state AGs, Attorneys General, who have said they don't want to play part of it. We've also got, obviously, two states, Missouri and Louisiana involved directly as plaintiffs, Murthy versus Missouri. But we've also now had 49 out of 100 senators saying that they don't think this should go ahead.

Dr Ron Hoffman

But this sounds like it's a treaty. And in the US, a treaty requires, international treaties require two thirds approval of the Senate if it's a proper treaty.

Rob Verkerk PhD

But there's discussions in the White House to say, guys, this is a Pandemic Accord. It’s not defined as a status. So there's a legal argument going on there as well. But look, it's a fascinating time. And the problem is that the way that the countries will vote at the end of May, beginning of June, does not necessarily reflect right action or the best for humanity because there's so many vested interests involved, because you only need a two thirds vote. So you've got 194 member states. If 67% or more of those vote for it, it is going through. And then when it's going through, there will be a lot of the smaller countries who have huge IMF loans are completely disposed to whatever the major industrialised countries are doing. They will just play the game.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Gravitational pull of something that monolithic. Yeah, yeah.

Rob Verkerk PhD

So this is the difficulty is that, you know, we're moving into a situation. If you look at that drift towards authoritarianism, that drift towards a kind of tyranny, as soon as we relinquish the ability to have a democratic process where these people become the executors of the public's will, you know, we can kiss goodbye to democracy, we can kiss goodbye to having control over our lives. And, you know, now that free speech is up for grabs, I mean, seriously up for grabs, because we have almost no separation of powers between government and big tech and the mainstream media, and now increasingly this sort of higher echelon of academia, Houston, we got a problem.

Dr Ron Hoffman

So the call to action is go to anh- usa.org or go directly to the FreeSpeech4Health campaign at freespeech4health.org dot and sign the petition. Be a part of this, continue to get updates.

Rob Verkerk PhD

We've got a whole bunch of assets and everything that you can use. Just one of the things we would say is that we're targeting a million signatures here. And this is just stage one of the campaign. We want a million signatures. We're then going to go to mountain view outside of San Francisco where the Alphabet offices are and we're going to convene, request a meeting with Alphabet to say guys, your medical misinformation policy. We know it follows exactly what the Nobel Prize summit was suggesting you do, but it makes no sense if you really have any care of the public interest. And we're going to show them exactly why it is impossible for the designated institutions, the WHO and these national health authorities to have sufficient arbitration capacity over the incredibly complex field of the health sciences. It is a huge domain and when we look at, you know, environmental and social and socioeconomic impacts, these are not areas that governments are deeply involved in. They've been involved in a limited number of them. And we saw the kind of bias, I mean the public has got to see the kind of bias that occurs, you know, when we were told hey guys, don't worry, we will have the solution.

It'll come in the form of a genetic vaccine that had never been tested in the public. Now just from an efficacy point of view it didn't really live up to the initial statements of 95% plus effectiveness. Now that's one of the limitations because governments and corporations now are essentially one. They form this corporatocracy. It becomes ever more important that we have independent organisations and players and associations. If you want to find out about nutrition you want to talk to someone who is a CNS specialist like you Ron, someone who is part of an association like the ANA that you are also very involved with. ANA will know a whole lot more about nutrition than most of the folk in the.

Dr Ron Hoffman

And has a policy of refusing contributions from the meat board, from the dairy board, from the wheat board, from the major ultra processed food makers. Unlike the ADA which often is a handmaiden to some of these food conglomerates. Great stuff, Rob. And as a final note, this is a Zoom call and I'm going to stand up so that you can see what's on my T shirt. Can you read it?

It's fun to feel good. It's fun to feel good. So I'm wearing that T shirt today in commemoration of our call. So great stuff once again anh-usa.org.Aalso the campaign that we're talking about is freespeech4health.org. godspeed and I look forward to our next sojourn in the US where over a glass of dark beer we can recount our cycling exploits.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Absolutely. Ron as ever so good to talk to you and thanks for giving weight to freespeech4health.org. such an important campaign to become part of, indeed.

Dr Ron Hoffman

Thank you Rob Verkerk, thanks for joining us. I'm Dr Ronald Hoffman and this is the Intelligent Medicine podcast. I want to thank you for listening to the Intelligent Medicine podcast. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Amazon Music or your favourite podcast app and get new episodes automatically downloaded every weekday.

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