Unraveling Healthcare's Hidden Truths: A Deep Dive with Rob Verkerk on Science, Politics, and Personal Resilience

In this latest episode of Functional Medicine Bitesized I enjoyed a fascinating conversation with Rob Verkerk whom I first made a connection with through the IFM and have now known for 20 years.  We discuss a lot in this conversation including the evolution of functional medicine and the importance of integrating physical and ecological aspects of health. 

Rob, a health ecologist with a background in ecology and agricultural sustainability, emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to health, including diet, exercise, and stress management. We discuss the over-reliance on patented pharmaceuticals and the suppression of natural health solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rob highlights the importance of self-healing and reconnecting with natural systems and we also delve into the impact of corporate and government influence on healthcare policies and the need for transparency and informed consent.

In 2002 Rob established the Alliance for Natural Health as a non-profit organisation to essentially do his life's work. 

This is another conversation not to be missed. 

Thanks for listening to our podcast and please feel free to get in touch:

• Tweet us at @fmedassociates
• Follow us on Instagram or Facebook @petewilliams_fma
• Email us on info@fm.associates
• For more information about our services please visit our website www.functional-medicine.associates

We would love to hear from you!

Transcript

Mon, Apr 07, 2025 12:24PM • 1:20:01

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Functional medicine, health ecologist, Alliance for Natural Health, skeletal structure, mitochondrial efficiency, agricultural sustainability, chemical hypersensitivity, epigenetic adaptation, hormesis, gut-brain connection, public health, vaccine safety, mRNA technology, natural immunity, medical ethics.

SPEAKERS

Peter Williams, Speaker 1, Rob Verkerk

Peter Williams  00:00

So welcome everybody. Welcome to this updated podcast of functional medicine Bite sized. Obviously, I'm Pete and I've got one of my old buddies. We don't actually we've known each other. For you, I've known you and Mel,Rob for 20 years. I think must be, I don't think we've ever really, truly, sat down and had a conversation. But I do have, I do remember one of my big regrets. Do you remember that, IFM conference in Austin, must have been about 10 or 15 years ago, and it was, it was the morning, and I'd gone down to Lance Armstrong's bike shop, which is pretty amazing. And the coffee in there is amazing. And you and Mel were there, and you were heading off on a bike ride, and you need to say, Come with us. And you know what? That was my only regret, because I didn't, and I still, because I was probably hungover from the night before, and I still regret that I should have gone with those guys, because that would have been a really cool ride.

Rob Verkerk  01:00

So be and just the other side of it is, of course, you've always been my hero. Because I, I think I'm right in thinking that was it you and Joe gamble were the first two fully accredited functional medicine that is, that is correct. Yeah. So, so, I mean, and I Well, that's your work for for years. So it's hugely appreciated. Your contribution is is massive. And I also love the fact that you've come from the sort of the physical side, because we are the tendencies and functional medicines for people to to look at the soft bits within the body and forget about some of the harder bits. And you know, the relationship between the skeletal structure, the musculoskeletal structure, and the rest of the body and its function, is absolutely vital we have now with people propped over computers for endless amounts of hours per day, we see this complete destruction of the human musculoskeletal system, mitochondrial efficiency falling through the floor and and people still dealing with the soft bits and the metabolism, and not some of the harder bits. So you know, hats off, Pete to what you're doing in that area. 

Peter Williams  02:17

Pleasure Rob, so thanks for that and but let's, as you say, let, let's, let's spin it back to you. And we always like to have a I think today is going to be, is going to be quite a deviation from my usual podcast, because I think you bring a very rare skill set. And so it's always great to get a little bit of background, particularly for you and particularly for your organization, which is the Alliance for Natural Health. So can we just talk? Can we amalgamate all of those in? Can you give us where your skill I mean, I know what your skill set is, but most people won't, but that would be really good place to start.

Rob Verkerk  02:54

Yeah. You know, I struggled to put myself in a particular category. Sometimes I refer to myself these days as a health ecologist, and one of the reasons for that is I'm originally an ecologist by training. I did my first degree. I've got three science degrees. My first degree is in ecology, and my masters and PhD are in agricultural sustainability. So it's effectively the application of ecological principles to producing sustainable food and and within that work, I have always looked at this, this tightrope that humans have been walking on between the, if you like, the the engineering, technological side of humanity, Visa V nature and and it's that duality that that has always fascinated me, and I've always been looking at ways in which either We can study that interaction, or we can come up with solutions. And essentially, I can divide around my life, essentially into three main areas. The first area, after I got my first degree, I worked at together with the total Environment Center in Australia for nearly 10 years, working on finding ways of minimizing chemical inputs into the Australian environment, and that was looking both at agricultural chemicals, industrial chemicals, as well as pesticides that are used in and around people's homes, which turned out to be some of the most, you know, problematic areas, you know, particularly around termite control. I We did a lot of work that ended up being extremely practical. I set up a business that learned how to deal with various insect pests without chemicals at all. And I work with people who are chemically hypersensitive. And I, you know, ended up working with with some of the pioneers of functional medicine in Australia, Doctor Paul Donahue in particular, who is one of the first people to describe multiple chemical sensitivities. And so I had that link already there. I am chemically hypersensitive myself, and so we were working with huge groups of people through the sensitivity awareness organization, the allergies association of Australia, who were looking for practical solutions. I then went back to academia in the UK. Got a distinction in my masters went straight into a PhD, which I completed, it in two years, which was not common, isn't common. In fact, it's now disallowed. And then went straight into seven years of post doc work, and that was really how do you apply principles of ecology to food production systems and make them sustainable. A lot of that is understanding that, if I can draw out the sort of fundamental conclusions is that you need to have a complex system of feedbacks within your system for it to be stable. So in very simple terms, if you take a monoculture, you have, you know, huge acreages of, say, one crop such as wheat, if an insect or fungi finds its way into that system, you will generally have a major problem, which will make it very dependent on fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, etc. If you have a complex system, you know a mixed farming system that has all these clades of natural enemies, and you find the system comes into balance. And what we were really doing is applying the principles that we learned about from rainforests and coral reefs, and see if we could bring those into agricultural systems. I then started moving around the world into real problem areas in Sub Saharan Africa, in Central Asia, cotton systems in Central Asia, Southeast Asian horticultural areas, where huge amounts of pesticides were being delivered, and then we were using that knowledge that we gained to see how we could practically change the agricultural systems. All the time. I was amazed that we had so little connection with the medical profession, because, hey, we're producing chemical free, or is least, at least minimal pesticide contaminated foods in order to improve health. And I was always stunned at Imperial College when we would mix with the medics, saying, hey, look, we're discovering these amazing things about these heritage varieties, that if we take these ancient varieties and we grow them, you can grow them completely pesticide free, particularly if they're become adapted to a local environment. So we were ready. We knew about the principle of epigenetic adaptation, but we didn't have a name for it back then. We weren't actually familiar with waddington's work. I think it was

Peter Williams  08:27

what you're saying at the moment, Rob, it literally just backs back to you use the corn field as opposed to the rainforest, which is exactly what we see with the gut microbiome. So there's no difference, really, is there

Rob Verkerk  08:41

so that that that's really so when I jumped into the health field, when, when I turned down permanent tenure at Imperial College back in 2002 and decided to set up the Alliance for Natural  Health as a nonprofit, essentially to do my life's work, I wanted to really find solutions and answers. Some of it is in the is in the understanding and the connecting of these diverse we've got to connect the people who are producing food to the people who are working in fitness centers, with the health professionals from all backgrounds. And it's you know, how do you how do you resolve these kinds of issues? And, of course, one of the, you know, whatever it was, 10 years on, we started to develop this idea of a Blueprint for Health Systems. How do you how do you fix the problem we have between, say, conventional and alternative health care? Well, one way is to stop throwing rotten tomatoes at each other and start to understand what, where, what is the common ground? You know, it's very imperfect on both sides of the equation. So how can we take the best bits out of so called conventional medicine that's actually extremely unconventional, it's has only been around 70 or 80 years to use fundamentally new to nature molecules as your mainstay in healthcare against this thing called alternative complementary medicine. And one of the ways forward is to create a common language. Another way forward is to come out of the silos of modalities, you know, we have different modalities. You you have a nutritionist talking to an oncologist, and they're talking different languages. You have a homeopath talking to, you know, a yoga practitioner, they're speaking a different language. So modalities are actually often quite unhelpful for the individual that is often using a combination of all these things. Even, even someone who's a, you know, who's dead set on natural medicine is probably going to take some NSAIDs  from time to time. So, you know, we're all using a combination of things, yeah, the system that we call our body and our mind, sometimes our spirit as well, is is something that's pretty constant between us, but we don't really have a language that brings all that together and allows us to speak to anyone and everyone. And you know, we can't help feeling that some of this language, some of the jargon that has evolved in all these different modalities, actually alienates the most important person in the equation, which is the patient or the client. And so we've got to find a way of, you know, we've seen it happen in the legal profession. You know, to use plain English instead of legalese, and we need to see the similar development across the health professions. Where

Peter Williams  11:49

have you seen, I mean, I followed, as I said to you, just before we went on and started recording, I was I followed quite a lot of your work, because I always saw you as the actually thought you were a potential Lawyer by your background, because you're you were the, the sort of man. And again, I'll use the quote, good science and good law that gave informed choice to the individual. That's how I thought. That's Rob and Mel. That's how I think about Rob and Mel. So I always think that, you know, you would Rob definitely is an individual who would never have the wool pulled over his eyes, particularly when there might be something that has come up in medicine or and I think, I think It was even more so through COVID. Can we talk about because I tell you where again, and look, I think we've both been in medical care a long time. We both know that medicine and healthcare makes lots of mistakes, and we can argue why those mistakes happen. So I don't, I don't look at where we are now thinking looking back, God, what a mess that we made, which we did make, quite a mess, I think, where it started to rub a lot of people in healthcare up the wrong way, and rightly so. With me in particular, started early on when those two big Spanish vitamin D studies came out which, and I remember quote someone saying, if this was a medication, the researchers would have won the Nobel Prize for Medicine based off what we saw with those two papers. And I couldn't understand, based on where we were with COVID, why nothing was being done by that and then that led me to watch how many clinicians, and these were clinicians, great clinicians around the world, who were on the front line saying, well, maybe we should all get together, because this is What we're seeing. This is what we're seeing, being brutalized through trying to do the best for their patients based on what they saw was good medicine. So could we expand a little bit on that?

Rob Verkerk  14:12

Absolutely so look on the legal side, just to so you know, we've always worked with some of the best lawyers in the world. So I effectively do a lot of paralegal work, because I've had the opportunity of working with some of the leading European lawyers. We've taken major cases to court. We've taken them to the a very big case on natural sources of vitamins and minerals, to the European Court of Justice. We had expedited out of the High Court in London into the European Court of Justice. And

Peter Williams  14:50

can you, I know we talk about, but can you talk about those?

Rob Verkerk  14:54

Yeah, look the this is one of the key things that pulled me out. From behind my lab in Imperial College, because I was already following what was going on. If you know dr Matthias Rath, he, he, he's a German doctor who has a big vitamin company, and he had set up a campaign saying, look, the EU is going to ban all these vitamins. It's going to make them drugs, and there's a new directive coming through the pipeline that could be very bad, because it's going to only allow very limited vitamins to be used as food supplements. Everything else would have to be licensed as a drug. So I was looking at this and that, and then, of course, he started attacking the European Parliament, and I had a big interest in this, because obviously we were very well aware of all the vitamins and minerals that are naturally present within the plants that I was studying, and when I had a look at the list of vitamins that were going to be allowed, I thought, well, the literally I had the sigma Aldrich catalogue of all our lab reagents sitting on the shelf above me. And I literally was, when I first looked at this list, I picked the lab reagent catalogue off the shelf, and lo and behold, every single one of those vitamins that was on the list was in my reagent category in my lab. And so I also knew a lot about the natural forms of vitamins in particular that are present in plants, and they're pretty different. So we I had been quoted in The Observer newspaper that was around at that time, page two, I had been critical as an academic of this thing called dietary simplification. This is the process whereby, due to the globalization of our food supply, we are consuming ever narrow range of staples. And you know, even when you look at the fruit and veg that people consume, or the kind of animals, or even the parts of the animals that you derive food from, they're getting smaller and smaller.  With animals we only three or four different species. We don't do nose to tail eating anymore. We since BSC we're consuming largely muscle fibers, and we're not consuming any of the organ meats. Has a massive change in the nutritional profile compared with our evolutionary background. In terms of plants, we are consuming a tiny number of plants, and those plants themselves, the type that our grandparents consumed, the broccoli or the kale that our grandparents consumed, is entirely different from the type that we consume today. And of course, the plant breeders are going, isn't it wonderful, we've grown a kale or a spinach that children can eat because it's no longer bitter. And we're going, Holy cow, you guys have just removed all the glucosinolates and sulforaphane and all the stuff that is cancer protective, and, you know, hits, you know, NRF2 pathways, and all the rest of it. And isn't that

Peter Williams  18:29

crazy? Because the bitter compound compounding foods are the reason why you want to eat that food from a health perspective. And

Rob Verkerk  18:37

this is, this is why the whole, you know, calorie idea that food is energy is just a crazy idea. First of all, food isn't energy. It's an energy carrier, and it's what I loved. Like you, I've been involved in functional medicine for years, and I love this idea that in functional medicine you look as at food as information, it's a much more accurate way of describing what food does it? It speaks to all these pathways. It speaks to our evolutionary background, it speaks to epigenetic expression and all the rest of it. So, yeah, I was, I was absolutely shocked when I would speak to Imperial College medics and say, you know, are you aware that some of these, we were looking at particular plants that had very high level levels of these mustard oils, loosely, they come under that category, and, and, and we showed them where we use these heritage varieties, we wouldn't have to use pesticides. And what I then said to them, what's really interesting is that these compounds that are then toxic to insects, for example, and certain fungi are. They have beneficial properties when humans eat them, and that sort of brings in this whole question of hormesis. And in fact, I'm going to be going over later this month. In fact, in 10 days time, I'll be speaking at the International College of integrative medicine at their annual meeting, and I'm giving a paper specifically on hormetics within plant foods. So can we I

Peter Williams  20:28

I just wanted to go over that point, because I think this is a very important point that in the social media world gets completely out of shape, because you'll have many people who suggest that you shouldn't eat vegetables because the vegetables create anti fungals, anti parasitic compounds that are trying to kill you, but they're completely missing the component of hormesis.

Rob Verkerk  20:56

We you know, the difficulty we have is, I would say that if we look at touching on the subject that you raised earlier about COVID, what's happened culturally is that people have become so risk averse they do not understand what the risks involved in being so risk averse are. And just to to break that down a bit. So, for example, the the idea of of taking measures through government action, or, you know, through the way in which you select the foods you buy in a supermarket, to the point that you try and eliminate all risk. What you do is you, you put the human being into this cotton wool environment in which we are not subjected to any stress at all. And one of the reasons that sitting is so dangerous, sitting is probably the most dangerous activity that most of us engage with every day. One of the reasons it's it's so dangerous is because we're not subjected to stress, not gravitational stress, not stress from all the micro capillaries that we break every time we move our bodies. There's a whole range of systems that are not able to function unless we're pushing up against stress. The problem. And of course, everyone sees Well, stresses is a big threat in our lifetime, so we've got to get rid of it, but we need to find a way of exposing us to this adapt these adaptive stresses, these low level stresses. And it turns out, most of these plant compounds, one, one of the things we do, if we engage, as you know only too well, in, say, hit high intensity interval training or time under tension training, is we put our bodies through a kind of stress that we have been we have evolved to get used to. And if we don't have those stresses, we really don't do well at all. The opposite is also true. We then expose ourselves chronically, regularly, on a daily basis, to kinds of stresses that we're not adapted to through our evolution, then we do ourselves a lot of harm. Yeah, so we've we've got to look at these hormetins. Hormetin is a word that describes something that has a non linear dose response. We're often a small amount of it can do us a lot of good, and a large amount of us can do a lot of harm. And so we've got to establish what are the hormetins that are good for us, that are associated with our evolution and which are the ones that are bad for us, so we can start to make choices, but, but, yeah, these these plant compounds. That's why they are pesticides in the right levels to the insects and the fungi that are feeding on those crops. And that's why they act as hormetins, adaptive stresses to us, and they build our resilience. So resilience, which first took roots, really in terms of understanding human psychology, can now be applied to metabolism, the immune system, pretty much all facets of of the human being. Resilience is what we want to shoot for. Resilience is what we're losing fast, and if we don't turn this around, you know what? One of the reasons we've got this cataclysmic situation in most industrialized countries, especially the UK, with so many people out of out of work, unable to to work, because of so called long term disease, of which a lot of it is now non specific, doesn't have a hard diagnosis attached to it is because we are being exposed to the wrong. Kind of stresses and not the right kind of stresses. Totally

Peter Williams  25:04

Totally agree on that one. And I think this is this comes back to what you said about food is information. So hormesis is good information. Hormetic stress, for me, doesn't matter where it comes from, whether it's food, whether it's exercise, whether it's movement, etc, comes from. It delivers a message that is going to stimulate your body's capacity to do good things for you. That's how I say. And I don't think we get it. We get enough of that. And in fact, I remember the about 10 years ago, there was the front of the lancet had James, James Watson, from Watson and Crick that discovered the helix, and he said he firmly believed that insulin resistance was a lack of oxidative stress, a lack of that hormetic stress, because people just didn't do what they did 50 years ago. They weren't active enough. The food system was different, and they weren't creating enough of a hormetic oxidative stress aspect that drives the beneficial changes. Yeah,

Rob Verkerk  26:11

It's like nitric oxide. You know, it's a it's a toxin, but we don't get proper in the function unless we're expressing it, not using their muscles enough, they actually don't have enough nitric oxide. Yeah, that kind of stress and

Peter Williams  26:29

Rob, nitric oxide is really becoming a big player in that, in that cardiovascular understanding from a point of view of endothelial health. So you know, cardiovascular disease is, for me, has moved from it's not just lipids, it's endothelial function. And in any one individual, you know, you might have someone with very high lipids, but endothelial function is really good, and you might have someone with optimal lipids and terrible endothelial function. Both are going to go on to get cardiovascular disease, but you have that capacity to manipulate them

Rob Verkerk  27:03

and their oxidative stress balance. You know, if they're if they have a lot of very low density lipoprotein and that's oxidized, they're going to be more risk so and again, if they're not, if they don't have adequate diversity of plant foods in their diet. So one of the reasons I'm in terms of the carnivore diet, you know, we've followed lots of people become huge protagonists of it, and we've said right from the outset, really understand that, you know, it can be very useful short term, because it takes plant stress out of the equation. If you've got someone who's moving down an autoimmune pathway, actually one of the most difficult things for them to be able to manage is to discern self from non self. And if you get a single plant food, you're actually exposing yourself to 1000s of discrete molecule, information, and that information can be too much for someone who's already substantially auto immune.  You know, Rob, I've never looked at it from that perspective. That's a really interesting way of of thinking about it, and that's never occurred to me. I mean, I don't the carnivore for me, long term, I would be surprised whether it has health, good health outcomes. Long term, we're

Speaker 1  28:28

already seeing it. We're already seeing it failing that the people who went on to it, they got short term benefits because they take the plant chemistries out of the equation, and they're providing a much more simplified they got all the proteins, the fats and the nucleotides, but they don't have all that plant chemistry that's really complicated for the body, you know, at the mucosal level, to discern, you know, friend from foe

Peter Williams  28:54

just a super interesting way of thinking about it. I suppose what you're saying is that you're losing a lot of the signaling by doing that correct,

Speaker 1  29:03

and which is why you then, when you want to look at reintroduction of plant foods post, say, three months on a carnivore diet, you gotta do it carefully. And you may choose, depending on that individual, to leave out certain foods that they may be more sensitive you know, are they sensitive to oxalates? Are they sensitive to lectins? Are you probably going to want to leave all gluten containing? Everything we know about gluten suggests that that you either have go on to develop celiac disease, or to some degree, you suffer some degree of, you know, non Celiac gluten sensitivity. So you probably want to keep that out of the equation. You may choose to keep the night shades all the solanaceous vegetables out of the equation. They're pretty, pretty tough. Cookies, that there's a lot of toxins that are that are carried in your aubergines, your peppers, your tomatoes, etc, so that for someone who's who's coming back into vegetables, maybe another group you decide to leave out initially, until someone becomes more tolerant and therefore more resilient. And

Peter Williams  30:18

do you think the problems with what you're talking about is because, fundamentally, people are just not, do not have that resilience anymore, and therefore plant, which, as you say, have incredibly complex, are going to say ingredients. Is the wrong thing to say. But there's lots of 1000s of compounds that you're going to be getting in food. So there's a lot of information. And do you think the reason why we see such a epidemic of problems is because their resilience levels are so low that it's bound to be a problem. It's almost like an information overload of a system that can't take that amount of information. I

Rob Verkerk  31:05

think that is exactly it. And how do we break that down? Well, the food has completely changed the microbiota. The microbiota is very, very closely linked to the immune system. We probably have 75% of the entire immune function going on within the gut. And then the gut is incredibly closely connected by the 10th cranial nerve, by the vagus, to the brain. So the the gut and the microbiota and the brain are involved in two way communication all the time. So if your amygdala in your brain is getting lots of fear and chronic stress messages. Actually, it's screwing up what's happening downstream in the gut and the microbiota. So we're really hitting it from all angles, and we've got to see the gut brain connection as the fundamental area in which you know, the the maladaptation to the Anthropocene, the modern environment that we live in at the moment, that we're completely maladapted to. We essentially carry more or less the same genome as our Paleolithic ancestors, the epigenetic expression, culture and environment, we often think of, you know, just the environment. And then when we think of the environment, we think, Oh, it's the chemicals in the environment. It's but, but we gotta remind ourselves that culture, the culture that we live in, is central to behavior. So you can go back to the there was a big study done by Hood et al in 2016 that looked at county health rankings in the United States, a very detailed study looking at what drives health outcomes. And what it shows is that only a tiny proportion, only 16% of all health outcomes were linked to clinical care at all. You know, this is any form of medicine. The vast majority of the outcome are linked to behavior and environment, which is also culture. So we've got to realize that if we want to do holistic medicine, we got to stop thinking about the pills and potions that we're taking, and we've got to start thinking about, how are we interacting in this environment? Of course, the food that we consume is the most intimate way in which we experience the environment, and we do it several times a day, yeah, but then the behaviors we choose, whether it's to sit down for eight hours a day or set your timer so after an hour, you get up and you do, you know, a three minute hit session, for example, transformational that can be to your Health, because sitting for prolonged periods is so deadly. Eating snacks all the time for anyone who's moving down, you know, the metabolic syndrome pathway is probably one of the most dangerous things we can do. You know, seeing where you are with your fasting glucose or your glycated hemoglobin, eating breakfast can be a major problem. Yet you've got most dietitians saying most important day, you know, meal of the day. So yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a huge piece we need to cover off to help educate people about health strategies that are relevant to them in their current circumstances and in the cultures and environments that they live in. And we're not, you know, as a society, we're we're not doing great job doing that. So

Peter Williams  34:52

I want to bring you back, because, as I see if, if you know, I see your I see the Alliance for natural health as a. A as an expertise in understanding, if you like, medical ethics, governments and how they collaborate with corporations, and how that may bias decision making, whether that's food or, as you were saying, whether that means that they are thinking about looking at natural products, like supplements, if you like, and banning them to some degree or put them under medical license. You guys, I think, understand that more than anyone else, with regards to the nuances and what goes on. And can I swing that back to and look again? I don't want to this is not blaming medicine medicine's, hard enough as it is. I think what the general public made may not understand is that we're really not quite sure what we're doing, really, because it's a bit too complicated. And I think, and I look back at the way COVID was, and people made decisions on what seemed to be the right decisions at the beginning, but then we started to see things that sort of didn't make sense. And as I say, for me, it was when those vitamin D studies came out, and that started to sort of make me think. And then, as I said to you, you started to see many clinicians who, again, normal front line emergency medicine clinicians around the world going well, this is what we're doing, and this is what we're doing, and this is working. And yet they were getting ostracized big time. So what is your understanding of why that happened and why it goes on. Because I think everyone's clear that to some degree, there's a collusion with regards to healthcare and what the government wants and what corporations want. And I know that sort of what my understanding is, that's what your organization is trying to protect the general public against or at least give them a better understanding of why this may not be a good thing.

Rob Verkerk  37:09

Yes, so that is, there's, there's many ways of tackling this is a huge question that you just asked, but let me try and be as succinct as I can. So it stems from a monopolistic tendency of the kind of corporations that have been trying to shape how we do health care for since the post Second World War period. So you gotta remember that the the theBayers and the mercs, the basfs and the herx of this world all spun out of IG Farben, which was one of the world's largest chemical conglomerates. They were the guys who made the Zyklon B that was used in the in the holocaust by Degech. And they basically came into being. You got to remember what IG Farben was already involved in, in in the production of vitamins in the 1930s so they, they had thought that the Nirvana to making lots of profits would be to supply these, these vitamins. And it was really happening at a time where the essentiality of vitamins and minerals was also being discovered. So this is when people thought, wow, this is how we're going to solve all these diseases and health problems. Then, of course, we had the Second World War. But it happened at a time when organic chemistry, the chemistry chemistry of carbon was booming, and what happened with organic chemistry was the ability to synthesize chemicals. So we saw the the development of synthetic chemistries that allow patented products to be made and and from that period, we started to see essentially a business with patented products develop that then started to control the entire way that health care was done. So we moved ever more into medical professionals becoming prescribers of patented medicines that are produced by these organizations. So by the time COVID rolls along, we also have this, this disparity that that exists between what what happens in the area of public health, and when you have an you know, a national or a global emergency, it moves out of the remit of individual physicians doing the best that they can within their communities and hospitals and clinics and everything else, and it goes into this realm of public health. Public health is always about you. Working out solutions for whole populations. It's never about doing the right thing for individuals. So it's not about personalized medicine. It's about essentially working with the bell shaped curve. Yeah. So once that happened, and of course, since the late 1980s immunity has been granted to vaccine manufacturers to be able to produce vaccines, and assuming that there are no obvious problems in quality, any harms that arise from from them, they are legally protected by the government from having to face any charges for for harming people. You imagine if you could sell motor cars or or children's toys with that kind of immunity? But so they've managed to to establish that. And right now, Bayer is trying to do that very same thing is trying to establish immunity through the states of the United States for its product glyphosate, that it first developed, that's now in generic form, that's ubiquitous, you know, in human tissues now, because it's been used so widely so You we saw in 2018 already. I attended a Politico conference in Brussels on preventative medicine that was run by the International Association of pharmaceutical companies. And I attended turns out I was the only person representing a non profit there. And it turns out, they were using it as a means to say, look, the primary way in which we intend to do disease prevention, whether it's cancer, whether it's a new infectious disease, is going to be through vaccines, and it's going to be through this new platform that work we're working with called mRNA. So one of the reasons, if you go to COVID zone.org which is the short link to all our articles, I think I wrote nearly 350 articles on COVID During that that time, on the day that the COVID pandemic was announced, on the 12th of March 2020, we published two articles. One was looking at, what do you need to do to support immune resilience, because there's a new bug in town. And then we also cautioned that there was a possibility, if a global approach was taken to this new pathogen, that it might do more harm than than good, and because we were well aware what would happen with with mRNA, we already knew that they would, you know, try and create mRNA vaccines very, very quickly that wouldn't go through adequate testing. So coming back to the nub of your story, why did they shut down the science on vitamin D, vitamin C, quercetin? There were a whole lot of agents that were looking very, very promising early on. The answer is an easy one. They had to in order to justify the emergency use authorizations. That was the reason that they needed, so that they were already predisposed to condemning anything that was natural, because it's unpatented, that's part of the model. But in addition to that, if they were going to roll out something to 90% of the adult population, it needed to have no competitors. So the ivermectin needed to be kibosh, the doctors who were prescribing it needed to be attacked. Anyone who's talking about something as simple as a vitamin, like vitamin D, are you crazy? You know, we're talking about a serious disease that's killing people. We need stuff that's much stronger than that. So it was very easy for them, and you saw the way in which the whole peer review process was concertinaed and distorted the editorials I've become so disappointed as a scientist, with the quality of the editorials that were going on in JAMA, New England Journal medicine, Lancet, BMJ, all of the the editors were taken over by this, this narrative. We started to use the term narrative a lot during COVID, and I think we're it's going to stay in our vocabulary, because this group thing does not reflect the totality of science at all. It represents what a group of individuals, often in very large corporations or in some of the most powerful and influential governments on the planet, decide is good for us. Yeah, and they use this safety first strategy, hey, we're out here to protect you, as the mechanism to get us all on board to become part of the in group. And you only have to look at the work of the great psychologist Ervin Staub to realize that's exactly how genocide occurs. It's the same principle you have you put forward a false ideology that's very, very persuasive, that talks to your amygdala, your fear receptors in your brain that then controls pretty much your entire psycho, neuro, immunological, endocrinological system that it then becomes captive to that narrative. You then basically create scapegoats. Who your scapegoat is going to be? Well, they're going to be these crazy doctors who are, you know, have come out of Emergency Medicine and deciding that you need ivermectin and all these vitamin D, vitamin C, and you ridicule them, and you ostracize them, you marginalize them, until you try and reapportion where trust is, Just as the trust went with the Third Reich, you know, imagine the, you know, SS officers that actually turned the taps on in Auschwitz, what was going through. They they were blinded. This is what Staub was studying he wanted to as, as a Hungarian Jew who escaped that system, who was protected by a bystander as a child, who hid him behind her when they came through the streets of Hungary. And then, of course, he found his way into America and became a leading psychologist. And he, he wanted to, so he, he has published extensively on this idea of the bystander effect. And he said, you know, the problem is, is when we become passive bystanders we can see some horrendous things happening, and that's what happened in COVID. Everyone became vulnerable to being a passive bystander, and some of us stood up as active bystanders. What Staub says the only way to deal with these false ideologies is to speak out. So that's why we put free speech at the front of the piece. It's the reason why, as of middle of last year, the leading constitutional lawyer in the US who's nicknamed the FDA Dragon Slayer, Jonathan Emord, is now very much part of our team. He is our general counsel at ANH-USA, I work incredibly closely with him on a daily basis now, and because he said, Look, the piece that I've got missing is the science, Rob, you've got the science. You got a deep understanding of the law. And I always say about Jonathan is, I don't know any other lawyer that has such a deep understanding of the of the science and and so we put the science. That's why, you know, we coined the idea of good science and good law for ANH back in 2002 but it couldn't be more important to us today, particularly in the work that we're doing in the US, the work we're doing in Europe, the work we're doing in the UK, on every every front.

Peter Williams  48:39

So as I said to you, I I've thought a lot about talking about COVID. I'm I'm not one where I think, you know, like, like many people, to truly understand papers, you have to and research. You essentially have to do that day in, day out. You have to be a reader of that. And that takes a very particular skill set. But it doesn't take much if you're as a clinician, to start to smell that, and I don't think I've ever been a conspiracy theorist or whatever, and I don't think for one minute that I mean, maybe I'm wrong that governments conspire on purpose. But I do think we end up getting ourselves in a pickle, and then we've got to keep the lie going, because we're too deep in. There's too there's too many mechanics at work. I mean, I always think there's a it's the same thing. I think about Lance Armstrong from a point of view of by the time he realized he was, he was, you know, shit, what do I do here? He was too deep in and the wheels had gone too far, and there were too many things at play that brought us to that situation. Would that be a good would that be? And look, the reason why i. Wanted to speak to you about this, because you're almost like the trusted source that everyone knows, because you can't pull the wool over his eyes with regards to law, and you can't put the wool over their eyes regards to the science. So I always feel like, you know, as a clinician, you always have those little you know, if Rob's saying it, then you know, you're sort of, you're, it's probably, it's probably correct. Would that be a good analysis of what tends to happen? Because it's, it's what the government decide?

Rob Verkerk  50:29

Yeah. I think the bottom line is, different governments work in different ways. What we're seeing this uncomfortable set of revelations that America is going through now under the Trump administration, is an example of of what happens when you try and turn the system upside down. I'm not going to say now I'm a huge Trump fan. What I am a fan of is the fact that the trunk of the tree and all of its branches are being given a damn good shake so that we can see what comes out of it all. So there is no doubt that one of the reasons that Trump and others close to him, and we see it very much in the actions of theDOGE department of government efficiency that Elon Musk is running. Their job is to root out corruption the you know, we were in the Senate speaking on the same day that Bobby Kennedy had his first of his two hearings, and Jonathan and I wrote a book about MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) just which we which we then delivered to each of the the senators, and there is no doubt that there is a very good reason why the remit that Trump gave to Kennedy to head up The Department of Health and Human Services was to end corruption number one second to reinstate rigorous scientific processes, and the third one is to reverse the chronic disease epidemic. Those are the three remits that he's got as head of HHS, which is what we've written our book about, because each one of them is a story unto themselves. So, you know, it's very clear what has happened in terms of governmental control generally, in most so called democratic countries, they've become less democratic. So in other words, most of the decisions that get made don't go through a full legislative process. We often are led to believe that they do. Actually. What happens is that many of the decisions and the interpretation of statutes that are the you know, that's where the rubber meets the road legally, that interpretation of statutes that's always somewhat plastic is made by bureaucrats. And in the end, it's the bureaucrats that either make your life heaven or hell, and so within the US that there was a doctrine called the chevron doctrine that was passed in 1984 that's been active up until 28th of June last year. And that Chevron doctrine basically said in the event of ambiguity in terms of the interpretation of a statute, the administration, the agencies, should be able to determine that, and what, what that's done is create this situation of massive overreach. We have a similar situation in in Europe, you know, and we've got to remember in healthcare, all the laws that we deal with in the UK have been imported, lock, stock and barrel into into the UK. So they essentially are European laws. And everything around medicines and supplements have been really the architecture the original drafting was done by the UK because the medicines control agency that subsequently became the MHRA, the FDA of the UK, was for many years positioned side by side with the European Medicines Agency. It's only since Brexit that the EMA has moved across to Amsterdam, and MHRA has left. So if you look at the revolving doors that have existed between corporations and these agencies, whether they are UK, European or US agencies, that story has been told a 1000 times over, there have been whistle blowers, left, right and center. You only have to look at, you know, books such as, you know Marcia Angell, the ex editor of the New England Journal of Medicine to read about that. You can read Peter Gotchas book from 2013 that that is all about the corruption that that's killing people he and his, of course, Think,

Peter Williams  55:28

Do you think, because of where we're at, is making people and people who work in health care not trust the system or the research anymore, because that's sort of if I look at the one of the lines I use is that COVID means the public and people who work in healthcare may never trust government advice, good medicines or Research anymore, and I think that's where we're at. It's that

Rob Verkerk  56:05

trust. There's very clear evidence that trust in science is at an all time low. There's also very clear evidence that trust in governments is at an all time low. Now, rather than seeing that as a problem, I would tend to see it as a solution, because what it what it means, is that we can start to re Empower trust in the longest standing process that that leads to good health, which is the therapeutic relationship, the relationship between the doctor, the practitioner, and their patient or client, that that relationship has been dramatically weakened. It's always going to be weakened when you have public health getting in the way. So you have all the clinicians essentially looking over their shoulders waiting to see what the institutions would tell them that they can or can't say now that that does not act in the best interests of the patient, nor does it follow any of the four abiding principles of medical ethics that Beauchamp and Childress have addressed as the dominant paradigm used throughout the western world. These four principles being autonomy, allowing the patient, essentially, to be able to self determine, make their own informed choices. Secondly, beneficence, for the practitioner to engage in practices that do the maximum possible good to the patient. Maleficence, that's the doctrine of primum non nocere, do no harm. The Hippocratic Oath, trying to minimize you can't, of course, sometimes do no harm, but you can certainly minimize it. And the fourth principle, principle, which is justice. So, you know, these principles have actually been around for 1000s of years. We are doing a large body of work now to redevelop not only these principles, but principles around a whole range of areas, in healthcare that we really haven't had a public debate on. You know that they're just happening in the same way that the Internet of Things, the development of AI is just happening. There's a steamroller going on. There is no way the public can stop it. It's happening, and we see a similar process occurring in the development of of medical approaches. The application of AI to health is not something that the public has been involved in at all. The arrival of mRNA technologies and platforms. I'm actually not opposed to the principle of it at all, because, you know, for example, if a loved one of mine developed a specific cancer and it was possible to develop a an immune response, you've got to understand that cancer is a failure in the immune response, and it can obviously also have a metabolic origin, and you know, we see this accumulation mutations and all these other downstream effects. But essentially, if the immune system was able to deal with cancer cells at an earlier stage because you could prime it to a specific antigen that was produced through using mRNA technology. I wouldn't say no to it, and I believe in the principle of informed choice. What I say no to is the idea of an mRNA platform being used indiscriminately on huge sectors of the population, and then the data, if you like, the pharmacovigilance data being concealed from public view, the only way in which we've been able to view any of that is is through the Twitter files, through freedom of information requests that have forced Pfizer to reveal data that the government has been sitting on. That's not right. So we need transparency. And again, that's a big part of Bobby Kennedy's remit. Rob

Peter Williams  1:00:20

I look at that and again, given how complicated things are, so I think either is that because they are trying to intentionally shield the population, or is it the fact that governments don't want to go, do you know what? We hold our hands up. We did our best, but our best wasn't good enough. And yeah, these vaccines maybe were developed too quickly. We didn't know the side effects, and we didn't inform you. So again, I sort of go back to the the process and the wheels were far too much in action for them to take a step back and say, Hang on a sec we've

Rob Verkerk  1:01:10

Yeah, I, my my concern would be, is, why did they then ask to Keep those data confidential for 75 years, which reflects pretty much the useful lifespan of a human being. My My sense is that that wouldn't have been the case.

Peter Williams  1:01:30

Well, what I'm trying to say on that is that do that it makes sense to me that that scientists and governments would have gone into this situation going, listen, here's our best shot, but we don't have the data to suggest how well this is going to pan out. And you know, that's the best we've got. You and I know that as you say, healthcare and medicine is that, I mean, even you know, you could say anything, rob you could, you could look at a sort of type two diabetics. And you know, every single type two diabetic you're going to see is going to come in with a unique presentation, and you're not sure whether you can solve their issue for a whole host of things. Things are incredibly complex, and I wonder whether that was part of the reason why, as I said to you, they've hidden things because they knew that it was they are trying to hide it from there, because if it came out, it would have been too much for everyone. I

Rob Verkerk  1:02:31

think there's a there's an element where, and you will know this as a clinician, that if you develop, develop and offer a very complex multi factorial strategy and tell people, Look, there's 20, 30/40, things that you need to do. You know, as Dale Bredesen has tried to do with with Alzheimer's, it's very difficult for people to be able to implement. And if you come up with a mono therapeutic strategy and say, Guys, forget everything else, we're going to have this magic bullet called an mRNA vaccine that so I understand that simplicity can be helpful. However, what I would say is that if you look at the attack on anything to do with natural immunity, that that which we saw right at the very beginning, they were basically saying there is no such thing as natural immunity, which is the science does not I mean, you can look at any, you know, review paper looking at how we respond to a new pathogen. And you know, it's very, very clear that innate immunity is critical. You know, your your ability to be able to bounce this thing out of your system before it starts replicating is pretty helpful if you have to only rely on your adaptive immune system, which takes, you know, around about a week to be able to get the antibodies and the T cells into place to respond specifically to it. You've lost a lot of time. There's six days in which replication can go on. And of course, nature has created an immune system that has these multiple facets. And in fact, it's probably incorrect to divide the immune system into the innate and adaptive parts as if they were separate, because they work so closely together, and so you know, to vitamin D and vitamin A status are critical to the function of the innate immune system, and they were anyone who was talking either vitamin D vitamin A early on was immediately. Um, you know, attacked and marginalized. Isn't that

Peter Williams  1:05:03

interesting, though? Again, this is what I couldn't understand. And this is where it started to give that I don't like, I don't like the feel of this, because, as I say, there was, there was, there was two Spanish studies. One was a an emergency, ITU, and the whole thing about what we were trying to do. And I think whether or not this is it, is this because the government knew on these studies and they just needed to just push them and suppress them, or was it that they were just ignorant of the way we should be looking at human health and medicine that, as you know, vitamin D influences 1000s of genes, and we had studies to show that if you gave high dose vitamin D when people came into the ITU, you would see 76% reduction in ITU stay. And of course, the whole point of what we were trying to do on lockdown was make sure that the NHS wasn't going to get overwhelmed, and yet they were completely ignored. Yeah, well,

Rob Verkerk  1:06:05

I think there's, there's wheels within wheels, and where the rubber really meets the road is, is there's a small group of people determining policy, and those people all knew that if they were going to suggest that that there was something as simple and cheap as a vitamin that would effectively act as a competitor for this soon to arrive warp speed produced mRNA vaccine, they would have a problem getting the registration through under emergency use authorization, so they they had to suppress it, and they couldn't make it generally part of public health policy. I mean, we've traveled extensively around the world, you know, during the COVID pandemic, working with different medical groups. And, you know, for example, in Brazil, there were a group of 18,000 doctors who were doing all this stuff, they were they were using largely natural therapeutic techniques with ivermectin thrown in, getting incredible results and getting away with it under the Bolsonaro government. But when the regime changed, bang, the whole thing was shut down. So it's and in fact, some of them have suffered some very severe consequences in terms of losing their licenses. Worse than that. And

Peter Williams  1:07:32

this really sort of rubs into the fact that, particularly public health care isn't essentially wrong. Well, I won't say everything, but isn't essentially run based on best science. Would that be? I

Rob Verkerk  1:07:48

think that's exactly it, and that that's my one of my passions is, is to see the reinstatement of the real scientific method that you know the principles of it is that you, you you make an observation, you generally the hypothesis is fueled by an observation or part of a system that's been seen. And you get an idea, a hypothesis, and then you test that experimentally, and obviously, with with a medication, you're testing it clinically, and then you publish those findings in a peer review process. Of course, peer review process was, was concertinered during COVID, so there wasn't a proper peer review we had all the preprints going out, but the idea of that peer review process in the methodology. And that's another thing I've seen breaking down of late. There should be enough information in the methodology for someone to reproduce an identical experiment, and generally there isn't any longer and so that

Peter Williams  1:08:59

Why do you think that is because, isn't that the whole point about, Okay, this looks like this may be positive for whatever. Let's and if, and if it is what it is, other labs or other researchers will be able to take that and they'll be able to reproduce it exactly, and should get the same results. Well,

Rob Verkerk  1:09:20

we you see what, what we see is, is people contesting that, because there's, there's some base information in there, but there's not enough to completely characterize all parts of that experimental design. So when someone else then does something that uses the same ingredient or the same medication, it's viewed as not being directly comparable, which is why you see now in these meta analyses some real distortion. Because actually, if you look at the forest plot results that come out of them, they're throwing a whole lot of apples and oranges and pears together. They're not. Looking at apples against apples. So the whole situation becomes messier and messier, and what ends up winning the day are the people who've done the largest study, which are the people who've received the largest amounts of money that generally come from pharmaceutical sources, which is why pharmaceutical research predominates. But once you publish that research, not only should it be reproduced by others, we then should enter this incredibly important process of discourse, and again, stunningly, because of this control over so called misinformation, the principal anyone who dissented, you know, dissent is at Imperial College we used to one Friday every month as postdocs, we would have to, we'd take it in terms to present to all the academic staff and other postdocs. So we could all try and rip the person who was presenting to shreds. You put put yourself in a hostile environment. If you can survive that, you know whatever comes out of the system is going to be something that that pertains to what we think of is scientific truth and and that system broke down.

Peter Williams  1:11:22

It was getting ripped to shreds for the greater good of everyone. Though, there was a positive purpose about, you know, getting ripped apart. It was, it was getting ripped apart because you were trying to either prove yay or nay to a process that was going to be beneficial to people correct. We do that anymore. It just seems that we've got two sides and never should mix anymore. And I think that's where we've been left, which I think is in, you know, I think about, well, let's assume that there's something new that comes up where we have to develop, or what you think about, how many people now will not take incredibly well established vaccines that have 50 years worth of research on them to say that generally these sort of good things. And I think that's the long term that I see. I think, wow, you know, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be harmed because maybe of the the situation that we've had over the last five years,

Rob Verkerk  1:12:21

trust, trust has broken down. You know, beyond belief. I actually never thought it would get to the state. But again, to draw up the comment you just made, what one of the and looking at apples versus apples, what we've got to remember is that the the vaccines that original research was done on are not necessarily identical to the ones that are used today. You know, we've seen in the 1980s the arrival recombinant DNA technology. You know, HPV was then one of the first mass produced recombinant technology vaccines. We now see the arrival of the mRNA platform, we see veterinary vaccines, you know, veterinary profession being used as a test bed for potential future vaccines. So the work on DTP in Sub Saharan Africa that Dr Peter Aaby has published extensively working with the WHO reflects what happens when those platforms change. And he's seen a situation when, if you look at the 40 year plus longitudinal study that he's been involved in with DTP, you see a sudden shift when they shifted to recombinant DNA technology, whereby it appears that the DTP vaccinated groups, particularly young girls, undergo higher mortality than those that were unvaccinated. And that wasn't the case. It was definitely protective prior to that time. So I've looked at his data in some detail, and I've had the opportunity of meeting him, and again, his big frustration, one of the reason reasons that he's, you know, moved towards Peter Gotzsche as the co founder of Cochrane, who's also been pushed out after he was critical some of the science of HPV vaccines, he's saying, Look, we just we want transparency, and we see a definite safety signal here. We brought it to the attention of the WHO and they're mute on it. And all he's able to say is, there's something about the politics that means that this is not being communicated to the for the greater good. So we you can't separate politics from health care anymore, and whenever we're looking at issues on a global scale, as we are with the potential arrival of possibility of a human variant of H5N1 bird flu at the moment in the US. You know, it's on the cards, and we need to be super I mean, my hope is that we learn from the many, many errors that occurred during COVID Some of those, I think, were genuine errors, and others were affected by this process by which certain vested interests and special interests have undue amounts of control over public health policy

Peter Williams  1:15:40

Rob we are an hour and a half already in, and this, it feels like 10 minutes. This could go on for hours. And I knew this because, say, I've known you for over 20 years, and I thought at some stage I'm going to get Rob on, and I knew this was going to happen, so I'm going to ask you to come on again when I can get you because I know you're a busy guy. But how do we summarize this, the person in the street who you know, genuinely wants to look after their health, and may, may have that inkling I think the key thing is, is that the particularly, probably the public health messages, maybe aren't validated in the best just the best available science, what would you what would be your what would be the tips that alliance and sort of natural health gives to the man and woman industry?

Rob Verkerk  1:16:30

I would say, stop thinking that there's someone else, whether it's in a corporation or whether it's a government is going to give you the magic pill that's going to resolve your health conditions that the power of healing is contained within each one of us, even when a pharmaceutical or a Green Medicine has its effect, it normally has its effect by pushing the body towards better self healing. So this trying to improve your propensity to self healing has got to be the start to dealing with any condition, and the simplest way of starting that journey is to engage in activities and behaviors that are associated with our evolutionary background, because pretty much all of the conditions that we suffer from today are linked to either maladaptation to our environment and culture or to a disconnection from the natural systems with which we've co evolved. So if we can reconnect with those systems. So, you know, something as as simple as being active. You know, many times I know we've we've broken my own rule, I try not to go more than an hour without jumping up and doing something crazy, but you know to make sure you never sit down for longer than an hour before doing a burst of, say, two or three minutes of activity to try and eat foods that are foods that you recognize, that are colorful, that come from natural sources, that are minimally, if not entirely, unprocessed, that are made in your own home, that you sit down to eat, those foods in a calm environment where you're not exposed to BBC or CNN or any other bad news that you engage in, in conversation, you engage in humor, that you sit down with some candle light and some nice music. These are all really important things to do, because our behaviors are so strongly correlated with our health. I

Peter Williams  1:19:04

think that's a brilliant place to end. Rob such a pleasure pal. I really appreciate you and Mel for organizing everything. I would love to have you back on at some stage. There's just so much here that we could dig into. And I think, I think really, really important to you know, this is we have to take, we have to take responsibility for our health. And maybe, you know, the public health messages aren't, maybe the messages they were 50 years ago, and we've got to do the basics. Well, I think is how you summarize it.

Rob Verkerk  1:19:45

Pete it's been an absolute pleasure talking with you. And of course, I'd love to come on. I'm off to the states shortly for about another month, but happy to talk to you anytime. And thank you for all the work that you do. A

Peter Williams  1:19:57

pleasure mate, I will hold you that. Thanks so much. Rob. So we don't.