Bret speaks with Dr. Lon Jones, DO on the subject of the mismatch between modern humans and the environment they live in. Find Dr. Lon Jones, DO at https://commonsensemedicine.org ***** Join DarkHorse on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams, and early access to many podcasts: https://darkhorse.locals.com Check out the DHP store! Epic tabby, digital book burning, saddle up the dire wolves, and more: https://www.darkhorsestore.or...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast Inside Rail.
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting this afternoon with Dr. Lon Jones, whose company is Common Sense Medicine and has written a book by that same title as well as another book called Make America Healthy Again.
I believe he may in fact be the originator of that phrase.
In any case, Dr. Jones, welcome to Dark Horse.
Glad to be here.
Nice to meet you.
It's very good to meet you.
I should tell our audience, since your son, Nate Jones, has been on the program, talked about five carbon sugars.
I have, in fact, been using the product Clear, and I'm one person.
I can't exactly say whether I've just been lucky with respiratory infections since I started using it, but I have had only one very minor infection, so potentially it's good stuff, which we will talk about why it might be.
How often and how long have you used Clear?
That's a good question, and I'm often terrible with such questions.
It's been, I think, something like a year.
So I've been through a winter where I typically would have had several infections, and as I said, I had one very minor run-in with something.
But anyway, we'll get into the discussion of five carbon sugars.
I have lots of questions about it, and you're just the man to tell me the answers.
But from the point of view of orienting the audience, your book, Common Sense Medicine, is about the mismatch between modern humans and the environment that they live in and the effect of that mismatch on health, which I presume you don't know that Heather and I, Heather being my wife, and I have written a book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, in which we coin a concept we call hypernovelty.
And hypernovelty is the idea that when the rate of change is fast to the point that you can't evolutionarily keep up with it, the consequence is to make you sick at every conceivable level, from psychological to physiological to social, and that that is, in fact, what we are experiencing.
And my sense, having looked at your book, is that actually these are parallel concepts.
We may be trafficking in exactly the same area, and I'm interested to hear your perspective on modern humans and the state of their health.
You're an evolutionary biologist.
That is correct.
Evolution is in three stages.
There's change, there is fitness criteria, and there is reproduction.
The change, we don't have much of a handle on because change happens.
And reproduction, we don't have much of a handle on it because that's a social phenomena or an evolutionary phenomena that just happens because of the fitness criteria.
The fitness criteria in medicine today and in our society is profit.
And profit goes wild.
That's why it's so rich in things that we can In things that change, because lots of things make a profit.
But profit is not evolutionary.
That's human introduction.
The thing that evolution is based on, traditional evolution, is survival.
And people are talking about strategy for what we can do to make our society better.
The primary thing we can do to make our society better is to go back to survival and look at survival.
Applying that to health care suggests that the Food and Drug Administration and their safety protocols don't rely on the drug companies to tell you that it's safe, but have our universities do generational studies, at least four, in simple animals that reproduce often.
We're looking at survival.
And if it goes four generations and survives, that's safe.
If nothing else happens in the process, then you're looking at offspring health, you're looking at behavioral patterns, you're looking at all the other aspects in the survival of those animals.
I think that would do a lot to change our healthcare system.
All right.
I want to try to...
And then I'm going to throw you a curveball that I'm pretty sure you're not going to see coming.
What you've said, with which I agree, is that we have a proxy for fitness in our current system.
That proxy is profit.
And that unfortunately, it's a very poor proxy for the success of our medical practices and our pharmaceutical products.
But there are lots of things that can make a profit that aren't good for you.
And in fact, we have many positive feedbacks in our system where if one drug makes you sick, then it provides a market for a second drug that treats the side effects.
So there are lots of perverse incentives.
Profit as a measure for whether what we did was actually successful because it's such a terrible measure.
What you are proposing instead of that system is one that I think intuitively is right.
That if we said, look, you don't want to give something to people that isn't going to make them healthier in the end, and we need to know what the long-term impact is, so we should take animals like mice and expose them.
To a treatment and check over the course of four generations as to whether or not the ones that were treated do better than the ones that weren't.
And in any case that they've done better, that we would have good reason to think that that was probably a positive intervention.
And in any case where they did worse, we don't even necessarily need to know why they did worse.
We just simply need to know that the net effect was negative.
Right.
Okay.
And don't use it.
Don't give it to people.
Here is the curveball you're not going to see coming.
When I was a graduate student, I did a project.
It was not what I was supposed to be working on, but I became fascinated by the question of why human beings grow feeble and inefficient with age, a process that you know we call senescence.
And the reason that I was fascinated by it was that there was a famous paper by George Williams, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, that argued that the reason that we Senes is that genes in the genome are condemned to do multiple things and that any time you have a gene that does something that makes you more robust in youth at some cost later in life,
selection will tend to accumulate that gene because many individuals may not live to experience the late life cost and so therefore it is considered a bargain in evolutionary terms.
We knew that that paper was right because it made many predictions that we could test in the field, but nobody had ever found a gene that matched this theory of antagonistic pleiotropy.
Pleiotropy meaning, explaining to the audience, that when a gene has multiple effects.
So what I became interested in was the fact that people over in the study of cancer had recognized that all tumors they were looking at produced an enzyme I think you're
wanting to turn it down and my thought was I think you're looking at a pleiotropy.
My guess is The benefit is that it prevents you from getting cancer, and the downside is it forces you to grow feeble with age because you can't fully repair your tissues.
That was the idea I was working on.
Here's the problem.
It was well known at the time, this would have been in the late 90s, it was well known at the time, That the system that limits the number of cellular reproductions is called a telomere.
That's a repetitive sequence of genes at the end of a chromosome.
That it reduces every time a cell divides, and when it gets critically short, the cell doesn't divide anymore.
And the question is, is that system related to the process of aging?
And there was doubt about that because mice were known to have extremely long telomeres.
And so it was thought...
Why do they have longer telomeres than humans?
And what I realized, what I predicted, was that if we look at wild mice, they won't have long telomeres.
The long telomeres would be the result of the conditions in the breeding colonies that had produced the mice, which turned out to be true.
This was tested by Carol Greider and Mike Heeman.
They discovered that mice that had been captive for a much shorter period of time had much shorter telomeres.
Therefore, what people had long thought they knew, which was that mice had long telomeres, that that was false.
Now, here's the problem.
When I realized what was going on, that the breeding colonies had elongated the telomeres of the mice and given their cells the capacity to reproduce many, many times where they wouldn't ordinarily have been in nature, It made those animals very prone to cancer.
And if you extrapolate from that, it turns out that when we use these animals in drug safety testing, if you give them something toxic, it actually functions like chemotherapy.
These animals are all going to die of cancer.
That's a quirk of what we've done to these laboratory mice.
They all die of cancer because their telomeres are so long.
So when you give them a poison, the rule, I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but the rule in treating cancer is that you want to kill the tumor faster than you kill the patient.
That's what chemotherapy does.
And the reason that this works is that because cancer cells are always dividing, their DNA is separated a large fraction of the time.
They're vulnerable.
So poisons tend to poison tumors faster than they poison the patient.
The upshot of this is, in drug safety testing, we frequently see the pattern that some drug that is being tested for safety actually makes the test animals live longer than they would live otherwise.
And the reason is because it is preventing their tumors from growing as fast as they would otherwise have grown.
So, if you take what you opened with, you say, here's how you test whether or not a drug is actually good for you.
You give it to these animals for four generations, see if they live longer, and my feeling is, That's a great idea if we hadn't broken the mice.
What do you think?
So, I'm glad we're not lab-trained mice.
You and me both.
Yeah, so why that happens?
Boy, I'll think on that.
Okay, so, I mean, I guess I will just say, I think you are thematically correct.
That what we need is a proxy that's very good, and that a proxy that involves looking at animals with short life cycles over several generations is much better than profit.
And maybe we need to look at what happens to their telomeres, too.
Well, maybe what we need to do is stop using mice with long telomeres for drug safety testing, which has always been a mistake.
Because I realize I'm talking a lot here, and I wish that wasn't the case.
Unfortunately, it's a complicated story.
These animals that have these long telomeres are effectively perfectly constructed to mislead us into believing that poisonous drugs are safe.
Because they give these animals the capacity to repair damage at a level that humans can't.
It's the same kind of thing that Bill Costerton, are you familiar with him?
No.
He's the father of biofilm.
And most people know about biofilm.
Biofilms are the protective devices that microbes build when they are assaulted with our antibiotics, with any other threat that they can identify.
And they take their glycocalyx, the covering of microbes, the covering of our cells, and they make a...
And when that happens in a human being, you have a chronic infection situation that you treat with antibiotics, the microbes go back into their biofilm, safe house.
And when the antibiotic wears off, they go out and cause another infection.
Recurrent ear infections are mostly biofilm origin.
But, you know, you have to deal with that problem when you're a doctor.
And that's one of the things that we're able to do better with the use of the 5-carbon sugar xylitol.
Because that interferes with the binding of the biofilm.
To itself.
To itself.
Or to whatever its foundation is.
Costerton came with that idea by looking at streams.
Fresh-running streams are very free of bacteria.
But if you go down to the rocks on the bottom, they're all this film coating.
That's the biofilm.
So they're full of microbes, just not in the water.
Fascinating.
Now, let me ask you a couple questions that I have had since I talked to Nate about xylitol.
He suggested, and you tell me if I've misunderstood him, that our relationship with five carbon sugars is an ancient one, and it has been disrupted.
That, you know, certainly when I learned...
Tell me what the real story of 5-carbon sugars is, how we should be encountering them, and why we're not.
Xylose is the 5-carbon sugar that is standard.
Xylose is plant sugar.
Plants are constructed.
From chains and polymers of xylose.
And you make xylitol from xylose by adding another hydrogen atom.
That breaks the ring that is xylose chemically.
It makes a ring that is stable in its form, which you need and want for its construction.
And when you add another hydrogen atom, it breaks that ring, so xylitol is flexible.
That's a real benefit to a five-carbon sugar.
It's a sugar that makes it into a sugar alcohol.
So it has some alcohol effects just because of that one hydroxide molecule, the OH, that is there that makes it flexible.
And we'll talk about that more later.
That's the foundation.
And the healthy things we need in our digestive system are plants.
And they're xylose.
So we need to be able to digest those five-carbon sugars.
And eating plant-based, which we're told to do now, plant-based diet, that makes more.
Bacteria in your GI tract that can digest five carbon sugars and make six carbon sugars that we need as animals because glucose is the xylose of the animal kingdom.
So hold on.
I need you to educate me here a little bit more.
And feel free to correct anything that my education or my understanding of it got wrong.
Six carbon sugars are what we process.
Six carbon sugars in their simple form Are sweet things and we also take them in as chains in starches.
You know something like a potato or rice or something like this.
You're saying five carbon sugars are plant sugars but obviously starches and fructose and glucose are coming from plants as well.
So are our diets deficient in five carbon sugars?
Dr. Likely because fruits and Let's talk about fruits in the ancient diet.
Okay.
Because they were there in season.
And fruits are very prominent in 5-carbon sugars.
And especially xylose.
But all other plants are very rich in xylose.
And some of them with xylitol.
Xylitol.
Let me tell you my story.
My wife was a special ed teacher.
Our granddaughter, Heather.
Her oldest granddaughter is Heather.
My oldest granddaughter is Heather.
So Heather is a pretty common name right here.
Anyway, she started having recurrent ear infections.
And Jerry knew from looking at her special ed class that the kids who were deficient in language and learning problems were also the kids that had chronic ear infections when they were babies.
So she knew there was a connection.
And much later, we talked with Jerry Klein, who co-wrote the textbook on otitis media, ear infections.
And at the end of that dinner, He looked at me and he said, "You tell everybody that you talk to that this Jerry agrees with your Jerry." So the agreement was about chronic ear infections causing learning problems.
So if you're threatened with a child with chronic ear infections, you need to start using something like Clear in the nose.
Four times a day, preferably every time you change the diaper, and you won't have any more ear infections.
And your child will have a much better chance of learning language because the learning window for language extends from about six months gestation to about two years.
And if you're getting ear infections, they affect the feedback so you can develop a speech pathology.
Because every infection is associated with fluid in your middle ear.
That gets thicker the longer it's there, and it interferes with the movement of the bones in your middle ear.
And that fluid is one of these biofilms?
I don't know if that's the fluid, but it's the fluid that you secrete to wash out an infection.
That's a normal process.
But it does turn, the English call it gluier.
That's an accurate term.
Okay, so I still need to know No, it's all right.
I still want to know, can we process a five-carbon sugar?
Can we break it down and extract energy from it?
Yes.
We can.
You can turn it into glucose.
You can.
Well, you can turn it into glucose, which is a six-carbon sugar, but you can't process it directly.
Is that what you're telling me?
Well, that's an enzymatic process in our liver, mostly.
Got it.
Okay.
So, fruits have a lot of xylitol.
Xylitol is the alcohol form.
And alcohol, for the audience's benefit, is basically just the chemical state of having an OH, an oxygen, and a hydrogen.
It's not intoxicating.
Right.
So, the five carbon sugars have been common in our ancestral diet.
You're arguing for a supplementation of 5-carbon sugars to ward off infections.
I still am not entirely clear if that's because of a deficit in the modern diet or because augmenting beyond what the ancestral diet would have had is a benefit.
I'm not sure it has much at all to do with diet.
Okay.
The rationale for my action came from sugar studies in Finland.
And back in the early 70s, they did the Turku sugar studies.
A group of dentists in Turku looked at what happened out in World War II when Finland was blockaded and couldn't get sugar.
They made xylitol out of their birch bark.
They have a lot of birch trees.
And when the war ended, they noticed that people were getting more infections again and more dental decay.
So they did the sugar study in Turku.
They divided the community of 200 people into sugar, fructose, and xylitol.
And they looked at their teeth at the beginning, and then they looked at their teeth after two years on those diets.
There was a whole lot of increased tooth decay in the sugar, less in the fructose, none in the xylitol.
In fact, teeth had gotten better and stronger.
So, profit-oriented people said, "How can we market this?" And they chose gum.
Years later, they started chewing gum in school to prevent tooth decay.
And then mothers started noticing that their kids had less ear infections.
Matty Uhari did a study in his group in Oulu, Finland, did a study looking at what happened to these kids, and he winded it with regular chewing gum and xylitol chewing gum.
Found that the kids that were chewing the xylitol chewing gum had 40% less ear infections.
When I read that, a week after, my wife told me if you really cared about kids, you'd find a way to prevent ear infections.
Went home, told her we need to get some gum with xylitol on a baby that's six months old.
That didn't work.
So they said that it works on the bacteria and the bacteria that cause their infections reside in your nose.
So I went down to the health food store and bought some xylitol and put a teaspoon in a bottle of saline nasal spray and gave it to mom and dad and said every time you change your diaper, hold her up, spray her nose, lay her down so it runs to the back of the nose where it's effective.
And I did that same process on 10 kids in my practice, and their infections dropped by 95%.
So it's easy to do.
It's something you can do at home.
Just do what I did.
Five grams or a teaspoon of xylitol in a bottle of saline nasal spray, and you've got clear.
Okay, so sounds to me like the answer is the ultimate story of why...
And what is the range of conditions for which this is preventative?
Well, it works on two elements.
And the most common Easily understood is that xylitol is an osmotic agent.
It pulls water into it.
So if you eat a lot of xylitol, you're going to have runny stools.
Or it'll keep you regular if you don't eat too much of it.
And you can play with that.
So it's pulling water out of your system.
Pulling water out of your system into the GI tract.
Yeah.
Does the same thing in the nose.
Arendelle did a study that primarily explained the benefits of humidity in terms of what it did to the microbes and the agents that cause our problems in our nose.
That was in 1986, and he was looking at the mechanics of it.
But if you look at his chart, which your people have, It speaks loudly to me as this is what's necessary for our defense to work properly.
And that fluid that was in the atmosphere that we breathe goes into our airway surface fluid in our nose and in our pharynx and in our trachea.
And that airway surface fluid is what provides the water for the mucus and a volume.
Or a space for the cilia to sweep.
If you're deficient in that, which we as a nation are because we breathe inside air that is air-conditioned, cooled, and heated, where the humidity is usually much less than 50%.
So, pay attention to the humidity in your environment.
And if you need to, go spend more time outside.
Because outside where you have some trees, the humidity is generally higher and most of the time healthy.
So the trees are putting out water in the process of respiration.
For those who haven't been through it, the issue with indoor humidity is at least greatly exacerbated by modernity.
Absolutely.
Because what we do in the winter is basically the amount you've all...
Humidity is relative to what the air can hold, but the amount of water the air can hold scales with temperature.
So in the winter, the amount of water the air can hold to get to 50% of that relative humidity is much lower.
But if you take that air circulating outside that's had its humidity reduced because it can only hold so much in its cold form, you bring it indoors and then you heat it, the relative humidity is...
And that's why we have flu season.
That's a big part of it in any case.
Another part of it is the reduced exposure to the sun which causes deficits of vitamin D. So this is actually a great lesson in the consequences of Modernity for human health.
You've got a reduction in vitamin D below what you would normally have because you're living indoors, because you can't make it in the winter, so you're living farther north maybe than you would be or farther south.
You're wearing lots of clothes to stay warm, which are blocking any sunlight for a great many months of the year.
That makes you vulnerable.
And then you have this radically reduced humidity as a result of our control in the climate inside.
You're basically setting yourself up for disease in the winter.
Right.
Also, you're concentrated in the winter with other people in close proximity because you're spending more time indoors.
So it's like a recipe for disaster.
So what's the solution?
You tell me.
Using an osmotic agent to pull water into your nose to reproduce that same environment that you get from breathing 50% humidity.
Okay, so tell me if I've got this right.
You're using an osmotic agent.
To get the body to shed water into your sinuses.
Your airway surfaces.
Your airway surfaces.
So you're basically creating a chamber inside your body where the humidity is being driven up by this process.
Right.
Okay.
And Higher humidity results in pathogens being less effective at invading our tissues.
Am I also correct in understanding...
Second, works osmotically, that's simple, easy to understand.
The second way it works was described early by the people that did the study with chewing gum in Finland.
They took cells from our nose, microbes that cause ear infections, and divided them into two pots, one with thylitol and one without.
And then they put them together.
So you have four containers, one with both xylitol on the cells and the microbes, one with xylitol on the microbes but not the cells, and one on the cells and without the microbes.
Did I say that wrong?
Anyway, you understand.
And what they found was that when they exposed both, either or, That it decreased the adherence of the microbes, mostly strep pneumo, which is the predominant cause of ear infections.
But it did it a little bit for the other two, Moraxella and Haemophilus.
Why did it do that?
And they thought that it was because xylitol is a five-carbon sugar.
Many bacteria cannot eat.
Five carbon sugars.
And they show that in the laboratory.
Well, showing that in the laboratory is easy to do, but you certainly can't reproduce it in a natural environment because there's always six carbon sugars that they can have access to.
What it told me was that this is affecting the adherence mechanism of the microbes because you put it on the cells.
We put it on the microbes.
Either way, it helps retard the ability of adherence.
And that's what the bottom line was.
When you have both of them, adherence was dropped substantially.
And when you have either one, it was a mix.
There was a little bit better when it was on the cell.
So, that says, It's not their failure to digest the 5-carbon sugars.
That doesn't explain their results.
It's blocking the adherence.
It's blocking the adherence.
Now, what's the adherence mechanism?
That led me to Nathan Sherwin, who did the studies looking at E. coli, the pathogenic E. coli that women...
That microbe binds to another sugar called mannose.
It's a lectin on the microbe that hangs onto mannose, and mannose molecules are prevalent in the vagina and the urinary tract.
So, what did Nathan Sharon start arguing for?
He said, "If you eat mannose, if you put that in your diet, You're giving E. coli in our GI tract something to bind with other than you, and you'll wash them out if you keep using that, and you won't have any more urinary infections.
Now, alternative doctors read that, and they recommend it, but you can't make any money at it because manos is a sugar.
And it's natural, and you can't patent it and control it.
So, regular medicine's not interested.
It's not in our evolutionary fitness category.
So, forgive me if I'm off track here, but there are certainly some things that people with urinary tract infections are advised to consume.
Pomegranate juice, am I right there?
Is that because it has mannose?
That's an alternative sugar that is a glycan, and we haven't talked about glycans, but Glycans are important.
And we will get there.
And mannose is a glycan.
But you can buy mannose and use it.
And we should, as we'll get into.
But that's an idea, and that led me to thinking in terms of xylitol, because xylose is also one of the glycans.
It's lower down usually on the chain of glycans that extends out of our cells, but it's still close enough and being flexible, it can interfere with those in competitive inhibition of process in medicine.
That we know about because, you know, things can compete.
Like one of the more common ones is ferritin that binds with the iron that microbes need.
So it's useful in a lot of drugs to Yeah, block their iron access.
So let me ask you a question.
I missed a step here.
The competitive inhibition was with glycans and microbes?
Yes.
Okay, so where is the active site that's being competed for?
On the glycans.
On the glycans, being competed for between what things?
Well, the adherence mechanism is glycan to glycan.
Sugar to sugar.
Sugars bind with each other.
So, okay, I now think I know what you're telling me.
Yeah.
The glycans are basically creating some kind of a lattice.
Yes.
And the xylitol effectively binds to some of the sites where the glycans would bind each other and prevents that lattice from being formed.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay.
Now, the lattice...
He had, according to one article that I read, it was his obituary, said that he had this insight while he was in a hotel in Denmark that he wrote about in this article.
And the article's entitled How Bacteria Stick.
It's in Scientific American, January 1979.
Back when Scientific American was a science publication.
Yeah.
And what he said, what he described in it, and I've talked to several of his apostles, the people that are still doing his work.
They say that article is about biofilm that he spent his life talking about.
There's nothing about biofilm in that article.
It's about the glycocalyx that our bodies have covering any protein that we make.
And microbes are in the same condition.
Except he points out early in that article that I've tried to validate in a variety of ways.
He says lab mice or lab microbes Do not have a glycocalyx.
Like your rats or mice that have long telomeres because of whatever we do to feed them and to keep them.
It's how we breed them that does it.
Okay, so you're telling me that lab microbes are distorted.
They're not like wild microbes in that they've lost their glycans?
Yes.
Wow.
There is a group at Michigan State that has been looking at E. coli.
For like 50 years and how they evolved.
And I wrote them asking them if their E. coli had glycans.
They're glycocalyx.
And I never got an answer.
I wrote them in email and I wrote them at U.S. Postal Service.
And nothing.
So I don't know whether that's still the case today.
I asked them if they did or if they didn't.
And if they didn't, why didn't they?
Because wild E. coli are covered with glycocalyx.
Wow.
The glycocalyx are long chains of nine sugar complexes and sugars.
And they're different sugars like we don't talk about or we don't know about.
And the clearest explanation of their usefulness is probably in our blood type.
Because we have basically three different types of blood: O, A, AB.
And that determination is made by the terminal glycans on red blood cells.
And you better give the right kind of blood or else it'll be destroyed by our immune system.
Alright, well there are a bunch of things I want to follow up on there.
I'm very interested in the blood group issues which are always taught sort of empirically but they're never taught in an evolutionary way that makes any sense to me.
So maybe you know something about that that I don't and I'd like to know what it is.
But let's go back to what I think is a mind-blowing insight, if it's true, that we're studying microbes.
That have been distorted by whatever we're doing to breed them in captivity into a state where they're going to mislead us because they're not behaving in a natural way.
They've lost their glycans.
Do you have any idea?
I think I ultimately figured out why the mice had their telomeres elongated, and it's because we were breeding young animals and not giving them long enough in the breeding colonies to die of cancer.
So that unbalanced a trade-off and elongated the telomeres.
Do you have any idea?
That's evolutionary-wise.
It's a tragedy in its consequences, but it's a fascinating process.
Do you have any idea what happened to the glycans in the laboratory microbes?
No, I don't.
But the glycocalyx is evolutionary expense.
Right, so you would dispense with it if it wasn't doing you any good.
Okay.
And if they breed?
Actually, you know, even brothers and sisters are the same.
Right.
So effectively, if I get you correctly, because you've got a colony in which you're going to breed out any diversity very quickly, everything's a clone of everything else, then there's no point in investing in competition.
And so to the extent that the glycoproteins or the glycans are...
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
Well, that's fascinating and troubling.
Mostly troubling.
Mostly troubling.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's go back to blood groups and glycans.
As you understand it, what is the meaning?
We have a locus in our genomes that has three possible states.
A, B, and neither.
And if your O, if your blood type is O, you have neither A nor B in either of the two spots where you can have it.
If you have A and O, or A and A, then you're A. If you have A and B, you're AB.
And if you have B and O, or B and B, Then you're B. So that's your AB blood type.
And then there's the second locus, which is the RH factor.
RH comes from rhesus monkeys, I think.
And you either have it or you don't.
You're RH positive or negative.
So if you're O positive, you have neither A nor B, but you do have the RH factor, etc.
Okay.
What is For example, your likelihood of contracting something like COVID varied by blood type somewhat.
What is the evolutionary story behind these blood groups?
Do you know?
I don't.
Okay.
I was hoping you'd solve that mystery for me.
No, I don't.
I don't know when that happened in our evolutionary history, and I don't know the
You know, they try and find genetic evidence for a lot of diseases, and what they come up with is a multiplicity of genes that help contribute to just about everything.
Well, that is easy to explain, because if you had simple genes that Predisposed you to a disease, selection would see them very clearly and get rid of them.
The only cases where that wouldn't be true is when there was a benefit to those genes that was greater in magnitude than the cost of the vulnerability to the disease.
And clouded by its benefits.
Right.
So basically what we're left with is vague associations in multi-gene complexes, and the rest of it is environmental differences.
Which is exactly what you would expect.
I don't know why we keep looking for these simple gene causes because they're not going to be there in most cases.
But let's go back to the issue of the glycans and the xylitol, which you say is a glycan, right?
Well, I call it a glycan mime.
A glycan mime.
All right.
Like a mimic?
Yeah.
Okay.
Or a decoy.
A decoy.
Which is exactly consistent with what you've said about being a competitive inhibitor.
competitive inhibitor in the traditional textbook way we describe this.
If you have an enzyme that has a site on it in which two molecules are going to land and then be induced to bind, if you have something that has the same shape as fits that site, it will It outcompetes them.
So when you say it's a mimic of a glycan, what that means is where glycans would be doing some job on behalf of a microbe, for example, the xylitol is similar enough that it interferes with that process.
There is one nice thing about that.
Okay.
That Costerton in his 1979 article introduces, because he postulates that we need a drug that does not kill the microbe, but that interferes with the binding process.
Now, what that does to the microbe, and this happens in our normal airway if the defenses are active enough.
It is bound with a glycan that lives in our mucus and made inactive so that it can go through the rest of the respiratory tract and then swallowed and go through the GI tract and develop immunity, which is done typically or technically outside the body.
Yep, in the payers.
That's important.
And it doesn't get into the body until it is safe.
And when it gets into the body, it goes to the lymph nodes and those lymph nodes is where the glycans are established on the antibody and immunity is completed.
So let me translate that into simpler terms.
Initially, it seems intuitive that what you want to do is take a pathogen and just simply get rid of it.
But that's actually counterproductive in the model you've just presented because what you really want is to use the information that comes from the pathogen that's been neutralized exactly the way a vaccine works or should work.
This is effectively the body's mechanism for vaccinating itself.
And it's best done outside your body where it's safe.
So when you say outside your body, I think I know what you're talking about, which is inside your gut, which is technically outside your body.
So your body is all of the bacteria-free space inside your tissues, within the cells, between the cells, etc.
Your gut is really outside the body, and the locations, it's going to be the Peyer's Patches in the gut, where...
The surface inside your gut has these special locations where the immune system is effectively given access to pathogens.
In many cases, I know from Dr. Clancy, these are cases where something has been brought up from the lungs and then swallowed into the gut.
It gets exposed to the immune cells.
BNT cells in your GI tract that go through a process of evolution, literal evolution, that causes them to hone in on the molecular nature of the pathogen.
And then, once they know the formula for whatever the pathogen is, they get sent back to the lungs where the immune system can engage in surveillance looking for that pathogen to show up again.
So anyway, I think that's a marvelous and Highly consistent model with many of the phenomena that we all experience.
Is there anything you want to add to that before I ask you the next question?
The important part of that is that the process of that type of immunization is no threat to the micro.
That is, it does not build resistance, which is a major, major problem today.
Because we're flooded with antimicrobial-resistant organisms.
And right now they're killing 5 million people a year.
And the World Health Organization says if we don't do something different, they'll kill 50 million people in 25 years.
So help me understand why this system is resistant to breeding.
Unlikely to create resistance.
The system.
Our system or the political system?
No, no.
Forget that political system.
The biological system you've described.
You said, if I understand you correctly, you said it is unlikely to produce resistance in the pathogens.
Yes.
Why?
Because you don't kill them.
Okay, I don't follow that yet.
It seems to me that if you take a pathogen that you've It gets exported from the lungs, swallowed into the gut.
It's exposed to the immune system.
The immune system learns the formula on the molecular surface and then starts fighting the pathogen that you will select for pathogens that don't look like the original one that you had.
Okay, and that process kills them.
But the initial process, it's done with the glycans.
Yeah.
And the glycans don't kill.
Yep, they bind it up.
They give you what, if you're a microbe, you're looking for something to hang on to.
Yep.
That's provided by the glycans, not killing them.
So it goes through that same process of dealing with the glycans, and that triggers your immune system and all the elements in your immune system to do the killing.
But the initial thing with all of the microbes is the adherence.
And if you give them something to hold on to, they're happy.
And they don't take that back home and develop resistance to it.
Interesting.
Okay.
I'm going to have to do some more thinking on that because it seems to me that ultimately it's an arms race between the immune system's recognition of these things, which will cause, it will drive the evolution of the pathogen to become invisible again.
And I see what you're saying about the initial stage not killing them, so not selecting for invisible variants.
So maybe it's a locality in the mucosa issue.
The other thing of interest is how it works, and that's best looked at through the lens of a study done in Belize on Tooth decay, looking at strep mutants.
Two-part study, five years apart.
The first was looking at gum, chewing gum with either sorbitol or xylitol.
And that lasted for two years.
It was done on kids in early education.
Five years later, well, first xylitol won over sorbitol better.
But five years later, they went back and they looked at the kids' teeth again without any xylitol or any treatment in the five-year interval.
What they found was that the teeth that had erupted during the two-year-long study had 95% less tooth decay than their neighbors in the same mouth.
How do you explain that?
Seems to me that there's Well, what surprises me about it is that whatever The change in the microbiome of the mouth you have created does not protect the new teeth in the same way that it protected the teeth that were exposed directly.
Yeah.
And what the protection consisted of is either you have changed the microbes that are in your biofilm on your teeth, the plaque on our teeth.
Either you have changed them, their nature, or they have gone away.
Changing the nature of microbes goes back to studies done by Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist like you, and his book Evolution of Infectious Disease.
What he points out in that book is that if you constrain transmission, you push microbes to developing beneficially.
And that's what happened in that study.
And the biofilm on your teeth is stable.
And so those teeth in those kids was protected for at least the five-year interval.
That's a nice thought.
Can we generalize that?
Likely.
I think so.
It seems straightforward.
But it leads to a next question, which is, is there a downside that you are aware of?
Obviously, if these 5-carbon sugars are competitively inhibiting natural glycan binding, they're having a negative impact on pathogens.
Is there a negative impact on people that we're aware of?
I would like to know.
Clear has been on the market for 25 years now, 26. No complaints.
When I first contacted, when I first found out what it did, I called the FDA and I started an initial drug process, which I didn't keep very long because I didn't have a million dollars to jump through their hoops.
But I told them that 5% of the dry weight of a plum is xylitol.
And you could use this nasal spray every hour, both sides of your nose, 24 hours a day, and get about half of a plum that's delivered to your stomach.
So, is it going to bother you?
Probably not.
They were impressed with that safety protocol, but they wouldn't put it in writing.
Well, I will say, having used it, I've detected nothing negative except that it's not fun.
To inhale it.
But, again, I do think it seems to work, anecdotally.
And, you know, it's a small price to pay if you save yourself one infection a year.
How much is that worth?
Well, if it's COVID.
Worth a lot.
Which then brings me to my last question for you.
I know from our interaction here in Austin with Lots of folks involved in Follow the Silence, the movie that we saw premiere last night.
I should say we are in the studio of Mickey Willis.
Matt Guthrie is the director.
He's helped set up the setup.
He's loaning me the studio for the purposes of these interviews.
Anyway, thank you to them.
But I know that you have a concern that we are missing something about the story of COVID as it relates to glycans.
Fill that in.
Yeah.
And early on, Nathan or I both had the same idea that we ought to see what xylitol did to the virus that causes COVID.
And the laboratory at Utah State University.
Ran a study looking at pharyngeal cells and micro and COVID and xylitol.
And they found that it had the same effect on the COVID vaccine or the COVID virus as what it did with strep pneumo.
It inhibited its adherence.
And when they made a press release to that effect is when the Federal Trade Commission jumped on them and said, You're making a drug claim.
You can't do that.
We're going to put you out of business.
And they fought it until they finally caved their complaint and walked away a couple of months ago.
There are three types of organizations in our country.
There's the ones that just start out that are generative.
That they take information and they use it properly and benefit from it.
And then they get bigger and stronger and they turn into bureaucratic organizations that take information and hide it if it's detrimental to the business structure.
And then they get even worse and get pathological and they take information and they use it to shut you down.
The question is how to get back to the generative state.
And that's what the second book that I wrote is about, Making America Healthy Again.
It's dealing with power and how to use our social defenses to deal with power and its quest.
And, you know, most of them are my, well, they're not my ideas.
Lynn Ostrom has a lot of good ideas on how to save our commons and got a Nobel Prize for it.
Yeah, she studied effectively how ancient cultures defeat game theory problems by the structure of their social relationships.
It's fascinating and very important work.
And we can do that.
We have to.
If we are cognitive enough and think enough.
And I'm a Rotarian, and the four-way test of Rotary, if you're familiar with that one, is it the truth?
Is it fair to all concerned?
Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
Those questions need to be analyzed on everything we do, and if we follow those questions, we will approach the evolutionary Yes, I agree with you.
I have it in different terms.
I would say that a large fraction of our economy involves people enlarging their slice of the pie while shrinking the overall size of the pie, and that effectively we should be building systems that do not allow shrinking the pie to be profitable.
A nice way to put it.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, this has been a marvelous discussion.
Thank you so much, Dr. Jones, for sharing this.
Thank you for having me and providing this, and thank Mickey and his crew.
Yeah, it's been marvelous.
So, anyway, I'm going to be thinking a lot about glycans and what role they've been playing in biology that I've been ignoring.
Let's finish that with what I tried to explain yesterday because we haven't talked about that.
But one of the things that needs to be done is correcting the misinformation of our current system.
Because last week there was an article in the New York Times, five questions about mRNA vaccines that we need to know about and understand.
And early on in that piece, they described falsely what happened.
And it's false.
It's wrong.
And we need to know and understand.
They said that when the microbe, the antigen that's contained in the mRNA vaccine has this combination of RNA that builds an antigen that our immune system is supposed to recognize.
When that antigen is built in the hijacked cells, It's budded out of those cells, but it's coated with our glycans.
And your immune system is blind to your own glycans.
So when it's budded out of the cell, it's free to wander around the body and go wherever it wants to go.
And that happens fast, as we saw in the movie last night, or it can be slow.
Like in patients that I took care of or that I looked at after she died.
And it's a process that we need to understand and relate to the glycans because it's the glycans on those proteins that your immune system deals with.
Okay, so let me simplify that a little bit more so people understand the full impact of what you're saying.
The way the mRNA vaccines work is an mRNA transcript is imported into cells, unfortunately haphazardly around the body.
Those cells then translate that transcript into proteins which are exported to the surface of the cell where the immune system is supposed to see them and learn the formula.
But there is a flaw in that picture, which is when your cells produce spike protein, And export it to their surface, it naturally gets coated in your own glycans, which blind the immune system to the thing that ostensibly they should be seeing, which is the underlying protein.
Because you cannot become immune to your own glycans without creating an autoimmune catastrophe.
So your immune system is not going to go that direction.
And that is, I would argue, One of several fatal flaws of the mRNA platform, which is itself causing a tremendous amount of harm.
And do not, for a moment, be misled by the propaganda campaign that wants us to believe that whatever harms came from the mRNA vaccines are the result of spike protein.
Spike protein wasn't good.
It didn't help.
It caused harm of its own.
But most of the harm is the mRNA platform itself.
Which is going to do this every time you load some new transcript into it.
The platform is fatally flawed across multiple domains and it can't be rescued.
Is that a fair summation in your opinion?
Yeah, but the main thing is your body doesn't build immunity to proteins.
It builds immunity to the glycans on the proteins.
And those are hours until it gets to place in your body where it's uncloaked.
What happens in the, now, COVID isn't a natural phenomenon, but what happens when a coronavirus invades a cell and takes hold?
When you have an infection with, let's say, a coronavirus that causes a cold, when the new viruses are produced inside of your body, are they covered in your glycans?
Uh-huh.
So they also have a kind of a cloak that allows them to evade your immune system.
So this is a hurdle that needs to be overcome by any vaccine.
Attempt to correct the problem.
And I will just re-emphasize, as long as we've come here, I will re-emphasize that there is apparently strong evidence that xylitol interferes with the binding of SARS-CoV-2.
To cells in your mucosa, meaning that it prevents COVID infection.
Correct.
So, like so many things, a safe, inexpensive, effective, preventive measure was blocked.
In this case, it was the FDA who told you you couldn't make a drug claim, even though it was scientifically validated?
Federal Trade Commission.
FTC.
Federal Trade Commission.
Wow.
And the FDA did not buy into that.
And I'm not sure why, but they didn't get any support from the FDA to end that lawsuit.
