Today's News: November 21, 2018

Top Headlines

Voter fraud investigation results in charges against 9
Washington Times – Los Angeles County prosecutors have charged nine people with felonies alleging they offered money and cigarettes to homeless people on LA’s Skid Row in exchange for false and forged signatures on ballot petitions and voter registration forms.
The office of District Attorney Jackie Lacey says in a statement Tuesday the alleged offenses occurred during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.
Five of the nine defendants were arraigned Tuesday in Superior Court.
The charges include circulating a petition with false names, use of false names on a petition, and voter fraud by registering fictitious or nonexistent persons.
Prosecutors allege there were hundreds of solicitations for false or forged signatures and homeless people were offered a dollar or cigarettes for participation.

Criminal Behavior: US May be Developing Biological Weapons
Counterpunch – The United States has great tolerance for wholesale killings. Think Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Think civilians killed in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq – in U.S. wars. Think biological weapons.
An article appearing October 4, 2018 in Science magazine deals with a U.S. Defense Department project named “Insect Allies” which began in 2017 and runs for four years. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)is providingfour U.S. Universities with $45 million in funding to enable researchers to alter the gene make-up of plants grown as crops on farms. DARPA claims to be “addressing national security challenges in agriculture domestically and abroad.” Genes are being “edited”, says DARPA, so that plants can resist diseases, drought, floods, excessive heat, or “natural or engineered harmful biological agents,”
Yet the five authors of the report, evolutionary biologists and lawyers at German and French Universities, see the U.S. Defense Department as probably developing offensive biological-warfare capabilities. The United States, they explain, actually may be working on an innovative mechanism of genetic modification programmed to reduce productivity rather than to maintain or increase it.
The authors write that the “knowledge to be gained from this program appears very limited in its capacity to enhance U.S. agriculture or respond to national emergencies.” They condemn the project “as probably in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which tookeffect under United Nations auspices in 1975.
The 182 nations ratifying the BWC as of 2018 are committed to prohibiting the “development, production, and stockpiling” of such weapons. In 1969 President Richard Nixon announced that the United States would no longer be making offensive biological weapons.
The Science magazine report focuses on a new delivery system Defense Department researchers are using to transfer altered genetic material to crops in the field. The authors cite the BWC which says: “certain developments in science and technology have the potential for use contrary to the provisions of the Convention now or in the future. These developments include, inter alia…to develop novel means of delivering biological agents and toxins.” The idea of a “novel means” is crucial to what follows here.
While offering no direct proof that the U.S. government is developing biological weapons capability, the article illustrates the difficulty in assigning war-making purposes to technology with peacetime applications. And to tease out offensive purposes from research on defensive capabilities is no easy task. But the history and current manifestations of U.S research and development on biological weapons tell their own story.

As Facebook Bans Alternative Media to ‘Promote Online Safety,’ they Allowed a Child to Be Sold in a Post
The Free Thought Project – Last month, Facebook and Twitter — without warning or justification — deleted the pages of Free Thought Project and Police the Police which had over 5 million followers. During this purge, they also removed hundreds of other pages including massive police accountability groups, antiwar activists, alternative media, and libertarian news outlets. Facebook claimed to remove these pages in the name of fighting disinformation online and creating a safer user experience. Illustrating just how big of ostentatious sham this was, this month, a child was openly sold on this same platform that claims to promote online safety.
Last month, an auction was held on Facebook in which a child bride was put up for sale in a public post. People openly bid on Facebook for a 16-year-old girl’s hand in marriage.
Facebook claims they removed the post, but this wasn’t until the auction had ended and the girl had been sold.
As FOX 59 reports, according to children’s rights organization Plan International, the girl was bid on by five men, some of whom were reportedly high-ranking South Sudanese government officials.
George Otim, Plan International’s country director in South Sudan, where the auction took place, said: “That a girl could be sold for marriage on the world’s biggest social networking site in this day and age is beyond belief.”
As Facebook doles out bans for photos of ET, deletes pages with millions of followers for promoting peace, and censors alternative media, the post selling a human child to a life of slavery was allowed to remain up for 15 days.
“Any form of human trafficking — whether posts, pages, ads or groups is not allowed on Facebook. We removed the post and permanently disabled the account belonging to the person who posted this to Facebook,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
“We’re always improving the methods we use to identify content that breaks our policies, including doubling our safety and security team to more than 30,000 and investing in technology,” the spokesperson added.
Facebook users have been banned within second and posts removed immediately for posting peaceful antiwar content—users have been banned and posts removed for quoting the declaration of independence—yet somehow, a post selling a child to high ranking government officials for 500 cows, three cars and $10,000 was allowed to stay up for 15 days. Let that sink in.
“Violations against women in South Sudan are a continuing issue, but for Facebook to allow their platform to enhance these violations is a problem,” said Judy Gitau, Equality Now’s regional coordinator for Africa.

US Dollar Completely Ditched in Trade Between Iran & Iraq – Official
Global Research – The US dollar is no longer used by Tehran and Baghdad in bilateral trade, giving way to the euro and local currencies, as well as direct barter of goods, head of the Iran-Iraq Chamber of Commerce Yahya Ale-Eshagh has revealed.

Judge dismisses female genital mutilation charges in historic case
Detroit Free Press – In a major blow to the federal government, a judge in Detroit has declared America’s female genital mutilation law unconstitutional, thereby dismissing the key charges against two Michigan doctors and six others accused of subjecting at least nine minor girls to the cutting procedure in the nation’s first FGM case.
The historic case involves minor girls from Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota, including some who cried, screamed and bled during the procedure and one who was given Valium ground in liquid Tylenol to keep her calm, court records show.
The judge’s ruling also dismissed charges against three mothers, including two Minnesota women whom prosecutors said tricked their 7 -year-old daughters into thinking they were coming to metro Detroit for a girls’ weekend, but instead had their genitals cut at a Livonia clinic as part of a religious procedure.
U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman concluded that “as despicable as this practice may be,” Congress did not have the authority to pass the 22-year-old federal law that criminalizes female genital mutilation, and that FGM is for the states to regulate. FGM is banned worldwide and has been outlawed in more than 30 countries, though the U.S. statute had never been tested before this case.

CDC: Do Not Eat Any Romaine Lettuce Until We Can Figure Out What the Hell Is Going On
Gizmodo – The Centers for Disease Control has an ominous warning for the nation this week: Please, for the love of god, do not consume romaine lettuce of any kind.
In a statement, the agency wrote that it has determined an outbreak of a strain of E. coli has resulted in infections in at least 32 people in 11 states, as well as an additional 18 people in two Canadian provinces. The CDC added that “epidemiologic evidence” in both countries suggests that the most likely culprit is romaine lettuce:
Ill people in this outbreak were infected with E. coli bacteria with the same DNA fingerprint as the E. coli strain isolated from ill people in a 2017 outbreak linked to leafy greens in the United States and to romaine lettuce in Canada. The current outbreak is not related to a recent multistate outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infections linked to romaine lettuce.
This appears to be a particularly nasty outbreak, with the CDC writing that 13 people have been hospitalized in the U.S., with one developing kidney failure.
The CDC further advised that since it has not determined which manufacturers or distributors are involved in the outbreak, absolutely no one should engage in the preparation or consumption of “all types or uses of romaine lettuce, such as whole heads of romaine, hearts of romaine, and bags and boxes of precut lettuce and salad mixes that contain romaine, including baby romaine, spring mix, and Caesar salad.”

World News

A Russian not becoming head of Interpol is bigger news than the person who did
RT – Interpol’s new boss is South Korean Kim Jong-yang, although reading the gleeful mainstream coverage of the news, it’s much easier to find out who didn’t get the job — or more specifically, that the losing candidate was Russian.
Alexander Prokopchuk, who currently serves as Interpol’s vice president was the favorite to take the top job at the international policing organization, but was edged out by the South Korean amid intense lobbying from Western powers against Prokopchuk, despite being described by one source to the Times newspaper as someone who is “respected by his peers and regarded as a more competent candidate than his South Korean rival.”
Almost without exception, mainstream headlines screamed that Prokopchuk had lost out on the job, with Kim Jong-yang’s election mentioned as a mere side note in the articles themselves. Perhaps anti-Russian sentiment has reached the point where something not happening to a Russian is deemed to be bigger news than something that does happen to someone else. Little of Kim Jong-yang’s biography, credentials or achievements is on offer in the articles either, which focus on Prokopchuk’s background instead.
The other obvious conclusion to make here is that the only reason Prokopchuk did not get the job was because of his nationality. Indeed, it was the fact that the organization’s vice president is Russian which led to the campaign of pressure by the United States and Britain to prevent him from being elected to the position, despite his suitableness for the job. Isn’t that exactly the kind of election interference Western powers have claimed to find so unacceptable?

US bombs continue to kill in Laos 50 years after Vietnam War
Al Jazeera – US dropped two million tonnes of bombs on Laos at height of Vietnam War. Why are cluster munitions still killing?
Vientiane – This year’s Thanksgiving celebration marks 50 years since the American military embarked on the biggest bombing campaign in history, decimating the small Southeast Asian country of Laos by dropping more than two million tonnes of bombs on it at the height of the Vietnam War.
Half a century on, innocent lives are still being lost as the country struggles with the leftovers of the conflict.
On Thanksgiving Day in November 1968, the United States escalated its war against North Vietnam in Laos.
Then-US President Lyndon B Johnson had ordered traditional turkey dinners to be helicoptered in to US troops who were secretly deployed in the quiet, landlocked country to sever the North Vietnamese supply lines that ran through the east.
At the same time, the US began dropping millions of tonnes of bombs – they “fell like rain” on the supply lines in Laos, a network of paths and tracks known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and most of the east of the country.
That hugely redoubled effort to shut down the trail saw a planeload of bombs dropped on Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years.
Now, some 80 million unexploded bombs and air-dropped cluster munitions left over continue to maim and kill Laotian men, women and children.
Manixia Thor is a Laotian operations manager at the UK-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), one of several NGOs trying to clear the land of unexploded ordnance (UXO).
“About 75 percent of injuries from cluster munitions involve children,” she tells Al Jazeera, referring to the tennis-ball sized fragmentation bomblets that have acquired the local name “bombies”.
They were dropped in their millions on Laos. Thousands of children have been killed or severely wounded by them, and Thor says they are “everywhere”.
Unexploded cluster bombs are found in particularly large numbers in the northern province of Xiengkhouang, where Thor works, and where MAG focuses its survey and clearance efforts.
They look attractive to children; anything shaped like a ball is tempting for a child in a country as poor as Laos, where toys and other amusements are few and far between.
Although the number of deaths has fallen from the 200 to 300 annually in the 1990s to around 50 today, all uncleared land is potentially dangerous.

Matthew Hedges: British academic accused of spying jailed for life in UAE
The Guardian – A British academic who was accused of spying for the UK government in the United Arab Emirates after travelling to Dubai to conduct research has been sentenced to life in jail.
Matthew Hedges, 31, has been in a UAE prison for more than six months. The Durham University PhD candidate went to the country to research his thesis and was handed the sentence at an Abu Dhabi court on Wednesday in a hearing that lasted less than five minutes, with no lawyer present.
His wife, Daniela Tejada, 27, who was present in the courtroom, said Hedges began shaking when the verdict was read out.
“I am in complete shock and I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Matthew is innocent. The Foreign Office know this and have made it clear to the UAE authorities that Matthew is not a spy for them.”

US, South Korea ‘closely coordinating’ on breaking nuclear talks stalemate, Mike Pompeo says
South China Morning Post – Top US and South Korean diplomats met at the US State Department on Tuesday to coordinate efforts to jump-start Washington’s stalled nuclear talks with Pyongyang.Stephen Biegun, the US’ special representative for North Korea, hosted his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, the Republic of Korea’s special representative for Korean peninsula peace and security affairs, in Washington.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters that the meeting aimed to “further strengthen our close coordination on achieving our shared goal – the final, fully verified denuclearisation as agreed to by Chairman Kim [Jong-un]”.
The diplomats were “discussing ongoing diplomatic efforts, sustained implementation of UN sanctions and inter-Korean cooperation,” Pompeo said during a press conference at the State Department.

Sweden: Sex Assaults Surge Since Migrant Crisis
Infowars – Sweden has seen a surge in recorded cases of sex assaults since 2013, with many linking the rise to increasing numbers of migrants entering the country.
According to Criminal statistics agency Brå, the number of adult women reporting that they had been sexually assaulted rose from 4.7 per cent of the population in 2016, to 6.4 per cent in 2017.
“Between 2006 and 2012, the level was relatively stable, but since 2013, the proportion that claims to be exposed to sexual offences has shown a clear increase,” stated the agency.
This debunks claims made by some leftists that Sweden’s rape and sexual assault rate is so high due to a definition change in 2012, since reported rapes and sexual assaults continued to rise after this date.
Brå also previously found that the number of reported cases of rape had rise by 10 per cent from 2016 to 2017.
As we previously reported, new figures released in August found that 58 per cent of convicted rapists and 85 per cent of all convicted assault rapists in Sweden were born outside of Europe.

U.S. News, Politics & Government

Forced into a mental health facility for talking about 5G with her family doctor
The Liberty Beacon (Sep 20, 2018) – An utterly remarkable and disturbing situation has transpired in the UK just in the last 3-4 days. Susanne Small (her Facebook name; see her posted FB video) was detained under the UK’s Mental Health Act on Monday because, during a recent visit to her GP, the doctor had determined she was a risk either to herself or others. On Tuesday, she appeared in a special segment of the Richie Allen show, which is linked to below (30 minutes). It’s well worth listening to.
Activists are familiar with Susanne’s concerns over the health effects of 5G technology and its quiet rollout. We’re also familiar with other topics she raises such as Agenda 21/2030, the work of Debra Tavares, etc. This is clearly someone who has done relevant research and, as we are fond of saying, ‘gone down the rabbit hole’.

No More Pay-To-Play: Clinton Foundation Donations Plummet 90%
Donors see little value in contributing to foundation now that they can’t get kickbacks
Infowars – Contributions to the Clinton Foundation dried up by almost 90% in a three year period from 2014 to 2017, according to financial statements.
In 2014, at the height of Obama’s power, the foundation raked in a staggering $218 million in donations.
But by 2017, after Clinton’s devastating election loss to Donald Trump, the organization had collected only $22 million.
The globalist charity is currently under investigation by several agencies, including the FBI, IRS, and DOJ for a litany of reasons, including pay-to-play schemes and tax code violations.
While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she had the State Department approve a $165 billion arms deal to 20 countries who had donated to the Clinton Foundation, representing almost double the sales made by the Bush administration.
In fact, nearly every government or corporation that made a donation to the Foundation enjoyed some kind of kickback by the U.S. government.

Cops Mistake Cotton Candy for Meth—Grandma Imprisoned for Months
Free Thought Project – A $2 drug kit, widely used by police, is resulting in thousands being wrongfully imprisoned, and some wrongfully convicted, of drug crimes.
Monroe County, GA — An innocent grandma, Dasha Fincher, was kidnapped by police and thrown in a cage for months—not because she did anything wrong—but because police couldn’t tell the difference between cotton candy and meth. Now, this innocent new grandma is going after the police who did this to her as well as the company who manufacturers the dangerously inaccurate tests cops used to take her freedom.
This horror movie for Fincher started back on New Year’s Eve of 2016, a day this innocent mother and new grandmother says she’ll never forget.
“Then they found the cotton candy in the floorboard of the car,” said Fincher.
As the video shows, the bag police claimed was meth was an obvious bag used to hold cotton candy. It looked nothing like the zip lock bags or other tiny bags meth is usually found in. It would be like a cocaine dealer selling coke from a purple Crown Royal bag.
The cotton candy was blue as well which is atypical because real meth is clear or white and only drug dealers looking to be like Breaking Bad add blue tint to their product, which is highly uncommon.
Still, however, this innocent grandma to be was accused of trafficking a large quantity of blue meth, in a cotton candy bag, that looked like cotton candy.
As Fincher noted, Deputy Cody Maples and Deputy Kevin Williams asked her what was in the bag. When she told them it was cotton candy, they did not believe her. According to the incident report, these expert drug recognition officers claimed that “based on the packaging and crystal like feature, Corporal Williams tested the substance.”
The officers then used the highly faulty field test kits which have been known to produce false positives—repeatedly. Predictably, the cotton candy falsely tested positive for drugs.
Fincher then became one of many women and men to suffer horrific fates at the hands of negligent cops and their continued use of faulty field drug test kits.
In fact, tens of thousands have been convicted and served time — even earning the black mark of a felony — for crimes they likely didn’t commit, according to a report, because the cases against them relied on horribly unreliable field drug test kits.
As WMAZ reports, this innocent grandma was put in jail for more than three months. Fincher says a judge set her bond at $1 million. In March 22, 2017, GBI lab tests came back to said there were “no controlled substances confirmed in the sample.”
While in jail, Fincher’s daughter miscarried a baby and could not be comforted by her mother. Also, Fincher missed the birth of her twin grandsons.
“My daughter had a miscarriage. I wasn’t there for that. My twin grandsons were born. I missed that,” said Fincher.

Economy & Business

Consumer Sentiment Fell Following Midterm Elections
Breitbart – Consumer sentiment declined following the midterm election, according to the University of Michigan’s survey.
The index fell to 97.5 for the final November score, down from October’s 98.6. Economists had estimated less of a post-election impact, forecasting a reading of 98.3.
The university’s preliminary sentiment index reading, covering the pre-election period, was 98.3.
“Although the data recorded a decline of 2.8 Index points following the election, the drop was related more to income than political party: among those with incomes in the bottom third, the Sentiment Index rose by 10.4 points and fell by 6.6 points among those in the top third of the income distribution. In contrast, the Sentiment Index remained unchanged among Democrats and Republicans prior to and following the election,” the survey’s chief economist Richard Curtin said in a statement.

Stock Market Crash: The Dow Has Fallen Nearly 2,500 Points And FAANG Stocks Have Lost A TRILLION Dollars In Value
Economic Collapse Blog – Thanksgiving week was not supposed to be like this. Normally things are slow in the days leading up to Thanksgiving as investors prepare to gorge themselves with turkey and stuffing as they gather with family and friends. But this year the stock market is crashing, and Wall Street is in panic mode. On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 24,465.64, which is nearly 2,500 points lower than the all-time high of 26,951.81 that was set in early October. But as I noted yesterday, what has been happening to tech stocks is even more dramatic. Each one of the FAANG stocks is now down by more than 20 percent, and they have combined to lose more than a trillion dollars in value. We haven’t seen anything like this since the financial crisis of 2008, and at this point all of Wall Street’s gains for 2018 have been completely wiped out.
Fear is a very powerful motivator, and right now a lot of investors are feverishly getting out of the market because they are afraid of losing their paper profits.

Science & Technology

Your Medical Devices Are Not Keeping Your Health Data to Themselves
Activist Post – PAP units, heart monitors, blood glucose meters and lifestyle apps generate information that can be used in ways patients don’t necessarily expect. It can be sold for advertising or even shared with insurers, who may use it to deny reimbursement.
Medical devices are gathering more and more data from their users, whether it’s their heart rates, sleep patterns or the number of steps taken in a day. Insurers and medical device makers say such data can be used to vastly improve health care.
But the data that’s generated can also be used in ways that patients don’t necessarily expect. It can be packaged and sold for advertising. It can anonymized and used by customer support and information technology companies. Or it can be shared with health insurers, who may use it to deny reimbursement. Privacy experts warn that data gathered by insurers could also be used to rate individuals’ health care costs and potentially raise their premiums.Patients typically have to give consent for their data to be used — so-called “donated data.” But some patients said they weren’t aware that their information was being gathered and shared. And once the data is shared, it can be used in a number of ways

Amazon Collects and Stores Everything You Say to Alexa — Here’s How to Delete
Activist Post – If you’re one of the millions of people who own a device with Amazon Alexa, the company’s mobile spying device helpful personal assistant, whatever you say may be recorded – especially if someone in the house is named Alexis, Alex, or Lexi.
According to Amazon’s Alexa terms of use, the company collects and stores most of what you say to Alexa – including the geolocation of the product along with your voice instructions, reports CNBC‘s Todd Haselton.
Does Alexa record everything? Not according to Amazon, which says that devices such as the Echo only begin “listening” when it hears its wake word, “Alexa.” Could Alexa be remotely switched on or hacked to surveil a target? Well – we know they’ve been hacked to eavesdrop, and we know the government has been using personal cell phones as “roving bugs” for years – so it stands to reason that an Amazon listening device could be used against its owner.
Two weeks ago a New Hampshire judge ordered Amazon to turn over two days worth of Amazon Echo recordings in a January, 2017 double murder of two women, for example, in the hopes that it may yield useful evidence in the case. The search warrant, obtained by TechCrunch, says that there is “probable cause to believe” that the Echo picked up “audio recordings capturing the attack.”
And in other spooky news, in May of this year an Amazon Echo recorded a conversation between a husband and wife, then sent it to one of the husband’s phone contacts. Amazon claims that during the conversation someone used a word that sounded like “Alexa,” which caused the device to begin recording.
According to CNBC’s Haselton, you can delete Alexa conversations maintained on Amazon servers (which we’re sure are totally gone forever);
You can listen to and delete this information through the Amazon Alexa app on your iPhone or Android phone. Here’s how:

Open the Alexa app on your phone.
Tap the menu icon on the top-left corner of the app.
Tap “Settings” at the bottom.’
Tap “Alexa Account” at the top of the page.
Select “History.”

You’ll see a list of all of your interactions with Alexa, just like the picture above. You can tap each one to listen to the recording, or to delete the recording from Amazon’s cloud.
Unfortunately, if you use Alexa as frequently as I do, the list of recordings is prohibitively long to actually move through and delete each voice request one by one. So, if you want to delete everything at once, do this:

Visit Amazon’s Device page
Select the menu button to the left of the Echo device you’d like to manage. (The menu button looks like three little dots stacked on top of one another.
Tap “Manage Voice Recordings” You’ll see a prompt like this:
Tap “Delete.”

This lets you delete all of the recordings sent to Amazon by a specific Echo. –CNBC

Health

Just One Energy Drink May Damage Blood Vessels, According to Research
Care2 – Before you reach for that energy drink, you might want to consider the potential harm you’re causing your body. That’s because energy drinks are likely giving your body a lot more than just a quick boost of energy. They are increasingly being linked with health issues, including damage to the heart and blood vessels.
Research conducted at the McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, assessed the effects of drinking a single energy drink on 44 healthy, non-smoking medical students in their twenties. Then, they conducted ultrasound testing to determine the health of their blood vessels. On average, they found that blood vessel dilation drastically dropped from 5.1 percent dilation to 2.8 percent just an hour and a half after drinking a single energy drink, which suggested an “acute impairment in vascular function,” according to the researchers.
Dilated blood vessels might not sound like a big deal to many people, but we depend on healthy blood flow for proper functioning of every organ, including our brain. Significantly reducing blood flow could have serious consequences. Earlier research had already linked energy drink consumption to substance abuse later in life as well as many other serious side effects, including: flushing, headaches, nausea, lethargy, abnormal heart rate, loss of consciousness, and even death.
Last year, an otherwise healthy 16-year-old boy, Davis Cripe drank an energy drink and a latte then later fell to his knees during an art class, before passing out, and being rushed to the hospital where he died. The official cause of death for sixteen-year-old Davis Cripe’s was “caffeine-induced cardiac event causing a probable arrhythmia.”

Vitamin D for Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Care2 – Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), “a chronic inflammatory condition of the intestine that causes abdominal pain, diarrhea, and weight loss,” includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. When we compare identical twins, even though they have the same genes, most of the time, if one twin has IBD, the other does not. In that case, there must be some important, non-genetic trigger factors. What might they be?
Studies like the ones I discuss in my video Vitamin D for Inflammatory Bowel Disease offer a clue. Why do those living in the southern United States have lower IBD rates than those living in the north? Maybe it’s because Southerners get more sun, which means more vitamin D and which may also mean less inflammation.
So, do people with Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis who have low vitamin D levels have worse disease? Apparently so. Not only is there an increased risk of surgery and hospitalization, but those who normalize their vitamin D levels appear to reduce their risk of relapse. However, instead of better vitamin D levels leading to better Crohn’s, maybe better control of Crohn’s led to better vitamin D. Indeed, perhaps they felt so good, they went outside more, “increasing physical activity and outdoor sun exposure.” We can’t tell if it’s cause and effect unless we put it to the test.
The first pilot study tried 1,000 units of vitamin D a day and saw no change in the Crohn’s disease activity index. At six weeks, however, there may have been a slight increase in IBD quality of life scores, but even that disappeared by year’s end, so the results were pretty disappointing overall. Perhaps the researchers didn’t use enough vitamin D? How about 1,200 IU a day? At that level, the relapse rate appeared to be cut in half, as you can see at 1:45 in my video, though there were too few people in the study to reach statistical significance.
What happens with 2,000 IU of vitamin D a day? Gut leakiness (so-called intestinal permeability) continued to worsen in the placebo group, but appeared to stabilize in the vitamin D group, though only those who reached blood levels over 75 nanomoles per liter appeared to have a significant drop in inflammation. And, indeed, if Crohn’s patients are started on 1,000 IU of vitamin D per day and then the dose is ramped up until a target blood level is reached, it’s possible to get a significant boost in quality of life accompanying a significant drop in disease activity, as you can see at 2:19 in my video.
Disease scores under 150 are considered remission, so “the majority of patients achieved remission” with improvements in disease activity in all but one person in the study. This suggests that Crohn’s patients may want to take 5,000 IU of vitamin D a day, but that’s nearly ten times the Recommended Daily Allowance. Why so much? Because that’s what it may take to get vitamin D levels that are normal for our species—that is, the kind of levels one might get running around half naked in Africa, as we did for millions of years.