After researching the lengthy, documented adverse effects of vaccines, many parents decide the purported benefits of vaccines are not worth the risks. Many have children with lifelong health problems as a result of side effects.
Whatever the reason, many parents want to know how to protect their children from everyday illnesses as well as childhood diseases. In this post, I'm going to share how to do exactly that.
This isn't ignoring modern medical advancement; this is using the God-given non-toxic ones!
For everything, the most important things of course are diet/nutrition, sanitation, and living conditions. In fact, these are the things that Columbia and Harvard researchers found to be the main contributing factor for the reduction in childhood diseases, not vaccines.
Citing renowned physician McKeown’s work, Columbia University reports that there were other factors that were much more responsible for the decline in diseases than vaccinations:
The main influences on the decline in mortality were improved nutrition. . . reduced exposure (from better hygiene). . . and, less certainly, immunization and therapy on the large number of conditions included in the miscellaneous group. Since these three classes were responsible respectively for nearly half, one-sixth, and one-tenth of the fall in the death rate, it is probably that the advancement in nutrition was the major influence.” (http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/pubhealth/rosner/g8965/client_edit/readings/week_2/mckinlay.pdf)
So let's work on nutrition!
The main factor for reducing a child's vulnerability to pathogenic bacteria, viruses, and diseases is avoiding refined sugars and foods containing them. Most people think of sugary foods like sodas, candy, and desserts but nowadays, even salad dressings and dried fruit contain added, refined sugar. Research from the American Heart Association found that the average toddler consumes around 12 teaspoons, or 48 grams, of added refined sugar per day. Children ages 4-8 average out at 21 teaspoons, or 84 grams, of added refined sugar per day. "Health" foods like sweetened yogurts, granola bars, and breakfast cereals maintain a large portion of that intake.
The problem is that consumption of
refined sugar shuts down the immune system for up to five hours after consumption
. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny reports:
It has been documented that refined white sugar can suppress the immune system. In a study reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition as far back as 1977 reported the adverse that sugar has on the immune system. Blood was drawn from subjects and the activity of the white blood cells that neutralize viruses and bacteria was observed and calculated. The white blood cell activity was calculated before and after subjects were given various doses of sugar: 6, 12, 18 and 24 teaspoons, respectively. Each subsequently higher dose of sugar created a corresponding decrease in the activities of the subject’s white blood cells. The group that had consumed the largest amount of sugar had essentially no functioning white blood cells within an hour after consuming the sugar. The immunosuppression occurred for up to two hours after consuming that sugar, but the adverse effects of no blood cell activity persisted in some instances for up to five hours. REF: Am J Clin Nut 1977;30:613 “Depression of lymphocyte transformation following oral glucose ingestion.”
Why is this important? White blood cells eliminate viruses and bacteria that invade our defenses. Without the efforts of these cells, susceptibility to infection is increased and recovering from infection can be stalled. Therefore, do not offer children with fevers Coca-Cola, 7-Up, or Ginger Ale for an upset tummy and ice cream to soothe a sore throat. Unaware, these hefty doses of sugar can further drag down the immune system at a time when it needs to be at its strongest.
If a child is given a sugary breakfast cereal, goes to school and has chocolate milk with other sugar-filled junk food, is exposed to someone at school with an illness, comes home and gets sugary cookies or other junk-food snack, they will essentially have no functioning white blood cells to protect them from the illness they were exposed to that day!
Additionally, refined sugar damages beneficial gut flora which is where at least 70% of the immune system resides.
So eliminating foods containing refined sugars is the first and most important way to protect your child from illness!
This includes anything containing "sugar," "brown sugar," "powdered sugar," "sucrose," "fructose," "high-fructose corn syrup," "corn syrup," "evaporated cane juice," "organic sugar," raw sugar," etc.
Additional dietary measures to help a child have the best possible immune system include avoiding the following food ingredients:
- Vegetable oils (corn, canola, soybean), especially hydrogenated;
- White breads ("enriched wheat"), white pasta, and other refined flours;
- Pasteurized dairy (read my article Milk: Harmful or Helpful here.)
- Frozen and canned meals
- Puffed cereals, puffed chips, rice cakes, etc.
- Meat from animals treated with growth hormones, antibiotics, and fed GMO foods
- "Low-fat" or "sugar-free" food products
- Gluten (Read my gluten eBook for more info here.)
Foods to eat more of include:
- Meat, eggs, and raw dairy from grass-fed animals (Read my post Milk: Helpful or Harmful)
- LOTS of organic vegetables, especially dark leafy greens like spinach, kale, Swiss chard, beet greens, etc.
- Homemade bone broth (not store-bought broth/stock)
- Probiotic-rich foods like kefir, kombucha/yogurt (unsweetened and made from whole milk), lacto-fermented pickles, lacto-fermented sauerkraut, etc.
Breastfeeding
I cannot stress enough the importance of breastfeeding our children to protect them from everyday illnesses as well as common childhood diseases. Research over the past 50 years has only confirmed that breastmilk is what we sometimes call "God's natural vaccine."
Before the introduction of pharmaceutical vaccines, babies were given natural immunity to common childhood diseases like measles, as well as protection from things like polio, both transplacentally and via breastmilk. This is how infants, who would otherwise be very vulnerable, were protected.
Now, because most women of childbearing age in America are vaccinated, they do not have lifelong immunity from naturally-acquiring wild strains of these illnesses, so they cannot pass on that immunity to their babies. Fortunately, breastmilk still offers Immunogloblin and other protective properties to keep babies protected.
For instance, research shows:
Human milk protects against infections in the breastfed offspring mainly via the secretory IgA antibodies, but also most likely via several other factors like the bactericidal lactoferrin. It is striking that the defense factors of human milk function without causing inflammation, some components are even directly anti-inflammatory. Protection against infections has been well evidenced during lactation against, e.g., acute and prolonged diarrhea, respiratory tract infections, otitis media, urinary tract infection, neonatal septicemia, and necrotizing enterocolitis. There is also interesting evidence for an enhanced protection remaining for years after lactationagainst diarrhea, respiratory tract infections, otitis media, Haemophilus influenzae type b infections, and wheezing illness. In several instances the protection seems to improve with the duration of breastfeeding.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9892025
Coincidentally, research
discovered that breastmilk would lower the efficacy of vaccines because breastmilk is so effective against diseases. Unfortunately, rather than using this information to widely promote the disease-protecting properties of breastmilk, the CDC advised women to delay/temporarily halt breastfeeding while infants undergo vaccinations.
Some more examples:
Did you know that Albert Sabin, inventor of the oral polio vaccine, did the first study on the anti-polio properties of breast milk? He infected mice with polio and then took breast milk from 71 American women and fed it to the mice. The breast milk had an 84% success rate at neutralising polio. (Albert Sabin and Howard Fieldsteel, 'Anti-poliomyelitic Activity of Human and Bovine Colostrum and Milk', Journal of Pediatrics, 29 (1962).
According to the journal of epidemiology, breast milk protects against HIBfor up to 10 years after you have stopped breast feeding. 'For each week of breast feeding, the protection improved.' (Journal of Epidemiology, 1997, 26: 443-450).
Tropical Pediatrics also found significant amounts of antibodies in breast milk to whooping cough, HIB, strep B infection and meningitis. 'Samples may indicate a protective role for breast milk against the four infections of early childhood.' Tropical Pediatrics, 1989, 4: 226-232.
Fatality from measles in third world children was REDUCED BY ONE THIRD in breast fed children. Lepage P. Munyakazi C, Hennart P. Breast feeding and hospital mortality in children from Rwanda. Lancet 1981;i:40911.
In a study in Brazil, dehydrating diarrhoea (defined by the presence of a persistent skinfold plus at least two other signs of dehydration) was 6.0 times more frequent among non-breastfed infants than among exclusively breastfed infants. If a child already had diarrhoea, the risk of developing dehydration was 3.3 times greater for the nonbreastfed infant.
Fuchs SC. Risk factors for dehydrating diarrhea: a case-control study. Ph.D. thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1993. Victora CG, Fuchs SC, Kirkwood BR, Lombardi C, Barros FC. Breastfeeding, nutritional status and other prognostic factors for dehydration among young children with diarrhoea: a casecontrol study. Bull WHO 1992;70:467-75.
http://www.vaccineriskawareness.com/Disease-Killing-Properties-Of-Breast-Milk
Now can you see why breastmilk is often referred to as "God's vaccines?"
It is true unfortunately that some women are not able to breastfeed. As a holistic health practitioner, I work with women to optimize their health before and during pregnancy in order to ensure that more women are able to breastfeed. There are many reasons women are not able to breastfeed, and many of them can be eliminated if addressed preventatively. For more information, read
my post here: Inadequate Breastmilk Supply: Causes & Solutions
.
Sanitation/Living Environment:
We are fortunate to live in an age where we have indoor plumping, running water, and designated place for sewer. There are a few additional things in the area of sanitation that parents can avoid to further promote good health for their children:
- Avoid using chlorine/bleach to sanitize the home. This has the potential to cause more harm than good. Use vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, and other safe, natural products instead. Also avoid using antibacterial soaps and other products containing triclosan.
- Consider homeschooling. Outbreaks always happen in areas where there is a large ratio of people to space, such as classrooms/schools, inner cities, tourist attractions, etc. When there is a condensed group of people in a small space, especially in schools, there is a high probability of Vaccine Shedding happening as well. Of course, homeschooling is not an option for everyone but it is usually an option for more people than realized. The goal of course is not to shelter our children from every single illness but to avoid areas most prone to outbreaks.
Nutritional Supplements
Regardless of the particular illness, these are the supplements I would recommend for those wanting to keep their children's immune systems at their best:
- Probiotics. At least 70% of the immune system is in the gut so supporting good gastrointestinal health is paramount to everything else. Probiotics can be in the form of a supplement or from homemade probiotic-rich foods like delicious kombucha, kefir, lacto-fermented vegetables, etc. These should be taken/consumed at least once/daily.
- Cod liver oil. Vitamin A and Vitamin D are two extremely crucial nutrients for good immune health as you will see from information below.
These are daily, preventative supplements. Below I will detail some further particular nutritional supplement recommendations for particular illnesses.
Whooping Cough/Pertussis
I have known countless people, including those vaccinated and unvaccinated, who have acquired pertussis and effectively used high-dose vitamin C treatment. It is my first and main recommendation for whooping cough. For more information on it, you can read
Dr. Suzanne Humphries article about it here
.
I recommend starting with
Dr. Klenner's dosage chart here
and working to achieve
. Bowel tolerance titration is necessary with whooping cough as any less may not fully relieve symptoms.
Measles
VITAMIN A FOR MEASLES:
One can quickly (and quite easily) find a wealth of documented research links proving vitamin A deficiency to be a contributing factor to measles outbreaks. There are research studies, like this one, showing that vitamin A reduces complications from measles:
Other studies show that vitamin A treatment is VERY effective for treating measles:
This is no secret, friends. The World Health Organization has it listed right on their website that measles is more prominent in areas where the population is deficient in Vitamin A and that they recommend treating measles with vitamin A:
All children in developing countries diagnosed with measles should receive two doses of vitamin A supplements, given 24 hours apart. This treatment restores low vitamin A levels during measles that occur even in well-nourished children and can help prevent eye damage and blindness. Vitamin A supplements have been shown to reduce the number of deaths from measles by 50%. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs286/en/
So what can we do? Give our children a daily dose of cod liver oil! Regular fish oil does NOT contain vitamin A, so it has to be cod liver oil.
Keep in mind that beta-carotene and other carotenoids from plants is NOT the same as Vitamin A. The body MUST convert those into Vitamin A and most people's livers nowadays are too overloaded with toxins to make that conversion so skip right to the animal-based Vitamin A!
Dosage recommendations for daily maintenance dosing can be found here:
http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/cod-liver-oil-basics-and-recommendations/
It's hard to know for sure what specific dosage recommendations would be for children with measles as vitamin A supplements used in research were from various sources, some synthetic vitamin A but even with synthetic vitamin A, which we know carries a much higher risk of toxicity in high doses, patients are given 100,000 iu's daily in children over six months of age for a couple of days. Additional research states:
The recommended regimen is 100 000 IU by mouth at the time of diagnosis for infants younger than 12 months of age, and 200 000 IU for older children. In the presence of ophthalmologic signs of vitamin A deficiency, such as night blindness, Bitot's spots (grayish white deposits on the bulbar conjunctiva adjacent to the cornea) or xerophthalmia, the WHO recommends the dose be repeated in 24 hours and again 4 weeks later. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/91/5/1014
You can also read a case study of a 10-month old baby being successfully treating using intravenous Vitamin C for measles here:
http://www.injectablevitaminc.com/images/Ch10.pdf
Polio
Ah, the hot button of all vaccine debates--the fearful polio virus that can cause paralysis. What most people don't know is that in the 1940's during a polio epidemic in North Carolina, Dr. Klenner treated polio successfully with large doses of vitamin C, usually given intravenously every 2-4 hours similar to the way antibiotics was given. All the patients presenting with polio were cured within a period of 72 hours and not a single patient was left with paralysis.
And even after symptoms of paralysis set in for one patient, the vitamin C therapy still worked:
In 1951, “In an especially incredible case,” Levy says, “Klenner (9) described a five-year-old girl stricken with polio. This child had already been paralyzed in both her lower legs for over four days! The right leg was completely limp, and the left leg was determined to be 85% flaccid. Pain was noticed especially in the knee and lumbar areas. Four consulting physicians confirmed the diagnosis of polio. Other than massage, vitamin C was the only therapy initiated. After four days of vitamin C injections the child was again moving both legs, but with only very slow and deliberate movement. Klenner also noted that there was a “definite response” after only the first injection of vitamin C. The child was discharged from the hospital after four days, and 1,000 mg of oral vitamin C was continued every two hours with fruit juice for seven days. The child was walking about, although slowly, on the 11th day of treatment. By the 19th day of treatment there was a “complete return of sensory and motor function,” and no long-term impairment ever resulted. Vitamin C not only completely cured this case of polio, it completely reversed what would undoubtedly have been a devastating, crippling result for the remainder of this girl’s life.” (4) For such elegant results, in the days before widespread use of either antibiotics or vaccination, one may wonder why Klenner was not awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
http://www.doctoryourself.com/klennerbio.html
Today, polio is still alive and well but is disguised under other medical terms, including Transverse Myelitis, viral or “aseptic” meningitis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS)- (what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had), Chinese Paralytic syndrome, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, epidemic cholera, cholera morbus, spinal meningitis, spinal apoplexy, inhibitory palsy, intermittent fever, famine fever, worm fever, bilious remittent fever, ergotism, post-polio syndrome, acute flaccid paralysis(AFP). - http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2011/11/17/smoke-mirrors-and-the-disappearance-of-polio/#sthash.57WvzWXo.dpuf
and most recently, enterovirus. As I write this, news headlines cite over a hundred cases recently from the enterovirus, a "mysterious polio-like illness" that presents with the very same symptoms of polio. Unfortunately, because doctors today are not employing orthomolecular treatment using vitamin C intravenously, many of these children are left with paralysis. This is such a shame.
Vitamin C therapy is not a profitable treatment for doctors so it is no longer employed in most cases, despite the fact that it was widely used many decades ago before the introduction of the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies.
Parents would do well to learn to use
Dr. Klenner's vitamin C dosage chart
for many illnesses, as well as to locate a local "drip room" where vitamin C can be given intravenously, or requested your child's care provider to offer this service.
Chickenpox
Dr. Klenner and other orthomolecular doctors again employed the use of high-dose vitamin C therapy in the case of chickenpox and found the following:
Chickenpox gave equally good response, the vesicles responding in the same manner as did those of herpes. These vesicles were crusted after the first 24 hours, and the patient well in three to four days.
I would also utilize the immune-boosting properties of vitamin A in the case of chickenpox as well, offering fermented cod liver oil as indicated above for measles.
And now that the chickenpox vaccine has led to an epidemic of shingles, Dr. Mercola recommends that raw honey, preferably Manuka but any raw honey one can obtain, is beneficial for shingles because it contains strong antibacterial activity, it draws fluid away from the wound, and its sugar content inhibits the formation of harmful microorganisms.
Vitamin C and Vitamin A as indicated above, as well as avoiding foods containing refined sugar to strengthen the immune system, are important as well.
Mumps
Orthomolecular treatment using vitamin C also found to be beneficial for mumps:
Of mumps, 33 cases were treated with ascorbic acid. When vitamin C was given at the peak of the infection the fever was gone within 24 hours, the pain within 36 hours, the swelling in 48 to 72 hours.
Pneumonia & Bronchitis
For 50 years, we have had documented research of the success using vitamin C in high doses for pneumonia and bronchitis. That research can be found here: http://injectablevitaminc.com/images/Ch20.pdf
If intravenous vitamin C is not available, oral doses using Dr. Klenner's chart should be utilized.
Keep in mind for all of these:
The amount of vitamin C for optimum effect will vary greatly with the individual. The type of the disease and the degree of toxemia (or viremia) are important guides in determining the dosage. http://www.injectablevitaminc.com/images/Ch10.pdf
Illnesses and stress quickly deplete the body of Vitamin C so the level of each of those will further affect the individual's needs for vitamin C.
Influenza
Prevention is quite helpful in all illnesses, especially the flu. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to the flu in many research studies, such as this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870528/and this: http://www.jsonline.com/news/health/44680902.html
Dr. Sherri Tenpenny offers the following vitamin D dosage recommendations:
However, the best way to determine dosage is by assessing one's serum D level. Most babies today are born to mothers who are already Vitamin D deficient, leaving baby to be born with a deficiency and susceptible to influenza and other viral illnesses. Consequently, optimizing mom's Vitamin D levels during pregnancy and providing baby with an oral vitamin D supplement (a liquid D3 without soybean oil like this one: http://www.vitacost.com/vitacost-infanthealth-liquid-vitamin-d-drops-for-kids-baby-ds-400-iu-1-fl-oz-30-ml-900-servings-5 ) is preferable in order to help prevent frequent sicknesses in infants.
For using orthomolecular vitamin C treatment for the flu, go here: http://www.vitamincfoundation.org/surefire.shtml
Click here to see my specific Supplement Recommendations for Vitamin C, cod liver oil, etc.
Also see: Detoxing from Vaccines.
Blessings of good health,
~Sara Jo Poff
Disclaimer: This information is not meant to be used in place of medical treatment. Please consult with either a physician, naturopathic doctor, or other healthcare practitioner for further information.