A very basic molecule, made up of just two simple atoms in the body—oxygen and nitrogen—could well be the key to healing most degenerative diseases, and it’s been largely overlooked by modern medicine.

Nitric oxide is a colorless gas that forms when nitrogen is oxidized, and it plays a central role in distributing blood around the body, dilating blood vessels, raising the blood supply and lowering blood pressure. But it’s also essential in protecting the body’s tissues from damage when blood supply is low.

Besides blood, this neurotransmitter sends messages from the brain to smooth muscle, including in the gastrointestinal tract. It can quickly heal altitude sickness. It’s even responsible for male erections.

Having adequate levels of nitric oxide affects heart rate variability (the time between beats, which vary ever so slightly, a measure of health or impending disease), plus blood pressure, breathing rate, immune functions, pain levels and even a person’s ability to respond to stress, anxiety and many other physical and emotional states.

The miracle molecule

It can spark new neurons to form, new neurological connections and pathways to develop, and still others to be remodeled or even pruned away when they no longer serve their purpose. It helps increase the availability of oxygen in the blood; closes pain “gates” (by stimulating the body’s a-beta fibers in the painful area); stimulates the vagus nerve, the largest nerve in humans that affects virtually every important organ in the body; and plays an important role in lowering inflammation. Its effect on the vagus nerve is particularly significant, as this nerve regulates many functions of internal organs, including the mechanisms of the heart, breathing rate and digestion.

Nitric oxide (or NO, as it’s often referred to) is also central to wound healing. It helps the body to form new blood vessels and even to produce more collagen, besides fending off bacteria and other microorganisms and calming inflammation.

NO decreases in our bodies as we age. But with a few simple practices—eating certain NO-rich healthy, whole foods, particularly your greens; exercising; letting healthy bacteria flourish in your mouth; maintaining a healthy level of stomach acidity; and other easy-to-follow measures—you can boost your NO levels quickly.

But for those who can’t, NO supplements and rub-on gels or creams are available. When used as a pill or ointment, its results in wound healing, cardiac illness and much more have been nothing short of miraculous.

Sorting a deficiency of nitric oxide with NO lozenges or ointments may well be the cure for all modern diseases.

Healing through our ears

But it’s also central to the hearing system, which may also be central to NO’s effects in healing the rest of our body. A team of scientists at the Neuroscience Research Institute at New York University discovered that nitric oxide and its signaling system play a central role in creating the auditory system itself, particularly blood flow within the cochlea, the snail-shaped and fluid-filled organ within the inner ear. It’s also the fundamental molecule responsible for the sense of ease and well-being that people experience with music.

Nitric oxide creates a perfect feedback loop within the body. It’s released when someone listens to music; the nerve fibers of the cochlea flow through the thalamus to the auditory cortex of the brain, but the thalamus is also within the limbic system, the brain’s emotional center.

All this means that when someone listens to music, they feel relaxation and enjoyment while also improving their hearing system by increasing blood flow to the ears—and of course, everywhere else.

That may be the ultimate reason for the simplest NO-booster of all.

Noted sound healer and musician Jonathan Goldman discovered that simple humming is one of the best ways to boost nitric oxide. The introduction to The Humming Effect (Healing Arts Press, 2017), which Goldman wrote with his wife Andi, noted evidence that humming causes nitric oxide levels in the body to increase 15-fold. You can enjoy all the extraordinary benefits above just by keeping your mouth closed and humming any single note your vocal range can easily reach for five minutes.

One of the most iconic scenes in movie history is in To Have and Have Not, when a young Lauren Bacall says, as a parting shot to an entranced Humphrey Bogart, that if he wants to see her again, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? Just put your lips together and blow.”

So perhaps for all those who need some healing, we could create a modern update: “You know how to hum, don’t you? Just put your lips together and hmmm.”

Modern medicine has knocked in a hole in one. It hasn’t completely conquered obesity, but it has made doing so effortless. All you need to do is get yourself a weekly injection.

This promise of no-sweat weight loss has captured the British and American public; the latest Gallup poll estimates 15.5 million US adults – some 6 percent of the entire population – have turned to drugs like Wegovy (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide), and 3 percent of American adults are currently on the drugs at any given time. Sales of Mounjaro alone, which is now preferred over Ozempic and Wegovy, are set to reach $34 billion a year by 2029.

But there’s a catch: instant, effort-free weight loss doesn’t come cheap. In the US, Wegovy and Mounjaro cost $1,000–$1,350 a month for weekly injections. In the UK, the shots, which can only be obtained privately at the moment, will set you back £150 each – or £600 every four weeks.

But Big Pharma is not an industry that overlooks opportunity. The UK government has announced the National Health Service will soon be picking up most of the tab for the shots, making them available as an NHS drug so that the cost plummets to £9.90 a shot.

And the US, NovoCare, a support vehicle of pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, has noted some insurers will cover obesity injections like Wegovy, making the drugs more or less free.

Besides the weight-loss bonanza, Mounjaro and the others have reached the holy grail of pharmaceuticals: the all-purpose drug. The latest claim, no doubt published by ‘friendly’ researchers, is that these drugs don’t just help you shed pounds; they assist your body in killing cancer and preventing dementia, stroke and heart attacks as well.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, or even an expensive empty plate.

What doesn’t usually get reported is that the drugs, Mounjaro in particular, appear to target muscle mass. In one study, about 40 percent of weight lost turned out to be muscle—it’s one reason for that ‘Ozempic face’ celebrities have begun to complain about.

And now come a host of other side effects: gastrointestinal effects, such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, plus dangerous effects on appetite, making it difficult to stop eating once you get off the drugs. And then there’s the risk of mental illness and suicide.  The London Times recently reported new cases of people who have suffered panic attacks, heart palpitations and suicidal ideation.

As with most new drugs, it takes a while for the bad news to come to light.

If all this sounds too worrying and expensive a way to lose pounds or tackle type 2 diabetes, there are simpler solutions. Functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner and metabolic health expert Ben Azadi, author of the new book Metabolic Freedom: A 30-Day Guide to Restore Your Metabolism, Heal Hormones & Burn Fat (Hay House) has more than 17 years’ experience helping thousands to reclaim their health.

In the June edition, my magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You just published Azadi’s top 11 anti-inflammatory supplements that function like natural cheat codes for losing weight and resetting your metabolism—something that weight-loss drugs demonstratively fail to do.

Everyday foods like coffee and apple cider vinegar and supplements like L-carnitine, conjugated linoleic acid, capsaicin, green tea extract, forskolin extract, Garcinia cambogia and African mango can boast results that rival Wegovy on a good day without all the ugly side effects.

Apple cider vinegar has been shown to improve blood glucose levels after a high-carb meal by 34 percent; African mango extract creates an average weight loss of 28 lb after 10 weeks and a 6 in. loss around the waist.

Research into some of the other supplements and foods has shown they help you burn more calories during exercise; boost fat breakdown, often by boosting the production of brown fat; help you shed fat in the abdomen and around the organs; and much more.

The answer to extra weight, as with so much in health, can usually be found in nature. All you have to do is learn to trust it and its extraordinary, finely tuned genius.

(To read our WDDTY article about biohacking weight loss, check it out here: https://www.wddty.com/features/biohack-your-weight-loss-11-supplements-that-help-shed-pounds/)

You may have heard this story, but probably not the true one, the one that George Dantzig himself recounted in a 1986 interview for the College Mathematics journal.

In 1939, George was a student at University of California at Berkeley. He’d showed up late at  Dr. Jerzy Neyman's class, the head of the statistics department, one of the two founders of modern statistics. On the blackboard he saw two statistical problems he figured were the class’s homework, so he copied them down.

Several days later, he apologized to Neyman for taking so much time to do the homework, but the problems had seemed a little harder than usual. He asked Neyman if he still wanted to grade it, and the professor told George to toss the paper on his desk on top of  piles of papers.

Some six weeks later at 8 am one Sunday morning George and his wife Anne were woken up by hard banging on the front door. He opened the door with a shock. Neyman was standing there, holding his two papers.  ‘I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers!’ he exclaimed. ‘Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.’

George had no idea what his professor was talking about, until the professor explained that he was going to send George’s paper to a scientific journal to publish.  The two math problems George had believed were homework were in fact two famous statistical problems that had remained unsolved and were thought to be impossible. In both cases, George had solved statistical problems that had confounded the best minds in statistics.

The following year, when George was scouting around for a subject for his thesis Professor Neyman told him that the solutions to the two problems alone were PhD thesis fodder enough and told him to simply put them in a binder.

The first paper got published at the time, but the second one wasn’t published until 11 years later. A man called Abraham Wald sent George final galley proofs of his own paper, about to go to press in a statistics journal, after someone had alerted him to the fact that George had already solved that second problem in his thesis. Wald graciously inserted Dantzig’s name on the paper and they were ultimately published as co-authors.

George eventually ended up as professor of operations research at Stanford and even received the National Medal of Science. This story turned into urban myth, was greatly embellished and appropriated by many ministers, including  Christian televangelist Robert Schuller, and was even considered the source of the film Good Will Hunting.

The takeaway in any version, though, was George’s attitude to the ‘homework.’ By arriving late, he didn’t know that the two problems were unsolvable. He assumed his professor expected the students to solve the problems, so he did. He didn’t know they were considered unsolvable, and without that limitation, he able to successfully tackle the impossible.

This is an important lesson about the thoughts you think about your own ability, especially when it comes to a challenging situation.

Like the old saying goes, whether you think you can or you think you can’t . . . you’re right.

It’s a tough Easter this year, when we look around at what is happening, a difficult time to rejoice in anything when everything feels broken. How can we recover the sense of hope that Easter time brings to us, no matter what religion we follow: the powerful symbol of the symbolism of Jesus’s death and rebirth.

I have a powerful bit of hope to pass on to all of you, and it has to do with game theory.  Biologists turn to game theory to determine how people react in certain complex social situations. Put people in a tight spot, and see what behavior comes naturally to them.

One of my favorites is something called the Public Goods game. This game is designed to test how people behave when asked to contribute to something that could benefit the entire community, but at a price to themselves.  It’s a bit like asking people to voluntarily pay a tax amount of their own choosing toward maintaining the parks in California.

In this scenario, a number of participants are given tokens as money and allowed to decide secretly how much of it to keep and how much to put into a common pot.  The experimenters then award some percentage of the total in the pot — 40 per cent, say — to everyone playing. If each player is playing with twenty tokens and all four put in all their tokens, the experiments will award 40 per cent of 80, or 32 tokens to each.

The irony of the game is that everyone makes the most money when forfeiting the majority of his own tokens, since the experimenters reward the most from the highest amounts within the pot.

Furious at unfairness

When it’s played as a repeat game, the urge to give is initially enormous — on average, people begin playing by giving up to 40 to 60 per cent of their tokens — but this generous impulse quickly abates so that, by the final rounds, nearly three-quarters of all people contribute nothing and the rest, close to nothing.

Although at first glance, it would appear that people are simply following their own self-interest, that isn’t the explanation offered by the players.  When interviewed later, those participants who had initially been generous grew increasingly furious at freeloaders, who were either contributing nothing or less than the others.

The generous players had retaliated with the only weapon available to them: they’d stop contributing to the public fund.

That’s a bit like what’s happening now.  Fairness is one of the pillars of being human. Our sense of unfairness emerges when two of the most fundamental needs we have — to give generously of ourselves, to take our turn — are thwarted, when the promises we make to each other to take our fair share are broken.

In what we view as our vastly unfair society, in our real-life Public Goods games, we are now all refusing to play.

Infiltrating the game

However, Nicholas Christakis, the Yale University sociologist and network specialist, recently discovered an amazingly hopeful phenomenon in social networks, again using the Public Goods game.

The participants were randomly assigned to a sequence of different groups in order to play a series of games with strangers.  This enabled Christakis to draw up networks of interactions, so that he could explore exactly how the behavior spreads from person to person along the network.

Christakis discovered something amazing and untoward:  giving creates a contagion of giving, a network of “pay-it-forward” altruism.

The actions of participants affected the future interactions of other people along the network.  “If Tom is kind to Harry, Harry will be kind to Susan, Susan will be kind to Jane, and Jane will be kind to Peter,” writes Christakis. “So, Tom's kindness to Harry is seen in Jane's kindness to Peter, even though Jane and Peter had nothing to do with Tom and Harry and never interacted with them.”

All it took was one act of kindness and generosity to spread through multiple periods of play and up to three degrees along the social network.

“Each additional contribution a person made to the public good in the first period of play is tripled over the course of the experiment by other people who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence,” Christakis and Fowler write.

So for every act of kindness or generosity you do for a friend, he or she pays it forward to their friends and their friends’ friends and their friends’ friends’ friends.

Christakis proved that kindness and generosity create a cascade of cooperative behavior, even in the most hardened of hearts.

Go out and do something kind for someone else this Easter and watch as your own game turns around and kindness and generosity begin to flow through your social network.

Happy holidays!

I leave you with these beautiful lines by Walt Whitman from Song of the Open Road:

Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Hands up, anyone who wants to take a guess. What is the biggest risk factor for illness in modern times? Smoking? Big Macs? Alcohol? All of them in excess aren’t very good for you, that’s for sure, but they may not offer the health risks of one simple facet of modern life: being by yourself a bit too much.

Loneliness and isolation are not just regrettable social situations; they’re killers. They distort brain function, causing hallucinations and depression. They’re the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day—worse for you than being obese, breathing polluted air or even being a couch potato.

Deep connection, rather than competition, is the quality most essential to human nature, and it’s one reason the Covid lockdowns were such a disastrous policy, far more dangerous and long-lasting than the virus itself.

Humanity is profoundly tribal; we feel most at home in small clusters in which we are a part of the whole. This most primal of human urges—not to stand apart but to connect, particularly with the people who immediately surround us—may well be so necessary to our existence that not satisfying it can be a matter of life or death.

At the University of California, Berkeley, sociologist Lisa Berkman once examined the importance of social networks and social support in protection against heart disease. She assembled the health statistics of most inhabitants within an entire county by laboriously combing through nine years’ worth of Alameda County Human Population Laboratory records.

Eventually she was able to show that those who felt lonely and isolated socially were two to three times more likely to die from heart disease and other causes than those who felt connected to others. These results were independent of risk factors such as high cholesterol levels or high blood pressure, smoking, and family history.

As Berkman was fascinated to learn, our biological responses to stress—the fight-or-flight mechanisms of our autonomic nervous and endocrine systems—are subdued when a companion is present, when we believe support will be present or even when we just think about support.

And that can act like a bulletproof shield. For instance, a group of researchers studying the native populations of the Solomon Islands found they had no coronary heart disease or high blood pressure even after adopting Western diets and religious practices. This puzzled the researchers until they discovered the one factor that had remained constant: the social ties and roles within the family.

In that sense, heart disease can be viewed chiefly as a disease of emotional alienation. Healthy adults with good support networks have been shown to have lower blood cholesterol and stronger immune function than those without emotional support.

A similar situation occurs with stroke patients; those who are socially isolated are more likely to have another stroke within five years.

Brigham Young University data from 148 studies came to an equally stark conclusion; relationships of any sort—good or bad—improve your odds of survival by 50 percent. Isolation was equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic and was twice as harmful as obesity.

These sorts of social connections even protect us in hard times. As one study showed, a sampling of Americans in the lowest income bracket suffered from virtually no stress about their financial circumstances so long as they had two means of support: a strong spiritual connection and a strong community.

The community connection was even more important than their spiritual beliefs; private prayer was not as protective as the support of their church group. Even when engaged in a daily struggle to survive, they were able to manage as long as they didn’t do so alone.

This protection starts early. A close family structure and strong community support during childhood have been found to offer life-long protection against future heart disease and other illnesses.

As a simple antidote to the ever-increasing isolation of modern times, membership in social groups of every variety can act as one of nature’s best preventive medicines. Social psychologists at the UK’s University of Exeter discovered that the most important predictor of health—even more than diet and exercise—is the number of groups to which you belong, particularly if you have strong relationships within them.

“As a rough rule of thumb,” writes Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam in his book Bowling Alone (Touchstone Books, 2000), “if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.”

The prescription against future illness of many varieties is simple:  join a group – a bowling group, book group, religious group, my community and especially a Power of Eight® group—and you immeasurably increase your chances of living a long and healthy life.

Stress-free and healing!

We’ve just started collecting the responses from February 1’s Peace Intention Experiment and the result is extraordinary. As you may know we measured 44 people via the Bio-Well devices to drill down further into why collective intentions cause so many effects on the participants themselves – healing their bodies, improving their relationships, even experiencing more love for everyone they come in contact with. The famous physicist Dr. Konstantin Korotkov has perfected this biofeedback device that takes a fingertip and offers information about the state of your health.  The technology uses fingertip sensors to measure the body’s subtle energy, providing insights into physical and emotional health, including immune responses, stress levels, vagus nerve activity and overall wellbeing.  Nima Farshid, a scientist and Bio-Well expert who works with Dr. Konstantin Korotkov, took measurements of 44 people who were present at my February 1 event before we started the broadcast of our Peace Intention Experiment and then afterward. Here is what we found. The vagus nerve, our longest nerve in the body, controls both the sympathetic nervous system and the para-sympathetic nervous system (our ‘rest-and-digest’ response). They are supposed to work together synergistically, but these days, our sympathetic nervous system tends to be dominant and we overly flooded by an over-abundance of cortisol in our system, whether it is stress over paying our bills, when we watch the news, or even when we listen to a different political belief. Everything now is triggering us – and the overload of cortisol is causing physical and emotional damage. As you can see, simply participating in a group intention to heal somewhere – in this case, three areas of high violence in Washington D.C. – did a great deal to heal the healers, too. Stress levels went down significantly, as did sympathetic nervous system domination. Our participants entered a state of far greater relaxation.

Besides calming down, the energy of their bodies increased, as did the energy in the various organs of their body.

Besides these individual changes, we also measured whether there were any changes in the emotion of the room, through another device invented by Dr. Korotkov, which he has playfully christened ‘Sputnik.’ As human emotions are related to the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, any changes in that system also changes blood circulation, perspiration and other functions, which change the overall electrical conductivity of the body. So when a person experiences a change of emotion, those changes of the body’s electrical conductivity will also affect the electricity of the environment, which in turn will be picked up by the Sputnik sensor through its extreme sensitivity to changes in environmental electromagnetic fields. Here’s what happened. The marked places are significant moments of my experiment, where you can see major changes in Sputnik:

These changes indicate a far greater calm, connection and coherence in the emotional content of the room just during our hour of the experiment and a lowering of energy, which the scientists believe indicates a shift of our energetic intention to Washington. In the coming weeks, I’ll be reporting on individual changes of the participants as they fill out the surveys.  And in a few months, we’ll find out from Dr. Jessica Utts, professor of statistics at the University of California at Irvine, whether we had any effect on violence levels.

Wow! What a Peace Intention Experiment! Thanks to so many of you for participating, inviting your own contacts to join us, organizing watch parties and more!

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Happy New Year, everyone!  May your 2025 be filled with love, joy, abundance and all the seeds of a long and healthy life.

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Pop star Dua Lipa says she manifested her slot as a headliner at this year’s British Glastonbury Festival in Britain – one of the world’s top pop festivals.

American gymnastic Olympian Simone Biles claimed she owed her 11 Olympic medals and 30 World Championship medals to manifestation.

And now ‘manifest’ has been crowned ‘Word of the Year’ by the Cambridge Dictionary, as the most looked up word of 2024.

Many scientists and psychologists are decidedly unhappy about this because they believe that manifesting has no basis in fact, calling it nothing more than ‘magical thinking.’

I beg to differ. Of the 41 Intention Experiments I’ve run with prestigious scientists from top universities, 37 have shown positive results. And through my Power of Eight® groups, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people manifest their dreams, whether for better health, relationships, finances or career, and more.
There’s no question that intention works.

The only magical thinking has to do with the many myths surrounding how exactly to ‘do’ intention.

One of the most overlooked methods in popular culture about manifestation is ‘mental rehearsal,’ practicing how to fulfil your dream by rehearsing it in your head. No question that Simone Biles will have practiced her routines hundreds of times in her head until she’d rehearsed every last move before stepping out on the Olympic floor.

In fact, every elite athlete today, from football players to rock climbers to Olympic swimmers, uses mental rehearsal to prepare for a match or event of any variety because they know that mental visualization spells the difference between winning and losing.

The reason why it works so well comes down to this one fact: your brain, extraordinary as it is in other regards, just cannot tell the difference between the thought of an action and the action itself. Rehearsing in your head is the equivalent of rehearsing with you body, smoothing the way for its actualization in the world.

In case you missed it, here’s an early podcast I did exploring the science of why this works.

I also cover why mental rehearsal is so essential to highly effective intention and how this amplifies the power of your thoughts to transform your body or indeed any area of your life.

The presidential election is finally over, and about 71 million Americans are jubilant, while the other 66 million who voted are in deep shock and despondent mourning. Much of Europe and the UK looks on in disbelief.

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