‘TRUTH’, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Season 3 Episode 5 featuring Dr. Tyna Moore

The following is a transcript of this podcast. Also see related article.

– What’s been your experience with the pandemic?

– Really interesting. So when I was 19, I got diagnosed with a virus that is not very common. Well, I’m sorry, I should take that back. It’s very common but it doesn’t commonly make people sick. It’s in the herpes family. It’s called cytomegalovirus. And I ended up with long hauler syndrome from that. And then I got a very, very bad case of the flu in the early 2000s. And that almost killed me. And so I became obsessed with viruses and how they worked. And my chiropractic training was excellent when it came to basic sciences, immunology and pathology, so I was ready. And when this hit, I thought for sure common sense would prevail. I was like, “Oh, hey, we know how corona viruses work”. We as naturopathic doctors, we have many, many effective tools on how to help avoid getting severely ill, how to mitigate cytokine storms, how to help. And we were silenced, particularly in Oregon. You’ll love this. The Department of Justice and the FTC somehow got involved with each other in Oregon specifically and silenced us immediately. My lawyer called me and said, “Do not say a word online. They are investigating doctors left and right.” If they even have, I had a friend who was under investigation, we believe, for even saying vitamin C and COVID in the same post. And so I was watching my friends get de-platformed and get in trouble immediately at the onset. And so I’ve had to navigate this very carefully. We are obviously not allowed to talk about treatment, prevention or cure. But, I just was, I cannot believe that we weren’t even allowed to tell people to high dose vitamin D and vitamin C at the beginning. So I feel like something was awry when that all started happening. I realized we shouldn’t be pedaling, you know, snake oil and unfounded cures but basic physiology, basic biochemistry, basic nutrition. We know that people who are nutritionally poor or have low nutritional status, not only do they get sicker and die faster from these types of viruses, but they also create more virulent strains and spread more virulent strains, as do obese people. And I thought for sure that this information would come out from the powers that be, and we would get some common sense. But, that didn’t happen. And so my Instagram following grew very quickly and I was getting information from doctors and nurses on the front lines all over the world in real time and hearing about what was going on. And very quickly, we realized that the obese population, those with diabetes and subsequently with kidney issues, were at most risk. And I thought, well, for sure, they’re gonna come out and say this is how you can empower yourself and help yourself be more resilient to this virus. And yet, not a peep. And we’re a year in and not a peep. And so I’ve been, quietly and carefully trying to navigate this without breaking any rules and trying to help people become more resilient because we’re not sitting ducks. And so I’ve been frustrated, very frustrated. And then watching subsequently folks such as yourself and brilliant doctors just be silenced over and over and over again. I mean, obviously, obviously there’s some truth out there that doesn’t wanna be let out.

– Yeah, I mean, Dr. Fauci I think was asked in August, he was on national TV, I think it was on CNN. And he was asked, “what are you personally doing?” And he said he takes 9,000 units daily of vitamin D. And my question was, why wasn’t he telling other people? Why didn’t he ever have that press conference at the beginning and say to people, “Here’s how to build your immune system?” We were watching this from the beginning. We had the data. 85 and 95% of the people who were first being hospitalized and then dying, were people who are vitamin D deficient.

– Yep.

– People with darker skin color, who are chronically vitamin D deficient, were having these death rates that were disproportionately high compared to the rest of the population. Why wasn’t he telling people of color, you need to supplement with vitamin D, you need to stop drinking sugar drinks?

– Yeah, yeah.

– You need to try to lose weight. You need to try to spend time in the sunlight because this isn’t like homeopathy or questionable science or something they can criticize. This is, you know, this is biology.

– Yeah.

– Everybody knows it. And yet, it seems like anything that was not vaccine tract, anything that would distract people from the vaccine is my only salvation was being silenced by these vested interests. As you point out, the Justice Department, the FTC. All of these diverse federal agencies were all in on this weird mission to stop people from finding any solution other than vaccines, including pharmaceutical solutions like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. Which, whether you believe that they work or not, and the peer-reviewed science overwhelmingly says they do, the kind of studies that Tony Fauci and Bill Gates were commissioning were the studies that we know were designed to discredit them. So they were studies that targeted late onset in the disease when people were already in the hospital. They used four or five times the lethal doses. They used placebos that were effective in order to dampen the effectiveness signals. And these are all old tricks that we see from the pharmaceutical industry. We know what they look like, we know what they’re up to. And that’s what they were doing. It was really, it was diabolical, I would say.

– It was so interesting to watch it play out too because they would throw up a study and say vitamin D and zinc don’t work. But we know as physicians who have been treating patients in real life, that oftentimes nutritional status takes a while to come up. And you can’t just throw nutrients at people in isolation and expect them to work. Oftentimes, these things work synergistically. And so it takes time for nutritional status to come up. The body can not just absorb massive aliquots of vitamin D and zinc all at the same time on the cellular level. They’ve gotta actually be absorbed over time. A good example is myself. I was so severely zinc deficient that it took me 10 years of high dosing zinc to actually get to the point where I was no longer experiencing zinc deficiency symptoms. So this isn’t just an overnight phenomenon. Those who are obese actually have a harder time absorbing vitamin D and getting their vitamin D status up. As you said, people of color and darker skin tone have a hard time absorbing, and getting their vitamin D status up, people who are inflamed. All the people who are most at risk for this virus and poor outcomes from it, I should say, have a harder time getting nutritional status up. Gut absorption is a huge issue. And then as far as the drugs went, I found studies very early on in this where different countries were working together to share their cocktail of drugs they were using. And so again, I think sometimes these drugs work synergistically with one another, not just high doses in isolation. That’s really where naturopathic medicine, I would say shines. We understand that concept. We’re not interested in a symptom picture that has a CPT code on it. We’re interested, or sorry, an ICD-9 code or ICD-10 code now. We’re interested in the person who’s presenting with the symptoms, so we treat the people, not the condition. And there’s a million reasons why somebody’s gonna have a difficult time with a virus, and it’s not all handled the same. But like you said, blanket distribution of vitamin D which costs, how much does that cost? Like a penny a pill? And zinc, I mean, I thought this stuff should have been subsidized and released. And I was getting information from folks who lived in Peru and other places telling me that they were being handed Ivermectin prophylactically. They were being given little goodie bags, just in case they were starting to come down with symptoms, so that they didn’t overwhelm the hospital system. And just not a word of it in the United States. And yet, everything I followed from the American Medical Association, and watching Medscape daily, the emails that came through, it was almost like they were trying to villainize it in real time, and just say it just doesn’t work. It’s like, well, yeah, if you throw somebody who’s heading towards a ventilator who’s really sick on a high dose of vitamin D, it’s not a miracle. Of course it’s not gonna work. And so it’s like common sense left the building completely. It’s like we forgot how, A, viruses work, and how, B, humans work and how herds work, how viruses move through herds. It was just completely disregarded. And we were treating this virus like it was some kind of alien. When in reality, it fits into a family of viruses we understand well. So that whole part has just been very frustrating for me.

– One of the things you just mentioned surprised me a little, which is this idea that people who are obese, and people of these other comorbidities actually become reservoirs for mutant strains. Is that just because there’s a lot of activity, of viral activity who aren’t what they call inoculum which is a large presence of very dense masses of the virus. Is that why that would happen?

– That’s part of it. So the ACE2 receptors where the virus binds and obese tissue, adipose cells actually have a high level of ACE2 receptors, so more fat cells, more ACE2 receptors. So you have a higher potential to bind more virus viral titers count. So the higher the virus tighter account in the body the more infectious somebody is. We know from flu studies, even more recent flu studies, that obese bodies, this was in mice and humans, they found that obese bodies not only spread more virus around but they spread it for longer periods of time and more comes out in their aerosol. So that’s concerning and very early on in the pandemic there was some literature that I saw, letters to the editor of different medical journals saying, hey, maybe we should consider this. And maybe we should consider quarantining obese folks if they are symptomatic and quarantining them for longer than 14 days because we know these facts about the flu and obesity. We also know in mouse studies that when a virus goes through the body, since it uses your own body to manufacture itself, it creates a different, a little bit different version that comes out right. And generally, as a virus moves through a society of mammals, it becomes kinder and gentler because the body is processing it and doing different things to it, right? Well in the obese model, out comes a very different virus. And so in these mice they looked at the obese mice were creating more virulent strains that actually created more morbidity or illness symptoms in lean counterparts. And so just recently there’s some data coming out that this might be true as well for this virus. And so that alone should have been a conversation. That’s not fat shaming. And every time I try to mention it someone wants to cut my head off and accuse me of fat shaming or a million other horrible words. When I’m literally just trying to share information that can empower a person to take their health into their own hands. Stop sitting around, you know, we’ve gained how much weight since the pandemic started? I think the average American’s gained like what, 20, 30 pounds a recent survey said. So I was simply trying to get people information to empower themselves to make changes, you know, small incremental changes add up quickly. Also, and I don’t, you know, it’s it can go down down the rabbit hole here but your fat cells are little reservoirs for your immune system as well. So your immune system is I was in the adipocyte which is your fat cell and fat cells, generally speaking, when in an obese body become, generally speaking become pro-inflammatory. And they act almost like a little endocrine organ pumping out cytokines. So a more obese body is going to have a bigger potential, bigger cytokine storm. So these fat cells are housing the immune system. The T-cells that are in there that should be the specialized, I like to think of them as the Navy Seal of the immune system. The T cells that are living in fat cells become sort of rogue and they’re not so nice. And it basically turns into a little bit of a nightmare. The T memory cells, which is the one cell we’re banking on here, whether vaccinated or natural immunity, we are banking on T memory cells for long-term immunity to this. T memory cells in the obese body don’t work. They just stop working. And from what I found in mice studies, it’s irreversible. And so that was short-term though. So we don’t know, I don’t want to blow the wind out of everyone’s sails and tell them they’re doomed but a fat cell can do some pretty crazy things to your immune system cells, and then they don’t work right. And it’s the overall harmony of the orchestra of the immune system that we need working because this virus bypasses the first part of your immune system, pretty well like a Ninja. Communication lines in inflamed and obese people and sickly people and malnourished people don’t work between the frontline Army and the Navy Seals. I don’t really know military as well as some, so don’t fry me on this but there should be a communication line. That’s a bit broken in bodies that are not healthy. And then over here, we have the specialized forces that maintain long-term immunity. Those are not working so well in malnourished, sickly, elderly, obese patients. The people most susceptible to poor outcomes of this virus. These are also the same types of patients or people who don’t respond well to vaccines. So my whole thing was not necessarily pro-vax or anti-vax, it was just informed consent. And that either way you want to approach this as a individual in this pandemic, you’ve got to have resiliency. You’ve got to have your body working favorably and your nutritional status up so that either your natural immunity or your induced immunity through immunizations, either way they’re not gonna work if we continue to be as sick as we are as a nation. This nation is having a very particular time with this virus, which I saw coming from a mile away because only 88% of us are metabolically sound or I’m sorry 12% of us are metabolically sound. 88% of us are not metabolically sound. And it’s the metabolic flexibility that this virus is taking advantage of. When people don’t have metabolic flexibility and they’re sitting in this sort of like pre-diabetic or diabetic soup, they have a very hard time dealing with the whole viral onset. So that’s the pickle we’re in. And I’m just really confused that this hasn’t been discussed in mainstream media or anywhere else for that matter. And that the small core of us freedom fighters trying to get the message out continually get attacked, villainified and censored. And it it’s left me in a stupor to be honest.

– So what you’re saying is, if you were the head of National Institute for Allergic Infectious Diseases, you probably would have given the nation a different prescription than what Anthony Fauci gave the nation. You know, that’s one of my kind of, just a basic question about the science that was used. That was never support the lockdowns and masking and social distancing. Is it possible that those safeguards actually made the problem worse?

– I think so.

– Locking people in their homes and keeping them out of the sunlight and keeping them away from social interaction and putting them under the stress of enduring bankruptcies and, you know, the spousal abuse and suicides and all this stuff. And then gaining weight and ruining their health. Does that actually ended up making people safer? I don’t think that we have the data to support that.

– No, I think that lockdowns were a terrible idea. The way that they were done. I think there could have been a different version of that. I think that the susceptible could have been protected better. I believe that people thought that the mask would save them. And so perhaps people who were at high risk took risks that they shouldn’t have taken. I’ve seen several people out in the community that, you look at them and you think that is exactly the type of person who is a sitting duck for poor outcomes with this virus. And here they are sitting in the middle of a restaurant with, even I’ve seen older folks with oxygen on. The other thing that fits in with what you just said is frailty has really come to the forefront as a big concern. Those folks, regardless of size or weight or age or gender, those folks who are most frail are the ones who are doing the poorest with the virus. And so let’s take exercise out of the picture. Let’s shut gyms. I mean, that’s what they did. In Oregon they shut gyms. We’ve been closed. They just opened them for like a pipsqueak of time. And now they’re shutting things down to some extent again. Take exercise out of the picture and let’s see how everyone does. When you put any mammal in isolation our immune systems need to encounter each other to practice and sample each other. It’s exercise, it’s, think of it as immune exercise. And when you put mammals in isolation their immune system plummets and their inflammation increases. So inflammation and frailty, I think are at the root cause of poor outcomes with this virus. And yet we’ve induced it through the measures that they’ve taken. So whenever they do let us out, which is in the, Oregon’s been under heavy lockdown. I don’t know if people realize the severity that we have endured here in Oregon. It’s particularly unpleasant and no one’s really talking about it because everybody’s so hung up on what happened in Portland and with the riots, et cetera. And so you let people out for a small amount of time and they’ve been completely isolated. They probably been eating high quality, or quantities of sugar. They’ve not been exercising and their immune systems are tanked out because they’ve been isolated. And so of course, the minute they come upon anybody viruses will hop to host. Viruses always have to find, they don’t want to kill their hosts, they want to find a host so they can spread. And so they’re gonna keep hopping to the next host that shows up and you let these folks out. And of course we’re gonna see cases rise up. And then PCR testing is a whole other conversation we don’t have to get into, but I don’t, I do believe it’s flawed. I don’t believe it’s been terribly accurate and helpful but it drives the case number up, which the media loves to latch on to, to keep that fear narrative going. And so the whole thing is it’s, I don’t know why some of us can see it and others want to absolutely deny it and fight us on it. But I’m sitting here watching it all play. I wish I had a dollar for every prediction I’ve made correctly throughout this. I’d be rich because I keep, I’m like, well this is what’s gonna happen next. And boom, it happens next. It’s crazy. And so now Oregon is saying well, because we really haven’t been out and about, because we’ve been under so much isolation, now we can’t let you out because you’re too susceptible. That’s the new narrative. So now we have to really push those vaccines so that everybody gets up to snuff because they’ve tanked out our immune systems through locking us down.

– Pertinent to that, I’m gonna show you a clip from George Carlin. Now I’m gonna, David’s gonna put that in but you know the clip I’m talking about.

– Yeah.

– So George Carlin has this famous clip where he talks about how the people like him who grew up in the Bronx and around the Hudson River. Where there was raw sewage that went into the Hudson and they’re the only ones in his neighborhood that didn’t get polio. Talk about, talk about, it’s a funny clip. But is there some truth in it?

– Absolutely it’s accurate. I was lucky enough to fall in love with a man who lives out on 40 acres out in rural Oregon, out in wine country, right before this pandemic hit. And so I was quarantined out here at the beginning and we’ve fallen in love and we’re gonna get married and everything’s great. And I now live out in the country but I have always been a city girl and a suburban girl. And when I came out of the shoot, literally my mother’s womb, I was put on antibiotics and I was, I spent the first part of my life on antibiotics. And I was a very, very sick person. That is why I’m so passionate about everything I’m telling you because I single-handedly built my health back and it took a long time to do. So I’m a proponent of people building their health. And I really, really try to be a cheerleader for that because I’ve been there. The kids out in farmland don’t get sick because they’re out in the dirt all day, even with all the, I’m shocked actually to tell you the truth with all the glyphosate they spray out here, it’s shocking how much pesticides and herbicides are sprayed. And I watch it happen and, you know, cringe, knowing what I know. They are still the most rugged, durable folks I’ve ever met. Good, common sense. Good immune systems. When I met my, and I really believe, and we do have studies to show this, we share our microbiomes. So if we are surrounded by very sick people, the chances are we’re probably going to end up being pretty sick ourselves. And so I’m always looking for healthy people to share my biome with. That’s kinda my thing. And when I met my fiance–

– You should try to date men that have really poor hygiene.

– Just good rugged men that take care of themselves. But when I met my fiance, I was like, oh, this one, I told my mom, I said, this one has a good microbiome. And she laughs at me because she thinks, she believes in me, but she thinks I’m so funny the way I say things. It’s true though. They’ve done studies in families, you give one person an antibiotic in the family and the whole family’s microbiome in that home will shift. So there’s a lot to, and you know the gut is so critical to people’s overall health. Just not to get off topic, but that’s really where being dirtier helps, getting dirty is helpful because you end up ingesting it. And what happens in the gut really kind of dictates what happens throughout the rest of the body’s immune system, because the bulk of your immune system is centered in the gut. And so it’s, we’ve got so many people in this country with bad gut health and IBS and a myriad of other conditions for so many reasons. And so the virus likes to latch on there too. Lots of ACE2 receptors in an inflamed gut. And that I think is leading to a lot of issues for people that we’re not talking about as well, so.

– Let’s say that you were on antibiotics for a while. That wrecks your gut biome. Or you’ve been eating a lot of glyphosate, which also wrecks your gut biome. Does that mean that you have to stay on probiotics for the rest of your life, or can you just eat some sauerkraut and it restores it and the ecosystem is now good forever?

– I think it depends on the person and how their overall health is. I think people who have good muscle mass and who are active will tend to recover better, who have good sleep, because that helps your human growth hormone levels come up and your human growth hormone levels are what heal your gut. So we don’t always want to do high dose probiotics with everybody as a blanket strategy. It doesn’t always work and it can make things worse for some. So it’s very individualized, but I do think that focusing on one’s gut health is a good strategy for longevity and good health, regardless of where they’re at. If they’ve spent a lot of time on antibiotics, folks like myself, I don’t have a great health gut. I have some gut issues, but I work really hard. I’m just very conscious of what I put in my mouth and I eat really quality food. I don’t eat a ton of it. And I make sure that it is pesticide and chemical free as much as I can. And again, we do the best we can because not everybody has access to that type of option. So we want to just make sure people are eating real food but I can say that eating something that’s highly processed in a package, regardless of what it says on the label. If it says organic gluten-free, paleo, who cares? If it’s highly processed and it’s in a package it’s probably not great for your gut health. And so just focusing on a variety, I like to say eat a variety of interesting foods that would be interesting for your microbiome. You want to feed your microbiome. You want to focus on it that way. You want to eat the foods that it wants so that it will do its thing magically. If you eat foods that the pathogenic bugs like, like sugar, then you’ll grow more pathogenic bugs. It’s just like your garden, right? If you weed the garden and you don’t plant ground cover, those weeds are gonna come back even stronger. And so it’s much like tending a garden.

– Yeah, one of my favorite books is by Jared Diamond. You know that book?

– I don’t.

– Guns, Germs, And Steel. Really, really wonderful book. And it’s about the history of, essentially the history of the human race. And there’s another book that came out of an article that Jared Diamond Wrote called Sapiens.

– Oh, I have that book.

– Yeah, one of the things, you really need to read Jared Diamond’s book, which is Guns, Germs, And Steel, which is one of the most transformative books I’ve ever read. And it’s a favorite of all my kids. And it’s really an extraordinary distillation of all of these different branches of the biology and history and geology and climate, et cetera, to explain human politics to the date. And human history. One of the kind of surprising things in this paper that was later adopted into the book Sapiens is the decline in quality of life and human health and stature and size that took place during the agricultural revolution. Because I always think of the agricultural revolution as a period in human history that really made quality of life better for human beings. That made it so they were less likely to get killed by a lion or a snake and that you had a steady food supply, less likely to starve to death. And better nutrition, but actually he says that nutrition, human nutrition really declined precipitously because hunter gatherers were eating a variety of foods. And that variety was really, the micro-nutrients in that variety where you eat different things all year. They were foraging, they were hunting and all these different food sources they have to find. And that when they switched to a monoculture and eliminated that variety in their food supply, out of all of these human healths chronic diseases and other diseases really date on that period in human history. And it was, that was kind of revelatory to me that, you know, the agricultural revolution was not only was lower quality of life, kind of a lower level of happiness, but also in contentment. And he makes a very, very good case. I’m not explaining it very well but I really urge people. It’s really fun to read those two books. But I would begin with Guns, Germs, And Steel. But it was revelatory to me to look at the agricultural revolution really as a period in human history when the quality of life and human health declined precipitously.

– I would agree with that. I’ve learned that that was when arthritis started showing up. Osteoarthritis started showing up in the, when we started digging up bones, looking at humans throughout history that the agricultural revolution when people hunkered down and started mono cropping and eating a lot of grains is when we started seeing really bad osteoarthritis creep up. So interesting. And I agree with you. I’m definitely more of a primal medicine kind of gal. I think that we should eat and source foods that we would normally find in that society, i.e. sugar. When would we ever take down a beehive? Probably not that often. So honey, as a daily staple, probably not a great idea. Copious amounts of fruit every day, et cetera. I don’t think we would find that in a hunter gatherer society. We’d probably find healthy fats coming off of wild animals and berries, more often than not than we would. And obviously seasonal too. So those are all considerations to think about, that I think about, and I try to share with my patients is eating seasonally. Even down to, I’ve read some information about folks eating closer to their ethnicity and their ethnic groups. So eating closer to where they came from because that’s the biome. If they were descendants of, and had moved here from another country and then they adopted entirely different diet, that’s a huge shift in their microbiome that might not be as healthy as their native microbiome was. And so all kinds of things–

– Well for me it’s a six pack and a potato.

– Yeah. Six pack and a potato, yeah. Yeah, and we have a culture of people who think that eating food out of McDonald’s drive through windows is adequate. And it just, the part, and I’m not shaming anyone, I just don’t understand the part where instincts turned off. Oh, here’s my dog. I think instincts are so critical and you can’t get your instincts on unless you’re eating well. If you’re eating well, you’re moving well and you’re sleeping well, instinctually you start to make better choices. And I think folks have just been so, I always have said long before this pandemic, and I’ve said it to my mom, we’re easier to control if we’re slow, sick and dumb. And so the hijacking chemicals that are put into fast food, junk food, et cetera, hijacks people’s dopamine circuits. Fear hijacks people’s dopamine circuits. I mean, it’s a perfect storm. I feel like this is, this was set up really nicely leading into this pandemic.

– Dr. Tyna, thank you so much for joining me today. Tell people where they can find you. I know you have a lot of works on Instagram. Where else can they find you and support your work?

– Yeah, so Instagram is where I mainly am at. And then drtyna.com, it’s D-R-T-Y-N-A. And that’s where all my goods are.

– And how are you listed on Instagram?

– Same way, D-R-T-Y-N-A.

– Thank you very much Dr. Tyna.

– Yes, thank you so much for having me.