Greg Ciola Interviews Byron Richards

October 6, 2006

CRUSADOR Editor, Greg Ciola, Interviews Board-Certified Clinical Nutritionist And Book Author, Byron Richards

According to Byron Richards, the FDA is out-of-control. It is a bully police force standing up for the profits of drug companies at the expense of health for Americans. It has far exceeded any legislative mandate and is blatantly involved in an abuse of Constitutional power.

This year the FDA is celebrating one hundred years of service to the American people. It considers itself to be the guardian of public health. The safety of twenty five percent of all products in use in the U.S. is under the watchful eye of the FDA.

The real story shows that the FDA has spent the last hundred years boosting the profits of drug companies and eliminating competition to those companies, acting as a misguided police force that has little to do with public safety. Adverse reactions, even deaths, are hidden while dangerous drugs are pushed on Americans, especially children – simply for profit. The FDA is busy attacking health freedom and seeking to eliminate effective natural health options. It is time for Americans to stand up and be heard. At stake is the health and well-being of all Americans.

In this explosive interview with Byron Richards, the FDA’s deceptions and drug-company profit schemes are revealed and the scam of the sickness industry is made clear. Health freedom is under attack and this interview will help arm you with invaluable information that you can use to take charge of your health.

Crusador:  What was the impetus for writing your new book “Fight for your Health, Exposing the FDA’s Betrayal of America?”

Byron: Well, Greg, I see so often that individuals are looking for health options. They are looking for meaningful ways to improve their health naturally. So many people don’t want a drug for this, another drug for that, a drug to treat the symptoms of the previous drug given. Take problems like Fibromyalgia or Candida albicans as an example. Either the medical profession doesn’t want to acknowledge the problems or really has no idea how to fix them. Yet at the same time they don’t want alternative health people describing to individuals how to get better or how to get well. Basically, they want individuals to stay hooked on drugs and to stay sick at the same time. So, really it was this disgust for the whole healthcare industry that prompted me to write the book, “Fight for Your Health.”

Crusador:  You touched on a lot of different topics in your book. You say the FDA is actually betraying America. Can you elaborate on that statement?

Byron:  Well, really the FDA has a mandate to protect the health of Americans. What we are finding instead is that the FDA is now actively hiding risk data, keeping it as if it is a trade secret, and is literally in collusion with pharmaceutical companies so that the doctors who are prescribing medication and the people who are taking it do not understand the actual problems that are even being reported to the agency. At the same time, the FDA is seeking to undermine the rights of citizens in states to file lawsuits when they have been harmed or damaged by medications. Instead of protecting the rights of citizens of states, the FDA is protecting the drug companies from legal liability when they don’t disclose known risks.

Crusador:  Numerous authors and even people like Dr. David Graham, FDA’s own employee, have come forward and validated what you’ve just said, yet nothing is being done by Congress, the FDA, or the drug companies to change this corrupt system. What’s going on here, Byron?

Byron: It’s really all about money. Right now the FDA receives several hundred million dollars a year in funding from drug companies to approve drugs and the safety branch of the FDA is no longer the main focus of the agency. The agency is instead, focused on approving drugs. In fact, the agency has shifted into drug development and drug design. So the agency that is supposed to be regulating the pharmaceutical industry is actually actively becoming part of the pharmaceutical industry, which truly compromises the role of the agency. Essentially, the bottom line is the drug companies are buying Congress and the agency. When you have billions and billions of dollars, it’s hard to get a change that’s in the best interest of health. There’s a momentum, I call it an evil momentum, that’s in place here with the pharmaceutical companies and the FDA. It’s an agenda that is not pro-American.

Crusador:  You say in your book that Wall Street is dictating drug use for Americans, so not only is the government in collusion with the drug companies through the FDA, you believe there is actual collusion with Wall Street to continue to injure people with risky and sometimes deadly drugs?

Byron: The pharmaceutical companies are under tremendous pressure from Wall Street to perform. The bottom line of it is the pharmaceutical companies cannot make money selling drugs to treat disease. Thus they have to create markets for drugs in order to have profits. Two major areas they focus a lot of their marketing efforts on is the baby boomers with the idea of prevention and children with antidepressants and antipsychotic medications, which by the way, were never approved for use in children. In the case of the adults it’s the bone drugs and statin drugs for cardiovascular health. There is close to $50 billion dollars in drug sales to these target markets for prevention or for modulating dubiously defined diseases such as ADHD or some kind of symptomatic behavioral disorder where they can then hand out an antipsychotic medication. So, we’re seeing Wall Street itself putting pressure on drug companies to perform.

At the same time the Bush administration has appointed to the second highest position in the FDA a medical doctor named Scott Gottlieb whose real experience is as a Wall Street adviser. His whole reason for being in the FDA is to speed new drugs onto the marketplace to the wishes of Wall Street. So we see another angle here where the top people in the FDA are involved with speeding new drugs to market, cutting down the costs of drug research, and exposing Americans to excessive risks for profit.

Crusador:  You’ve been a board certified clinical nutritionist for over twenty years. Tell me a little bit about your background and what you do so our readers can understand where you are coming from on these issues.

Byron: Well, I got started in this field over twenty years ago working with a medical doctor. He was an expert at working with Candida albicans and food allergies and I was his nutritionist. We literally saw thousands of people from all over the country that lost their quality of health, were not getting helped by the medical profession, in many cases were being injured, and were losing their health as a result of medical treatments. It was up to us as a place of last resort to sort out their health and get them on track. I have a lot of what you would call “in the trench experience” on the front lines of clinical nutrition and helping people get well and stay well. It’s really from this point of view that I see the extreme importance for people to know what their health options are, to not just robotically take medications and then take more and more medications, but to actually work in a way that can fix their health and improve their quality of health. These factors are just vital. It’s one thing to have the pressure coming from the drug companies; it’s another thing to have a public that doesn’t understand other ways to actually improve themselves partly because the FDA is actively seeking to prevent them from getting the valuable information that can help them.

Crusador:  Some of the biggest areas of prescription drug use are with things they claim they’re trying to treat like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, etc. and they never really address proper diet and natural remedies with patients and if they do, the things they recommend are not that good. You have a chapter in your book that discusses the real truth about cholesterol lowering drugs and high blood pressure. As a clinical nutritionist what did you tell people to do naturally and what’s going on with these drugs, are they really causing more problems than what they claim to be helping?

Byron: Let’s take the statin medications as an example. They have shown a value in people who have had a heart attack or some serious heart problem. They may be able to reduce the risk of a second heart attack by 30%. So there is some value in them, but there aren’t that many people who have that specific issue that would warrant selling that much medication. What we have seen then, in order to boost sales of the drugs, is a shift of these medications into people who are relatively low risk. In that population we struggle to find a benefit, meaning over a ten year period 1% of the people are going to die as a side effect of the medication. Of course when you have fourteen million people on it that means 140,000 deaths are going to occur as a result of the medication. Then you have to be able to justify that you are saving more lives by doing that and what they find is it’s a wash, meaning that from a societal point of view just as many lives are saved as are lost over a ten year period which doesn’t make any sense at all when the drug is going to cost a couple thousand dollars a year. Instead of dying from heart disease, the individuals die from accidents, suicide, cancer, and infections. .

Cholesterol fitness is a huge topic. There’s no shortcut to cholesterol fitness. People actually have to stay healthy, exercise, manage stress, manage their weight; they have to manage the amount of food they’re eating. There are a variety of nutrients that can assist in cholesterol metabolism to be healthy such as the nutrient pantethine or the tocotrienol form of vitamin E. These things can be very helpful as part of an overall plan, but unfortunately we’re in a quick fix society where people do not realize that statin medications do not return anything to normal. In fact, they make the system abnormal. Sure they can lower cholesterol numbers, but they don’t restore anything back to health.

Crusador:  What surprises people that don’t know much about the subject is that the body actually needs cholesterol to produce all your hormones. Cholesterol also has a tendency to naturally go up as you age and is not necessarily a bad thing. Can you comment on that?

Byron: In the book “Fight For Your Health,” I explain how cholesterol actually works in normal function. I go into the actual value of LDL cholesterol. It’s astounding that LDL cholesterol could be labeled bad when in fact it is the absolutely vital substance that transports all fat soluble nutrition in the human body so the cells can get the important antioxidants such as COQ10, vitamin E, beta carotene, vitamin K, etc. People need to go beyond the very naïve notion that there’s good and bad cholesterol and go to a more intelligent understanding of cholesterol where they’re actually trying to restore and maintain normal cholesterol functioning in their body. Until the public’s IQ on the subject is raised, they’re going to be subjected to this simplistic good and bad idea that then results in a medication being dispensed.

Crusador:  Lipitor is one of the common drugs they prescribe to lower cholesterol and the side effects of this drug are quite scary. Some users have felt as though they lost their minds on the drug. What insights do you have on this subject?

Byron: The problem is brain cells and nerve cells do not split and divide like every other cell in the body, so they actually have a higher level of cholesterol in their cell membranes which enables them to live longer. Well, one of the adverse side effects of statin medication is that it lowers the brain cell membrane’s natural level of cholesterol so that brain cells die faster. The longer the person takes the medication or the higher the dose of medication a person takes the greater the problem. This is an issue where people can be on a statin medication, not notice initially that it’s causing memory loss or nerve problems, and after two, three or four years these problems can really start to mount. Then the doctors just tell them it is aging or some other line. The point is these medications can have very serious, long-term neurological effects which are not being discussed or described to the public as a potential risk factor.

Crusador:  What about high blood pressure medication that millions of people are taking?

Byron: Well, individuals really need to take charge of the blood pressure issue because as soon as you go down that path it’s a problem in terms of maintaining normal function for the entire body. I like to use the analogy of somebody watering their garden and they’re trying to water something maybe ten feet away and they have to turn up the pressure on their hose to get it there. Blood pressure medication is basically turning down the ability to water something. In the case of the human body, people then all of the sudden have trouble pumping blood up into their head and so they’re more prone to depression or cognitive decline from the blood pressure medication. The blood pressure medication over time can cause imbalances in circulation in the body to the point where the lymphatic system becomes sluggish and congested. When that happens a person is much more prone to becoming toxic and lethargic as a result of a blood pressure medication reducing normal circulation. We want people to have normal blood pressure, but because they’re healthy. A small percentage of people will need some blood pressure medication due to a serious problem, but a great majority of people could in fact return normal circulation to their body and not need the medication simply because they’re healthy.

Crusador:  Except doctors will never tell their patients that.

Byron: No, they don’t. The medical doctors say “why do you want to fix something if it isn’t broken.” They’re basing that on the fact that the number looks good on paper, but in reality they are oftentimes reducing circulation to small tissues, the capillary structures are not getting proper circulation to them and this results then in low oxygen and acidic conditions in the body, which sets the stage for other diseases that one wouldn’t necessarily associate with blood pressure medication. Individuals really want to take care to keep the basic circulation systems working in their body and keep their blood pressure in a good range because they are healthy.

Crusador:  What role do you think hydrogenated fats play with high blood pressure and high cholesterol?

Byron: Well, the trans fatty acids or hydrogenated oils as you’re referring to them are essentially what I call “plastic fats” because they’re dead fats. They don’t do anything useful in metabolism except they’re deceptive, meaning that they kind of look like something that should get built into a cell membrane, but once they get built into a cell membrane they don’t perform. They’re basically dead. The point is people literally are what they eat when it comes to fats. We need a certain amount of saturated fats and essential fatty acids to perform normally, but when we get this rather bizarre, mostly man-made concoction called a trans fat built into our cell membranes, it tilts them into the direction of inflammation, poor function, and in the direction of disease, as well as high cholesterol.

Crusador:  What do you know about X-Rays contributing to, or actually causing heart disease?

Byron:  It’s an interesting paradox. These new heart scans for example, are basically X-Rays. They’re taking these X-Ray pictures as a diagnostic tool and it’s a double edged sword. There’s no question that X-Rays increase oxidative damage or free radical distress inside of cells. When we’re talking about trans fats we’re talking about the cell membrane. When we’re talking about X-Rays, we’re talking about the inner parts of a cell being damaged from free radical production generated from the X-Rays. The aging process in general is based on an ability to trap these free radicals inside of cells and maintain a healthy balance inside of the cells, so the X-Ray load, especially from recurring X-Rays as diagnostic markers is going to draw a lot of criticism as time goes along.

Crusador:  One of the topics that you discuss in your book is drug based mind control programs on children and adults under the false guise of mental health. What do you discuss in your book?

Byron: This is a serious problem. The Bush administration is trying to get a medical model of psychiatric medications being dispensed on our children. To me this is a total travesty and a serious attempt at government-sponsored mind control under the false guise of helping people who may be struggling. Actually the big plan is to get all children tested as they enter public school, all fifty five million children, screened for mental health issues using these questionnaires that were developed by drug companies that then result in a fictitious diagnosis of mental health issues that will result in medication and labeling of children. This is a huge issue and you’d like to think of what I just said as a joke, but this is exactly what they’re doing.

Crusador:  We ran an interview in our publication last year with Ken Kramer who discussed the Teen Screen programs and it’s quite disturbing. I also had a customer call me from Michigan a few months ago and said that there was some kind of questionnaire that their child had to take and they didn’t even inform the parents about it before hand. I have it in my files here. What I want to know is who is going to evaluate these questionnaires?

Byron: A school administrator, a school psychologist, a school psychiatrist. It’s really a situation where the questionnaire generates a result with a label. This label then gets attached to the student’s file and then this obviously has to have a medical doctor’s signature to give the prescription. But that’s the procedure. It is mass marketing of pharmaceutical brain drugs to children. The Teen Screen program that you’re referring to was actually set up by drug companies to promote their new and expensive drugs, which is an illegal off-labeled promotional use.

Crusador:  The most shocking thing about these questionnaires is that they are deceptively designed to make just about everybody fail so they can get them on a drug.

Byron: That’s right. In other words, it’s in the best interest of drug companies to sell drugs, not to really help people. That’s a real problem. It goes back to the connections with Wall Street and money. It’s all about greed, it’s all about profit, and they use some kind of mental health benefit as an excuse or justifiable reason why this is acceptable to do. History shows us that when our medicine starts to orient to the function of the mind and the subject of psychiatry as a medication system becomes dominant in society, this is really tracing back to the workings of Nazi Germany. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which was funded by the Rockefellers, got all this in motion as a method of mind control on society. The whole underlying agenda is to separate children from their families, from God, from society, from community and create a drug society which is individuated and separated from family bonds so that the children can be controlled into a social agenda. It’s a very sinister plot and it’s actually very well documented.

Crusador:  What’s going to happen when a parent of a student who takes that test is diagnosed with a problem and the parent refuses to put their child on any of the drugs they recommend? Is the school going to turn that parent or family into HRS and say they are abusing their children for refusing treatment?

Byron:  I think that’s where we’re heading with this. I think that these kinds of mind control, social control, public health and mental health connections are really a travesty that people need to vigorously denounce and resist participation in these programs. The whole idea that you can just get people into a state-run and legally-backed drug dispensing paradigm, whether it’s vaccinations, public health immunizations or other public health measures, and then being able to lump mental health treatments into that same kind of automated drug dispensing without asking any questions, is a drug company’s dream come true. It just shows the amount of collusion that’s going on. On this same topic we have our water supply being poisoned with fluoride which is another brain control drug that was used by the Nazi’s and the Russians. Fluoride has been shown to damage bones and teeth. Its ability to reduce cavities is minimal and its risk factor for extreme neurological problems is now becoming recognized. We’re seeing that the public health system is set up for vested interest purposes and bought and paid for by those who sell the substances that the public health system is promoting.

Crusador:  Do you believe that there is actually a satanic conspiracy to injure people and kill vast numbers of the world’s population?

Byron:  That may well be, but the bottom line conspiracy is about profit and how the elite can make money off of the United States population and they do it in three ways. They create workers not thinkers, and so the educational system, the brainwashing that’s going on with these medications and the curriculum, is guaranteed to create a hard working population who will then pay taxes into this fraudulent economic system. Then we have a sickness industry which they are creating that will keep the profits rolling. Then by making people robotic and disconnected from family, church, and community, we end up with a lot of young men who are unfortunately just willing to go off and fight any war for any reason which generates huge profits for the war industry. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the pharmaceutical industry and the military are one and the same. This has been the case ever since World War One when Bayer, the drug company controlled by the Nazi’s, learned how to make poison nerve gasses. Ever since then biological weapons, drug company research and the military have been linked.

Crusador:  You also say in your new book that the FDA wants a radio transmitter chip in everyone’s arm and your DNA in their new database. Why would the FDA want everybody radio chipped or microchipped?

Byron: The FDA wants all of that information purportedly, to improve health care for Americans. That’s going to be the plausible excuse they use to hoodwink Americans into being part of a national database where not only is the DNA of every American stored in an FDA owned computer, but they will also have these radio frequency chips in the arm of every individual with their medical history. And they’re saying this will improve the quality of health, but I think people are going to have to draw the line somewhere on the invasion of privacy related to quality of health.

Crusador:  Obviously a lot of Christians and concerned Americans are going to be very resistant to taking a microchip and it will draw a lot of red flags. However, we’ve been propagandized for well over a year now about a coming Bird Flu pandemic. It’s not out of the realm of possibility for some type of world health emergency to be used as a means for the governments of the world to initiate some kind of program that forces people into that position.

Byron: That’s exactly right, and it’s a scary thought that we could have a government whose control agenda is to induce a very serious problem so they can then implement their plan. In other words, in a time of non-emergency most rational people won’t go along with these kinds of plans. So then an emergency situation is created so that people will then comply out of fear. This is a huge issue and in fact a great deal of what these elite do. They create fear in people that if they don’t behave a certain way or take a certain treatment something bad will happen to them. Of course, that’s how drug companies have marketed"