Finally, Some Good News about Covid
Accentuating the positive in this first SOS Memo of 2022
SOS #139 -- J. Morris Hicks -- (1-04-22)

First, Happy Birthday to Greta Thunberg! (She turned nineteen yesterday)
Dear Greta, from the ultra-shy, 15-year-old child at COP24 in Poland (2018) to the world-influencing young woman you are today, we greatly appreciate and desperately need -- your essential voice of integrity in this crazy world!

Hopefully, we can collaborate with you in 2022. Happy New Year from J. Morris Hicks at hpjmh.com.

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I will get to that "good news" about Covid in a minute, but first I want to review three reasons why I am choosing to make a sincere effort to deliver an upbeat and positive message throughout 2022.

Last week, in my final SOS Memo of 2021, I began by listing reasons for choosing to convey a "positive" message in my weekly memos in 2022 and beyond. Even when the news is horrible, I will do my best to put a positive spin on it.

Why am I doing that? Three reasons:

  • One. It just feels better.

  • Two. More people are likely to read the information and we will get more accomplished.

  • Three. It is the realization that, no matter how dire the situation may appear to be -- our positive actions can help to make things better.

Now, for that "good news" about Covid. As horrible as it has been and continues to be -- this 2020, 21, 22 pandemic may someday be remembered as the primary wake-up call that jolted us into coming to grips with the dangerous and grossly unsustainable way we have chosen to feed ourselves for the past few hundred years.

We mentioned Covid-19 on the front cover of OUTCRY -- our book that was published on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, April 22, 2020. In that book, co-author Stuart Scott and I wore several hats:

  • Researchers (gathering data about the problems) 
  • Problem-solvers (envisioning a possible solution)
  • Story-tellers (explaining the vision of a sustainable world) 
  • Instigators (sparking a global conversation on the all-important topic of learning to live in harmony with nature)

Shortly before our publish date in 2020, we added Chapter 13 -- which was intended to put a positive spin on the deadly Covid-19 pandemic. The title of that chapter is...
"About that Silver Lining on the Cover"
By the middle of 2020, Covid-19 was affecting the lives of most people in the world. Notice the question above the title of Outcry?

Is there a Covid-19 silver lining?
In a nutshell, that possible "silver lining" is that this terrible pandemic may eventually lead to a uniform understanding throughout the world -- a truism that few people see or understand:

Pandemics throughout history have been a by-product of the reckless animal agriculture industry interfering with nature.

We told that story in Chapter 13 of Outcry. Read it now by clicking this Outcry image.

It's a story about the need to carefully analyze the way we are eating in the developed world. In so doing, we begin taking a crucial, long-overdue, look at the leading driver of climate change -- deforestation of billions of acres throughout history -- to make room for the growing of feed for cows, pigs and chickens.

Finally making this connection is good news. Hopefully, as citizens of all nations begin discovering the need to re-invent the way we feed ourselves, it may later lead to a natural down-sizing of the global healthcare (disease management) industry as it gradually becomes a mere shadow of its former self.

As hundreds of millions of people begin shifting away from eating cows, pigs and chickens -- and in the direction of a plant-based way of eating that actually reverses many chronic diseases and promotes vibrant health -- there will be lots of winners:

  • The food animals who no longer have to suffer and die
  • We the people -- are rewarded with better physical health, saving money and a brighter future
  • The biggest winners are the children of the world -- for, as we adults start urgently addressing the leader driver of climate change -- their collective futures become much brighter.

What about the losers? It will be the out-of-control, money-motivated "disease management system" that we have today.

And if we're lucky, it will be like winning a war without firing a single bullet. As Dr. T. Colin Campbell explained in his book: The China Study -- over fifteen years ago:

  • “The entire system—government, science, medicine, industry and media—promotes profits over health, technology over food and confusion over clarity. Most, but not all, of the confusion about nutrition is created in legal, fully disclosed ways and is disseminated by unsuspecting, well-intentioned people, whether they are researchers, politicians, or journalists."

  • "The most damaging aspect of the system is not sensational, nor is it likely to create much of a stir upon its discovery. It is a silent enemy that few people see and understand."

While Dr. Campbell envisions a gradual, natural transformation of the healthcare industry AND the way we feed ourselves, the current best-selling book in America seems to be proposing an all-out war against the entire healthcare establishment. NOW!

An MD friend of mine in Arkansas told me about that book last week. I bought an e-copy for three bucks and quickly realized that the book was a downer that did not spark joy for me. As a matter of fact, it made me somewhat nauseous, but the good news is this:
It inspired me to write this SOS Memo
While I have not read the entire book, I read enough to gain further confirmation of a sad fact that I have known for a very long time.

Our healthcare system does not promote health. It is in the business of "managing disease" because that is what makes money for the overall "system." It all boils down to money. As Dr. Campbell concluded long ago:

"the entire system: government, science, medicine, industry and media promotes profits over health, technology over food and confusion over clarity."

So where does that leave us? It leaves us desperately in need of totally replacing the "entire system" to which Dr. Campbell alluded. Sadly, we cannot do that via revolution, but we can do it by taking steps as individuals to:

Gradually begin the process of rendering our behemoth "Disease Management" System obsolete!

Just as you cannot transform a donkey into a spaceship, you cannot turn our corrupt "disease management" system into one that promotes health while eliminating millions of healthcare jobs and trillions of healthcare dollars around the world.
Sometimes, we have to start completely over.
And, for healthcare, that time is now!

Our goal is simple. We must start stealing customers from the global disease-management industry -- by simply helping them learn how to prevent and/or reverse their chronic disease. That's something that I have been trying to do with my books, SOS Memos and lectures for the last nineteen years.

Many others have been doing the same: scores of enlightened MD's, health coaches, dietitians and authors have been trying to help people everywhere take charge of their own health. Although we have made little real progress, we have lit the fuse.

Now, we have a rare opportunity with two dangerous monsters to fight at the same time: a broken healthcare system and runaway climate change.

Fortunately, if we move quickly and are lucky,
we can seriously wound them both with the same bullet.

Back to the Fauci book. I have more ideas to cover, but first -- a bit more about that book. Amazingly, it is the #1 bestselling book on Amazon AND is a NY Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Publishers Weekly National Bestseller.

My first impression of it was not good. The title, the color and the content on the cover did not spark joy for me! But, as I said earlier, I will tell you that my exposure to that book did inspire me to write this first SOS Memo of 2022. For me, that's the silver lining.

The highest rated reader review by Dr. Joseph Mercola (liked by over 5,000 people) began with this sentence:

  • "Kennedy describes how Fauci turned the National Institutes of Health into an incubator for pharmaceutical products, and essentially sold the entire country to the drug industry. The book is an incredibly well-referenced record of his history of decimating human health, and exposes Fauci as a self-serving charlatan."
Also, not sparking joy for me, was this recent October 2021 piece in The NY Times about Dr. Mercola, who wrote the "book review" above.

The article described him as The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online. The subtitle reads:

Researchers and regulators say Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, creates and profits from misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not necessarily agreeing with what The NY Times piece had to say about Dr. Mercola -- I am just saying that the book itself -- and the thousands of reviews of that book were painful to read.

But the good news is that it reinforces my long-time view that our healthcare system is seriously broken. In fact, broken beyond repair.
That simply means that it must be replaced.
And we can replace it. Not by revolution but, as stated earlier, by taking personal actions that render it obsolete. If every American adult had taken the same step that I took eighteen years ago -- and simply started eating mostly plants, that replacement of our ineffective "disease-management" system would be well underway.

That obviously did not not happen -- but NOW we have a new incentive for taking that long overdue action: the current Covid-19 mess -- coupled with all the future pandemic messes that are inevitable if we don't quickly end the madness of interfering with the animal kingdom as we go about deforesting ourselves to extinction.
RFK Jr. also knows that our healthcare system is terribly broken, but I doubt that he has any clue about how to fix it. What he doesn't understand is that it would be impossible, for a host of reasons, to "fix/transform" our healthcare system -- into one that actually promotes health.

So we should not waste precious time trying to fix it -- and move right on to rendering it obsolete -- which is the first step of replacing it.

I applaud Kennedy for shining a bright light on some terrible flaws in our healthcare system but I am near certain that his methods will not lead to a transformation of that horribly dysfunctional system anytime soon.

I think that there is a much better way. That better way begins with the realization that we now have two big reasons for promoting change in the way over 90% of the population feed themselves in the developed world:

  • Our own health. Reversal of chronic disease while promoting vibrant health

  • Our children's future. Obliteration of the leading driver of climate change: animal agriculture

What must we do? As alluded to earlier, we must influence most people in the developed world to shift to an entirely new "system" of eating -- which will be followed by an entirely new system of health-care. And it should be government-funded healthcare. That way, all citizens will benefit from much better health -- aided by a much smaller, less expensive, and more effective healthcare system.
In my opinion, Buckminster Fuller had the right idea long ago and I quote him often:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

That philosophy makes total sense to me. It reminds me of what Colin Campbell said earlier about not "creating much of a stir" as we go about building that "new model" which will be accompanied by the dismantling of the current healthcare (disease management) system throughout the world.

The solution has literally been right under our noses all the time. It's what we put on our forks. By changing what we choose to eat, we quietly begin the natural downsizing of our horribly broken "disease management" business.
The Bottom Line
Why do I think that we have a better chance NOW of replacing that huge "disease management" system -- when we've made so little progress for the past thirty years? Four reasons:

  • The stakes are higher, our children's futures are on the line.

  • We're finally beginning to reach a larger global audience when it comes to choosing plant-based foods.

  • We've also begun collaborating with various leaders who are working on certain geo-engineering fixes for slowing climate change.

  • Building on the above, we are confident that, collectively -- we will garner the much-needed global publicity that is needed to get all this information to the public.

The best news about Covid is that it may go down in the history books as the terrible disease that jolted the world's most affluent populations into walking away from the #1 driver of climate change:

  • Animal based foods whose production and delivery processes contribute more to climate change than ALL other drivers of climate change COMBINED.

As that happens, we'll be talking about the most significant win-win proposition in the history of humanity -- vibrant health, less expensive food and a chance to stop the climate change monster in its tracks.

As a bonus, we're talking about the reversal of chronic diseases and the downsizing of the global healthcare system.

Another bonus. Eventually, perhaps within a decade, we can completely eliminate all animal-based foods -- and with their departure -- we can prevent most, if not all, of the pandemics of the future that might have been.
What would happen if everyone in the developed world bought into this plan?

  • The healthcare systems around the planet as we know them -- would be downsized substantially.

  • As millions of people stopped eating meat, dairy, eggs and/or fish at every meal, the deforestation necessary for grazing more cattle could end.

  • Shortly thereafter, the green re-wilding (re-forestation process) could begin in earnest.

Need more motivation for taking the simple step of choosing to eat more plants? Just click on my friend, Glen Merzer's 2021 book above and learn about the many gory details of our out-of-control system of feeding humans on this planet.

If you care about your children and grandchildren's future, you will do the right thing.
Next week's SOS Memo will focus on the new model that Buckminster Fuller says we must build. When following his advice we believe that the new model should be as simple as possible.

Conveniently, my son and I built such a model eight years ago. It is called the 4Leaf Program.

That model is based on simply maximizing the percentage of one's daily calories that are derived from whole, plant-based foods. Fortunately, we have a simple, yet powerful, tool to get that information quickly from millions of people.

Click on the above 4Leaf image to visit 4leafsurvey.com and you can have your estimated percentage in less than two minutes.

Watch for the next SOS Memo on Tuesday, January 11. It is entitled:

Finally, a true global "health" care "system"
One more thing. Please share today's timely SOS widely. It is #139 on this list of all of my SOS Memos.
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Finally, contact me directly at the email address below with any questions you may have.



J. Morris (Jim) Hicks

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The section below will continue to provide you with handy reference materials on this most crucial of all topics.
The "Big Picture" Data and Info Section
Focusing on what matters. People everywhere are constantly talking about mostly trivial things.

But not my professional colleagues, like Dr. Sailesh Rao and Dr. Peter Wadhams and many others. They are mostly engaged in the never-ending process of figuring out how we can possibly survive as a species on the only planet in the universe capable of keeping us alive.

In order to do that, we must first grasp the all-important "big picture" regarding how we got to where we are in the first place. The various links below will help you do that.

This first one, that I just discovered recently, is a free YouTube video by Michael Dowd, a non-scientific researcher like me who does a very fine job of explaining the many facets of the obstacles standing between us and survival as a species.

Dowd has a pretty good handle on most things, but he seems to be unaware of the simple weapon that we can all use to fight the leading driver of climate change. Our forks.

That said, he does a terrific job of describing our ever-worsening dilemma. Click the link below to view this very informative 33-minute video, entitled:

This next item is a free 83-minute documentary film that is all about the findings that were documented in Dr. Stephen Emmott's 2013 book. TEN BILLION.
This powerful film will certainly help more people grasp that all-important "big picture." Just click on the hourglass image.

I will continue sharing this TEN BILLION link in future weekly SOS Memos
More Data re Leading Driver of Climate Change.

Beginning in September of 2021, I have been including links to world-changing scientific information that thought leaders everywhere should read and and share with others.

What can you do? For starters, you can buy the new documentary -- Eating our way to Extinction for $6 on Netflix -- and watch it often with your friends and family.

Also, you can:

  • Share this SOS Memo with everyone you know.
  • Get an e-copy of OUTCRY. Visit Outcry page on Amazon and get a much bigger understanding of the situation in which all humans find ourselves.
  • Inform all the young people in your world that you are deadly serious about this topic. Urge them to read these SOS Memos and our latest book, OUTCRY.
  • Completely stop eating meat, dairy, eggs and fish today and tell everyone why you are taking such a "radical" step. You're doing it for the innocent children of the world.

  • As noted above, do yourself a favor and make sure that your plant-based meals of the future consist of whole plants -- the kinds of foods that prevent or reverse most chronic diseases AND enable your body to effortlessly seek its optimal weight.
A final word. Hopefully, the kind of crucially serious situations expressed in these SOS Memos will soon replace meaningless and trivial topics that dominate a ridiculously large percentage of all of the conversations in the world.

We must all start talking much more about what's really important. That is , we must start doing everything possible to maximize the chances of a meaningful and pleasant life ahead for the young people of the world.

I volunteer to help you do that. For Free. Invite me to collaborate with you and your group via Zoom. To help you jump-start that all-important conversation, I will be happy to present and discuss this topic at length. Here's an advance link to my standard presentation: 62 slides.

“Food, protein, pandemics and the future of humanity” This is the latest title slide that I am currently using for those kinds of sessions:
The image above is a clue regarding the essence of my "family game plan" that is revealed only in my talks. I do not put that in writing.

Want to share some of my SOS Memos with others? Visit my SOS Memos page where the most recent ones are listed first.

Finally, I am confident that if a few million people carefully read and digested OUTCRY, that there might at least be a more robust conversation taking place about our grossly unsustainable way of living in the developed world -- and what it will take to get us focused on maximizing our chances of survival as a species.

To be sure, we must do a lot more than change what we eat -- and OUTCRY helps explain the "why" and the "how" of that proposition. 

To my knowledge, OUTCRY remains the only book ever published that features an envisioned, totally-green, ultra-sustainable, super-desirable, future way of living for humans -- along with ideas for how we might get there as quickly as possible.


Regarding the free Zoom conferences with your group,
Send me an email and let's get started.
Our book, for a host of environmental reasons, is only available as an e-book on Amazon. As such, it contains hyperlinks to hundreds of references and videos, is less expensive, does not kill any trees and does not have to be manufactured and delivered. 

The links below to earlier SOS Memos will help you understand how these ideas unfolded since 2018.
You can join my mailing list and/or find all of my previous postings by visiting the SOS Memos page on my website. 
As always, I am just trying to help spark the all-important "conversation" about what is needed. By sharing a vision of what I believe is possible, I hope to influence others to think bigger, faster, better and bolder. 

You will find that there aren't many books that cover both the health of your body and the health of your planet. This is one of them -- a book that my son Jason assisted me in writing. It was published ten years ago this month.
Order e-book on Amazon
Promoting health, hope and harmony on planet Earth
Want to see earlier SOS Memos? Click here
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Want to get started nurturing your own health and the health of our planet? Take our survey at 4leafsurvey.com
Click here to learn more about this free online dietary assessment tool.