Interview With Forrest Maready

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HILDA LABRADA GORE: My guest, Forrest Maready, had an interesting and varied career in the film and television industry before he became a medical historian, researcher and au­thor of the book, Crooked: Man-Made Disease Explained.¹ Today we focus on his “crooked” theory, which is the idea that many illnesses leave a visible sign on our faces that something is amiss, like a crooked smile or misaligned eyes. The theory also addresses how seemingly unrelated conditions and neurological and im­munological illnesses like eczema and asthma can be traced back to a single root cause that leaves lesions on the brain stem, wreaking havoc on our mental and physical health. Forrest helps us understand neurotoxins, incorrect antibiotic use and other factors that affect our health—and also discusses what we can do about it. Forrest spoke about the crooked theory at the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Wise Traditions conference in Baltimore (November, 2018), discussing what he believes to be the root cause of most disease.

Forrest, I want to talk about your interesting background. You used to work in the film in­dustry. What made you change from film to the field of wellness?

FORREST MAREADY: Yes, that was my ca­reer for quite a while. I worked mainly behind the scenes and sometimes on the set but never in front of the camera. Then my wife and I started going down rabbit holes doing a lot of research into Crohn’s disease and other chronic illnesses that had affected some of our family members. Through some of that research, I started paying more attention to vaccinations as a potential source of problems. And through some of that research, I started noticing how frequently people seem to exhibit on their face what we now know as cranial nerve damage. That was a fifteen-year journey, which I’m condensing down very quickly.

HG: What is cranial nerve damage?

FM: Basically, people noticed this in the 1800s when children came down with “teething paral­ysis”—something children seemed to get after they were teething—or what they then called “infantile paralysis” and later became known as polio. A lot of children would exhibit something they called “squint” (or being “cross-eyed”), which we now call strabismus. It is where their eyes would not point in the same direction. You might have one eye point inward or one pointing outward. Children with polio would often have eyes that wouldn’t point in the same direction.

If you look a little harder, you notice people saying that a part or side of their face became paralyzed, similar to what we may think of as Bell’s palsy. For many years, this has sometimes been associated with vaccination. The focus was always on the eyes or the mouth, though I think—after a lot of research—that this is actually a problem in the brainstem that affects what we call cranial nerves. The brain is a grey spongy thing with a protrusion, which we call the brainstem, that connects the brain to the spinal cord. There are twelve cranial nerves in the brainstem. These nerves are different than the nerves that come off the spinal cord, which control your arms or legs. Some of the cranial nerves control your face and let you smile. Some control your eyes and the direction they point. They also function as inputs. They control your hearing and sense of taste. There is one cranial nerve that many have heard of called the vagus nerve. That one actually interfaces with quite a few functions in our body, including, most importantly, our gut.

What I started realizing, through much re­search, was that it wasn’t just the mouth or the eyes that were being affected; it was all of the cranial nerves. Often, you see a child who has strabismus, where their eye points in, but they may also have suddenly developed a speech impediment. Speech pathologists will spin their wheels trying to figure out why this kid is suddenly unable to talk. To me, it is fairly obvious: their eye is turned in, and if you look two millimeters down the brainstem, you’ll see the cranial nerve that controls the tongue. It may have developed a problem that keeps the tongue from being able to form properly. You may have a kid who used to say “yellow” but now says “lellow” because they can’t control the sides of the tongue anymore. The cranial nerves can affect all kinds of things, and they can explain so many mystery ailments—such as a baby who was latching perfectly and was able to breastfeed just fine and then suddenly is unable to latch. To me, that’s a dead giveaway for tongue paralysis, which is a cranial nerve problem. I could go on and on. These cranial nerve problems manifest themselves in a million different ways, and usually they leave doctors completely flummoxed.

HG: What conclusion did your research and observations lead you to, Forrest?

FM: Part of my research led me to a realiza­tion that the brainstem is frequently the target of attack or assault in different ways. For me, most importantly, it was frequently under assault via damage from the neurotoxic alu­minum adjuvants in vaccines. [Editor’s note: Childhood vaccines that contain aluminum adjuvants include various diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccines (DT, DTaP, Td, Tdap and combination vaccines with a DTaP component); Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib); hepatitis A and B; human papillomavirus (HPV); and meningococcal and pneumococcal vaccines, which may include one or more of the following aluminum formulations: aluminum hydroxide, aluminum phosphate, potassium aluminum sul­fate or amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate (AAHS).]

HG: You said the brainstem is “under attack.” How does it show up in the eyes, mouth and elsewhere? What other patterns did you notice?

FM: I started to notice a pattern where it wasn’t just the eyes or the mouth. I saw problems with other functions within the brainstem affected by cranial nerves. Have you ever seen a kid who had a speech impediment? Have you seen mystery ailments that doctors can’t diagnose?

HG: When you were talking earlier about the eye problem that kids with polio had, it made me think of what we call “lazy eye.” I’ve seen young children who have to wear corrective glasses or an eye patch. I know the doctors don’t often have a reason for why that happens. You’re saying there is more to this than meets the eye?

FM: Most definitely. We’ve come to accept that it is a rite of passage that weird things are going to happen to our kids that doctors can’t explain. I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of these things may be explained by what I call lesions in the brainstem where all these cranial nerves emanate from.

HG: What would cause the lesions?

FM: There can be many causes. Normally, the ones that doctors are familiar with can be seen on MRIs or cat scans and are easily diagnosable. My fear is that the biggest cause of this cranial nerve damage may be the neurotoxic aluminum adjuvants frequently injected via vaccinations.

HG: There are many skeptics who immediately claim that vaccines are safe and effective the minute they hear anything or anyone questioning the efficacy of vaccinations. They consider me and others who think differently as lunatics. How can you be so sure that the adjuvants are the irritants and that vaccinations are causing these brain lesions?

FM: That is fairly easy to explain, especially if you realize that the amount of aluminum adjuvant in any given vaccine is easily enough to kill an infant. If injected into the right place in their brainstem, it could instantly kill them. We’ve always relied on the thought that injection into the body will dilute it so much that the amount required to do enough damage to the brainstem to kill someone would never actually get there. We assume that no one would be that unlucky and that the entire dosage—the entire five hundred micrograms of aluminum hydroxide—would never make its way to the brainstem. [Editor’s note: There are two hundred and fifty micrograms of aluminum in a single dose of the hepatitis B vaccine routinely administered within twenty-four hours of birth. By eighteen months of age, babies who adhere to the child­hood vaccine schedule will receive almost five thousand micrograms of aluminum.²]

We’ve realized that there are two problems. First, an aluminum adjuvant doesn’t dilute inside the body. Think about pouring a package of grape Kool-Aid powder into a pitcher of water; you can imagine it spreading out into a perfect purple hue. That’s not what happens with an aluminum adjuvant. It gets picked up by the white blood cells, but the white blood cells don’t travel around the body randomly—they move where they are signaled to go by the immune system. This was one of the big discoveries I write about in Crooked.

Unfortunately, when a child is vaccinated, the brainstem signals very aggressively for help from the immune system. There are three reasons for that. The first one, which I just mentioned, is pathogen invasion; when your body senses that a microbe is invading your brainstem, the dorsal vagal complex—this very particular part of your brainstem—actually sends out signals for help from the white blood cells. Second, when you have tissue injury, and your body senses that you’ve been cut, it signals for white blood cells to go to the cut, but it also signals for white blood cells to go to the brain­stem. It is a very intriguing bit of science that proves this. The third reason is the most disturb­ing. The dorsal vagal complex signals for help from the immune system whenever you’re being restrained, and you don’t think you can escape. It is a very primal response to being afraid. This is the absolute horrible reason why I believe vac­cines are so frequently associated with autism. Not just any vaccine, but the vaccines that are administered at the twelve-to-eighteen-month mark. This is when children are probably the most terrified of being pinned down and given vaccines. I don’t know for sure if this is true, but I’m terrified that it is true. Those are the main reasons I believe that aluminum adjuvants have a proclivity for the brainstem. It is because the body’s immune system is signaling for the white blood cells—which we know pick up the aluminum adjuvant contained in vaccines—to come to the brainstem, the very part that seems so frequently damaged after vaccination.

HG: If I’m picturing this correctly, it is like these white blood cells are going to help wherever the brain tells them to go, whether it’s an injury on a limb or to mitigate fear in the brain. They unintentionally take with them the hitchhikers that cause harm. Is that right?

FM: Yes. I couldn’t have said it better. You could not devise a more dia­bolical scheme if you tried. You basically hijack your body’s attempt to help itself with an invader that does more damage to the most vulnerable part of the brain. The brainstem is different than your brain. You hear about children who have horrible brain injuries, like a traumatic physical injury from a car wreck. They are able to survive and regain a lot of the function they lost. There is a lot of redundancy within your brain. They call it “plasticity,” it’s your brain’s ability to heal itself. The brainstem is very different. There is very little redundancy there, and it doesn’t take much to do a lot of damage. These are tiny gossamer neuronal pathways that are so easily damaged. This is very macabre, but when someone is hanged for an execution, they are trying to snap their brainstem, not strangle them. In my opinion, the brainstem is the heart of what is being attacked by vaccine adjuvants. That is why this situation is so insidious.

HG: Wow, this is a radical theory that I haven’t heard articulated quite as you have done. Are you the first to have made this connection?

FM: I don’t know. As far as I know, I’m the first person who has connected immobilization and restraint as reasons why vaccination seems to be so frequently associated with neurological dam­age. As mentioned, many people have talked about eye and mouth problems from vaccines. I don’t know if other people made the connection that vaccinations affect all the cranial nerves, but the restraint and immobilization ideas came from studying Stephen Porges, who is the cre­ator of Polyvagal Theory.³ He offers an expla­nation of the human body’s response to stress.

Interestingly, the female response to stress is remarkably different than the male response. As a scientist put it, besides pregnancy and childbirth, the single characteristic that most distinguishes between female versus male is the female response to stress. I believe the reason why autism is so disproportionately associated with males over females is because the female response to stress is markedly different than the male response. Females do not create the aggres­sive signaling for white blood cells to the dorsal vagal complex while under stress. I explain it more thoroughly in my book. That’s my think­ing as to why females seem to have less frequent neurological damage from vaccinations.

HG: That is fascinating. You also say in your book and videos that it isn’t just autism. Auto­immune disorders and some other neurological conditions may also be rooted in this aluminum invading other parts of the body. Is that right?

FM: Unfortunately, I believe the answer is yes. I would love for this not to be true. I can’t emphasize this enough: I have nothing to gain from this being true aside from perhaps the ability to solve this problem and find a better way to promote health among our population. From the amount of research my wife and I have done, we’re fairly certain that aluminum is capable of creating what are called “intracellular bacterial infections.” An intracellular infection is one where the bacteria are stripped of their cell wall, and they actually begin to replicate inside the white blood cells. My understand­ing of this came about through our research trying to understand what causes Crohn’s disease. Bacteria have a cell wall, and certain things, like antibiotics, can strip the cell wall. That is how a lot of antibiotics actually kill bacteria. They strip the cell wall of the bacteria, and this prevents them from replicating. However, some bacteria actually thrive under these conditions and proliferate.

Let’s say you have a kid with an infection, and you give them penicillin-family antibiotics. It actually turns the bacterial infection into an intracel­lular infection. Your body ends up having a really difficult time getting on top of this infection. I believe that PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections) should be associated with penicillin or any penicillin-family antibiotic, as that is the source of the problem. The strep by itself does not cause PANDAS. The administration of the antibiotic turns the infection into an intracellular infection, and your body has a very difficult time getting on top of it. You can see it with Crohn’s disease, by the location where Crohn’s disease starts. It is the location where aluminum tends to ac­cumulate in the intestines.

HG: Going back to what you said about antibiotics brings to mind some­thing that Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride said recently. She said that we give antibiotics for every cough, sniffle and sneeze. Are we cultivating some of these issues in children or ourselves because of the overuse of antibiotics? What do you recommend? Should they not take antibiotics?

FM: I would definitely not suggest that. Although I’m about as anti-vaccine as you’ll meet, I’m not as “anti-antibiotics” as some people are. I think there is a time and a place for them, but, like anything, there is also a cost. Everyone knows of someone who took an antibiotic, and it completely wrecked their gut for weeks. People have been near death from them. We know that antibiotics can cause problems. But we’re starting to learn which antibiotics don’t work well with certain bacteria. Unfortunately, this is a field of study that most doctors or nurses have no clue about. If you have a strep infection, they wouldn’t think twice about giving you amoxicillin or some other penicillin-family antibiotic, even though anyone who spends more than five minutes reading about this would tell you not to administer a penicillin-family antibiotic for strep. This is a known problem. It will cause it to go intracellular and run rampant. You have a kid who starts with strep and a sore throat. They’ll get a course of penicillin, and then they’ll have rectal strep. It will work its way through their entire gastrointestinal tract. You have to look into this and learn which antibiotics are safe for which bacteria. Unfortu­nately, it is an understudied part of immunology because it is difficult to study intracellular bacteria. They don’t stain well. They don’t show up on microscopes as easily as we would like. But people recognized intracellular bacteria a hundred years ago. No one has taken the time to study it thoroughly. There are a couple of people like my wife and me, and other people like Royal Rife and Edward Rose. There are scientists from seventy years ago who knew about it even though they didn’t understand it. It needs to be studied.

HG: Who has read your book and gives it credence? Who considers it as on track and wants to start studying these things?

FM: Well, like any new hypothesis or theory, it has been met with a lot of scorn from academia. I expected that. I can’t say what gives it credence other than it makes a lot of sense to people whose children have suffered. They start to connect the dots and realize how everything lines up. They see that their child, for example, could see perfectly fine, and suddenly they were going to the doctor to get glasses. At the same time, the child started having a problem where he couldn’t swallow his food. Now they’ve gone to two different doctors to treat those issues—an optometrist and a gastroenterologist—as if these are two completely separate issues. The problem is, it’s the same issue. It is a neurological issue in the brainstem. I can guarantee you that those two cranial nerve nuclei are only a few millimeters apart. If you have damage in one, you’re likely to have dam­age in the other. It is rare to see a kid with a crooked smile, losing muscle control in one side of their face, who does not have some other problem that seems unrelated. Yet when you look at the anatomy of the brainstem, you’ll see that these things are millimeters apart from each other.

HG: It is funny how we compartmentalize medical care and medicines.

FM: It’s the problem with specialists. We need general practitioners. They need a fifty-thousand-foot view because we’re being killed by special­ists. Doctors need to go back up to the fifty-thousand-foot view and also look back two hundred years to the beginning of the 1800s. They need to become familiar with medical history. When they realize what their profession has done over the past two centuries, it will give them a real big dose of humility. It will also give them a holistic view of health and show that there were things in the past that actually worked. Practitioners in the past weren’t crazy people. They had actually figured out—like humans have always done, through trial and error—that there are remedies (not made in a laboratory) that work. There are legitimate cures for things.

HG: That is exactly what we’re about at the Weston A. Price Foundation, those wise, traditional healing ways. What can we do right now to avoid these issues that come from that aluminum at­tacking the brainstem?

FM: Well, everybody has heard the saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Nowhere is that more true than with exposure to injected metals. I’m going to be really specific here and say “injected metals.” There are a lot of concerns about toxins in the environment, but injected metals are far more insidious than just about anything you could eat. If you are dead set on getting your child vaccinated—do not let anyone inject aluminum hydroxide into your child. This horrible neurotoxin bypasses all of your body’s defense mechanisms when injected. You are asking for trouble by doing that. Eating well and getting rid of toxins is necessary for good health and certainly helps people who are immunocompromised and have damage. But someone who has never had injected metals and has never been exposed to antibiotics has got it easy. They don’t have to make all these adjustments because their gut is probably in better health, and they aren’t so susceptible to environmental toxins and other things.

REFERENCES

1. Maready F. Crooked: Man-Made Disease Explained. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 2018.
2. Miller NZ. Aluminum in childhood vaccines is unsafe. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 2016;21(4):109-117.
3. http://stephenporges.com/index.php/scientif­ic-articles/scientific-articles/publicationss/3- the-polyvagal-perspective.

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2019

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