Doc's Tips for a Healthy 2021

A Stansberry original... The full toll of the COVID-19 pandemic... Doc's tips for a healthy 2021... More people are getting 'the shot'... 'Vaccine tourism' in Florida... Learn your own body... Doc, Austin, and Steve get together next week...

We're deviating from our usual Digest fare today (but not too far)...

We mostly cover the markets and economy here... But we read a lot of other sources of information that don't often make it into these pages.

Today, we're specifically thinking of the great health-focused work that our colleague Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig and his research team do every single day...

As longtime subscribers know, Doc is one of the Stansberry "originals." Although he didn't join Porter and Dr. Steve Sjuggerud right when our company started more than two decades ago, he came aboard in the mid-2000s while they were still growing the business. (If you want to hear more details about that, Doc shared his "origin story" in his free Health & Wealth Bulletin in October 2019, around when we were celebrating our 20th anniversary.)

Doc is a rare kind of individual... He's one of the most interesting and worldly yet salt-of-the-earth type thinkers we've ever met. He started his professional career working on the trading desk at Goldman Sachs (GS). But after a decade on Wall Street, he left that world because he was sick of the greed and hypocrisy...

He quit his senior vice president position to become a doctor, finished medical school, and became a board-certified eye surgeon. And along the way, he helped start a small biotechnology company that was sold to Roche for $125 million in 2008. Before long, though, he became frustrated with the Big Medicine industry, too...

And that's how Doc landed with us. Today, in addition to writing newsletters, he makes wine under his own label out in California. But all of that just scratches the surface...

We don't typically get sentimental here, but we know from working closely with Doc over the past year or so that he's a kind soul... He's someone who really cares about each and every one of his readers, about getting things right, about sharing what he knows in regard to health and wealth, and exploring the questions he has and wants to know more about...

Any of Doc's longtime subscribers know what I'm talking about...

Don't worry... I'm not going into a sales message right now, though it may sound like it.

Take Doc's latest issue of his signature Retirement Millionaire newsletter, for example... In it, as always, Doc and his research team recommended a great, unique investment idea for folks in or close to retirement, or dreaming of it and looking to boost their nest egg...

And as Doc and his team have done in every issue for years, they also dedicated pages strictly to health advice. In this issue, the first one of the year, Doc shared his list of the top ways to protect and improve your health...

For a lot of us, these ideas take on more meaning given what the COVID-19 pandemic – and the world's response to it – has done to so many people over the past 10 months... physically (with the effects of COVID-19), economically, and mentally (with isolation and social-distancing restrictions contributing to higher reported rates of anxiety and depression).

Just today, we came across these sobering statistics via Wired magazine...

According to data from Mental Health America (MHA)... more people are facing deteriorating mental health. From January through September of 2020, the number of people who have taken MHA's anxiety screenings has increased by 93% over the entire previous year. The organization's depression screening has seen a 62% increase over 2019's totals.

And...

A survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation in July 2020 found that 53% of adults said the pandemic had a negative toll on their mental health. Data collected from the CDC found that 41% of adults experienced symptoms of an anxiety or depressive disorder in December 2020, compared to 11% in January-July of 2019.

And there's these terrible official numbers, of course... More than 400,000 deaths in the U.S. have been attributed to COVID-19 and at least 24 million people have been infected. That also means about 23.5 million people in the U.S. have recovered, though each with their own unique story about the symptoms they experienced and the course the virus took.

With this backdrop, Doc went deeper with his health tips for 2021 than in previous years. He took a little more time to delve into each of the 13 items to address how they support our bodies' own natural defenses via the immune system, and in some cases, can boost our mental health as well...

You may have heard many of these tips before, like... get good quality sleep, manage stress with meditation, get outside and get moving, and get social, even from a distance.

But Doc does more than just share a list...

Typical of his research, he details the "how" and "why" in an easy-to-read way that you won't find many other places. As he writes about the benefits of "social ties," for example, and what isolation can do to us humans...

Having few relationships or low-quality ones weakens the body's immune functioning and produces inflammation. Emotionally supportive environments promote healthy development in the body's many regulatory systems – including the immune system.

Humans need to connect with people, see their faces, and hear their voices... I use WhatsApp, FaceTime, and Zoom for video calls. I also still travel to visit with whoever will see me.

And then, Doc gets into the science about it...

Being around other people improves our levels of dopamine and serotonin. Scientists understand that these neurotransmitters are important modulators of our moods. Too little, and we become depressed. Too much, and we become manic. We want to maintain that "just right" amount of serotonin and dopamine. It turns out that connecting with others is a great way to achieve that.

Research shows that being isolated decreases the levels of dopamine and serotonin being released in the brain... Over time, social isolation and loneliness can develop into depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder ("PTSD").

Social connections allow us to foster self-awareness, empathy, impulse control, self-motivation, positive societal contribution, and a sense of safety in the world around us.

So pick up the phone, mail a letter, and schedule Zoom meetups with your social circle, family members, and people you know who are living alone. And if someone reaches out to you, they might truly need the chemical bump your call will provide.

As we talked about in yesterday's Digest, the start of a new year (or anytime, really) is a great time to get your financial house in order... Today, we say the same about your health, for no particular reason other than that it has been on our minds lately.

That brings me to one non-COVID-related reason why...

I've been spending a lot of time around my parents over the past few weeks, and I've seen several folks a little bit older than them seriously injuring themselves because of falls. I can't make this up...

A few days ago, one of their neighbors cut open her leg on an outdoor stairway, and we helped bandage it up. Another neighbor tripped over something inside his home and broke his neck in two places. He's getting surgery today. And yet another of my parents' friends spent several days in the hospital after breaking her pelvis while falling.

I thought this was a startling turn of events until today, when I flipped through Doc's latest issue of Retirement Millionaire once again. In the issue, he talks about these accidents as a huge and common problem for many Americans today. As Doc wrote...

Falls are the third leading cause of accidental death – after poisoning and car accidents. There were 37,455 fall-related deaths in the U.S. in 2018. Death rates from falls are highest among adults over the age of 60. So especially if you're over 60, listen up... please make some changes in your home to help prevent this type of accident.

To minimize your risk of falling, Doc recommends simple pieces of advice that pretty much everyone can heed – like keeping your home clutter-free and well-lit, as well as removing or taping down any cords that run along the floor. As he continued...

While there are various reasons for someone to have a deadly fall, tackling the tripping hazards and fall-proofing your home is an easy and valuable place to start.

Here's why I'm talking about Doc's health advice in today's Digest...

Taking control of your health can sound like a big endeavor – and it no doubt can be. But in many cases, it doesn't mean you need to make a wholesale diet change or start to run 30 minutes a day if you haven't run anywhere in a year.

Maybe you start by thinking if the blood-sugar spike is really worth eating that extra cookie... or you just walk for 10 extra minutes per day... or clean up the living room...

Or maybe you consider ways to naturally boost your immune system, like getting outside in the sun and getting enough Vitamin D – which Doc recommends in great detail in his January issue. Our immune system doesn't get enough credit, according to Doc...

Each year, I see more and more folks act like our bodies can't protect us from disease. It's one reason why antibacterial soaps are so popular. People would rather slather their hands with a harmful chemical to destroy bacteria than count on their immune systems to handle the job.

Your immune system is designed to take care of illness and disease. And as long as you're relatively healthy and don't have a compromised immune system (from cancer, for example), your body can defend itself against almost anything.

For most of us, practicing usual measures during cold and flu season – like washing our hands and not sharing utensils – is enough to protect us. And our immune systems fight off anything that slips through those basic defenses. You may have some rough days... but your body will almost always win the fight.

Don't get me wrong...

By introducing the idea here today of boosting your natural immunity, I'm not saying that it's best to recklessly go around in public in today's world in a way that risks you contracting COVID-19 and spreading it to others without you or them knowing it. But there's a way to do things smartly, help yourself and others with things we already know, and keep living...

Some people might think I'm crazy, and I can't say for sure if it has been effective, but for peace of mind, I've been careful to keep windows or doors open whenever I could if we had visitors over the last year, often without them noticing...

I'd rather keep air moving in and out of an indoor space and give any would-be virus droplets a better chance to move along and dissipate, instead of letting them linger in the air without knowing for certain...

Of course, if it were all as simple as that, we wouldn't be in the 10th month of a pandemic. We live in a complicated world with a wide variety of ways of thinking about doing things...

And sometimes, your immune system can use a boost. That's true when it comes to COVID-19, especially if you have pre-existing conditions or are of an age that makes it that much more dangerous. To that end...

Today, we're hearing more and more anecdotal stories about Americans getting 'the shot'...

By that, we mean access to their first COVID-19 vaccine shot from either Moderna (MRNA) or Pfizer (PFE). As of last week, 11 million people had reportedly gotten at least one dose of either vaccine...

In Florida, where I've been staying for the past several weeks, things are really starting to pick up as the vaccine gets distributed at big supermarket chain Publix. Appointments are on a first-come, first-served basis for those older than 65, via online booking systems in most cases.

And at the same time, Florida officials are even starting to crack down on "vaccine tourism" – meaning people traveling to the state just to get the vaccine.

According to the Florida Department of Health, of the 1.1 million vaccines distributed in the state so far, more than 39,000 have been given to people from outside of Florida... those folks who can afford to travel here and successfully find the right webpage to make a reservation. (Here are the "two economies" at work again.)

Folks getting the vaccine are really excited to get it, and we don't blame them... though we also don't know for sure if you can still pass on the virus even if you're vaccinated and don't get sick from it yourself... or how long immunity may last and if a shot may be recommended yearly, for instance.

That's something our colleague Thomas Carroll, a longtime health care sector analyst, said in a private e-mail to our research team would probably be the endgame of all this, way back in the springtime as we started to learn details about COVID-19.

From an investing point of view, we will see if or how much more widespread acceptance of the vaccine (and whatever its effectiveness is) has on the economy in the months ahead. But from our vantage point, we sense a lot of pent-up demand to get out and about as quickly as possible...

The point today, though, is the price of your health cannot be overstated...

In a practical matter, we've spent time this year reading Bill Bryson's terrific book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants... And we do consider it required, or at the very least recommended, reading for everyone.

Doc's senior analyst, Matt Weinschenk, recommended this book to us back in 2019.

Our minds have been blown away by the things we didn't know about our own body – the thing we live in, for crying out loud – and things we can do to support it... By that, we mean everything about our immune system, like Doc talks about, to facts like...

1. If you laid out all the DNA in just one human body, it would stretch from Earth to Pluto.

2. One of the world's biggest exports is actually plasma from blood. (In the U.S., it has been a roughly $20 billion-per-year industry, or 2% of all exports.)

3. The oft-repeated advice to drink eight glasses of water per day stems from the misinterpretation of a decades-old research paper that said about eight glasses of water was the typical amount that a person took in on a usual day, in food and pure water included... not what they necessarily needed to drink to stay healthy.

Bryson, an American-British author, calls that last one "the most enduring of dietary misunderstandings."

Pretty much every page of Bryson's book includes something that we didn't know before... I've been telling anybody I know to read it.

We could go probably go on and on about health, but we'll end here...

If there's something you've been wanting to do to "get healthier" or that you've said you would do before but are neglecting (more exercise, better sleep, eating better, working on your mental health, etc.)... go make time to do it today. Nobody else will do it for you.

We take it for granted when we're healthy... And it costs a lot when we're sick. That's why the health care industry accounts for about 20% of U.S. gross domestic product.

So if you don't already subscribe to Doc's Retirement Millionaire and it sounds like something you are interested in, click here to learn how you can give it a try right now. (And if you are an existing subscriber, you can read the January issue here.)

We haven't seen another publication in our industry that brings subscribers as much great investing insight and health advice all in the same place each and every month. If you actually use it, it's worth way more than the small annual subscription fee.

One more thing...

If you want to hear more from Doc, mostly about his investing outlook in this case, he will join our Director of Research Austin Root and True Wealth editor Dr. Steve Sjuggerud for a FREE online event next Tuesday night, January 26, at 8 p.m. Eastern time.

They plan to touch on the crazy year that was 2020... what they're expecting to happen in 2021 in the economy and the markets... and how best to position your investment portfolio accordingly. Plus, everyone who attends will hear their No. 1 recommendation for this year.

You won't want to miss it. Click here to RSVP right now.

Bitcoin's Greatest Threat

In Part Two of an exclusive interview with our colleague Daniela Cambone, billionaire philanthropist and investor Frank Giustra weighs in on the heated bitcoin-versus-gold debate. And he explains which of the two he prefers as a store of wealth...

Click here to watch this video right now. For more free video content, subscribe to our Stansberry Research YouTube channel... and don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

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In today's mailbag, the discussion continues about Modern Monetary Theory ("MMT"). Do you have a question for us? Send your e-mails to feedback@stansberryresearch.com. As a reminder, we cannot provide individual investment advice but we do read each note.

"Initially governments produced money to facilitate the speed and volume of trade and to protect all parties to an exchange from fraudulent payment. Of course, governments found many ways to debase the value of money for their own gain.

"MMT is completely divorced from the commercial need for money. It is a way for authoritarian government to gain absolute control of all taxation, commerce, savings and investment, i.e., all money flows in both the private and public sector.

"It stems from the false belief that no economic activity could occur without government, so therefore the government has both the ordained right and the obligation to completely control any and all economic activity, i.e., to enforce or prohibit any transaction. This, of course, violates the central construct of our constitution, that people, not government, have ordained rights." – Paid-up subscriber Kendrick M.

All the best,

Corey McLaughlin
Naples, Florida
January 21, 2021