Round in circles like the ArchersAlways stiff or always starchy

I am the first to concede that ground hemp-seeds have a place as an adjunct to fermentation, and that place is in Lithuanian farmhouse beers. I cannot muster the same enthusiasm for putting them in vegan yoghurt. That seems postmodern and weird, like oatmeal soap, or chia-seed-&-pomegranate shampoo. Yet here we are, with Bravo Edestiny. What has the world become?

We have encountered Mimi Castellanos already, Florida Woman extraordinaire. Her portfolio of talents is diverse and not limited to light-working. I particularly admire her gig as a Consultant Graphology Profiler, putting her intuition and special talents to work for employers to weed out the narcissists and grifters and psychopaths and borderline-personality dramaturges who lurk among potential employees, all on the basis of their handwriting.

This guy was employed for four years because
people did not consult Mimi about his signature

But here we are more concerned with Mimi's "Mouth of Marco Ruggiero" role, trading as "Healthy Energetics" and as "ImunoTheSolution" while peddling the dude's potions. In particular, peddling Bravo Edestiny capsules:
The ingredients include:

• hemp seed protein powder
• sugar
• fructooligosaccharides
• lemon juice
• apple cider vinegar
• cultured kefir grains
• Bifidobacterium infantis
• Bifidobacterium bifidum
• Bifidobacterium lactis
• Bifidobacterium longum
• hypromellose
• gellan gum

As advertised at AutismOne 2021 (a Trade Fair for autism-cure scammers and mountebanks in general), so you know it's legit!

A novel strategy combining the benefits of an original vegetal GcMAF with the benefits of hemp fermentation and the presence of a unique array of probiotics and phages

A talk by Marco Ruggiero MD, PhD

The account of Edestiny on Mimi's webstore has the ring of Ruggiero's word-choices rather than hers. The quotation from Montagnier is a dogwhistle, implying in its full context that the right immuno-modulation will cure AIDS, and HIV-denial is more Marco's obsession than Mimi's.

As Nobel Laureate Professor Luc Montagnier prophetically stated "…our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system…".

The backstory here is that our man Ruggiero began his Mad Scientist career as a disciple of Yamamoto, professionally convinced that certain deglycosylating enzymes will turn VBP (Vitamin-D Binding Protein) into a Macrophage Activating Factor, VBP-MAF (a.k.a. GcMAF), which stimulates the immune system and cures all ailments. He promoted Magic Yoghurt for a while, which has a curated ecosystem of bacteria to perform that enzymatic transubstantiation.

Later he advised his eager audience that they should instead consume Magic Non-Dairy Yoghurt, i.e. fermented fruit-juice fortified with chondroitin, for Yamamoto was wrong... the miraculous cures thought to be wrought by GcMAF should instead be credited to chondroitin. Thus Rerum, and Imuno, and Immortalis.

Now the pendulum has turned full circle, and we are back to GcMAF, but now in a vegan form, fermented by those transformative bacteria out of 'Edestin' (a globular protein found in hemp seed).

Ruggiero & Pacini (2020) professed to show that edestin is analogous to VBP in mammalian metabolism, although it remained ambiguous whether the similarity is conserved from the last common ancestor of mammals and Cannabis sativa, or convergent evolution driven by the need of hempseeds for homeostasis in their vitamin-D levels. They concluded that if VBP could be glycosylated into GcMAF by bacterial transformation, then the same will happen to edestin.

Of the 17 references in that opuscule, 12 were self-citations, shoe-horned in on specious pretexts, e.g. to justify the use of mineral water for bacterial cultivation, despite the absence of mineral-water content in those papers. A 13th citation went out to Bradstreet, Vogelaar & Thyer (2012), where all three authors were Ruggiero associates (that paper is not easily accessible because the publisher cancelled Autism Insights as soon as it had served its purpose and the antivax-fraudster editors stopped subsidising it). This is a high level of self-citation, though standards may be different at Medical Research and Innovations, as it was extruded by OAText... readers should remember that parasitical publisher. That is to say, Dottori Ruggiero & Pacini were using the advertising opportunities of predatory academic publishing to lend their promotional piece a veneer of scholarly acceptance. Or, it may be, a pebbledash coating.

In a curious foreshadowing of Ruggiero & Pacini (2020), we find another invocation of the VBP / edestin homology in a citation-turned-footnote, pretending to be Ref [7] in Zunaid, Pacini & Ruggiero (2020), in which it serves no obvious purpose.

Hempseeds made a third appearance in our man's oeuvre in Ruggiero (2020), in the section "Determination of microbial viability in radioactive water A, and deuterium-depleted water". There we learn that the ingredient list for 'Bravo-Edestiny' appears identical to the ad-hoc culture medium used for transferring the radiation-insensitivity of cyanobacteria to probiotic bacteria species via Quantum Entanglement (and from there, readers can infer, to the human hosts who consume those probiotic species, in the form of Ruggiero's product Praesidium).

Microbial cultures, defined as culture starter, were kindly donated by Silver Spring Sagl (ArzoMendrisio, Switzerland). In one arm of the experiment, radioactive water A was used; in the other arm, deuterium-depleted water was used. 45 g of hemp seed proteins were added to 500 mL of each type water. The mixture of water and hemp seed proteins was boiled for 10 s; after that, it was cooled at room temperature (22 °C). When the mixture had reached room temperature, the following ingredients were added: lemon juice (7.5 g); cane sugar (25 g); apple cider vinegar (5 g); culture starter (a blend of active cultures, cultured kefir grains with Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Streptococcus thermophilus, Bifidobacterium infantis, Bifidobacterium bifidum, Bifidobacterium lactis, Bifidobacterium longum) (2.5 g). The mixture was left at room temperature for a total of 48 hours; after the first 24 h, the mixture was gently stirred. After that, the fermented product was gently mixed and then lyophilized using an apparatus provided by Zhengzhou Hento Machinery Ltd (Zhengzhou City, Henan, China).

An alternative recipe for co-cultivating those cyano- and plain bacteria ("Method for co-culturing in radioactive water B") involved horsetail, Equisetum, because why not?

Really shite photoshopping

We observed in previous posts that the prime distributor for Ruggiero products is the webstore at "Natural Solutions" (the work of a New Zealand 'naturopathy entrepreneur'-turned-fringe-politician, Michael Kelly).* Bravo-Edestiny features on the webstore, of course, adorned with immoderate therapeutic claims, hidden in the HTML as as <meta> tags so they will catch the eye of search engines but evade the casual scrutiny of MedSafe or the Advertising Standards Commission.
<meta name="description" content="Bravo Probiotics for Autism, Chronic Fatigue, Cancer, HIV, Athletic Performance, Anti-ageing, Inflammatory Bowel disease, and Neurodegenerative disease.">

It comes as no surprise to find that purchased press release from Ruggiero & Pacini, prominent within the "Science Shows that Edestiny Works" part of the webpage. It is almost as if it were written, and OAText were paid to host it, entirely for that purpose.

The corollary follows that another Ruggiero probiotic product is still in the pipeline, involving Equisetum (on account of that plant's evolutionary antiquity). Maybe 'Praesidium' is that potion!

* "Dora" at HIVforum reminds me that one leading non-NZ distributor of Brave and the rest of the Ruggiero product range was "Healing Together", the stamping ground of Katerina Baboulas (resident of Toronto, Ontario). In its previous recensions, that website was an agent or branch office of Natural Solutions. Now Katerina has removed herself as the middle-man and set her site to redirect straight to Natural Solutions, freeing up time she can devote to pimping medscams plus Positive Non-Judgmental Thinking on FaceBorg and Twiddle, and to forwarding Trumplicker lies about the illegitimacy of the 2020 US presidential election.

It is the moral calibre of GcMAF merchants that keeps me coming back to the topic again and again.