The Arrow #170

Hello friends.

Greetings from Montecito.

I had a reader comment on what might be causing the difficulty in viewing the graphics in The Arrow. If you’re having that issue, it might be the email program you’re using. Not all email programs or apps show the graphics. If you’re not seeing the graphics in the version you get via email, click on the “Read online” link in the upper right hand part of the email.

For those of you who are still miffed about my calling MD an “elderly, grey-haired lady” in a previous post, you have been avenged. She got me back in last week’s Arrow. As most of you long-time readers know, when I finish the writing, I turn it over to MD to vet. When she’s through, I send it without re-reading it myself.

Anyone reading last week’s edition knows I wrote a section on the benefits of magnesium. I also put up a link to Amazon for the magnesium we used in our clinic. It was an affiliate link, which means I get a small (very small) commission if anyone purchases magnesium through that link.

I wrote “If 50 people buy the Thorne magnesium—which would be a first, by a long shot—I would trouser a whopping six dollars. You couldn’t pay me to write this section for 6 bucks, so I promise I’m not trying to scam you.”

MD rewrote the last sentence to say:

She left the “not” out. I had countless people inform me of it.

She swears it was inadvertent, so I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.

As it turns out, much to my surprise, there were exactly 50 readers who purchased the magnesium. And I was incorrect. My commission was not $6, as I figured it would be. Instead, it added $9.45 to my bulging coffers.

I guess it was a little more expensive than the $18 I thought it was. I end up earning one percent on most Amazon purchases, so don’t think I’m getting rich from it.

But MD’s error, giving her the benefit of the doubt, provides me with the opportunity to briefly discuss affiliate marketing. I’ve discovered a lot of people don’t know what that is, so I’ll explain. If you already know, just skip on down.

Affiliate Marketing

Over the years, I and companies I’ve been associated with have spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing and advertising products and services. A huge amount of every budget of any major company is spent on marketing and advertising simply because that’s the way they attract customers.

As I wrote a couple of years ago in The Arrow, advertising underwrites everything. Take the National Football League for example. It’s the richest sport in the world. The owners sell the broadcast rights for billions of dollars to the various networks. The networks then sell ads during the games. If all goes according to form, the NFL owners make enough from the broadcast rights to pay all the players their mind-boggling salaries and have enough left over to make themselves fabulously wealthy. The various networks make enough from the ads they sell to bolster their bottom lines. And the advertisers sell enough product to justify the enormous prices they pay for the ads.

So, the NFL owners, the players, the broadcast networks, and the advertisers all profit because you sit through all the ads during NFL games.

It’s the same with all sports and, really, all shows you watch on TV. It’s all underwritten by ad sales. Now, granted, some of the costs of sports are recouped by ticket sales to the games, but nothing like what is made from the ads.

Now, ask any market or ad person what is the best kind of advertising, and you’ll be told it is word of mouth. You can watch a series of flashy ads for, say, a new kind of coffee maker, and you probably won’t buy it. But if your friend tells you the new coffee maker is the absolute bomb, you rush out and get one.

That’s essentially what affiliate marketing is. Word of mouth advertising. I don’t know who came up with it, but it’s genius.

If you have a company and you fork over $5,000 for some kind of ad campaign, you have no idea how well it’s going to work. You could sell a lot of product, or you could easily not come close to paying for the ad. It’s a crapshoot. Affiliate marketing is a sure thing. It comes the closest to a win-win-win as any type of marketing out there. If you’re the company that makes the product, you pay a commission only if your product is actually sold.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say I make a widget. I can throw a bunch of money into advertising it, or I could set up an affiliate marketing plan. If I choose to advertise, I’m taking a risk. If I set up an affiliate marketing plan, I’m not.

I set a commission amount I’m willing to pay for someone else to sell my widgets. It could be a blogger who writes about widgets. It could be a newsletter that covers widgets. It could be a podcaster who talks about widgets or anyone who has a platform.

I set the commission and I provide a link to the product. The blogger signs up as an affiliate marketer, and I send him/her my affiliate link. The blogger then inserts the link into a blog post about widgets. Anyone who clicks that link gets taken to my website. If the clicker makes a purchase, the blogger gets a commission.

Which is why it is a win-win-win.

The owner of the company pays for the advertising (in the form of a commission) only when the advertising actually sells a product. The blogger makes a commission by simply promoting a product he/she believes in and can usually do it with just a simple link. So the blogger doesn’t have to purchase and store inventory. It costs the blogger nothing but a link. It’s a win for the buyer because he/she gets taken to the company’s website and is able to participate in any sales that are going on. And the buyer doesn’t have to sit through a long commercial. All the buyer does is click the link, and only if it is something that strikes the buyer’s interest.

The only fly in the ointment is the trustworthiness of the middle man here, i.e., in this case the blogger. Some crappy companies give huge commissions to affiliate marketers, so the products of these companies get promoted heavily. So, you need to watch for that.

If your blogger, podcaster, newsletter writer, influencer, whatever is trustworthy, then you don’t have a problem.

Having said all that, The Arrow uses affiliate marketing here and there.

We basically promote two products, both of which we use ourselves. One is HLTH Code meal replacements, which we believe are the best available. And which come from an extremely reliable company. The other is Dry Farm Wines, which are our wines of choice. We can drink too much—from time to time—and not pay the price in terms of drunkenness and hangovers. We’ve added another product to the list, which I’ll describe later in today’s Arrow.

The point is, we don’t promote anything we don’t believe in and use ourselves.

Then there is Amazon.

Amazon has an affiliate program that used to be great, but which now sucks. And Amazon is not the best of companies to work with. They are great for customers, but terrible with vendors and affiliate marketers. I’ve worked with them as both, so I know.

Back when Amazon was trying to get going, they had a great affiliate program. As I recall, the commissions were ~8%. So if there was a book I really liked and I reviewed it, and 20 were sold through my site, I might earn $30 or so. When I wrote a handful of book reviews, I might make a couple hundred bucks per month. Which paid for my blog hosting and tech guy to keep things running.

Then, after building their company with the help of affiliate marketers, as Amazon became profitable then ever more profitable, they started reducing the commissions. Now it’s 1 percent on most everything and ~4.5 percent on books.

Not only is the dramatic reduction in commissions bad for affiliate marketers, the FTC—my most hated government agency—has made things even worse. And Amazon has capitalized on it.

The FTC has mandated the so-called two-click rule, which means that if you are doing affiliate marketing, the customer has to make two clicks before arriving at the product site. Which is okay if you’re a blogger. Your readers click on your blog, then click on the affiliate link if they’re interested and are taken to the product site. But if you send out something via email that has an affiliate link in it, then it takes the reader of the newsletter only one click to get to the product. Which is a no no. But isn’t really enforced…except by Amazon. And they profit mightily from it.

If I wanted to recommend a book on Amazon in The Arrow, I would have to create a separate page on my blog and have the link from The Arrow go to that. Then on that page, there would be a link to the Amazon book or whatever.

Since that would take a lot of time to do, I—and pretty much everyone else who has an affiliate agreement with Amazon—uses a commercial product, for which we all pay a monthly fee depending upon use. You’ve seen it if you’ve ever clicked one of my Amazon links. It just adds another layer of cost and time to the process.

I totally got screwed by Amazon as a consequence of not knowing about this. I’ve been blogging since 2005, so almost 20 years. Over that time, I wrote a zillion book reviews and/or mentioned specific books many times. All with Amazon links. As most of you probably know, we have a family company that sells a cooking device. MD has written a weekly newsletter for that company for over five years. A couple of years ago, she decided she would add a book on cooking or molecular gastronomy or whatever each week to the newsletter.

Which she did. And she used my Amazon affiliate link to do so, not realizing the FTC rules. Amazon shut my affiliate account and basically told me it would never be reopened. My only recourse they told me was to open a completely new affiliate account, which they would not connect to my old account.

I probably have put 500-700 book reviews and/or mentions on my many blogs over the past almost 20 years. I tried to go back and switch out the new affiliate account link for the old, but it took forever as I had to page through each blog post one by one. I still get a lot of traffic to my old blog posts, and there are, I’m sure, a lot of books sold that way. But I no longer get the affiliate commission on any of the ones I haven’t changed to the new affiliate link.

If you’re going to do business with Amazon, do it as a customer, not a vendor or an affiliate. But now they’ve deteriorated in how they deal with customers. I’m a Prime member, and I’m constantly getting shipments lost or delayed. Their service has deteriorated badly.

Ectopic Pregnancy

There is a case before the Supreme Court right now over the FDA’s allowing mifepristone (as part of a two-drug regimen along with misoprostol) taken to induce abortion to be widely available. The FDA has widened the time window for the regimen’s use and has “eased dispensing requirements.”

According to The Economist, The plaintiffs

While the government

Like almost all of these sorts of issues, what is being argued is secondary. The plaintiffs are from the Right to Life movement, who don’t believe in abortion in almost any case, while the pharmaceutical defendant stands to make money from the drugs, and the Biden administration is all in on all abortions any time.

My own position on abortions is sort of middle of the road, but my position doesn’t matter. What matters is the safety of the women concerned, and that’s what I want to explain.

When pregnant women take these medications, they basically experience symptoms of a miscarriage. There is cramping to a variable degree and bleeding. Sometimes serious enough to occasion a visit to the emergency room.

These are the same symptoms women experience when they have an ectopic pregnancy. And an ectopic pregnancy is often a life-threatening event.

My best doctor friend in Little Rock, a busy family practitioner, had a sign on the edge of his office door that he saw every time he walked out of his office to see a patient. It said: ‘Always think ectopic’.

Early in his career he had almost lost a patient for not thinking ectopic. He did not want a repeat.

Physicians and patients look at things differently during an office visit. The patient is there to get something fixed. Maybe an upper respiratory infection, a urinary tract infection, the flu, a migraine headache, whatever. The physician, if he/she is competent, first thinks of any life-threatening issues that might be presenting. All the disorders I mentioned above are uncomfortable, but none is life-threatening. So the first thing you want to do as a doc is make sure your patient isn’t exhibiting signs and symptoms of something that could be fatal. Once you’ve ruled that out, then you can deal with the patient’s actual complaint.

One of the conditions that fools a lot of physicians is an ectopic pregnancy.

An ectopic pregnancy is simply a growing embryo implanted anywhere other than in the uterus. Below is a graphic showing the most common places embryos can end up implanted outside the uterus:

These ectopic implantations are often real medical emergencies. And they are not that uncommon. Anywhere from 1-2 percent of pregnancies are ectopic pregnancies, so they aren’t rare. But they can be deadly if not treated in time.

There are a number of issues that increase the risk for an ectopic pregnancy.

• A previous ectopic pregnancy increases the risk substantially.

• Being older than 35

• Becoming pregnant with an IUD in place.

• Having an STD

• And a handful of others, including smoking.

From what I’ve read, ectopic pregnancies are on the rise. Probably because a lot more women are starting to have kids later. Many are using IUDs. And STDs are more common these days.

As I wrote above, the symptoms brought on by these abortion drugs are the same as a miscarriage. And the same as an ectopic pregnancy announcing itself. So, how is a woman, a layperson, experiencing these symptoms supposed to know which is which?

The sad news is that she can’t. And if an ectopic pregnancy is the case, time is of the essence.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal penned by an obstetrician

I think this is really playing with fire. Especially if the ectopic pregnancy rate of 1-2 percent is on the rise. Women are going to die.

I would at least require notices to be plastered on all of the medications warning of an ectopic pregnancy. And require some kind of written information to be handed to the patient. Sure, it’s going to scare a lot of women who are just going through the symptoms of a miscarriage brought on by the drug. And will probably increase visits to the emergency room. But it will also save some lives.

Pass this along to anyone who uses these medications to terminate a pregnancy.

Protein, Fat, and Muscle Growth

I was trolling through the medical literature and came across a really nice study. While I was in the journal I electronically flipped through the rest of the studies and came upon yet another good one on the same subject.

As I’ve noted (and I am far from the first person who has ever said this), carbs and fat aren’t found together in nature. Except in mother’s milk, which is, of course, designed by nature to stimulate growth. Which is not really what we want when we’ve already grown too much, if you get my drift.

Fat and protein are often found together in nature, especially in foods of animal origin. We know that protein, particularly the amino acid leucine, stimulates the mTOR complex to drive muscle protein synthesis (MPS). But what about fat? Does the extra fat found in most foods of animal origin boost MPS? Or is it just the protein?

In other words, would say downing an amount of whey protein in a non-fat shake provide the same MPS as downing the whey protein with some fat added to it.

Fortunately, a study exists looking at this very question.

The study with the unwieldy title Consumption of whole eggs promotes greater stimulation of postexercise muscle protein synthesis than consumption of isonitrogenous amounts of egg whites in young men looks at what happens to muscle growth when young men eat protein alone or protein and fat.

The researchers recruited 10 resistance trained men to undertake the study. After extensive lab evaluations on the day of the study the men underwent a hard workout involving 10 reps to max on leg presses and leg extensions. Immediately after the workout, the subjects were fed either three whole eggs or the protein equivalent in egg whites. Thirty minutes before the exercise, the researchers took muscle biopsies from the subjects and again after two hours and then five hours post exercise. After a washout period of from one to two weeks, the subjects came back and repeated the experiment with the same workout, but the opposite meal. Each subject acted as his own control.

This was an incredibly precise experiment as the leucine in the eggs was labeled, so the researchers could see where it ended up.

The results of the study were enlightening because such a study had never been done, but before I get to that, I’ve got to share with you my favorite lines in the study, which appeared in the Introduction. (Lightly edited for clarity.)

I was in a golf tournament earlier this week in which I was thrown in with some people I had never met. All were high-income types, all were well-educated at prestigious schools. And all were blathering on about nutrition and what they ate and how they worked out. I hadn’t heard such a load of nonsense compressed into a four hour walk in my life. Of course, eggs are bad, because—you guessed it—cholesterol. Anyway, I wanted to blow my brains out by the time we had finished. But I digress…

What this study showed, was that muscle protein synthesis was greater after the whole egg meal than after a meal of just egg whites with an equal amount of protein.

Let’s look at some charts, all of which can be found in the study linked above in case there is difficulty in opening.

As you can see insulin bumps a little but goes back down. It isn’t markedly higher with the whole eggs than with the egg whites. Nor is the glucose, which one would predict. The triglycerides do jump a bit post-prandially, which makes sense since there is extra fat in the yolks. But trigs come down as well.

Here is another really interesting graphic demonstrating a phenomenon we’ve discussed previously.

Remember how we discussed that AMPK was a signaling molecule that inhibits mTOR? When AMPK is phosphorylated, it is active. When it isn’t as phosphorylated, it is less active. As you can see in A above, with the protein intake from the eggs, the AMPK becomes less active. As AMPK becomes less active, you can see in B above, that mTOR becomes more active and drives MPS.

Here is the most important graphic of all.

As you can see, there was substantially more muscle synthesis driven by the whole eggs than by an equivalent amount of protein as egg white.

This is real muscle synthesis as measured by muscle biopsy. It isn’t determined by some proxy for muscle synthesis such as an increase in LBM as measured by a DEXA scan.

What you have to remember about this study is that it was done in young, healthy, fit men. Not aging goobers such as myself. In young people mTOR is driven more by hormones than in people over 30ish. After 30, mTOR is driven by protein intake. The subjects in this study did not get a lot of protein in their test meal. They each got only 18g of protein, which is a small dose for young, healthy males. Yet it triggered their mTOR.

Remember, in youth, mTOR is under hormonal control. You saw in the graphic above that insulin went up a bit.

It doesn’t work the same after about 30. Then mTOR is triggered more by protein. And it takes a fair amount of protein to do it. Much more than the 18g these subjects consumed.

When you’re young, your body will grab protein from anywhere and convert it to muscle. This study shows it does it better when there is fat included with the protein.

The next study I came across in the same issue of this journal was done at the University of Aukland; it looks at what happens to older people when they vastly increase their protein intake.

The authors of this study titled The effects of dietary protein intake on appendicular lean mass and muscle function in elderly men: a 10-wk randomized controlled trial randomized males in good health and over the age of 70 into two groups. One was to consume the RDA of protein (0.8g/kg/day) while the other was to consume double that, or 1.6g/kg/day.

The men in this study were an average height of 5’8” and an average weight of about 188 pounds. But these figures varied all over the place.

The research center provided the food to the subjects and the experiment lasted for 10 weeks. The food provided was matched as closely as possible to each subject’s dietary likes and dislikes.

The objective was to see if doubling the RDA (which many, myself included, believe is too low) would lead to an increase in lean body mass.

Here is what the breakdown of the diet looked like in terms of animal vs plant protein.

If you look at the line on animal sources of protein, you can see that the 2RDA group got almost three times as much as those in the RDA group. And you can see from the line below that both consumed about the same amount of plant protein. This was a long chart, so I couldn’t copy all of it. (It is available in the study, which you can get from the link provided above.) In terms of fat, those on the RDA diet got about 7 grams more per day than those on the 2RDA diet.

After the ten weeks, the team looked at a number of lean body mass parameters. Here is what they found.

As you can see, the subjects consuming the 2RDA dose of protein increased body mass across the board. The above chart measures not total body mass, but the change in body mass over the 10 weeks.

What about strength?

Here’s what the authors wrote (lightly edited for clarity):

Although muscle biopsies were not a part of this study, it’s pretty clear that increasing protein intake in males over 70 ends up increasing lean body mass both overall and in the trunk and arms and legs (appendicular mass).

The total protein per day in the 2RDA group came in at ~136 g, which represents a ten ounce steak and a couple of chicken thighs over the course of a day. Just to give you an idea. As the Trommelen study we discussed several weeks ago shows, the greater the protein intake, the greater the increase in muscle mass.

So, the take home message is eat your animal protein. And do resistance training, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

Before we get to that, I would like to briefly cover a couple of other topics.

Is There A Covid Disaster Awaiting the Highly Vaccinated?

I’ve had countless people send me this article by James Howard Kunstler and ask me what I think about it. Kunstler is summarizing a podcast he did with virologist Geert Vanden Bossche. Here are the highlights:

Well, many people early on said that vaccinating into the teeth of an ongoing pandemic was the wrong strategy. The proper strategy is to vaccinate before a pandemic starts. Which is why vaccines are given before people are sick.

If you vaccinate while someone has an active illness, it gives the virus a chance to mutate quickly. If the vaccine works, and you give it before the illness, then the body builds up immunity, and the virus never gets a toe hold.

Dr. Vanden Bossche publicly predicted at the start of the pandemic that there would be major problems as a result of this vaccination into the pandemic. But the problems never occurred, at least not anywhere near the magnitude he predicted. He now says he has revised his opinion based on a mistake he made in his calculations and now predicts an extremely dire picture of what’s going to happen to the highly vaccinated when Covid kicks off again. It ain’t pretty.

But is it correct?

Trial Site News published an interview with him you can read here. TSN requires a paid subscription, but you can get behind the paywall for an article or two. This one is a little less over the top than the Kunstler article, but still alarming. Here is an excerpt:

He goes on to say that those who have never been vaccinated (or were vaccinated only once) will not be bothered too much. But those who have had multiple vaccines will be in for a nightmare such as the world has never seen.

What does it all mean?

To be honest, I don’t know. I have trouble understanding Vanden Bossche. Not trouble with his accent, but his constant use of acronyms. I never know what all of them mean, so I get lost in the conversation. He has a new book out about all this called The Inescapable Immune Escape Pandemic, which I forked over the $20 for so you don’t have to. The only reason I purchased it was because the free part I could read on Amazon looked like he was writing much more clearly than his typical writing. But when I got the book, it was filled with countless acronyms for everything.

The first thing I encountered was CMII, quickly followed by CMIIs. I didn’t know what either of these were, so I looked them up in the long chart he provides in the front of the book. CMII stands for cellular mediated innate immunity and CMIIs stands for cellular mediated innate immune system. Jesus wept!

I’m fairly conversant in immunology and read a lot about it, including in textbooks. Everyone calls it the innate immune system. No one abbreviates it.

Anyway, I’ll work my way through the book after I print out the long list of acronyms to keep at hand and see if I can figure out what he’s talking about. When I do, I’ll let you know.

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

I came across this video a couple of days ago and decided to post it. What I didn’t realize until I got to the end of it was that it was made by Gurwinder Bhogal, a Substacker whose Stack I pay for. I quickly went there, fearing I had somehow unsubscribed. But, nope, he just hasn’t posted in a while. I guess he was busy making this excellent video.

Gurwinder has a nice X following, so I went there. Where I did find it. But since I don’t spend a lot of time on X, I didn’t see it. A member of our academic low-carb email group found it and posted it.

Before you watch it, let me tell you Gurwinder is in the tech industry, and he used to be like all of them. Then he got red pilled. This video shows it, so beware.

I think when most people watch videos like this one, they always wish they could get a friend or relative who is of a different political persuasion to watch it. Hoping, of course, that that person would instantly become open minded, discard his political beliefs, and immediately begin thinking the same way the person who sent him the video thinks. Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.

The guy who gets it will wonder if the guy who sent it actually watched it, because if he had, he would be thinking the same way the recipient does.

I kind of fell into that trap when I watched it, so I started thinking about whether I had changed any of my long-held beliefs. And I had. But not by watching this video.

After reading End Times by Peter Turchin, which is still my book of the year so far, I completely changed my mind about unions. I still hate many things about them, which I think could be greatly improved. But they do provide people a living wage, which most non-union jobs don’t any longer.

I had my own close call with a union. One of my many jobs while in college was working at Disneyland in Anaheim. The biggest people trap ever built by a mouse. I was conductor on the train that circumnavigated the park, starting at Main Street and ending by going through the Grand Canyon and Primeval World diorama. Hell, I can almost still quote the spiel.

It was the worst job of the many I had in college. I didn’t actually work for Disneyland, I worked for Retlaw (which is Walter spelled backwards), the related company that operated the train and the monorail. Employees on those two rides made more money than the rank and file Disney workers who dealt with the other rides. But after working for Retlaw for a certain period of time, you had to join the Teamster’s Union. Since I wasn’t big on puking up the union dues whip out, I quit. Now I kind of wish I had joined, just so I could burnish my blue collar cred.

Until I read End Times, I would have gladly busted any and all unions. But they do provide a living wage for their members. The wealth pump that sends money from the working class to the elites doesn’t work as well with the unions.

Anyway, watch the video and let me know what you thought of it. And contemplate the last time you ever changed your mind about a long-cherished belief.

Okay, before we move on, I’ve got to tell you I’m not doing the Mercola beat down today. I would rather focus on some important stuff like the study above and what I’m about to write about below than spend time rebutting idiocy. I’ll do it next week maybe if nothing new and better comes along.

Variable Resistance Training

Learning about the training effect and variable resistance training is vastly more important than whether or not Mercola thinks you can’t build muscle without eating carbs.

Years ago our editor called MD and me and asked if we knew anything about slow speed strength training. We said we didn’t. She told us of a trainer in New York who used our Protein Power book in his training facility, and she wanted to hook us up with him to write a book on his methods.

We flew to New York and met Fred Hahn, the trainer, who put us through a session in his facility. I could barely walk when I left, and dreaded the next day. I had had many weight-lifting sessions earlier in life, and I knew well how I would feel the next day. As it turned out, I didn’t feel all that beat up. Not nearly like I thought I would.

Fred put me onto a lot of scientific papers, which I pulled and read. And pulled even more and read them. And learned a ton about strength training I hadn’t known before. So, once MD and I were persuaded that this kind of training really did work, we agreed to co-write the book. It’s called The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution, and it is still in print. Fred still trains folks at his center in NY, and I think is franchising it. And we’re still friends.

Strangely, when I went to look up our book to find the link, I found another book titled Slow Burn that just came out. Different author, but the same technique. A title rustler, apparently.

In doing my research for our Slow Burn, I learned a lot. Of course, there was a lot to learn as I had minimal scientific knowledge of exercise physiology. I basically parroted what I had heard everyone else say. Do aerobics. Do sets of reps with weights. Blah, blah, blah.

When I started reading the literature, I realized the folly of my ways.

I learned what fitness is. I learned that one could be healthy, but not necessarily fit. And fit, but not necessarily healthy. Think Jim Fixx, who wrote all the books on running and started the whole jogging craze, who died at age 52 of a heart attack while running. Fit, but not healthy.

And I learned what fitness is.

Let’s say you haven’t done anything strenuous for a while, and on a whim you decide you’re by God going to get in shape, so you go out and run around the block. You make it back home, and fall on the couch. Your heart is pounding and you’re gasping for air.

‘I am so out of shape,’ you croak between breaths. ‘I’ve got to get better.’

So, you start a regimen of running. Before too long, you can run around the block and arrive back home breathing just a little faster with your heart beating a little harder. And you remember that first day. And what a difference all your running has made. You say to yourself, you are in vastly better cardiopulmonary shape than you were just a couple of months before.

But are you?

If you suddenly died and the pathologist looked at your heart and lungs, would he say, Wow, this person’s heart and lungs look great? Or would he be able to even differentiate them from the heart and lungs you had before you started jogging?

What if someone could take the heart and lungs of runner Usain Bolt and transplant them into you? Would you be able to run like Usain?

The answer is no.

When you’ve run for a few months and can easily make it around the block at a good pace without panting and puffing and feeling like your heart is about to jump out of your chest, have your heart and lungs really changed?

Again, the answer is no.

Well, what has happened then? Something has happened otherwise you would still be panting and pounding.

Here is the deal.

When you are out of shape, you have trouble moving oxygen into your muscle cells. When you exert yourself, you compensate for this lack of ability to transfer oxygen by gasping for breath, which adds more oxygen to your blood. And by having your heart beat like crazy, which pumps more of this oxygenated blood throughout your body. Your heart and lungs combine to send more oxygenated blood to the tissues. The concentration is much higher, so it moves into the muscles more easily.

As you continue to train, this ability to move oxygen from your blood into your muscles becomes more efficient. When the transfer is vastly more efficient, you can do a lot more strenuous exercise without the panting, puffing, and heart pounding that you experienced before. You think it’s that your heart and lungs are more fit, but it’s really because the oxygen transfer works more efficiently.

Okay, so how you get aerobically fit has nothing to do with aerobics. It has to do with the efficiency of oxygen transfer.

So, how do you build muscle?

The same way. As you work your way up to heavier weights, the same thing happens. You increase the efficiency of oxygen transfer. But you do something else as well. You increase the size of your muscles.

When you take your muscles to failure, which is not fun, you end up breaking them down a bit, then on days off heal them, and the healing process makes them stronger and bigger. But not necessarily hugely bigger like a body builder’s. That’s a function of your genetics.

Our eldest son started serious weight training a few years ago. He now has a nice physique. It’s not the physique of a body builder, but he can deadlift 435 pounds (I think that’s what he last told me—it’s well over 400) and squat almost 400 pounds. It’s amazing, because you would never know looking at him. Others look like Arnold lifting much less. It’s all in the genes. The look, not the strength.

But what is the best way to gain strength in the shortest amount of time?

By doing variable-resistance strength training.

What is that?

Before I tell you, let me tell you how muscle works. Your muscles are strongest when they are contracted. They are less strong when they are minimally contracted. Let me explain.

For those of you who have ever done a bench press, you’ll notice that the hardest part of the lift is getting the weight moving to begin with. Your muscles aren’t contracted, so they are at their weakest. Once you can get the bar up a little and your muscles are more contracted, it becomes easier to lift the weight.

So, you are limited in the amount of weight you can lift by your starting weight. Since muscles respond better when they are stressed, you’re stressing them only at the start of the lift. The rest of the lift stresses them some, but not as much as it does at the start.

What if you could add more weight as your muscles contracted? That would keep the muscles under maximal tension throughout the lift. Do you think you would get stronger faster? Indeed you would.

But how do you increase the weight during the lift?

A couple of ways.

You could go to a facility like our co-author Fred Hahn’s where he has specially made machines that are cammed in such a way as to steadily increase the weight throughout the lift. There is no mercy. When I first did a chest press on one of Fred’s machines, I thought as soon as I got the bar moved away from my chest, it would get easier. It didn’t. The pressure was constant.

Another way is to use elastic bands made for strength training. Think of a rubber band. If you try to stretch it, it’s easier at the start than it is once you’ve got it stretched some. Same with bands used for weight training. They are easier to move when you start the ‘lift’ and get progressively more difficult as the bands stretch out. You perceive it as a constant weight that doesn’t get easier to lift as your muscles contract more.

There are numerous studies showing that those who do variable-resistance training build strength much faster than those who lift weights. There are many studies showing people who are randomized into a variable-resistance group are able to lift more weight (actual weights) than people randomized into the weight lifting group.

These studies hold for sedentary people, for people who are weekend athletes, and for elite athletes. All gain strength faster with variable-resistance training. In all these studies, the folks from all walks of life who do variable strength training can lift more weight at the end of the study than those who were randomized into the actual weight-training group.

I, myself, do variable-strength training. I use a system developed by John Jaquish, PhD. Dr. Jaquish has written a little book on the technique titled Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. The title is a little disingenuous because it implies you don’t have to work hard. When you read it, you realize you do. It’s a brutal workout, in fact. But it really does work.

But, as I discovered, you have to keep after it, or you lose your gains.

I don’t know who said it, but the quote is true: “The only way you can coast is if you’re going downhill.” That’s my motivational quote for the day.

Jaquish Biomedical makes a full-body workout gym that I have two of. I keep one in Dallas and one in Montecito, so I don’t have to travel with them. The X3 Gym as it’s called is made to be transportable in a carry on piece of luggage, but it’s a bit heavy. The bar is high-quality stainless steel and is kind of heavy. The floor plate will fit in a carry on, but it is also heavy. I have traveled with them, but it was just easier to purchase two and not have to constantly shlep one back and forth.

It comes with full workout instructions for a total full-body workout. As I wrote last week, I do deadlifts, overhead and chest presses, and squats. The kit comes with four variable strength bands. The one with the least resistance, I call the weenie band. The next one up is the big boy band. The next the real man band, and the stoutest one the monster band. There is even a larger one that can be purchased separately, but I’m a long way from that one.

You basically work your way up the bands doing ever more reps at a kind of slow motion pace until failure. Once you’ve made it to a set number of reps, you move to the larger band, which is always an adventure. Before you get there, you’re repping away on the lower band. When you get to the next one, you can barely move it.

And best of all, it doesn’t take up any space. My kid has an entire home gym full of weights that cost him $4,000 and takes up a big part of his garage. I can put my home gym, which cost a tiny fraction of what his cost, under the bed, which is where it lives.

Just so you’ll know, I’m still on the weenie band for my overhead presses. And I’m on the big boy band for my chest presses and made it to the real man band for my squats and deadlifts. But fell back to the big boy bands after not working out for two weeks.

I’ve been doing it now since last November and feel markedly better. My golf balls go farther. I don’t get nearly as tired. I have better posture. There have been a multitude of positive changes. The only problem is, I still dread doing it. But I love, love, love having done it.

I reached out to the company and asked if they had an affiliate program. I told them about The Arrow, and our books, and all that. They wanted to see The Arrow, so I sent them a recent version. They finally approved me, but wanted me to go through Commission Junction, which is the largest affiliate marketing platform in the world. I went through the brain damage of signing up with them. There is some kind of law of nature that says the larger the organization, the more of a pain in the ass it is to deal with them.

But I finally made it through, so now I’m an affiliate with Jaquish Biomedical.

It’s like HLTH Code and Dry Farm Wines. If I didn’t like the product so much, I wouldn’t be doing this.

I think there is a sale going on for the next three days or so, so if you’re at all interested in the X3 Program or learning more about variable strength training, click here.

Odds and Ends

• Why does peeling onions make the tears run?

• Hawking was wrong: Philosophy is not dead, and it has kept up with modern science.

• Seeing and hearing worsens as we get older. Where are you on the spectrum?

• Could this be a 130,000-year-old stingray sculpture? Or wishful thinking on the part of the archeologists who found it.

• Can human milk repair the gut microbiome and reduce infections?

• More Gen Zers going to vocational schools, means fewer going to university. Which I think is great. More folks making actual stuff rather than creating problems.

• Not good news if you’re a dark chocolate fan. Cocoa prices have doubled the first quarter of this year and tripled over the past year. Bad harvests are to blame.

• Is your property overrun with ticks and snakes? Want an early alert system if strangers come to your house? Guinea fowl could be your answer. 

• Wow! All this as a consequence of trying to escape paying $50 for a traffic ticket.

• The coming revolt against woke capitalism. The ‘progressive’ super-rich have no idea how much the public loathes them.

• Are fire departments in the US the enemies of walkable cities?

• ‘Ozempig’ remains Minnesota baseball team’s mascot despite uproar that name is form of fat-shaming.

• Which states have the overall lowest tax rates? You’ll probably not be surprised to learn that New York has the highest.

• At the NHS in the UK, they’re going to test overweight kids as young as 6 with the Ozempic jabs. What could possibly go wrong?

• Researchers with a keen grasp of the obvious conduct study showing extreme views get more likes on social media. Who knew?

• Breaking Bad on the border. Methamphetamine traffickers in Mexico become global wholesalers.

• Not quite ready for prime time. ‘Many-shot jailbreak’: lab reveals how AI safety features can be easily bypassed.

• How ancient Mayan astronomers predicted eclipses.

• Not sure I agree with all these, but here is a ranking of the healthiest and unhealthiest cities in the US.

• I wonder how long this law will stay in effect? More than 3,000 hate crime complaints made to Police Scotland.

• Want to feel better? Compare yourself to this average individual selected entirely at random.

Other Newsletters I Enjoy

Again, one of my favs is Alex & Books. I always learn something when I read it. And it is free. Give it a look.

Now it’s time for the…

Video of the Week

This is a great one. Especially if you like Mozart. I had never heard of this group of Italian guitarists until I happened to run across their video while searching for something else. Really incredible how they can do Mozart’s Overture to the Marriage of Figaro with just four guitars (and four guitarists with a total of 40 fingers, which is the name of the group). Enjoy!

After watching this, MD googled the group and discovered they had a concert in Ventura, which is about 25 minutes from Montecito in October last year. If we had but known this group existed, we would have been there.

Time for the poll. How did I do this week?

Okay, thanks for hanging in there. I’ll be back next week, and maybe I’ll be able to tackle Mercola. I’ll just have to wait to see what else more interesting pops up.

Keep in good cheer, and I’ll see you next Thursday.

Please help me out by clicking the Like button, assuming, of course, that you like it.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Really, thanks. If you got something out of it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t yet. I would really appreciate it.

Finally, don’t forget to take a look at what our kind sponsors have to offer. Dry Farm Wines, HLTH Code, Precision Health Reports, and The Morning Brew (free)

And don’t forget my newest affiliate sponsor Jaquish Biomedical.