The Arrow #171

Hello friends.

Greetings from Montecito.

Did everyone enjoy the eclipse on Monday? All of our kids were in Arkansas and Texas where the totality was in full view. Meanwhile, MD and I were here in Montecito where it was less than spectacular. In fact, it was barely noticeable. Here it was at its max as seen by MD’s pinhole projection.

As you can see, more than half the area of the sun was blocked by the moon, yet, to my eye, at least, there was no real difference in sunlight intensity. In other words, had I not known there was an eclipse taking place, I’m not sure I would have known it.

I have my own sort of funny eclipse story to tell. Back in the late 1980s, I wrote Thin So Fast, a book telling readers how they could do an Optifast- Medifast-type diet on their own without medical supervision. (Thin So Fast is long out of print, but used copies come up from time to time on Amazon.)

So the publisher sends me on a three-week book tour to publicize this book, and about halfway through, I find myself in Minneapolis being dragged from one place to the next in the snow and cold (the book tour took place in January).

I can’t remember now whether or not it was in the morning or in the afternoon, but whichever I was to appear on the biggest daytime talk show in the city. I had been on a couple of these already, so it wasn’t my first rodeo with a big talk show. But this one was different for a couple of reasons. Both provoking a bit of angst in me.

It was the first show I would be on that had a studio audience. And, second, some guests in the studio audience were going to try the protein shake I had come up with. (Actually, MD cobbled it together, but she wasn’t a co-author on the book, so I took all the credit.)

A little aside is in order here. Given the walls of protein powders and meal replacements you find today online and at health food and whole food grocery stores, it’s difficult to imagine they weren’t there in the late 1980s. But they weren’t. The only meal replacements available then were made by Optifast and Medifast. Both were available only through hospitals (Optifast) and doctor’s offices (Medifast). There were maybe three brands of protein powders available, all of which tasted terrible, and all of which were mainly used by body builders. These products were designed to be mixed with other foods or in shakes with bananas, apple juice, sugar, etc. So Thin So Fast was the only book or instruction manual out there that gave people a recipe for making decent tasting total meal replacements using these crappy-tasting protein powders as a base.

Okay, back to the story.

I get to the broadcast station where this talk show is produced and get a peek at the studio audience, which was substantial. I’m starting to get a little antsy, because you never know how these things are going to turn out. Is the host going to be hostile? Friendly? Bored? You never know.

Then the production assistant comes into the green room, grabs me and takes me to the back and tells me they’ve got all the ingredients for my shake, and they want me to make it on stage and let some of the audience members try it on camera. My anxiety levels then skyrocketed. I told the PA it would be better if I made it in the back, took it out there, and then let someone try it. It takes a bit of time to throw it all together, get it completely mixed, etc. And I wanted to be able to taste it myself before letting someone from the audience taste it.

She agreed, so I busied myself mixing it all together while waiting to be called to the stage.

What I did not know during all this was that a total eclipse was taking place somewhere in the world—I can’t remember now where it was happening. But it was a big deal during the exact time of this show. They had it on a big screen that they kept cutting to. And the host was interacting with the audience about it. They were all going back and forth debating what caused an eclipse of the sun.

And I had no idea the eclipse was taking place and no idea it was under heated debate on the very stage I was getting ready to walk out on.

During a commercial break they set up the blender, the powder I had just put together in the back, and a diet soft drink (you mixed the powder with a diet soft drink—I know, it sounds terrible, but it was really pretty good).

Then they introduce me, and I walk out to the applause of the audience. Remember, I am suffused with angst that something is going to go wrong with the blending process, or even worse, the guests from the audience will say the shake sucks.

I’m expecting the normal introduction and all that, when the host of the show turns to the audience and says, “Now we can get our question answered.” Then turns to me and says, “Dr. Eades, you are just the person we’ve been waiting for. We have a question and since you are a man of science, you can give us an answer.”

He then tells me they’ve been watching the eclipse—which, as I said, I had no idea was going on—then says he and the audience have a difference of opinion as to what causes an eclipse. Some say it is the shadow of the moon crossing between the earth and the sun. Others say it is the shadow of the earth projected on the sun. “So, Dr. Eades, which is it?”

It was, of course, the absolute last question I thought I might be asked as I walked out there. And my mind certainly was not on the moon or the sun or the earth or an eclipse. Had anyone asked me at some other time what a total eclipse was, I could have told them in a heartbeat.

But under these circumstances, I kind of went blank for a moment. Then I shook it off, and said it is the moon in alignment between the Earth and the sun. The moon is in front of the sun and hides it. The host said “There’s a lot riding on this, are you absolutely sure?” Which ratcheted my angst even higher.

I finally gathered my wits and told them the sun was the source of light for our solar system. Consequently, there could be no shadow on the sun from the earth or any other planet. Besides, the earth and other planets don’t emit light, they only reflect it.

After all that was over, we talked about the book, and I made the shake on camera, and a couple of guests tried it. They both said it was good and that they could easily see drinking them as a part of a diet program.

So, the segment went well, and I was off to the next show.

Now, every time there is an eclipse, I think of that moment.

Although all of our children and grandchildren now have, MD and I still haven’t witnessed a total eclipse. In case you’re interested, here is the best account I’ve read of what it’s like. Tim Urban, of Wait But Why fame, witnessed the one on Monday from a field in Arkansas.

A Plea for Help

And sort of an admission I didn’t want to make.

First, the plea for help. Since switching to this new platform—which has many things I like very much as well as a handful I hate—I have experienced a ticklish problem. In late February of last year, I made the decision to make The Arrow a paid newsletter. The reason I did this was that I was spending a much greater amount of time on it than I had anticipated. Consequently, I had to farm out other activities I had been performing for the various other businesses I was involved in. And I started paying a little at first then more and more to subscribe to other peoples newsletters to keep up to date on what is going on in a number of fields. So I either lost income directly or had to pay others to do what I had been doing. I needed to make up for this loss, so I decided to take The Arrow to a paid subscription model to make up the difference.

Fortunately, when I made this switchover many of you subscribed; an act for which I am eternally grateful. In fact, there was a pretty substantial group who signed up as premium subscribers over the first few months. At the time, I was using Stripe as my credit card processing company (I had no choice—that was the only provider Substack worked with), and everything was fine.

Then I switched platforms. And the new platform required that I use Stripe to process credit cards, which I had no problem with as they had been fine while I was with Substack.

The only issue I had was with the switch over.

As it turned out, I discovered when I tried to move the premium accounts from Substack to the new platform that Substack wasn’t giving up without a fight. Substack’s SOP when one is moving away from that platform and trying to transfer paid subscribers is to cancel all the subscriptions and refund all the funds for the remaining of each subscription period.

I had to hire a Stripe expert to keep this from happening and transfer all the premium subscribers to the new platform. And I had to get a new Stripe account, which isn’t all that difficult. But that’s when the problem I’m about to describe started.

As soon as I switched over, I began getting notified that many, if not most, of my subscribers’ credit cards were not making it through the Stripe process. The credit cards were listed as stolen, the card numbers were incorrect, declined by the issuing bank and a host of other reasons the charges wouldn’t go through. Or, one of the most common responses I got from Stripe re a card that was blocked was this one.

Stripe obviously has some kind of algorithm that determines whether a credit card is a high risk or not. I went back and looked at the last half dozen of these on the list, and they were all from subscribers whose cards had gone through just fine last year. Same Stripe, different year.

And it wasn’t just the ones rated too high-risk.

On each and every one of these, I went back and looked, and they were all from subscribers who signed up to go paid in early 2023. And all who had their credit cards go through without a hitch back then. I’ve had my own credit cards declined because I was over my limit, so those didn’t bother me. I figured that would get fixed soon enough. But most were declined because either Stripe or the bank issuing the credit card suspected some sort of fraud.

It is inconceivable to me that dozens and dozens of people who signed up for a newsletter such as The Arrow a year ago and had their credit cards go through seamlessly would suddenly turn into fraudsters in the space of a year. I know times are tough now, but…

So, I figured something else was afoot. I contacted the new platform and Stripe and found out I could reduce the degree of surveillance if I jumped through a bunch of hoops, which I did.

That helped a little. But not much.

Here is what I just pulled down from Stripe today in terms of credit card charges denied. And below that, a typical day from when I was with Substack.

As you can see, there is a big difference.

And it’s not just in these few. It’s like this every day. Back in the Substack days, there was an occasional, and I mean occasional, block or failed credit card. Maybe one out of thirty. Now it’s like the batch at the top all day, every day.

Part of the problem was my own fault, but just a tiny part. MD and I have a little partnership company we’ve used to hold the copyrights to our last few books, deposit affiliate sales income into, and now The Arrow income. The company is called Nutridox, LLC, which is a play on the words Nutritional Doctors. Stripe requested the name of the account into which the funds from the newsletter would be deposited. The name on the account is Nutridox, LLC, so that’s what I gave them.

I can’t remember if I mentioned it back in the Substack days, but I didn’t have a problem then. Now, a year plus later, people are seeing Nutridox, LLC on their credit card statements and not recognizing it as a legitimate charge. They call their bank, their bank withdraws the funds from Stripe, Stripe withdraws the funds from our Nutridox, LLC bank account along with an extra $15 for their trouble. And I then have a major hassle to deal with. And it’s not just me. Those with the credit cards often get their credit card numbers changed, which is a huge hassle for them.

I think I have that issue solved. I spent over an hour last night on the Stripe website and finally navigated to a page that told me I could change my “Statement descriptor” to whatever I wanted. The Statement descriptor is what shows up on the credit card statement. So I changed it to DR MICHAEL EADES. There are a limited number of characters allowed (all caps, of course), so I couldn’t decide between my name and The Arrow, so I figured more people would recognize my name than The Arrow on their card.

Beyond all this, I’ve gotten hassled even more because of all these denied charges. Stripe became worried that I was some kind of fraudster myself and sent me a notice telling me they wanted access to my bank account to make sure it wasn’t some kind of scam. I had to go through all the brain damage it took to let them have access to look around (without, one supposes, being able to grab money) to make sure I was legit. Fortunately, it didn’t take long, and I got a clean bill of health in a few hours.

Now, for the ticklish admission I didn’t really want to make…

One of the reasons I switched platforms—not the only reason, but one reason—was that in the current platform I can decide who gets what. In other words, I can with the click of a button make any or all sections of The Arrow either visible or invisible to premium or paid subscribers. I think that’s a much better way of doing things than the Substack method of putting up a paywall.

So, if you are a paid subscriber to The Arrow, you get a different version than do free subscribers.

Since I don’t have the time to go through and check each credit card block or fail or whatever against each subscriber in the list, I have no way of knowing if a paid subscriber is taken off the premium list by the system itself once the credit card doesn’t go through.

Consequently, I’m sending this to ALL subscribers, premium and free, to make sure those who may be having issues get it.

If you are having an issue re-subscribing, or subscribing for the first time and not having your card go through, please check to make sure you have all the numbers entered correctly and the correct zip code.

Thanks very much in advance. I’ll continue to work with Stripe to see if can make things better from my end.

And to those of you who are premium subscribers, a big wholehearted thank you.

Okay, I’m going to resurrect an old segment headline for this issue. At least.

From the Mailbag

I got the following email as part of a response to a group email a friend of mine sent out. It kind of triggered me (which, BTW, is a term I hate, but it is descriptive).

The friend, who is a subscriber to The Arrow, sent a group email around about an article detailing the FDA’s caving to a lawsuit by Mary Talley Bowden, M.D., a Texas physician, and others against the regulatory agency for belittling Ivermectin. As you might recall, the FDA’s website had all sorts of demeaning commentary on Ivermectin including a tweet that said:

Here is a copy of the original FDA tweet, which has since been removed by the FDA as a consequence of the lawsuit.

The article from the email (from which the above quote was taken) isn’t nearly as hard on the FDA as I would have been had I written it.

As is doubtless true, the FDA, like most governmental regulatory agencies, has been captured by industry. They have a revolving door with industry, through which members of each faction go back and forth all the time. Consequently, I would make book that many folks in decision-making capacities in the FDA stood to profit from the Covid vaccines, which, of course, were inflicted on the public with very little oversight or scrutiny.

They were given an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) because, so we were all told, we were in the middle of a raging pandemic and there were no medications that could be used to treat Covid. That’s the only way an EUA can be issued. If it’s a pandemic-kind of emergency, and there are no other drugs available to treat whatever is causing the disease.

As it has been shown, a number of medications given at the appropriate time—including Ivermectin—have been successful in treating Covid. Or at least the symptoms of Covid.

The nice thing from a drug company’s perspective about getting issued an EUA for a drug or vaccine is that there is no liability. If the company jumps through all the many-million dollar hoops it takes to get a drug approved and allowed into the open market, the company still has liability. Even if the FDA approves a drug, and that drug ends up causing a ton of issues—think Vioxx—people can still sue the drug company right and left for damages caused by the drug.

Not so with an EUA. That’s part of the appeal. If the FDA issues an EUA, then the company cannot be sued. The FDA is in essence saying, Hey, we did our best to make sure this drug is safe and effective, but we didn’t give it the scrutiny we usually do. But since it’s the only drug or vaccine out there that can save us all from [insert whatever the danger is], we’ve approved it on an emergency basis. Oh, and the company can’t be sued.

Think about what a windfall this whole thing was for the drug companies making these vaccines. Usually, a drug company spends many, many millions of dollars developing a drug, then many more millions (along with several years) getting it through the FDA drug-approval process. Once approved, the drug company has to pay many more millions to advertise it in publications going out to physicians and to the general public on TV. Getting a drug to market is a costly, costly process. And even once out, there is still the looming liability of lawsuits if the drug causes problems when used by millions instead of just the few thousand in testing. Some issues are so problematic that many drugs have to be withdrawn from the market because of the huge rate of adverse reactions.

So, consider the Covid vaccines.

The government provided the funding to develop and test the vaccines. That’s an expense the drug companies typically have to cover. There was no marketing necessary; granted the government and media marketed it for them night and day. There was a line at the door for the vaccines from the start, so no ad money spent. And the government actually bought the drugs; the government paid the drug companies for the actual vaccines the government funded the development of. What a deal.

Talk about a bird’s nest on the ground. It would have been nice to have gotten in on that gravy train. And I’m sure a number of folks in the FDA and other governmental agencies did.

But that’s not what triggered me.

Here is what triggered me. The guy’s response to the email sent out to a group of us about the article describing the FDA’s capitulation on its anti-ivermectin stance. Here’s what he wrote:

I’ve written before about cognitive dissonance, but it was in one of the early editions of The Arrow that I have copies of but am still trying to figure out how to make available.

A working definition of cognitive dissonance would be the mental stress or discomfort experienced by someone who tries to hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values in his/her head at the same time.

It happens all the time, but it happens a lot in politics. And politicians know it.

Let’s say one of your favorite politicians (doesn’t matter which party) does something you find reprehensible. Yet he’s your guy. You don’t know all the details, but the news stories make it sound really bad. You like the guy, and you like your party (the one he’s a member of), but you can’t come to grips with what he allegedly did. You are experiencing cognitive dissonance.

It’s uncomfortable. The only way you can resolve it is to take one side or the other. You can say, Okay, I misjudged the guy. He really is a swine. And if the party sticks up for him, they are all swine, too. Or, you can tell yourself, he really didn’t do whatever he is alleged to have done. It’s simply not true. You’re not so sure about this take, though, because you aren’t an insider, and you really don’t know.

All politicians know this about their constituencies. So when something like the imaginary scenario I created above happens, the party bigwigs get together and come up with a response that resolves the cognitive dissonance of the party followers.

And that’s exactly the role the Russian disinformation serves for the brother of the email writer above. Anything that might cause him cognitive dissonance, he can easily resolve by writing it off as Russian disinformation. He doesn’t have to think. There is no danger of his being red-pilled and having to confront an uncomfortable belief. I wish I had the ability to grasp onto something like that. It would make my own life a lot easier if every time I were confronted with an inconvenient truth, I could simply say, That’s just Russian disinformation.

And speaking of red-pilled and blue-pilled, I wish to God the movie The Matrix, where the red-pilled/blue-pilled idea came from, would have used green-pill, yellow-pill, or any other combination of colors other than red and blue. Red and blue too closely associate with Republicans and Democrats.

In the movie the red pill is associated with truth while the blue pill is associated with continuing to bask in the way one has been thinking, which is not the truth.

And, BTW, because I use red-pill/blue-pill so often, and since it is part of the national lingo, I decided to watch The Matrix, which neither MD nor I had ever watched. If you haven’t seen it, take my advice (and hers): don’t waste your time. The movie absolutely sucks. It may have been a special-effects wonder in its day, but that day is long gone. At least in our humble opinions.

Here is an excellent article from Bari Weiss’s Substack (which, BTW, I absolutely love and to which I am a paid subscriber) written by Uri Berliner, a long-time veteran (25 years) at NPR, who, although a guy of the left, has been fighting woke at NPR forever.

He lays out his lefty credentials at the start.

He then goes on to describe a number of political debates that NPR took the losing side on, and then when it was discovered that they were on the losing side, they never apologized or mentioned it again. Which distressed him mightily.

One of those was the Russian collusion hoax. After saying he voted against Trump twice, Berliner says he believes NPR should have still covered him honestly.

I find Adam Schiff to be revolting. I never thought much about him one way or another until this Russian business. Politicians lie for a living, and everyone expects it. But they don’t usually lie in a way that can be found out. They are not usually that brazen.

When I first started paying attention to what became the Russian collusion hoax, I put a lot of stock in what Schiff said. I played golf a couple of times with a guy who had worked for Trump for two years. He told me Trump was way too unsophisticated to do anything even close to colluding with Russia. But there was also his political team, who were probably sophisticated enough to pull something off.

I was kept off balance by Adam Schiff, because I saw him on at least a dozen news shows, and on each one, he said he had seen the evidence that Trump colluded with Russia. Since Schiff was on the House Intelligence Committee, he had access to all the classified information. And I heard him say, I’ve seen the documentation, the Mueller report is going to crucify him.

And as it turned out, the Mueller team, which was filled with people who hated Trump, could find no evidence of Russian collusion. They all had access to classified information. They saw all the same information Schiff saw. Yet they found no collusion, even though they greatly wanted to.

I’ve despised Schiff since.

Okay, enough of all this. Let’s look at something more uplifting than Adam Schiff and cognitive dissonance. Of which he caused me a lot.

Saturated Fat and Lp(a)

Below is a short video by Harvard medical student Nick Norwitz on a week-long experiment he did with butter.

Here is the set up. He was trying to do an experiment to determine what would happen to his LDL levels if he jacked his saturated fat intake for a week. So he decided to add 4.5 pounds of butter to his usual diet for seven days to see what happened.

The descriptive part of the video is a bit short of 4 minutes, so it doesn’t take much time to watch it.

Here are the all numbers from the notes on the video:

Okay, now that you’ve watched the video, let’s dive in.

We have to assume the diet Nick added the 4.55 pounds of butter to was his normal diet, so the extra 2,118 calories of butter were in addition to his regular diet. I’m taking him at his word that’s what he did.

In terms of grams of macronutrients, his diet stacks up thusly:

• Fat: 389 g

• Protein: 194 g

• Carb: 11 g

A low-carb, high-fat diet indeed. And high-protein as well.

In terms of calories in vs calories out, Nick certainly should have gained some weight. But, as he puts it, it was just a week-long diet, not a year-long, or even a month-long diet. And as he says, acute is different than chronic. He was on this diet acutely, not chronically.

There is some truth to that, but what we see is the seen, as Bastiat would say. What we’re not seeing is Bastiat’s unseen. What would have happened had Nick substituted 100 grams of carb for a 100 grams of protein? He would have still been getting 94 g protein per day, and given his size (he’s small), that would probably have been more than the RDA. And the carbs at 111 g would still qualify as an almost low-carb diet. Much lower than the average American diet, that’s for sure.

Had Nick made those substitutions, the calories would have stayed the same. But would he have still lost 0.8 pounds? We don’t know.

What if he had peeled off a mere 50 g of fat and instead had eaten those calories as carbs, what would have happened? He would still be getting 339 g of fat, which is a gracious plenty, but he would also be getting an extra 113 g of carb. So if he had traded some protein for carb and some fat for carb—keeping the calories the same— would he have still lost 0.8 pounds?

At 224 g of carbs, I doubt it very much. Even though it was acute. At the very least, he would have probably gained some water weight from the carbs. But, since that experiment was never done, we don’t know.

But we do know that acutely—at least over a week—on a really low-carb, high-fat diet of vastly more calories than needed, one person lost weight.

Which means the old calories in vs calories out doesn’t really work acutely. Maybe chronically, but based on this (I’m sure) carefully-controlled experiment, it does not work acutely. Which means either the much-vaunted laws of thermodynamics work only under chronic conditions…

Or something else is going on.

Back when Protein Power was selling like crazy, we used to get extraordinary letters from people who gave it a try. Somewhere they are all in a box, but I’m not sure where that box is among the many we’ve got stuck here and there.

Many of the letters are like one I remember distinctly. I can’t remember specifically all the foods involved, but the letter went something like this.

Dear Dr. Eades, I’m writing to tell you how disappointed I am in your program. I lost weight the first few weeks or so, but now I’m not losing at all. I’m religiously sticking to my carb limit of ~30 g per day. Here is what I eat. Then she launches into this listing of cheese, nuts, salami, multiple eggs, bacon, sausage and cheese every morning for breakfast, tuna throughout the day, steak or some other big chunk of meat for dinner. As I say, I can’t remember the specifics, but MD calculated the calories based on what this lady wrote, and it came out to be nearly 5,000 per day.

I wanted to write her back and say, Dear Mrs. So and So, Does it not seem odd to you that you are consuming almost 5,000 calories a day and not gaining weight? That’s the power of carb restriction.

Most of the time people who restrict carbs have a difficult time eating too much fat and protein, but some can. And those who can have to watch what they eat. In our experience, the most common low-carb foods that keep people from losing are cheese, nuts, and nut butters. These are foods that are packed with calories, yet contain few carbs.

Take cheddar cheese, for example. It contains 114 calories per ounce, but only 0.4 g carbohydrate. Eat 8 ounces of it, and you’ve consumed 912 calories, but only 2.4g of carb.

So, beware of cheese, nuts, and nut butters.

Where did Nick get the idea that a pound of body fat represents about 3,500 calories?

It’s from a 1958 paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Max Wishnofsky. It’s behind a paywall but here is a Dropbox link to my copy. You’ll now have your own copy in case anyone asks you where that notion came from.

According to the studies referenced in the paper

And

This is where the oft-quoted 3,500 calories per pound of fat comes from.

Unfortunately, many people take it to mean that increasing or decreasing caloric intake by 3,500 calories will either increase or decrease body weight by a pound. As we saw from Nick’s video above, it didn’t work for him. He increased his caloric intake by 13,909 calories in the week he chowed down on an extra 4.55 pounds of butter. Dividing 13,909 by 3,500 give us 3.974, which tells us he should have gained almost 4 pounds over the week. Yet he lost 0.8 pounds instead.

Although everyone seems to want to consider the body as a machine that takes in fuel and puts out effort and heat in a precisely determined equation, it doesn’t really work that way. The body tends to want to maintain a set weight. At least for the short term.

If you increase food intake, your body ratchets up its metabolic rate to burn off extra calories. If, conversely, you decide to cut your calories way back, your body cuts way back on your metabolic rate, so you don’t burn as much. As we all know, this is frustrating.

Especially the trying to cut back, because then we become hungry. And no one likes to be hungry. It’s an atavistic urge that sooner or later we will all succumb to.

Which is why I like the low-carb diet. Forget about all the health benefits, the best part is that you can eat if you’re hungry as long as you don’t go face down in the carbs. And you can pretty much eat until satisfied. Unless you’re one of those people like the woman who wrote me, one who can eat fat until it comes out your ears.

Most people have a shut off switch for the fat-protein combo, so there is no real risk of overeating. In fact, it sometimes helps to eat more, so your body gets the idea that you’re not in a famine, and cranks up your metabolic rate.

Now, back to how this experiment of Nick’s failed. He was trying to see what happened to his LDL levels with this hugely increased fat intake. But when the lab did the final test, they looked at Lp(a) instead of LDL. Which fell by 10 percent after being on the high-saturated fat diet for a week.

A number of papers have shown that consumption of saturated fat reduces Lp(a) levels, but Nick’s self experimentation shows it happens (at least to him) in just 7 days. It could have been in 2 days, for all we know. He didn’t have the test until the end of the 7 day experiment.

Nick wanted to see what happened to his LDL levels, because everyone is worried about LDL. Not all that many people know about Lp(a), pronounced L P little A. But Lp(a) is indeed a risk factor for heart disease. However, since there really isn’t a drug yet made that reduces its levels, the drug companies haven’t had much interest. There was a lot of research going on until statins came on the scene, then everyone forgot about Lp(a) in favor of LDL since statins did reduce LDL. All the drug companies went to work trying to develop a better statin because that’s where the money was.

Malcolm Kendrick has looked into the notion of what causes heart disease more deeply than anyone I know. His book The Clot Thickens is a must read if you’re interested in his research.

In his book, he reviews all the studies out there on Lp(a) and heart disease. Here is what he writes. (I can’t put it in a quote box because this platform won’t let me do it as a list.) Everything below is a quote from his book:

“I shall attempt to summarize the findings on Lp(a):

• Humans have Lp(a) in the blood stream, in some cases at higher levels than LDL (although it is normally about a quarter of the LDL level.

• LDL and Lp(a) are identical in structure, other than the attachment of the protein apo(a) to Lp(a).

• Lp(a) is designed to protect against the arterial damage caused by vitamin C deficiency (and other forms of arterial damage).

• Lp(a) is incorporated into blood clots that form on damaged artery walls.

• Lp(a) makes blood clots far more difficult to remove

• Lp(a) can be found in high concentrations in atherosclerotic plaques.

• A raised Lp(a) level can, at least, triple the risk of cardiovascular disease.[My bold]”

I would say that a 10 percent reduction in just one week by eating a bunch of extra saturated fat is a good thing irrespective of how much weight was lost or gained. And, even though it was an n=1, I would say the experiment confirms the data from other papers showing the consumption of saturated fat lowers Lp(a).

Okay, time for some quick Mercola discussion.

Consequences of Low-Carb Diets

I’m just going to hit a point or two here because a) it is late, and I’ve got to get this out, and b) I’ve already written 7313 words, which is more than normal.

This article is not by Dr. Mercola, but is on his site, so I can only believe he approves it.

There are so many things that are incorrect that it could take me hours to address them all. I will do so over the course of the next few Arrows, but for now, let’s just look at one.

The article discusses gluconeogenesis (making new glucose), the conversion of (mainly) protein to glucose. The subtitle for the section is “Endogenous Glucose Production Is Not Optimal.” Which makes it sound like gluconeogenesis is a bad thing.

Below is the image that follows the above quote from the article.

The article goes on to argue that gluconeogenesis is energetically inefficient and that it consumes the body’s energy that could be used for other functions. And as a consequence, we can feel tired and run down because we are diverting our energy to make glucose because we don’t eat enough carbohydrates.

We do not need carbs to live. Even to live an active life. We don’t need a single carbohydrate to do just fine.

The author of the piece is correct in saying gluconeogenesis is a bit inefficient, but so what? Most of us have way more energy stored than we need. Not feeling energetic is not a manifestation of starvation for most of us. It may be a manifestation of insulin resistance and a bit of glucose intolerance, which can result in a lower blood sugar an hour or so after eating. But it certainly is not a manifestation of excess energy being diverted for gluconeogenesis.

Most of what is shown in the graphic above is true. Red blood cells must use glucose. That we know for sure. Some other cells probably need glucose for sure, but we are a bit iffy about that, because it has never been tested.

Back in the 1960s George Cahill, from Harvard, did some starvation studies that could never be done today. They would never, ever make it through the review board approval process. Cahill starved people for months and measured all kinds of parameters to see what happened. He found that ketones increased pretty dramatically and ended up taking over many of the functions we think of as glucose functions.

These subjects ended up with lower blood sugar levels than they started with. Just to see what would happen, Cahill gave them small amounts of insulin, which drove their blood sugars down. One subject’s blood sugar dropped to 25 mg/dl, which is probably the lowest on record. The subject did fine throughout. If you took a man not in ketosis and not adapted, and ran his blood sugar that low, he would be unconscious long before his blood sugar got to the 25 mg/dl level.

Since no one has done the studies, and now probably no one ever will, we don’t know how low blood sugar can go in a person who is keto adapted. We do know that it got pretty low in the group Cahill studied.

My point is that other than red blood cells, we don’t know whether these other tissues absolutely require glucose or not. They might, probably do, but we just don’t know for certain.

People who are thin and healthy typically don’t go on diets. They just stay on whatever their regular diet is that’s kept them thin and healthy. The vast majority of people who do go on diets do so to lose weight. If you’re overweight, you’re carrying excess fat, which is the body’s primary source of stored energy. Wouldn’t you want to activate a pathway in your body that would use up a little of that excess energy, so you wouldn’t have to work it all off at the gym.

Gluconeogenesis does that very thing. In the act of converting protein to glucose, it chews up a lot of calories. Which makes you lose weight more quickly. It’s one of the reasons most scientists give to explain why almost all of the studies looking at low-fat, high-carb vs high-fat, low-carb diets end up with the subjects on the low-carb diets losing the most weight.

I’ll get into some more of this next week.

Odds and Ends

• I’m not particularly an animal rights activist, but this really pisses me off. Esp after raising a 76% wolf from a cub. Not that wolves are all that delicate in their dealing with prey, but still… More here. The story continues… More here.

• I love watching stuff like this. How a sewing machine works.

• Here’s a real mood killer for you. Sorry, but I can’t get it away from the paywall. You can read enough to get the gist.

• This is terrific. People recreate famous paintings with stuff they find around the house.

• The golden age of shipwreck discovery. Where was all this technology when I was teaching SCUBA, salvage diving, and looking for shipwrecks?

• Would you like a free $3.6 house in Nantucket? It’s yours for the taking. Literally. You’ve got to move it to get it.

• Perhaps it was survival of the nicest not survival of the fittest that got us to where we are evolutionarily.

• China complains that the US is denying entry to too many of its spies.

• Maybe it was an extinct fox instead of a dog that was man’s best friend. At least in South America.

• Significant drops in internet traffic in the eclipse’s path of totality. A lot of people out watching instead of googling.

• The latest event attributed to climate change: The eclipse. Believe it or not, that’s what ‘The View’ co-host Sunny Hostin claims. Next thing you know, it will be the tides.

• How China is hacking America.

• Inflation in the US much greater than expected in March.

• Consumer Price Index figures show a pretty substantial inflation change not just in March, but over the entire last year.

• “The CDC has quietly admitted that all of the indignities of the Covid-19 pandemic management have failed: the masks, the distancing, the lockdowns, the closures, and especially the vaccines; all of it…”

• Elon Musk predicts superhuman AI will be smarter than people next year. Based on my own limited experience with AI, I’m not so sure. It’s got a long way to go.

• Speaking of AI… Stanford researchers are using it to develop drugs to treat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. If it works, this will be a good thing.

• People are so clever. Who would have ever thought of this? Very clever art. Not that I would particularly want it in my house or office, but clever nonetheless.

• This is one tough, tough woman. God bless her.

• Photos of recently discovered Roman frescos in a vast dining hall just excavated in Pompeii.

Here are a couple of other newsletters you might enjoy. One of my favorites is Alex & Books Newsletter that is about one of my favorite subjects: Books. It’s great and it’s free. Give it a look.

The Aurorean, a science-related weekly newsletter from which I often get subjects for my Odd and Ends section. Always fun to read. Almost always find something interesting. And always free. Give it a look.

Okay, time for the VOTW.

Video of the Week

This one is a real wowser. A whole lot of energy going on.

It’ll wake you up if nothing else.

Time for the poll.

Apologies for the lateness of this edition of The Arrow. I’m getting it out just before midnight (PDT), so it’s still technically Thursday. Thanks for hanging in there. I’ll be back next week and tackle some more Mercola and who knows what else. 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.