The Arrow #174

Hello friends,

Greetings from Edinburgh/Dallas.

All I can say is thank God last week’s platform misadventure is over. I think there was some kind of reset that took place, because everything seems to be working much better. A bunch of people emailed or responded through the poll or comments that they had received a notice welcoming them to The Arrow. Which is why I think there was some sort of reset, because a lot of stuff changed from my perspective.

Let’s hope this is the end of all the hassle. If it is not, at least it will be easier to deal with back in the US of A instead of on the road.

Speaking of which…

We were in Edinburgh, one of our favorite cities, for a Peakers get together. MD is a full-blown Peaker, and, as such, she’s made friends from all over the world. She wanted to head to Edinburg for one of the every-other-year-or-so Gala get togethers.

What’s a Peaker? I’ll let her explain. Take it away MD.

Okay, back to me at the keyboard. A little longer and more comprehensive than I thought it would be, but MD is a committed Peaker, so…

Since her fave celeb, Sam Heughan, star of the Outlander series, is the moving force behind the Peakers, MD wanted to meet and chat with him. Which she did. And not only that, he took take a few selfies of the two of them with her phone camera. See below.

Before all the festivities, we climbed to Arthur’s Seat, which is at the top of the mountain range that overlooks Edinburgh. Takes a while to schlep up there, but the view of the city is terrific. The climb down is almost as bad as the climb up. I’m glad that bucket-list item is checked off. Here is a view of Edinburgh from there.

As the festivities began, I quickly realized I was a total fish out of water. There were 1,000 people who attended these events. When MD signed me up, I didn’t think much about it. But when I got there, I quickly realized that the entire group was made up of middle-aged women—with a few exceptions on either side of middle age. Out of the 1,000 people there, only seven of them were males. And of those seven, only two (I think) were themselves truly Peakers.

At the final event, the gala, there was a dance. Since MD loves music and loves to dance, I found myself on the dance floor with MD and 992 other women all dancing with one another and going nuts. All I could think of was right out of the old Star Trek series: “Beam me up, Scottie.”

But it didn’t work, and I soldiered on despite having an Achilles tendon strain that I developed while climbing to Arthur’s Seat. I developed one of these about six years ago, and it took me forever to get over it. So I was worried when this one started. But it seems to be resolving much more quickly than it did the last time.

From the Mailbag…

I received a few emails and inquiries through the poll responses I’ll expand on. From a poll response:

I had completely forgotten about starting this off months (years?) ago and not finishing it.

Those of you who care about this sort of thing might remember back when Luke Combs first came out with a cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, many wokesters proclaimed that it was racial or cultural appropriation. I wrote that I was sure Tracy Chapman was delighted about the cover.

Here’s how the music biz works. I have a great friend who was in the Rock and Roll music biz—actually still is, but not to the same extent as he was earlier in his career—who enlightened me. He is also a reader of The Arrow, and I’m sure will let me know if I am the least bit incorrect. If so, I will let you know.

Here’s how it works.

When a songwriter writes a song, the royalties from that song are divided equally between the song writer and the publisher of the song.

Here is what most people don’t know. If a performer sings the song at a concert, he/she doesn’t get a dime from the song other than the ticket sold at the door. In fact, unless the performer is the composer, he/she has to pay to be able to sing it. All radio stations, movies, live performances, etc. have to pay a fee to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in order to be able to sing or play the song based on the number of people being played or broadcast to. For example, each radio station that plays music keeps a log of all the songs played each day. Each song has an ASCAP fee that is a function of the radio stations broadcast audience size.

Same for live performances. Depending upon the size of the crowd, the producers pay ASCAP a fee for all songs performed.

ASCAP then divvies these fees up, takes its own fees for doing the accounting, and pays what’s left to the songwriters and publishers of the various songs. The performer of the song doesn’t get squat from ASCAP—only the song writer and publisher.

So, if, say, Garth Brooks covers a particular song written by someone else that shoots to the top of the charts and is played relentlessly by radio stations all over the country, he doesn’t get a dime from it. But the songwriter and publisher make a ton of money from it.

Garth Brooks and other performers make money by touring. They get paid for that, although they do have to pay ASCAP for the songs they perform. They also get record deals, for which sales they are paid a royalty. But the record company also has to pay ASCAP, which then pays the songwriter and publisher.

This is why songwriters love it when a big name performer wants to perform the songwriter’s song. Big bucks ensue due to the fame of the performer.

But, this flow of funds is not lost on the performers, so sometimes when they find a song they like, they try to get a writing credit on it, so they, too, will get paid by ASCAP every time it is performed. This is called in the biz “change a word, get a third.”

One of the most famous instances of this was when Colonel Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager, tried to brow beat Dolly Parton into giving Elvis a writing credit on I Will Always Love You. Dolly held firm, and the Colonel wouldn’t let Elvis record it. Ultimately, Whitney Houston did record it, and it became a phenomenal hit, and Dolly didn’t have to share it with anyone.

So, when country star Luke Combs recorded Tracy Chapman’s song, I’m sure she was absolutely over the moon. In fact, she said so publicly. And she performed the song with Luke at The Grammies. I’m sure The Grammies paid both of them to perform it, but Tracy got the ASCAP money, which The Grammies had to pay to be able to broadcast the song.

Linda Ronstadt didn’t write any of the songs she recorded. She made a ton of money performing them on tour and from record royalties, but she is now living a fairly modest existence. She still receives royalties from her own records that are sold. But the songwriters continue to get their royalties from her recordings and everyone else’s who records the songs. And when the oldies radio stations play Desperado or any other of the songs Linda made famous, she doesn’t get a nickel, but the song writers and publishers get plenty.

It’s nice to be the songwriter.

Here is another from the poll responses.

I did answer this question when it came up in the comments, but the reader must not have seen it. But I answered it by saying I would deal with it in more detail later.

Heme iron, the kind of iron you get from eating meat, absorbs vastly better than the iron that comes from fortification of, say, bread. Or other iron enriched foods. Based on the literature, iron overload isn’t a problem—even for those with hemochromatosis—from consuming heme iron. Iron overload is a potential issue, however, for those taking iron supplements. It’s difficult to get iron overload from plant foods that contain iron simply because a) there isn’t that much iron in many plant foods, and b) even when there is a lot of iron, there are many impediments to iron absorption from plant foods.

I’ll write more on this at a later date when I’ve really had time to dig into the literature in more depth. Iron absorption is a fairly complex subject with a lot of nuances. The above is simply a brief overview.

Eat Like a Pig?

A forage agronomist PhD friend of mine introduced me to an animal studies professor at the University of North Dakota who has done some great work I find applicable to human nutrition. The professor spends a lot of time studying pigs, which are, like us, omnivores. And though they can grow much larger, they are about our size.

Dr. Eric Berg, the prof, took a look at the typical human diet a few years ago and decided to feed it to pigs to see what happened. He used the 2007/2008 National Health and Nutritional Survey (NHANES), “What We Eat in America” as the basis for his diet for pigs in an experiment.

I love how he describes the diets below. TWD stands for Typical Western Diet.

What he is saying here, of course, is that human nutritionist have not studied the diet of humans in the way swine nutritionists have studied swine nutrition. Of course, it’s a lot easier to study swine nutrition when you can keep them captive and select their feed. It might be nice to get that kind of data from humans, but it will never happen.

What a person who raises pigs for the market is looking for in a diet may well be different than what a human is looking for. I doubt swine researchers are much concerned about what a particular diet does for swine longevity, because the swine are being raised for slaughter.

It’s more likely that the optimal diet for a swine is one that produces the largest animal and the best quality meat in the shortest time period.

So, given those differences between perfect swine nutrition and perfect human nutrition, let’s take a look at the study.

In reading about the human diet to decide how to set up the study, Dr. Berg was appalled to learn from NHANES just how much sugar was in the typical American diet: it came in at 229 grams per 1000 grams of food. We’re not talking grams of carbs here; we’re talking sugar.

I, too, was appalled when I first learned back in the 1980s that the single food providing the most calories in the standard American diet was sugar. Sugar alone accounted for about 20 percent of the calories in the American diet. Sugar, not total carbs.

Think about that. Sugar is the single food providing the most calories in the standard American diet. Meat doesn’t provide 20 percent of the calories. Cheese doesn’t. Potatoes don’t. Sugar is the single individual food that provides 20+ percent of calories in the American diet.

Pitiful. But it got worse.

And that was in the early 1980s when I first became interested in all this. By the time the 2007/2008 NHANES came out, sugar had jumped to 21.2 percent.

Here is what Dr. Berg and his team did. They took 24 Berkshire gilts (young female pigs), all with a common sire (they were genetically similar), weighing 40 pounds each and divided them into two groups. One group was to get the TWD replete with all the sugar. The pigs in the other group were going to be fed the same diet except the sugar portion was going to be replaced with an equal number of calories of cooked ground beef. These were to be the TWD-GB (Typical Western Diet with Ground Beef) group.

The pigs were to be fed on an equal basis for 90 days.

The hypothesis of the study was

Before we get into what happened with this study, you’ve got to remember that these are young, growing pigs. So, they’re not similar in that respect to mature adult humans. The pigs in both of the groups were expected to grow and put on weight during this feeding period.

What happened?

Here is a chart of the growth differential between the two groups.

/As you can easily see, the pigs on the TWD-GB grew significantly larger than those on the sugary TWD. Now growth for a growing hog is a good thing. Just like it’s a good thing for a human teenage going through a growth spurt.

But when these pigs grew, they grew differently,

There was a noticeable change in their coats. The TWD-GB pigs had nice healthy coats, whereas the TWD pigs lost hair and had patchy coats. And the TWD pigs developed a sort of acne that the TWD-GB pigs avoided.

Kind of like teenagers who eat a lot of sugar. At least the acne part.

Here are photos of the two so you can see the difference. You can’t really see the pimples, so you’ll have to go with the report of the researchers on that. But you can see the difference in size and the difference in coat.

So the TWD-GB pigs were definitely larger. But were they larger because they were fatter or because they had more muscle mass?

If you guessed more muscle mass, you were right.

Here is how the muscle grew in the two groups. Below is a graphic showing the area of a particular muscle.

As you can see, as time went on, the TWD-GB pigs increased the size of this particular muscle as the TWD lost muscle size.

Here is a graphic showing what happened to the overall amount of lean meat in the carcasses of the pigs.

There is substantially more muscle mass in the TWD-GB pigs. Remember, these pigs started out equal in body size, muscle mass, etc., and these are the changes that took place over a three month period. Pretty impressive, I would say.

What about body fat? Did the TWD-GB hogs have a lot of body fat along with their larger muscle mass?

The depth of the subcutaneous fat was greater on the TWD pigs. So the ground beef fed pigs were larger overall, had more muscle mass and less fat than the sugar-fed pigs.

Here you can actually see the difference in fat between the two.

I don’t have a graphic for it, but the report says there was significantly more visceral fat in the TWD (sugar-fed) pigs than those that got the ground beef.

As Dr. Berg mentioned in one of quotes above, neither of these diets was optimal. There were deficiencies of iron, magnesium, zinc, etc. as compared to a true optimal diet for swine. But he wanted to see what would happen if swine were fed the standard American diet.

Here are the two diets:

Even with the vitamin and mineral mixes added, the diet was inadequate in a number of nutrients.

Just imagine what the standard American diet (TWD) is doing to us.

I would encourage you to read the entire report. Here is a link to it in my Dropbox.

Or, if you would prefer, here is a long Dr. Berg lecture in which he describes this study along with a few others.

I really love to cross over into other sciences to see what’s happening there. There are always insights you don’t find within your own group.

Do Ketogenic Diets Increase Risk for Cardiovascular Disease?

A new paper came out just a day or two ago written by David Diamond, Paul Mason, and Ben Bikman looking at this very issue. There have been some pretty astonishing papers published recently showing that the ketogenic diet works wonders for people suffering all kinds of mental disorders.

The question then becomes one of risk versus reward. Is the reward of liberation of various mental issues worth the increased risk of cardiovascular disease? Is there a risk of cardiovascular disease as a consequence of eating a ketogenic diet?

Of course, the entire issue arises because typically ketogenic diets are meat heavy. And meat-heavy diets are generally higher in saturated fat. And, diets high in saturated fat often bring about a rise in LDL-cholesterol levels. And the lipophobes go nuts. You’re clogging your arteries, they shout.

The above authors address this issue.

They start by laying out the problem from the perspective of the lipophobes.

The authors of the paper counter by looking at what happens to people with familial hypercholesterolemia (FH).

What they are saying here is that those with FH have normal lifespans. Once past their early years, they don’t get heart disease at greater rates than to people with normal LDL levels. If LDL were truly a risk factor for heart disease, then people with FH would die with heart disease at much greater rates than those without FH. But they don’t.

They also make the point that those with FH who do die young from heart disease typically have a clotting disorder, which many consider to be a vastly greater risk for heart disease than LDL.

The authors make the case that elevated insulin levels and the metabolic syndrome are a much greater risk for heart disease than an elevated LDL. And all the components of the metabolic syndrome are pretty much improved with a ketogenic diet.

Blood glucose levels fall. Triglycerides come down nicely. HDL levels generally rise. People lose weight, especially abdominal weight, so their waist-to-hip ratio improves.

Even Lp(a), which isn’t part of the metabolic syndrome, goes down with increased saturated fat intake.

The article is well written and easy to understand. I encourage you to read it if you have qualms about a ketogenic or low-carb diet and what it might do to your LDL levels.

Odds and Ends

• German Greens accused of lying about nuclear power safety issues in an effort to shut down plants.

• Scientist says “strongest statistical evidence yet” has been found indicating the existence of a 9th planet.

• The first US nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia. It will provide 23 percent of Georgia’s power plus send some to Florida and Alabama.

• How long would it take a brute-force hacker to figure out your password? Probably not all that long.

• John Jacob Astor, one of the richest people in the world at the time, died when the Titanic sank. His pocket watch just sold for $1.5M.

• Great read about a star rodeo bull rider and his bond with the bull that broke his neck.

• Does the CIA run America? I don’t know, but I suspect the agency controls a lot of it. At least a lot of what we get as information.

• Will Gen-Z cancel America?

• What is the world coming to? Anonymous man in orange mask eats an entire giant jar of cheeseballs to the applause of a huge crowd gathered to watch. Do they—and he—not have anything better to do?

• Scientists can't bring themselves to admit they were wrong about Covid. They can’t face the fact that Sweden got it right. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been around scientists.

• Why do “Super agers” have such superior memories? For one, they don’t have as much brain atrophy as non-super agers.

• Growing up is hard to do. Don’t make it more difficult by paying someone else to do your thinking for you.

• The drinking fountain button is tragically misunderstood. Think about this the next time you drinking fountain doesn’t spurt forth.

• Be on the lookout. According to the FBI, scammers stole more than $3.4 billion from older Americans last year.

• My favorite historian and ex-spy says that American campuses have a terrorism problem. Based on recent news reports, I believe it.

• Where did these 500 professionally printed protest posters come from at a “spontaneous” pro-Hamas rally?

• Massive new Chinese aircraft carrier embarks on first set of sea trials.

• Sometimes it helps to put things in perspective. Just how much could be accomplished by private ingenuity and industry as compared to government spending?

• University of Alabama anti-Israel and anti-Hamas groups chanting at one another, then they all start to chant the same thing. President Biden brought them together.

• The Kansai airport in Japan hasn’t lost a bag in almost 30 years. Why don’t the rest of the airports learn from the folks at Kansai?

Newsletter Recommendations

As per always, if you are a fan of Outlander or have an interest in how medicine was practiced in the late 18th century, you should give my wife’s newsletter a look. OutlanderMD comes out pretty much weekly.

Video of the Week

A little different this week. I’m coupling two videos. The first will make sense of the second. We’re all living in a world of Kayfabe. I got these from Dominic Cummings, whose Substack I always read.

We have no idea whether what we read in the news or see on the mainstream media on TV is real or not. We all seek comfort reading and watching, therefor we never get the real news. Only the news the news providers provide. And they provide it because they think it’s what we want to read or watch.

@screenoffscript

Rick Rubin with some incredible insight into Pro Wrestling 🤼‍♂️ “The world is fake and wrestling is real” #WWE #WWERaw #WrestleMania #Ric... See more

I remember watching this one with my grandson, who took it all seriously as I was laughing my rear off. But I’m sure my grandson wasn’t the only one taking it seriously…

This edition of The Arrow could have been a whole lot longer. I wrote a huge rant and deleted it. I’ve had airline woes today and been up for many, many hours as a consequence. But I spared you all that. I did make me feel better to write it, though.

Now for the poll. Let me know how I did.

Okay, that’s about it for today. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back 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. Highly recommended to increase your lean body mass.