Hello friends.

Greetings from Montecito.

I learned something new about this platform last week. It has a limit. And last week’s Arrow exceeded it. As I was writing about my friend who stage- managed the John Wayne special that was the Video of the Week last week, the platform quit accepting my typing. I thought something was wrong with my laptop, so I rebooted, which didn’t fix the problem. Then I scrolled to the top to see if it was at least synching only to see a message that told me I had reached my limit character-wise. So, at least I now know when to quit.

He had posted on FB about the experience, so I wanted to pass that story along with the video.

He called me the day after The Arrow came out, and we talked about the show. He said it took two months to film the entire thing, what with the varied schedules of all the stars involved. I love hearing all his stories of Hollywood and all the people he’s worked with. He sings with MD in the Santa Barbara Choral Society, which is how we met. And our meeting was one of the great small world stories of my life.

We were on a European performance tour with the Choral Society in Italy that went from the bottom to the top. (Well she was performing; I was a roadie.) We were in Florence at a hotel a bit out of town. Bob and his wife had scored on a dinner reservation at Cibreo, which at the time (and probably still) was almost impossible to get. They had a table for four, and decided to wait at the bottom of the hotel’s staircase and ask the first couple who came down to join then. It happened to be MD and me. So off we went.

At dinner—which was fabulous—discussion turned to all the topics common to people who have just met. Where are you from? What do you do? Etc. We kind of went around table, and his wife, also a director, said she grew up in a little town in Michigan. I asked where. She said I probably would have never heard of it. I said tell me, I lived in Michigan for my first couple of years in high school. She tells me the town, which was next door to the town I lived in. I asked her what high school she went to. She told me. And I told her my first love went there, too. My absolute first madly-in-love-with girlfriend when I was 16. As it turned out, they were in the same class and were friends.

What’s even weirder is that months later this couple were at our house for dinner, and the wife asks me if I ever contacted my old girlfriend. I tell her no. So we decide to look her up on Classmates. We find her, and she has a different last name, so I figured she had gotten married.

At the time I was blogging almost daily, and the very next day, I’m reading the comments that came in on my blog. One of them is from this old girlfriend asking me if it is possible that I was the Mike Eades that lived on such and such street back in the day? I was gobsmacked. Then I figured my friend was spoofing me or maybe put the old girl friend up to it. But such was not the case. She was as gobsmacked as I about it. It was just a weird confluence of events.

As it ended up, next time I was in Michigan to visit my folks, I met the old girlfriend for coffee, and MD and I ended up spending the day with her at the Henry Ford Museum.

Okay, on to the poll responses.

Poll Responses

Caesar Salad Recipe

Okay, this one has to be my favorite poll response of the week.

This person wasn’t the only one. I had a bunch of poll respondents asking the same thing along with a few emails and the comments. Who knew there would be that much interest in a Caesar salad?

Here is the recipe. She’s published this in our 6 Week Cure book and a couple of other places and calls it “Hail of a Caesar.”

Enjoy! I’ve had it countless times, and it’s really good.

Okay, now to the second most popular request, or maybe even tied…

Weight-Loss Supplement Recipe

Last week in my section about the dreadful experience MD and I and our partners went through with the FTC, I mentioned we had come up with a supplement recipe we gave to our patients to try as a weight-loss accelerant. We didn’t do a randomized, controlled trial with these supplements, but based on the positive feedback from our patients, we felt it was worth the investment of making a real product and forking over the funds to clinically test it.

It was a bit more than 20 years ago that we came up with the recipe, and I can’t find the exact supplement list we used then. I can probably come close, because we modified a recipe that was used in a published paper. I would have linked the paper last week, but it is highly technical, so I didn’t figure it would be of value. I threw a copy of the paper in my Dropbox. You can read it here.

To the best of my recollection, the recipe pretty much followed what was used in the paper with a little tweaks here and there to accommodate the supplement doses that were available then.

• 12 g of pyruvate

• 1.5 g HCA as garcina cambogia

• L-carnitine 250 mg

• Chromium picolinate 600 mcg

• We added some biotin ~600 mcg

This recipe was to be divided into three doses and taken three times per day on an empty stomach. It was a lot of pills to consume, and I take my hat off to those who could throw them all back.

I recall that based on our results, we modified the recipe a bit here and there as a consequence of different patient feedback.

When we finally made our own real product, we modified it a bit more, because one of the big complaints people had was having to consume all the pills three times per day. We worked to come up with a formula that we could dose in a twice per day regimen.

We are still involved with a company that makes the supplement, which we now call Metabosol. MD and I don’t play much of a role in the operation. We basically act as advisors.

My intention last week was to describe the horrors of dealing with the administrative state, which, I hope, is going to be less malignant than it has been. I didn’t want to mention that the product is still available, because I didn’t want the article about the administrative state to be thought some kind of sales piece.

But since so many are interested in giving the recipe a try, the actual product can be found here. It is probably less expensive—and certainly less of a hassle—than all the supplements listed above. And, unlike the recipe in the scientific paper we used to create the recipe for our clinic patients, this formula has been through a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled trial.

One scoop in a glass of water on an empty stomach in the morning and before bed. It has no stimulants, so it won’t affect sleep.

Niacin Paradox

I had a few more responses to the poll from people wondering about niacin. Plus this one from the comments (edited for size).

I replied to this comment before I came across a paper discussing niacin’s use to lower lipid levels. As I told the person who commented, I don’t think there is much difference in a TRG/HDL ratio of 0.8 and 0.27. These aren’t actual measurements like a hemoglobin or hematocrit would be—these are simply numbers used as markers, basically for insulin resistance. And both are good.

After I replied to the comment, I came across a new paper showing that the products of niacin breakdown are associated with increased risk for major adverse cardiac events (MACE). I read the abstract, then wrote to the lead author for a full copy of the paper. I then discovered another researcher had reviewed that paper for the journal Nature Reviews Cardiology, so I wrote to him asking for his review. I still haven’t received the actual paper (it always seems to take a while in the summer due to vacations), but I did get the review, which I’ll excerpt here.

Bear in mind that the average intake of niacin as described above is calculated from the average diet, which includes plenty of enriched wheat flour and processed foods, almost all of which have niacin added either from the enriched grain included or simply added as a “health” benefit. It doesn’t include multivitiamins or other supplements, such as the electrolyte packet I posted the photo of, which contained 24.9 mg all by itself.

Processed food manufacturers love to add vitamin packets to their products. They cost next to nothing and they give an aura of health to otherwise crappy products. You don’t feel as bad about eating these products when they say, “contains 50 percent of the RDA” of all these vitamins. Several of these snacks a day ends up giving you a lot more than the RDA, especially when you consider the typical diet today contains over 100 percent of the RDA of most vitamins.

I would say the average American diet contains a lot more niacin than 48 mg per day. It’s probably 5-10 times the RDA.

The author goes on to say

A paradox is statement or action that runs counter to expectation. The French eat a lot of butter and other saturated fats and have a low incidence of heart disease. Since the grand poobahs of lipidology believe with all their hearts that saturated fat causes heart disease, then this fact about the French is a paradox. To those of us who don’t buy into that BS, it all makes perfect sense.

As always, the fear of lipids, lipophobia, drives people to make the effort to get lipids to the lowest levels possible. Years ago, niacin was used to reduce triglycerides and increase HDL, both of which are markers describing what’s going on metabolically. But just because you change the markers, you don’t necessarily change what the markers represent, which in this case is a disturbed metabolism.

The lipophobes believe anything that makes your lipid profile ‘better’ decreases your risk of heart disease. Since pharmacological doses of niacin lower triglycerides and raise HDL, the fact that people taking niacin don’t have a reduction in heart disease is called the niacin paradox.

If you reduce carbs you’ll lower triglycerides not because carbs simply change the marker, but because reducing carbs changes the metabolic milieu. Same with saturated fats. Increase the intake of saturated fats and your HDL goes up (and your Lp(a) goes down). Not because you’ve affected the markers artificially, but because you’ve changed what’s going on metabolically.

Indeed!

I looked on Amazon and found a couple of flours that are not enriched (nor are they GMO). But you would have to bake your own bread. I guarantee you that any bread you find—even freshly locally-baked bread—will use enriched flour. I mean who doesn’t want whatever it is to be “enriched”? It would be much more honest to use the word “adulterated.” Wouldn’t have quite the sales appeal, though.

I keep badgering MD to get one of these flours and bake me some bread, but she keeps telling me she’s not a baker. (And moreover that because she eats gluten free, she wouldn’t eat it herself.) I usually have one slice of sourdough bread for breakfast every Sunday, so I’m continuing to work on her. I’ll keep you posted on how it tastes once I’ve worn her down.

While doing my research on niacin, I came across a paper worth discussing, primarily because of its worthlessness. The paper, published just last year and titled “Increased Dietary Niacin Intake Improves Muscle Strength, Quality, and Glucose Homeostasis in Adults over 40 Years of Age,” came from China, which is one major strike against it. But it used US data from NHANES, so I took a deeper look at it. Especially since what it says refutes everything else I’ve been reading about niacin.

In this study, the researchers took at look at nutritional data gathered by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to compare niacin intake with skeletal muscle mass, strength, and glucose tolerance. Strangely, they used different NHANES data sets to make the comparisons (cherry picking?), and they went to great pains to not provide the actual niacin levels.

According to their conclusions, increased niacin intake correlated strongly with BMI, grip strength, and glucose tolerance.

Let’s take a look.

NHANES periodically studies the food intake (along with other parameters) of a set of US subjects, the results of which are available to researchers. The authors of this study used a one-day, 24-hour, dietary recall to determine niacin intake. Then they analyzed the niacin intake from this one-day, 24-hour, dietary recall, divided this intake into quartiles, and compared those to grip strength, BMI, and glucose status.

As you might imagine, a recollection of what one ate the day before is probably not all that accurate. Can you remember precisely what you ate yesterday? Most people can’t. And even if you could remember what you ate to the gram, would that be representative of what you ate over the entire previous year? It’s highly doubtful. Yet that’s what these researchers used to determine niacin intake.

It was difficult to ferret out what the niacin intake was for these quartiles. You would think that would be one of the primary numbers made easily available in the article, but that was not the case. By doing my own fiddling with it, I came up with an average intake of ~23 g per day, which is a little bit over the RDA, which is 14–18 mg, depending on age and sex.

The fact that the values are four to six times higher leads me to believe the 24-hr recall didn’t include any supplementation, but just food.

If you look at the foods highest in niacin, you’ll find they are almost all meat. I’ve seen the list before, but to keep from having to look it up, I used Perlexity.ai to run a search for me. Here is the list of the five foods containing the greatest amount of niacin:

Other foods high in niacin (other than enriched flour or snack products) are peanuts, avocados, and mushrooms, which are all pretty much low-carb foods.

So, for argument’s sake, let’s assume the 24-hour dietary recall was accurate and representative of what these subjects ate all the time. If so, it would make sense that those in the top quartile consumed more meat than those in the bottom quartile. Since more meat would probably displace more higher-carb fare, then it would make sense that those in the higher quartile would have more strength, a better BMI, and better glucose tolerance.

At least that’s my take away from this study.

In my view, this study typifies what is wrong with so many studies these days. If you pull it and take a look at it, which I encourage you to do, you’ll find it to be ten pages long with a lot of references at the end. It has all kinds of calculations and charts. It has technical looking graphics out the wazoo. It has all the appearance of a huge amount of effort and detail, but all these meticulous calculations, charts, and graphs are derived from one 24-hour dietary recall. The whole thing is built on a shaky foundation.

If you just casually look at the paper, and read the title, you’ll see that “increased niacin intake Improves Muscle Strength, Quality, and Glucose Homeostasis in Adults over 40 Years of Age.” That’s a statement of causality. No hedging whatsoever. “Increased niacin intake improves…” If you flip through the ten pages and see all the graphs, charts, etc., it looks really research-y.

But if you read the abstract, you’ll find that “higher dietary niacin intake was significantly correlated with with higher grip strength...higher total lean mass… higher appendicular lean mass…and higher total bone mineral content.”

Who wouldn’t want to load up on niacin?

But a significant correlation is simply that: a correlation. There is nothing causal about it. If it weren’t significant, it wouldn’t even be a correlation at all. So the word significant is nonsensical.

And at the bottom, it all hinges on one 24-hour dietary recall.

Don’t be fooled by these kinds of studies.

It reminds me of the first financial spreadsheet I ever created. MD and I had been operating our first urgent care clinic, and we wanted to open a second in another part of town. But we didn’t have the funds to do so. We needed bank financing.

We had been running our first clinic for almost two years, so I knew our operating costs down to the last stretched penny. When I divided those costs by the number of patients we had seen, I knew with great accuracy what our cost per patient was. So I created a spreadsheet with all these costs broken out by category. I then estimated the rate at which patient visits would grow. From the past two years of operating data, I knew what the revenue per patient was, so I put that in and multiplied it by the number of patient visits I estimated.

When I calculated it all out, it showed enough funds to pay for everything including the payments to the bank for making the loan allowing us to open the clinic.

I made an appointment with my banker and showed him my impressive spreadsheet. I brought documentation on cost per patient to operate and revenue per patient in our other clinic. I explained to him in great detail how accurate these revenue and expense numbers were based on our one clinic.

He looked it all over and told me it was very impressive. He said you’ve really got the revenue and expense numbers to the penny. And I believe them. But, you’re simply guessing at the growth of patient visits. Your first clinic was in one area—this second clinic you want is in a totally different area with a different demographic. On what basis can you truly estimate how this kind of clinic will be perceived by people in this part of town?

He was right. I hadn’t a clue. (A hope and a prayer, but not a clue.)

So, despite being meticulously accurate about per patient revenue and expenses, the whole spreadsheet was built on a guess, because I didn’t have any idea as to how many patients were going to come in to an urgent care center in that part of town. They weren’t even called urgent care centers at the time. It was such a new concept that it didn’t even have a name. Which was why the banker was iffy.

Fortunately, I was a good salesman (and agreed to personally guarantee the loan), so we got the financing. But, still, the spreadsheet was faulty just as the study above is because it was built on an extremely shaky foundation.

So if you read a study and one piece of critical data is wobbly, then the entire study is wobbly.

Moving on…

MD’s Exercise Regimen

A reader asked via the poll

Well, the Bride has plenty of muscle mass. She truly is strong. And very athletic. Her strength has kind of become a family joke. If something heavy needs to be lifted or moved, we all say, Get Sug to do it. She is strong, like bull.

Over the years, we have worked out with weights, done Kung Fu, followed CrossFit, pursued Slow Burn with machines, and a few other methods I can’t recall.

Now I pretty much always do the X3 as my workout method. She does it from time to time, but she regularly—and I mean regularly; she hasn’t missed in over two years—does MPC. As regular readers here know, MD is obsessed with the TV series Outlander. When the guy who stars in the series—Sam Heughan (with whom she is also obsessed)—needed to buff up for his role as Jamie Fraser, the producers sent him to a gym in Glasgow, which was previously a CrossFit box. In 2014 or 2015, he and the trainer and a business partner developed an online cross-training style nutrition and fitness program called MPC, which stands for My Peak Challenge. It’s a 501(c)3 not-for-profit fitness charity (a large portion of the proceeds are given to various worthy causes) with the mission ‘help yourself while helping others’. She follows to the letter three or four days per week rain or shine. It’s what made her fit enough to do 90 full burpees on her 70th birthday last November.

Power of Protein Webinar

I heard from a number of people who tried unsuccessfully to log in to the free webinar. I checked with the people in charge there, and they provided me with this link they say will work for sure. Click here to go to the site, where you will find a registration button at the bottom right.

The White Death

I came across a terrific video on the disease that had doubtless caused the greatest number of deaths of any infectious disease, including the plague. Watching the video took me back to my med school days. To be honest, I had forgotten a fair amount about The White Death, aka tuberculosis, as it’s not something we see much of in the Western world these days. Whenever it has cropped up in my career, it’s has always been an all-hands-on-deck kind of response as it is pretty tough to treat.

There were many cases of latent TB reactivated by AIDS, and many AIDS patients ended up dying from TB, which is really a dreadful disease.

As I first wrote regarding Covid, back when I started The Arrow over three years ago, infectious diseases evolve in ways that make them less virulent and more infectious. They want to propagate just like we do, and the best way for them to do that is to a) not kill their host and b) become more infectious.

Most of what we call the common cold now doubtless started as a much more serious infectious disease. But over time it evolved to be much less serious, so much so, in fact, that most of us go to work, go to school, and pretty much follow our normal routine despite a bit of sneezing and maybe a headache and stuffy nose. The fact that it is much less serious lets us get out of the house and spread the virus to others. And since part of the viral evolution process is to become more infectious, our feeling well enough to go out and about spreads the cold around more. The viral evolution has been successful.

As you’ll see from the video, TB has adopted a different evolutionary strategy that makes it more treacherous. It recruits our own immune system to help hide it and keep it going until it can finally break out and run rampant. TB is a bacterium, not a virus, so it acts and evolves differently.

The video is excellent and reminded me of a wonderful book published a few years back on TB, more about which later. First, enjoy the video.

Ten or more years ago, a splendid volume titled The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won - And Lost fell into my hands. I don’t remember what inspired me to buy it, because I wasn’t in the habit of buying or reading books on infectious diseases at the time. That all changed with Covid, but back when I read this one, I had little to no interest in infectious diseases. Despite that lack of interest, I devoured this book.

It was written by a British physician named Frank Ryan, who was first intrigued about the origins of the cure for TB by a single sentence he came across in a pharmacology textbook when he was a medical student:

Who was Waksman? he wondered. And how did he find one of the cures for TB in a “heavily manured field”?

Later on while in practice, he had a young woman patient who came in with TB. At the time he saw her, she was at death’s door, but after a few days of antibiotics, she was relieved of her symptoms and made a normal recovery.

Her recovery from a disease that had killed millions made Dr. Ryan wonder all over again about Waksman. Who was he? How did he find streptomycin?

He started asking around and found out no one really knew the history of the discovery of the drugs that ended up wiping out TB. So he made it a quest to uncover the history. And wrote what I think is a riveting book about his findings.

I was amazed to discover that the tuberculosis bug is found in the soil in a lot of places. Researchers trying to find an agent to kill the bug began by culturing soil. Since the TB bacterium was basically held in check and prevented from overtaking all the other bacteria and fungi in soil, scientists figured there must be something else in there that holds the TB bug in check.

That’s how the search for the TB cure started.

Strange as this sounds, it’s exactly how ivermectin was discovered. It was found in the soil of a golf course in Japan by a Japanese researcher. And it was found to have major anti-parasitic effects. And lately a lot of other effects as well. And it has never been found anywhere other than the soil of this one particular golf course.

The same book is now out in Kindle under a different title: Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told. If you give it a whirl, I hope you find it as fascinating as I did.

Quote of the Week

This one from last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal in a book review of the much-reviled Anthony Fauci’s new memoir detailing his illustrious career as the nation’s top doc. Reviewer John Tierney writes:

Macronutrient Intake and Insulin Release

In my daily troll through the medical literature, I just came across a fascinating paper in Cell Metabolism (one of my favorite journals) titled “Proteomic predictors of individualized nutrient-specific insulin secretion in health and disease.” The paper is not easy to read, but it may well explain a phenomenon I’ve witnessed a few times.

My caveat before you read what I’m going to write about this paper is that I am in no way a proteomics expert. In fact, I know just enough about it to be dangerous. But it is a new way of looking at biological processes that more and more people are using.

Basically, here is how it works.

Whenever you see all these graphics of metabolism or other biological functions, you typically see arrows pointing from one product to another. For instance, during glycolysis (the breakdown of glucose), the first step goes from glucose to glucose-6-phosphate and is catalyzed by the enzyme hexokinase (HK) as shown below.

Enzymes catalyze the conversion of one product to another throughout all of the metabolic processes at work in our bodies all the time. Each of these enzymes has its own specific energetics and dynamics. Many are up-regulated and/or down-regulated depending upon the body’s needs at any point in time.

Looking at the graphic above, if you have a lot of glucose, but not much glucose-6-phosphate, you can pretty much figure that HK isn’t converting glucose to g-6-p at warp speed. So something may be inhibiting HK.

By looking at the relative amounts of all these enzyme—which are all proteins—scientists can more or less determine what is going on under specific circumstances. The process of analyzing a number of proteins—which proteins are present, how much of each is there, and how these change given a change in different metabolic situations—is proteomics. It’s kind of like taking an inventory of all the tools in a given metabolic toolbox to see how they change when the metabolic job changes.

This is doubtless a lame explanation, but I think you probably get the idea.

The paper under discussion here involves running a proteomics analysis of beta cells (the insulin producing cells in the pancreas), and it produced some surprising results.

The researchers harvested beta cells from 140 donors, some of whom had type 2 diabetes (T2DM). They kept these beta cells alive and presented them with various concentrations of glucose and protein and fat.

The authors report

Which was expected. Carb intake stimulates the release of insulin at the highest rate, followed by protein at a distant second, then fat as a way, way distant third.

The researchers go on to report

Which I found interesting. Just about every paper I’ve ever read on the subjects shows that protein intake along with carbs increases insulin beyond what just the carbs do. But most studies I’ve read indicate that—at least in overweight subjects—fat intake along with carbs magnifies the insulin response. This paper indicates the opposite.

The most startling discovery made by these scientists is that in some cases, the intake of fat alone will provoke an insulin response greater than that provoked by glucose.

As it turned out, eight percent of the beta cell samples ended up producing more insulin when exposed to fat than when exposed to glucose.

This is pretty stunning if it turns out to be true in living, breathing humans. It would mean that about one in twelve people might respond to a low-carb, high-fat diet by producing more insulin than they would on a lower fat diet.

I am firmly of the opinion that excess insulin and consequent insulin resistance is definitely not a good thing. If it turns out that fat intake alone in a percentage of people ends up generating a greater insulin response, then we need to really rethink dietary recommendations at least for that cohort of people.

Next month continuous glucose monitors are going to be available over the counter. I expect sales to be enormous as most everyone wants to learn what foods do what to their blood sugar levels. Blood sugar levels are important, no question about it. But, in my view, insulin levels are even more important. And as of yet, there is no way to measure them continuously.

Short of a continuous insulin monitor, the best way would be to measure insulin levels indirectly with a continuous ketone monitor. These are available in Europe, but not in the US yet.

If a continuous ketone monitor shows ketones are up in the nutritional ketosis range, then you can be sure insulin is low. Ketone production is extremely sensitive to insulin levels. If insulin is high, ketones will be so low as to be non-measurable.

If these results reported in this study are replicated, then about one in twelve people using a CGM will get a false sense of security based on low glucose levels while following, say, a high-fat, ketogenic diet, but still be cranking out insulin like crazy.

What would that look like? Typically if people are on ketogenic diets and they consume a high-fat diet, it would be expected that ketone levels would rise (assuming, of course, that carbs were limited). But if the dietary fat stimulated a big insulin release, the ketone levels would fall in the face of a high-fat diet.

Before I go overboard on all this, I would like to see some other researchers replicate this study. Meanwhile, my plan is to root through the citations listed in the paper to see what I can learn.

I will keep everyone posted on what I find.

Major Vaccine Admission by an Über Vaccinator

Stanley Plotkin is one of the major pro-vaccine academic physicians out there. He has defended vaccines to the max and called anyone who is hesitant about them a charlatan. Now he has published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine expressing his dismay that he has been lied to. It’s not his fault. No one told him that vaccines had been approved under such atrociously low-regulatory oversight. Yada yada yada.

You can read about it all here in this great Substack piece by Aaron Siri, who has deposed Plotkin in a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers. The link to the deposition is in the article and is well worth watching. Plotkin is your typical academic physician who thinks he knows everything. It’s fun to see him get dismantled by Siri. But now Plotkin, instead of saying he didn’t do his own due diligence before promoting vaccines to everyone, is saying he was lied to.

Read the Siri Sunstack here.

It basically confirms everything the authors of one of my favorite books, Turtles All the Way Down, wrote about the subject.

Odds and Ends

• ‘The sword is coming’: Biblical IDF email warned of Hamas plans days before Oct.7. Kind of like 9/11 here. Warnings issued and ignored.

• Former NSA counterspy says foreign spies likely knew of Biden’s age-related decline. It’s pretty much been known to all but the mainstream media.

• Fossils in a cave show the Denisovans, another of our ancient ancestors, to have been meat eaters. The cave included bones of sheep, yaks, carnivores, and birds that were butchered. We’ve always been apex preditors.

• Extremely cool and interesting site if you’re into old maps. You can find them here from all over the world.

• If you enjoy avocados, protect yourself from “avocado hand,” an injury hand surgeons actually have a name for.

• If you have anxiety, or simply want a greater sense of well-being, follow the Tchaikovsky Cure for Worry: Do something creative.

• There are so many people using GLP-1 agonist that major companies are developing products for them. Nestle to launch Vital Pursuit frozen-food brand targeting GLP-1 users.

• A frigging hacker just leaked 10 billion passwords. Here’s what to do now.

• From the NY Times, of all places. “Biden’s Strategy to Make the Race About Trump Is Suddenly in Doubt.” What happened to the good old days when politicians got elected by extolling their own virtues and platforms?

• Julian Assange Did the Time, but Who Did the Crime? The Wikileaks founder was forced to plead guilty to something journalists do every day.

• Regulatory capture of the WHO by Big Pharma promises a never ending series of pandemics.

• Researchers used Bayesian analysis and gravitational wave research to help identify the purpose of one of the gadget’s (found on a 2000 year old Greek shipwreck) mysterious calendar rings.

• Pablo Escobar’s abandoned hippos are wreaking havoc in the Colombian jungle. As a consequence, Columbian citizens are having close encounters with Africa’s most dangerous animal.

• Mount Everest’s highest camp is littered with 50 tons of trash and frozen garbage. Cleanup is likely to take years.

• For the first time in history, we are eating more farm-raised fish than we are wild caught fish.

• Could music possibly affect the taste of aging cheese? You might be surprise to learn that it can. At least according to researchers who played nonstop loops of various types of music to the aging cheeses.

• The search for Amelia Earhart continues—in her hometown.

• 51,000 years old artwork—oldest yet discovered—found in Indonesian cave. It is a flaking image of three people around a giant red pig.

• Miraculous story of a first-time skydiver who plummeted 14,000 feet with a malfunctioned parachute and survived.

• A 7-foot tall, well-preserved, marble statue of Greek god Hermes has been uncovered in an ancient Roman sewer in the Bulgarian village of Rupite.

• At long last, New York City discovers trash bins. City leaders pat themselves on the back for their ingenuity.

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Newsletter Recommendations

As always, I’ve got to recommend MD’s OutlanderMD newsletter to anyone who is a fan of the Outlander series on TV or who would just like to learn about 18th century medicine. This coming week, she’ll be discussing battlefield amputations and the use of laudanum.

I got a lovely note from a reader of The Arrow telling me my diligent posting every week has inspired him to start his own Substack. It’s called Northern Naturalist. Give it a look if you’re interested in nature in the far north.

Video of the Week

The past week has been filled with sad videos of our aging president. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve got a couple of videos this week of the elderly who can still tear it up. These will give us all inspiration as we approach our golden years. First up, Fred Astaire, who could still cut a rug at age 71.

And then who else? The indefatigable, preternaturally youthful Mick Jagger at age 80. Who says a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll isn’t good for a person? Age 80. Did I already say that?

Maybe eating an ice cream cone at every stop isn’t the best way to preserve one’s faculties. Just saying.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

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This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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