Hello friends.

Greetings from Montecito, where this week it’s been sunny and beautiful with balmy ocean breezes.

One thing I learned from the comments and poll responses to last week’s Arrow is that folks like the above greeting. So, back it goes.

I subscribe to and read dozens of email newsletters, and none of them have the kind of greeting I have above. The authors all simply start out with whatever the lead sentence is in their article. Given that, I figured I was being too folksy, so I decided to do the same. And I got a slew of backlash.

People could take or leave the summary of contents. I’ll continue that, because I kind of like it in the newsletters I follow that use it, so here it is:

This week’s Arrow starts out with a short discussion on current events, then moves on to a discussion of variable resistance training and donating blood. We learn about all the excess deaths in the US after the pandemic. What has the carnivore diet ever done for us? Then two videos: one about the history of polio, the other on what’s happened since WWII in terms of US geopolitical events. Finally, an in-depth discussion of the paper on fat trapping I mentioned last week. And, of course, the odds and ends and video of the week.

Before we move on, I’ve got a housekeeping issue I need to address. I received many emails this week from people who had signed up and paid for premium subscriptions, yet didn’t get the premium version, i.e. the one without the paywall. I couldn’t figure out what had happened, so I dug into it. Turns out that for some bizarre and inexplicable reason, when a subscriber signs up with two different emails—one for the free subscription and one for a premium subscription—the system defaults to the free subscription. That’s what happened in each case.

What I suspect is that many people sign up for newsletters and such with email addresses that aren’t their primary email address, so that they don’t get on a thousand mailing lists. Then when they pay using a credit card, they use their actual email address. So they end up with two accounts. And this platform defaults to the free (first) one. How it knows, I haven’t a clue. But in all the cases I heard about via email and resolved, this is what had happened.

So, if you decide to become a premium subscriber, make sure you use the same address.

Polls, Comment, Emails

Current Events

I had a handful of poll responses about the events of the previous week, i.e., the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. It was too fresh for me to write about with any clarity, and no one had a good grip on what had happened. And since I’m not an investigative reporter on the scene with access to all kinds of insiders, there’s nothing much I can say that others haven’t said. And even others at the time of publication of last week’s Arrow didn’t have all that much to report.

People have been all over the place with all kinds of theories about what happened. As those of you who have read my scribblings for a long time know, I am a believer in Hanlon’s razor, which basically posits: Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

Amidst everything I read about the shooting, only one writer blamed it all on incompetence. Everyone else had some sort of conspiratorial take on it, and given my strong confirmation bias, I tended to side with the Bad Cat, who cited Hanlon’s razor and was the one attributing the near assassination to all around incompetence. Now as more information is coming to light, I’m not so sure. But I don’t want to opine until I have a lot more info.

One of the welcome occurrences the Trump shooting brought about was an outbreak of bipartisanism. At least in the House of Representatives. When I heard Kimberly Cheatle was going to appear before a subcommittee, I decided to dip in a bit here and there during the hearing to see what was going on. I don’t recognize everyone of the 435 House members by sight, but I can usually tell if they’re Democrats or Republicans by the questions they ask the person(s) being interrogated. In this case, I couldn’t tell the difference. When I checked in and someone was lambasting Ms. Cheatle, I could discern the party. Both sides of the aisle went after her hammer and tongs, as they should have.

Now with Biden’s abdication and Harris’s ascendancy, things are moving too fast for me to keep up with. I had some great articles that I contemplated linking to last week, but they’re already out of date. So I’m going to stay out of the skirmish till things settle down a bit.

Variable Resistance Strength Training

I got a fair amount of feedback from poll respondents and via comments and email. Some verged on being testimonials for the X3 Band System, which made me realize I had left out an important piece of the puzzle. There was a common question. And there was an email from Fred Hahn, the New York trainer who is the co-author with MD and me of The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution, who set me straight on a couple of issues.

Let me hit the common question first.

When MD and I stand side by side, her hands hang about an inch lower than mine. I’m 6’ 2” tall; she is 5’ 6” tall, so I’m 8-inches taller than she, yet our hands are about the same distance above the floor. Which means the bands will work for her as well as they do for me. I have to pull them a bit farther than she does, but I have a greater lean body mass.

MD does use them sometimes, but she mainly does the MPC workout described in the Arrow a week or two ago. She is obsessed with the TV series Outlander, and MPC is the workout the star of the show used to get cut for the role. He and the trainer developed the online platform so others could use it. Aside from that, MD loved CrossFit. She likes the variety of exercise rather than just pure strength training. MPC is a cross-training program similar to CrossFit, so it meshes with her love of CF and her Outlander obsession.

I tell her that she will gain more strength doing strength training than doing MPC, but she tells me that the best exercise is one she will do, and she is relentless in following her MPC schedule.

But the bands do work for her, and she does use them occasionally, for example when deadlifts are a part of the day’s MPC workout.

The next couple of quotes come from readers who have used the X3 Band System. The first is a female.

Here is another:

The above is exactly why I do it, and why everyone should do some sort of strength training exercise in combination with a protein-rich diet. Time and age aren’t your friends when it comes to muscle mass retention. It’s an ongoing battle for the rest of your life after ~age 30. I didn’t set those rules, but I’ve got to live by them. So do you.

Now to the part of the strength training puzzle I left out.

There are a great couple of lines in the wonderful Crosby, Stills, and Nash song Southern Cross that always reminds me of strength training: “So we cheated, and we lied, and we tested. We never failed to fail, it was the easiest thing to do.”

I always think of failing to fail as the easiest thing to do in the context of strength training. As I’ve mentioned numerous times, I absolutely hate strength training. I dread it. And when I hear people talk about how much they love it, I kind of think they’re doing it wrong.

Let me explain.

To get the most out of strength training, you need to take your muscles to failure. If you fail to fail, which is the easiest thing to do, you won’t get maximal benefit.

When you take your muscles to failure, you stimulate their growth, their vascularity, and their strength.

Without getting too technical, you’ve got two types of muscle fibers: type 1 and type 2 (usually written as type II) . The type 1 fibers are basically endurance fibers. Long distance runners have a lot of these. Type 2 are explosive strength fibers. Practitioners of any kind of sport requiring explosive action have a lot of these fibers. Baseball, football, golf, tennis, wrestling, etc. are all sports requiring a lot of type 2 fibers.

These fibers fail at different rates. The type 1 fibers fail first, then once those have failed, the type 2s begin to fail. So you need to drive the type 1 fibers to failure before you can get to the type 2.

Muscle failure is not fun, which is why I dread doing strength training. Once it’s over, I feel a huge sense of accomplishment, but before I start, I’ll do almost anything to put it off.

The way you work muscles to failure is to, well, work them until they don’t work, no matter how hard you try. If you’re doing a chest press, for example, you’ll reach the point where you just can’t do one more. You probably can, but it’s too uncomfortable to do it, so you don’t. But to get to failure, you have to push until you just can’t push any longer.

One of the fruits of Professor Tim Noakes research was the discovery that your brain fails long before your muscles. In other words, your brain makes you think you can’t do one or more reps long before your muscles fail.

When I did training sessions with Fred Hahn, the NYC trainer who co-authored Slow Burn with MD and me, I would think I couldn’t possibly do one more rep, and Fred would say, “Come on, you can do one more. Just give me one more.” I would say, “I don’t think I can.” He would say, “Just try.”

I would feel like I was going to die, but I would somehow manage to get one more rep just to escape the torture. Then Fred would say, “Come on, I think you’ve got another one in you.”

This would go on until I absolutely could not do one more.

I try to do this to myself now, and it isn’t easy. I give up a lot sooner than I would were Fred looming over me. But I still do as many reps as I think I can, then try to squeeze at least one more out. MD hates to be anywhere near me, because on these last few reps I’m screaming out. Usually some sort of obscenity. I don’t know why, but it helps me get through it.

Then I collapse on the bed (I workout in the bedroom as I keep my bands and bar under the bed) and pant and puff till I’ve caught up my oxygen deficit. Then I do the next exercise.

This is how you do it to get the maximal benefit. It doesn’t mean that you don’t get some benefit by not brutalizing yourself as much, but if you want the fastest results possible, you need to take your muscles to failure.

Besides building muscle mass and strength more quickly, taking muscles to failure also stimulates a sort of body-wide, or systemic, training effect. In other words, the rest of your muscles get stronger even though they are not specifically worked directly. This is why I always do squats, dead lifts, overhead and front presses. The first two work big lower-body and core muscles. The second two work big muscles in the upper body. Working the larger muscles increases the systemic response more than small muscles.

On another note, I received this comment:

Almost everything that happens in the body is catalyzed in a step-by-step fashion by enzymes. Enzymes are large proteins made up of huge numbers of amino acids. Just to give you an idea of the relative size, below is a graphic of the enzyme hexokinase, which catalyzes just the first step in the glycolysis pathway.

At the top you can the little stick figures of the sugar and ATP, so you can tell the relative size of this enzyme. All enzymes are like this.

Each of these enzymes has to be built by first transcribing the gene, sending the transcribed mRNA template to the ribosomes where the protein is assembled. It’s a complicated process requiring many steps. Since the body is pretty parsimonious about conserving everything, it initiates this process only when necessary. And it doesn’t go through all this just to make a bunch of unnecessary enzymes just in case they’re needed. Once the need arises, the body steps up its production to meet the need.

A classic case of this is low-carb adaptation. When you switch from a high-carb, standard American diet to a low-carb diet, it’s common to feel a bit of fatigue for a while. For some this fatigue hangs around longer than for others, but almost everyone experiences it at first.

The body has on hand all the enzymes needed to catalyze the reactions required to convert the components of the Standard American diet into energy. When the diet is drastically changed, many of those enzymes are useless. And it takes the body some time to generate the enzymes necessary to efficiently convert the new low-carb diet into energy.

As I wrote above, the body is parsimonious with all this. So just downing one low-carb meal doesn’t do the trick. The body doesn’t know that one meal isn’t just an aberration, so it doesn’t immediately churn out all the enzymes required to better deal with a long-term low-carb diet. It takes a bit of time to make the conversion.

Same with the transfer of oxygen into the cells. It takes a bit of time to grease those skids as well. And if you’re constantly increasing the amount of work you’re doing in your strength training regimen, you will always be a bit behind the curve. But that stimulates more of the appropriate enzymes to hasten the transfer.

Also, I neglected to mention last week that the heart can change a bit, too, with long term exercise. I didn’t want to confuse the issue, so I said the heart and lungs don’t really change. Well, the heart can. Since it is a muscle and since it also gets stressed with exercise, it can enlarge a bit and increase its circulation. Which is a benefit.

But I think the greatest improvement comes from the increase in transport of oxygen into the cells.

After reading last weeks Arrow, Fred Hahn wrote me and pointed out an error I had made. And it wasn’t really an error as much as it was ignorance. I just didn’t know this fact, but had I thought about it, I should have.

As I mentioned, when you are pushing a weight, the muscle gets stronger as the limb reaches full extension. But, as Fred pointed out in his email, when you pull, it’s just the opposite. The muscle gets stronger as the joint is more bent.

For example, if you are doing an overhead press, you are at your weakest right at the start of the upward pushing motion. As your arms extend, the muscle is stronger.

If you are doing a pull up, it’s just the opposite. When your arms are extended, they are at their weakest, but as you pull up, the muscles get stronger. So you can’t get the pull up started (until you get stronger). I should have thought of this myself, because I have helped many people get started on a pull up. They couldn’t get it going, but once I lifted them up a bit, they could take it from there.

The bands should still be able to exert variable pressure if you do the exercise by starting with the arms extended, then contract from there against the resistance of the bands.

Fred also wrote

I agree. And I do workout with the bands slowly. But the difference between Fred’s machines is that with them you can go up in weight in small increments. Not so with the bands, unless you have 20 or so of them. The X3 bands come in a set of four, so the only way you can increase your time under “load” is by doing more reps. If you do it the Slow Burn way, it will take you a long time to get through four bands. But by the time you do, you will be a stud. Or a studette.

Donating Blood

I had a handful of responses re blood donation. Many from people who pass out trying to give blood. One commenter told me about a new program the Red Cross recommends for those who faint when giving blood. Here is the link.

I have no personal experience with this, but if you faint when giving blood, give it a whirl. It just may do the trick.

Another poll respondent wrote

If it’s a donation of whole blood, it doesn’t take long. If it’s just red blood cells, it takes longer, because they have to basically extract the red blood cells and pump the plasma back into you in a process called plasmapheresis. You can even donate double red blood cells this way, but it takes a while. You get to choose on the front end what kind of donation you want to make: whole blood, packed red cells, double red cells, platelets, etc. If they have a particular need for something right at the moment, they might ask if you would be willing to do another type of donation, but it’s still your choice. They should always confirm with you what they are going to do.

Another wrote

It’s actually percentage of hemoglobin they check for, not hematocrit. It is representative of iron levels, because every molecule of hemoglobin contains an ion of ferrous iron. I’m not sure what the demographic is for this person’s small town, but typically people who are overweight—most American’s—don’t have low iron levels. It’s usually the opposite.

I ran a quick search of the medical literature, and though there are studies showing donating blood seems to reduce the risk for heart disease, I couldn’t find anything showing donating blood strengthens bones. No studies—that I found, anyway—showing donating blood has a negative effect on bone health either.

Post-Pandemic Excess Deaths

One of the commenters on last week’s Arrow linked to a discussion of insurance folks and one doctor about the large increase in excess deaths since the pandemic ended. The data are pretty impressive. You can watch the entire discussion here. Below is one of the graphics from the site.

The dates are small and difficult to see, but you can tell when the pandemic started in early 2020 by the large increase in excess deaths. The death toll stayed pretty high till it abruptly dropped off in early 2022.

If you compare the pre-early 2020 excess deaths with the post-early 2022 excess deaths, you will see a startling and substantial increase post-early 2022. The excess deaths pre-pandemic are what you would expect. A little bit up one year and a bit down the next.

But there is no ‘down’ post pandemic. The excess deaths for just about any measuring period post-pandemic would have been considered incredibly high pre-pandemic.

What’s going on?

Looking at the next graphic gives us some idea of what these people are dying from.

The major increase in excess deaths is coming from younger people, people of working age. The body of the article says the “external causes,” delineated by the orange come from automobile accidents and drug overdoses. If you eliminate those, the deaths from natural causes are still high.

Are these other excess deaths from vaccine injuries? I don’t know. Or could it be a late sequela from earlier Covid infections? Who knows? If we had a decent public health service, the folks there might look into it. But they are too busy playing CYA right now to probe too deeply least it turn out to be injuries from the very vaccines they were all in on mandating.

All I can say is that it is a sad state of affairs we’re in the midst of.

What Has the Carnivore Diet Done For Us?

I received an email last week from one of my old golf buddies. He’s been on the carnivore diet for a few months and has been doing spectacularly well. He sent me an article he had read about the diet and wondered what I thought of it.

It was the typical drivel one always finds in articles such as these. There was a laundry list of negatives including the almost required caveat about all the saturated fat in a carnivore diet raising cholesterol levels. And, of course, the warning about not enough fiber, with a big dose of ‘it’s not good for the planet’ thrown in.

Somehow the pinhead who wrote this article—a Dr. Wendy Hall, whoever he, she, they might be—lost sight of the fact that we, ourselves, are basically meat. When we eat meat, we get pretty much everything we need. We are in essence eating ourselves. Why do we need plants?

But I digress.

There was one paragraph, however, that I kind of found absolutely hilarious. In describing the nutritional benefits before getting to the supposed deficiencies, Dr. Wendy Hall writes

I had to chuckle as I read this, because it reminded me of one of my favorite short clips from one of my favorite movies, The Life of Brian.

I can just imagine Dr. Wendy Hall asking a group of folks on the carnivore diet “What has the carnivore diet ever done for us?”

Well, there’s the protein. And the zinc. And the vitamins, and on and on.

The minute that got into my head, I had to look up the clip and post it. So next time anyone asks about the carnivore diet, you’ll be prepared with an answer.

Two Long Videos

I try to bring value to the readers of this newsletter. One of my many self-imposed tasks is, along with reading a zillion articles, to review videos. I hate watching videos simply because I can ingest so much more information via the printed word than I can spending the same amount of time watching a video.

Most of the videos I post are short ones, because I figure most people are like me and don’t have the patience to watch long ones. But every once in a while I come across a long video so incredibly interesting and informative—to me, at least—that I watch the whole thing from beginning to end. Sometimes more than once.

That happened to me this week, not once, but twice. So let me present the following two long videos for your consideration. I hope you watch both, because both are not only valuable in terms of the information provided, but are also mesmerizing to watch.

The Moth In the Iron Lung

At the behest of a number of readers, I read the book The Moth In the Iron Lung: A Biography of Polio by Forrest Maready a few years ago. As the subtitle suggests, this book is the author’s treatise on how the polio epidemic took hold and his idea of the driving force behind it.

I more or less blew the book off after I read it. Why? Because, and I’m sort of ashamed to admit this, but I am a bit of a scientific elitist. In other words, I have trouble taking seriously anything scientific written by anyone without a scientific background. And the author of this book has no scientific background. According to his bio, the author is a

As I say, I have a built-in bias against anyone who has not gone through some kind of scientific training. I come by it honestly, however. When I finished my first two years of medical school, which were mainly intensive classroom lectures and textbook reading, I thought I was the smartest mofo in the valley. I was champing at the bit to get into the clinical part of med school, which are the last two years, to show my stuff. When I hit the wards and was exposed to actual patients and their specific problems, I quickly realized I didn’t know shit. It was a humbling experience after two hard years of study.

Then, after a number of years of practice, I started to read the scientific literature. At first, I took it all at face value and believed everything I read. I soon learned that most of it was BS, and that I had to learn to navigate the medical literature the same way I had to learn to navigate my second two years of med school.

For years I’ve had to listen to non-scientifically trained people bend my ear at social occasions about their weird theories of diet, nutrition, medicine, and science that they gleaned from some popular book, magazine article, website, or TV show. It has all made me incredibly suspicious of anything scientific not written by someone with scientific training.

I often forget that smart people using a bit of diligence can learn just about anything. I consider myself somewhat of an expert in nutrition, and I had only one hour of nutrition training in medical school. I have been completely self taught, yet I sometimes find myself forgetting that others can be self taught, too.

With that prelude, let me tell you what happened.

I came across a video of a discussion between Bret Weinstein and Forrest Maready. Bret had read Maready’s book, but, unlike me, he had taken it seriously. Since Bret is a scientist, I figured I would take the time to see what he had to say about it. And I got sucked into a 2 hour plus video. Which is outstanding. And which I am supremely glad I got sucked into watching.

As it turns out, Maready is a very smart person, who has put in a vast amount of time doing in-depth research on his subjects. Which, in the case of this book, is polio.

After watching this video, I pulled the book back up on my Kindle app and started rereading it.

Late in the video, Brett carefully asks Maready if he is a vaccine denier. Maready’s response is exactly the same as mine. Probably more articulately said, but exactly the same. As I’ve written in these pages many times, I am a real victim of the confirmation bias. I have to fight against it constantly. So the fact that he and I align so perfectly on vaccines after having gone through the same intellectual steps to get there maybe influenced my perception of the video overall. Maybe, but I don’t think so. The vaccine part came at the end, by which time I had already been dazzled by the discussion.

Maready starts out by saying that from all the research he has done, he believes his conclusions are true. But he hopes they aren’t.

I feel the same way.

Give the video a watch and let me know what you think. Don’t be put off by the length. You can always watch it 20 or 30 minutes at a time. It’s worth watching

Jeffrey Sachs and How We Got to Where We Are

This next video is not a scientific one, at least not the terms of hard science. In terms of political science, it is a masterpiece.

It is a Tucker Carlson interview (sort of) with economist and diplomat Jeffrey Sachs on US political history since WWII. I’ve sent it to a number of friends, one of whom said he wouldn’t watch it because “Tucker Carlson creeps [him] out” I told him he needn’t worry as Tucker Carlson probably doesn’t say 200 words during the entire video.

Sachs has been around for a long time and has been present—not just in time, but in the actual places during the events be describes—for many historical happenings over the past four decades. And he is a fabulous narrator.

This interview took place a month or so ago, so it was before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, so that particular event isn’t mentioned. In fact, I don’t think Trump is mentioned even once.

I may have been primed for this video by a short piece I read a couple of days after the attempt on Trump’s life by Doomberg, a group that publishes an expensive newsletter on the energy sector four or five times per month. I’m often tempted to quote it, but it is almost always paywalled, and the best parts are behind the paywall, so no one would be able to check the accuracy of the quotes.

This time, however, the piece was not paywalled. Here it is in its entirety.

Usually Doomberg avoids politics unless they specifically involve the energy sector. They made an exception this time. Wrote they

As I wrote above, had I not read the Doomberg piece maybe my private garden wouldn’t be as susceptible to the information in the video I’ll post below. Who knows?

Jeffrey Sachs cannot be considered anything other than one of the very elites everyone seems to despise. Given his resume, Sachs out-elites the elites. Yet what he says outs these very elites he’s a member of. He is definitely not an advocate of the military-industrial complex.

You may disagree with everything he says. I had one minor quibble, but otherwise did agree with everything he said. And I was floored by his experience and the way he has integrated it into his own personal politics and view of what has gone wrong over the years.

He is not partisan. He attacks both parties pretty much equally, because both have sinned mightily in terms of how he views what has happened. Give it a watch and let me know what you think. Again, a long one, but worth the time. I suspect you’ll be as surprised as I was at some of the revelations. And I believe many people watching this from countries other than the US will be nodding their heads in agreement.

Trapped Fat and Fuel Partitioning

As promised last week, here are my thoughts on the paper Nick Norwitz discussed in his video.

I was out playing golf a couple of weeks ago with a group of guys I know, but haven’t played with for awhile. One of them asked me how the book was coming, referring to Protein Power 2.0. I said MD and I were working on it.

Another guy in the group said something along the lines of Mike writes all these books, but I can tell him in a sentence how to lose weight. There’s no secret to it.

Then he says, wait for it… All you have to do is eat fewer calories than you burn off, and you’ll lose weight. Guaranteed. There is no magic to it.

The other two guys in the foursome sniggered as if this was some well-known truth.

The guy who made the comment is himself kind of pudgy. I fought down the temptation to comment with something along the lines of, Well, then, you must be pretty effing stupid if you know the answer yet you are yourself overweight.

Instead, I said you are correct, of course. But you’re not asking the right question. Every moron knows if you eat more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. The question is Why do people eat more calories than they burn? What makes them do it?

Imagine you have a favorite restaurant and you go there one night for dinner and it’s packed. You can usually always get a table, but not this particular night. The maître d’ tells you there will be an hour wait for a table.

You’ve never seen the restaurant this packed, so you ask him why is it so crowded tonight.

And he responds, Well, that’s easy. There are a lot more people coming in than there are people leaving.

If this was his real answer, you would think he was a total idiot. You would say, I know there are more people coming in than there are leaving. What I want to know is why are they all coming in? Did a concert just let out? Is there some kind of huge discount tonight I know nothing about? Did a big football game just end? Why are they all swarming in?

It’s the same thing with calories. Why do people eat more than they burn. That’s the real question that needs asking and answering. I think he finally understood.

And that’s what the paper under consideration is asking.

Let’s take a look.

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