Hello everyone.

Greetings from Dallas, where it is kind of cool and balmy as it has been for the last week or so. Meanwhile, in Montecito the last week it was brutally hot, which can be awful there as air conditioning isn’t universal as it is here. Looks like MD and I played weather-roulette to our advantage this time. It’s usually the opposite.

I planned to do something a little differently this time, but emails, comments, and stuff happening in general intervened. As everyone who reads this newsletter probably knows by now, my laptop (upon which I do almost all my work) is continually clotted with tabs. After I put each weekly edition of The Arrow to bed, my goal is to clean up all the hundreds and hundreds of tabs in an effort to be ready for a fresh start on the next week’s edition.

I seized on what I thought was a brilliant idea this week. Since most of the tabs I have up are ideas I’ve come across for content for The Arrow, I figured instead of writing long sections about a few of them, I would do a kind of potpourri of a bunch of short sections about the various items under the various tabs. But, alas, other things have captured my attention, so I’ll have to leave to potpourri for a later edition.

I gathered all the tabs on the Chrome browser of my MacBook Pro in a way that all could be seen. I’ve tried this before, but could never capture them all. Now I have. Here is what my screen looks like when I have them all stacked. Which is not easy to do, BTW. Seems like it would be, but, believe me, it isn’t.

And this is just one browser. I use Safari, Brave, and Arc as well, but those each have just a few tabs open. Nothing anywhere comparable to what you see above. For what it’s worth, it took me a bit to figure out how to use Arc, but I’m starting to like it quite a bit.

Policy Change Suggestions

A week or so ago, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal in which he sketched out policy changes having to do with the healthcare industry. I was aware of most of these issues, but not all. Let’s take a look. Here is the first:

This is something I know nothing about. All I can say is that if the fees paid to apply for a new drug approval make up three quarters of the FDA’s drug division budget, the fees must be pretty frigging high. Which in turn leads to higher drug prices once a drug does get approved. Many don’t, so those that do must make up for the expenses of those that don’t make the cut.

I’m of two minds on this one. I spent the first half of my professional life putting people on medicines, and the last half trying to get them off of medications. There are so many disorders amenable to treatment by lifestyle changes, but people are tripping over themselves in a rush to make drugs that do a half-assed job of what diet and exercise can do much better. Should we really incentivize them by making drug applications less expensive? It’s a difficult question. If I were going to make changes, this would be at the bottom of my list.

Okay, this one would be at or near the top of my list. The nutritional guidelines are a disaster. You would think there wouldn’t be any money in the nutritional guidelines. Who cares what’s in them? People pretty much eat what they want to eat, and most folks have no idea what the nutritional guidelines even suggest. But the law requires that the any people the US Gov’t feeds have to be fed in accordance with the guidelines. And since the government through various programs feeds ~70 million people per year, that’s a lot of food. And the companies that make the ingredients that go into these foods would all like not to have their products left off of the nutritional guidelines.

Many of the people selected to be on the Advisory Committee have strong financial ties to industry. So the derivation of these guidelines is more about placating industry (not to mention fattening industry’s pockets) than it is about healthful eating.

This is a tough one for me, because I’m a real first amendment kind of guy. I believe in freedom of speech, but freedom of speech in advertising has gone the way of the Dodo bird. And probably for good reason. Otherwise we would be bombarded with ads for products guaranteed to cure cancer or your money back.

Plus, we don’t know how much ad revenue drives what the mainstream media news reports. Not all that long ago, Pfizer was sponsoring just about all the news shows on any channel or cable feed you might want to watch. Do you think any of these stations would turn down that massive revenue to do a deep dive on, say, vaccine safety?

This one would vie for the top spot along with the nutritional guidelines one. Big Pharma can pay plenty for testing its own products. Why should taxpayers be on the hook to fund researchers with major conflicts of interest? In my view, they should be vetted and remain unfunded if they do have conflicts, otherwise their research is suspect. It may be perfectly done research, but will still be suspect. Why not just avoid the problem altogether?

This one I have an issue with. The FDA makes drug testing prohibitively expensive. Any drug making it through the FDA gauntlet has to recover the fortune spent not only to get the drug in question approved, but also to cover the expenses of those drugs that did not make it through the process. The drugs companies have to cover their expenses. I would make a rule that any drug company with an approved drug has to sell it to other countries at the same price they sell it to US users.

Most of these drugs cost pennies to make. Their expense all comes from the development and making it through the approval process. Why let the Germans, the French, or anyone else outside the US get a giant price reduction based on the cost to actually produce the meds while the expense of underwriting the expensive development and FDA approval process gets loaded onto the backs of the American consumer?

The people getting SNAP funds will probably be mostly the same people who end up under taxpayer-provided medical care for their chronic diseases. Why subsidize it on both ends. No one would recommend we underwrite cigarettes, so why underwrite sweetened drinks and cereal and other crap that do almost as much damage. The reason, of course, is that the nutritional guidelines approve of sugar.

I don’t know as much about this one as I do the others, so I’m not going to comment other than to say it seems reasonable to me if data showing these products to be harmful, maybe someone should take a closer look at them.

It’s an oft repeated and hoary platitude that doctors get no nutritional training. I did have a 3-hour lecture in nutrition in medical school, but it wasn’t a course. Or if it was, it was a really Mickey Mouse one. No real lectures on the power of proper nutrition, instead it was taught by hospital dietitians and basically covered the proper way to write nutritional orders for hospitalized patients. It was less than worthless.

I’m not sure a course in nutrition would be necessary if it were instead incorporated into other basic science classes. Basically, nutrition is nothing but applied biochemistry and physiology. It could easily become a part of both of those courses. My friend biochemist Richard Feinman has incorporated nutrition into his med school biochemistry course, but he is an exception. Primarily medical school teaches about drugs, surgery, and trauma treatment.

I’m not so sure about this one. If you read the link, you’ll find that it comes from someone who wrote a book titled Meatonomics, which I can only imagine is a screed against meat. He writes that “these subsidies are largely for the production of meat: “nearly two-thirds of government farming support goes to the animal foods that the government suggests we limit, while less than two percent goes to the fruits and vegetables it recommends we eat.””

I pulled a 2014 Washington Post article about agricultural subsidies, and it claims that

So if this is how they’re subsidizing the meat industry, then I’m not for it. I would prefer no subsidies at all, especially since most of them go to Big Ag, which is doing just fine. If there were to be subsidies, I would prefer them going directly to those who raise animals on grass for food. Not to those who raise grains for feed and HFCS.

If you would like to read an in-depth discussion of the entire US agricultural subsidy situation and how we got to where we are today, my friend Dale Saran wrote a terrific Substack post on it today linked above. It’s where I found the Washington Post article.

I think this is a great idea. If kids are going to be in school, insist that they get some vigorous physical activity. Since most schools get federal funds, tie it to that.

This all sounds great, but half the budget?!?! If you ask just about anyone what the big problem is in medicine today, the answer will be that there is no emphasis on disease prevention. Or preventative care. I’ve been in practice for many, many years and have taken care of thousands and thousands of patients for a multitude of problems. And in all that time, I’ve never had one person come to see me for preventative care. No one has ever said to me, “Doc, I just feel so damn good. And I want to keep feeling this way. What can I do to maintain my health?”

Just like no one ever takes a car to a mechanic when it is running perfectly, people don’t interact with the medical system unless they have a problem. It would be nice to fund some studies on preventative care, but half the budget? It’s one of those things that sounds good.

I don’t look at alternative and holistic approaches from any perspective other than if they work or not. If they work, it’s legitimate medical therapy. If they don’t, then they don’t. Many, many times I’ve witnessed the extraordinary power of a switch in diet. When I first started putting my patients who had high blood pressure and/or type 2 diabetes on low-carb diets, I didn’t change their medications. I told them we would start tapering their meds as they lost weight.

Some of them quickly ended up passing out from their blood pressure dropping too quickly and from low blood sugar. I quickly learned that I needed to stop most blood pressure meds and diabetes meds when the patients started their low-carb diets. I could then add meds back in later if needed.

The right dietary changes can be hugely potent. I definitely believe the low-carb diet as a therapeutic tool—not just a means of weight loss—should be taught in medical school. And should be studied. It’s a more potent remedy than any pill they’ll ever prescribe.

I heard Harvard professor Chris Palmer on a podcast discuss why the NIH wouldn’t fund keto diet studies for Alzheimer’s. He said the folks who followed the diet had spectacular results, but many people dropped out of the study because they basically wanted to eat carbs. The take of the nattering nabobs at the NIH was that there was no point in funding a larger study because even if the therapy worked, no one wanted to follow it. Which is an insane way to look at it from my perspective. These kinds of studies need to be funded. The NIH has funded God only knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars into drug studies for Alzheimer’s, none of which have really panned out. Why not fund something that has shown tremendous promise? If it truly works, then mount a PR campaign much like the successful one against smoking.

This is another one that sounds good, but I don’t see it going anywhere. It would be great if folks all had HSAs. But I just don’t see them ever being approved for gym memberships or specific foods. I suspect many would end up with both gym memberships that go unused and metformin.

The Latest In Type 2 Diabetes Treatment

I just came across a new paper titled “Advances and counterpoints in type 2 diabetes. What is ready for translation into real-world practice, ahead of the guidelines” that I found appalling. Written by many of the grand poobahs of diabetes research, that paper discusses all the many therapeutic modalities available for the poor patient suffering from type 2 diabetes (T2DM.

The “recent new guideline recommendations ready to be routinely incorporated into routine practice’ include the following:”

• Complication-centric prescribing should take center stage. Treatment plans should no longer ‘silo’ hyperglycemia as a single treatment target but rather manage it synchronously with the patient’s comorbidities and risk factors. [My bold]

• In patients with cardiorenal risk factors, long-acting glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists and sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors (SGLT-2is) have been shown to provide protection and are recommended as preferred treatments.

• A novel algorithm enables treatment decision-making for latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA) based on glutamic acid decarboxylase (GADA) and C-peptide testing

See anything in that list about a low-carb diet, which is arguably the safest and most potent treatment available for a first-line therapy for T2DM?

Here are “several key advances in the management of type 2 diabetes [that] are supported by strong evidence that make these ready for use in routine care…”

• The pleiotropic benefits of several antidiabetic agents provide important new considerations to treatment decision-making; and, should be employed in treatment selection in the clinic.

• Disease remission should be elevated to a primary objective of case management of type 2 diabetes beyond the role it had in past routine care. The inherent resilience of beta cells can be harnessed to help remit hyperglycemia through the use of diet and lifestyle modifications and/or short-term intensive pharmacotherapy. [My bold]

Drugs, drugs, drugs. One throwaway line about diet and lifestyle “modifications” combined (and/or) intensive medication. I’m sure they threw that line in simply because, well, you’ve got to at least mention it in passing.

Then they discussed the “underpinnings of type 2 diabetes etiology and progression have been corrected. In particular,”

• Early type 2 diabetes is no longer considered an intractable (‘inexorable’) state. Beta cells, in fact, remain robust and resilient through much of the course of the disease, and with support, can resume partial or complete glucoregulation.

• Type 2 diabetes is not a single disease across all patients, nor does it arise from the same defects. Accordingly, tailored therapy is imperative.

• Precision medicine veers away from management to treatment failure with sequential add-on therapy. Instead, targeted therapy can address the individual drivers of hyperglycemia in each patient without agents that are ineffective in the given patient.

• Target attainment is distinctly possible with current treatments, without treatment-emergent hypoglycemia. Intensive glucose control is pivotal for preventing or offsetting diabetes-related long-term outcomes.

• With the expanding antidiabetes armamentarium, it is possible to reduce reliance on sulfonylureas and exogenous insulin, which present less desirable benefit: risk profiles (including weight gain, hypoglycemia, and ‘wear and tear’ on beta cells) than many other currently available options. [My bold]

The sad thing about all this is that diet—particularly a low carb one—is probably the most effective way of treating T2DM. It is for sure the safest way. But yet diet of any sort gets mentioned only in one toss off line.

But this is how medicine is practiced today.

In my view, which is obviously the minority perspective, doctors should discuss diet and lifestyle changes with their patients. Most people have good sense (although there are many with the don’t-you-just-have-a-pill-you-can-give-me mindset) and would at the very least be willing to give diet a chance. But if their doctor says to them, Looks like you have T2DM, so we need to get you medicated to get your blood sugar down, they usually simply go along with it.

Papers like the one above, which focuses almost entirely on medications, will do nothing but further the common practice of medication first, and more medication second.

It is truly a sad state of affairs.

Seed Oils, Carbs, and Obesity

I’m on an email discussion list that is composed of a lot of academic low-carb docs and a bunch of others involved in research. Over the past week, it has blown up over a debate about what really causes obesity. Is it seed oils, or carbs, or both?

Before I get into it, I’ll state my own opinion first. I believe the primary cause is excess refined carbohydrate consumption. But I also believe seed oils are a contributor. The question is, how much of a contributor? And can seed oils all by themselves cause obesity along with a host of other disorders.

The folks on the carb side of the debate point out that there have never been RCTs comparing seed oils to other sources of fat in any obesity studies. (Which is not altogether true—there is one that Tucker Goodrich provided. I’ll discuss it in a bit.)

There have been a number of RCTs comparing corn and other seed oils to butter and other more saturated fats in terms of lowering LDL-cholesterol levels. As it turns out, seed oils do reduce LDL-C levels in many people, but they still end up having the same or more heart disease than those on the more saturated fats. Which is just one more nail in the coffin of the lipid hypothesis of heart disease. A couple of these major RCTS weren’t even published, because they didn’t confirm the bias of the researchers, which was that these oils are good because they lower LDL-C, therefor they will reduce heart disease, which they didn’t.

But other than the one I’ll discuss later, I haven’t seen any RCTs on seed oils and obesity. And I’m not sure there will ever be any. Why? Because seed oils have gotten a bad name in the nutritional world, and I would imagine that institutional review boards, the entities that approve such studies on humans, would claim that since seed oils are thought to be unhealthful, it would be unethical to give them to the study group. Even though entire shelves in grocery stores are given over to them and ultra-processed foods, which supposedly make up anywhere from 60 percent to 73 percent (those are the ranges I’ve seen) of the American diet are loaded with them.

The people on the email list who are the carbs-cause-obesity arguers keep harping on the fact that there aren’t any human RTCs on seed oils. Only animal studies, most of which do show negative effects. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s, 2003 to be specific, before there were any RCTs on carbs and obesity.

In that year, two groups, both headed by lipophobes, did perform RCTs comparing low-carb diets to low-fat diets and published their results in the May 22, 2003 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious pure medical journal in the world. I’m sure they did it to shut up all the low-carbers out there, including MD and me, constantly promoting carb restriction. Since these groups, I’m sure, were pretty much convinced the low-fat diet would win out, they did the studies. As it turned out, the low-carb diet triumphed mightily. In both studies.

In the study that showed the greatest improvement in both weight loss and diabetes, our book was used as the study diet (without any association on our part). Which means I have to digress here for a moment of prideful gloating. Here is what the author’s wrote in the study design part of the methods section of the study showing how both the subjects in the low-carb and low-fat arms of the study were instructed. It starts out by saying “the two diet groups attended separate two-hour group-teaching sessions each week for four weeks…”

The conclusion of the researchers:

So, the program we presented for our own patients beat the brains out of the program provided to the subjects in the low-fat arm “in accordance with the obesity-management guidelines of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute…” Which is a major department within the NIH.

Talk about David vs Goliath. And with much the same outcome.

Anyway, the researchers were so surprised they had to add a major caveat.

After this study and the other one in the same issue of the NEJM came out, the debate changed in the public sphere from low-carb diets are fad diets and don’t work to sure, you’ll lose more weight on a low-carb diet, but you’ll be clogging your arteries and will die from heart disease.

Fortunately, since this time many, many more RCTs have been done on low-carb diets, almost all of which show its superiority as a treatment for obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and even lipid problems.

But still, as you can see from the diabetes article I mentioned above, the low-carb diet still gets short shrift as a first line therapy for T2DM.

These articles opened the floodgates for more RCTS on low-carb diets, but, as mentioned above, I’m not sure we’ll see a spate of them looking at seed oils.

We do have one, though. It’s behind a paywall, but I stuck a copy in by Dropbox in case you’re interested in reading it in whole.

The paper titled “Effect of a 6-Month Intervention with Cooking Oils Containing a High Concentration of Monounsaturated Fatty Acids (Olive and Canola Oils) Compared with Control Oil in Male Asian Indians with Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease” compares the outcome if three groups of subjects consuming cooking oils with varying amounts of linoleic acid, the PUFA thought to generate the issues with seed oils.

This study is a good one to look at the carb-seed oils situation because the subjects are all on a baseline low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. The paper describes the recommendations for the diet and exercise program:

55-70% carbs is a pretty whopping dose. And it’s tough to stay under 20% fat, but maybe not in an area where vegetarianism is quite common. The researchers provided the cooking oil to the participants and had multiple follow ups as the six month study progressed.

All 93 subjects studied had non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) as measured by ultrasound, but without a history of excessive alcohol intake, diabetes, and a host of other disorders. The subjects had an average weight of around 175 pounds and a BMI of a little over 27, which put them in the overweight category.

The subjects were randomized into three groups, each of which was to get a different cooking oil.

The control oil was the standard soybean/safflower oil commonly used in India. It contains from 15-24 percent monounsaturated fat (MFA), 12-16 percent saturated fat (SFA), and 50-60 percent polyunsaturated fat (PUFA).

(One wonders why, if the researchers were providing the cooking oils, they didn’t standardize it to one particular brand, so that the specific differences in oils would be the same instead of a range.)

The second group received a specific brand of canola oil that contained 61 percent MUFA, 7 percent SFA, and 32 percent PUFA.

The third group were provided a specific olive pomace oil composed of 70 percent MUFA, 15 percent SFA, and 15 percent PUFA.

Let’s look at them all stacked in order of MFA/SFA/PUFA

• Olive oil 70/15/15

• Canola oil 61/7/32

• Control oil 15-24/12-16/50-60

After six months of using these cooking oils, following the diet, and daily exercise, the results were pretty amazing.

In terms of weight loss, those on the olive oil diet lost 11 pounds, which was a significant weight loss. Those on canola oil lost a bit of weight, but the difference didn’t reach statistical significance. And those on the control oil didn’t lose much at all.

Only those subjects on the olive oil had a statistically significant reduction in BMI.

The amazing finding was the large reduction of fasting insulin and insulin resistance in both the olive oil and canola oil groups (olive oil > canola oil) as compared to the control group, which didn’t change much.

Liver size came down in both the olive oil and canola oil subjects as compared to the control oil.

Here is the rundown from the paper:

This one study shows that while keeping diet constant—even a 70 percent carb diet—increasing the number of saturated bonds in the cooking oil brings about positive changes when compared to typical cooking oil, i.e., soybean oil, corn oil, etc. In other words, the more PUFA, the worse the conditions.

Why is this?

I guess no one knows for sure, though there are a number of theories out there.

In my view, the one most likely to be the true mechanism at work was proposed by Peter Dobromylskyj, who writes the Hyperlipid blog. It’s fairly complex. I gave a 45 minute talk on it a few years back if you’re interested in learning more specifics.

Basically the theory is a nutrient-partitioning theory much the same as the carbohydrate-insulin model (CIM).

Let me review that one quickly, then I’ll show how the SFA/PUFA theory is similar.

The CIM posits that in those who are genetically predisposed to be carb sensitive (many of us, and more so as we age) end up running up insulin levels in response to carb intake, especially refined carbs and sugar. If insulin levels are chronically elevated, they end up running fuels from the blood into the fat cells. The fuel-diminished blood circulates through the hypothalamus, the hunger center, which responds by increasing hunger. Which, of course, drives intake of more food. Then the cycle repeats.

Problem is, this occurs when the fat cells are full of fat, so there is plenty of fuel there. The body just can’t access it because insulin is keeping it partitioned in the fat cells.

In the non-insulin resistant state, carbs go in, insulin goes up, fuel is driven into the fat cells. Insulin comes down, fuel goes into the blood from where it is delivered to the tissues. The fuel-laden blood flows through the hypothalamus telling it there is plenty of energy available, so the hunger switch stays off.

In my favored hypothesis re seed oils, the same sort of thing happens, but at the level of the fat cells.

As everyone knows, most of the energy we get from food is converted to ATP via the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. This process generates about our own body weight in ATP each day.

In order for fat to be broken down prior to entering the mitochondria, it goes through a process called beta-oxidation. If a saturated fat goes through this process, it is converted to an unsaturated fat in the first step of the breakdown. This conversion releases energy, which is captured by FADH, which is then converted to FADH_2, a high energy electron carrier. PUFA do not go through this process, because they already have a double bond, so no conversion is needed. Consequently, no FADH₂ is spun off, which means less FADH₂ makes its way to ETF, an entry portal to the mitochondria.

The more FADH₂ that comes through the mitochondria via ETF, the greater the congestion. Other high energy electron carriers are dumping their cargoes as well. So the congestion causes electrons to move backwards down the electron transport chain, which ends up popping off free radicals.

Most people think free radicals are a bad thing, and too many of them in the wrong place are. But they are also signaling molecules. In this instance, they are signaling that there is plenty of energy and the fat cell doesn’t need any more.

It ends up creating local insulin resistance at the level of the fat cell, which prevents more fat from going into the fat cell. Which then keeps more in the blood, which circulates through the hypothalamus, which, then, keeps us from being hungry.

If a lot of PUFA goes through the beta-oxidation process, it doesn’t throw off much FADH₂. Consequently, there is not as much, if any, congestion in the mitochondria and no free radicals. This allows for insulin sensitivity at the level of the fat cell, which basically opens up the door to incoming fat. Since the fat is moving into the fat cells, it is moving out of the blood, which then signals to the hypothalamus that fuel is low. And the hypothalamus says ‘hunger’.

Based on this theory, we could say the problem is one of too little saturated fat, or too much PUFA, or, more likely, both. It ends up partitioning the fuels in the fat cell and triggering the hypothalamus to send the hunger signal. Which is tough to ignore.

As we saw in the study above, those on the higher saturated fat diet lost the most weight. Imagine what it might have looked like with a truly high saturated fat diet?

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Is the Carnivore Diet Dangerous?

I have a reader who keeps asking me to comment on the carnivore diet, and I keep forgetting. I was reminded today by a couple of things.

First, the Wall Street Journal came out with an article on men and meat eating. It was filled with all the typical kinds of warnings you would expect to see in some tabloid or a magazine you might see at the supermarket check out.

The title pretty much tells you what the article is going to opine: Dear Men, You’re Eating Too Much Meat. The entire article is a bulging thesaurus of weasel words:

• Linked to

• Associated with

• Raises the risk

• Concerned about

• Research has found

These are all scientifically meaningless words, but they do cause hesitance in those who don’t understand.

This entire article is just the kind I hate. I’m sure the editors tasked some reporter for the paper to go out and write an article on men and meat. She (in this case it is a she, though these days one never knows for sure) then grabs the phone and starts calling everyone who has ever published anything negative on meat consumption. Then quotes them along with the institutions they’re affiliated with to add prestige.

Then the next step is to talk to a few men-on-the-street types with no academic credentials to describe how they go face down in meat at every meal.

These articles always start out with something positive then turn quickly to the negatives. Or, more accurately, the perceived negatives as scrounged up by the writer.

The first full paragraph right after the line “American men have a meat problem” is a sterling example:

“Is linked to health problems.” “Research links processed meat…” “Might raise the risk of diabetes.” Jesus wept.

Linked is a meaningless term when it comes to scientific proof. All it means is some observational study somewhere found an association between meat consumption and some health problem. There was no RCT involved simply because there couldn’t be.

You would have to recruit many, many subjects, randomize them into two groups, one of which ate a lot of meat while the other didn’t. And they would have to stay on their meat or non-meat diet for years, and you would have to follow them for years beyond that. Decades. Multiple decades. Who is going to stay on such a study and stick to it for decades? No one. Who is going to fund such a study? No one.

We will never have a randomized, controlled trial of meat consumption and disease. It just isn’t feasible.

We have evolved on meat, so how could it be bad for us? If it were a new addition to our diet as, say, refined grains or seed oils are, then maybe. But we’ve eaten meat for millennia, so anyone who didn’t do well on it was probably removed from the gene pool.

Let’s skip on down through this article and see some of the blatantly incorrect things these academics fed this idiot of a reporter.

God help us all. Men eat meat because it tastes good. Threaten to take anything away from anyone who loves it, and they perceive it as a threat to their freedom of choice.

Strangely enough, processing most foods deprives them of nutrients. Processing meat by curing and smoking actually makes the protein content more available. And all this blather about nitrites is just so much bull shit. If you want to avoid nitrites, avoid spinach, a food any one of the twerps commenting on this article would say is a superfood.

I did a quick check with perplexity, ai (which I have found to be an excellent tool for finding things quickly) shows this:

Granted, they are talking about nitrites added in processed meats, but I doubt they can match spinach and many other vegetables in nitrite content. They can have a fair amount of sodium, but I’m not worried about that. The whole we-eat-too-much-salt recommendation is bogus in my view. Especially if you are on a low-carb diet. You need some extra sodium.

One of the men-on-the-street who was interviewed by the writer had this to say:

He avoids those processed meats and eats plenty of spinach and kale. I guess Eddie like to get his nitrites from plants.

Here is my favorite part. These two never fail to disappoint when it comes to slinging misinformation.

Well, let’s see, the American College of Cardiology, the group most afraid of LDL of all docs pronounced saturated fat as being non-problematic in their journal. They absolved it of all guilt. Yet Willett still advocates its intake be greatly limited.

And Mozaffarian has to know that heme iron isn’t problematic unless someone has hemochromatosis. And most people who have it know they have it. Anyone who doesn’t have it—the great mass of others out there—don’t have to worry. Geez…

These two guys continue…

Mozaffarian comes across a little less crazy than Willett, but still. “Unprocessed red meat is probably better for you than most packaged and processed starch and sugar-rich foods.” Ya think maybe?

I, myself, follow an almost carnivore diet. Every meal is primarily meat. I’ll have maybe a slice of tomato or two. Maybe some asparagus. But that’s about it.

We are made of the same stuff meat is made of. So meat is the perfect food for us.

Our middle son, who is the most junk-food junky of any of our kids announced early this year that he was going carnivore. MD and I were both taking bets on how long it would last. Our middle son has always been thin and never worried about his weight, and so ate anything and everything that wasn’t red hot or nailed down. “I’ll have a side of fries with those fries.” Once he started gaining a little weight around his middle, he would periodically make these pronouncements about starting a diet. It would last all of about two days.

He started carnivore and within just a couple of days told us he had never felt so good. He said his sleep improved, his energy levels improved, his mood improved, his skin improved, his joint aches improved. He announced that he was going to stay carnivore for the rest of his life.

And, true to his word, he’s stayed carnivore since early this year. That included a family trip to Jackson Hole to ski and a two week family drive from Maine to Key West at Spring break. He didn’t break from his carnivore diet during any of these vacations. He says to me, I feel better than I ever have, and nothing can taste as good as I’m feeling right now.

That seems to be a common refrain from those who go carnivore.

I feel pretty much the same way. I feel fabulous when I’m on full carnivore, but I’m weak of will. And my lovely wife always insists on making the plate look balanced. She says it needs different colors. We spend a lot of time with our son when we’re in Montecito, and when we do, we get served up generous portions of ribeye steak, which is my favorite. So on those days, I, too, am pretty much carnivore.

There are many benefits of the carnivore diet, and no real downside other than maybe price if you love expensive cuts of meat. You get plenty of vitamins and minerals. And if the meat isn’t overcooked, you get some kind of anti-scorbutic no one has figured out what is yet, because you don’t get scurvy. But you do, as many Arctic explorers discovered, if you boil your meat to death.

One of the great benefits of a carnivore diet is that it is truly anti-inflammatory. If you have inflammation issues…

I just got noticed from the platform that I was out of room. Below is a great video on how effective the carnivore diet is on a specific type of inflammation.

I’ll explain more next week. Sorry about the sudden cut off. I guess I got diarrhea of the keyboard and out wrote my allotted space.

Odds and Ends

• The average American eats 42 pounds of cheese a year—almost double the amount consumed in 1975—and that number could go up.

• Study shows human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with only ~1280 breeding individuals existing around 900,000 years ago, which lasted for about 117,000 years, almost bringing human ancestors to extinction.

• The latest federal job report shows the creation of jobs by eating and drinking places continued at a stable clip while hiring across the economy dropped by about 30%. More eating out equates to more bad health. So, figures.

• Iran’s shadow hand in Houthi Red Sea attacks.

• Wonderful rant. In most states you need a license to cut hair. What are the consequences of a total, massive, barber screw up? A bad haircut.

• Is there an evolutionary basis for the existence of so many stupid people?

• We now think we know exactly where in the world anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals hooked up and intermingled genes.

• Witness the exact moment a hurricane-damaged office building in Louisiana was imploded. Pretty impressive demolition.

• Exceptionally rare Roosevelt dime, struck by the U.S. Mint in San Francisco in 1975, could be worth more than $500,000.

• Chinese spies are being planted in some of America's biggest companies to steal 'sensitive information.' This doesn’t surprise me in the least.

• Mental health providers are abandoning insurance networks in droves. Here is why, at least according to ProPublica, a not always reliable source in my view.

• Short video explaining how sports betting went from illegal to mainstream in America. With projected annual revenues of $45B, how can we ensure the integrity of the games?

• Harvard Business Review article on what self-awareness really is (and how to cultivate It). It’s not just about introspection.

• Where does your dollar stretch the most? Here is the answer all mapped out for you.

• Tattoos and piercings, what does the scientific literature say about people who get them? I am no fan of tattoos and piercings, so this pushes all my confirmation-bias buttons.

• Last week I posted here about how the Navy is installing StarLink on its ships. This is probably what inspired the decision.

• Speaking of ships, more than 20,000 of them sank during World War II. One man is on a mission to map them all. Here is his story.

• Weird story. Woman who has been the object of a massive internet search finally found. And she had no idea tens of thousands of people had been seeking her.

• Researchers in Gabon studied tropical plants eaten by wild gorillas - and used also by local human healers - identifying four with medicinal effects.

• Ah, how diets for the wealthiest have changed. For the juiciest, tastiest rodents, the Romans used a glirarium, or dormouse fattener, to plump them up.

• Man using Google Maps to find a vacation spot may have found an ancient asteroid impact site hidden deep in the mountains of Canada. Who knew?

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

This week’s video shows just how difficult and time consuming cooking was almost 200 years ago. When I watched, all I could think of was how easy a cotton apron or skirt could catch fire. It’s a little longer than the average VOTW, but since there is no dialog, you can watch it at double speed. Enjoy.

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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