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Hello everyone.

Greetings from Dallas where the snow is gone and the sun is out. For a day or two. Maybe.

I’m going to get this edition going with a mini rant, but with some useful information. It’s another episode of the shittification of everything these days.

My kid sent me an overnight package via FedEx a couple of days ago. It wasn’t really time sensitive, but he sent it for morning delivery. Supposed to be on my doorstep at 10 AM. It wasn’t there. He called me at 10:30 or so to ask if I had gotten it. Since I hadn’t, he checked with the shipping place that sent it. They said it would be delivered by noon.

At noon it still hadn’t arrived. He called again. They told him it would be there by 3 PM. At 3 PM there was no package. He calls them back. They tell him it will arrive by the end of the day. He tells them he paid for early morning delivery, so he wants a refund. They give him the refund.

The package finally arrives at around 4 PM.

During all this, I had a call with a friend who owns and operates a giant fulfillment house. She and her husband ship thousands of items per day. Their warehouse is about the size of a Costco store.

I told her about my issue with the package coming from FedEx. She told me FedEx was the worst of all these days in terms of reliability. She said they never, ever use FedEx as they’ve had so many problems with them. She recommends UPS for reliability.

I was stunned, because FedEx built their early reputation on their tagline, which was “If it absolutely, positively needs to be there overnight, use FedEx.” Or something close to that.

So, my advice to you based on my friend’s recommendation is to use UPS if your package absolutely, positively has to get there.

And just a fact of interest. Did you know FedEx started in Little Rock, Arkansas? It did, indeed. Fred Smith, the founder, was looking for a city with an airport that was centrally located in the United States. He picked Little Rock. I have a number of friends and family who worked there.

But as business picked up, Smith met with the city and airport poobahs to see if they would expand the size of the LIttle Rock airport to accommodate the many planes FedEx was going to require. In their wisdom, they decided that FedEx probably was not going to grow as rapidly as Fred Smith said it would, so they turned him down.

Smith ended up moving FedEx 130 miles east to Memphis, where it is headquartered today. Little Rock lost out on a major industry thanks to the small thinking of a tiny coterie of dolts.

So, there you go. A rant, a recommendation, and a history lesson all rolled into one.

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Comments, Polls, and Emails

I received the following in the comments section of last week’s Arrow.

MD and I just spent last weekend at a meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona that was all about the corruption of science. And if there has been a science that has been totally corrupted it is the whole “science” of climate change. The above comment gives me an opportunity to focus on that corruption.

Before I get into the whys and hows of its corruption, let me provide you with a little history.

I’ve lived through a so-called existential threat to civilization myself. I witnessed it first hand. And I bought into it hook, line, and sinker when I was young. And it turned out to be total and complete bullshit.

Before I get to it, I’ve got to tell you that I studied another such existential threat from an earlier time that truly had the potential to be hugely problematic. But it ended up being solved by human ingenuity.

In the waning days of the turn of the 19th century, the world was running out of bird crap. At the time, the world was in the early throes of the industrial age, but still depended upon grain-based agriculture to feed the masses. And it was starting to look grim. Many academics were legitimately projecting mass starvation.

Why?

Because the world was running out of .

Plants require nitrogen to grow, but It has to come from the soil in which the plants grow. Although the atmosphere on earth is composed of ~80 percent nitrogen, that nitrogen cannot be used out of the air by plants. Plants have to extract it from the earth. When crops are planted in one spot, they suck up a large part of the nitrogen in the soil. If farmers plant the next year on the same plot, they don’t get nearly as large a yield due to the depleted nitrogen. If they try a third year, they don’t get much at all.

This understanding led to the idea of crop rotation, so that crops weren’t grown on the same piece of land year after year, and the nitrogen in the soil would replenish.

People used animal waste for fertilizer, but there wasn’t nearly enough. A huge industry developed around the collection of bird guano from the west coast of South America and the shipping of it to Europe. Guano is rich in nitrogen, so it could be used for fertilizer. But the west coast of South America and the islands up and down that coast were becoming rapidly depleted of guano.

As the mountains of this stuff that had been deposited over centuries began to get smaller and smaller, scientists were starting to predict—and legitimately so—that an end was going to be reached, at which point there could well-be mass starvation. It was a true worry.

In the early part of the 20th century a German scientist named Fritz Haber was deliberating on this problem and trying to think of a way to somehow exploit the 80 percent of nitrogen that was just floating around in the air. If that nitrogen could be converted somehow to a form that could be used for agricultural purposes, the existential threat would be solved.

So, he set about trying to figure out how to do it.

After a lot of false starts, he came up with a small contraption that could extract nitrogen from the air and convert it to NH₃ (ammonia), which is essentially fertilizer.

Problem was, his little model that could do this could not be expanded to industrial size to churn out copious amounts of NH₃.

Enter Carl Bosch, another German who was a high-pressure industrial chemist who worked for the giant German company BASF. It took four years of unremitting work from 1909 until 1913 before Bosch created an industrial version of Haber’s little table-top model.

Once Bosch’s work was completed, industrial plants—called Haber-Bosch plants—popped up everywhere. Suddenly, fertilizer could be made at scale, and the threat of starvation disappeared. Both Haber and Bosch were awarded the Nobel prize and the world has been able to grow crops on the same plots since.

I did not live through that crisis, but I have read about it extensively. If you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating part of history, read The Alchemy of Air and Enriching the Earth. The whole enterprise makes for riveting history and shows how human ingenuity can overcome great obstacles.

Now for the existential crisis I lived through.

In the late 1960s a Stanford professor name Paul Ehrlich decided the entire world was going to suffer mass starvation and millions of deaths in pretty short order simply because people were reproducing too rapidly. Among other things, he predicted Great Britain would cease to exist by the 1980s simply because the population growth would outstrip the food supply. And it wasn’t just Great Britain, in his view, the entire world was doomed. He detailed it all in a book titled The Population Bomb.

As silly as all this sounds now, at the time, during my callow youth, I was an Ehrlich devotee. A total fan boy. I went to all his lectures, which were all the same, wherever he was speaking that I could get to. I proselytized everyone I knew and tried to drag them along. At the time. Ehrlich was a staple on Johnny Carson and all the talk shows. I tried not to miss a one.

And I read his book cover to cover. I still have it my ancient yellowed copy, in fact.

I started to reread it just so I could extract some particularly juicy predictions for this doom, but I decided I had wasted enough of my life on Ehrlich’s nonsense, so I abandoned the idea. I did read the short two-page prologue, which I snapped a photo of. It’s below. You can see for yourself the hysterical tone.

A little overwrought, methinks. Sounds a lot like AOC talking about the earth as we know it ending in 12 years.

It’s difficult to believe today the furor this book caused 55 or so years ago. The interesting thing is that Ehrlich had vastly more data leading him to believe all the starvation and die offs he was predicting than climate scientists have now.

Ehrlich had the birth rates for all the countries, he knew the food production figures, and he could extrapolate those to the point where the mouths to feed exceeded the food production. It was all there in black and white.

But, as we know now, it did not come to pass. Europe still exists. But its birth rate is way below the replacement rate. China is in real trouble as its population is in major decline. Just a couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article saying that if the trend continues, for the first time in our history, there will be more people dying than there will be being born in 2033. That’s just eight years from now. If that comes to pass, the US will find itself in a population crisis of a different sort — too few people being born.

Ehrlich couldn’t have been more wrong. And remember, he had accurate data. He simply misinterpreted it. He was in the middle of two phenomenon. First, the post WWII baby boom and the rapid change from a basically agricultural way of life to a city life. Ehrlich assumed—wrongly—that the baby boom would continue. And he failed to recognize that as societies change from agriculturally-based to industrially-based, the birth rate always falls.

After studying one of these supposedly existential crises and living through another, I’m not as inclined to jump on the climate change bandwagon as I was with Ehrlich’s scare.

Before we even get to climate change, let’s change course for just a bit and take a look at what science really is, which MD and I spent last weekend immersed in.

Way back in 1996, the very first page of the first chapter of Protein Power brought up a subject under consideration last weekend.

The paragraph I put in a red rectangle above is a quote from one of my great grandfather’s medical text books. We discussed not our book, but this situation at the meeting last weekend.

We were discussing malaria instead of yellow fever, but the principle is the same.

It was recognized that a lot of people got malaria if they worked or lived around swamps. In those days, it was a reasonable conclusion that swamps, or perhaps the vapors from swamps, were the cause of malaria.

When people avoided swamps, rates of malaria went way down. So there was some predictability to the “science” telling them swamps somehow caused malaria.

Over time, of course, it was discovered that mosquitos were the carriers of malaria, so avoiding mosquitos prevented the disease. It wasn’t swamps, but swamps were a pretty good first approximation, because they were breeding grounds for mosquitos. Avoiding swamps certainly cut down the cases.

Further investigation determined that it wasn’t just any mosquito that carried malaria, but was one specific mosquito only: The Anopheles mosquito.

Finally, scientists determined that it wasn’t even the Anopheles mosquito that actually causes malaria, but instead a tiny parasite called Plasmodium falciparum that spends part of its lifecycle inside the Anopheles mosquito. (There are five different versions of the Plasmodium, but the falciparum causes the most serious disease and deaths.)

Each step in the above path of scientific discovery brought greater predictability. At first, if you just avoided swamps, you had a pretty good chance of avoiding malaria. But as the science became more and more specific about what the cause really was, you could take steps to avoid it completely.

That’s the way science is supposed to work.

Someone makes an observation. A lot of people get malaria when they live or work around swamps. Someone generates a hypothesis. Swamps, or swamp vapors, cause malaria. Then the testing of that hypothesis begins.

Over time, the hypothesis is refined. Ultimately, it reaches great predictive value.

Which is the sine qua non of science. Predictability. In other words, probability.

If you spend time around a swamp, the probability of your coming down with malaria is higher than if you spent time in the desert. But it’s no guarantee you’ll get malaria. If you spend time around a swamp where Anopheles mosquitos are present, your probability of developing malaria is even higher. But if you are around an area where both the Anopheles mosquito and the Plasmodium parasite are found together, your odds really go up.

Unfortunately, we have gotten far from looking at science for its predictability, and have for years been looking at it instead through a lens of statistical analysis. Unfortunately, we’ve been looking at the probability of the data and not the probability of the hypothesis.

Here’s how most studies are done. Let’s say we’re looking for a new cancer chemotherapeutic drug. We get 100 people with cancer, we put 50 of them on the drug and 50 of them on placebo. After three months, we find that six of them on the drug have shown improvement, while only one on the placebo has shown improvement. If we run a typical statistical analysis on these numbers (the data), we may find that the improvement was statistically significant as determined by a p-value of <0.05.

Since there is a statistically significant difference in outcomes, the drug is approved. But would you take it? Given the side effects of cancer therapeutic drugs, would you take one that helped only 6 people out of 50?

The hypothesis that was tested was: does this drug work to beat back cancer? It does for 6 people out of 50. Which means it does not work for 44 people out of 50. In my view, that hypothesis doesn’t really predict much. You would be better off avoiding swamps to prevent malaria than taking this drug to treat cancer.

But, sadly, that’s how science is done these days. Researchers look at the probability of the data instead of the probability of the hypothesis.

The true measure of the scientific validity of a hypothesis is its predictive power. In other words, does the hypothesis correctly predict an outcome? If it does, then it is a valid hypothesis; if it doesn’t, it’s not.

Valid hypothesis may not be the best term. Maybe valuable hypothesis would be better. It is useful. Just like with the initial malaria hypothesis above, a hypothesis becomes more and more valuable as its predictive accuracy increases.

Now, having said all this, let’s look at climate change. Although the New York Times and many, many (too many) news outlets use the term climate change as if it is a truth and not just a hypothesis. When it is, in fact, a hypothesis. The climate changes from place to place and year to year and has since we’ve begun keeping time.

The fall of Rome was probably due to a change in climate. Between A.D. 350 and 370 eastern Asia suffered a drought more severe than any drought recorded in the last 2,000 years. It drove those suffering it south where they displaced the people living there. Who themselves moved south, and ultimately overthrew Rome. Pre-industrial history is rife with stories like this one. Up until just a few years ago, mild Santa Barbara, California suffered the highest temperature ever recorded in the world. The temperature reached 133F in 1859. Cattle died standing in the fields. I can only imagine what journalists would write should that have occurred today. You can bet it would be blamed on climate change.

History is replete with droughts, record snows, and even fires for centuries. Even the fires in Pacific Palisades and Malibu were just one more in a centuries long procession of such fires. If it takes climate change to provoke these fires, what caused the ones back in the 1800s and before?

Delving into the scientific literature on climate change, one finds articles that both confirm and deny. Those who want to finger climate change can muster any number of papers to do so. Same with those who want to pooh pooh it. All that is needed is picking the right papers to make the point one wishes to make.

So, we can’t really tell anything from the scientific literature. Sure, we can decide that those papers making our points are the valid ones, while we trash the others. But is that the best way to decide the issue? I don’t think so.

And let me tell you, people really stretch these days.

For example, a month or so ago I was going through my emails and came upon this one from one of the many medical newsletters to which I subscribe.

Over the past few years there has been an increase in lung cancer in non-smokers, especially women. I know two who have succumbed. One was Sarah Hallberg, another was a female journalist I knew. Since I’ve been intrigued by the situation, I clicked on the link. Here’s what I got.

You can read it for yourself.

Every thing in the world is blamed on climate change. And papers are all over the place about it, so it’s hard to come by valid info by digging into the scientific literature.

So let’s instead look at the predicability of the hypothesis.

First, let’s look at a truly valid hypothesis that has endured the test of time.

In 1664 Isaac Newton was sent home from Cambridge where he was a student because of the plague. He was 22 at the time. Over the next two years he came up with his laws of motion along with discovering calculus and differential equations. And a lot more. He was a busy young man.

Those same laws of motion, which were hypothetical, allow us to predict to the minute when there will be a solar eclipse and where it can be seen anywhere in the world. His hypotheses have tremendous predictive powers. (I understand his laws were improved (very slightly) by Einstein with his special and general theories of relativity, but we still use Newton’s laws to predict eclipses. And send people to the moon.)

Now compare Newton’s hypothesis to any number of climate change hypotheses. Go to any search engine and enter “failed climate change predictions.” Here is one example. You will find countless entries.

Climate change predictions have failed over and over and over again. The hypotheses are rubbish.

Why?

Because climate change predictions are not based on science. They are based on modeling. And those who generate the models make them show what they want them to show. Which in most cases is temperatures screaming upward and ice caps melting, polar bears dying, and all the rest. And it simply hasn’t happened.

How can you model a giant volcanic eruption? Or a massive fire such as the one still going on in California. The number of variables required to make an accurate model are infinite. So people pick a few here and there, then run the model out using yet more approximations, and then, usually the worst case outcome is publicized. And it never comes to fruition.

Which is why I don’t waste a lot of time worrying about climate change. Nor do I blame every bad thing that happens on it.

I spent a lot more time and words than I intended on this essay, mainly because I wanted to make the point about hypotheses being valued because of their predictive abilities. If they don’t predict, they are not good hypotheses.

Obesity is Bifurcated

Well, finally the BMI has officially come a cropper. It’s no longer a valid measurement of obesity. Nor at least is it a valid measurement of what constitutes an unhealthful effect of obesity. Now you can have a BMI of 40, and as long as you don’t have any of the disorders associated with typical obesity, you’re golden.

In the good old days, obesity was defined by the body mass index (BMI). If your BMI was between 25 and 29.5, you were overweight. If over 30, your were declared obese.

Now a new article from The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology has defined the new rules. Obesity shouldn’t be determined by the BMI alone, but by waist-to-hip circumference and other measurements. Which is fine with me as those are more accurate tools to determine the degree of adiposity and its sequeale than is the simple BMI.

But now there are two categories of obesity. One called clinical obesity and another called pre-clinical obesity.

What’s the difference?

Clinical obesity is defined as being obese and having one or more of the health problems commonly associated with obesity, i.e., diabetes, high blood pressure, lipid disorders, fatty liver, etc.

If one is simply obese without any of those issues, then the diagnosis is pre-clinical obesity.

Doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me, but then it shouldn’t.

How did this idea come to pass? The paper tells us.

There is a famous quote out there—I don’t know who said it—that posits: “Science is never done by commission.”

Which is just what happened here.

What makes one person who carries, say, an excess 60 pounds have all kinds of health issues while another person of the same sex, age, and height carries an extra 60 pounds and has no health problems. Other than, of course, dragging around the extra 60 pounds.

It is primarily a function of genetics. How a person is designed to store fat.

We have good fat storage places and bad fat storage places in our bodies. It’s kind of like with houses. Some houses have a lot of storage space and others don’t. Our bodies are the same, and the storage capacity is mainly set by genetics.

You can have a neat, organized house even if you’re a pack rat like I am as long as you have plenty of storage space. You can cram stuff in closets, garages, and attics while your house looks pristine. If you’re a pack rat, and you don’t have all the extra storage space, your house looks like my office or desktop with crap strewn everywhere.

Bodies are the same way. Some of us are endowed with a lot of subcutaneous fat-storage space. And some of us aren’t. Some are in between.

If you have a lot of subcutaneous fat-storage space, you can eat a lot and put on a lot of weight without developing any of the medical problems associated with obesity. I’ve had huge patients come into the clinic to lose weight who have completely normal lab tests, EKGs, and all the rest. They are endowed with a lot of subcutaneous storage space. They can cram fat into these storage depots and not suffer the consequences…until they run out of storage space. Then the trouble begins.

Others who aren’t so genetically endowed, which means most of us, don’t have that advantage.

When we run out of subcutaneous fat storage depots, we start to store excess fat in our viscera. That means inside our abdominal cavities in and around our organs. Fat stuffed into viscera is no bueno. It compromises the organs and increases inflammation. It’s fat where it isn’t supposed to be, and the body treats it like a foreign body—like a big splinter—and sics the immune system on it. People with a lot of visceral fat tend to develop insulin resistance and everything downstream from that.

In my view, that is the difference between clinical obesity and pre-clinical obesity. So I can go along with those definitions despite their being determined by a commission.

But I’m quite sure a number of the 58 “experts” on the committee had other objectives than simply a more accurate way to qualify obesity.

Big Pharma has forever been trying to get obesity medications covered by insurance. Since the obese and the overweight make up the majority of the population, having these folks be able to get their obesity treatment paid for by insurance would open the golden gates for Big Pharma but would devastate the insurance industry.

You just think the homeowners insurance rates are going up after the Pacific Palisades fires. You ain’t seen anything compared to what you’ll see if those with the newly defined “clinical obesity” end up getting obesity treatments covered by insurance. Health insurance will go through the roof.

I would be willing to bet a goodly number of the 58 people on the committee that decided this by consensus are on the payroll of Big Pharma. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

Speaking of insurance…

Good Advice On Homeowners Insurance

I came across this video and thought it was excellent, so I’m passing it along. As some of you may know, MD and I were in our house in Montecito when the Thomas fire scorched the mountains above us and forced us to evacuate for almost two weeks in December of 2017. We got back into our house a little before Christmas, and it was covered in ash and soot. We arranged to get it professionally cleaned, which our insurance company covered.

Then, just a couple of weeks after Christmas on the morning of January 9, a heavy rain came down on the freshly-burned mountains above us. Since there was no plant cover and the clay had been turned to basically ‘galss’ in the ground above as it had burned, the rain mixed with ash flowed down the mountains picking up debris as it went. And when I say debris, I mean large stones. Some were the sizes of a garage. This debris flow tore through Montecito killing 23 people, several of whom we knew, and destroyed hundreds of homes.

Our house was not touched, but two houses away two people were killed and one seriously injured.

Once again, we had to evacuate. This time for almost a month. We, like the lady in the video below, were lucky in that we had another place to go to.

But we had the same battles with the insurance company that she did over the fire damage. And, as her insurance company did to her, ours canceled our policy.

I heard countless horror stories from others in our neighborhood about the ongoing disputes they had with their insurance companies. The lady in the video tells the same tales. By watching it, you will be more prepared should some disaster befall your home. God forbid.

If there are any insurance professionals who would like to add to this or criticize it, have at it in the comments or email me.

My Fasting Experience

As I wrote a few Arrows ago, I decided to test my will power and eschew all the goodies I normally go face down in over Christmas. I was able to do it pretty easily. I’ve been on a pretty rigid ketogenic diet since then, so I decided I would try a three-day water fast.

I am about 15 hours as of this moment from breaking the fast with a bunch of bacon and eggs.

What’s interesting is that my Lumen has been all over the place. This morning it told me I was burning 55 percent fat and 45 percent carb. I hadn’t had anything to eat at all for 36 hours. Last night I whipped out my Keto-Mojo, which I thought I had left in Montecito till my bride informed me it was here.

I was curious to see what my ketone levels might be as I typically have trouble getting into measurable ketosis.

Since the Keto-Mojo comes with both ketone and glucose test materials, I checked both. As it turned out, my blood sugar was 46 mg/dl and my ketones 2.2 mmol/l. Was I ever surprised?! My blood sugars usually run in the 80s to 90s. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos last night of the readings, but the device synched with my phone.

Here are readings from last night as recorded on the Keto-Mojo app on my phone.

I fasted all night, checked my Lumen this morning. It read that I was burning 55 percent fat and 45 percent carb. Hmmm. Unfortunately, I didn’t save a photo of that one.

Here are my two readings—blood sugar and ketones—from this afternoon.

Here they are synched with my phone.

And the Lumen reading, which I did remember to photo.

I am proof—at least to myself—that someone who appears to have difficulty getting into ketosis can really do it if push comes to shove. I’m eager to see what the readings are tomorrow morning before I break the fast. And to see what happens later in the day as I continue to eat strictly ketogenic. Will the blood ketones come down? What about the blood sugar? Who knows? I’ll update next week.

More On Ultra-Processed Foods

MD used the last of a carton of Land-O-Lakes butter and was going to throw it away. I grabbed it and looked at the ingredients. Here’s what I found.

As you can see from my red underline, the butter contains natural flavoring. What on earth kind of flavor would you add to butter? Butter flavor?!?! To make it taste more buttery?

As it turns out, that’s exactly what they do.

I dug into it and discovered that natural flavoring is added to unsalted butter primarily to enhance its taste and provide preservation. The most common natural flavorings in unsalted butter are lactic acid, diacetyl, acetic acid, acetoin, ethyl formate, and/or ethyl acetate. Surprisingly enough, these all fall under the rubric of natural flavors.

How can they be natural flavors?

Because these compounds are typically derived from fermented milk. They are designed to give unsalted butter a more robust, traditional butter taste. Manufacturers use these additives to make unsalted butter more appealing and flavorful, approximating the taste of European-style cultured butter. So since they come from fermented milk, they are “natural flavoring.”

Apparently, modern fast dairy operations cannot naturally age cream, so they add compounds like diacetyl to recreate a more complex butter flavor. So typical. Let’s speed it through, then add flavors to match what it would have tasted like had we done it the traditional way.

MD tells me salted butter doesn’t have natural flavorings because the salt brings out the butter taste. She likes to keep unsalted butter around because, as she says, good cooks never use salted butter. They always add their own salt. She is an excellent cook, so…

She does use salted butter for topping things or even eating by the pat.

As I mentioned last week, I am doing a deep dive on flavorings of foods. So far, I can tell you that Big Food is nuts about flavors. There are so many experiments where flavors are added to foods that make people eat and eat and eat them. Even animals in the wild respond to flavors and consume plants they otherwise wouldn’t.

It’s incredible what flavors can do to one’s appetite. More to come on this. But it is the reason you almost never see a packaged food that doesn’t have “natural flavors” in the ingredient list.

Stay tuned for a lot more on this.

FDA Wants To Put Warning Labels On Foods

A couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about how in its waning hours the Biden FDA had proposed a new labeling rule requiring labels be prominently placed on foods listing the dangers that might lurk within.

What do you suppose those dangers might be?

Here is the proposed label. Take a look.

Getting one out of three correct isn’t all that bad for a government agency. I agree about the added sugars, but totally disagree about the other two.

Most of the studies on sodium are bogus. People can deal with a bit of extra sodium. Hell, people are making a fortune right now selling electrolyte packets that contain a ton of sodium.

The saturated fat is the one that bugs me the most. Which medical specialty would you guess is most down on saturated fat? It has to be the cardiologists, right? Saturated fat clogs your arteries and all that.

But as it turns out, the cardiologists have embraced saturated fat. Or at least the governing body has. Maybe embraced is not the right word. Accepted as not harmful would be a more accurate way of putting it. A couple of years ago, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) published a position paper in which saturated fat was absolved. They pored through the literature and concluded that after many years of demonizing saturated fat there was no there there. No data that it was harmful. So they said, go and eat it.

Yet the FDA still thinks it is harmful. And wants to scare people off by prominently putting it on a label.

What do they think will happen if they do that? Anyone with half a brain can figure that one out. They’ll replace the saturated fat with seed oils. And won’t that be a big improvement? Jesus wept.

Even though the JACC said saturated fat isn’t problematic, I have a different take. In my view, saturated fat is a health food. Maybe part of the driving force behind the obesity epidemic is a lack of saturated fat in the diet. Right about the time everyone started getting fat, the government and everyone else was demonizing saturated fats as being artery clogging. In fact, you almost never heard saturated fat used by itself. It was always referred to as “artery-clogging, saturated fat.”

But what if it were really a health food?

It bears contemplation. I do think it is.

Okay, this thing is approaching Tolstoyian proportions. Off to the Odds and Ends

Odds and Ends

• Why did we start drinking milk? One person’s take on the ancient rise of dairy consumption.

• The habitual attribution of wildfires to climate change somewhat ignores the reality: that actually global wildfire burn has decreased over the past 25 years.

• Over 17,000 doctors sign letter urging Senate to reject RFK Jr. as health secretary. In my view, that is 17,000 reasons to quickly approve him.

• LA’s dreams went up in flames. Politicians are to blame for a shocking lack of preparation.

• Japanese researchers develop method to break down PFAS 'forever chemicals.' If it truly works, let’s hope it can be made to do so at scale.

• Nearly 4,000 seal pups were born on a Norfolk beach near the United Kingdom’s North Sea last year—a record-breaking crop.

• Scientists have uncovered the fossil remains of a tiny feline species smaller than a house cat from an ancient cave in eastern China.

• There is no perfect medicine, says Yale professor. The benefits and harms of any treatment must be carefully considered in order to prescribe the safest, most effective course of action for a patient. That includes the mRNA Covid vaccines.

• We’ve kicked the habit! At least for now. US imports of Saudi oil drop to 277,000 barrels per day, 85% lower than the peak in 2003, and the lowest for 40 years.

• For those who are interested. A deep dive on why Meta dropped its fact checking. It was politically motivated, of course, but also because it never achieved trust or scale.

• New research shows male mosquitos carrying venomous proteins transfer these to disease-spreading females, thus reducing their lifespan and providing a pest control method. What could possibly go wrong?

• Nice discussion as to why a rocket has to hit 25,000 miles per hour to escape from the earth’s gravitational pull.

• The UK’s MI5 (roughly equivalent to the US’s FBI) released a mountain of classified documents on the infamous Cambridge Five, a group of traitors, the most famous of whom was Kim Philby, who spied for the USSR.

• Why do some people get drunk faster than others? And, no, it’s not because they drink faster.

• Clever interactive science lesson. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but if it is reasonably accurate, look at the biomass of plants. All working 24/7 to suck CO₂ out of the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.

• South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was arrested Wednesday morning as a consequence of his declaring martial law a few weeks ago. For which he was first impeached. There needs to be more of this going around.

• A map of all the Japanese ships sunk during WWII. A lot of national treasure sitting at the bottom of the ocean. Ought to make countries think twice before provoking a war.

• NSA releases report showing the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test.

• Some of the world’s first cities were built some 6,000 years ago in what are now Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine. But the cities mysteriously disappeared after 2,000 years.

• Tattoos with much finer lines—0.1-0.2mm—than are typical in modern tats were uncovered on 1,000-year-old mummified individuals.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

This VOTW is nine years old, but I hadn’t seen it until a couple of days ago. Since it is nine years old, you can’t attach it to any current politicians. But I think it is accurate. We have a new administration coming in four days from now. All we can do is hope it will deal with this problem.

Government is regarded differently by various groups of people. The average person fears the government, while the extremely wealthy use it as an ATM account. This is what this short video describes. It shows how the process works. The only thing I would add is that the congress people end up wealthy as well because they can trade stocks in companies they are regulating. They know what laws are going to benefit which companies who are going to benefit from a law that is getting ready to be passed. And they can invest in them before the law passes. If they did this outside congress, they would go to jail just like Martha Stewart did for insider trading. But it is legit for people in congress.

During every political campaign contenders always say they are going to stop congress from doing insider trading. But you never hear it again after the election. But it is the reason that these folks making $177,000 per year always come out millionaires.

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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