The Arrow #122

Hello everyone.

Greetings from Montecito. Apologies that we’re a little late today. Back on California time.

Our hectic travel is over for a bit. Still have a trip to Scotland and Ireland in September and a jaunt to Australia and New Zealand in October ahead of us. But for now, we can settle in a bit and tend to other things. Which include finishing Protein Power 2.0.

Speaking of which…

Protein Power 2.0 Final Cover Design

Thanks to everyone who participated in the poll and to those who emailed us directly. The big winner was #5 on the poll.

Here is what the cover looks like right now, which is pretty close to the final design.

The only thing that might change is the wording under the PP 2.0. We may fiddle with that a bit.

And I’m not crazy about the heart-shaped graphic. I like the heart-shaped part of it, but I would much rather have a big steak where the salmon is. But the graphic we have is the one that comes the closest. Having been involved in numerous food photo shoots for our sous vide business, I know how expensive it is to do a photo shoot for something like this. Every time I think about it, it makes the salmon look more and more appealing. And, besides, as the bride reminds me, salmon is good protein, too. And there’s salmon, beef, chicken, pork, eggs all represented.

Anyway, that’s how the cover looks now and how it will likely go up (or at least close to this) when we put the book up for pre-sale on Amazon. If you’ve got any thoughtfully recommended changes—or know of a graphic like this with all meat and eggs and cheese—reply by email.

The Connected Class Redux

Anheuser-Busch

I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying the whole Bud Light fiasco. Problems are compounding at an almost exponential rate for Anheuser-Busch (AB). And all because they didn’t focus on their core business.

MD and I have a friend who runs a good size company that contracts with AB. In discussing this fiasco, the friend told us that dealing with AB has become a nightmare over the past couple of years. The staff, which had before been professional, has been replaced with young people much like the woman who got them into this mess. And not just one group of them. Apparently there is a lot of turnover there, and one group of woke millennial idiots is forever being replaced by another.

The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday about the escalating disaster consuming AB. Years ago, someone came up with the idea that AB should put born-on dates on their beers, so they could advertise them as being fresher than those of their competitors. Now that sales of both Bud Light and Budweiser have plummeted, distributors all over the country are being saddled with huge inventories of beers with rapidly aging born-on dates.

What to do? What to do?

According to the WSJ piece, the honchos at AB instructed their distributors to give cases of the beers to their employees. I’m sure the specter of a secretly filmed video of zillions of cans of brew being poured down the drain loomed large in their thinking.

It’s been brutal.

This is what happens when you fail to understand your customer base.

Other than firing the clueless woman who ramrodded the ad campaign through and firing the guy who hired her (and, for all I know, firing the person who hired him), they appear to be wallowing in the same pit of cluelessness.

“We’re in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”

What an inane statement. It punches all the feely good buttons, but isn’t grounded in reality. There are groups you are extremely unlikely to bring together over a beer, so why try?

Now, by trying to be all things to all people, poor AB is getting it from all sides.

According to The Hill, Jay Brown, a honcho at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, wrote a letter to AB taking issue with how AB is responding to the growing controversy.

Which means, of course, that now those LGBTQ+ ers who were formerly Bud Light drinkers are abandoning the brand in droves. According to one worried distributor

I’m holding my sides.

AB has obviously revved up its ad campaign, but I’m not sure ads like this one are going to make a big difference. Would you rush out to buy a Bud Light after watching this one?

Ol’ Ben Franklin said it in the 1700s. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

In AB’s case, it is worth about a ton of cure.

Daleep Singh

In a piece titled The Peter Principle, one of my favorite substacks, Doomberg, published an article about a functionary in the Biden administration.

When I read about people like this guy, I always think of two things. First is Nassim Taleb’s characterization of such people as what he calls IYI, which stands for intellectual yet idiot. I’m sure these folks are pretty smart in an academic sort of way, but just because you can test well, get good grades, and get into and out of prestigious universities doesn’t mean you have good sense.

The second thing these kinds of people remind me of is one of my all-time favorite books: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, which I’ve recommended before here. I bought this book years ago on a whim when I saw it on a table in a bookstore in Paris. It’s turned out to be a favorite because it is so perceptive. It encompasses what the author defines as the five basic laws of human stupidity, the first of which is that “Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals among us.” And the second, “The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”

The second law especially defines this sort of person. There are Nobel laureates who are stupid. And people from prestigious centers of learning.

So, what did Daleep Singh do to distinguish himself?

As Doomberg continues…

So Mr. Singh set all these wheels into motion. And just as Doomberg predicted in an earlier piece

It’s basic Economics 101. Supply and demand.

If supply goes down while demand stays the same, prices go up.

At the end of the Trump presidency, the United States was a net energy exporter.

On the first day of his administration, President Biden shut down construction on the Keystone pipeline and has worked since to make fracking as difficult as possible. Which is all good in the eyes of the Climate Change crowd, but is bad in terms of oil prices. Which predictably went up and up.

So even though Putin has had to jump through a few hoops to get his oil to market, he’s getting it there at a much higher price point, so although he’s exporting less, he’s making more. And our policies helped him do that.

And those of us here in the US are paying more at the pump. To top it off, the Biden administration, fearing the political repercussions as the midterms drew near, drained our petroleum strategic reserves in an effort to lower prices here.

Our best bet to have hamstrung Putin would have been to frack, baby frack. Produce all the gas and oil we could and flood the market with it. Prices would have dropped like a rock, and Putin would have been in a bad way. He would have to pump more just to keep even. And the rest of us would have enjoyed cheap gas.

Where does the oil Putin manages to ship go?

Doomberg shares a Reuter’s report with highlights:

Then Doomberg asks, “What has India been doing with this newfound abundance of raw materials?”

In addition to meeting its domestic needs, the country has also stepped up its exports of refined products like diesel. Which country has been experiencing a diesel crisis because of a lack of refining capacity? The US, of course!

From Bloomberg with emphasis included:

And what happened to Daleep Singh?

Okay, one more, then I’ll quit. I promise.

Jennifer Granholm

This one I absolutely went ape about when I heard it. It truly beggars belief. But Doomberg (once again) takes a more refined take on it than my Southern redneck, Scots Highlander blood would allow.

Incompetence or malice? This question is consistently posed to us by readers responding to the staggering idiocy of our political class, especially as it pertains to energy policy. Perverse though it might sound, many would be more comfortable if the unworkable policies and unscientific nonsense emanating from our elected officials were part of some dark and purposeful criminal conspiracy. This, with hope as a concession, offers the possibility that the source coordinates of the enemy might eventually face discovery – a necessity for ejecting “it” from the captain’s chair. The pervasiveness of the alternative is too scary to ponder.

The writers at Doomberg then go on to quote another of my favorite Substacks bad cattitude with what they call the “greatest run on sentence in Substack history.”

Back to Doomberg:

This was one of my favorite El gato malo pieces, too. I particularly liked this graphic contained within. It’s funny, but how many people who know better take this ‘Let’s just try this to see what happens’ attitude? More than you would expect (see book on stupidity above). And many of them are in government where they often damage other peoples’ fortunes, but are immune from economic punishment themselves.

The topic of this Doomberg piece (who perfectly exemplifies that of which El gato malo wrote) is Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of the Department of Energy. She, in the words of the Doomberg writers “declared her candidacy for Rube of the Year™ before the Senate Armed Services committee (emphasis added throughout):”

Although Doomberg doesn’t cut her any slack, I kind of do. She’s a political appointee. If your president (or his puppet master) comes up with something as idiotic as this one has, then you’ve sort of got to go along with it publicly even if you think it’s total idiocy.

In all my watching of politics, I’ve never seen an underling not try to put a good face on commands from above, no matter how moronic.

In the good old days, people put in this position would simply resign saying something along the lines of, I love this president, but I disagree with him about this, so the only honorable choice I have here is to resign. Which is basically what Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense did with Trump. But he’s the only one I’ve seen do this in forever.

This notion of bringing the entire military to go electric by 2030 is insane.

When I saw Biden say this on video, I thought he was talking about just the non-combat vehicles. The cars they use to transport generals to the airport and stuff like that.

But according to Doomberg, who listens to these things carefully…

Even getting all “non-tactical assets” electrified would be a huge, and probably disastrous, undertaking. But getting “every vehicle” climate friendly…

Of course, Biden shoots his mouth off to play to a particular audience, so maybe he doesn’t really mean “every vehicle.”

If he didn’t, I’m sure Jennifer Granholm would have known he didn’t really mean “every vehicle” and could have corrected what he said. But she didn’t. And if she didn’t know whether what he said was correct or not, then that’s an even worse failure. If you’re an underling to someone who is a walking gaffe machine, you’ve got to be on your toes.

Doomberg discusses at length what this would mean. I encourage you to read the entire piece (which is behind kind of a pricey paywall), but I’ll focus on just one aspect: The M1 Abrams Tank.

And that’s the weight in addition to the 60 metric tons the tank weighs minus the 1.6 metric tons of petroleum its fuel tank holds.

You get the picture. Highly impractical.

Does no one think these days?

On to less depressing things

Deaths from Heart Disease on the Decline

See, that’s a lot less depressing.

A poster presentation at the American College of Cardiology’s (ACC) annual scientific meeting in March showed that deaths from heart disease have fallen over the last 20 years up to 2020 [Bold emphasis below mine].

87/100k to 39/100k is a substantial drop in deaths. And it is indeed good news.

But this press release I think gives more credit to cardiologists for this decline than is deserved.

First, they say

A statement with which I concur 100 percent.

But then they go on to say…

If you smoke, quitting smoking is the single best thing you can do to prevent a heart attack. Doesn’t mean you won’t have one, but it significantly reduces the odds. Before people started smoking in huge numbers circa WWI, heart attacks were almost unheard of. They happened, but were rare.

So, I totally agree re the stopping smoking.

But then comes the bit about managing cholesterol. Which is code for taking statins. Which, as I’ve repeated till I’m blue in the face, prevent deaths from heart disease (and only by a tiny, tiny amount) in men under 65 who have already had a heart attack. For men under 65 who haven’t had a heart attack, or men over 65 irrespective of heart attack status, or women in general, they don’t do squat.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at this segment from a Joe Rogan interview with my friend Dr. Aseem Malhotra (a UK Cardiologist of note) about statins.

I think the ACC is giving itself a little too much credit for bringing down the deaths from heart disease.

How many times have you heard the American Heart Association and/or the ACC go on and on about smoking the way they do about cholesterol? They mention stopping smoking, of course, but they don’t dwell on it like they do cholesterol, because there are no drugs to make you stop smoking.

People have somehow gotten the message, however, as smoking is way down. You can see from this graphic from American Lung Association that other than a little blip in youth smoking in the 1990s the habit has been in steady decline. I suspect this is the primary reason deaths from heart attacks have fallen so precipitously. Not the ministrations of my brother physicians, however well intentioned.

If you go to the link for the graphic above and click on the various data points, you can see that smoking has dropped off by a substantial amount between 1999 and 2020, the years of the deaths from heart disease study. But, more accurately, they dropped even more from 1970 to 1990, the time period most of the smokers would have started who are having heart attacks now.

In neither case have they dropped quite as much as deaths from heart disease, so we can give medical care a bit of the credit. But, in my view, most credit should be given to whatever it was that got people to quit smoking.

One ominous finding did come out of this otherwise happy report on the decline of deaths from heart disease.

Hmmm. Let’s see. Did anything out of the ordinary happen in 2020? My bet is that when the data comes in for the years 2021 through 2025, we will see an increase in deaths from heart disease. That’s my prediction.

Covid Highlights

MD just sent me this article, and I couldn’t help but belly laugh when I read it. [Which is what she was doing when she read it.] The irony is so sweet. If this were in a TV show, no one would believe it.

The CDC had its first meeting open to the public in four years. And 35 people—so far—have come down with Covid.

Reading this inspired me to put together a couple of graphs I had come across in two separate publications to see if there were any conclusions to be drawn.

The first publication is the Covid vaccination data from the CDC.

The overlay is from the Financial Times data on Covid deaths the world over. This data was gathered by Johns Hopkins. I set the start dates the same.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to the efficacy of the vaccines.

Weight Loss in the Elderly

A study just came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) titled “Associations of Change in Body Size With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality Among Healthy Older Adults” with the conclusion that

Zoë Harcombe had a great review of this article in her newsletter this week. Some of her clients were concerned that losing weight at an older age might cause them to die earlier. Zoë, as usual, did a nice job of getting to the heart of the matter.

I want to hit it from a little different perspective.

As Zoë points out, there are a couple of different kinds of weight loss. Loss from excess fat an overweight person is trying to shed. And weight loss that happens as a consequence of disease. They are two different animals.

If an elderly individual (or any individual, for that matter) is losing weight without making any effort to do so, that situation bears checking out. It could be that the weight loss is coming about as a result of cancer, diabetes, or a handful of other issues.

If, on the other hand, an elderly person, who is overweight, is losing weight on a diet, the situation is completely different. This weight loss, far from being dangerous or life threatening, is actually healthful. And should be encouraged.

My take on the situation is that people who are older should carry a little extra weight. Not be obese, but not be teenage thin, either.

The reason is that elderly people have a greater chance of being hospitalized for some kind of life-threatening or non-life-threatening condition than do younger people. And when you go into the hospital—despite the crappy food on offer—you almost always lose weight. Here’s Zoë’s story of what happened to her own mother.

The problem with losing weight in the hospital if you are thin—even if you’re a youth and bulked up—is that you lose mainly muscle. When you are young, it’s fairly easy to regain muscle mass. Not so when you’re over 30. And the more over 30 you are, the more difficult it is.

You don’t want to go into the hospital able to do all the things you like to do, then come out frail. It takes a ton of work to get un-frailed.

So, it’s nice to have a little padding as you age, so that doesn’t happen. With emphasis on the word “little.” Little doesn’t mean 50 pounds.

If you like being thin, the other option you have is to do some kind of resistance training and keep your protein intake high. If you do that consistently, you’ll build muscle mass. And if you end up in the hospital for a bit, you won’t come out frail. You’ll lose some muscle, but if you have a fair amount going in, it won’t be so bad.

Press reports on papers such as this one tend to imply that losing weight in the elderly is a bad thing. Something, in fact, that could kill you. Nothing could be farther from the truth…as long as you have a lot of excess weight to lose. Lose it, and you’ll be the better for it. And build some muscle. It will take work, but do it.

Carrying extra weight has a lot of downsides, but a couple of advantages. First, it makes your bones stronger. And, second, it actually gives you more muscle mass. You have to have more muscle to lug around the extra weight. And the extra weight puts pressure on your bones, which makes them thicker and stronger.

When you decide to lose weight, you want to keep the good parts—the strong bones, lean organs, and extra muscle—while getting rid of the bad parts: the extra fat.

In my view, the best way to do that is with a good quality low-carb, high-protein diet with some good fat thrown in.

Which brings me to the next section about which I am unbelievably excited.

Longevity and Natural Selection

I’m just going to hit the high points here, because I am just starting to dip my toe in these waters. Expect a lot more in weeks to come.

I’ll start off with a question.

How would you like to quit aging?

There is good news and bad news in the answer.

You may be able to quit aging. That’s the good news. But you can’t start until you’re already old. That, obviously, is the bad news.

Which brings me to some advice I got from a guidance counselor while I was in medical school. For whatever reason, I decided I wanted to play the violin. Since I learned to play the guitar in high school, and since the violin was a stringed instrument, I figured I could be on stage within just a few months. Well, the violin is a stringed instrument, but it doesn’t have frets. And, as I found out all too quickly, it is hellishly difficult to play well. And takes hours of practice.

I knew the guidance counselor, not because I needed guidance, but because he was one of my SCUBA students. And he was a fan of classical music. We ended up talking about violin playing and my struggles with it along with all my time constraints because of medical school. I was whining because I couldn’t devote all the time I wanted to devote to fiddling, which had become a great passion for me. I made the comment that if I couldn’t practice any more than I could, given my brutal schedule, I wouldn’t be able to play the violin the way I wanted to play it until I was 50.

He said, you’re going to be 50 anyway.

I said, Say what?

He said, If you live long enough, you’re going to hit 50. So what you do today doesn’t have any bearing on that. You’ll turn 50 no matter what. So why not turn 50 being able to play the violin well?

I thought it was a profound statement. But it didn’t keep me going on the violin, which, sadly, I ultimately abandoned.

So, the idea that you can’t quit aging till you are aged might not appeal to you at age 25, but I can assure you it will when you are approaching old age.

The concepts of evolutionary biology are a little difficult to grasp as the language is different than what I’m used to. But they are truly exciting.

I read a paper in the journal PLoS about some amazing fruit fly experiments that I haven’t been able to quit thinking about since.

Now, I’m not a big fan of experiments with animals, because they don’t always translate to humans. So, how did I get so carried away with experiments with fruit flies? What possible relevance do they have to human health?

That’s the exciting thing about evolutionary biology. It acts on all living things. It doesn’t involve the reductive type of medicine all doctors learn. All biological scientists and physicians learn about how organs and systems work, and how the individual cells in those systems work, and even how the organelles inside the cells work. And even the molecules that flow through the organelles.

What we don’t learn is Darwinian medicine and how natural selection molds and shapes all those systems, organs, organelles, etc. And the understanding of that can revolutionize medicine just as Einstein’s equation E=MC2 revolutionized physics.

In the PLoS paper, evolutionary biologist Michael Rose and his team from University of California at Irvine performed a long-term study on the effects of natural selection on fruit flies. The outcome of the study was incredible.

Here’s what they did.

They captured a bunch of fruit flies from the wild in Massachusetts. These particular fruit flies fed from rotting apples and had since the 17th century. Since a fruit fly lives for ~40 days, this is equivalent to the Paleo diet for fruit flies. The researchers collected zillions of these flies and continued to feed them on the rotted apple fare.

They then took their offspring and fed them on another diet that was more comparable to what we could consider an agricultural diet. These flies were fed on bananas, which was a new food for them. These flies were then kept on this diet for years, which made it similar in generations to the amount of time we humans have been on agricultural diets.

Finally, the researchers took the offspring of these flies and put them on a diet they designed to be similar to a highly novel diet based on oranges and designed to replicate today’s highly processed foods.

Here is a graphic showing the three diets and the generations on each.

Once they had established populations on these diets, they began to test the flies using a fly parameter for health called PxMx, which I don’t entirely understand since I have just started reading in this field. As time goes on, I’ll be able to explain it to you better.

What they discovered is shown in the graphic below.

The red line above represents this PxMx of those flies on the Paleo apple diet. The blue line shows the flies on the agricultural banana diet. Early on health-wise they are about the same. The forces of natural selection work quickly to adapt those flies in the reproductive age to the diet. But when they get past that age, their health diminishes more quickly than those on the Paleo apple diet.

When they compared the agricultural banana diet to the modern processed food diet, they found the following.

Those flies on the processed food diet were less healthy early on than those on the banana diet, but they both ultimately declined at the same rate after a point.

Part of Rose’s paper is showing that waiting till later in life to have children makes a big positive difference in terms of the effects of natural selection. Agricultural flies that have been kept from breeding till later in life seem to do well on an agricultural diet. Better, in fact, than they would do on a Paleo fly diet. But even then as they get older, they do better on a Paleo or ancestral diet.

You can see the red line go above the blue line at the later stages. The conclusion to all this from an evolutionary biology perspective is that humans who have a long history of an agricultural diet can do well on an agricultural diet until their later years. Once they’ve got some age on them, then switching to a Paleo or ancestral diet will keep them healthier.

It’s their ancestral genes whispering to them from the pre-agricultural days of their millennia on the Paleo diet.

I’m sorry that I don’t have the tools to explain this to you better than I have at present. But I’ve become so excited since I started reading about all this a few days ago that I had to share. Next week I’ll get into how age can be vastly extended.

Believe me, you’ll hear a lot about evolutionary biology in days to come.

Video of the Week

I had a different video set up for this week, but it will have to be put off till next. One of our favorite singers/songwriters, Gordon Lightfoot, died this past week. MD and I have spent hours listening to Gordo, as we called him.

Years ago, we learned he was scheduled to appear at Robinson Auditorium in Little Rock. We immediately grabbed tickets as that venue was where the symphony and other more sophisticated music was featured and only about 2500 seats max. All the rock bands went to Barton Coliseum, a much rowdier, bigger venue. We were thrilled we would be able to see Gordo in a more intimate place.

We got there, got to our seats, and we were two of just a handful of people there. By the time the concert started, the house was maybe half full of people, so it ended up being a lot more intimate than we had anticipated. It was a perfect concert. Despite the lack of anything approximating a full house, Gordo gave his best. And the crowd was totally mellow. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended. MD agrees.

He is one of the few entertainers I’ve ever seen who sounded live just like they do on their studio cuts.

Here he is playing one of my faves. RIP Gordo.

And just to lighten things up, here is a video of what I would do if I were ever to work in an amusement park. Maybe not the first day, but sooner or later…

Here is the Twitter link. I’ll be glad when this dispute between Twitter and Substack goes away, and I can embed these again. Enjoy!

https://twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1653350414518210569?s=20

Okay, that’s it for today. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next week with more evolutionary biology.

Sorry this one was a little late. I forgot I was on California time.

And, finally, don’t forget to take a look at what our sponsors have to offer. Dry Farm Wines, HLTH Code, and Precision Health Reports.