The Arrow #159

Hello friends.

Greetings from Dallas.

Where it has been bitterly, brutally cold for the past five or six days. Warmed up a little today, but still cold enough. As I write these words, it’s about 35F, which may not seem like much if you’re in the frozen north, but it is cold for Dallas. The 10F it was a couple of days ago was really cold for Dallas.

Okay, I want to start out with something today that I’ve been pondering for a bit. It came as a huge shock to me when I came across this. It has nothing to do with nutrition and really involves politics only peripherally. But I think it is extremely important.

Justice For All?

I want to start this section by saying that I have a real anti-authoritarian streak in me. It’s inherent because I came from Borderer stock. If you don’t know what a Borderer is, read Steel Bonnets by George MacDonald Fraser, one of my favorite fiction authors. Steel Bonnets is his non-fictional account of the Border reivers, the untamed folks who fought for years along the border between Scotland and England. They were so fierce and troublesome that they got run out of Scotland and England and took up in Ireland. In due course, their rowdy ways got them run out of Ireland. They are the Scots-Irish who came to Appalachia, from where many of them migrated through Tennessee, Illinois, and down through Missouri where they ended up in the Ozark Mountains. Where I grew up. Reared by Borderers.

So I come by my anti-authoritarian bent honestly. I’ve got an instinctive distrust of the police. I’ll hasten to say I don’t mean all cops; there are good cops, and I know some of them personally. In fact, I’m related to a few. But on the other side of it, I’ve had maybe 15 interactions with ‘the police’ over the course of my life, and at least 10 of them were unpleasant. And that’s just the US police of one form or another. That doesn’t count the police interaction I had in Berlin about ten years ago, which ended up getting the US Embassy involved. And in which I ultimately triumphed. That one is a story for another day.

Before you think I’m so anti-cop that I would vote for defunding the police, I can assure you I would not. The police are a necessary adjunct to a civil society. Without them, there would be chaos. I just wish the various police departments would do a better job in screening out those who have no business being cops.

Along with my anti-authoritarian genes, I have a firm belief that many of the people who seek to become police officers are the very people who shouldn’t be allowed to come within a country mile of a badge and gun. In my view, most of those who want to be in the police are much like those who want to be on condo boards or homeowners’ association boards. They are often the very people who you don’t want to have there. The people who should be on the boards, don’t want to have anything to do with them.

So based on my inborn mistrust of the police (or any authoritarians), I always jump to the defense of anyone the police hassle. So, when I saw the tapes of the Derek Chauvin-George Floyd interaction, I was instantly on Floyd’s side. I figured anything Chauvin got was good enough for him. Despite my genetic dislike of the police, I did feel the other three cops kind of got screwed. But I didn’t lose much sleep over it.

Recently, a documentary about the whole George Floyd situation called The Fall of Minneapolis came out. I did not watch it because I don’t like documentaries on controversial subjects. Documentaries always show via careful editing exactly what the producers want to show, and they make you believe what the producers want you to believe. As a consequence, I almost never watch them. When I do, I try to figure out what the producer wants me to believe. And then believe the opposite. Again, the anti-authoritarian in me.

Then I saw a podcast with Glenn Loury, one of my favorite podcasters. Glenn had on John McWhorter, a regular. Glenn Loury is an economics professor at Brown University; John McWhorter is a columnist from the New York Times. Both are black, both hate Donald Trump, both were all in on the conviction of Derek Chauvin for murder. Though both of them are quasi-liberal—McWhorter more so than Loury—they aren’t far-left liberal. And they both have good sense.

The entire podcast was devoted to how their minds were changed by watching The Fall of Minneapolis. And I don’t mean changed just a little. I’m talking a complete 180. They were outraged. I know these guys are smart, so I wondered how they couldn’t see that the documentary was designed to show them the side the producers wanted them to see. How could they be so flim-flammed?

I decided to watch the documentary myself, but before I got around to it, Loury and McWhorter had posted another podcast. This one with the two people who made the documentary. At the start of the podcast, Glenn said YouTube (where his podcasts appear) refused to show the entire show unless they cut it. They ended up having to cut about half of it to satisfy YouTube.

The fact that YouTube censored their show made The Fall of Minneapolis catnip to me. I had to watch it and did so immediately.

Now that I have watched it, I see why they changed their minds. I changed mine, too.

I don’t see how any thinking person could watch the documentary and not come away with a changed mind. Assuming he/she started with my anti-Chauvin (anti-police in general) bias.

The documentary shows all the video the mainstream media didn’t show. And it laid out in stark detail three of the seminal events involved that the mainstream media never reported and the judge wouldn’t allow to be brought up in any of the trials. These three things were all exculpatory. But were disallowed. And believe me, they weren’t minor issues.

The Fall of Minneapolis includes all the body cam video footage of the officers involved, which we never saw on mainstream media. It includes the autopsy report, which concludes George Floyd a) had a fatal amount of fentanyl in his blood, and b) had no signs of asphyxia. Neither of which we heard about from mainstream media. The documentary shows that Derek Chauvin followed the protocol exactly as described in the Minneapolis police training manual. And body cam video proves he was not kneeling on Floyd’s neck. It shows another earlier arrest of George Floyd in which he acted the same as he did in his final video performance. And it shows a major snafu in the EMT dispatch that costs a lot of critical time, although the autopsy results indicate Floyd would have died anyway had the EMT unit arrived immediately. And, most damning, a close up video from the body cam shows exactly how Floyd ended up with so much fentanyl on board.

And, believe it or not, this was just the tip of the iceberg of what was going on. It’s obvious in viewing this documentary that Chauvin and the other officers were sacrificial lambs.

In all great man-against-the-masses movies, one person of integrity stands against the mob and wins. In this case, there was no one with integrity to stand alone against this travesty. The trial judge, the appellate judges, the media, even the Chief of Police in Minneapolis all cravenly caved to the mob.

As you will see, if you watch the video, Chauvin followed the procedure he had been taught to restrain an agitated, drug-addled person while waiting for the EMTs to arrive. The police training manual gives explicit instructions as to how to do it, illustrations included, and Chauvin followed them to the letter. Yet the judge would not allow this manual to be entered as evidence in the trial.

Along with every other cockup in this whole disgraceful affair, the jurors were intimidated. They knew what would happen to them if they found Chauvin not guilty. They had to brave a huge surly mob surrounding the courthouse every day as they came to trial. This is definitely the kind of trial that needed a venue change. As it was, the deck was totally stacked against Chauvin, yet the judge refused a change of venue.

You may watch The Fall of Minneapolis and come away from it with a different view than I do, but I really doubt it.

Here is the order in which I watched all the videos. First, the original podcast with Loury and McWhorter.

The second podcast is the one YouTube refused to carry unless it was edited to conform to what the twits who run YouTube wanted it to show. You’ll have to watch it on Loury’s Substack.

Here is the version YouTube wants you to see. It’s about half as long as the actual podcast video you can watch at the link above. The first couple of minutes of the video below are of Glenn describing his interaction with the folks at YouTube.

Of course, there is no way in the world YouTube would carry The Fall of Minneapolis, so you’ll have to watch it on Rumble. I linked to it above, but here is the link again.

I urge you to watch it, if for no other reason than to give you an alternative view to that presented by the mainstream media. I will be surprised if you are anything less than as outraged as Loury, McWhorter, and I are about it. And everyone else I know who has taken the time to watch it.

It is an anti-civics lesson. It shows how everything can go remarkably wrong in a country in which there is a rule of law and folks are supposedly innocent until proven guilty.

The Latest on Fauci

Dr. Anthony Fauci underwent questioning for two days in a closed, but transcribed, hearing in the House. Here is a summary as reported by Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) after day one of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s two-day, 14-hour transcribed interview:

Here is the report from the second day of testimony starting with commentary by Chairman Wenstrup (R-Ohio):

In my view, Fauci did us all a big favor with all his dissembling. According to him—at least as quoted above—all his shenanigans ended up creating “vaccine hesitancy for years to come.” I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

As I’ve written here multiple times, I was all in on vaccines for my entire career. Fortunately for me, I didn’t get many vaccines. I had two smallpox vaccines, a polio vaccine, and a couple of tetanus shots. That’s it. Most people of my generation had the same. Our kids had the full complement of vaccines available at the time, but fortunately they are all old enough to have had their vaccines before the 1986 law signed into effect by Reagan that prevented lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. That law opened the floodgates for a ton more vaccines to be developed. Fortunately, our kids escaped that. But, unfortunately, not all our grandkids. Some were vaxxed to the max in their early years.

Fauci’s behavior during the pandemic is what drove me to learn more about vaccines. I began to read everything I could get my hands on. The three books that really changed my thinking were Turtles All the Way Down, Dissolving Illusions, and Expired. Turtles All the Way Down, written by a group of Israeli academics, taught me how crappy the studies on vaccines really are. From Dissolving Illusions I learned the history of vaccines and the natural history of the diseases they were designed to protect against. In virtually all cases, by the time the vaccines were developed, the diseases they were produced to immunize against were already in decline. Expired made me realize how futile it is to try to protect anyone against an aerosol-spread virus, which can travel thousands of miles. It showed the idiocy—which Fauci copped to—of maintaining six feet of social distancing. And mask mandates.

I have had the benefit of being a long-time member of the Paleopathology Society, which was ramrodded by Eve Cockburn, who had taken over from her husband Aiden Cockburn upon his death. Aiden Cockburn, whom I never met as he had already died before I joined in the late 1980s, was the person who realized and reported on the fact that the natural history of infectious agents was to become less lethal and more infectious over time. They want to survive and prosper as much as we do. If they kill their host, they kill themselves. So it is logical that over time only the ones that are a bit less lethal end up surviving to reproduce or replicate. Nirvana for an infectious disease agent is to be totally innocuous, but highly contagious, which is the evolutionary path of them all. Had I not met Eve Cockburn, it’s not likely I would have read her husband’s work.

When Covid came along and I started hearing all the BS Fauci and others were slinging, it was based on Aiden Cockburn’s work that I knew they were full of it.

Okay, here is Wenstrup’s bullet-point summary of the second day of Fauci’s testimony.

Let’s look at the responses in bold above in reverse order.

First, I thought it was documented that Fauci visited the CIA. I know that at least six CIA agents were paid to reverse their opinion that, based on their in-depth investigations, a lab leak was a strong probability. I always assumed Fauci’s visit was the driving force behind this payoff.

Second, Fauci has publicly denied that he had anything to do with vaccine mandates. He’s emphatically said that he simply laid out the ‘facts’ on Covid, and multiple institutions initiated the mandates on their own. Here he apparently admits to it where universities are concerned. Which is insane. Universities are filled with people—students—who are at the absolutely least risk for developing serious symptoms of Covid. Infecting kids of all ages is the best way to develop herd immunity, which far from being the dangerous heresy it was billed as would probably have been the end of Covid. Now, thanks to the mandated vaccines, which have encouraged viral mutation, we’re still confronted with new strains.

Finally, I’m sure Fauci was instrumental in getting the media on his side in all this. At the time, he was the media darling. You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing him interviewed. The result of his own “ideological bullshit” combined with his lust for media coverage and, doubtless, financial gain ended up having us all constantly bombarded as shown below:

I hope we never let ourselves be hoodwinked by these shysters again. They will try, so let’s not fall for it.

More Enlightenment on Ultra-Processed Foods

I hope everyone isn’t getting tired of hearing about ultra-processed foods (UPF) in The Arrow. I am becoming more and more fascinated with the subject by the day. And I’ve been doing my own customer research on UPF and have discovered that all kinds of additives are in almost every commercially prepared food.

Plus, I kind of misinterpreted Kevin Hall’s study on UPF, which is really the only RCT I could find.

According to Chris van Tulleken, the author of Ultra-Processed People, Kevin Hall thought the whole idea of UPF causing problems was crazy. As CvT puts it,

As the interchange between the two of them continued, Hall related the conversation that triggered his study.

According to van Tulleken, Hall said he had numerous conversations with different folks about UPF and thought they were all kind of woo woo. So he decided to do a study to prove them wrong.

The fact that Hall was trying to disprove the idea that UPF were problematic is what makes the experiment so valuable. Far too many people run experiments to prove their own hypotheses and set the experiment up to do so. When researchers try to disprove something and it blows up in their faces, that data is much more valuable. At least in my opinion.

You can read in detail about the different NOVA group classifications here, but just to make it simple, here in abbreviated form are what they are.

NOVA group 1 are unprocessed foods. An apple, a steak, an ear of corn. Green beans, peas, a sliced tomato.

NOVA group 2 are salt, butter, sugar, vinegar, etc. Basically spices you would find in the typical home kitchen. Group 2 foods are usually not eaten by themselves, but are used in typical home preparation of Group 1 foods.

NOVA group 3 foods are canned vegetables, canned fish, fresh breads, cheese, things made from Group 1 foods with Group 2 foods added using various cooking and preservation techniques.

NOVA group 4 foods are not modified foods but formulations made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods and additives, with little if any intact Group 1 food. These are the foods usually found in boxes or cans with a long list of chemical-sounding ingredients at the bottom of the ingredients list.

Hall and his team recruited 20 subjects—10 males and 10 females—to live in the NIH clinic for four weeks. The subjects would act as their own controls with half starting the UPF diet and the other half starting with the non-UPF diet. At two weeks, they would switch and go on the opposite diet for the final two weeks.

I have a little bit of an issue with how they did this in that there was no run in to the study in which everyone ate the same diet for, say, a week before, so they all started from the same place. Nor was there a washout period between the two diets; the subjects just moved from one diet to the next.

Hall admits this in the body of the paper describing the study. He said he wanted to minimize the chance for dropouts. And I agree with him. If you sent these people home after the first two weeks, I guarantee all of them wouldn’t come back. And it would have made the study more expensive to house and feed them for a week or two washout period.

Plus, I suspect Hall figured the study was going to show little to no difference between the groups, so why go to all that expense.

It was difficult to create diets that were calorically equal and had the same macronutrient composition. The goal was to have the non-processed food diet be made of 80% NOVA groups 1-3. In other words, foods made from fresh vegetables, fruits, and meats with added salt, pepper, butter, etc. Basically, what you would eat if you bought only fresh food and fresh baked bread. The remaining 20% of food came from UPF.

It was just the opposite in the UPF diet group. They got 80% of their food from NOVA group 4 and the remaining 20% from NOVA groups 1-3.

Both groups were provided with large breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and unlimited snacks they had to request. The regular meals were so large that most subjects couldn’t finish them. The leftovers were collected and their nutritional content measured and recorded.

Since I’ve become so interested in this, I did my own little recon project. I went to Whole Foods and took a look at a bunch of different foods. I found a couple of cold breakfast cereals that could be used in a study like the Hall study.

Here is a Whole Foods 365 branded cereal called Organic Frosted Flakes that is a knockoff of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. Remember Tony the Tiger?

Now what do you imagine might be in this cereal? Which NOVA group would you put it in?

You might be surprised to learn that it would be NOVA group 3. It has only three ingredients in it.

If the label can be believed, it contains only organic milled corn, organic cane sugar, and sea salt. Had the corn not been milled, it would be NOVA group 2. It’s pretty unadulterated stuff as breakfast cereals go. And note that a serving of it contains 150 calories.

Now take a look at this one I found just a couple of feet away on the same shelf.

I picked this one because the caloric content is the same as the frosted flakes above. But take a look at the ingredients.

This one would definitely qualify as NOVA group 4. And it’s not as bad as some. I selected it because it was the only one with exactly the same number of calories per serving.

Here is one more with fewer calories, but a lot more ingredients. This one is Organic Gluten Free Cocoa Rice Crisps. Cocoa Krispies, anyone? Here is the nutritional label.

Now we’re getting into the seed oils, natural flavors, organic tapioca syrup (who has that sitting around in their kitchen?), and organic soy lecithin. A true NOVA group 4 product.

It’s got about the same carb count as the other two—a bit less than the Frosted Flakes, in fact. Were I after a cereal, I would consider these three all interchangeable. I would have grabbed the one that I thought would have tasted the best. Not any longer. (Disclosure: I haven’t eaten a boxed breakfast cereal in years and years, so it’s not something I would typically purchase. I took all these photos and put all the cereals back on the shelf.)

The group of people who are down on UPF—and I guess I can now count myself among that number—believe that these foods (if you can call them that) are designed by the manufacturers to encourage people to eat more of them. If that were true, people, given unlimited amounts of each, would eat more of the Cocoa Rice Crisps than they would the Peanut Butter Balls. And more of those than they would the Frosted Flakes.

And that’s what Hall’s study did show using a lot of different foods. Those on the 80% UPF diet consumed a bit more than 500 calories per day more as compared to those on the 80% NOVA group 1-3 foods. And gained weight to prove it.

It was a pretty impressive finding, that’s for sure.

There was one little disclosure buried in the body of the study that could possibly affect the outcome.

Any or all of these factors could be a driving force in how much the subjects ate. Probably the saturated fat least of all. But a large increase in added sugar could drive people to eat more. As could the increase in omega-6 fats.

But it would be difficult to match these diets precisely. It could be done with the cereals I described above, but not with a lot of the other foods included.

My issue with the whole idea of UPF is that the people who set up the NOVA categories did not look at how the foods were processed mechanically. And what this mechanical processing would do to the incretin response.

I can guarantee you that the Frosted Flakes discussed above made of only milled corn, sugar, and sea salt would generate a hellish incretin response. It would run GIP and insulin to high levels. Would the other two cereals mentioned—the ones with about the same macros but with much more additives—run GIP and insulin even higher? Who knows? It wasn’t tested.

If I were charged with making up the categories, I would set them first by the amount of mechanical processing involved. Cooked sugar beets would be a category 1 food, table sugar, a category 2. And powdered sugar a category 3. Then I would modify each category by the amount and type of food additive it contained.

I already knew that the degree of mechanical processing made a huge difference in the body’s response to food. Now I’m pretty sure the additives do as well. It would be nice to have some sort of grading system that included both.

But in a way, we sort of do. If it comes in a box or a wrapper, it’s probably highly mechanically processed. You can look on the label to see if a handful of chemicals are added as well. If so, avoid it. If you choose not to avoid it, just realize you’ll have an incretin response either way. But if you avoid the adulterations of the UPF at least you won’t have whatever effects accrue from those unpronounceable multi-syllabic added ingredients. Like being driven to eat an additional 500 calories of UPF a day!

But best of all, just spend more time in your own kitchen preparing real food, then you don’t have to worry about it.

Okay, time for my piteous whine for paid subscribers. I work hard to bring you The Arrow every week and have done so now for over three years. I would really appreciate it if you would convert to a paid subscription. As Tony the Tiger said, that would be ‘Grrrreat!’ It costs less each week than half a box of any of the cereals discussed above. And is much better for your health. Help a brother out.

Allulose Update

I received my allulose the day after I wrote and sent last week’s Arrow. I tried a bit of it straight out of the sack. It is much less sweet than sugar. It did not have a bad taste to me or MD. But I’ve gotten a few emails from others who complained it was quite bitter. What that tells me is that there are allulose supertasters. It’s probably not for them. Others don’t seem to have a problem with the taste. We certainly didn’t. Straight out of the spoon, the bride noted a slight, cool metallic back note, but not bitterness. And she’s usually one to home in on bitterness.

I also received an email from someone telling me he had some bad GI effects. I didn’t notice a thing one way or another. But my max dose was about ten grams. I didn’t come anywhere near the 50 grams the guy did in the video from last week.

I intended to use it to make something, but I couldn’t figure out what to make. I usually drink a cup or two of decaffeinated tea or herbal tea in the evening just to have something to sip on. I tried a heaping teaspoon of allulose in my tea, and it made it a little sweeter. Vastly less sweet than a comparable amount of sugar.

My plan is to continue to fool with it. I’m trying to get MD motivated to make some cherry preserves with it. Time will tell if she succumbs to my entreaties. I’ll keep everyone posted.

More On Lean Mass Hyper-Responders

A new paper came out looking at the LDL responses to weight loss on a low-carbohydrate diet as a function of total weight. Which corroborated exactly what MD and I saw in our practice with countless patients.

The study titled Increased LDL-cholesterol on a low-carbohydrate diet in adults with normal but not high body weight: a meta-analysis looked at 41 different studies in which a total of 1397 subjects were put on low-carb diets lasting an average of 19.4 weeks. The end result was that people with higher BMIs, i.e., people with more weight to lose, saw their LDL levels drop considerably on a low-carbohydrate diet, while those with little weight to lose found their LDL levels increasing on a low-carbohydrate diet.

People who follow low-carbohydrate diets tend to eat more meat and more saturated fat. Saturated fat is supposed to increase LDL levels, but in our own practice, virtually all of our patients saw a reduction in LDL levels. But we were treating people with a lot of weight to lose.

We had a handful of patients who were thinner (including one of our employees) and who experienced an increase in their LDL levels. In the few times this happened, I checked LDL particle size, which was an expensive test, and found in all cases that the large fluffy type A LDL particles were the majority.

The fact that LDL goes up in some folks who go on low-carb diets has been an issue. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve told about the virtues of low-carb diets for a variety of health issues only to have them reply, Well, yeah, maybe. But all that saturated fat will clog your arteries. You may reduce your blood pressure, but die from heart disease.

Unless you’ve lived in my shoes, you wouldn’t believe how many people feel this way.

Saturated fat and LDL are the bugaboo of low-carbohydrate diets.

Here is a chart I got from someone’s presentation somewhere. I can’t remember whose or even where, but it is totally accurate.

Everything improves on a low-carb diet…except LDL in some people. And that is enough to put a lot of people off of such diets. Which is a shame.

This new study just published should lay all this to rest. The LDL levels correlate much more closely to BMI than they do to saturated fat intake. In other words, if you’ve got a lot of weight to lose, you’ll drop your LDL on a low-carb diet. If you are thin and are going on a low-carb diet for other reasons than weight loss, you will probably see your LDL go up. But if you check particle size, you’ll find that your LDL will be composed primarily of large, fluffy, buoyant particles (the lbLDL in the chart above) which no one believes are harmful.

In regression analysis the authors found that BMI was vastly more powerful in determining what happens to LDL levels than is saturated fat.

I hope this new study lays a lot of this nonsense to rest, but I doubt it will. At least it provides us with data to help persuade.

Nick Norwitz made a nice video discussing the study in which he points out that it is BMI not butter that drives LDL levels.

Links of Interest

• The last wild apple forests.

• $5M return on a $2 investment is not a bad deal.

• According to the NY Times, the Biden administration is resisting pressure to form something similar to a 9/11 committee to review actions taken during the pandemic.

• Some people never learn. The Chinese are supposedly screwing around with another corona virus mutation that has a 100 percent kill rate in rodents. What happens if it leaks?

• European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tells WEF attendees at Davos that the biggest threats facing civilization as we know it are, you guessed it, disinformation and misinformation.

• How to look better in photos. Boy do I need this. H/T to Morning Brew for this one.

• Boeing will increase the quality of its inspections since the Alaskan Airlines door blew off. I feel better.

• Best and Worst states to drive in in 2024.

• Winter storm exposes 112 year-old shipwreck.

• Alaska grows by the size of the state of Texas.

• Japanese scientists are developing a way to regrow human teeth.

• US centenarian population expected to quadruple over the next 30 years.

• How is your passport ranked in terms of how many countries you can visit without a visa?

• The number one personality trait linked to a long life.

Okay. Enough links. On to the video of the week.

Video of the Week

You’ve probably seen one or more of those bad-lip-reading videos where nonsense words are coming out of various athletes’ (usually football players) mouths and it’s all very funny. Well, it’s not just for athletes now.

Here is a really good one.

SOURCE

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