The Arrow #160

Hello friends.

Greetings from Dallas.

No local weather report other than it has sucked every day since I wrote last Thursday. To make matters even worse, today at the store the bus-tub buffet was bare.

While MD shops, I always hit the aisle with bulk storage of nuts, seeds, etc. and run a savage burn on the little catch basins under the dispensers. Usually I come up with a few pecans, walnuts, almonds, and even the occasional chocolate-covered almond or three left by customers who have missed their sacks while loading up. The people who work at the store do not put these back in the containers—they throw them away—so they’re there for the foraging. But, alas, today the cupboard was bare.

MD and I have some friends who own and operate a busy, successful restaurant in Little Rock. The husband of the duo was a competitive triathlete in college, often broke, and always hungry. He got a job bussing tables in a nice restaurant, where he would survey the tables for uneaten, untouched food. He’d slice off chunks of steak or grab the rolls, or other other foods he removed from the tables he bussed and put them aside to eat later. He called it his bus-tub buffet. Which I’ve adopted as my term for the little catch shelves under the nuts.

Of course, it makes MD want to gag. “You don’t know who’s handled that stuff or where it’s been,” she says. I always reply that that’s the reason God gave me stomach acid. Plus, it probably boosts my immune system.

I’ve received a number of emails on a couple of issues over the past two weeks, so let’s dive into that.

Do Viruses Exist?

Strange though it seems, many people apparently believe viruses don’t exist. I’ve been sent videos and articles by and about people with medical training who don’t believe viruses cause the diseases attributed to them.

I watched one long video that was an interview with one of the leaders in the there-are-no-viruses movement. It was mainly about Covid, but the majority of it was the physician describing why he thought viruses didn’t exist. His reasoning was gibberish as far as I was concerned, but I hung in there to see if he would ever say what really caused Covid if it weren’t a virus.

I was just about to abandon the whole thing when the woman doing the interviewing brought up her view as to what caused Covid. And the doc agreed. Which stunned me.

Her explanation: 5G. WTF!

I couldn’t believe it. Then, as if to prove her point, she stated that the country with the greatest rate of Covid infection was San Marino, a tiny enclave country within the borders of Italy. And, so she said, San Marino had the highest use of 5G technology as compared to the rest of the world.

If you look at the Financial Times data, which quit being updated in Dec 2023, you can see that the per capita number of cases in San Marino is a bit higher than in the other diverse countries I compared it with, but not a lot.

While I was trying to process the notion that anyone would think it was 5G causing Covid, I wondered how she would explain the 1918 influenza pandemic. And just as I was wondering, she pipes up with the explanation.

The 1918 flu pandemic was caused by radio waves. The world was just starting to use radio, and we humans were being exposed to radio waves for the first time. We hadn’t been exposed before, so we all responded by coming down with the flu.

But what about all the flu years since 1918? We were all well acquainted with radio waves by then. What were those caused by?

It’s mind boggling.

If you want to read about SARS-CoV-2, take a look at this magisterial article by Nicholas Wade about the probable lab origin of that virus. This article was written in May 2021 and, in my opinion, at least, is the best explanation out there of the origins of Covid.

In a few short paragraphs in a long, long article, Wade explains gain-of-function:

This is just a tiny portion of this article, but in it you can see that viruses can obviously be identified, sequenced, and manipulated. Either that, or all the highly-trained people who are virologists are engaged in a monstrous hoax. They just go to their labs, read sci-fi (or whatever) all day, then write up papers detailing various viral sequences that other virologists read and comment on just to keep the hoax alive.

They would have to have merely imagined the furin cleavage site, about which we’ve all heard so much. And the spike protein, the sequence of which was used to create the mRNA vaccines. Plus the sequencing of the nucleocapsid, the body of the virus, which has barely mutated since SARS-CoV-1 almost 20 years ago. How would they know this if they hadn’t sequenced both versions of the SARS virus?

Before the varicella vaccine (chicken pox), if one kid in a class came down with chicken pox, damn near every kid came down with it. Same pretty much with measles and mumps. What kind of weird waves caused those diseases to spread so quickly?

Researchers identified these viruses, grew them up in some kind of medium, then were able to inactive them and use them as vaccines. Those getting the vaccines ended up not getting measles, mumps, or chicken pox. If viruses were imaginary, then these vaccines constructed with attenuated viruses would not have been as effective as they have been.

And how does one attenuate a virus if there is no such thing?

(I have to add a caveat when I discuss how effective these vaccines are. They have been extremely effective against the infections they were designed to prevent, but we don’t know what the non-specific effects (NSE) are. NSE are other issues the vaccines may either prevent or cause. Maybe kids who got the measles vaccine didn’t get the measles, but they got a lot more flu or other respiratory infections. We don’t know what the NSE are because as explained in my favorite book on the subject these vaccines have never been tested against a placebo. If we don’t know the NSE, we can’t really determine if the vaccines are an overall positive or not. But we do know that for the most part they prevent the measles. But unlike actually having the measles, which confers pretty much permanent immunity, the vaccine protection wanes over time.)

I’ve been reading about and studying viruses before I even went to medical school. Then I got a double dose of it in medical school. In practice I’ve taken care of many, many patients with viral diseases. So it is incomprehensible to me that people could believe viruses don’t exist.

Our middle son has a book—a modern book, believe it or not—about how the Earth is really flat. Looking through the book, it has every argument as to why the Earth is not a sphere. If you didn’t know any better, you would think the arguments for a flat earth are valid.

The point is, most people understand the earth is not flat, but that is more easily comprehended than the idea of a virus, which can’t be seen without all kinds of complex equipment. So it’s easy, I suppose, to make the case that viruses don’t exist since they are not something that can be identified under a standard microscope. But I am convinced they do exist. And it will take a lot of persuading and hard science to get me to believe they don’t.

So much so, in fact, that I’m not going to spend time and effort and money buying and reading books or watching videos telling me viruses don’t exist. If, in the highly unlikely event, it turns out that viruses don’t exist, well, I’ll be the first in line to eat crow.

But until then I don’t plan on spending any time listening to people who have half-baked ideas on their lack of existence.

I try to keep an open mind about just about everything, but sometimes you’ve got to be careful that your mind isn’t so open that your brains fall out.

While on the subject of viruses…

Aerosols

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how surprised I was to learn that viruses, which are aerosols, could travel thousands of miles through the air.

A friend of mine, who has a PhD in environmental engineering and who was a professor at Southern Methodist University, emailed me a little exegesis he put together on aerosols. I asked him for permission to pass it along. He said, Sure.

So here it is. Very enlightening.

Everything except for the part about my ignorance makes for pretty good reading. In my defense, my ignorance was only about how far they could travel. Not that they weren’t able to both travel more than the socially distanced 6-feet or that they weren’t able to penetrate cloth masks, surgical masks, and N-95 masks. Those points I did know and did speak about.

Dietary Protein Does Not Increase Blood Sugar

Unless, of course, you have type 1 diabetes. Which we’ll address later.

Along with emails about the lack of proof of the existence of viruses, I got a handful from readers asking if protein raises blood sugar. And if so, why do I recommend a lot of protein.

I can tell you categorically if you are on a low-carb or ketogenic diet, consuming a lot of protein will not raise your blood sugar level nor your insulin level. If you’re on a crappy SAD diet, taking in a good dose of protein might raise your glucose level, but even then, it’s doubtful.

It’s all a function of insulin, or, more specifically, the insulin to glucagon ratio, Which is nothing new. MD and I wrote about it in Protein Power almost 30 years ago.

We all know that dietary protein breaks down to individual amino acids, most of which can then be converted to glucose if the body needs it. Which is where this notion originated that increasing protein intake would cause blood sugar to rise.

This process has been studied since way back in 1915, even before insulin was discovered. And in virtually every case, protein intake increases blood glucose minimally, if at all. (There are some exceptions, which I’ll get to later.)

Let’s look at one of my favorite studies. This one was done at the University of Michigan and published in 1936. The researchers looked at what happened when subjects consumed a lot of meat.

At the time, it was thought that protein converted to glucose at the rate of about 50 percent of the weight of the ingested protein. The researchers wanted to test what would happen to subjects with diabetes compared to subjects without when both consumed a large amount of protein.

The researchers recruited 15 subjects with diabetes along with 4 healthy medical students as controls. All of the subjects with diabetes had what we call today type 2 diabetes (T2D). They did not use that terminology at the time, because they thought diabetes was a continuum running from the really severe, what we would call type 1 diabetes today and the less severe called at the time adult onset diabetes. They called the more severe, life-threatening kind, juvenile-onset diabetes. As it turns out, they are two separate diseases, but they both still carry the name diabetes.

The subjects in this study were all what we would identify as T2D. I know this because in the paper the authors wrote that

Aglycosuric means no sugar in the urine, which would have been an impossibility had the subjects had type 1 diabetes. So, I’m sure they were all T2D.

Here was the setup:

Most of the subjects ended up eating a bit over a pound of lean beef at this meal. If they weighed 70 kg, they ended up getting 140 grams of protein. Most of them weighed more than that.

The researchers figured that if these subjects consumed, say, 150 grams of protein, it would be reflected in a glucose rise commensurate to their having taken in 75 grams of glucose.

As it turned out, that wasn’t quite the case. Let’s look at a few graphs from the paper.

Here is what happened to two of the medical students who had no blood sugar issues. Each of these students were given doses of glucose that would equal 50 percent of the protein they consumed, and you can see that their blood sugar levels went up as expected. But when they consumed these huge amounts of protein, which supposedly converted to the same amount of glucose, their blood sugar levels barely budged.

What happened to the subjects with T2D?

Pretty much the same outcome.

You can see how their blood sugar levels went up significantly higher than those of the non-diabetic subjects when they consumed glucose or other high-carb foods containing an amount of carb equivalent to 50 percent of the protein. But when they ate the meat, their blood sugar levels stayed flat and looked pretty much like those of the non-diabetic medical students.

And these folks were eating over a pound of beef at the meal.

So, even in those subjects with T2D, a large amount of dietary protein doesn’t elevate blood sugar. At least not in 1936.

Fast forward almost 80 years to a much more technically advanced study done in France, and we find basically the same thing.

In this study researchers used doubly-labeled (for nitrogen and carbon) hens’ eggs as a protein source. Eight healthy, slim subjects (three women; five men) were provided four eggs as a breakfast. They consumed nothing else for eight hours other than a bit of water.

These subjects provided blood samples throughout to measure various parameters.

The eggs were a product of hens that had been provided with a specific diet including labeled nitrogen and carbon. The labeled nitrogen and carbon ended up in the eggs, which allowed them to be followed after the human subjects consumed them.

Since the researchers could track these labeled elements, they could determine how much glucose was made from these eggs. And just as the researchers discovered in 1936, not much protein was converted to glucose.

Here is the money shot from the experiment. The black circles are the glucose levels over time after the egg consumption. The open circles are the amount of glucose that was converted from the protein in the eggs. Unlike the scientists in 1936, thanks to the doubly-labeled carbon and nitrogen, these researchers could precisely track how much glucose came from the protein meal. As you can see, it is an insignificant amount.

The whole system relies on the insulin to glucagon ratio as we described in Protein Power. If insulin is dominant, you’re in an anabolic, storage mode. If, on the other hand, glucagon is dominant, you’re in a catabolic or breaking down mode. You vacillate in and out of these two modes all day long depending upon whether you’re eating and what you’re eating.

If you eat carbs, you run insulin levels up and depress glucagon. If you eat fat, insulin and glucagon stay pretty much flat. If you eat protein, you get a little bump in insulin and a little bump of glucagon. Let’s look at the latter for a second.

Why would a protein meal run both insulin and glucagon up at the same time? Seems counterproductive.

But looked at physiologically, especially given what we now know about how little protein is converted to glucose, it all makes sense.

If you consume protein, it does generate a rise in insulin. The insulin is necessary for the storage of the protein. But since, as we’ve seen, dietary protein does not end up converting to much glucose, the increase in insulin would run blood sugar lower. Maybe even too low. So the little squirt of glucagon dietary protein provokes compensates for the decrease in blood sugar the insulin would cause.

Okay, so don’t worry about protein running up your blood glucose. You need protein to build and maintain your muscle mass. And you even need more of it as you age. Since none of us are getting younger every day, it pays to keep our protein intake up.

Especially on a ketogenic diet.

A few things are required to produce ketones. First, the stage has to be set by keeping insulin levels low. You’ll never make ketones if your insulin is sky high. Second, you need fat. Ketones are made from fat. Third, you need to get the fat into your mitochondria where ketones are made. The body requires carnitine to do this. Carnitine can be made from other amino acids, so it usually isn’t a problem. But it can be problematic under certain circumstances. So, along with low insulin levels and plenty of fat, it helps if you have some extra carnitine.

Carnitine comes from meat, especially red meat. So a nice steak will provide everything you need. It won’t run your insulin up. It has plenty of protein for building and maintaining muscle mass. It’s loaded with fat, so you have substrate from which to make ketones (they can be made from stored body fat as well). And it is a terrific source for the carnitine you need to get the fat into the mitochondria. A perfect food.

Now, let’s look at the one situation in which dietary protein can indeed run your blood sugar up: Type 1 diabetes.

If you have type 1 diabetes, your pancreas can’t produce insulin. If you have no insulin, then glucagon dominates. If you have ragingly high levels of unopposed glucagon, you will convert dietary protein into blood sugar.

Those with type 1 diabetes are taught to cover their protein intake with injectable insulin. The rest of us don’t have to worry about it.

I hope this lays to rest the idea that dietary protein increases blood sugar. If you are still not persuaded, go to PubMed and search “Gannon MC and Nuttall FQ.” These are two scientists who have done a ton of research on the conversion of dietary protein to glucose. You’ll be able to find many papers on the subject.

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What Great Beast Slouches Toward Bethlehem…?

I’ve been keeping up with Bret Weinstein since his red-pilling by what happened to him at Evergreen State College in 2017. He has always seemed to me to be a reasonable person. I enjoyed the book he wrote with his wife, who was also a professor at Evergreen State. And I was surprised given his history that he got on the anti-mRNA vaccine bandwagon early on.

His brother is Eric Weinstein, who is, among other things, Peter Thiel’s right hand man. Of the two, Eric has been the much more public until Bret’s ouster at Evergreen and his Darkhorse Podcast. Now more people probably know Bret than know Eric.

Over the past year or so, Bret has become worried about what I would call an elite takeover of the country. The ruling class today is composed of elites, which is what pretty much defines them. But Bret is worried that this elite group—or the connect class, as I call them—will somehow manage to throw off the Constitutional shackles by which they’ve been bound since the late 1700s and become an autocratic ruling class.

He fears this greatly. And calls this group of people with this lust for power Goliath. His notions of some sort of conflagration looming is similar to Peter Turchin’s in his book End Times, which I reviewed here. According to Turchin, the problem is elite overproduction, whereas according to Bret—at least from my read—there is simply a lust for power and control by the group he calls Goliath.

Bret has appeared in three interviews (that I’ve seen; maybe he’s been in more that I haven’t come across) each one a little more circumspect than the previous one.

First was his interview in London by Dave Rubin.

It was kind of an impromptu interview in which Bret lays out his worries. He also gives an excellent little disquisition of what has made humans so special. Bret measures each word he says, so he speaks fairly slowly. If you crank the speed up to 1.5x normal, he sounds like a regular person who is a fast talker. Still easily understood, but you can make it through the video more quickly.

After this taste, Dave Rubin wanted Bret on in a more formal setting for a longer interview. Which you can watch in the YouTube below:

This is a much longer interview, but you can crank it to 1.5x speed and understand it well. There is one segment that made me clarify my own thinking about something I have noticed in the anti-Covid vaccine movement. And in the more right-leaning political organizations in general. Bret makes the case that those of us who didn’t succumb to the bullshit and the pressure on us to conform are basically what he calls lone wolves.

And lone wolves don’t work in packs. They have difficulty in collaborating. They let minor differences of opinions on some often insignificant issues keep them from joining forces. Whereas those who are in the opposition—Goliath, if you will—generally overlook the little issues on which they disagree and join forces on the major issues.

You can see this in action in the Democratic and Republican parties. The Dems—who right now compose most of the ruling class—always close ranks irrespective of differences on the small issues and vote as a bloc. The Republicans are all over the place. A recent poll showed just how similar the thinking is among those in control.

We can see this in the anti-Covid vaccine-pro-Ivermectin-pro-hydroxychloroquine movement. At first, they were all together. Now they are starting to fragment. Robert Malone is suing a bunch of people for defamation. He’s also dissing Peter McCullough and Harvey Risch over their involvement with The Wellness Company. Paul Alexander is accusing Malone of pedophilia and criminal intent for coming up with the idea of mRNA vaccines. And on and on. Whereas they were at first all on the same team, now there is all this internecine warfare. Which is typical of lone wolves. And which is Bret’s great worry about the battle to come.

Finally, Bret appeared on an episode of Tucker Carlson’s new network, TCN. You can also find the interview here on Rumble.

Bret gets a little more circumspect with each interview, probably as a function of the number of people watching.

Since Bret isn’t a wild-eyed radical (like the ones saying viruses don’t exist) and is part of a family with at least one foot firmly implanted in the ruling class, his opinions are worth at least listening to. I encourage everyone to watch these videos.

Great News on the Climate Change Front

Just in from Matt Briggs. I’ll let you read it from the top.

Statins and Oreos

Nick Norwitz and co-author Bill Cromwell just published the results of an n=1 study they have been working on for some time.

Nick, who has a PhD in nutrition and is a medical student at Harvard, was the single subject in this study. Nick is a so-called lean mass hyper-responder, which means when he goes on a low-carb or ketogenic diet (which, in his case, is his standard diet), his LDL cholesterol levels skyrocket.

The presumed cause of this particular situation is theorized to be what the authors call the Lipid Energy Model (LEM).

The LPM, as hypothesized, works this way. Subjects who are lean and follow low-carb/ketogenic diets deplete their livers of glycogen and bring about a change in circulating  hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL), which helps transport fat out of the adipose tissue to use for energy. The liver captures these fats (called non-esterified fatty acids, or NEFA) and repackages them as triglycerides, which are released as VLDL. As VLDL lose their cargoes to the tissues needing energy, they become LDL particles. This increased LDL turnover ends up creating a situation in which LDL levels are extremely high, triglyceride levels low, and HDL levels high. The lean mass hyper-responder triad.

Here it is graphically.

If this theory is correct, then upping the carb content would refill the liver with glycogen, and the process would more or less run in reverse and end up lowering LDL levels.

Which is what the authors wanted to test.

So, Nick added 12 Oreo cookies to his diet daily. And over a period of 16 days on the 12 Oreo per day diet, he reduced his LDL levels from 384 mg/dl to 111 mg/dl, which, if you think about it, is pretty incredible.

Then, after a three month washout period back on his standard daily ketogenic diet, Nick underwent the next phase. He started on Crestor—a powerful statin. After four weeks on the drug, his LDL dropped from 421 mg/dl to 284 mg/dl at its nadir. Then his LDL levels started to creep up slowly over the following two weeks. He stopped the experiment after six weeks.

Here is a graphic representation of what happened.

Remember, the Oreos took only 16 days to drop Nick’s LDL to 111 mg/dl whereas the statin took four weeks to drop it only half as much. Read that again. 16 days vs 4 weeks.

It was just an n=1, but a pretty impressive experiment, if you ask me.

Here is Nick’s short video discussion of the experiment.

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. I don’t recommend you do the Oreo diet to lower your LDL levels.

Odds and Ends

• You would think this was from the Babylon Bee, but no… Trans man about to have sex change operation discovers he’s pregnant.

• Interesting conversation between John Gray and Peter Thiel on life in a postmodern world.

• Amazingly, a majority of Canadians live south of Seattle.

• How does a pool table recognize the cue ball?

• Boeing planning to do complete inspections on 737 Max after a door blew off one of them in flight.

• As Fetterman’s brain function improves, he becomes more conservative.

• Study shows a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death from myocarditis.

• Heart disease warning as early deaths at highest rate in more than a decade.

• Valentine’s day is on the horizon. Name a cockroach after your ex.

• Give up your smart phone for a month and win $10,000.

• What the Simpson characters would look like as real people.

Video of the Week

MD sent me this one. I guess a good musician can play anything. This proves it.

SOURCE

Now it’s time to let me know what you think.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday

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