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Hello everyone.

Greetings from Boulder, Colorado.

MD and I are here to take part in the wedding of the eldest daughter of one of our most dearly loved families. Kristi, the mother of the bride came to work for us in our clinic in Boulder way back in the late 1990s when the bride-to-be was a toddler. Kristi has worked for us and with us in multiple capacities ever since — ie for years and years. She and her husband Doug now have their own thriving business. I can say that we’ve all been through a lot together. So we are here to celebrate, and I even get to play a role in the affair.

I won’t even go into the nightmare ordeal we suffered to get here, but we’re here and happy to be here. I’ll just give you a hint, and you can imagine the rest. We left our house in an Uber to catch a 10:47 am flight to Denver out of DFW. When we got to the airport (early) and tried to check in, American did not have us on the list. The agent asked for our record locator number, which we provided. She then told us the flight we were confirmed on was leaving at 10:47 PM, not AM. And there we were at ~9:15 AM. I’ll let you imagine the rest. We did get here, though. And not on the 10:47 PM flight. But it was a major hassle (that with her usual efficiency Kristi jumped in to deal with).

Without going into all the details, it cost me almost an entire day, which I intended to spend writing The Arrow. Now that I’m here in Boulder, I’ve got other duties, so this issue is going to be shorter than normal.

I’ll catch up on emails, poll responses, and comments next week, when I’ll have vastly more time. I’m sticking in a section on the media that I wrote in a frenzy a few days ago because I was so annoyed at something I read in the Wall Street Journal. It isn’t nutritional, but it does fall into the category of critical thinking and the catch all of “anything else that strikes my fancy.” If you are completely sold on the idea of anthropogenic climate change, you might want to skip right on past it.

Peter McCullough & Joel Kahn

As promised last week, I’m going to provide my thoughts on the Dr. McCullough interview of Dr. Joel Kahn. If you haven’t watched it, you can find it here, or click the graphic above.

My overall impression is that Dr. Kahn is a very nice man who is certainly willing to discuss and debate all comers. He is also not above being a little fast and loose with what the science says about his favorite diet, which is the plant-based vegan diet. (BTW, is the term plant-based vegan diet one from the department of redundancy department or what?) I have no doubt that Dr. Kahn is a fervent believer in the health benefits of such a diet. But he really needs to spend a little more time with the scientific literature, and read more deeply on what he seems to have just brushed over.

Dr. Kahn starts out by detailing all the keto/carnivore/low-carb diet folks he has debated. Then he goes into how difficult it is to do nutritional research. And about that he is absolutely correct.

It is virtually impossible to do an accurate study of longevity and diet. To do so, you would have to randomize people to specific diets and keep them on those diets until they died. It’s hard enough to get people to diligently adhere to a particular diet for three months, let alone a lifetime. And that’s really the only way to determine whether a particular diet promotes longevity.

And to do such a study accurately, you would have to keep these people under observation is some kind of clinical setting to ensure they were eating what they were supposed to be eating and not ordering out from Door Dash. Such an experiment would be totally impractical. Virtually impossible, in fact. Especially since many of the subjects would probably outlive the researchers doing the study.

Another huge confounding factor in dietary studies is the standard American diet (SAD) that most standard Americans follow. The SAD has been exported across much of the world, so studies in other countries are also affected. The SAD is so bad that virtually any change brings about benefits.

Just about anyone promoting a particular diet will not recommend trans fats, food additives, sugar, seed oils (thought some do recommend these), and all the other crap that makes up a large portion of the SAD. If you randomize subjects into a SAD diet and a meager vegan diet, those on the vegan diet will do better simply because they ditch the sugar and all the other crap in the SAD. Same thing if you randomize them onto a carnivore diet. They will do better than those on the SAD.

If you come up with any kind of diet that gets rid of all the crap in the SAD, you’re going to have a winner. But the goal should not be to beat the SAD, the goal should be to come up with the optimal diet for humans. Humans vary, so probably no one diet is optimal. So the goal should be to find the diet that works the best for the largest number of people.

That optimal diet, in the mind of Dr. Kahn, at least, is the plant-based, whole-food diet. In his view, 98 percent of the experts world wide are advocates of such a diet, which I think is malarky. He talks about all the observational studies showing meat is bad and admits that they can’t prove causality. But he says there are millions of subjects involved, so you’ve got to give them some credence. This is what I’ve heard called a Schrödinger’s inference, which is when the authors caution against causal interpretations while they themselves offer causal interpretations. Dr. Kahn is the master of the Schrödinger’s inference.

He also says there are countless studies showing the superiority of the plant based diet, but none demonstrating the advantage of the low-carb, more meat-based diet. He obviously hasn’t done his homework.

A non-profit organization in the UK called the Public Health Collaboration has been tracking the comparison of low-carb, high-fat diets to low-fat, high-carb diets (mainly plant-based) for years now.

To date they have found 71 studies that satisfy their inclusion criteria in terms of study length, subject number, study design, etc, in terms of just weight loss.

62 of the studies have shown the low-carb diet to have brought about the greatest weight loss, while 7 of the 71 showed more weight loss in the low-fat group. But when a statistical analysis was done of the data from all the studies, 31 of the 71 studies have shown a statistically significant difference in weight loss in favor of the low-carb diet, while 0 of the 71 have shown a statistically significant weight loss provided by the low-fat diet.

But, you may be saying, just because a diet causes one to lose more weight doesn’t mean it is a better diet overall. I’m sure that’s what Dr. Kahn would say.

Well, the PHC has also tallied diets comparing type 2 diabetes improvement in those that follow them. Subjects with type 2 diabetes all have insulin resistance, which is a tremendous risk factor for all kinds of disorders, including heart disease and shortened longevity. So any diet that treats type 2 diabetes is a diet that will reduce insulin resistance and decrease the risk of heart disease (the greatest killer of all) and improve longevity.

The PHC has found 22 studies of low-carb diets vs low-fat diets in the treatment of type 2 diabetes that met their inclusion standards.

Of these 22 diets, 20 showed the low-carb diet as more effective in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, while 2 showed more improvement with the low-fat diet. But of these diets, 15 of the 22 showed a statistically significant improvement with the low-carb diet, while zero of the low-fat diets showed a statistically significant improvement.

These studies—both the weight loss and type 2 diabetes studies—were randomized, controlled studies. And, in many cases, those subjects in the low-carb arm were not calorically restricted. They were restricted only in grams of carbohydrate per day. Which means that in many of them, those on the low-carb diet consumed more calories than those on the low-fat diets, yet the low-carb still triumphed in terms of bringing about significant weight loss or diabetes improvement.

I would hazard the opinion that these studies more or less prove carb restriction works better than fat restriction to bring about better health.

I seriously doubt that Dr. Kahn is aware of the PHC or this tabulation of studies. And if he is, then he’s really sandbagging the data.

Dr. Kahn makes much of the fact that a handful of advocates of the plant-based, low-fat diet are still alive at advanced ages.

Other than a bunch of food faddists, no one much was interested in diets until Ancel Keys came along. He was able to bring diet to the mainstream, and he was a major advocate of a low-fat diet. As a consequence, many other doctors jumped on the bandwagon. A few of them have made it to advanced ages.

Back in the mid-to-late 1960s, Dr. Irwin Stillman came up with the Stillman diet, a low-carb, higher-protein diet, which he claims restored his health. He lived to be 79. I don’t know if he smoked or not, but most people of that era did. John Yudkin, the UK physician who taught us that sugar might be a problem, lived to be 84. Austrian low-carb promoter Wolfgang Lutz lived to be 94.

Dr. Atkins came along about a decade after Stillman, and he died at age 73 from a brain injury sustained in a fall on icde. Herman Tarnower, the author of the Scarsdale Diet, a low-carb diet, was gunned down by his outraged girlfriend at age 70.

After those guys, Steve Phinney and I are doubtless the oldest living low-carb promoters, and we’re both in good health.

The point of all this is that there just haven’t been that many promoters of low-carb, meat-based diets over the years. So it’s difficult if you don’t start with a big group—as the low-fatters did—that you will end up with a lot who reach advanced ages. Especially if they die of accidents or gunshot.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you outfitted a lab with 1,000 test tubes, over the course of 50 years, you might end up with 40 of them left intact. The rest would have been destroyed by being dropped or accidentally broken in other ways. Whereas if you just started your lab out with 100 test tubes, you might not have any left at the end of 50 years. The fact that you had none left at the end of 50 years wouldn’t be a slight on the manufacturer of the test tubes. It would just mean you started out with a lot fewer and the vagaries of lab accidents whittled them down to nothing.

Same with low-fat vs low-carb docs. There were a whole lot more of the former who got going a lot earlier. So the fact that a handful of them are still kicking is not proof that their lifestyles are optimal.

Dr. Kahn says in the course of his interview that there is no way to know what early man ate, so the idea that we know the ancestral diet is nonsense. I’m pretty sure he said something along those lines, but I just don’t have it in me to go back and watch the awful thing again. But if he did say that, he is dead wrong.

There is a technique called stable isotope analysis that is a research tool to absolutely determine what people ate during all kinds of different eras including the Paleolithic. I wrote about the technique a decade or so ago, but you can find all kinds of info on line by searching “stable isotope analysis.”

Stable isotope analysis demonstrated that early man (and Neanderthals) were not just carnivores, but hyper-rcarnivores. What does that mean? Carnivores typically dine on herbivores. Hyper-carnivores (or top level carnivores) dine on both herbivores and carnivores. We ate them both.

Dr. Kahn mentions a study he read about a group of Paleolithic people living in Morocco 15,000 years ago who seemed to have eaten a plant-based or at least plant-heavy diet and did well. He presumes to extrapolate from this that therefore early man was an herbivore. I’m sure most of those listening to his interview—including Dr. McCullough—are not familiar with that study. As it happens, I am familiar with it and have included some of its findings in some of my talks.

Before I get into the study, let me tell you what one of the big differences between humans living in pre-agricultural times vs post agricultural times is the amount of tooth decay in the later. Once man started farming, tooth decay became rampant. Almost all Neolithic agriculturalists have a set of teeth crawling with tooth decay. And they lived before sugar was ever refined.

The study was of a group of Paleolithic people who lived in caves in an area of Morocco.

Their primary diet was acorns. Which is a plant product without a doubt. Their entire diet revolved around acorns. They ground them and made them into all kinds of different acorn-based food stuffs. The paper provides a dissertation on all the ways acorns can be prepared.

The researchers found a number of skeletons of these people, and the one thing that stood out was how terrible their teeth were. Below is a photo of the upper dentition of one of these people that is a veritable encyclopedia of dental pathology. Prepare to be grossed out.

These do not look like the teeth of typical Paleolithic people shown by stable isotope analysis to be hyper-carnivores. Those folks had perfect teeth, few, if any, signs of inflammation (which can be seen in skeletal remains), greater stature, no signs of iron deficiency (which can be seen on the skulls), greater bone thickness, and overall better health. I can only assume that these Moroccan cave-dwelling, acorn eaters were not in the best of health.

The tooth abscess (F above in the photo) probably killed this person. At the very least, it was horribly painful, and would have caused fevers, chills, and maybe a systemic infection, i.e., sepsis. It could have drained when it broke through the bone in the hole you can see just to the right of the letter F. According to the authors, most of the inhabitants of these caves had horrible dental pathology.

So, were I Dr. Kahn, I would not be touting this study as one that confirms the idea that plant-based diets are the be all and end all of good health.

Dr. Kahn also mentions a study done in Monash University about which he says

I had never heard of this study, so I looked it up. Like the other studies he mentioned, Dr. Kahn didn’t get this one exactly right either.

The study titled “Association of low carbohydrate diet score with the risk of type 2 diabetes in an Australian population: A longitudinal study” is, as I suspected, an observational study (the word “association” gives it away), which can’t prove causality. The researchers followed 40,000 residents of Melbourne for 14-18 years by asking them what they ate and reviewing their medical records. They came up with a carbohydrate score that showed those who ate the fewest carbohydrates ended up with a 20% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those who ate more carbohydrates.

Problem is, those who ate the fewest carbohydrates still consumed 38 percent of their calories as carbohydrate, which is not low-carb, and especially not a ketogenic diet. Those who ate the most carbohydrates, around 55 percent of calories as carbs, had the lowest risk.

But those eating 55 percent of their calories as carbs are typically those who are health conscious. So you have the healthy user bias to deal with. Those who eat 38 percent of their calories as carbs are not on any kind of low-carb diet. Instead they are on the high-everything diet. They eat a lot of fat and a lot of carb. In other words, they are on the SAD.

The conclusion of the authors gives it away:

In other words, those who ate the fewest carbs in this study were obese. We know from the Public Health Collaboration data discussed above that the RCTs comparing low-carb diets to low-fat ones show overwhelmingly that the low-carb diet brings about greater weight loss than the low-fat diet. So if the people in this study with the lowest carbs (38% of cals) were the most obese, then they weren’t really on low-carb diets.

I suspect Dr. Kahn read one of the many media reports on this study, and not the study itself.

I could go on, but I won’t. I’ve got to give Dr. Kahn credit for not taking a statin himself. And for not putting his patients on statins who don’t have actual evidence of coronary artery disease. Those he does put on statins, he insists that they take CoQ10 along with the drugs. I find this admirable. Most cardiologists don’t. But apparently, he doesn’t realize that CoQ10 doesn’t absorb well without fat along with it. From what I could tell, he figures all CoQ10s are the same. If he has his patients on low-fat, plant-based diets, and they take an inexpensive CoQ10 supplement, not a lot of it will absorb. You’ve got to use the one’s that come in a capsule with oil included.

I also would like to ask him a question. How does he eat the broccoli, chard, spinach, lentils, Brussels sprouts, and all the other veggies he eats without fat. Does he just eat his beloved potatoes dry? Or does he add a little butter or sour cream. Does he put a bit of cheese on his broccoli? I could not eat any of the above without a bit of butter, sour cream, cheese or some animal fat added. I can’t think of anything more tasteless than a bunch of vegetables without fat.

Does he just eat bread and bagels and dinner rolls (whole wheat, of course) dry? Or does he use a dab of butter? Or does he use margarine? Gack!

I’m curious how he does it.

I’ve got both time and space constraints here. If you see something specific in this interview that I didn’t mention and you have a question, put it in the comments or a poll response, and I’ll go over it next week.

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Misplaced Media Certainty

As we all know, corporate media has lost most of its credibility lately. We’re all used to reading ‘news stories’ written in the style of opinion pieces, so we kind of just take that for granted. But what is even worse, in my opinion, at least, is when ‘journalists’ state theories as fact.

We’ve all seen this when ‘journalists’ write about “artery-clogging saturated fat” as if it is a well known, scientifically-proven truth that saturated fat clogs arteries. It would never occur to them to write something along the lines of “saturated fat, thought by some doctors to clog arteries, …” Oh, no. Writing thusly would inform readers that there is some controversy over the notion that saturated fats are bad. But it never happens.

And it annoys the crap out of me.

So, I’m going to meander a little here and discuss a few such instances that I found particularly obnoxious.

I might was well get the one with all the political overtones out of the way first. Let me start off by saying I’m not making an argument pro or con on man-driven climate change. I’m just saying that at this point, it is a theory. Just like the lipid hypothesis, which many people believe to be fact. But it isn’t. At this stage, it is still a hypothesis. Same with climate change. My gripe is that, just as with the lipid hypothesis, so many journalists write about as being factual, not hypothetical.

The idea that we are living in a climate crisis is the default operating state of all of one of our major political parties and about a third of the other one. It is constantly stated as a truth, when it is anything but. Once you’ve reached the state where anyone doubting the current media and/or political theory is called a denier, you know the odds are that it’s total bullshit. When they have to resort to name-calling instead of scientific validation, you know they are grasping at straws.

The simple truth is, we don’t know squat about what’s going to happen climate-wise in 50 years. Virtually all of the disastrous climate predictions made by climate soothsayers over the past 50 years have turned out to be wrong, so why should we expect the ones made today should be any better?

Climate science is, for the most part, junk science. By this, I don’t mean the science of learning about the climate and what makes weather act like it does. That can be real investigative science. But ‘the science’ of climate change is not that kind of science. Climate change is all predicated on models, and as statistician William Briggs accurately states, “models tell us what the makers of the models want them to tell us.”

Noted statistician George Box famously pronounced “All models are wrong; some are useful.”

It’s difficult, for example, for giant corporations that have years of meticulous data at hand to predict what their stock will be valued in a year. Stock market gurus who have the same data—or even more—can’t predict with any accuracy where the market will be in a year. They can and do predict, but they are more often wrong than right.

Imagine how much more complex the climate is than predicting a particular company’s stock valuation in a year. People doing climate predicting create models out of ‘known’ weather patterns and anticipated CO₂ released into the atmosphere, along with countless other variables. These predictors always come up with a minimal and maximal effect, and the media and those who stand to profit from fears of climate change always go with the maximal.

Always everyone goes with the worst case scenario, and no one ever thinks of anything positive that might occur as a function of climate change. There is no money in that. A number of papers have been published in prestigious journals detailing how cold kills vastly more people per year than warmth. If the temperature were to rise a couple of degrees, many more people would survive the cold. No one ever writes about that.

How about the huge Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption and tsunami that happened a couple of years ago, which, according to Wikipedia was

How many climate change modelers had that one on their bingo card? It had nothing to do with human activity. These things can’t be predicted, so they’re not part of the climate modeling.

How about the one in Iceland a year or two before? The one that disrupted plane travel for weeks thanks to all the smoke and vapor injected into the atmosphere.

The point I’m trying to make here as a preface to what annoys me is that climate science is model driven, not an exact science. And journalists should acknowledge that when writing about it instead of treating it as fact. Here is what I mean. This from the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago in an article about a dairy farmer in the Netherlands trying to be net zero.

As you can see, this ‘journalist’ writes what I’ve highlighted in bold above as a fact. When in fact, it isn’t. It’s all speculation. He could have written it that way, but it would have weakened his argument and the thesis of his entire piece.

Take a look at this link and the graphic below from Wikipedia.

The link above shows a video of commercial flights circa 2016; the Wikipedia graphic above show flights in 2009. According to the WEF, there are ~100,000 commercial flights taking off and landing daily. Remember, these are the flights every single day of the year, 365 days per year. And it doesn’t include military traffic from all the different countries.

Take a long look at these graphics. Do you really believe that cow burps have more effect on the atmosphere than airline travel? Yet no one, but perhaps the Greta Thunberg’s of the world, are militating to get rid of the airlines to save us from climate change.

Now, imagine if that graphic showed automobile, truck, train, and bus traffic. It would dwarf the airline traffic. And how about ships? I just so happen to have a graphic showing ship travel.

A ton of boat traffic shown above. And it isn’t international boat and ship traffic, these are just the tracks (so to speak) of lobster boats in mid-coast Maine. Take a look at this link to see more boat traffic in specific areas and extrapolate in your mind what it would look like worldwide. And then tell me cows are a problem.

Here’s another example of journalistic certainty that drives me crazy. In an article about Australian supermodel Elle Mcpherson refusing chemotherapy for her breast cancer, I read that her partner at the time was Andrew Wakefield. As most of you probably know, Andrew Wakefield gained notoriety for speculating in a peer-reviewed paper that the MMR vaccines could be behind the burgeoning epidemic of autism.

I used the term speculated, because that’s what he did in the article. He did not state anything as a fact, he simply speculated that perhaps combining all three (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccines into one might not be the best idea. He didn’t badmouth vaccines; he simple stated that there was an association and that it might be best to give the three vaccines separately.

This was the first time a physician with a major pedigree had voiced any concern over vaccines and Big Pharma did not like it. Consequently, his paper was retracted (I say his paper, but he had several co-authors who suffered no consequences), and he was struck off the medical register, which, to those in the US, means he had his license to practice medicine revoked.

You can read the retracted paper here. It wasn’t retracted until 12 years after it was published. If you do read it, you will note that it is like many, many other papers in the scientific literature. It proposes an association between two findings and suggests more research to determine causality. There were probably at least a hundred papers published just today in the medical literature that do the same thing.

But these papers didn’t put one of the profit centers of Big Pharma at risk. And this was the first to hit the press by a credible author that cast some doubt on the healthful halo of vaccines. And it just couldn’t be allowed.

Here is what the ‘journalist’ wrote in the article about Elle Mcpherson:

It is true that he was struck off, but his paper was not fraudulent and he did not falsely claim “that the MMR caused autism.” Any journalist worth his/her salt could have tracked down the truth, and written something along the lines of how he was a controversial physician. But it’s much easier to go the “artery-clogging saturated fat” route.

Here is what Wakefield et al wrote in their conclusion:

Nothing written above was untrue. It was loaded with weasel words (bolded above). Yet it was what set off the witch hunt.

Perhaps his reward in all this was that he got to date Elle Mcpherson for a while. Sometime I’ll write more about Andrew Wakefield.

But now let’s turn to artery-clogging saturated fat and climate change all in one book.

Back when it first came out, Erik Larson’s Devil In the White City was a publishing phenomenon. I can’t remember how long it was on the bestseller list, but it was on there forever it seems. Everyone I knew recommended it to me, but, for whatever reason, it just didn’t push my buttons at the time. I bought it back then, but I never cracked the book. I don’t know why.

I finally ended up reading it last week. I can see what all the hoopla was about as it is an engaging book. I’m not sure I can figure out why it was such a mega-bestseller, but what do I know?

For those of you who haven’t read it, the book is about the world’s 1893 Columbian Exposition held in Chicago (aka the Chicago World’s Fair). It details the incredible obstacles that were overcome by the lead architect on the project (after reading that back, it strikes me it sounds kind of boring, but it was anything but). Parallel to this story was the tale of H.H. Holmes, a notorious serial killer who plied his trade in Chicago at the same time. The book shifts back and forth between the two.

The architect from Chicago was forever throwing huge dinners in an attempt to recruit other major architects to join the project. The menu for one such dinner is shown below:

A casual glance at this menu tells you that almost everything on it is a meat dish of some kind. A few vegetables and fruits here and there, but mainly meat prepared various ways.

Writing of a similar dinner, the author states with great authority

He is, of course, referring to all the meat served. Had he been talking about all the cigarettes, he may have had a case. But, as we all know, not with the meat. Yet he states it as a certainty.

During the course of the author’s discussion about the exposition, he describes a couple of weather events. In one right before work on the exposition started, a brutal heat wave took place in Chicago, during which people died like flies.

In another weather disaster that created much havoc and damage right before the exposition opened, a huge deluge struck the city. No one remembered anything like it. It rained so hard for days that people couldn’t see to navigate the roads by buggy.

Had either of these events occurred today, we all know they would both be blamed on climate change. But then people sensibly blamed it on bad weather.

Speaking of deadly weather, how many times have we heard Helene, the recent hurricane that caused all the damage in the Carolinas blamed on climate change? It has been compared to the great hurricane of 1780 that killed ~20,000 people. What was that 1780 hurricane blamed on? If that deadly hurricane came out of nowhere when there was no notion of climate change, why couldn’t Helene have come out of nowhere instead of being blamed on climate change?

Speaking of Helene and the damage she wrought, did you know that there was another giant storm that hit Asheville, NC a little over a hundred years ago. The folks at Doomberg wrote about it yesterday.

Here is a quote from the link in the above quote:

Sound familiar? The writers at Doomberg continue:

If you read the Doomberg piece, you will discover that the scapegoat a hundred years ago was the logging industry. Now it’s you know what.

A couple of years ago, I posted a video here of a Danish climate scientist who had studied ice cores going back thousands of years. He posited that based on his ice core sampling, it had been warmer for a thousand years than it is now. He said the temperature had started to decline over the previous century or two and hit its nadir right at the time scientist started measuring worldwide meteorological phenomenon.

He said we had started measuring temperature at the coldest time in thousands of years, so we don’t know if the slight temperature increases we’ve seen are man made or are simple natural variation.

Now comes an article from the Washington Post, of all places, that confirms what the Danish scientist pointed out. The piece was a discussion of an article in Science about temperature variations over the past 485 million years. Here is the graphic from the article.

As you can see, the dip and tiny upturn we see at the far right side of the diagram confirms what the Danish scientist in the video above said. We started measuring at the lowest point in 485 million years.

Here is how the writers at the Washington Post interpreted this data. After blowing up the little dip and rise on the right side of the above graphic, they writes the following:

“Unprecedented territory” eh? Did they not look at the rest of the graph?

The climate changes. Of that there is little doubt. Given the temperatures the earth has experienced over the past thousands of years, it hasn’t been destroyed. I doubt that it will be over the next few thousand years. You may come to a different conclusion. But if you do, base it on science, not modeling or, God forbid, politics.

I’m not advocating that we discard the entire idea and write climate change off as a hoax. I’m just saying that at this point that it is human caused and what its impact might be it is a theory, not a fact. And when it is being written about, journalists should make that distinction. Given all the previous ‘facts’ that have blown up in their faces, you would think they would be more careful. But they never are.

Alzheimer’s and Statins

I got a great study from David Diamond. Titled “The Effect of HMG-CoA Reductase Inhibitors on Cognition in Patients With Alzheimer’s Dementia: A Prospective Withdrawal and Rechallenge Pilot Study,” the study does just what its title implies.

It looked at the effects of discontinuing and restarting statins on cognition in patients with Alzheimer's disease or mixed dementia. It was a 12 week prospective study involving 18 older subjects who were on statins (the HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors of the study’s title). These subjects were given the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), then told to discontinue their statins for six weeks.

After the six weeks, the subjects were again given the MMSE along with a host of other tests of cognition and mental status. Their MMSE scores improved by an average of 1.9. The other studies trended toward improvement.

The subjects went back on their statins for another six weeks and were again reevaluated for their cognitive abilities. After the six weeks back on statins, their MMSE scores dropped by 1.9. They were back to where they were on the test before they discontinued the drugs.

The authors concluded

This pilot study was done in 2012. Pilot studies are typically done to see if there is enough evidence to fund a larger study to get better data. As far as I can tell, there have been no larger studies. My guess is that no one wants a larger, more definitive study for obvious reasons.

What this study makes me wonder (and makes David Diamond wonder) is how many people are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia who are simply cognitively impaired as a consequence of statin use. The study is a small one, so you can’t really extrapolate it to the elderly population of statin takers at large. But it does give me pause.

Especially since statins provide no benefit to the elderly. A number of studies have shown that higher cholesterol levels in the elderly correlate with greater longevity, which doesn’t mean higher cholesterol improves longevity. But I would rather take my chances. And I would certainly avoid statins.

Even if I were a big believer in statins, which I am not, I would at least take any elderly patients with dementia I had on statins off of them for a few weeks to see if their dementia improved. If it did, I would keep them off. Or at the least try a different statin. The lipophilic statins seem to be worse in terms of causing dementia than do the hydrophilic ones.

But elderly people get no benefit, so I would simply stop them.

Rising Sun

And, I'd be remiss (and get myself in hot water) if I didn't let MD's Caddo Bend fans know that Book 3 in her romance series, Rising Sun, will be released on October 16th. It's available NOW for pre-order at Amazon here.

Odds and Ends

• LAPD defends unleashing robot dog on city, promises 'Spot' will never be weaponized. They probably need more than one.

• Rare white rainbow spotted in Poland. Must be rare as I have never even heard of one.

• Study from Duke shows alarming rise in heart failure deaths, especially among younger adults.

• Incredible before and after sliding photos of the devastation in North Carolina. Tiny burbling creeks became rushing torrents and wiped out buildings, roads, bridges…

• Politic does indeed make strange bedfellows. Anything for the win, I guess.

• Did we Homo sapiens kill the Neanderthals? New research may finally answer an age-old question.

• Douglas Murray writes about how ‘Factcheck’ has become just another word for censorship.

• How about some uplifting news for a change. 79-year old woman falls while hiking and breaks her leg. A stranger carried her for hours on his back

• Interesting video showing why 1% of the stock market is tied to 11 random American millennials. I’ve never heard of this, so don’t know if it is true or not.

• Demand for air travel is skyrocketing, but even more planes are sitting unused than before the pandemic. Why? It’s not just because of Boeing.

• Share price chart shows how Pfizer has become dependent on COVID-19 vaccine. They desperately need another pandemic.

• Founded by a former director of the National Security Agency and stacked with elite members of the U.S. intelligence establishment, cybersecurity firm fails spectacularly. Maybe they weren’t so intelligent after all.

• Circa 3.3 million years ago, when our remote ancestors began to make sharp stone knives and scavenge meat, they made a really important evolutionary breakthrough: they joined the league of carnivores.

• On Call, Anthony Fauci's new memoir, can't disguise the damage caused by his COVID-19 policies. A balanced review by Jay Bhattacharya.

• Sad to say, but your grandmother didn’t invent that recipe. American food traditions that started as marketing ploys. God only knows how many pieces of pineapple upside down cake I ate in my youth.

• Researchers have uncovered the fact that a popular food dye (tartrazine) used in Cheetos can turn mice’s skin completely transparent — making their organs visible.

• A trail camera captured rare photographs of the elusive “fisher” in Pennsylvania — centuries after the species went extinct in the state.

• Son of Osama bin Laden deported from France, barred from returning. He effed around and found out.

• There is nothing ‘unsustainable’ about having children. Green scaremongering about overpopulation is based on misanthropic myths.

• Everything you ever might want to know about tarantula mating. Who knew female tarantulas can live for 20 years? I got over my own fear of spiders by having a pet tarantula in my youth, so they are near and dear to me.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

I’ve got a great one this week. Might not be to everyone’s taste, but it certainly is to mine. Given my modest upbringing in the Ozarks, you probably wouldn’t think I would be a big opera fan. But you would be wrong. I absolutely love opera. I had never seen one or been to one until I was in my 40s, but once I went, I was hooked. Before MD and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico part time, we used to trek there from Little Rock every August to catch the Santa Fe Opera. The SFO is in a majestic setting with the sides open to the outside. It gets cold in Santa Fe at night, so you need to dress warmly. Unlike most operas, the SFO encourages tailgating in the parking lot, which adds to the experience. Some of them are quite glam and over the top — candelabra, linen and crystal, champagne.

One of the operas we’ve seen there a couple of times is Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (aka The Magic Flute). Which is, if you’re a beginner at opera, a good place to start. One of the catchiest, most charming duets is Papagena/Papageno, shown in the video below. I’m not sure if this is a recorded rehearsal or was done as direct to audio. Whichever, it is a fantastic piece.

The Papagena/Papageno is a flirting piece, and so is supposed to be flirty. Which is often missed in the opera. These folks have it down pat. It’s funny, sexy, and, well, flirty. The soprano, whom I had never heard of, has a terrific voice and is definitely not difficult to look at. I love her little dance at the end.

Enjoy. But beware: the piece is the gateway drug to opera. Anyone who doesn’t like this is a communist… no wait, they probably like opera, too!

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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