Hello everyone.

Greetings from Montecito.

Happy Boxing Day or Feast of St. Stephen as per your preference.

I’m hoping all of you who celebrated it had a wonderful Christmas yesterday. MD and I certainly did. We were exultant amid the chaos of grandchildren and Christmas along with the adults. Had calls with all the ones in Dallas and Little Rock. It was really nice to be with or talk to them all on the same day. Almost like having them all under the same roof again, but not quite.

I wrote last week that this edition of The Arrow was going to be a bit short. I’m going to try to keep it that way, but I sometimes get carried away. One of my major New Year’s resolutions is to clear out all the countless tabs I have up. Instead of starting on New Year’s Day, my plan is to have them gone by Jan 1. I’ve already started, and what I discovered is that most of the tabs contain info I planned to write about in The Arrow, but kept putting off because other subjects would come up that I ended up writing about. Meanwhile the tabs just kept stacking up. (I know…same refrain.)

So, once I get through the first part of this week’s Arrow, I plan on trying something a little different. I’ll kind of do a potpourri of subjects just to keep from having to figure out how to save all these tabs. I’ll use them. As I wrote last week, given the season, this one will be a bit shorter than usual.

Christmas Day in the Morning

Once again—probably for the fourth time—I’m going to post what has become my favorite Christmas story. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens had always been my favorite, but after multiple readings, I think Pearl Buck’s Christmas Day in the Morning has overtaken it.

Like most folks these days, I came across Pearl Buck by being forced to read what is probably her most famous work The Good Earth in high school. Since that was the only thing of hers I had read, I always assumed she wrote novels about China. I was wrong. She was a prolific writer of all kinds of books, articles, and short stories. She was both a Pulitzer and Nobel prize winner, so she was no slouch in the writing department. And she’s almost unknown today, other than by the poor high school students who have to slog through The Good Earth, assuming they still do.

I stumbled across Christmas Day in the Morning four or five years ago, and I can’t now remember how I even found it. But it has exerted a profound influence on me. It’s short, but packs an emotional wallop. Makes you realize what’s really important in life and does so in just a few pages. I can’t think of another piece of writing this short that makes such a massive impact.

Perhaps some of the emotion for me derives from the fact that I, too, had a similar experience, at least where it comes from milking cows early in the cold winter morning. I wrote about it all in a blog post on Christmas day a couple of weeks before I wrote the very first issue of The Arrow, which, at the time, was called the No Name Newsletter.

Here is the link to the blog post and the story. I hope you enjoy it and get as much out of it as I have.

Christmas Goodies and Mother’s Milk

I typically follow a fairly strict low-carb diet. It would be a big carb day for me if I exceeded 100g of carbs. I pretty much avoid sugar, so most of my carb intake comes from the few vegetables I eat. Which are pretty much limited to asparagus, tomatoes, and occasionally little dark-colored heirloom potatoes. I don’t eat many of the potatoes, though. And I’ll occasionally (rarely) have a piece of toasted sourdough bread. And even less occasionally a croissant, which I’ve been able to convince myself is almost all butter and air. (I love the human mind’s ability to rationalize.) My average daily total is probably 30-50g of carb.

About the only sweet thing I ever eat is a small bowl of ice cream every now and then.

I don’t adhere to a rigid low-carb diet mainly because I’m at a normal body weight for my height. I don’t really need to lose weight. I’m mainly interested in maintaining what I have. And building muscle mass.

There is only one exception to my pretty boring diet as described above. I go hog wild at Christmas. From a couple of days before Christmas until January 1, I eat all the crap I can get my hands on. But I never make it all the way to Jan 1, because I end up getting burned out and start to feel like crap. So my window of carb gluttony runs from, say, December 20th to December 28th. About a week of indulgence.

I eat brownies and Christmas cookies. I eat fudge. I eat fruitcake. My mother (RIP) made the best fruitcake I’ve ever eaten. Once she went into decline a few years ago, my sister picked up the mantle of fruit-cake maker, using my mother’s recipe. So I get a small fruit cake every year from my sis. Fortunately (for me, anyway) no one else in the fam really likes fruit cake, so I have it all to myself. I eat it with slab of butter on top. So, so good.

This week or so is my big carb blowout of the year. It’s like Paleo man stumbling into the honey tree. Which is about the only time Paleo man ever got anything like pure sugar in his diet. Table sugar—sucrose—is a disaccharide, which is two sugars hooked together. Fructose and glucose bind together in equal amounts to become sucrose.

Honey is the same thing, except the fructose and glucose are not attached to one another. Honey is called an invert sugar, which means it has the same amount of fructose and glucose as table sugar, but they aren’t hooked together.

So when our Paleolithic ancestors raided a honey tree, they basically dined on table sugar.

A few months ago there was a lot of back and forth in The Arrow about what some readers called unremitting hunger. I had mentioned that given the wide variety of foods available today, it required some will power to stay on any diet. I had written previously in a number of places (including books) that hunger always wins. And it does. But what I was talking about was real, true, hunger. The type that comes from starvation for a long time. The kind Joseph Conrad wrote about in The Heart of Darkness.

The above is not the same hunger people experience three or four hours after eating. At least I wouldn’t think so. Yet I got a lot of pushback from a few people saying they did begin to suffer with unremitting hunger after just a few hours. Those conversations lodged in my mind.

So, this Christmas season, I pledged to myself that I wasn’t going to consume a bite of any Christmas high-carb fare. Not so much as a single candied nut. Not even a tiny piece of candied fruit out of the fruitcake. No fudge. No Christmas cookies from the plate MD and our grandson made.

I had been looking forward to going face down in all this for a few days or so, but decided at the last minute I would deny myself of it all. Not a single gram. It really wasn’t that difficult. Whereas before, I would walk through the kitchen where all these goodies were laid out and grab one or two or maybe a chunk of fudge and pop it in my mouth. Not so this year. I avoided everything that had any kind of sugar or carb on it, including the chutney that goes on the brie.

Strangely, I didn’t find it all that difficult. I was able to eat the prime rib on Christmas Eve and the ham on Christmas day along with a smattering of low starch vegetables. I doubt that I ate any more prime rib or ham than I would have had I indulged in the cookies, fudge, fruitcake, etc.

The whole experience set me to thinking, however.

It’s a well known fact that fat and carb are virtually never found together in nature, with one exception, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Fat and protein are found together often in nature. Even carbs and protein are found together in plants. But never carbs and fat. There is a little fat in plants, but not huge amounts. Plants today can contain a lot of carbs, but not so much in the distant past.

You can look around on the web and find all kinds of sites that show you what the precursors of today’s fruits and vegetables looked like in Paleolithic times (here is one), and it’s not even close to what they look like today. Back then they were these gnarly-looking things that were obviously fibrous, tart, and contained very little carbohydrate.

Our ancestors got most of their calories from meat of one form or another. They may have gotten some honey here or there, or some berries in season, but they did not have a year-round diet of carbs.

I think it was last week, I posted in the Odds and Ends section about archeologists discovering the bones of an 18-month-old toddler in Montana, who died ~13,000 years ago. Since most hunter-gather societies breast feed their babies a long time, the scientists assumed this kid probably got two thirds of his nutrition via breast milk.

Upon analysis of his bones, they determined that 96 percent of his mother’s diet came from meat, primarily mammoth meat with the remainder being from elk, bison, and camel with a little small game thrown in as well.

That was what we all cut our prehistoric teeth on. And although we’ve gained a gene or two for amylase (to breakdown carb), we’ve been basically designed by the forces of natural selection to eat primarily a meat-based diet.

So, why do we all enjoy carbs so much when we never really consumed many back when our genes were being laid down back in our Paleolithic days?

A thought occurred to me as I was reading a label on a little blob of fat-carb someone had dropped off at our kid’s house. It was come kind of commercially-prepared muffin-brownie-kind of thing. Since my sensitization to ultra-processed foods, I’ve become a careful label reader of everything. This was UPF to the max, but I noted the macronutrient content. It was 45 percent fat, 45 percent carb, and 10 percent protein.

It made me wonder what the macronutrient content of human breast milk was. So I looked it up. According to the papers analyzed by Perplexity dot ai, which I read to confirm, here are the macros:

I wrote earlier that, with one exception, fat and carbohydrate were never found together in nature in similarly large amounts, except for one food: human breast milk.

When I looked up the macronutrient composition of human breast milk and compared it to the sweet treat I had just read the label on, I was kind of gobsmacked by the implications. I began looking up all kinds of recipes for high-carb treats and they were all in a similar range to that of mothers milk. Some had 30 percent fat and 60 percent carb, while others went the other way. But they were all in the ballpark.

It gave me the notion that these high-carb, high-fat comfort foods were essentially the same macronutrient composition as the food that fueled our growth as infants. Way back at a time in our lives when we had no worries, no stress, and the warmth and comfort of mom.

Eating these high-carb, high-fat foods, found no place in nature except mother’s milk, puts us in the nutritional equivalent of the fetal position.

All of a sudden, we’re warm and safe. Back under mom’s careful care. No one ever thinks of it this way, but it makes a perfect sort of sense.

Is it any wonder these foods are so addictive? Or maybe mouthwateringly crave worthy.

This notion broke over me like a thunderbolt. It’s seems so simple and rational, that I can’t possibly be the first one to have thought of it.

But it does make a certain amount of biological (and psychological) sense. Why else would we be so drawn to foods we never consumed beyond early childhood in our Paleolithic days?

Think about this next time you can’t resist a sugary, fatty treat.

Why Healthcare Costs Keep Going Up, Up, Up

I came across this video by a doc out in practice. I checked with a couple of physicians I know, and they confirmed it was the case. Let me know in the comments or poll if you’ve had these experiences as a patient.

Pitiful.

Operation Warp Speed

I’m a paid subscriber to Dr. Peter McCullough’s Substack. Most of the posts are written by a Dallas guy named John Leake, who is an author of a number of true crime books, all of which I’ve read. I enjoy John’s pieces immensely.

He wrote one a few weeks ago expressing a worry I, myself, have had about the coming administration. I’ve got some insight that John doesn’t have that makes the situation a little more worrisome.

John’s post is titled “Warp Speed: How Long Can the Big Lie Be Maintained?” It is not paywalled.

He starts the article with a link to the 520-page House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic report released on December 2. I intended to read this thing in detail and report on it, but my patience for government-generated documents is thin. I kind of skimmed it a time or two, but no in-depth read.

John Leake apparently has more patience than I, and he read it. And excerpted a bit of it in his post. There is much more than this, but these particular issues John felt to be important. And I agree.

I agree across the board on these selections except #3, the one about Operation Warp Speed.

I have a friend who worked closely, one-on-one, in fact, with Donald Trump back in the late 1990s. This friend went back to a college reunion during Trump’s first term, and his classmates wanted him to give a talk about what Trump is really like.

He modeled his talk about three things he discovered about Trump.

• He lies like a salesman

• He is immoral

• He’s a great father

When he was telling me about his talk, I asked for a deeper explanation. Lying like a salesman I can understand. My friend said Trump would say what he needed to say to get a deal done, even if it stretched the truth a bit. Which is what my he meant by lying like a salesman.

I asked about the immoral part. What did he mean. Trump and all his women back in the day? He said, no, what he meant was that Trump never thought he had ever done anything wrong. If a deal blew up, for example, Trump wouldn’t reflect on it and say, Yeah, I screwed that part up. I wish I had done something different. Instead, he believed he had done everything correctly, and the deal just hadn’t gone through. Which is not what my definition of immoral is, but that’s what my friend called it.

Trump did famously apologize for his locker-room grab-em-by-the-you-know-what comment, but that’s the only time I’ve ever seen him say, basically, I screwed up. I’m sorry.

As to the good father part, my friend said Trump told everyone he worked with to let his kids calls come through to him. He had them in and out of his office all the time. He went to all their school functions. Worked with them on their homework. And was just in general crazy about his kids.

It’s the #2 issue that worries me, especially where the #3 component of the congressional report bolded above: Operation Warp Speed. Trump was hugely proud of raising the money and getting a vaccine into production in under a year. It was a monumental task, but it had pretty serious consequences.

Trump had sense enough to realize his main constituency was not happy about the Covid vaccines, so as the 2024 campaign wore on, he more or less quit bringing it up. But it just worries me that should another strange virus attack—think maybe the bird flu—he might throw tons of money at it and come up with another loser. And he would be just as convinced as he was about Operation Warp Speed, which the congressional report stated as saving millions of lives. The study of the Pfizer vaccine had more deaths in the vaccine group than in the control group, which means it is doubtful the vaccine saved millions of lives.

A new report just came out showing Pfizer fudged and failed to report a couple of other deaths in the study group. As it was first reported, although there were more deaths in the study group than the control group, the difference did not reach statistical significance. So it was not reported. Adding an extra two deaths to the study group may have pushed the difference into statistical significance, which would have meant trouble.

Fortunately, the folks who will probably be advising Trump won’t be on the money train like last time, so let’s hope if another issue arises, things go in a different direction.

Stopping By the Woods On a Snowy Evening

I first read this poem by Robert Frost when I was in high school. I had to memorize it, in fact. And at the time, given my high school sensibilities, I thought it was dorky.

As the years have rolled on, and I’ve read it probably 300 times, I feel much differently about it. While looking for something else, I happened to stumble into a video of Robert Frost, his own self, reading it on command. And the Drumlin Woodchuck thrown in for good measure. I can’t believe he whipped off Stopping By the Woods… in a mere 20 minutes.

Enjoy!

The Wexford Carol

MD requested I put this up as The Wexford Carol is one of her all time faves. She found this cello version performed in Ireland. According to her, it is the oldest actual written down Christmas carol. And it came from Ireland somewhere around the 12th Century. Thus her love for this video.

I love the black dog.

Supercilious Vaccinator Gets Her Comeuppance

I both love and hate the video below. I love it because this smarmy academic physician is made to realize she doesn’t know squat about the vaccines she’s recommending to everyone in her state. She is the President of the Michigan American Academy of Pediatrics and is just so full of herself. Nice to watch her when it slowly dawns on her that she’s just not quite as knowledgeable as she thought she was.

I hate the video because I was very much the same way when we had our primary care clinics. I hope I wasn’t as obnoxious as she. In fact, I was never confronted by anyone questioning me about vaccines or their serious adverse consequences. We gave countless vaccines to kids over the years, and I never gave it a thought. Which is the thing that haunts me now. I was a purveyor of a treatment that has now been shown not to be the panacea it was touted to be.

Like most doctors—and medical training leads to this kind of thinking—when asked how she came to her knowledge about vaccines at ~7:15 in the video, she more or less admits she doesn’t know squat. She says she relies on the CDC and runs down a list of the various medical and pediatric associations, so she doesn’t have to think for herself.

We’ve discussed this before, but just as a reminder, the pharmaceutical industry recruits physicians with all the merit badges to underwrite studies on their products. These folks are then sent to meetings all over the world to present their work. They are highly paid and put up in wonderful accommodations. It’s a plush job. And the pharmaceutical industry helps guide these people onto the various medical associations—the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example—that come up with the treatment guidelines.

Then doctors don’t have to think. They just follow the guidelines promulgated by their particular guild. If they do this, they’re pretty much immune to lawsuits, which is why every doctor and his brother recommends statins at the drop of a hat.

If a thinking doctor goes against the various academy recommendations, he/she is risking a lawsuit if there is a bad outcome. Much easier to just not think and follow the recommendations.

Watch it and weep.

A Close Encounter With Luigi Mangione

One of my favorite Substacks is The Prism, written by Gurwinder Bhogal. I don’t always agree with what he writes, but I always find a different perspective when I read him. In is latest post, he writes about his one-on-one with Luigi Mangione, the kid who (it appears) killed the CEO of United Healthcare.

Gurwinder has a deal by which people who sign up for his Founders Membership get a two hour call with him to talk about anything. Luigi signed up months before the murder. Gerwinder recounts his interactions with Luigi, which went on longer than simply the phone call.

Makes for interesting reading if you are at all interested in the murder. I’m disappointed in Gurwinder’s position on vaccines. I thought he was much more incisive than what he appears to be on that subject.

If you’re interested, here is the link. It’s one of his few posts not behind a paywall.

Odds and Ends

• Scientists think they know why Stonehenge was rebuilt thousands of years ago.

• Surprise! We thought trees emitted methane, but instead they absorb it… (What else don’t we know?)

• FDA ruling limits which foods can be labeled 'healthy' on packaging. What do you think they limited? Of course saturated fat, salt, and sugar. I guess one out of three ain’t bad.

• Homebuyers can access neighbors' political leanings with new real estate platform. I wonder how it works?

• The oldest restaurants in the world from Berlin to Boston. And I haven’t been to a single one of them.

• Americans confidence in their judicial system dropped to an all-time low this year. Only 35 percent of citizens have confidence in the judiciary.

• New genetic studies show that only humans who interbred with Neanderthals went on to thrive, while other bloodlines died out.

• You can purchase 900 human molar teeth for a mere $900. But what would you do with them?

• Well preserved 50,000-year-old remains of a baby mammoth found in the permafrost-covered region of Yakutia, Russia. The 7th one ever found.

• Woman bottle feeds calf that grows to 700 pounds and becomes a house pet. Pretty amazing short video. The question the video doesn’t answer: Is the cow housebroken?

• Subjects interacting with biased AI systems can become even more biased themselves, creating a potential snowball effect whereas tiny biases in original datasets become amplified by the AI. Just another reason to be careful with AI. It’s not always benign.

• Apparently, artificial intelligence hallucinations can lead to remarkable discoveries. Who knew?

• New study shows the warming trend since 2013 is better explained by increases in absorbed solar radiation, not CO₂.

• South Koran scientist has developed a technology that can treat colon cancer by converting cancer cells into a state resembling normal colon cells without killing them, thus avoiding side effects.

• New administration transition team seeks to pull US out of WHO “on day one.” I can only pray that it does. Right now China pretty much controls it. So, let’s let them finance it as well.

• If valid, a new study from Virginia Tech pushes the development of life on the planet back 1.5 billion years.

• The 8 worst technology failures of 2024. Yet. There is still time for more. And I’m not sure I would classify the exploding pagers as a failure. Diabolical, yes.

• Giant Nile crocodile that has sired over 10,000 offspring celebrates his 124th birthday.

• Stressed animals on their way to the slaughterhouse often produce lower-quality meat thanks to overproduction of stress hormones. Temple Grandin has done terrific work in redesign of slaughter facilities to keep animals stress free to the end.

• A handful of historical mysteries solved by science in 2024. None of which I knew about despite my compulsive reading.

• A day late, but still relevant. The history of the Christmas tree.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

The VOTW this week is a South Korean group of a cappella singers called MayTree I stumbled upon who are really great. Incredible mix of voices. They do these short videos that are addictive to listen to.

Here is what I’m guessing is the theme from the game Minecraft. I have no idea if they sound like it or not, but love the blending of voices.

Since these are short, let’s look at a more traditional one we will all know.

If you would like to see more, here is the link to their site. I’ve watched them all.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week. Let me know what you think of the potpourri.

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

Please help me out by clicking the Like button, assuming, of course, that you like it.

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.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Really, thanks. If you got something out of it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t yet. I would really appreciate it.

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And don’t forget my newest affiliate sponsor Lumen. Highly recommended to determine whether you’re burning fat or burning carbs.