The Arrow #209

Author

Michael Eades
January 02, 2025

Happy New Year everyone!

Greetings from a cold, crisp Montecito on the second day of the new year.

MD and I wish for you all the happiest, healthiest New Year imaginable. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being such faithful subscribers.

Somehow last week, I did not notice the number of The Arrow. It was #208, which meant it was officially four years old. 4 times 52 equals 208. So I made it for an entire four years without missing an issue.

This week marks #209, which is the first issue of the next year. Thanks again for all those who have been hanging in there with me. I really appreciate it.

Great Hopes for MAHA in the New Year

MD and I are incredibly excited about the prospects of America’s health improving with the incoming administration. The NIH, FDA, CMS, and CDC should get total makeovers. Totally disrupting make overs, we’re hoping. Assuming, of course, that all the proposed heads of these organizations get senate approval, which I think they will.

I’m also praying the new leaders have the pelotas to do what has to be done, because it will be a major fight against an entrenched bureaucracy. If they can prevail, America’s health should improve markedly. Big Food will have to change for sure.

The medical press is in panty-knotting mode over the vaccine issue, mainly because the medical press is primarily underwritten by the pharmaceutical industry. And vaccines are big, big profit centers for Big Pharma.

As I’ve discussed ad nauseam, back in the early 1980s there were just a handful of vaccines given to children. Yet even these five caused enough adverse reactions that the makers of them were getting sued right and left. The vaccine divisions of the pharmaceutical companies that made these vaccines were so small revenue-wise in relation to the main business—making drugs—that the many lawsuits arising from vaccine injuries were costing more than the vaccines were earning. Those running these companies made the fiscally sound decision to quit making the vaccines.

Now enter the halo effect. Like the ignorant Dr. Eades (at that time), everyone thought vaccines were God’s gift to humanity. No one (regrettably, even Dr. Eades) stopped and said, Wait a minute…if all these companies are getting sued right and left for vaccine injuries, maybe we should take a look and see if vaccines are really all that safe. Or if we can make them safer.

Nope, the halo effect overrode everyone’s good sense.

The entire country panicked. Congress panicked and quickly drew up a bill that would indemnify all the companies that made vaccines against any lawsuits for any vaccine injuries. President Reagan panicked and signed the bill in 1986. After the bill, with the Orwellian name The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which made it sound like it was protecting children from vaccine injuries, was signed, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. We’ll still have vaccines available to us. Thank God.

Once the companies making the vaccines were immune from lawsuits, the creation of new vaccines—none tested against placebo—exploded. Below are a couple of graphics showing what happened as the years drew on.

Here is another going back even further.

Now for many companies, vaccines are huge profit centers. They can crank them out and never have to worry about getting sued. So, they do.

Imagine what cars would be like today from a safety perspective if automobile companies had been indemnified against lawsuits by government edict. That’s what’s happened to vaccines.

(Disclosure: I, myself, have had four vaccines over the course of my life. I got a smallpox vaccination as a baby, I guess. I have no memory of it, but I do have the scar. I ended up having to get another smallpox vaccine before my first trip to Europe in 1969. I also got the original polio vaccine as a kid. And a couple of tetanus shots over the course of my life. And one flu vaccine in the early 1990s. That’s it.)

Now the medical press (as well as the regular press) are droning on about how RFK, Jr. is going to deny vaccines to everyone, and soon we will all be swallowed up by multiple pandemics driven by a thousand infectious agents.

RFK, Jr. has said over and over and over that he is not going to prevent anyone from getting any vaccine. He has said, however, that he won’t force anyone to take any vaccine against their will. And I’m hoping he cracks down on mandates for school and any other institutions that now demand vaccines.

Pearl clutchers are all saying, Yes, but what about my precious child? He/she will be exposed to other children who aren’t vaccinated.

So what?

Here’s the deal.

Either a particular vaccine works to prevent catching a disease, or it doesn’t. If it does work, and your kid gets vaccinated, he/she has nothing to worry about. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. So, no need for all the hand wringing?

Since it is one of his major issues with vaccines, I suspect RFK, Jr. will make every effort possible to have vaccines tested against placebo instead of against former versions of the same vaccine. That will be tough, because of the vaccine halo effect still held in the minds of many. There will be a huge hue and cry that it will be unethical to randomize kids into a placebo group as they will be susceptible to whatever disease is being vaccinated for. I'm hoping RFK, Jr. will hang tough on this one.

The media has seized on measles for their scare articles. I guess that the measles vaccine has been around long enough that no one remembers what a mild childhood disease it was/is, at least to healthy kids with good nutrition. The media keep throwing around this figure that ~1.5 kids per thousand died from measles pre-vaccine. I was there in pre-measles vaccine days when everyone got the measles. From measles-catching age, I lived in multiple states and went to multiple schools, and I never heard of anyone dying of the measles.

As I wrote in a previous edition of The Arrow, I checked the CDC stats to see if I could find where this ridiculous stat came from. As I recall, in the year before the measles vaccine, there were ~400,000 cases of measles reported to the CDC. Of those cases, there were 300 or so deaths. Which comes out to about 1.5 deaths per thousand cases.

But, and this is a big but, no one went to the doctor with the measles. It was so common that if were going around and you got a rash, your mother said, You’ve got the measles. If a worried parent took a kid to the doctor, which was rare—at least among my friends—the doctor said, He’s got the measles. It was such a common disease, no doctor would report it to the CDC. I’m assuming all those 400,000 reports to the CDC were really serious cases, probably in immunosuppressed or otherwise unhealthy kids. And, sadly, those were the kids who were most vulnerable, some of which died.

I’ve posted the graphic below a number of times showing the decline in measles deaths over the years. By the time the measles vaccines came on the scene, almost no one was dying of measles.

Here is an even more impressive graphic. This one for deaths from scarlet fever, for which there has never been a vaccine.

Both of these graphics, along with many others, can be found at the Dissolving Illusions website. Also, both of these graphics are from the UK, which kept vastly better records than the US.

Look at the last one above, the one for scarlet fever. There has never been a vaccine for scarlet fever. It can be treated successfully with antibiotics, but those didn’t enter the scene until 1943. Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but it could never be purified and made commercially available until the mid-1940s. As you can see, deaths from scarlet fever were almost eliminated by improved sanitation and better diet before antibiotics ever came along.

One more data point, before I get into how the media are making all their overwrought articles about the impending disaster should RFK, Jr. be confirmed.

Dr. Christine Stabell Benn, whom I’ve written about years ago, is one of the world’s top vaccine researchers. She is from Denmark, but has done most of her work in Africa. She has discovered that in Africa, kids given the measles vaccine end up dying at much lower rates than kids who don’t. There is some non-specific protective effect of the measles vaccine that promotes greater longevity among kids who get it versus those who don’t.

But this is in Africa. The kids she studies don’t have the best of diets and live in squalor. We’re not talking about Cape Town here, but in the more rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa.

We don’t know if this applies to kids living in the United States or other developed countries because no randomized trials have been done. But it is doubtful, at least in my view.

So, here is an article that appeared in The Conversation, a lefty source that I read regularly. In days gone by, The Conversation would have been a supporter of RFK, Jr., but no more. All in all, the article is pretty accurate until it gets to it’s conclusion.

The article is a long and accurate childhood death-a-log from when they started keeping records up until the mid-to-late 19th century when industrialized countries began deploying widespread sanitation efforts. And diets began to improve. The entire article is worth a read until it gets the final couple of concluding paragraphs, which are scaremongering to the max. Especially since their conclusions don’t correspond to anything whatsoever written in the previous part of the article.

The whole piece—until the bitter end—is a sort of brief summary of Dissolving Illusions, one of my favorite two books about the whole vaccine situation.

A few excerpts:

In the first half of the 19th century, between 40% and 50% of children in the U.S. didn’t live past the age of 5. While overall child mortality was somewhat lower in the U.K., the rate remained near 50% through the early 20th century for children living in the poorest slums.

Threats from disease were extensive. Tuberculosis killed an estimated 1 in 7 people in the U.S. and Europe, and it was the leading cause of death in the U.S. in the early decades of the 19th century. Smallpox killed 80% of the children it infected. The high fatality rate of diphtheria and the apparent randomness of its onset caused panic in the press when the disease emerged in the U.K. in the late 1850s.

Victorian periodicals and personal writings remind us that death being common did not make it less tragic.

Darwin agonized at losing “the joy of the Household,” when his 10-year-old daughter Annie succumbed to tuberculosis in 1851.

The weekly magazine “Household Words” reported the 1853 death of a 3-year-old from typhoid fever in a London slum contaminated by an open cesspool. But better housing was no guarantee against waterborne infection. President Abraham Lincoln was “convulsed” and “unnerved,” his wife “inconsolable,” watching their son Willie, 11, die of typhoid in the White House.

In 1856, Archibald Tait, then headmaster of Rugby and later Archbishop of Canterbury, lost five of his seven children in just over a month to scarlet fever. At the time, according to historians of medicine, this was the most common pediatric infectious disease in the U.S. and Europe, killing 10,000 children per year in England and Wales alone.

Here is the grim report of the death of the 3-year-old mentioned above.

If you read Dissolving Illusions, you will discover that these living conditions were all too common in the 19th century, even in industrialized countries. We don’t know for sure if this poor kid had typhoid fever or something else. But if he did indeed have typhoid, it did not come from “Noxious Exhalation from a Cesspool.” It came from ingesting the water from the cesspool. Typhoid is caused by a bacteria called Salmonella typhi, which is transmitted by the fecal-oral route. This victim consumed it from the literally shitty water that seeped up through the floor.

After going on and on about the serious lack of sanitation during the times when all kinds of infectious diseases struck kids (and adults) down right and left, the article makes an abrupt change in course.

While tipping points differ by illness, epidemiologists agree that even small drops in vaccine rates can compromise herd immunity. Infectious disease experts and public health officials are already warning of the dangerous uptick of diseases whose horrors 20th century advances helped wealthy societies forget.

People who want to dismantle a century of resolute public health measures, like vaccination, invite those horrors to return.

Jesus wept.

They spend a couple of thousand words describing how the beyond-horrible sanitation conditions led to countless children’s deaths, then conclude that these plagues will again be with us if there is even a tiny dip in the vaccination rates.

We’ve already seen how deaths from virtually every one of these diseases dropped to about zero before vaccines were even developed. Due, of course, to improvements in sanitation and nutrition. The vaccines haven’t really done squat. Yet if fewer kids get vaccinated due to parental choice, we’ll be right back to Victorian times in terms of childhood deaths? I don’t think so.

Another trick the medical media uses to scare everyone about vaccines is by citing how measles has almost been made extinct, but now there are millions of new cases surging every year worldwide. Which means, of course, in Africa and other non-industrialized areas. Not in the parts of the world where there is sanitation and decent nutrition.

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More Big Pharma Perfidy

As I’ve been taking down tabs right and left, I came across a couple I’ve been meaning to post on. Unfortunately, these two are not unique. They are just the ones I’ve been saving. These two exemplify what Big Pharma is all about.

The first one is a paper about a new drug being tested called Plozasirin. It’s been known for a long time that markedly elevated triglycerides, called severe hypertriglyceridemia (sHTG) in the paper can cause, or are at least associated with, heart disease, fatty liver disease, and pancreatitis, none of which anyone would want to have. It has also been known for a long, long time that the best way to quickly reduce sHTG is by going on low-carb diet. MD and I (along with many other physicians) have seen patients with sHTG (in the thousands) return to normal within just a few weeks on a low-carb diet.

But now a new drug is in the offing, which will probably costs hundreds of dollars. (A low-carb diet is free, since you have to eat something anyway.) Plozasirin has to be given as a subcutaneous injection. It doesn’t work as well as a low-carb diet in lowering sHGT. As the article is quick to point out, “serious adverse events were mild to moderate, not considered treatment related, and none led to discontinuation or death.” Which is always nice to know. But reducing sHGT with a low-carb diet doesn’t bring about any serious events.

To summarize, Plozasirin works to bring down sHGT to below 500 mg/dl in ~90 percent of those taking it. (If I put a patient with sHGT on a low-carb diet and said patient’s triglycerides dipped just below 500 mg/dl, I would consider it a treatment failure, which has never happened in my set of patients.)

Big Pharma has come up with what will be an extremely expensive drug to solve an easily solvable problem, i.e., lowering sHGT.

But here’s the kicker.

The last line in the abstract says

Additional studies will be required to determine whether plozasiran favorably modulates the risk of sHTG-associated complications.

As far as we now know, all this drug does is treat a lab value and will be destined to make Big Pharma big bucks. But we and Big Pharma don’t know if artificially lowering the levels of sHGT will accomplish anything.

It’s comparable to my saying, I’ve found a solution to the obesity epidemic. I’m going to reduce the belt size of everyone who is now obese. That is as insane as what Big Pharma is doing with this drug.

Just in case you think this is a one off. Here is another.

A new drug called Muvalaplin successfully lowers Lp(a) levels. Lp(a), called ‘LP little a’ in the medical jargon is an interesting particle. It’s been long known to be a true risk factor for heart disease, unlike LDL and other cholesterol particles, which have never truly been shown to be causal in terms of heart disease. When Lp(a) was first determined to be a real risk factor, there was a flurry of research activity trying to elucidate what was going on and how to lower its levels.

Then statins hit the market. They didn’t do anything to lower Lp(a), but they did lower LDL, so all attention was turned in that direction and Lp(a) research was dropped like the proverbial hot potato.

(Now is not the time to get deeply into the mechanics of Lp(a), but if you would like to know more about it, Dr. Malcolm Kendrick does a terrific job of explaining it in his wonderful book The Clot Thickens, which should be a must-read for all readers of The Arrow.)

But now that statins have all gone generic and the money spigot has slowed, Big Pharma has turned its attention to Lp(a) once again. Funny how that works.

In a new study, it turns out that Muvalaplin can reduce Lp(a) levels by a fair amount.

Lp(a) levels were up to 70.0% lower in the muvalaplin group than in the placebo group when measured with the traditional blood test and by up to 85.5% lower when measured with the new test. Approximately 82% of participants achieved an Lp(a) level lower than 125 nmol/L when measured with the traditional blood test, and 97% achieved that level when the new test was used. Patients who received either 60 or 240 mg of muvalaplin had similar reductions in Lp(a) levels, which were greater than the reductions seen in the 10 mg group. The drug was safe and generally well tolerated.

So, just like with the previous drug Plozasirin, Muvalaplin treats a lab value. But does it treat the underlying disease process, or does it just treat the lab value?

Here is what the article allows:

Lp(a) levels are not affected by changes in lifestyle or diet or by traditional lipid-lowering treatments like statins, said Erin Michos, MD, a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who was not involved in the study.

And high Lp(a) levels confer significant cardiovascular risk even when other risks are reduced. So muvalaplin is “a highly promising approach to treat a previously untreatable disorder,” she explained. [My bold]

Erin Michos is dead wrong about at least dietary changes. An increased consumption of dietary saturated fat will decrease Lp(a) levels, but cardiologists don’t want to hear that.

Here’s the kicker:

“While muvalaplin appears to be an effective approach to lowering Lp(a) levels, we still need to study whether Lp(a) lowering will result in fewer heart attacks and strokes,” Nicholls [one of the researchers on the study] added. [My bold]

Such is the state of modern medicine.

Mother Eades’s Fruitcake Recipe

I can’t believe I’m doing this. I write a newsletter advocating a low-carb diet, and I’m including a fruitcake recipe. And not a low-carb version.

As those of you who read last week’s Arrow may recall, I discussed how I avoided (and have continued to avoid) all the Christmas sweets I usually go face down in this time of year. It’s really my only such indulgence throughout the year, so it’s not that big a deal. But I wanted to see if I could muster the will to eschew it all, every single morsel this year. And I have.

I mentioned my mother’s fruitcake, which I dearly love. Since a few years before Mom died, my sister took over the fruitcake-making job. So I’ve got one awaiting me in Dallas when I get back there in a couple of days.

Surprisingly, I had a couple of commenters and a handful of emails asking for the recipe.

I had my sister send it to me. I do not recommend it to anyone on a low-carb diet, so don’t take my putting it up as any kind of encouragement to make it or eat it. But here goes for them what wants it. Do not blame me if your blood sugar skyrockets.

Granny Eades’s Old Fashioned Light Fruit Cake’ Recipe
makes (2) 9x5x3-inch pans or (1) 10-inch tube pan)

INGREDIENTS

  • ½ pound butter

  • 2-1/4 cups sugar

  • 6 eggs

  • 1 bottle brandy flavoring (extract?)

  • 1 ½ pounds pecans, chopped (keep a few whole to decorate the top of the loaves, if you like)

  • ¾ pound candied pineapple

  • ¾ pound candied cherries

  • 1 pound seedless white raisins

  • 4 cups flour, divided use

  • 1 teaspoon nutmeg

  • 1-1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

  • 1 teaspoon salt

DIRECTIONS

  1. Cream together butter and sugar.

  2. Add eggs and flavoring.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the fruit and nuts with 1 cup of the flour and set aside.

  4. Mix the remaining flour with the rest of the dry ingredients (spices and salt) and add to the creamed butter mixture.

  5. Stir in the floured fruit.

  6. Line loaf pans with aluminum foil.

  7. Fill the pans and bake in a 275F oven for 2 to 2-1/2 hours.

  8. When cool, wrap in clean cotton cloth doused with brandy and store well-wrapped in foil for a week or so.

Now that you’re suffering from sugar overload, let’s take a look at a different time when stick people strode the earth.

I haven’t done one of these in a while, and this one really tells the tale.

Stick People In Chicago In 1942

This video is a great one, because it shows a lot of people just walking around. Look at how thin they all were. This was normal not all that long ago. It was more or less like this all over America until the late 1970s/early 1980s.

In the video, you’ll see a portly person here or there, but the vast majority are thin.

I spent about an hour trying to find a video of people walking around in Chicago today, but, alas, all I could find was influencers trying to make names for themselves by discussing some aspect of Chicago. The camera was focused on them and not on the street scene. Apparently making a video like the one above was considered worthwhile as an historical document back then. Not today, I guess.

Here is an extremely short video (goes along with the attention spans of today, I suppose) showing a few people walking around Chicago today. You can definitely see the difference.

What Are the Odds?

I’m going to post a video below, but before I do, I want to give you my rationale for posting.

When I worked my first day as a real doctor in an emergency room in Arkansas, the first patient I saw who had a true emergency was an elderly gentleman who was a gardener. He had been using one of those push devices made to edge along a sidewalk. As he was edging, he ran the tool into a nest of yellowjackets.

The wasps flew out and were all over the poor guy. He ran, but stumbled, fell headfirst down some rip rap, notched a big cut in his forehead and injured his right ear, which was about half torn off.

As I was sewing up his head and re-attaching his ear, I started thinking about the whole situation. I began to think to myself, What if just before this guy had edged into the yellowjacket nest, some genie had stopped time and appeared before him saying, Hey man, what do you think the odds are right now that in ten seconds you’ll be lying at the bottom of that rip rap with a gash in your head and your ear almost torn off?

I’m sure the old guy would have said, the odds are astronomically low. But, in the end, there he was.

Once that idea had entered my brain, every time I see or hear about some freak accident, I always think the same thing: If time could stop right before the accident, what do you think the odds would be that in ten seconds you’ll be [fill in the blank]. It always keeps me aware of how quickly accidents can happen.

The video below shows some poor woman entering the back of the shop where she works, just like she’s done countless times. Only this time it was a little different. From all appearances, she wasn’t hurt. But if someone had just stopped her before she went through the back of the restaurant and asked, What do you think the odds are than in the next ten seconds you’ll be going on an unexpected ride?

It’s a brain worm that infects me. Now it may infect you, too.

Another Reason the Inuit Struggle With Obesity

For years I’ve heard of so-called Eskimo ice cream called akutuk, pronounced a-goo-duk as near as I can tell. As I understood it, akutuk was made by mixing snow, some kind of fish or seal or caribou oil, sugar, and berries and whipping it into a sort of ice cream consistency. I was in Alaska 15 years ago, but I couldn’t find any. I couldn’t imagine how fish oil or any animal oil, for that matter, could end up being tasty when mixed with snow, sugar, and berries.

It, of course, didn’t occur to me that the fat in milk is of animal origin, and I absolutely love it when that fat is turned into ice cream. I just couldn’t imagine fish oil ice cream.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a video of this guy in Alaska, who spent the night in -30F weather without a tent or sleeping bag. Of course, thanks to the YouTube algorithm, I’ve been getting fed one video by this same guy after another. Most of them are compulsively watchable, so I’ve spent more time than I should watching them.

I came across this one of his travels in some remote part of Alaska, where he was introduced to akutuk. He loved it, and couldn’t quit eating it. You can see it in the video below starting at the 35:04 mark.

They are lapping it up hammer and tongs. He asks what it’s made of. They tell him Crisco, sugar, and berries. I’m sure it does taste good, but I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. Trans fat plus sugar. With a few berries thrown in for flavoring. Ugh.

Dietary Guideline Follies

Once again the US Dietary Guidelines are in progress. Here’s how it works. A bunch of nimrods get together from academia and industry—the scientific guidelines advisory committee—to argue over the ‘science’ of how various foods added to or eliminated from the guidelines will affect their careers and earnings. Once their recommendations are made, the government will decide on what to actually include in the guidelines.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on the latest recommendations.

The article’s title “More Beans, Less Red Meat: New Report Proposes Changing American Dietary Guidelines” tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the thinking of this group. They are moving away from meat toward plant-based protein.

Here is the gist.

The scientific committee is recommending that Americans eat less red and processed meats and consume more beans, peas and lentils. Americans consuming a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet should eat 2.5 cups of beans, peas and lentils each week, according to the report, an increase from the currently recommended 1.5 cups.

The scientists also recommend emphasizing plant-based protein sources by moving beans, peas and lentils from the vegetable group to the protein foods group, and by listing plant sources of protein above animal sources including seafood, meats, poultry and eggs.

The meat industry pushed back on the scientists’ proposal, saying the committee “ignored robust and rigorous scientific evidence about beef’s essential nutrients and the foundational, positive role it plays in health as a preferred protein food,” said Mark Eisele, president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a trade association of cattle farmers and ranchers.

Research links processed meat to heart disease, stroke and some cancers. The research on unprocessed red meat is more mixed: Some studies show an association with heart disease and premature death while others find only a modest link or no link to cardiovascular disease. Some studies have found that red meat consumption raises the risk of diabetes.

Overall, the committee defined a healthy diet as one that is higher in vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, whole grains and fish, and lower in red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and sweets, refined grains and saturated fat.

Once again, the plaintive pleas of the cattlemen and other producers of animal-based foods fall on deaf ears and they are likely going to get screwed.

And not only are the cattlemen and others in the ranching business going to get screwed, Big Food is going to get a five-year reprieve on ultra-processed foods.

Scientists noted there is evidence that diets higher in ultraprocessed foods are linked with greater body-mass index and risk of obesity, but indicated that the research wasn’t strong enough to draw firm conclusions. The report urged closer scrutiny of ultraprocessed foods in future rounds of dietary guidelines.

It didn’t advise Americans to limit ultraprocessed foods, which many nutrition researchers would like to see. Food manufacturers have been arguing strongly against such limits. [My bold]

It’s the Golden Rule in action. He who has the gold makes the rules.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past few weeks talking about UPFs, so now I’m going to turn my attention to protein. In the past, I’ve written about how important protein is for the human body. And how as we age, we have more and more trouble getting enough.

Not only is it more difficult to generate more muscle out of dietary protein as we age, it’s more difficult to eat more protein. We’re just not as hungry as we were when younger. So we eat less protein, and what we do eat is more difficult to convert to muscle.

The better the quality of the protein we eat, the less we have to eat to get the effect we want, which is muscle protein synthesis, MPS.

Before we get to protein quality, let’s look at the three macronutrients: fat, protein, and carbohydrate.

Fat and carbohydrate are fuels. We don’t do much with them other than store them for use later. We have limited space to store carbs, but a whole lot of space to store fat.

Protein is different. Protein is structural. We use it to build muscle, bone, hair, skin, nails, organs, enzymes, hormones, and just about everything else you can think of in the human body. In a pinch, protein can even be used as a fuel, but the body holds off on that as long as there is plenty of fat and/or carbohydrate available.

So, we’ve got fat and carbs for fuel and protein to build and repair bodily structures.

If you compare the two fuels, you find big differences there. Fats don’t really generate much of a metabolic response when you eat them. They’re absorbed fairly slowly, and when they are absorbed, they don’t cause much of a reaction anywhere.

Carbohydrates are different. Throw back a bunch of carbs and you initiate a Mad Hatter’s Party of metabolic activity. Blood sugar goes up, insulin goes up, all kinds of reactions take place. (My own blood sugar and insulin levels probably went up just copying my mother’s fruit cake recipe above.)

So, there is definitely a difference in the reactivity of the two fuels.

Fats and carbs are basically chains of carbons, hydrogens, and oxygens of varying lengths that can be broken down piecemeal to provide energy.

Proteins are a conglomeration of various amino acids. The quality of a given protein is a function of the various amino acids of which it is composed. Basically, the closer the amino acid profile is to you, the higher the quality of the protein. It is reasonable to assume that animal protein is closer to human protein than plant protein is. And that is indeed true. We are more closely related to other animals than we are to plants, therefore animal protein is closer to our own than is plant protein.

Over the years, there has been a continuous effort to qualitatively define protein, i.e., what is most available to humans. Way back in the day, scientists looked at what they called crude protein, which was totally inaccurate in terms of what the human body can use. Over the years there has been one improvement after another in the determination of protein quality.

Since the mid-20th century, scientists have run through a number of ways to measure protein quality, each one a little more accurate than the one before. After crude protein came Protein Efficiency Ratio (PER), which measured weight gain in rats relative to protein intake; rats of course, aren’t human and don’t have the same human amino acid needs. Then we moved on to Biological Value (BV) and Net Protein Utilization (NPU), which did not account for amino acid bioavailability and digestibility factors.

In 1989, in a pretty significant breakthrough, FAO/WHO experts figured out and introduced the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS), called colloquially PD-Cass. PDCAAS was new in that it considered human amino acid requirements, protein digestibility measurements, and a standardize scoring system of 0-1. The problem with PDCAAS was that the scores were artificially capped at 1.0. Any food that calculated greater than 1 was simply truncated at 1. PDCAAS also used fecal sampling rather than digestibility measurements and potentially overestimated protein quality of some sources. But it was vastly better than what came before.

Finally, in 2013, the FAO introduced the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS), pronounced DYE-Ass as an even more accurate protein quality measurement.

DIAAS measures the actual digestibility of each essential amino acid. It does not truncate scores for high-quality proteins. It does not rely on fecal sampling, but on intestinal sampling instead, which is more accurate. It provides a much more precise assessment of amino acid bioavailability.

I didn’t give you this long run down on how protein bioavailability is determined so you’ll memorize it. I did it because many protein sources still use the old way of determining protein bioavailability in the advertising. For example, you’ll often see various protein supplements described as having a great Protein Efficiency Ratio (PER), which is an outdated method of analyzing protein.

What does it all mean?

The DIASS clearly shows that the protein bioavailability of animal protein is vastly superior to that of plant protein. I’ve cobbled together a chart using Perplexity to show the difference. Perplexity in all its wisdom decided to put a red dotted line across the 75th percentile of protein bioavailability. And, I, in all my wisdom, can’t figure out how to get that frigging line out. So I simply added one at 1.

I chose the foods and provided the values from the various tables I found. I specifically used the terms the WSJ article used in describing quality plant proteins: beans, peas, rice, nuts, and lentils. Perplexity arbitrarily used a .75 cutoff as what they call the good protein quality threshold, but only one ‘food’ exceeds it (and just barely), which is pea protein concentrate. When was the last time you were served a heaping helping of pea protein concentrate on your plate?

I would bet you’ve had peas, which kind of suck as a protein source compared to food of animal origin.

From the chart above, you can see that all the animal foods listed top the 1 threshold as defined by DIASS, while none of the plant proteins comes close.

When you eat foods of animal origin, you get high-quality protein and you get fat for your fuel. Remember, fat just burns to provide energy. It doesn’t send your insulin and blood sugar through the roof. When you get plant protein, it comes with carbohydrate (and a little fat), so you get a sub-quality protein along with highly metabolically active fuel.

So much better to go after the higher quality protein and the fat that goes with it. It’s what we cut our metabolic teeth on historically.

Remember from last week, the only food in nature that has a lot of fat and a lot of carb is breast milk. That combination is designed to make us grow quickly. If you emulate breast milk with a high-carb, high-fat diet, I predict you will grow. Just not the way you want to.

One of my all-time favorite and most profound quotes is from Francis Bacon from 1620. Said he: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed"

Make of it what you will. I’m pretty sure of its meaning in terms of diet.

Odds and Ends

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Video of the Week

I’ve had the old Saturday Night Live video up in a link forever. It’s a couple of years old, but even back then the idea of all the vaccine nonsense was wearing a bit thin. It’s pretty funny, though. And best of all, I can get rid of yet another tab. It’s just a reminder of how screwed up things were not all that long ago.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

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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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