Hello everyone.

Greetings from Dallas where it is snowing like crazy. There is maybe an inch on the ground so far, but the entire city is shut down. That’s the way it is in the South. If there is any serious forecast for snow, the grocery stores are packed the night before. And everything comes to a halt. Doctor’s appointments are canceled. Everything is canceled. Everyone just holes up at home until the couple of inches of snow starts to melt.

Weird.

In other parts of the country where snow is common, life goes on as usual, but not in the South.

Last night MD and I were meeting the kids here for dinner. We popped by Whole Foods simply to get some RO water. The place was absolutely packed. Every register with a line 15 people long. Took us forever — and a whopping $4.90 — to check out.

It’s a real pain.

Probably not nearly as much pain as the folks in Los Angeles are experiencing right now. And it’s only going to get worse for them, which saddens me.

About ten percent of the population in the United States lives in California, and those people understand.

Let me explain for the other 90 percent who don’t live there. A lot of readers get pissed at me when I write about anything but nutrition. They’ll just have to be pissed this time, because this giant fire, though located in Los Angeles, is going to end up being a major national issue. Most people think California is just another state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not given the >10% of the population of the U.S. It’s kind of as California goes, so goes the rest of the country.

Usually, I sit down on Thursday morning to pound out The Arrow. MD and I are flying out of here later to head for a scientific conference in Scottsdale, AZ, so I wrote the part about the books yesterday. So it’s not really about nutrition either. I’ll try to make it up next week.

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How California Sucks

I lived in California for ten years straight back in the mid-1960s-early 1970s. MD and I have lived there part time for the past 27 years. So what I say comes from personal experience, not hearsay or reading articles. It’s all from personal experience.

Before I get to the bad, let me tell you I’ve been all over California in the time I’ve been here. I’ve lived in the Bay Area; I’ve lived on the Eastern Side of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where I worked for the US Forest Service as a firefighter and trail crew guy; I’ve lived in SoCal in both Orange County and Los Angeles County; I’ve lived in Carlsbad, which is a beach town between the LA area and San Diego. I had my first engineering job there and ended up becoming a Carlsbad fireman (long story). And for the past 27 years, MD and I have lived part time in the Santa Barbara area.

California is without a doubt the most diverse (topographically) and most beautiful state in the country. It has the highest peak (Mount Whitney) and the lowest point (Death Valley) in the continental United States. It’s got deciduous forests, pine forests, redwood forests, giant Sequoia forests, plains, deserts, and a long, beautiful Pacific coastline. I could go on and on, but you get the picture. All in all, from a topographical perspective, it is a magnificent place.

But its politics suck. And it’s not just the Right vs Left politics, it’s the way the entire system works. And it is emblematic of why Los Angeles is burning to the ground. The State of California is horribly mismanaged, and this latest fire is a consequence of its mismanagement. The leaders are more concerned with DEI, ESG, climate change, and the rest of that sort of agenda than they are about protecting their citizens and the actual terrain. And the mainstream media covers for them. Here is a hilarious on-air fact check of one such journalist.

I’m sure you’ll be hearing that this fire was a consequence of climate change. Don’t believe it. It’s just a way to shift blame away from the politicians and onto a fiction that these same politicians have used to explain everything.

The Santa Ana winds have been around forever, and those are what drove the fire in LA to spread so quickly. The Santa Ana winds combined with the winds stoked by the fire itself make the spread uncontrollable. Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

This isn’t just the Santa Anas. This a combo of the Santa Ana winds and those generated by the fire. There is absolutely no way to stop a fire when winds are like this.

Author Raymond Chandler wrote about the Santa Ana winds back in the 1930s.

These winds are dry and warm. They are downright creepy, in fact. Chandler hits the nail on the head with his description. Let me elaborate.

Late on the afternoon of November 13, 2008, I was out walking a few holes on my golf course in Montecito. It gets dark at ~5 PM at that time of year in Montecito, so I would do my day’s work, then head out to walk a few holes while i could still see. I would end up at about dark. On this particular day, it was really chilly, and I was bundled up. On the next to the last hole, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came a hot, hard wind. It felt good, but I knew it was a Santa Ana.

Later that night, MD and I were watching Thursday Night Football, and I got a call from a friend. I answered, and the first words he spoke were: “ Are you guys all right?” Which is never a good thing to hear.

As it turned out, the Santa Anas had stoked a fire that was spreading like crazy through the Santa Barbara area. I went and looked out the front door, and flames were leaping above the trees right down the street. MD and I and our son and his family all ended up evacuating for a couple of days.

That’s how quickly a fire can spread.

Now let me tell you a bit about the administrative state of California and why all these people who have lost their homes are going to ended up getting screwed. Here is a diatribe from Adam Carolla, who is in a hotel after being evacuated from his home. I apologize in advance for the NSFW language. Also, you can ignore his overt politics re the Dems vs the GOP. He’s a total partisan. But the rest is absolutely true, as I have lived it.

When MD and I decided we wanted to move to the Santa Barbara area in 1998, we took a look at property prices and had major sticker shock. Just to give it a try, we ended up buying a live-aboard sailboat in the Santa Barbara marina. It sounds expensive, but it was vastly cheaper than even the tiniest condo we could find. We lived there off and on for short periods for a couple of years. MD hated living on the boat (she called it a floating Boy Scout camp) and wouldn’t spend but a couple of weeks at a time, so we ended up finally buying a condo that cost three times the price of the sailboat, but didn’t require walking 200 yards to take a shower in the marina restroom complex.

After we had lived in the condo for a while, we came across the most incredible piece of property we had ever seen. It was on a hill and had a 180-degree view of the Pacific Ocean and a 180-degree view of the mountains behind. (In the Santa Barbara area, you usually get either an ocean view or a mountain view. This one had both.) And the property had avocado trees, and a host of other fruit trees. It was idyllic. And, strangely enough, it wasn’t all that expensive.

Plus, we ended up buying it in such a way that we could sell off a part of it immediately, which really reduced our costs.

We decided that was where we wanted to build our dream home. We hired an architect to design it and spent months going back and forth on the plans. During this time, I talked to a number of people about what we were doing. They all said, “Oh, Santa Barbara County is so difficult to work with. You’ll really have trouble trying to get your house built.”

I kind of blew it off, because I had worked with contractors to build a house and several clinics in Arkansas, remodel a house in the mountains of Boulder, CO, an historic house in Santa Fe, NM, and a condo in Incline Village, NV right on the shore of Lake Tahoe. In all three cases, everyone told us how difficult the various planning agencies would be to work with. As it turned out, it was a little hassle, but nothing major.

I figured it would be the same in Santa Barbara County. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

We submitted our plans to the county planning commission and they were savaged. Nothing we did violated any code, but the planners just didn’t want more houses built. So they obstructed. Once we got started with all this, we discovered that people (applicants) had to hire expensive attorneys and private planners to get their request to build approved.

The private planners were people who had previously worked for the County Planning Commission, so knew how things worked on the inside. Ours told us that The County, as it was called, did everything they could to stymie people from building. She had worked there for years, so she knew.

In all the other places I’ve been involved in getting projects approved, the various administrative bodies involved reviewed plans as part of their service. If changes had to be made, you made them, then resubmitted. And they looked again. There was a bit of back and forth, but they finally approved the plans and gave you a permit. The only cost was your architect’s fees and reprinting the plans.

Not so in Santa Barbara County. There the county charges you by the hour for reviewing your plans and having them turned down. You have to pony up a bunch of money into an account that they draw down as their planners beaver away. And not only that, apparently (at least according to our private planner) working there is a high-stress job, so there is a lot of turnover. Every time—and there were several—that the particular planner working on our plans quit, we had to pay to bring a new planner “up to speed.” I shit you not. And these fees were not minor. They were in the $4,000 to $6,000 range.

Since both our architect and planner and attorney assured us that our plans were all within code, I asked why would couldn’t simply sue the county and force them to approve it. They said we could, but only after the county had turned us down. Which they didn’t do. They simply asked that changes be made. Each time we made the requested changes and resubmitted, they found something else.

Our professionals, all of whom we were paying along with the county planners, told us that’s how the country works. They keep throwing up roadblocks hoping you’ll just quit. As the process started getting close to the end, i.e., the point at which they couldn’t come up with any more changes, they started to lighten up, because they didn’t want to get sued. If you could hold out long enough, you could end up getting your plans approved and a building permit. But they were going to make it as expensive and as costly and as difficult as possible.

We were kind of at the end of our rope financially, and we discovered a house was for sale that MD had driven by daily and loved. We made a sort of low-ball offer contingent upon the sale of the lot, and ended up getting the house.

We sold the lot to a guy from Texas, who ran a hedge fund. He had a ton of money, but the county ended up beating him down, and he sold the property in frustration. As his last act of defiance, he cut down every avocado and fruit tree on the property and left a naked hillside. (We had offered to put the trees into an ‘Ag preserve,’ which would have preserved its naturalized state.)

This is not unique to Santa Barbara County. As Adam Carolla points out in his rant above, this is what is going to happen to all these people who will try to rebuild in LA.

Plus, California leans heavily on insurance companies, and the insurance companies finally say screw you and pull out of the state. If any of these poor people try to rebuild, they will be confronted with not being able to get homeowners insurance. Of if they can, it will me preposterously high.

When we had the big fire in Montecito that we had to evacuate from for almost three weeks in 2017, we ended up getting our homeowner’s insurance canceled. It wasn’t really canceled, the company just pulled out of California. We were paying ~$500 per month for homeowners insurance at the time. When we tried to get new coverage, we got prices in the $40,000 to $60,000 per year range. We were stunned. We got an out-of-state insurance agent (from Texas, of all places) who ended up getting us the best deal she could find, which was $25,000 per year. The kicker was that in order to get this deal, we had to pay the entire $25K up front. It was a nightmare. And that was what made us finally decide to downscale.

Most of the houses lost in this Los Angeles fire are in the $5M to $20M range. I can’t imagine what homeowner’s insurance will cost them to rebuild. Insurance may pay to replace their houses and belongings (though I doubt it will completely), but they will be hammered with insurance premiums. And no homeowners insurance means no loans to rebuild.

The nightmare for all these folks is just beginning. And I truly feel for them.

Fats Are Structural, Too

I made a mistake last week that a reader pointed out to me.

In last week’s Arrow, I wrote that protein is not really a fuel, unless during starvation when it can be used for energy. Under normal circumstances, fat and carbs are used as fuel, and protein is used to build and repair the body. Thus I categorized fat and carbs as fuels and protein as a structural element.

I was, of course, forgetting that all the membranes in the body are made of fatty acids. So, in essence fats are a sort of structural material as well. But not in the same way proteins are. Your DNA codes for protein, not fat. The DNA codes for the proteins that end up as enzymes, which construct the cellular and other membranes.

Proteins really are different in that they are both the raw materials for organs, organelles, bone, muscle, connective tissue, and everything else. And not only are they the raw materials, they are the actual factories in which these products are made. They are all made step-by-step by enzymes basically grabbing one component and attaching it to (or detaching it from, as the case may be) another to build a muscle, bone, or whatever.

Enzymes, which are made of protein, end up constructing the cellular membranes, which are composed of fatty acid tails. Below is a nice illustration from Wikipedia showing the hydrophobic tails of the cellular membrane. These tails are all made of fatty acids (i.e., fats).

The sharp-eyed among you may notice that carbohydrates and even cholesterol are part of the cell membrane. Cholesterol comes in through the diet, but it is primarily made by an enzymatic system in the cells—essentially all cells. Carbs and glycoproteins are also moved around by enzymes, but they are not considered structural.

I still stand by the notion that dietary fats and carbohydrates are primarily fuels and protein is primarily structural. Proteins can be used for energy in the absence of fats and carbs, and fats and carbs, especially fats, can be used for structural purposes.

But nutritionally fats and carbs are the fuels we use for energy.

Ultra-Processed Foods…Yet Again

Ultra-processed foods (UPF) are much in the news lately. Just yesterday the Wall Street Journal carried a piece headlined “Are Some Ultra-Processed Foods OK? New Study Has Answers.”

The first couple of paragraphs more or less lay out the article’s argument.

The article goes on to describe a study by Kevin Hall, PhD, at the NIH. He and his group did a sort of pilot study on UPF a couple of years ago, showing that those who chow down on a lot of UPF end up consuming about 500 more calories per day than those who eat similar diets without the UPF.

Here is a summary of that paper:

Let me give you a little history on this. At least as I heard it described by Dr. Hall himself. Dr. Hall is a calories in, calories out (CICO) guy of the deepest dye. In his world, that’s all that matters. When he heard at a talk that UPF (which was defined as additions to food that would not be found in a normal kitchen) caused excess weight gain, he was highly skeptical. These added ingredients such as flavorings and emulsifiers didn’t really add any calories to the diet, so, he wondered, how could they really make a person consuming them gain weight. In short, he thought the whole thing was BS.

So he threw together a study on 20 people who acted as their own controls. He started half on one diet and half on the other, then switched diets after two weeks. As it turned out, those on the UPF version of the diet consumed 500 calories per day more and gained weight.

Other scientists criticized the study for a number of reasons, but primarily because there wasn’t a washout period between the two phases of the study. Which is valid criticism.

If you put people on a low-carb diet for two weeks, then switch them abruptly to a low-fat diet without a few weeks in between to get rid of all the metabolic hormonal changes created by the two weeks of carb restriction, you aren’t going to get a valid reading on what happens with the low-fat diet. The same would be the case if the low-fat diet were first. This is why all serious studies of this kind have at least a several-week washout period between the two diets.

I understand why he did it this way on the first study. He had only 20 subjects, and they had to stay in the clinic at the NIH for the entire four weeks. He was afraid if he let them out after two weeks, a number of them wouldn’t return.

And I’m sure he expected there would be little, if any, difference in caloric consumption or weight change between the two groups, because ha had already deemed the idea of UPF causing issues as a load of bull.

Once he got the results, though, he was gobsmacked. So he decided to do a better study, or so I thought.

I was wrong. Here is how the study was designed.

There are more subjects—36 instead of 20—but only a one-week trial on each diet (it usually takes longer than a week for a diet to have a major effect) and still no washout periods between the diets. Or at least one wasn’t mentioned in the article.

And the study isn’t really designed to test the effects of UPF as UPF are defined: Those ingredients you wouldn’t find in a standard home kitchen. Every kitchen in America has salt, sugar, and fats (butter and/or salad dressing). And that’s what they are looking at.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the only foods found in nature in which both carbs and fats were high was human breast milk (milk of other animals vary as compared to humans). And that combo is designed to strongly fuel growth of the baby. Sadly, it seems it also fuels growth in an outward direction in adults.

Why are they fooling around in this study diddling with changes in composition of fats, salt, and carbohydrate? Why not simply take the same foods with the same caloric intake and add flavors, surfactants, emulsifiers and all the rest. That’s what makes UPF UPF. Not the combinations of fat and carb not found in nature.

Your tax dollars at work, I suppose.

Metabolic Theory of Cancer

Great new video by Tom Seyfried about a new paper linked in the video below. I wrote a three part series on this a couple of years ago. Here it is summarized nicely in about 12 minutes.

For those of you who don’t want to click on the video, here is the link to the paper. The problem, as I see it, anyway, is how to block glutamine, which is the most common amino acid in the human body.

If anyone has had any experience with this, please let me know. I’m intensely curious.

Richard Burton and Reading Serendipity

Over the past few days I’ve had one of those great experiences readers can have from time to time. I’m passing it along in case you would like to do the same.

A week or so ago I finished River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile written by Candace Millard, one of my favorite authors of this kind of book. The book is a sort of biography of Richard Burton, the 19th century English explorer (not the actor twice married to Elizabeth Taylor), but focuses primarily on his quest to find the source of the Nile.

Given the tools we have today that let us explore other planets, it’s difficult to imagine that around the time of our Civil War most of the map of Africa was pretty much blank. Map makers of the time could describe coastal Africa, but most of the interior was a cypher. Thus its old moniker, ‘The Dark Continent’.

At the same time, the Nile was one of the most famous rivers in the world. But no one knew its source. They realized, of course, that it had to originate somewhere in the blank part of the African map, but no one knew where precisely. Not even precisely; they didn’t know at all.

Richard Burton was an explorer, writer, linguist, and ethnographer of sorts. He was a true genius at picking up languages. He allegedly spoke 29 of them fluently. Due to his fluency in Arabic, he was the first non-Muslim to enter Mecca by pretending to be Arabic and a devotee of Islam, when in fact he was not a devotee of any particular religion. He had traveled widely, written a number of books about his explorations, and was a brilliant lecturer. And a nice looking guy. (MD thinks he looks like Freddie Mercury.)

In the mid-1800s, discovering the source of the Nile was a major goal for explorers the world over. Anyone who did discover the source would become instantly a international hero. So Burton decided he was up to the task and set about obtaining financing and gathering a crew.

Burton was an eccentric genius, who had been expelled from Oxford. He was totally Bohemian, but a skilled linguist. He had kicked around in the army for almost two decades and was widely traveled. He also had a lot of enemies, a situation that would hamper him for the rest of his life. But, in the end, he got the nod from the Royal Geographical Society, which agreed to fund his expedition.

He had a good friend who was a botanist and a medic who was to be his next in command. But not long before they were to set off, this friend died unexpectedly, leaving Burton in the lurch. He ended up being introduced to another man six years his junior who took up the mantle. Problem was, this man—John Hanning Speke—was a typical aristocratic Englishman through and through. He was virtually the opposite to Burton in almost every respect. Speke’s primary interest was in being a sportsman, which meant shooting every large game animal he could find. He had no felicity with languages, no interest in ethnography, and was devoid of any knowledge of botany or medicine.

As you might imagine, there was trouble from the get go. They first went to Zanzibar, where they were to find a crew and gather all the supplies they needed for the trek into the interior of Africa. They were set upon by a group of Somalis, who almost killed them. One Englishman, who was part or the expedition was killed. Speke was beaten severely and Burton took a lance through the left side of his face that went through and came out his other cheek.

They ended up going back to England to regroup. It is beyond me why Burton chose Speke again for the second go round, but he did. They went again to Zanzibar, but this time were able to assemble a crew—which was not a small task, since they needed between 100-200 porters and bearers. They finally made it to the mainland of Africa and set out by foot on their mission. They were plagued by every thing imaginable. First one of them got sick, then the other. They had crew desertions, theft, swarming insects, severe heat, and a thousand other unpleasantries.

And Speke and Burton came to hate one another. The expedition continued slowly toward Lake Tanganyika, which Burton had learned of from a number of sources during the journey. He speculated that Lake Tanganyika was probably the source of the Nile.

By the time they reached the lake, Burton and Speke were able to spend some time exploring it. But soon Burton was laid up ill. They spent weeks waiting for him to recover. Finally, running out of funds, porters, food, and everything else, Burton decided it would be best if he sent Speke on ahead to check out one other lake in the vicinity called Nyanza.

Speke did so and found the lake. He named it Lake Victoria, after his queen. And in traveling around Nyanza, he came to believe that it, not Lake Tanganyika, was the source of the Nile. As it turned out, he was correct.

He came back, told Burton about it, and they ended their expedition and headed back to Zanzibar. When they got there, Burton was trying to wind down all their affairs, get some funding to pay all the porters and others. Speke took off for England. And when he got there, he, Speke, took credit for discovering the source of the Nile.

Which, as you might imagine, sent Burton over the edge when he got back and realized what had happened.

I don’t want to spoil the story for you, so I’ll let you read the outcome. I was unfamiliar with the story myself, so I had no idea what was going to happen.

The author, Candace Millard, let both Burton and Speke speak for themselves by using their own words from the many letters and manuscripts she perused while doing her research for the book. Burton was an enormously talented writer, who, over the course of his life wrote many books. Speke, despite being an aristocrat, couldn’t write for squat.

I was so taken with Burton’s writing that I decided to see if I could find one of his books that I might enjoy reading. As it turned out, not long after this expedition to find the source of the Nile, Burton went to America to study the Mormons, or Saints as they were called. He took off on an expedition from Missouri and headed west to Salt Lake City. After studying the Saints, he headed for the west coast. And he wrote a book about it titled The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California. I was able to get it on Kindle for two bucks.

I started reading about Burton’s preparations for his trip across the plains, which was no easy thing back then. Probably a lot easier than forging into the wilds of deepest Africa, but still not without a lot of danger. Early in the book, he wrote that he had relied on a number of sources to prepare for his trip. One of the sources was a book written in 1859 titled The Prairie Traveler A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions by Randolph Barnes Marcy, who had himself led multiple wagon trains over the plains and through the mountains. I was able to get the book on Kindle for free.

And what a find. I’ve read almost nothing else since. I totally abandoned Burton’s book once I found this one. It is one helluva read.

Unlike modern histories reporting on what it was like to cross the country in a wagon train or caravan, this one doesn’t just tell you what they did back in those days. Instead it’s contemporaneous; it was written for people—many of whom were totally inexperienced—facing the prospect of undertaking overland travel and all the risks that entailed in 1859. The author tells them what they need, what to expect, and what to do if they meet the unexpected.

It is fascinating.

I’m probably going to go a bit overboard here, simply because I highlighted just about every page in the book. So bear with me, or simply skip on down if you don’t want to learn about what our pioneer ancestors faced.

Before I get into some of the highlights, I’ve got to tell you the book is peppered with words I didn’t know. Not grammatical terms, but terms describing things common to people back then, but not to us. For instance, when the author is describing how to outfit wagons or pack animals, he uses all kinds of terms I didn’t recognize at all.

It would be comparable to someone from 1859 reading about the features of one of today’s automobiles. The terms alternator, ignition, clutch, automatic transmission, odometer, or even battery would be totally foreign to them. Same with many of the descriptions in this book.

If you watch movies or TV shows about wagon trains, you don’t get the half of it. In these films the wagons just plod along over level ground, or maybe there is a scene in which the animals are pulling the wagon up a hill and everyone has to get out and help push. But you never see what happens when a wagon goes down a steep grade.

If the downhill grade is steep enough, the wagon will run over the animals trying to pull it. There are a lot of both steep uphill and steep downhill grades between Fort Smith, Arkansas (a popular starting point) and, say, Santa Fe, New Mexico. How did they keep the wagons from overrunning the mules or oxen going down hill?

Depends upon the grade. If it is fairly steep, they would remove one of the back wagon wheels and replace it with a thick pole they carried for the task. The pole would be attached pointing straight down and in such a way as to keep the wagon at the same height as it would be with the wheel. Then the drag of the pole would slow the wagon so it wouldn’t overrun the animals.

If the slope were really steep, this process would be undertaken on both rear wheels.

It’s described in the book as just one of those things that had to be done. Think of the effort required to pull off the wheel, then attach the pole, go down the slope, then take off the pole and remount the wheel. (Or both wheels, if the grade were steep enough.)

I’m going to post some excerpts just so you can get an idea what people endured back then.

Before I do, though, I want you to imagine seeing your daughter or son (and maybe grandchildren) off on such a journey. It would probably be the last time you ever saw them. They would be headed for a new life, and given the dangers and expense of such a trip, would not be coming back. No FaceTime. No phone calls, No nothing. They might as well be dead. Talk about a difficult parting. I cannot even imagine it.

A stampede is just about the greatest disaster that could befall a group. A good portion of the book is devoted to preventing stampedes.

When times got tough and they had to resort to eating their animals…

These wagon trains would travel early in the morning when it was still dark, then break at midday due to the heat. Then pick back up in the afternoon and go till after dark. When they were at rest, they posted sentries, or pickets, as the author calls them. They would be stationed some distance from the camp and were primarily there to warn the camp if Indians were approaching. Here is how they signaled.

Okay, I knew I was going to get carried away here, but I just found this book so fascinating, I’m assuming everyone will find it as interesting as I did.

I’ll leave you with one more.

Much is made in this book about the differences and idiosyncrasies between horses and mules. Sometimes these parties ran into heavy snow, especially as they approached the Rocky Mountains. If the snow was light, it was no biggie, they just proceeded as before. But if it were heavy, it was another story.

Does not sound like a lot of fun to me. Especially since at the end of the day, you couldn’t just repair to the lodge and sit in front of the fire with a tasty dram.

These were intrepid people.

At the end of the book, there are explicit day-by-day instructions for traveling from all the starting points to all the ending points of the many trails. The first one, for example, starts at Fort Smith, Arkansas and goes to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It tells how many miles it is between each camping spot, describes the water and grass situation. One day, I’m going to sit down with a detailed map and sketch it out.

If you want a taste of what the Old West was really like, grab a copy of this book. You won’t be disappointed.

Speaking of UPF, yesterday MD and I were running around getting provisions since we hadn’t been in Texas for a couple of months. We first went to Tom Thumb, the Texas brand of Safeway. Among other things, we wanted some heavy cream. There were three brands there, all of which contained gellan gum along with the cream. Not a single brand of cream that didn’t contain it.

We then went to Central Market, which is a sort of hybrid regular grocery store/whole foods type grocery store. Again, we found three brands of cream, but all three contained gellan gum.

Finally, we went to Whole Foods, where we found three more brands, including the Whole Foods brand, containing gellan gum. But, along with those three, there was one that was just pure cream. Which cost ten bucks per quart, but we bought it anyway.

So we went through nine brands of cream before finding the one and only that did not contain gellan gum (more about which shortly). Here is the one we found.

You will notice that the ingredients are cream and milk. That’s because it’s difficult to get only cream when you’re separating the two. There is always a little milk residual.

Which is where I suspect the gellan gum comes in. I had never heard of gellan gum, so I ran it through Perplexity, which is my new go-to search engine as it provides the papers to back up its conclusions.

Turns out is primary use is to act as a stabilizer, thickener, and suspension agent, while it provides texture control and ingredient suspension in beverages, especially dairy products.

According to Perplexity, it is relatively innocuous, but it can

• Slow digestion and alter gastrointestinal transit time

• Cause abdominal bloating and excessive gas

• Cause loose stools or diarrhea, particularly when consumed in large amounts

• Alter healthy intestinal bacteria levels in some individuals

• Potentially disrupt the normal mucous layer lining the gut

• Contribute to low-level inflammation in the digestive tract

Which makes me wonder why they use it at all. I suspect these other brands allow more of the less expensive milk to be a bigger part of their cream and make it seem thicker by adding gellan gum. I suspect a tiny bit of gellan gum is way less expensive than going the full cream route. I don’t know, but I suspect the milk content may be 10 or 20 percent, yet it tastes like full cream. A UPF all the way.

Right now I’m doing a deep dive on flavorings, which I think are one of the biggest culprits in terms of causing people to eat more. Look for more in future editions of The Arrow.

Odds and Ends

• Researchers discover huge ‘dinosaur highway’ dating back to around 166 million years ago. The tracks include those of a 32-foot-tall ferocious predator Megalosaurus, and herbivorous dinosaurs up to twice that size.

• Here is a list of the most punctual airlines in 2024. American Airlines, the one I fly most often didn’t make it into the top ten. Now you know why I rant about air travel.

• Know what happens to those coins you flip into the Trevi Fountain in Rome? (Admission: I’ve been to the fountain dozens of times, but have yet to toss a coin in.) The 2 million Euros a year end up feeding the poor.

• Apple has agreed to pay $95M to settle a lawsuit accusing its voice assistant, Siri, of listening to and recording users' conversations, and Apple of passing these private conversations onto third-party advertisers. This has happened to me multiple times. I’ll mention something to MD, and within an hour get an ad for it texted to me.

• Along with a baffling rise in post-pandemic mortality rates that has insurers stymied, the number of Americans claiming disabilities has skyrocketed since 2020. Hmmm. What could it possibly be? No mention of the V word.

• US homelessness reaches highest point since at least 2007, when homelessness record keeping started.

• Among mammals, the fully underground lifestyle has evolved independently at least five times.

• Chickadees and other birds that are top learners in tests to relocate food caches survive about three times longer than their less clever peers.

• Outraged vegans force closure of restaurant that tried to add regeneratively-farmed meat, eggs and dairy to the menu. In California, of course. Where else?

• Swearing has been shown to improve physical performance during short and intense tasks requiring strength and power development. Not really an RCT, but sure works for me during my band workouts.

• Highly sophisticated AI, by being able to resurrect and read formerly unreadable documents, is poised to reshape how we see the ancient world.

• Bizarre story about Turkey’s valley of ghost Disney castles. Really weird.

• Widespread use of lead in Rome caused estimated 2- to 3-point drop in IQ for nearly 180 years of Pax Romana. What might the Romans have done had they had two or three more points IQ-wise?

• New study shows that animals injected weekly with a microorganism found in cow’s milk and soil were essentially immune to weight gain from a high-fat, high-sugar diet.

• Ancient coins were not mass produced in a mint as they are today. Each was made individually and tells us something about its maker.

• Everyone seems to think multitasking is a great thing. As new research shows, it isn’t such a great thing. In fact, it drains your brain. (Single tasking drains my brain.)

• A rigorous nine-year government study looking at fluoride intake and intelligence in children concludes that as fluoride levels rise, IQ drops. Every 1 part per million increase in fluoride in urine was associated with a roughly 1 point drop in a child’s IQ score.

• Michigan university comes up with a banned words list. When I first saw the article, I figured the words would be those sensitive to the Woke. But I was wrong. I agree with the list. I wish they would add “like” to it. As in, I was like wow? If “like” were a banned word, many people, especially young people, would be struck mute.

• Were he still alive, Elvis Presley would have turned 90 on Jan 8. Would he still be jerking and twitching to his greatest hits? Hard to imagine him at 90.

• I enjoy coffee a lot. But I’m not nearly as obsessive about it as these folks who will go to any length—and pay any price—for a perfect cup of Joe.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

A reader sent me this video. It’s a clever video about Ozempic. A lot of the commenters on the video didn’t like it, but I thought it was kind of funny. My favorite line is about not whipping the horse.

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.

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.

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