The Arrow #215

Hello friends.

Greetings from Dallas, where it is bright and sunny, but cold. Very cold. But at least the sun is out. We haven’t seen it for a week or so. It’s been overcast and pouring rain for days.

I hope those of you in the US (and anyone else who is an American football fan) enjoyed the Super Bowl. I enjoyed it immensely as my bet on the Eagles paid off. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to football this year as I had way too much other stuff going on. But I had to watch the Super Bowl, and if I’m going to watch it, I’m going to bet it.

There is an enormous amount of sports betting that goes on in the US, which involves an obscene amount of money. And when you’ve got a basically unregulated system, and a huge amount of money involved, there is always the major temptation to fiddle with it. With football, in particular, it is pretty easy to throw a game one way or another with a well-timed call by one of the refs.

So with my correct (or not) suspicions that the whole affair isn’t on the total up and up, I always look for the team that is getting all the hype and bet against them. It was a no brainer this year. Kansas City was getting hyped out the wazoo, yet Philadelphia had the best running back in the NFL, the biggest O-line in pro football, probably the best defense in the game, a terrific receiver, and an excellent quarterback.

I watched the line carefully, and it never strayed from Kansas City as a one point favorite. All the talk everywhere was of Mahomes and the “three-peat.” And that’s not to mention Taylor Swift and all of that drama, I figured the line would go out as everyone lined up to be the Chiefs. I plopped my bet on the Eagles. It was a massive triumph. No nail biting at all. Just an easy win.

But I do have to admit, I was worried I had jumped on the wrong side early on when one of the refs made an absolutely atrocious call against the Eagles. But then within a few minutes there was an equally awful call made against the Chiefs, which, I’m sure, was a make-up call. Then the game settled in to a real Eagles-dominated butt kicking.

Another note on the big game. I think I’ve mentioned that our three sons all attended Catholic High School for Boys in Little Rock, Arkansas. We are not Catholic, but neither is a good part of the student body at Catholic High. As it turned out, Catholic High contributed to the Super Bowl.

Go Rockets!

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US Crime Stats Due for a Major Downturn

I was reminded of Vilfedo Pareto by a Substack post I stuck away in one of my countless open tabs a couple of months ago. Pareto gained fame as an economist and sociologist, but I’ve always liked him because he started out as a civil engineer, as did I. In the early 1900s, Pareto came up with the idea that is still attached to his name. He noticed that 80 percent of Italian land was owned by 20 percent of Italian people. He expanded that ratio to other situations as well. It might not be 20 percent of people doing about 80 percent of the work on a project. It could be 30 percent doing 70 percent of the work. Or even 5 percent doing 90 percent. But whatever the breakdown, it was a power law.

So many things turned out to fit the 80 percent/20 percent breakdown that it’s now commonly called the 80/20 rule, or Pareto’s law.

Pareto’s law can be taken to a second order level, or a third, or fourth. For example, let’s say 20 percent of the workers end up doing 80 percent of the work on a project. That’s the first order look at the law. If you take the 80 percent of work that was accomplished by the 20 percent, you can apply Pareto’s law to that, which would mean 20 percent of the first 20 percent did 80 percent of the 80 percent of work completed. 20 percent of 20 percent equals 4 percent. And 80 percent of 80 percent equals 64 percent. So a second order look would tell you that, assuming Pareto’s law holds, that 4 percent of the workers did 64 percent of the work.

To put it in numbers instead of percents, let’s say you start out with 100 people working on a project. Pareto would say that 20 of them did 80 percent of the work. Taking it to the second order would mean that 4 of them did 64 percent of the work.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the Substack post I referred to above that has been hiding in my tabs.

In July 2021, three young friends from the Tallaght area of Dublin were driving along the city’s N7 road when their car went headlong into a lorry. Graham Taylor, Karl Freeman and Dean Maguire, aged between 26 and 31, were all killed in the horror smash, which was followed by a fire of such intensity that the men had to be identified using DNA from relatives.

What was so unusual about the tragedy was that after the accident the number of burglaries across Leinster plummeted, with huge declines in some counties; in Laois and Offaly non-aggravated burglaries fell by more than half between June and August.

Freeman had ‘previous convictions for offences including dangerous driving, endangerment, burglary, assault and unlawful taking of a car’, one judge calling him ‘a menace to society’. Maguire had 30 previous criminal convictions, while the Gardaí considered Taylor to be the ‘most significant criminal’ of the three. He had 120 previous convictions, including a number of driving offences for speeding and endangerment.

Before their untimely and tragic deaths, these three men had between them made a huge contribution to crime in that part of Ireland, and with considerable effect on trust and wellbeing for literally tens of thousands of residents.

The post, which is well worth reading in its entirety, goes on to point out that there is a power law in crime similar to Pareto’s law. Below are a few stats mentioned.

Swedish nationwide data of all 2.4 million individuals born in 1958–1980 … looked at the distribution of violent crime convictions. In short, they found that 1% of people were accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions, and 0.12% of people accounted for 20% of violent crime convictions.’

“0.12 percent accounted for 20 percent of violent crimes.” Starting with Pareto’s 20 percent, that would be between three and four orders down.

In Washington DC, about 60–70% of all gun violence is carried out by just 500 individuals…

[in terms of shoplifting in] San Francisco or Vancouver … 40 offenders were arrested 6,000 times in a year.

According to the New York Times, ‘Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.’ That third is therefore committed by less than 0.004% of New York’s population. [Link in the original]

This is the Pareto’s law on steroids.

The thrust of the entire article is that a tiny percentage of people commit the vast majority of crimes. If this minuscule population of crooks, thugs, and violent offenders can be nabbed and locked up for a long time, then it makes the rest of us a lot safer.

Note: I hadn’t mentioned this before, but when we were in Montecito in December, our house in Dallas got broken into. Our next door neighbor has a lot of cars, and we let him park the overflow in our driveway when we’re out of town. He drove in and the thieves took off. Fortunately, it appeared they hadn’t gotten far in their brigandry before he scared them off. But they had completely turned our closet and bedroom chests into giant piles of clothes and belongings. I guess they were looking for something hidden there. It was a mess to clean up. After this, I have a keener appreciation of how devastating it is to have your house burgled. (Our house in Boulder, CO got burgled 20+ years ago, but that bad memory has almost faded.)

What with ICEs rounding up all the gangs such as Tren de Aragua and others and deporting them, I suspect a lot of crime will fall off just from that. These gangs did not come to the US to find jobs to support their struggling families. Getting rid of them should have a robust impact on the crime rate, which I predict will drop a considerable amount.

Good Article about Meat

Last week I put up a series of articles bashing meat in one of the many medical newsletters I subscribe to. A couple of days ago, I got one with a positive article about meat, so I’ll start off this next few sections with it.

The article titled New Insights Into How Dairy Cattle Efficiently Convert Plant Biomass Into Nutrients: Unlocking the Power of Rumen Microbiota discusses a paper in which researchers delved into the microbiota of dairy cattle to figure out how they were breaking down tough plant silage and converting it to milk and meat.

It’s a fairly technical paper, so I'm just going to post this paragraph describing what’s going on without getting deep in the weeds.

Lignocellulose, a structural component of plants, is challenging to break down due to its complex, tightly packed structure. While mammals cannot digest lignocellulose directly, ruminants like cows rely on their symbiotic rumen microbiota to perform this task. The cow’s rumen hosts a diverse microbial community that breaks down plant fibers, allowing cows to efficiently extract nutrients from otherwise indigestible materials. However, the mechanisms of microbial lignocellulose degradation remain poorly understood, especially how different feed types influence these processes.

The actual paper discusses how the different feeds impact the breakdown and digestion of lignocellulose and other fibrous components of plants.

Although this is a study of dairy cattle, beef cattle also have the same digestive anatomy, so I would assume the findings would apply to them as well.

I was not crazy about the following paragraph.

This research marks a significant step forward in our understanding of how dairy cattle convert plant biomass into valuable nutrients. By revealing the intricate microbial and enzymatic processes involved in lignocellulose degradation, the study offers new strategies for improving feed efficiency and sustainability in dairy farming. The identification of novel microbes and the influence of diet on microbial activity present exciting opportunities for future innovations in animal nutrition and agricultural biotechnology.

In other words, what we’re looking for is a way to decrease feed and increase milk production. Doesn’t matter if the milk doesn’t taste like regular milk, or if the cows are healthy, what matters is less expense on feed and more milk production.

That in a nutshell is what has happened across the board agriculturally.

Which brings me to a book review this week.

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Fiat Food

After I posted the bit last week about how the powers that be are trying to get everyone to avoid meat and switch to mainly plant-based foods, a reader sent me a link to a book, the subject of which was the same thing. So I grabbed a copy and read it. (Also, another reader—a PhD economist—sent me a note telling me some housing costs are included in the CPI, whereas the writer whose post I put up last week said they weren’t.)

The book titled Fiat Food is a mixed bag. The greatest part of the book is terrific, but the last 20 percent is a little out there. (See 80/20 again!)

In the first part of the book the author describes various monetary systems the world has used and how these monetary systems have all come a cropper when the money itself gets separated from some sort of valuable commodity.

Throughout centuries that commodity has been gold. Gold has many virtues as a store of value. It doesn’t degrade, it can be divided into small pieces, so it’s portable, it requires much effort to mine it, so the supply doesn’t increase much each year. It basically grows with the population. If a government’s currency is tied to gold—as the US’s was until 1971—it makes it almost impossible for government to inflate the currency and cause inflation.

If the government prints money that is tied to the gold stores it maintains, it is difficult to vastly increase the money by ramping up the printing presses. All those dollars (or whatever the currency) can be redeemed for gold. So if inflation strikes, people can simply trade their dollars for gold. That is theoretical. I’m not sure a lot of people did that, but it was possible for them to do so until 1934 when FDR signed the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. This act increased the dollar value of gold, which had been $20.67 per ounce since 1900. Roosevelt bumped the price to $35 per ounce, but quit allowing dollars to be redeemed for gold. Up until then, one could go into a bank and trade paper dollars for gold at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce.

After the 1934 act, you had to fork over $35 for an ounce of gold. Except you couldn’t. The act also prohibited the ownership of gold by private individuals. That is correct. It became unlawful to have gold in your possession unless it was in a watch or some sort of jewelry. Or teeth. All gold coins had to be turned in for paper dollars along with any other gold you might have.

American citizens could not trade their dollars for gold, but foreign nations could. Back then all the paper money in the US said Federal Reserve Note across the top and One Dollar (or whatever the denomination on the bottom. But right under the One Dollar there was a line that said “Will pay to the bearer on demand” referring to the denomination. It meant the bill represented a claim on gold, but no gold would be provided.

Then in 1971, when Richard Nixon was worried about getting re-elected in the face of both inflation and high unemployment, he figured the best thing he could do was to basically print more money to infuse into circulation in an effort to increase employment. But he couldn’t just turn on the presses, because the number of dollars in circulation was tied to the supply of gold held by the United States.

So Tricky Dick did the unthinkable, for which he was lauded at the time. He disconnected the dollar from gold. Instead of the imaginary ounce of gold you could get by trading in $35, you couldn’t get squat. The dollar was worth what the government said it was worth. Not long after, all the bills in circulation that said Federal Reserve Note on top and One Dollar (or whatever) on the bottom and “Will pay bearer on demand.” were removed from circulation and replaced by bills that simply said One Dollar.

Here is an old One Dollar bill. I’ve put the will pay bearer… in a red box.

Here is a new dollar bill. No will pay bearer on demand anywhere.

The new dollar is a dollar because the US government tells you it’s a dollar. If you tried to change it for any kind of hard currency, you would be out of luck.

This is what is called fiat money. It’s money not because it has intrinsic value or can be redeemed for gold or silver, but because the government proclaims it as money.

Once money is untethered from some sort of commodity of intrinsic value, the politicians can have a field day. They have no limit to what they can pay for. Just print more money.

Which is why a McDonald’s hamburger when I was in high school cost 15 cents and now it costs $2.17, which is almost 15 times as much. (When I was in high school this was the only burger available—now it is the lowest price burger on the menu.) Back then the McDonald’s burger cost 15 cents as did an order of fries (they had only one size) and a soft drink (again, only one size). I could get three burgers, two orders of fries, and a Coke for a dollar and get change back.

I’ve droned on too long about this. The first part of the book is basically about the debasement of the currency, which leads to inflation. The second part of the book is about what happened to our food quality at the same time.

These stories aren’t broken into separate sections—they are intertwined. The story about the change in our food is totally depressing. It involves Ancel Keys, John Harvey Kellogg, Frederick Stare, and a host of others who foisted the idea on us that meat was bad. Some were ideologues, while others were completely in the pay of the food industry.

It goes into detail as to how the medical literature has been corrupted by money from Big Food and Big Ag (not to mention Big Pharma). What I found most helpful about Fiat Food is that all of these stories of food abasement are between one cover. Most books cover one element—this one summarizes them all. All in one place.

The book’s main theme is that red meat, other meats, eggs, and dairy are the real foods we need to thrive. These foods can’t be shortchanged. Animals require feed and care, which is not inexpensive. And time. Foods of animal origin are always going to cost more than some adulterated snack bar made of wheat and HFCS, all of which are cheap.

The goal of Big Food is to make cheap, but tasty, carbs to lure us all away from steaks and eggs. And they are pretty much doing it. Probably more so in the US than in any other place

The realization of how Big Food and Big Sugar got their tentacles around the less fortunate and the kids in school is totally infuriating. For instance, reasonable people were inquiring as to why—with so much obesity and diabetes prevalent in lower income people—were we providing sugar-laden soft drinks on the food stamp program.

Coke raised hell about it (and invested a lot of money in payoffs and PR) and the powers that be buckled.

In 2021, an astounding $113 billion was spent on SNAP benefits, with 10 percent of all dollars spent on sugary drinks, which for Coca Cola would translate into $5.23 billion or more than 40 percent of their revenue for the year.

Is it any wonder that Coca Cola jumped into the fray? Big money was involved.

Then there is the school lunch program. The book talks about how there are now vending machines all over schools, filled with sugary drinks.

Perhaps, most notably, was the absence of the familiar red-and-white cartons of whole milk, a dietary staple of the lunch tray since President Harry Truman’s signing of the 1946 National School Lunch Program. As part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act that Michelle Obama called a “cornerstone” of her campaign, a new regulation was put into place that made it “a crime” to sell whole milk in public schools, vending machines, or anywhere else on school grounds. The First Lady called it “the most meaningful and comprehensive change to food in schools we’ve seen in a generation.”

The book will make your blood boil, but I still recommend it. I did not understand the magnitude of the outright payoffs involved in so many situations until I read it.

The one thing I did not like about the book is the citations. The author would describe a paper by telling the institution it came from and (sometimes) the year. I need a little more than that to dig up a study. The book is dotted with footnotes, but when I would go to them, the citation would always be some newspaper or magazine, not a scientific paper. And, typically, it wouldn’t give enough info about the newspaper or magazine so that I could track it down.

The final one fifth of the book discussed Bitcoin and how it can take the place of some sort of commodity-backed currency. There will ultimately be a finite number of Bitcoins. Like gold, they have to be mined, and it is expensive and time consuming. The mining process provides a service, so it isn’t just busy work.

But I’m just not sure the powers that be will allow Bitcoin to replace the dollar. Maybe on some one-on-one transactions. Already, you have to pay taxes if your Bitcoins or other such currency appreciate and you sell them. Others who have a better understanding of the cryptocurrency world than I have may find the latter part of the book more enlightening than I did.

Do not not purchase it because of the last 20 percent. The first 80 percent is worth the price of admission. And it’s only ten bucks on Kindle. Here is the link again, so you don’t have to scroll back up.

The Chart That Says It All

I found a version of the chart below in the NY Times a while back, but it was kind of washed out and difficult to read. I came across another vastly clearer version of the same graphic a few days ago on Wikipedia. The NY Times said the data came from the World Bank.

It absolutely tells the tale of what the depredations of the nutritional guidelines (which Fiat Food also goes into), Big Ag, Big Food, Big Pharma have created.

This is really pathetic. It hasn’t been this way forever. Not too many years ago, we were near the top, if not at the top, of the longevity stats. But then came the major changes in our food supply. Last week I wrote about the major inflection point in the obesity and diabetes stats, which had remained pretty much unchanged for decades. Then right about 1980 something changed. Rates of both obesity and diabetes began to rocket upward. If you look at the chart above, you can see the curve really start to change at about 1980.

This was when the first dietary guidelines came out. The ones pushing carbs and encouraging the avoidance of meat, especially red meat, and cholesterol. At the same time the government bumped the flour enrichment numbers, which increased everyone’s niacin load. Niacin has been shown to increase insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, and weight gain. As carb intake skyrocketed, saturated fat intake nose dived, seed oil intake shot up markedly. We started ditching beef for chicken in a trend that has done nothing but get worse.

I’m one of those people who believe the government screws up everything it touches, so the fewer things it touches, the better. I doubt the founding fathers had any idea the federal government was at some point going to micromanage our food choices, but alas it has come to pass. And in keeping with my theory, it has pretty much screwed everything up.

For proof, just look at the red line in the graphic above representing the longevity of US citizens versus the rest of the world.

What’s really a shame is that our medico-industrial complex has failed us so miserably.

Just this morning, I read the headline below in one of the many medical newsletters I get.

Maybe we need our biomedical dominance needs to be undermined. If it is undermined enough, perhaps we can get on the same longevity curves as all those other countries that have been dominated by our biomedical industry.

Just think about it. We spend more money than any other country on medical care. We develop most of the drugs that are developed. And we invent almost all of the medical technology used in diagnosis and treatment. Yet, as a population, our health sucks and we die earlier than folks from all the worse-off countries.

That, to me, speaks volumes.

I used to tell my patients that if they wanted to lose weight easily, all they needed to do was take a couple of months of vacation in Europe and eat anything they want. I said it kind of jokingly, knowing that no one would take me up on it. But it is for the most part true.

I’ve always lost weight whenever I spent time in Europe. The food is different. On the outside, it looks much the same, but on the inside it doesn’t have all the crap US food has.

The US and European regulatory agencies take significantly different approaches to food additive regulation, leading to many substances being allowed in the US but banned in Europe. The FDA takes a more permissive approach. It allows food additives to be added pretty much willy nilly. If these additives are later proven to he harmful, the FDA bans them as it just did one of the red dyes. Sort of an ‘innocent until proven guilty’ stance, which is good in terms of justice but poor in terms of food safety. European regulators require additives to be proven safe before approval. Which, in my view, is a much better approach, especially since it is an expensive undertaking to prove an additive is harmful. Who is going to cover that expense? Certainly not the food manufacturer.

I hate to use n=1 examples, because they are simply anecdotal. But I came across an article I’ve had stuck up on a browser tab for a while now that demonstrates the difference between US and European food.

A young woman grew up in the US in an Italian family and ate Italian food most of her life. She was getting married and planned to spend her honeymoon in Rome.

As an Italian-American, my fondest memories are of coming home from school to my mom cooking a massive pot of spaghetti and homemade garlic bread, or getting takeout pizza as a family on Friday nights.

But as much as I love pasta and a slice, they don't exactly love me. As I've gotten older, increasingly they leave me stuffed and fatigued for hours post-meal.

Like many Americans, I'd heard stories about people traveling to Europe and being able to eat anything without suffering bloating like they would at home.

She learns about continuous glucose monitors, so she decides to wear one for a week before she goes to Italy and for a week after she gets there. She plans to go face down in all the Italian food she finds in Rome, and wants to know if it affects her differently.

Sure enough, she had different readings eating American and Italian versions of the same Italian foods. Here are a set of the readings from the article. I tried everything to get the little blue view gallery boxes, but was unsuccessful.

The left was after eating pasta in the US, whereas the right was eating pasta in Italy.

Even the five-course meal we made during a cooking class, which included three separate pasta courses, didn't cause any high glucose alerts.

Experts believe the ultra-processed nature of US food versus European products may play a role.

Many pasta brands in the US use thickening agents, coloring agents and additives like emulsifiers which prolong their shelf life which have been linked to bloating, sluggishness and diabetes.

Italian pasta, meanwhile, is usually made with just semolina wheat flour and water, leaving out the preservatives.

You can read her story here.

Again, this is an n=1 and published in a tabloid. I would usually never quote something like this as being in any way authoritative, but it replicates my own experience and that of many people I know who spend time in Europe. I have never worn a CGM in Europe, but I would expect my experience to mimic hers had I done so. I probably will the next time I go. Which would be tomorrow if MD had anything to do with it. [The Bride concurs!]

But it’s not just the food.

I’ve never had medicine practiced on me in Europe (knock on wood), but I can’t imagine it is worse than what we have in the US.

And it’s getting worse by the day.

Attorney Jeff Childers from Florida filed a number of lawsuits during Covid against mandates and all kinds of foolishness. In putting together his cases, he did a deep dive on how medicine really works. He wrote it up in one of his recent Substack posts. Here’s what he reported.

During the early pandemic, my office was swamped with “hospital kidnapping” cases where desperate families called us because their loved one went into the hospital for an unrelated condition, like a broken ankle, then failed a mandatory covid test, and before anyone knew what was happening, they were in a coma, on the ventilator.

The reason the desperate families called lawyers was because the hospitals refused to discharge the patients so that the families could arrange alternative care. In cases we were forced to litigate, hospitals spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on defensive tall-building lawyers opposing our efforts to sue the hospitals to release those patients.

The individual stories are so hair-raising I hesitate to dive into the morbid details.

But I spent hundreds of hours investigating what was going on. Had the healers turned evil? Was the federally funded covid relief money so tantalizing that doctors and nurses and hospital managers cared nothing for their patients? Why did every single covid patient receive the exact same treatment protocol despite every case being different because individuals are different? Why did doctors refuse to try anything but the cookie-cutter treatment protocol even though covid was a “novel” disease?

It turns out the root cause of this tragic medical homogeneity wasn’t the doctors. What I found was much worse. I found the withered hand of government, right where Milton Friedman said it would be whenever you find a distorted market.

Here’s the problem: Most hospitals’ total income is almost entirely sourced from Medicare/Medicaid—the same agencies DOGE has been quietly auditing for the past week. In most cases, any hospital’s government funding exceeds 70% of total revenue. Hospitals basically have one customer, and it isn’t the patient.

Worse, Medicare/Medicaid establishes the “approved” treatment protocols for nearly every disease and condition, dictating what it will pay for, and what it refuses to pay for. Hospitals’ financial existence depends on compliance, and they had no choice but to obey. And on the flip side of the Judas coin, obeying was very lucrative.

In other words, the reason every COVID patient got the same useless, devastating Remdesivir/ventilator/opioid treatment is because partisan government bureaucrats dictated it and froze it into place. That’s it. And the same thing is true for nearly every other disease you can think of. [My bold]

In talking to my doctor friends who still have hospital practices, they say this is what’s going on.

And though Jeff Childers lets the docs off the hook with the first bolded paragraph above, they are not without blame. But at the same time, they are in a bad situation.

There is a concept called standard of care (SOC), which is the ‘approved’ method of treating patients with specific conditions. Physicians are supposed to do what in their professional opinion is best for their patients, and SOC be damned. But few have the courage to veer from the SOC, because they’ll get in trouble with the hospitals, Medicare won’t pay the docs, and, if anything goes awry, the doc gets sued.

Big Pharma has a lot to do with setting the SOC. Big Pharma recruits young (and sometimes older) physicians who are moving up the ranks at Harvard, Stanford, and other prestigious institutions. Big Pharma sends them to international medical conferences in first class and puts them up in style. Funds their studies, and often pays them outright. All these docs have to do is promote the various drug regimens of the pharmaceutical company supporting them.

Since these are docs from the big named institutions, they end up (probably with Big Pharma’s help) getting onto the SOC guidelines committees for the various specialties. And once they help set the SOC guidelines, those become a sort of law.

If your doctor diagnosed you with some form of cancer, you would probably be told you needed to get chemotherapy, radiation therapy, maybe immunotherapy, and then have all or part of whatever organ was cancerous taken out.

The whole process would cost tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of dollars, most of which would make it into the hands of Big Pharma and the hospital. Some would make it to the physician, but probably not nearly as much as the other two entities got paid.

Now let’s say you’re a physician who, like me, has been studying the anti-cancer effects of fenbendazole, mebendazole, and ivermectin along with another handful of relatively harmless substances for the treatment of cancer, and you decide you’ll treat your patient with theses drugs instead of following the SOC.

You’re dead in the water.

The hospital will probably kick you off the staff. The medical associations will be after you. And, God forbid, if anything went wrong with the patient, you would be looking at a huge lawsuit. You would probably lose your malpractice insurance as well.

So, despite the fact that you know the chemotherapy is going to be brutal for the patient, as is the radiation treatment, you recommend it; you’re sort of up against the system. Then the patient will have to recover from these debilitating therapies before they will be strong enough to withstand the surgery. Then comes the surgery, which can be horrific. After a few years, the patient’s cancer returns. You try another round of chemo. It doesn’t particularly work. And in a year or so, the patient dies.

All is good. You’ve followed the SOC.

If you did try the fenbendazole or one of the other repurposed drugs (which don’t have the horrific side effects) and escaped censure from the hospital, who knows if Medicare or Medicaid or other private insurers would pay for the patient’s follow up labs, scans, scopes, and/or X-rays to monitor the status when the SOC hadn’t been followed.

The whole situation is a nightmare, which is why the US longevity follows the pitiful curve away from all the other countries that don’t have our biomedical brilliance.

I hope things are changing. I just got word that Bobby Kennedy just got confirmed as HHS Secretary. I’m hoping we will see some major changes. Here’s what Politico just had to say.

Throughout his confirmation process, Kennedy focused on the need to address nutrition and food systems to improve the country’s overall wellbeing — a reframing of the usual health policy debates in Congress.

And he was backed by a movement of MAHA supporters, who argue the health system should focus on nutrition and exercise more than pharmaceutical solutions. Senators said they saw the power in the MAHA movement, which flooded their offices with calls and emails urging support for Kennedy. [My bold]

I hope he sticks to his guns. And I hope he gets some good people in there who take a hard look at the involvement of Big Pharma and Big Hospital in driving the standard of care. And to try to restore some autonomy to physicians to use their best judgement in the treating of their patients instead of doing cookbook medicine.

My Ketogenic Experiment

When MD and I ran our chain of urgent care centers in Little Rock, we had hundreds of doctors rotate through working shifts over the years. We always knew which doctors had experienced any kind of illness themselves by the way they showed compassion for patients suffering with the same thing. It was easy to spot.

You can read about a disease, but that’s not the same as living through it. And if you have lived through it, you have more compassion for those patients who have the same condition.

I just experienced this myself with the ketogenic diet and getting into ketosis.

I have treated countless patients with low-carb/ketogenic diets. I’ve counseled them to cut their carbs, and told them if they keep the carbs down, they will go into ketosis. And the downer they keep their carbs, the higher their ketones will go.

Now this was in the days before blood ketone monitors, so all we had to go by were urine dipsticks that tested for ketones. People would come in swearing they had adhered to their diet, but just barely got a ketone reading on their urine test.

I more or less blew it off and told them to cut more carbs. Plus, if truth be known, I had the whiff of suspicion that they were cheating. (Note: as a new study has shown using labeled water, I was right more often than wrong. People do underreport what they eat.)

But I have learned a lesson.

In an issue of the Arrow back around Christmas, I wrote about how I avoided every speck of Christmas candy, cookies, fruitcake, etc., that I usually go face down in. That’s my one splurge time of the year. Plus at about the same time, or a little earlier, I started refusing to eat anything that was adulterated with gums, emulsifiers, and other crap, which I’m sure played a role. (MD came up with an acronym we now use for clean foods. It’s NBS, no bad shit. She’ll say, hey, I found some cream cheese with NBS. I hope it catches on.)

While I was being so good over the Christmas holiday season and avoiding all the Christmas goodies along with eating foods that had NBS, I decided to go carnivore for a while. Our middle son had been doing carnivore for almost a year, so I had a partner in carnivory.

I assumed I was generating ketones like crazy, because I was eating virtually no carbs and a lot of fat and protein. I couldn’t wait to get back to Dallas where I had left my Keto-Mojo.

When we finally got back, I dug it out and tested myself. My ketones were barely measurable and my blood sugar was in the high 90s. And this after almost a month on really low-carb, then carnivore. I couldn’t believe it. I looked at the test strips, and discovered they were way out of date. So I immediately ordered some new ones. When they arrived, I tested again, and the same thing. Not even 1 mmol ketones.

I couldn’t really cut the carbs any more, because they were already at nothing. So I tried adding fat. I put pats of butter on my meat. I put it on eggs. MD got some pork belly, which is really fat, and I ate that along with bacon. My ketones came up a bit, but not like I thought they would.

I had read that some people kick ketosis into gear by doing a three-day water fast. I had never done a three-day fast. A lot of one-day fasts, but never a three-day one. I decided to try that. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it also wasn’t fun. But I made it through.

When I checked again, my blood sugar was 67 and my ketones were 6.0 mmol, which is really high. Not dangerously high, but at the upper end of what is considered nutritional ketosis.

After the fast, I gorged on meat and a tiny, and I mean tiny, bit of carb. As in maybe three cherry tomatoes split in half. After a day of that, I rechecked, and my blood sugar was back up and my ketones back down to below 1 mmol.

Since everything had gone where I wanted it to go with the three-day fast, then cratered when I went back to meat and almost no carbs, I pondered what to try next. I couldn’t really cut carbs to nothing as there was almost nowhere to go. I was getting plenty of protein with the meat and the protein shake I was drinking after I worked out.

I knew cutting fat wasn’t going to do the trick, so all I could think of was to really boost the fat. I drank chicken broth MD made with a lot of fat in it, and I added butter to everything. And my ketones went up, not back up to 6.0, but up.

I watched a video in which it was recommended to take a couple of tablespoons of Tahini (which is sesame seed butter), so I got some Tahini that had NBS in it. Just ground sesame seeds and a bit of sea salt. I took a couple of tablespoons after dinner and one here or there when I thought of it during the day. I didn’t think of it often, because it tastes nasty to me and the consistency is wretched. But I choked it down in the name of science.

Since tahini contains a fair amount of linoleic acid, I also took a tablespoon of fish oil to balance things out. And I got some macadamia nuts that MD roasted and salted for me, so I didn’t have to eat the ones roasted in vegetable oil. Each of those was a little ball of fat.

It took a couple of days, but I woke up one morning and my ketones were 5.5 mmol. I was ecstatic.

I’ve fiddled around with it now for a while, and I can keep my ketones up over 2.0 pretty easily (usually up around 4.0 or over) by just pounding the fat.

While all this was going on, I have no idea how many calories I was eating, but I really started shedding the weight. I’m now down about my high school weight. (I’m assuming—we don’t have a set of scales.) It’s incredible.

The secret to getting into ketosis is to pound your fat intake. I’ve always said protein doesn’t run blood sugar up (based on a fairly substantial library of studies). If you need blood sugar, you can convert protein to sugar. If you don’t need sugar, you won’t. But I’m beginning to rethink that. When I cut back on the protein a bit, my blood sugar goes down.

So I am rethinking the entire protein/blood sugar situation and will begin going through the literature with my own experience in mind.

But I can tell you that I have never lost weight like I have with a real, deep, honest-to-Pete ketogenic diet. And not just a diet that is called ketogenic, but one that makes you produce actual ketones. If you’re interested, grab yourself a Keto-Mojo or any other device (there are many) that measure ketones. The Keto-Mojo couldn’t be simpler to use, but I imagine they all work about the same.

If you do try this, please let me know your results. I am keenly interested after my own revelatory experience.

Odds and Ends

Newsletter Recommendations

I love to read. And I love to get Alex & Books every Sunday in my mailbox. I always find a book I was unaware of. And I enjoy the reviews. Give it a look. Absolutely free.

Video of the Week

The VOTW is going to be a little different this week. I’ve been hanging onto for a while wondering if I should post it, because it is kind of erotic. When I was looking at my saved videos today and came across it again, I said, what the hell. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so we could all us a little eroticism, so up it goes.

It’s modern dance, not ballet, but it’s almost ballet. I always thought ballet sucked till I saw it live. Once I saw it live, I was hooked. I still won’t watch it on TV, but I'll gladly go to live ballet. I suspect this short dance is vastly better live than in video, but it ain’t too bad in video.

Enjoy. And Happy Valentine’s Day.

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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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