Hello everyone.

Greetings from Montecito, where it has been pouring rain and cold for the last couple of days. Today it has been alternating between rain and a kind of watery sunshine. It seems I can’t find good weather anywhere I go lately.

I’ve got to kick off today’s Arrow with a comment I got from a reader in Israel. It is about the graphic below I displayed last week.

The red columns on top represent deaths from measles in those who have been vaccinated against measles. The blue columns on the bottom are those who died from measles who were unvaccinated.

I commented that "There are about 13 times more kids who are vaccinated than there are those who aren’t. If you apply that to the stats above, it makes the deaths in red much lower than those in blue (non-vaccinated)."

I just kind of did this via a quick mental calculation. I should have been more careful and done it correctly.

As my reader pointed out:

No, he did not miss something. I did. He is correct.

Based on the figures I found on the number of US kids vaccinated versus unvaccinated, it turns out that a bit more than 13 times more kids were vaccinated than unvaccinated. When you apply that difference to the numbers shown in the graphic above (144 deaths in the vaccinated vs 9 deaths in the unvaccinated, it turns out that were 23 percent more deaths per capita in the vaccinated group than in the unvaccinated. Just as my reader calculated.

I made mention last week that VAERS is a voluntary reporting system. Those who are on board with the vaccines always retort when VAERS is mentioned that these are not officially figures, the deaths aren’t validated, and the numbers aren’t to be believed.

Those who are on the vaccine skeptical side of the argument point out that only 1-2 percent of vaccine injuries or deaths are reported to VAERS. One can only imagine how many vaccine deaths may have occurred that weren’t reported. I, myself, know of two for sure.

I apologize for doing such a sloppy job last week on analyzing these data by eyeball. I’m glad my preceptive reader called me out on it.

Since I’ve spent so much time studying vaccines over the past four or so years, my bias is against them until they are tested properly. So in doing my eyeball estimate last week, I actually went against my own bias. I’m glad I was wrong.

While we’re on the subject of vaccines, I have delved into every source I can find in Texas trying to discover the health status of the little girl who they say died of measles. I’ve come up empty handed everywhere I’ve looked.

Then I found an X post. I’m reluctant to put it up, because I have no way of verifying if what the woman says is true or not. But it makes sense. Since I’ve had measles myself and had siblings and countless friends who had the measles, I know what an innocuous infection it is to normal kids. I highly suspect there were other issues with the child who died in Texas, because normal, healthy kids don’t usually die from measles.

I’m throwing this X tweet up for you to watch. Maybe someone will know the woman on it and be able to confirm. But what she says makes perfect sense given what I know about the disease.

The person who posted this has an obvious anti-vax bias based on the rest of his/her posts. I don’t know if the lady in the video is known to the poster or not. I went through all the comments looking for anything that might provide more info, but alas found nothing. If anyone knows this lady, or knows where this video was originally posted, please let me know.

Doctor Apologizes to His Patients For Vaccinating Without Informed Consent

Dr. Daniel Neides, formerly of the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, makes an emotional apology in the video below to his patients for subjecting them to vaccines without providing them with informed consent beforehand. Not only did he not explain potential issues that might arise post vaccine, he didn’t know what those issues might be.

Why?

Because he was never taught them in medical school. All he was taught regarding vaccines was the vaccination schedule. I had the same experience, except I wasn’t even taught the vaccination schedule. I attended medical school in the late 1970s (I graduated in 1979, which was well before the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) that removed all liability from vaccine manufacturers for damages caused by their product. ) When I graduated, small pox had been eliminated, so there was no longer a vaccine. The vaccine schedule was the MMR, the DpT, and polio. That was it.

Once liability was removed by the NCVIA, the number of vaccines exploded.

Dr. Neides was about ten years behind me, so when he was in med school, there were many more vaccines than when I was a med student. But he wasn’t taught anything about the vaccines other than the schedule. I wasn’t taught about them, either. It was just a given the ‘truth’ that they were wonderful.

There is a major course in med school called pharmacology, which is the study of drugs. As I recall, it was a year-long course that ran through the second year. In the course, we learned about all the different classes of drugs, what they were used for, how to dose them, and what the side effects were. Vaccines were never mentioned.

I’m sure it was the same with Dr. Neides.

After his residency, Dr. Neides went to work for the Cleveland Clinic and ended up being the COO and the medical director of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. His motivation was to keep his patients healthy, and somewhere along the way he realized that just maybe vaccinations were problematic. He ended up writing an op-ed piece for Cleveland News site about wellness in 2017 that included these paragraphs:

As you might imagine, this did not set well with his masters. In short order the gears began to turn in the Cleveland Clinic grinding him out of his long-held position. Here is his telling of what happened:

As my redneck friends would say, It just don’t do to scorn vaccines.

For the life of me, I can’t understand the hallowed position vaccines hold in the minds of the medical profession. There is not a drug out there—including the lowly aspirin—that doesn’t cause side effects of one kind or another in some people. Vaccines are no different. It’s okay to discuss the side effects of every other drug, but mention vaccine side effects, and you’re in big trouble.

It shows the massive snow job Big Pharma has laid on the medical profession. If you’re in mainstream medicine and you criticize vaccines in any way, you risk your position.

Here is the video of Dr. Neides apologizing to his patients.

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RFK, Jr. Meets With Big Food

Bobby Kennedy had his first meeting with the CEOs of Big Food a couple of days ago and nothing much happened. According to both the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy’s big ask was to get rid of all the dyes in foods kids eat. No where was there a mention of seed oils and/or ultra-processed foods.

According to the NY Times

It’s strange to me that dyes would be the first thing Kennedy leads with. He says it is a “strong desire and urgent priority” of the Trump administration to remove artificial coloring from food.

I’m not a fan of food dyes, but this is the first I’ve heard of its being an “urgent priority.” I guess you’ve got to start somewhere, but given Kennedy’s antipathy toward seed oils, I figured that would be the first thing he would bring up. Apparently, it wasn’t mentioned.

Later in the day, after the meeting, Kennedy as HHS Secretary released a directive to the FDA instructing that agency

According to the press release from the HHS:

As the NY Times article mentioned, additives to foods such as salt, garlic, and other spices frequently used in cooking were thought to be benign, so companies could simply list them as GRAS, Generally Recognized as Safe without going through an approval process.

The old “give them an inch, and they’ll take a mile” dictum took hold, and Big Food began classifying all kinds of chemicals as GRAS bypassing any regulatory agency. Which is why Europe has so many fewer food additives than we do in the US. In Europe these additives have to be passed before they can be added to the foods. Not so much here.

I would suspect that all the honchos from Big Food figured they were in pretty good shape after the meeting during which Kennedy focused mainly on artificial dyes. Then when they got back to their offices, they second shoe drops.

My guess is that the FDA will start requesting a number of formerly declared GRAS additives that will ultimately be found to be not so GRAS be banned from the food supply.

At least that is my hope.

Is Butter Bad For You?

First, I hope not, because I consume a fair amount of it.

The title of this section comes from an article with the same title published in The Economist a week or so ago.

I’m always surprised when these terrible studies are foisted off on the world by health journalists, who should know better. Any health journalist worth his/her salt should smell the BS in these kinds of studies from a mile away.

I’m also always surprised when these kinds of studies get funded by the NIH, because they are less than worthless. As I’ll demonstrate, they are good for nothing other than maybe putting those who don’t understand the statistics involved off of butter for a week or so. I would think the NIH would have a better vetting process for studies and would refuse to fund something like this one.

When I saw the article in The Economist, I knew I was going to get asked about it, and, sure enough, I got a handful of emails wondering if butter really was bad for us.

The paper titled “Butter and Plant-Based Oils Intake and Mortality” was published in JAMA Internal Medicine a week ago. Not only was this POS written up in The Economist, it was reviewed in an editorial in JAMA.

It is behind a JAMA paywall, but I don’t need to see the whole thing to know how crappy it is. Just reading the abstract tells me everything I need to know.

The study—if you want to call it that—is a cohort study, which is a type of observational study involving following a group of individuals who share a common characteristic or experience over a period of time. The purpose is to examine how certain factors, such as exposure to a risk factor, affect health outcomes or other events of interest.

There are a lot of such cohorts around. The three used for this study are “the Nurses’ Health Study (1990-2023), the Nurses’ Health Study II (1991-2023), and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (1990-2023).” These cohorts are groups of people who volunteered to be studies over a long period of time. They were in good health going into the cohort, then have follow up visits periodically when all kinds of health questions are asked of them. The databases of these cohorts can be, and often are, used as the databases for many studies.

The subjects making up the cohorts are usually given various questionnaires a couple of times a year. In this case, these cohorts were given dietary questionnaires twice a year asking them to estimate how much of whatever kind of food they had eaten over the previous six months.

Let me ask you. On a daily basis, how much butter did you consume over the past six months? How many eggs? How many apples?

I’m trying to keep a food diary to go along with my ketogenic diet experiment, and if I don’t write it down as I do it, I always forget something if I try to reconstruct my diet the next day. And my ketogenic diet is a fairly simple one. If I ate everything that wasn’t red hot or nailed down, I would never be able to come up with an accurate accounting of my diet from the day before or the week before.

The folks in these cohorts are doing it for the previous six months.

When all the adjustments were made on these cohorts to make them fit the specs for the study (for example, the authors eliminated all those who had health issues when they signed up as part of the cohort) they ended up with 33 years of follow-up among 221, 054 adults.

They analyzed the database for butter intake and consumable oil intake, and concluded that those who ate the most butter had a 15 percent higher risk of dying.

They adjusted for potential confounders, which are arbitrary choices. You’ve got a situation where you’re relying on food questionnaire data compiled by trying to recall foods eaten in the previous six months. And you fiddle with the data to “adjust for potential confounders.” Then, after all that, the difference isn’t all that much. It’s certainly not enough to recommend people not to eat butter.

Plus, there is a healthy user bias to contend with. Despite the fact as I’ve belabored countless times that even the cardiologists have given saturated fat a pass as not being problematic, most everyone still thinks it is a health issue. So people in these cohorts who are trying to eat ‘healthfully’ will probably avoid saturated fats, such as butter. Or at least avoid reporting that they used it. And they will probably use more oils in their cooking or say they did.

But healthy people are healthy in a lot of ways. They don’t smoke as much. They exercise more. They watch their weight. They are more particular in what they eat. If they erroneously believe that saturated fat will cause their cholesterol levels to rise and potentially cause them to experience heart disease, they will probably avoid it.

Since healthy people tend to live longer, then I would suspect those who consumed less butter would live longer, not because they avoided butter, but because they are living and being healthier overall.

I’m assuming the writer(s) of the article in The Economist had the full copy of the paper and any supplemental materials. No one is listed as the writer, so the article is more of an editorial. Whoever wrote the piece has not kept up with the science on saturated fat.

The kind of interesting thing about all of this is that the saturated fat in butter should run cholesterol up and lead to more heart disease. The lipophobes who wrote this article certainly think so. But those who consumed the most butter did not experience more heart disease.

The lipid hypothesis is simply that. A hypothesis that posits that cholesterol causes heart disease, and that saturated fat runs cholesterol levels up, therefor saturated fat causes heart disease. And it’s still only a hypothesis. Never yet proven. And in this case, the evidence does not show it to be true.

One more thing from the article in The Economist that makes the whole thing moot.

Let me ask you, dear reader, which do you think would contribute more to an early death? Eating a tablespoon of butter? Or being a smoker?

I rest my case.

For those of you who don’t have a firm grasp on what an observational study such as this one really is, I wrote a piece on it years ago explaining why such studies can’t prove causality.

How To Prevent Brain Aging

A really nice study came out this week that takes a deep dive on brain aging. It shows the human brain’s aging process is not a steady, linear decline, but instead follows a nonlinear trajectory with specific transition points.

The research team evaluated neuroimaging data from 19,300 subjects using genetic analyses and interventional studies to figure out how the human brain ages in an effort to identify potential strategies to protect cognitive function.

Traditionally, brain aging has been characterized by a handful of degenerative processes, including glucose hypometabolism, brain atrophy (shrinkage), and the deposition of proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Problem is, these findings often become detectable only in later stages when little can be done about them.

These authors took a different approach and employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect earlier changes in brain network connectivity and organization.

In their study of the 19,300 subjects, the researchers discovered that brain networks destabilize following an S-shaped (sigmoid) curve instead of a straight line trajectory. This S-shaped curve revealed three key transition points in the deterioration of cognition.

These findings challenge the conventional perspective of brain aging as a gradual, steady process. Instead, they suggest discrete phases with recognizable neurobiological characteristics. Identifying these transition points provides insights into when interventions might be most effective. And which of the various mechanisms might be best targeted.

Which, of course, is where the rubber meats the road. Let’s look at it.

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