Hello friends.

Greetings from Montecito.

Just got back late last night from a whirlwind trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We stayed in the city (if you can call it that) of Duck. Duck is the home of Duck Donuts, which every one who has ever eaten one seems to rave about. My DIL loves them, and her favorite is the maple bacon version.

Since I, too, love donuts (but haven’t eaten one in ages), I decided to try a little piece. It’s weird the way Duck Donuts work—at least in Duck, NC. You order from one place, then walk your order across the way (Duck Donuts is in a little outdoor mall) where the guy makes it for you.

He first fishes a cake donut out of the pile. I was immediately disappointed as I vastly prefer glazed donuts to cake donuts. He then dunks one side of the donut in a vat of maple glaze. He turns it glaze-side up, then sprinkles a handful of bacon bits on it that sticks to the maple glaze.

I took my purchase out to the car, and pinched off a tiny bit of it. Maybe 1/6 of the total donut and plopped it in my mouth. I didn’t think it tasted that great, and I was kind of pissed that I had bolted from my extreme ketogenic diet for so little reward. I gave the rest of it to my DIL.

I wish I had taken a photo of it, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. I took the photo above of the Duck Donuts place on our way out yesterday, but , for whatever reason, I didn’t take a photo of the frigging donut with my 1/6 of it taken out. For those of you who are interested, I did search around for a photo and came up with something better. Here is a short video of a maple bacon Duck Donut being made. Not my cup of tea.

duckdonuts

236K followers

View more on Instagram

These cannabis gummies keep selling out

Just 1 can get you feeling right within 5 minutes! Get 20% off your order.

Shop Now

Among the other things we did while at the Outer Banks were trips to Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers flew the first heavier than air flying machine. It’s a bleak, windy place with not a lot to see other than a vast stretch of flat land with a giant hill at one end of it. They used the hill to “fly” the glider version of their plane. Apparently, they hoofed it up the hill multiple times for a number of flights before they tried it under power on the flatland. The hill is large, and I didn’t have it in me to hoof it up even once. And that was without having to lug a huge glider up it.

Another outing was to see the wild horses that are a feature of the Outer Banks. This involved getting into a Hummer with multiple seats driven by a crazy woman. We took off from the place where we booked the trip. We drove down a paved road a ways then turned off onto the beach. Once we hit the beach, the howling winds hit us. It became almost unbearably cold as we drove along the beach with the wind cutting through us.

After what seemed an eternity, we turned away from the beach and up into a sort of disorganized housing area. We drove around all these big houses until we came upon a few wild horses grazing in someone’s back yard.

And another in someone else’s backyard.

We continued on our trek until we had come across nine or ten horses in various peoples’ back yards, where the horses were attracted because of patches of grass. Look and stare though I did, I couldn’t see any difference in these “wild” horses than in the thousands of other non-wild horses I had seen during my life. I don’t know what I expected in signing up for this adventure, but it wasn’t bouncing along the sand dunes in the freezing-assed wind to observe a handful of grazing horses that looked just like every other horse I’ve ever ridden or seen grazing.

There was one highlight of the excursion that did bring me some joy. As we sped along the beach in the howling cold wind, the lady driving the Hummer pointed out the stumps of trees along the waterline of the beach. She said those are from forests that used to extend far out into the ocean 500 hundred years ago. Which means, of course, that the ocean his risen since then on its own, pretty much wiping out the forests. Just another datapoint showing how nature makes these changes all on her own.

The few days we spent in the Outer Banks were kind of for battery recharging. When I wasn’t experimenting with a tiny bite of a Duck Donut, wandering around at Kitty Hawk, or rediscovering what horses really looked like, I was poring over medical/scientific papers, which, to me, is relaxing. I got a lot accomplished for future issues of The Arrow. What I didn’t get accomplished was a lot of work on this week’s edition. So it’s going to be a bit abbreviated. But it will be the only time so far in 221 weeks.

Comments and Poll Responses

My Breakfast Menu

Before we get to these, I’ve got to remind everyone what NBS stands for. I had a million questions about it last week because I didn’t specifically define it. I’ve used it for a while now—defining it every time—so I figured readers would know it. But apparently not.

NBS stands for No Bad Shit.

I use it in terms of ingredients in foods one finds at the grocery store. And I don’t mean just processed foods. You can find all kinds of half and half, heavy cream, butter, and all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t think of as processed foods with Bad Shit in them. MD and I are now careful shoppers and look for products containing NBS.

Here is a comment from someone taking me to task for not eating “real” foods for breakfast instead of the shake I showed last week.

First, I often do eat eggs for breakfast. Usually either scrambled or in an omelette. In either case, MD loads them heavily with Good Culture cream cheese, which contains NBS. All the other cream cheese brands we’ve found at our local grocers—both in Dallas and in Montecito—are not NBS. If I have eggs, I usually have a few strips of bacon along with them. We search for bacon with NBS. It is expensive, but we splurge.

I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten a pork chop for breakfast, but I’ve eaten a lot of chicken thighs or MD’s leftover steak from the night before. Same with ground beef. Just doesn’t seem breakfast-y to me. A bunch of sausage patties, on the other hand…

I just showed the thick shake last week because I absolutely love them. Being on a strict carnivore diet and getting a shake like that is almost equivalent to an ice cream sundae or something. It’s thick and delicious and filled with goodness because it’s made with heavy cream and whey protein powder. As I wrote, I switch between Ancient Nutrients whey protein and HLTHCode, one of our sponsors.

One day I looked at every protein powder in an enormous health food store in Santa Barbara. I could not find a single one that didn’t have a gum or an emulsifier in it. Which told me that protein powders are difficult to make mixable.

I did a further search online and found a whey protein powder that did not contain anything—at least according to its label—except for pure, sweet whey protein concentrate. Here it is.

You can find it on Amazon. It’s a little more expensive than most protein powders, but I wanted to give it a try, so I bought a bag.

When it arrived, I was fired up to try it out. To say it did not mix well is an understatement. MD and I used a shaker jar with a ball in it and an electric whisk, neither of which worked. We even used an immersion blender, and it sort of blended, but not very well. I ended up kind of eating the big chunks of unblended whey with a spoon. It was really tasty, but not so much so to be worth all the effort.

I realized why all protein powders have emulsifiers in them.

I started reading up on emulsifiers, and, as it turns out, the two that appear to be the least problematic are soy lecithin and sunflower lecithin.

The Ancient Nutrition vanilla bean whey protein contains sunflower lecithin. But based on my experience with the other one containing no emulsifier, I’m willing to accept whatever risk the sunflower lecithin might have.

I alternate the Ancient Nutrition with HLTHCode shakes. I like the fact that HLTHCode shakes have some saturated fat in them. And they have a multivitamin formula thrown in, because they are designed as a full-meal replacement. Not just some added protein. Since I don’t take a multivitamin, and since I’m on a pretty strict diet, I figure it might be a good thing to get a little scattering of vitamins and minerals thrown in a time or two per week. HLTHCode shakes do contain xanthan gum, which I’m not crazy about. But since I consume it once or twice a week at most, I’m not too concerned.

I figure most of these additives that have heretofore been considered GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the FDA will get another look under RFK, Jr. The findings may end up changing a lot of ingredient labels on a lot of products.

Glucose and Ketone Monitors

I got the message below from a poll respondent.

This reader is living my blood sugar testing life. Fluctuations all over the place despite maintaining a fairly constant diet.

I ran a Perplexity dot ai search on the most accurate glucometers and keto meters for home use. Turns out the highest recommendation was the Precision Xtra for ketones.

Here is what Perplexity had to say about the glucometer:

This was followed by a long list of other glucometers, none of which was the Keto-Mojo. I fact, the Keto-Mojo was not mentioned at all. Which leads me to believe my blood sugar readings were not especially accurate during the time I’ve been checking.

I immediately ordered a Contour Next glucometer with a bunch of test strips. I ordered it the day before we left the Outer Banks. Amazon said I would have it the next day. When we got home late last night, there it was, lying in the grass where the Amazon driver had thrown it. I took it in and opened it only to find that it was 70 glucose test strips for the Contour Next, not the Contour Next itself. I was, of course, outraged, so I flew to Amazon only to find that I had ordered the test strips and not the glucometer. I ordered it today, so it should be here tomorrow. What a moron.

After looking at all the glucose meters, I ran the same Perplexity search looking for the best ketone meters. What came up was the following:

So off I ran to order a Precision Xtra on Amazon, but alas, the only products available there were combined blood glucose, blood ketone monitors. I would have ordered one of those, except for the fact that perplexity rated the Keto-Mojo second best for ketones.

Since I already have a Keto-Mojo, I figure I’ll stick with it. At least for a while. I have not been as concerned over the ketone readings as I have the blood sugar ones. I’ll keep everyone posted on how it all goes once I’ve got the new glucometer in hand and give it a try. I took the Keto-Mojo to the Outer Banks, but I didn’t break it out even once. Other than the pinch of a Duck Donut, I ate pretty much as I do at home, so I would expect the readings to be about the same.

After going back and rereading the poll respondents response above, there is one thing that needs to be remembered. Glucose readings from a blood draw will be different from those obtained by finger stick. Typically, the ones from a blood draw will be lower.

Why?

The blood that comes from a finger stick is capillary blood, which means it is oxygenated, nutrient-rich blood heading out to the tissues. Veinous blood—that which comes from a blood draw—has had most of its nutrients withdrawn by the tissues it serviced. It is now heading back to get enriched. So if you find your blood sugar from a finger stick to be a bit higher than from a venous blood draw, that should be expected.

Now, there is one caveat to this rule. If you are in the fasted state, both should be about the same. But if you do it in the fed state, the finger stick will be higher.

My Eugenics Leanings

Every sentence of this poll response pissed me off.

In the first place, letting a virus spread through a flock of chickens is not eugenics. Eugenics is the practice of breeding humans to increase the the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Or to prevent humans with mental or physical disabilities from breeding in an effort to purify the species.

Eugenics is practiced all the time by farmers and other breeders of animals, but it’s called selective breeding. And no one thinks a thing about it. Unless, of course, it’s mentioned in the context of human breeding.

But letting a virus run through a flock of chickens… Eugenics it ain’t.

Even if we let a virus run through a population of humans, that wouldn’t be eugenics. Over the course of history, we’ve let God-only-knows how many viruses, bacteria, and fungi run rampant through populations simpy because we didn’t know how to treat them. The outcome was that those who didn’t die from the various infectious agents lived to reproduce. And their offspring may have been more resilient as a consequence.

The reader above wrote “You’ve got people in your government now who care so little for individual people that the thought of doing that is not far off.” Well, as we saw, it wasn’t eugenics. The implication is that my people (people in your government) care so little they would gladly kill off a chunk of the population to what end?

Let’s not forget that during the last year of the first Trump administration The Donald himself pushed through Operation Warp Speed to try to get a vaccination out in record time to prevent the spread of Covid. He even got it out before the election, but Gottlieb, the head of the FDA held it back until after the election so as to not give Trump a credit that might help his campaign.

Then once Biden took office, everyone in government was working as hard as possible to mandate the vaccines, which turned out to be a disaster. (These would be the people according to my respondent ‘not in my government’.) Now papers are coming out right and left predicting huge death rates in the near future for many people who took the vaccines. The Cleveland Clinic data I posted last week showed that the more vaccines people took, the more cases of Covid they came down with. Trump is damn lucky he didn’t get credit for the vaccine. And will be more lucky as time passes.

The next sentence is the one that really puts me over the edge.

“I enjoy reading your thoughts on diet and nutrition but I feel like you are moving ever more right wing and there are less and less things we agree on.”

Nothing pisses me off more than equating intellect with politics. Lefties do it all the time. One of my favorite professors was a total communist, but he was a brilliant physiologist. I learned a ton from him. Had I said, This guy is far, far left, so he doesn’t know squat, I would be much the worse for it today. Politics has absolutely nothing to do with nutritional science and the two shouldn’t be conflated.

Politics is tribal. It’s opinion. Anyone can have an opinion on one thing and be brilliant on another.

John von Neumann was considered by most to be the most intelligent human since Isaak Newton. But von Neumann was a right wing crank. As was Newton, to be honest. Does that mean everything they thought or wrote about is worthless because of their political opinions. My poll respondent might think so, but I doubt many others do.

I don’t know who created this graphic, but it portrays my political position perfectly.

In my case, I started a little right of center, which now makes me appear an extreme right winger, which my respondent accused me of being.

I wonder if my respondent would feel more comfortable making a stormy, cross-wind landing with a far right pilot at the controls or with a squishy leftie who got his/her job via DEI?

Julian Nott, RIP

I can’t let today go by without mentioning the death of my best friend in Santa Barbara six years ago yesterday.

I wrote a longer piece about Julian a few years ago, so I’ll just hit a few high points today. Julian was one of the most famous balloonists in the world. He holds something like 95 UK records and 79 international world records. Six years ago, he was preparing to set two world records on one flight.

He was going to set the speed record for going around the world and then go round again on the same flight and set the endurance record. During a test flight of the experimental balloon he had designed, an issue developed, and he had to land the balloon on the side of a hill.

He got out, called for a helicopter to come pick him up, and got back into the capsule to retrieve his wallet, papers, laptop, and other personal items. While he was in the capsule, it became unstable and began to tumble down the hill. Julian was thrown out and basically run over and crushed by the capsule.

I got the call when he was admitted to the hospital. The woman who I had always assumed was his wife was actually his long-term partner in an arrangement that by mutual agreement had never been formalized. The hospital would give her no information. Since I was the closest thing to a doctor he had, I ended up running interface with the docs at the hospital.

When I finally spoke to the neurosurgeon, he told me Julian had had a major brain injury and would never be the same again. I asked what percentage. He told me he would at best maybe get 25 percent back. I had to pass this along to Anne.

Julian and Anne had spoken many times about his wishes should some kind of similar catastrophe occur. Julian said that if his body were mangled beyond use, but his brain were okay, he wanted all the stops to be pulled out to save him. If, on the other hand, his body was okay, but his brain was badly damaged, he just wanted to be let go. Which is what Anne did. He died with her holding his hand.

Julian was a brilliant, funny, wonderful guy. Here is a little video that will give you a small taste of him. I miss him every day.

A few weeks after Julian’s memorial service in Santa Barbara (he had many memorial services all over the world—here is his obit in the Times of London), his partner Anne gifted me with a little trove of Julian memorabilia. One of the things she gave me was the very Charles Lindbergh book from which the quote came.

High LDL-Cholesterol on a Low-Carb Diet

I got a note a few days ago from my friend David Diamond that he had a new talk out on video. As I watched it, I realized it was a talk I had seen before, but I kept watching. As it turns out, there is much near the end that wasn’t in the other talk.

For those who don’t know Dr. Diamond, he is a neuroscientist. When he was a young man he got a cholesterol reading that was extremely high, and he was told he needed to go on a statin immediately. Since he was a PhD neuroscientist doing a lot of research, he decided to do a deep dive into his own situation. He wanted to see what the actual science was behind the supposed LDL-cholesterol heart disease connection.

His talk on this video is what he found. As he continues to learn more, he keeps making the talk on his situation and what he’s learned about cholesterol and heart disease a little longer and more comprehensive.

I get questions from readers all the time about their doctors badgering them to go on statins. This video will provide the answers. Some people actually will do better on a statin, but only if they aren’t willing to take control of their own health in a different way.

Enjoy!

Drug Ads on Television

I came across these paragraphs as I was going through my daily reading.

I didn’t really care what Rosenbluth had to say about it behind the paywall. I’ve got a pretty good idea what will happen.

If Big Pharma can’t run ads on TV, Big Pharma may be doomed. If Big Pharma can’t run ads for prescription drugs in anything except for medical journals, they are in trouble.

MD and I don’t watch much TV, but we’ve been hanging out with some people who turn the TV on first thing in the morning and turn it off as the last thing before going to bed. I can’t believe how many drug ads are on there. All day long, one after another. I knew there were a lot of them, but I had no idea there were as many as there are.

With the amount of money Big Pharma is spending, they basically control the newsrooms. If Bobby kills the drug ads, there will be thousands of layoffs in network TV and the cable channels. It will perhaps force some people who work there to become actual journalists and investigate the drug companies.

No one will do that now, because there is way too much money coming in. Big Pharma is untouchable. They are paying protection money. If that is stripped from them, you will see a major change. That at least is my prediction.

Okay, that’s about it for today. It’s a short one, but I’ll be back on my groove next week.

Odds and Ends

• We blew the whistle on the Covid lab leak five years ago and were written off as cranks. Now the CIA, British, and German intelligence have confirmed. Back then it was all ‘misinformation.’ Never forget.

• New research suggests that ancient Greek and Roman sculptures were perfumed with sweet-smelling fragrances such as rose and beeswax. Not only were they beautiful to look at, they smelled good, too.

• Huge insect study may have missed the mark.It appears that while insects on land are declining at a rate of 9 per cent per decade, freshwater insects are increasing at 11 per cent per decade.

• Boris Johnson: “I now believe Covid WAS caused by a lab leak. The Chinese owe us proper answers and our Government should start demanding them.” ‘Bout time, esp since your own intelligence agency believes as does our CIA.

• A study recently in Nature Medicine has strongly suggesting our environment and lifestyle play a much greater role than our genes in determining our longevity.

• For the second time this year, archaeologists discover tomb of unknown ancient Egyptian pharaoh.

• Newly declassified documents in the trial over Merck’s Gardasil HVP vaccine have revealed troubling details about the company’s failure to conduct key safety tests.

• Good news if it works. A piece of glass thinner than a credit card could solve a bug chunk of America’s $25 billion energy problem.

• First defund bad science; then invest in good science. Great idea, boss! But who gets to decide what is bad and what is good?

• Segway recalls 220K scooters due to fall hazard that has resulted in 20 injuries, ranging from bruises to broken bones. I saw the video of W come a cropper on one decades ago and decided it wasn’t for me.

• Study of European users of Google shows most don’t come to the site to search for news. They come to look things up, not to see what’s going on.

• This should provoke a few lively dinner table discussions. Javier Milei ordered the declassification of files on Nazis and the dictatorship in Argentina.

• New Study: Recent ‘unprecedented’ cloud cover decline driving modern (and past) climate change.

• Chewing gums shed microplastics into saliva. Interesting that it doesn’t matter if the base is a natural rubber or petroleum synthetic, they both shed the same.

• Running a marathon reduces brain myelin, but it fully recovers…in about two months. I like my brain myelin to be at full force all the time. Just another reason I don’t run marathons.

• A high school student might have stumbled upon a record-setting, dead black hole’s eerie afterglow—one of the largest ever seen.

• “Climate change is going to fade from view like overpopulation did.” From your lips to God’s ears. Lack of protests over Trump’s action on energy shows how little anyone ever really cared about global warming.

• One of the biggest and most important iron age hoards ever found in the UK has been revealed, potentially altering our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.

• Apparently, huge wooly mammoths were no match for humans 25,000 years ago. New site unearthed in which five enormous mammoths were butchered.

• How scientists misled the world about Covid’s origins. The suppression of the lab-leak theory is the mother of all Covid scandals.

Newsletter Recommendations

As always, I’ve got to promo Alex of Alex & Books. His newsletter comes out every Sunday morning, and I never miss reading it. I always find books I didn't know about. Give him a look if you’re a reader. Absolutely free!

Video of the Week

This VOTW is a little different. I just happened to stumble over this video and loved it. I don’t know any of the people involved. I don’t particularly enjoy Irish music and/or dancing, but the precision on this short video is unbelievable.

Since I’m a Scot’s Irish borderer, this is my music. It’s what became clogging over here starting in Appalachia and spreading through the South. I love to watch people clog and I love the music that goes along with it, but I’ve never really come to love Irish music and dancing. It seems to go on forever with the same thing over and over.

This piece is quite short, so you don’t have to worry about that. Just think about the precision it takes to make the violinist and dancer converge on every beat.

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.

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

Finally, don’t forget to take a look at what our kind sponsors have to offer. Dry Farm Wines, HLTH Code, Precision Health Reports, and Jaquish Biomedical.

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