Hello everyone.

Greetings from Dallas. Where we’re being lashed with rain and howling winds intermittently. Meanwhile the weather in Montecito is sunny and mid-60s. Over the last few trips back and forth we have been weather cursed. Always in the place with the crappy weather.

Comments From Polls, Comments, and Emails

Eugenics and Bird Flu

As those of you who read last week’s Arrow will recall, I took poll respondent to task for accusing me of being a promotor of eugenics among other things. I laid out my position on the issues, and the respondent wrote back in the poll responses. I’ll show his full response below, but first, I’ve got to say, this is a perfect example of how communications go awry in today’s social-media short form communications.

He wrote sentences meaning one thing to him, while I interpreted them as conveying a different meaning.

Here is his response to my commentary on his original commentary (both can be seen in last week’s Arrow):

Okay, I’m not sure I willfully misinterpreted his comments on eugenics. I just read them at face value. He made the case that I was coming close to approving eugenics by my recommendation of letting a virus spread through a chicken flock, killing those that had no immunity to the disease. The ones left standing, I wrote, did have either an immunity to the bird flu or more robust constitutions to be able to weather the disease. In any case, these birds would be the core of a new flock that would not be so vulnerable to the disease.

The course of action taken, as recommended by the Biden administration, was simply to kill all the chickens, which I thought was a stupid response.

My respondent still thinks this has the odor of eugenics on it. But I strongly disagree.

Every day, all over the world, farmers and ranchers engage in selective breeding of various farm animals in efforts to improve the breed. Whether these techniques improve the breed or not is questionable. I’m sure in does in terms of monetary gain to the farmer, but perhaps not to the consumer.

An example would be the Cornish Cross chicken, which is the selectively bred chicken that makes up over 98 percent of chickens sold at grocery stores in the US. It has been selectively bred to gain weight on half the weight of food of other chicken breeds. It grows so quickly, it comes to market in about five weeks after hatching (vs 15-18 weeks for chickens when I was a kid). It has huge breasts and stubby little legs that allow its feathers to drag when it walks. And it is truly tasteless. Try a grocery store Cornish Cross against any heritage breed of chicken, and you will find an enormous difference in taste.

That is eugenics in action, but it’s called selective breeding.

Eugenics is selective breeding applied to human subjects. Back a hundred years ago many prestigious people thought the race could be improved by selective breeding. They advocated the sterilization of those who had mental illness, bodily imperfections, low IQ levels, and a host of other issues.

Eugenics is clearly different than allowing a virus to sweep through a flock of chickens. Or even through a ‘flock’ of humans, for that matter. That’s what viruses do, in fact. If a new virus comes along, it sweeps through the human populace infecting everyone it can.

For context, the next sentence in my respondent’s first missive was “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.”

Again, he’s talking about eugenics. But my issue was with his term “your government,” which I took to mean the current administration versus his vastly more humanitarian, intelligent, kind, responsive, blah, blah, blah.

But he did not really mean that. What he failed to tell me in his first missive is that he is a Brit who lives in Australia, so he was talking about the US government in general, not taking a swipe at the current admin.

And his last point is one I agree with fully. He says he enjoys my thoughts on diet and nutrition despite our political disagreements. Perfect.

I’ve gone on with this longer than I probably should have, but it is just an example as to how we can completely misinterpret short messages. And I’m probably one of the worst at doing so. With all the short ways of interacting we have today—texts, tweets, and other messaging systems—its really easy to get things screwed up. We should all be more careful in how we interpret these mini-messages.

NBS Protein Supplements

After my piece on how I like Ancient Nutrition Whey Protein powder because in contains NBS, I got a zillion emails from people sending me protein powders that had NBS in them. (For new readers, NBS stands for no bad shit.) When I was at a whole foods grocery store (not Whole Foods), I went through the entire shelf of protein powders and couldn’t find one with NBS. All of them had gums and emulsifiers and other crap in them. The only one that didn’t was the Ancient Nutrition brand, which I’ve been using since. It does contain some sunflower lecithin for ease of mixing. I would prefer that not to be there, but it and soy lecithin are relatively benign as far as food additives go.

But I like the A₂/A₂ milk powder and the collagen protein as well. Plus a scoop of it gives me almost 3 grams of the amino acid leucine, which is the primary amino acid that throws the mTOR complex into gear and kicks off muscle protein synthesis. I wait around for it go down to $39 on Amazon (it’s usually $54-$59) and load up.

It’s nice to know that there are a lot of other protein powders out there containing NBS, so thanks to all of you who sent me evidence of that.

NBS Supplements

One reader sent me a link to the ultimate NBS supplement company.

There you go. The NBS supplement company. Problem is, if you go through the site looking at ingredients, you’ll discover there are many products containing a lot of BS, so I’m sure the NBS name of the company does not stand for the same thing my definition of NBS is. Funny, though, that there is a company with this name.

All pleasure. No guilt. And NBS!

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Bobby Feeling His Oats

I’ve had major apprehension about what was going to happen when RFK, Jr. actually occupied the office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). I’ve been around for a long time and have been bitterly disappointed in so many politicians I thought would be good and weren’t that I hardly dared to have major expectations for another.

I thought I had been bought out when I read the response he issued to the measles epidemic in Texas. Until I read it a second time and realized he was adhering to his principles as recited in his confirmation hearings and in all his pre-election campaigning.

I had major angst when Dr. David Weldon got the boot from his appointment as head of the CDC before he even went before the senate. Dr. Weldon is a vaccine skeptic, which means he simply wants vaccines to be proven to be as safe as everyone claims they are. But they do this claiming without there ever being placebo testing. When Dr. Weldon pulled away, I feared RFKs power and influence wasn’t what I thought it would be.

This one brief period over the next four years looks to be the only time that someone such as RFK can reform this snake pit of revolving doors, corporate capture, ignoring of parental pleas, avarice, and all the rest. Maybe the next leader of HHS can do it, but based on history, I doubt it. This is our hour.

I’ve been living on a knife’s edge since waiting for some announcement that would imply he was succumbing to pressure from within the HHS, NIH, or CDC. Instead all I’ve gotten is feedback suggesting he is really going to do what he promised.

The latest early this week was that he terminated Dr. Peter Marks. Dr. Marks submitted his resignation, but it is clearly a resignation under duress. He does not want to go. The fact that Bobby is booting him out the door is the first sign I’ve seen of some real change looming. Here is his scathing resignation letter:

Dr. Marks was the prime mover of Operation Warp Speed during the first Trump administration when the Faucis, Birxes, Collinses, and all the rest had the President buffaloed. Since his forced resignation vaccinators have been coming out of the woodwork screaming about Dr. Marks’s loss of stature.

In the same way I look at it as a hugely positive development, they see it as the end of their world. And most, if they’re smart, will see it as a harbinger ultimately of the end of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), which indemnified pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits claiming vaccine injuries.

At the time, there were only a handful of vaccinations given to children, and vaccines were not money making divisions of any pharmaceutical companies. It was the reverse, in fact. Companies were getting so many vaccine injury lawsuits from harmed children’s parents that it was putting them in the red financially. Consequently, most abandoned making vaccines. The peril of no vaccine availability frightened Congress into passing the bill preventing lawsuits for vaccine injuries.

What always blows my mind about this situation is that no one said, Wait a minute, if these vaccines are causing such problems that the manufacturers were going to quit making them because they are being inundated with lawsuits, maybe we should take a closer look at the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.

Instead they passed the law to indemnify the pharmaceutical companies against recourse and established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) as a no-fault alternative to traditional litigation. Once this law passed in 1986, people who incurred vaccine injuries had to file a claim against the Secretary of the HHS (Kennedy’s position now) and have a hearing in a court within the HHS.

From the DOJ website on the vaccine court, you can pretty easily discern how the court views these vaccine injury cases:

It’s pretty easy to see which way the courts lean in these cases. Especially since the recommended childhood vaccine schedule has gone from 5 immunizations before the passing of this law in 1986 to 72 now. That should speak volumes.

I spent a lot of time basking in the howls of outrage over the firing of Dr. Marks. I have at least 20 articles I could quote from to show just how much his dismissal made the vaccinators howl. But for time’s sake, I’ll just quote from a couple.

The first one is by the American Council on Science and Health. This outfit’s tagline says “Promoting science and debunking junk since 1978.” Which pretty much tells you all you need to know.

The author of this piece is devastated that Dr. Marks was sent packing. Probably because she is an investor in the pharmaceutical industry, and when Marks got the axe, pharmaceutical stock prices dropped like stones. That’s another dead giveaway.

You can see the BS creep in already with the clever mention of the 6-year-old child’s dying. The implication is that she died from measles. We learned last week that she died from medical mistakes in treating her pneumonia. But people reading the above who don’t know that will assume she died of the measles. I’m not even sure of the 41 hospitalization figure unless these are kids or adults in the hospital for something else who happened to have measles.

This author wrote something that almost defies belief in terms of how inaccurate it is.

This is absolutely off the charts nonsense. I’m sure many of the readers of this Arrow had the measles during childhood. I certainly did, though it took me until the 7th grade to get them.

Think about the numbers above. 2000 hospitalizations out of 10,000 cases? That would be one kid hospitalized out of each five who got measles. Twenty percent! I was around God only knows how many measles cases growing up, and I knew no one who went to the hospital. No one really went to the doctor. That is a flat out bogus stat. The rest of the stats are made up was well.

Now let’s look at the comparison when they look at vaccine injuries.

If these statistics were accurate, anyone would be a fool not to take the vaccines. But unfortunately, they are not accurate. Those statistics, if they came from anywhere other than this author’s head, which we already know is deluded, came from testing this particular vaccine against the previous version or another vaccine.

That’s how it’s done. If these are accurate, it means that the new vaccine provoked three more fever-related seizures than the previous version did. Same with the abnormal blood clotting and the allergic reactions. So, yes, compared to an earlier version of the vaccine, this isn’t too bad. But how many fever-related seizures and the other issues would have occurred in children getting a true placebo? We don’t know, because this new vaccine has never been tested against placebo—only against a former version of itself.

And in testing against a former version of itself, it came out a bit worse. What if the former version were tested against a previous version of itself and came out a bit worse in the comparison like the current one did. What if you follow that back through all the versions? What might you find? The seemingly small difference in adverse events between the current version and the previous version might be dwarfed compared to what would be found if the current version were compared with the version six editions before. Or… novel idea… against a true saline placebo!

Another writer went off the deep end after the firing of Marks. This article from Science-Based Medicine (SBC), the very title of which is almost a giveaway that the medicine isn’t likely science based, doesn’t so much gripe about Marks’s firing as it does about the person RFK picked to do the studies he wants done. I’m not familiar with the man in question, but the writer of SBC loathes him.

The author starts with an attack on RFK.

The author of this paper’s main issue with RFK is his determination to discover if autism is caused in some way by vaccines. His mind is made up.

There you have it in the most categorical words. No room for misunderstanding. There is no study showing a link. None whatsoever.

What always amazes me when people say things like this is the lack of curiosity about where all the cases of autism have come from. First generally recognized in the 1940s, during the 1960s and 1970s there were approximately 2-4 autistic kids per 10,000 children.

By the mid-1980s, 1 in 2,500 kids were autistic. The rate of autistic kids went from 1 in 150 in 2000 to 1 in 68 in 2010. In 2014 it was 1 in 59. In 2018, 1 in 44. And in 2023 it was 1 in 36.

I was in medical school in the late 1970s, and I never saw an autistic child. I learned about them, but in all the time I spent in pediatrics and doing pediatric ER work, I never saw a single case.

We watched a lot of interviews of kids with various mental issues from behind a one-way mirror. The staff psychiatrists did the interviews—we learned from them. I never saw an autistic kid.

You would think that a disorder that started out being seen in 2-4 kids out of ten thousand not that long ago and has now burgeoned to 1 in 36 live births would cause some curiosity. Other than vaccine frequency, not a lot medically has changed since 1970. We had plenty of antibiotics then and had been using them regularly with no change in the incidence of autism. I can’t think of any procedures correlated with autism. The fact that the onset of autism concurs with about the time kids get their big dose of childhood vaccines makes one wonder.

Why the huge increase in autism over the past 50 years? No one seems to want to try to figure it out. The pro-vaxxers certainly don’t. If you even mention the increase in autism over time, they’ll chime in that it wasn’t from vaccines. But how do they know?

The guy writing this SBM article at least understands in a small way why people have issues with the companies spinning off all these vaccines.

Then he goes on to hit the real hot button.

It’s the old we can’t ethically withhold proven treatment… That’s what they rely on testing the newest vaccines against the previous one. In my view, is bogus.

Let’s look at the difference between getting the measles and getting the vaccine.

If you get the vaccine, you have a bit of a sore arm. You probably won’t come down with the measles, but it’s not a 100 percent sure thing. Your immunity will wane, and you’ll probably have to get a booster shot later in life. Or maybe several. If not, you could get the measles and wind up in the ‘has measles’ group in terms of other risks of having measles. And you will have all the risks from the measles vaccine as well, whatever they are.

If you get the measles, it’s a relatively mild disease that in the vast majority of cases you’ll be over in about ten days. You’ll feel crappy for a day or two, but after that, it’s smooth sailing. You’ll have lifetime immunity, i.e., you’ll never have to worry about the measles again. You could develop a severe case that could lead to pneumonia, but that is quite rare and usually happens to kids who have underlying issues. In which case, it might behoove them to take the vaccine.

Given those choices, were I a healthy individual, I would skip the vaccine.

Now that there is greater widespread awareness of the whole vaccine-adverse-event situation, I’m sure researchers could recruit plenty of subjects to take either a measles vaccine or a total placebo. Most, I suspect would be hoping for the placebo. It would be an easy study to do. Get the forms signed after a lengthy explanation so the subjects would have informed consent — it’s not like you’re asking them to take or forego a vaccine against ebola for Heaven’s sake. It’s measles.

Then you would have a real, randomized, placebo-controlled study. Which we have not seen the likes of concerning a vaccine yet. It would provide an enormous amount of critical information and finally bring clarity to all the guessing.

The only issue is that you might have more people not signing up because they would fear they would be put in the vaccine group. But maybe not.

The author of this SBM blog says since we can’t ethically not give kids the vaccine, the best we can do is try to gain information from observational studies that aren’t RCTs. And he says those studies show categorically that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Well, we just talked about one of those studies in The Arrow a few weeks ago. It was done in Florida looking at kids on Medicaid who either went in for vaccines or didn’t. There were 47,155 kids enrolled in the study, which looked at neurodevelopment disorders (NDDs) and autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) as a function of how many vaccines a given child had taken.

Since we went over this paper in depth before, I don’ want to do it again, but you can read the results below.

Just remember that last figure. Kids with just one vaccine were 1.7 (almost two) times more likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than the unvaccinated. And those kids who had 11 or more vaccine visits were 4.4 more times likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than those with no vaccines.

Okay, I’ve got to end this. All I can say is godspeed Bobby; let’s learn the truth.

Reduce Your Microplastics Intake from 90,000 to 4000 Particles Per Year

Not long ago I wrote about a conversation I had with my mother (RIP) back in the 1990s. We had been talking about her smoking, which she had just quit for good. I asked her why she started smoking in the first place. She replied that back when she started in the WWII days everyone smoked. She said if you didn’t smoke, people thought you were weird.

It got me to thinking about what we did then (in the 1990s) that everyone would look back on and say, What a fool you were for doing that. Why did you do it?

I thought and thought about it, and the only thing I could come up with was that everyone was starting to drink their water from plastic bottles. No one—or, let’s say few—drank from the tap. I, of course, grew up drinking from the tap — or the garden hose depending on need. I had my own glass bottle that I would fill from the tap and put in the fridge, so I would have cold drinking water. Ultimately, though, I ended up like everyone else with an aversion to tap water and wound up carrying a plastic bottle with me everywhere I went.

I came upon one of those sites where you could put in your address and it would show you the contaminants in your tap water. I checked mine, and it looked awful, so that confirmed my decision to get my water from plastic bottles and avoid the tap.

A week or so ago, I saw the headline below in the New York Post.

Since I have been reading a lot about microplastics lately, the headline was clickbait for me, so I hit it.

I couldn’t believe what I read.

I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. I had to track down the paper to find out if it really said that, or if the Post was exaggerating.

I found the paper and discovered it was referencing a Nature paper I discussed about microplastics a few weeks ago in The Arrow.

The authors of the Nature paper, you may remember, gathered brains and other organs from autopsies and discovered that the brain accumulated much more micro- and nanoplastics (that the authors refer to as MNPs) than the other organs. And a troubling finding was that those patients who had dementia or Alzheimers had a greater accumulation of MNPs than those who had not developed cognitive issues.

The big question is, what does it all mean? Plastics are more or less stable chemically under conditions found in the human body, so do these MNPs just clutter up the place or do they cause problems? Since those with dementia had greater amounts, the plastics may be problematic. But we don’t know without the right kind of studies.

I haven’t read any studies on this at all, but I would bet that you would be more healthy if you had no MNPs in your body anywhere as compared to having them in all your organs. But that’s just speculation on my part Then, again, if I could get rid of whatever I have, and not get it back, I think I would be a much happier guy.

The authors agree.

And all I have to do is start drinking tap water, and I’ll reduce them by a good percent. Sounds like a winner to me. I’ll bet if I get a filter on my tap water, I can reduce them even further to the 90 percent in the article. But what if the filter is plastic? Will that just add more to the total?

I can see I’m going to have to do a deep dive on this one. More to come. If anyone has any ideas or knowledge on this front, please, please reply.

Well, it happened again. I ran out of space. I had about a third of a piece on thyroid levels and low-carb/ketogenic diets written the platform wouldn’t let me write another letter. I’ll put it up next week. A lot of people have been asking about thyroid hormone going down when they start low-carb or keto. I’ll explain it all next week. Sorry.

Odds and Ends

• Excellent long investigative piece by the NYT on what has gone on during the Ukraine-Russian war. I didn’t realize how deep the US was involved in terms of not just equipment, but intelligence and military feet on the ground. There was a real risk for WWII, yet the Biden administration said nothing.

• In the current era of pitching dominance, the hitting guru for the NY Yankees helps design a more lethal bat. What is a torpedo bat? Inside MLB's next big thing. But will it last?

• Fecal transplants from elite athletes improve insulin sensitivity in mice and help their muscles store more energy. Who knows where this is leading? Could be fecal transplant clinics on every corner before we know it.

• Uh, excuse me waiter, but there’s a rat in my soup. Japanese restaurant chain closes 2000 sites after this very thing happened. The very definition of bad PR.

• ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ movie to hit the big screen after all. Ketchup Entertainment buys the rights from Warner Bros after the latter canceled the flic.

• Private jet owners can now get a little more privacy. Elon Musk and Taylor Swift can now ask the FAA to keep their registration information out of the public eye, so they can’t be tracked.

• Cities in the United States with the most overweight and obese populations in 2025. Look what happened to Little Rock since MD and I moved away in 1997.

• A study done by The Associated Press shows that for the first time in history Major League Baseball's average salary broke the $5 million mark on Opening Day.

• Elon Musk claimed Monday the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) deleted a “terabyte of financial data” amid a probe of its internal operations. The data showed USIP contributed to ISIS and the Taliban. According to Musk, the data has been recovered.

• Researchers link linoleic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid, to an aggressive type of breast cancer; the molecule activates a major tumor growth pathway for "triple negative" cancers

• Sicilian farmer is laboring to revive and ancient superfood mentioned in the Bible 17 times; manna, a white mineral-rich resin has been used as a natural sweetener and medicinal aid for centuries. I’ve got to admit, I would love to taste it.

• Who drank wine in ancient Troy? According to recent research on the site, apparently just about everyone.

• New hypothesis: When ancient humans first invented stone tools, they may have been trying to emulate naturally formed sharp stones, meaning they would not have needed a huge leap of inspiration. Duh.

• Intermittent fasting is often associated with weight loss and metabolic health, but a new study suggests it may also boost sex drive too. Apparently fasting lowers serotonin levels in the brain, reducing inhibitory effects on sexual behavior.

• It may not just be tooth decay you need to worry about when it comes to sugary drinks: new research suggests that these sweetened beverages might also be raising the risk of oral cancer.

• Whether it’s an early morning jog, or a touch of Tai Chi, groundbreaking research from the University of South Australia shows that any form of exercise can significantly boost brain function and memory across children, adults, and older adults.

• A study from the Keck School of Medicine of USC found that a common sugar substitute—sucralose—alters brain activity related to hunger and increases appetite, especially in people with obesity.

• Toddler finds nearly 4,000-year-old Egyptian scarab amulet while vacationing in Israel. Why does this never happen to me? I lose stuff on vacations.

• Stone excavated from Viking era grave thought to look like female external genitalia deemed a “vulva stone.” In my long career as a primary care doc, I’ve seen many vulvas, and had I found this stone, it would never have occurred to me that it looked like one.

• Now for the best news of the day. Fauci’s wife got canned. She was “a top bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health.” He was bioethically challenged, which must have made for strange bedfellows. Two fewer grifters we no longer have to pay for.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

This week’s video is a choral work by one of MD’s favorite living choral composers, Ola Gjeilo. It’s called Northern Lights, in homage to his Norwegian homeland. MD has sung it with her chorus, but she has the fondest memories of listening to it on a several day car trip through Norway, from Oslo up to the glaciers, back down to the fjords and finally back to Oslo. And a stay on the shore of one fjord at the historic Walaker Inn that we both agree bears repeating at some time in the future.

The road up into the glaciers was breathtakingly beautiful, with shaggy cows and wooly sheep resting by the roadside, picturesque villages tucked into peaceful valleys, towering mountain peaks all around. And a navigation that looked like this:

Our native Norwejian host and driver on the trip was Morton, our good friend (and then European Director of Sales for our SousVide Supreme brand), who also happens to be a committed DeadHead — as in Grateful Dead. Morton and I sat in the front seat and MD in the rear on our trip. As soon as we pulled out of town, Morton put the Dead on the sound system — a cache of many hours of vintage live concert recordings he’d been asked to listen to — that after a while was more than MD could take.

She likes the Dead well enough in studio sessions, as do I, but live performances tend to be out of tune and go on and on and on. That’s all part of their charm to the DeadHeads and great for ‘noodling’ in the concert throng, but tedious to listen to (almost painful) to someone with really good pitch. So she plugged her ears in and cranked up Northern Lights (the whole album) to listen to in the gorgeous country that inspired its composer.

MD says to listen to the intricate harmonies here, the clear high soprano voices that soar above it all, anchoring it from above like the low bass lines often do from below. Classic Gjeilo touch. Notice how the voice parts hand off to one another so seamlessly. Just exquisite. And the music really evokes the ethereal, pure light of the place.

I, unfortunately, got treated to 17 hours of unfiltered Grateful Dead in the front seat.

Enjoy!

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.

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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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