Greetings friends.

Let’s get to it.

Comments, Poll Responses, and Emails

I received the following response through the poll:

That was it.

I’m not sure what to say. My birthday is June 19. Juneteenth has been celebrated in the South (where I’m from) on June 19 going back as long as I can remember. Biden, of whom I wasn’t a fan, made Juneteenth a national holiday, which had nothing to do with his not being a fan of mine. I applauded it. So now my birthday will always fall on a national holiday. Most of our national holidays get moved around each year to make for a long weekend. Thanksgiving and Easter fall on Thursday and Sunday, leaving only Christmas, New Years, the 4th of July (many wrote to tell me I forgot that one), and Juneteenth to be stand alone holidays, always celebrated on the day they actually fall.

Now if anyone can find racism in that, then I guess I’m a racist, though I’ve never thought so myself. If you do find it racist, please let me know why.

For those of you not from the South or who live in other countries, here is a brief history of Juneteenth.

Doctors Kill More People Than Drug Overdoses and Automobile Accidents Combined

A couple of days ago in my reading I came across a statistic that greatly surprised me. It surprised me so much that I dug into it to see if it were really true. And it is.

Iatrogenic deaths are the third leading cause of death in the United States, right behind heart disease and cancer. What are iatrogenic deaths? They are deaths caused by doctors.

Exactly how many iatrogenic deaths per year is difficult to calculate accurately, but most sources come in between 250,000 and 400,000+ per year.

A large percentage of these deaths are attributed to prescription drugs that were prescribed correctly. Yep, even prescribed correctly, drugs kill ~100,000 people per year. Which is why I’m so careful both about taking and prescribing medications.

According to NBI 

The CDC reported 80,391 deaths from illicit drug overdose in 2024, which was down considerably since 2023.

And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its latest figure for traffic fatalities in 2024: 39,345. Which, to me, is a testament to safer cars. When I started driving in the 1960s there were ~50,000 deaths annually from automobile accidents then when there were vastly fewer cars on the road than there are now.

What these statistics tell me is that going to the doctor is not necessarily a benign undertaking. You may be opening your self to the third greatest cause of death. Some people go at the drop of a hat, while others have to practically be at death’s door before seeing a physician. I would encourage a more middle road. The tincture of time will “cure” many mild illnesses.

I’m especially depressed when I hear from readers—which I regularly do—whose doctors threaten to fire them as patients if they don’t go on a statin, which, in my view, is a worthless medication that causes more problems than it fixes.

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Do As I Say, Not As I Do

I’ve picked on Art Caplan a couple of times. Once on my blog and once in The Arrow a couple of years ago. I almost hate to do it, because he seems like a nice guy. But he leaves himself so open, it’s simply difficult to resist.

A couple of weeks ago, he got his first look at the edict from RFK’s HHS on what needs to be done to improve the health of Americans. He read it and decided to comment on it.

You can watch the entire five or six minute video through the above link. I’ll excerpt the parts I want to discuss.

First (and this has nothing to do with the content) Dr. Caplan has the annoying tendency to watch the teleprompter for the entire video, short though it is. Even his introduction and his sign off, which should always be to camera, he does while looking at the prompter.

Alright, my petty production value criticisms aside, let’s look at what he says.

I agree with him across the board here about what this executive order said. Shortly after this condemnation of the health of Americans, he jumps to one of the most overused and useless statements ever uttered about preventative medicine.

Preventative care is what folks yammer about all the time, yet there is no evidence whatsoever—other than their mouthing about it—that anyone has any interest at all about preventative care. I’ve been on dozens of panels discussing the problems with healthcare today, and invariably someone brings up the importance of preventative care. Heads nod sagely all around. Except for mine.

I usually end up saying something along the following lines.

“I’ve been practicing medicine for decades, and I have yet to have anyone come in to see me in the clinic saying the following. ‘Doc, I just feel so damn good right now, what do I need to do to keep feeling this way forever?’”

No one ever knows how to respond to that. Usually there is dead silence, then the monitor takes another question.

It’s true. No one wants to pay for preventative care. When people get sick, they’ll rush into the clinic. But never when they’re well. There is no money in preventative care. And from my experience no interest.

I would bet that if I or other doctors had a free preventative care clinic, no one would come. We mainly think about our health only when we’re sick. Sure, some read books and articles about improving health. Weight-loss books can be big sellers, and those are more or less preventative care, though most of the people who buy them are already overweight, so they’re remedying a problem, not preventing one. But for the most part preventative care is simply a feel-good couple of words that few people give a flip about, and no one wants to pay for.

Yet all the Art Caplan’s of the world mouth them.

Okay, mini-rant over, let’s get back to Art.

He starts edging into the obesity epidemic, and what should be done about it.

Dr. Caplan seems to have a sort of primitive sense of what part of the problem is. Europe has Big Food and Big Ag, but they don’t have the obesity problem we do. It might have something to do with all the additives we have in our food that they don’t have there. That might be a place to look, not at trying to change lifestyles.

He goes on.

I’ll address the bolded sentences above in order, but will save the first for last. In the second and third sentences, he goes back to the idea of preventative health. He thinks someone—the government, Big Pharma, Big Ag—should pay for it. That whole idea is a no go, at least in my opinion. His final sentence pretty much sums up his take on the obesity epidemic. Preventative care.

His first sentence has some truth to it, but is Dr. Caplan really a believer in what he says?

A few years back, he had a video series called Dining Out With Art Caplan (notice the lack of PhD after his name) that was doubtless a hobby for him. He went all around New Jersey and nearby locations reviewing diners and similar restaurants.

Here is an example:

These were for the most part dives that provided huge portions of carby foods. If you like this kind of food, I suggest you watch it. I don’t. In fact, it kind of made me want to puke. But different strokes and all. Obviously, Art likes this kind of food.

David Kessler Gets a Brain Transplant

I don’t know how many of you remember who David Kessler is. He was the FDA commissioner from 1990 until 1997. I despised him at the time. He started out as FDA commissioner under George H. W. Bush in 1990, which is when I began loathing him. When Bush lost to Clinton in 1992, I was disappointed, but looked on the bright side. At least Kessler would be gone. But I’ll be damned if Clinton didn’t keep him on as his FDA commissioner for five more years.

Why my antipathy towards Kessler?

Because a) he was a media hound. Most people don’t ever know (or care) who the FDA commissioner is. Kessler was all over the media. Everyone knew who he was. And b) he was a big anti-fat guy. Especially anti-saturated fat. He was who ended up getting the nutritional labels to add saturated fat and calories from fat.

My first book Thin So Fast came out in 1989 and in the years between then and when Protein Power came out, Kessler was blabbing his no-more-than-30-percent-of- calories-and-cut-the-saturated-fat-as-much-as-possible mantra. It went on for two years after Protein Power was published, and MD and I were constantly confronted on radio and TV shows that the FDA commissioner was in total disagreement with everything we said.

I was glad to see the back of him in 1997, let me tell you.

Happily I hadn’t heard much about him since. In fact, I figured he had disappeared into anonymity.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the Wall Street Journal to find an opinion piece by him with the mind boggling title “RFK Jr. Can Take On America’s Addiction to Carbs.” The subtitle was just as amazing: “A radical revision in the dietary guidelines would help contain the explosion of obesity and diabetes.”

At first, I thought it must be a different David Kessler, but, nope, it was the same one. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I tore into the piece to see what brought about this Damascene conversion. There was no mention of any reason for the conversion, but what he wrote could have come directly from any of our books or pages of The Arrow.

I was stunned.

Here is the first paragraph:

Given what MD and I went through during his administration, that last sentence is amazing.

He goes on:

Okay, many years after his tenure at the FDA, he is finally worshiping at the church of low-carb. But what about his take on fat? Does he advocate a low-carb, low-fat diet, or a real low-carb diet?

Not an A+ on that one. But still he recognizes that visceral fat, driven by insulin resistance, can create lipid problems—mainly high triglycerides—on its own.

Kessler is, unbelievably to me, trying to get RFK to drastically change the dietary guidelines to promote lower carb diets.

Finally, he puts a knife in the back of CICO. (If David Kessler rejects CICO, it’s no wonder Kevin Hall got the axe at NIH.)

So, there you have it. Quite the turn around. I looked Kessler up in Wikipedia and found his birthday. He, MD, and I were all born within a few years of one another. I guess it just takes some people a little longer to learn. I’m gratified that he has.

Study of Muscle Memory That Is Hard to Believe

Every once in a while, I come across a study that I really, really want to believe. Usually, when I dig into the methods and data, I find the loophole that sets the title apart from the reality. But not always.

What would you say if I told you that if after completing a strength training regimen involving working out hard twice per week for ten weeks then you completely quit for ten weeks that you could recover all your gains in just a couple of weeks of the same workout regimen? Would you believe me? I wouldn’t believe me. But that’s what a study from Finland demonstrated.

22 subjects in one arm of the study worked out twice a week focusing on muscle strength and size. The exercises were bicep curls, leg extensions, and a countermovement jump height (CMJ), which involves squatting to a predetermined depth, then springing up as high as possible.

Before the actual testing, the participants went through a warm up period described below.

Then, although the measured tests were only one rep, there was a warmup to that rep.

As you can see if you read the above, the tests are much more than just a single rep bicep curl, leg extension and countermovement jump.

One group of 22 people (both men and women) went through this process twice per week for 20 weeks. Their strength in multiple parameters was evaluated throughout.

Another group of 22 similar subjects undertook the same regimen, but for only ten weeks. Then they chilled for ten weeks. Then pick the same workout for another ten weeks, making it 20 weeks in total with a ten-week break in the middle.

During this study, the researchers measured both strength and muscle size of all participants.

What they found was pretty amazing.

Taking off ten weeks in the middle of a training regimen didn’t matter that much. After the ten-week layoff, muscle size had diminished, but strength not so much. It didn’t take the subjects much time to catch back up to those who had plowed through the full 20 weeks without a break.

Here is a graphic showing the changes.

This graphic was a bit difficult for me to figure out until I realized the red lines represent those who trained continuously for 20 weeks. They took their ten-week break at the start, so to speak.

You can see from the blue lines representing those who took a ten-week break in the middle fairly quickly caught up with those shown by the red line and had equal outcomes at the end.

The take away from this study is that when you do strength training, you develop muscle memory that allows you to catch up quickly if you do take a break. And that your muscles will decrease in size but maintain strength, which is nice to know.

The two big caveats I have about this study are a) there weren’t a lot of subjects, and b) the subjects were basically between the ages of 20 and 40. The outcome might not have been the same had the subjects been between the ages of 50 and 70.

I hope this prompts more studies with more subjects and a wider age span.

Vanquishers of Infectious Disease

I swore to myself that this week I wasn’t going to write anything about vaccines, but I came across and article so terrific that I can’t help but post part of it.

The part I’m going to post is really nothing I haven’t written myself over the years as my own take on vaccines has evolved, but in this article, it is all in one place.

Substack has this great feature where you can just take an entire article and embed it in your own. Alas, the platform I’m now using—though it has many virtues—does not have that one. So, I will have to cut and paste.

The article is by John Leake, who is the writer for Dr. Peter McCullough’s books and Substack. He also publishes his own essays on the same platform.

In this short essay, which I encourage you to read in full, he looks at the way physicians today look at infectious diseases. Most look upon them as something that needs to be vanquished, and vaccines are the weapon needed to do the vanquishing. Leake lays out the way most infectious diseases had already been vanquished, long before there were vaccines to prevent them.

He writes

Okay, that’s it for vaccines this week.

Stearic Acid and Mitochondrial Fusion

I just came across a phenomenal paper out of Germany on how stearic acid, an 18 carbon saturated fat (18:0), drives mitochondrial fusion. I’m assuming a lot of you probably don’t know what mitochondrial fusion is, so let’s address that first.

As I’m sure we all know, mitochondria are the organelles inside our cells that generate most of the energy we use to live our lives. If operating properly, our mitochondria can produce about our own body weight in ATP, the energy currency of the body, every day.

An average human cell contains between 100 and 2000 mitochondria. Some high energy cells such as muscle or liver cells contain many, many more.

Mitochondria, like all body parts, undergo wear and tear. Such is the importance of the mitochondria that nature has devised a scheme to keep them as healthy as possible.

This scheme is called fusion.

Fusion is simply one or more mitochondria fusing together making a larger organelle. If, for example, one mitochondrion has damaged DNA or proteins, fusion allows it to mix with another mitochondrion that has intact components, thereby restoring function and preventing the loss of essential elements, a process especially critical under metabolic or environmental stress, when mitochondria are more susceptible to damage.

Defects in mitochondrial fusion are linked to several neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases. The inability to properly fuse mitochondria leads to the accumulation of dysfunctional organelles, impaired neuronal function, and ultimately cell death. These examples are by no means the entire function of mitochondrial fusion, but it’s enough to show just how important the process is.

Here is a short video showing graphically what happens with mitochondrial fusion.

It is only by understanding how important mitochondrial fusion is—and I’ve just touched on the subject—that makes the paper I’m about to discuss so important.

The paper in Nature Communications titled Dietary stearic acid regulates mitochondria in vivo in humans describes how stearic acid increases mitochondrial fusion.

The article starts out by discussing how only a few of the many metabolites in particular foods stimulate a downstream response.

Of course, given our overly processed food sources today, there are often single metabolites in there—the wrong ones—that don’t provide the signal that natural foods would.

For instance…

Sadly, these scientists have fallen for the idea that saturated fats, C-16 in particular, elevate LDL levels, so are therefore harmful and predispose us to heart disease. This is such an excellent paper otherwise, however, that I will forgive them this mistake.

As an aside, let me tell you about a correspondent of mine right after Thin So Fast was published. It was an elderly guy who had to be an engineer. He kept close tabs on his cholesterol levels, complete with charts and graphs, having them checked routinely. He wrote to tell me of an experiment he did.

He was taking some sort of vitamin (as I recall) and noticed a minor change in his cholesterol level. He noticed from the label that the ingredients in the capsules he was taking were whatever the vitamin was and stearic acid. Stearic acid is commonly used as a filler for capsules as it is inert and greases up the capsule making it easier for the encapsulation machine to put it together. It ends up being a cost saver for the company as there are way fewer crushed capsules that have to be discarded.

My guy decides to see if he can find someone who will encapsulate just stearic acid for him. He finds someone to do it, gets the capsules, starts taking them, and lowers his cholesterol significantly. He then writes me a long missive about it replete with a graph showing it all. At the time, I was just starting to get interested in lipids, so didn’t really know that stearic acid reduced cholesterol levels. In fact, at that time, I’m not sure anyone knew.

Aside over.

The researchers who did this study previously discovered that stearic acid signals via a dedicated pathway to regulate one of the enzymes involved in mitochondrial fusion. So they wondered if in actual living humans stearic acid would do the same. They recruited twelve healthy controls and eleven type 2 diabetic subjects as study participants. The study was a double-blind study with participants acting as their own controls. They put all the subjects on a low-fat (ie low in C18:0) vegan diet for two days “to bring everyone to a low C18:0 baseline regardless of their habitual diet”.

They then had the subjects drink a banana milkshake containing 24g of C18:0 fat or no C18:0.

To determine what happened in terms of mitochondrial fusion, the researchers used neutrophils (white blood cells) “because unlike other tissues, blood can be obtained in a minimally invasive manner and neutrophils are the most abundant blood cells that have mitochondria in them”.

The researchers found that those taking the banana shakes with the C18:0 did indeed have increased mitochondrial fusion, especially at the predicted 3-hour point. Those without the C18:0 were found to have far less mitochondrial fusion.

In another interesting spinoff of this study, the researchers found levels of acyl-carnitines dropped quickly after the C18:0 enriched drinks, but did not change after consumption of the mock drink. Acyl-carnitines assist with beta-oxidation, the burning of fat in the mitochondria, which is much to be desired. Their dropping is a sign that fat is being shunted into the mitochondria for burning. A good thing brought about by the C18:0.

Here is the researcher’s commentary on the study.

As a consequence to reading this study, I decided to add more stearic acid to my ketogenic diet. I eat a lot of steak and other meat rich in stearic acid, but I decided to add a little more to see if it affected my ketone levels. I figured there was probably some pure stearic acid for sale out there, so I went to Amazon and found a reasonably priced product and ordered it. It hasn’t arrived yet, so I can’t comment on it. But I will let everyone know once I have fiddled with it.

My goal is to keep my mitochondria happily fusing as much as possible.

Odds and Ends

• Meet the daredevils who take on a job at the Grand Canyon that you couldn’t pay me enough to do.

• An ex-Wagner recruit from prison gives a chilling story of Russia’s suicide attacks against Ukraine.

• Scientists use DNA to reconstruct the face of a European woman who lived 10,500 years ago.

• In a triumph for real science, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been forced to make a humiliating U-turn and admit that radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF EMFs) can cause cancer and infertility in animals.

• British pubs are not like bars in the US. British pubs have their own set of rules. Here’s what you need to know if you want to get served..

• Nice piece in the WSJ about cooking oil products with very little PUFA. I knew very little about Algae Cooking Club and Zero Acre oil, so I’ve avoided them. After reading this article, I’ll give them a try.

• 85-year-old grandmother devised a stock-picking system that generated stunning returns, outperforming all of the major hedge funds in the US in 2024.

• News you can use. Female baboons with strong relationship to fathers found to live longer.

• I thought Navajo was the only other language used as code in WWII. Apparently there was another. The secret British language that was used to outwit the Nazis.

• YouTube Shorts dominates attention. YouTube Shorts, boasting 200 billion daily views, now commands a staggering 1% of all waking human hours globally. What an incredible waste of time.

• Stem cell treatment effectively cures severe Type 1 diabetes in small clinical trial; 10 of 12 patients no longer needed insulin a year after a single infusion of zimislecel. If this pans out, it will be a wonderful medical breakthrough. Fingers crossed.

• Never-before-seen Picasso ceramics surpass expectations at auction in Geneva, pulls in $334,000. All except for the last one looks like something my kids could have done in 5th grade ceramics class. Maybe the buyer just paid to get the one on the bottom.

• Their idiotic wind energy industry is now destroying 1000-year old German forest that inspired the Grimm Fairy Tales.

• Fascinating article on the heat treatment of Robberg tools found in South Africa dating to the end of the Ice Age when water levels were 125 ft lower than now.

• Apparently it’s not just the NYC subway system. Ancient Rome had a graffiti problem, too.

• What happens if you funnel Niagra Falls through a straw? Think it isn’t possible? Think again.

• I love music. Many of you do, too. Some cities are just made for it and here are a list of under-rated music cities you might want to experience.

• Truly far out. The European VLT (which in a keen grasp of the obvious for picking names stands for Very Large Telescope) captured stunning images of the incredible Sculptor galaxy in glorious technicolor.

• A murder of crows. An unkindness of ravens. A shiver of sharks. I love oddball collective nouns… and I’m not alone!

• Approximately 16 million American men and women went to war in WWII. Most of them took a little bit of home with them into the field. Ever wonder what was in their pockets?

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

Earlier this week, my friend Tom Naughton (creator of the movie Fat Head fame) suggested a video for the VOTW. So, I decided to go with it. 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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