The Arrow #235

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Hello everyone.

Greetings from Montecito where the skies are blue and the sun is shining. Just a heads up: two-thirds of the Eades clan has assembled out here for the July 4 holiday week and it’s been a non-stop blur of family activities, some of which I have eschewed, but I will still need to ask your indulgence if this edition turns out to be a bit abbreviated. So let’s get to it.

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Emails and Comments

I keep getting a request to delve into Thomas Seyfried’s theories on the metabolic basis of cancer. I know Tom, and I’ve spent a fair bit of time talking to him. I’ve read his papers and have been present at many talks he’s given. I wrote all about his methods in a three part piece on the Arrow a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to find them to provide a link. I’m trying to get all of the Arrows from day one on one website, which is searchable, but I haven’t had the time to do it yet. If any canny readers out there remember, send me a comment, and I’ll post it next week.

A handful of people keep asking me if I’m aware of the work of Brad Johnson and/or Jack Kruse. I have read some of their stuff, and I find it a little esoteric for my taste. Kruse over Johnson. I do read their posts and watch their videos, but to really get into them, especially Kruse, would take me forever. And though I might learn something, I would spend vast amounts of time doing so. I would rather spend that time working with the literature on low-carb, ketogenesis, weight-loss, and all the rest of the subjects I’m constantly reading about.

Here is a question I commonly get. In this case, it’s about Europeans.

You can’t make judgments like these just by looking at the folks you know. There are going to be obese people and thin people in just about anyone’s personal sphere. You’ve got to go to the data. It took me about three minutes to go to Google and ask for a graphic showing the obesity difference between those living in Europe and those living in the US.

I got a horrible story through a poll response about a significant number of people in a medical facility coming down with a life-threatening disease.

I, of course, don’t know what caused these folks to come down with stage 4 liver disease or any of the rest. But it’s not unreasonable to suspect (and I do suspect) the jabs they took (in many cases because they had to to keep their jobs) could have played a large role in their all developing these unusual issues at around the same time.

The two sides of this debate have become irreconcilable.

Do the Covid jabs have some long-acting effect that damages those who took them and primes them for some sort of disease later? Or are the jabs perfectly safe for the vast majority of people? There are hardcore advocates of the vaccines and equally hardcore folks dedicated to the idea that the jabs are going to cause big problems for a huge number of people down the line. Who is right? I’m hoping that over the next couple of years RFK, Jr. will be able answer that question definitively for us.

I’ve read a lot of autopsy studies of people who suddenly died, who had all the symptoms of death by Covid vaccine. I believe the data will come down in that way ultimately. It’s my belief that there’s something rotten in the state of Covid jabs, but it needs proving in the sanitizing glow of sunlight and scientific inquiry unfettered by industry.

Here’s another purely anecdotal data point, but one that tilts in the other direction. I’m a member of a golf club that has a lot of elderly people as members. New members can’t come into the club unless someone dies or resigns to open a spot for them. Typically about ten people per year die, but for the last year or so, no one has died. Right now there is a long waiting list of people who have been vetted, but who can’t get in, because no one is dying. I know most of these folks got vaccinated and boosted, because they told me so, yet they are still hanging in there. So in my small database of ~500 people or so, it doesn’t appear that the jabs had overwhelming negative consequences in this group. At least not the ultimate negative consequence.

But then there is the whole ‘hot lot’ or ‘bad batch’ theory that some people have proposed, saying there were lot numbers of the vaccine that had a heavier dose of the mRNA than others. Or that there were inconsistencies in adjuvants from lot to lot. Or contaminants. Some lots might have had very little — maybe zero — mRNA and others a concentration of it. And the ones with a lot of it per dose were perhaps responsible for most of the adverse events.

There was even a website put up (I think I posted this link before at one point) where you could go to see if there were a plethora of adverse events associated with your lot (if you got the shot).

That theory would certainly explain the cluster of unusual illnesses among the reader’s long-term care facility friend and her co-workers. The facility could have brought the shots into the care home, all the affected employees could have taken shots from the same lot right there at work, and suffered adversely from it. Others in the facility who didn’t suffer might have gotten their jabs from a different, ‘not bad batch’. Interesting to speculate, but of course we don’t know. It’s another thing in this whole Covid debacle that I hope gets sorted out in the next few years.

At last, a stearic acid update. It finally got here, and we gave it a try. It arrives as a bag full of tiny white flakes. It is a saturated fat, and saturated fats are solid at room temperature. So how shall one take it? As a part of my ketogenic diet, I drink a couple of mugs of bone broth each day with some butter added and a bit of salt and pepper. When the tiny flakes arrived, MD added a teaspoon to the usual mix, which represents about 5 grams of stearic acid, and heated it up as usual. It dissolved nicely and didn’t alter the taste of the broth to me.

For my next cup of broth, we tried two teaspoons of stearic acid, but that didn’t work out so well. It more or less solidified and clung to the sides of the mug. Even trying to stir it in didn’t help much. It was like candle wax.

But if I drink two cups of broth daily with 5 grams of stearic acid in each, that will give me ten grams per day. Add that to the stearic acid I’m getting in meat, and I’ll probably hit the 18 grams in the paper. I’ll let you know how it goes and whether it affects my ketone levels. And, I hope, my happy, little mitochondria will be just fusing like crazy.

Tales from the Crypt

Those of you who have been Arrow readers for a long while (and many of you who were Protein Power blog readers before that, or started as Protein Power book readers a much longer while ago yet) know of my obsession with the Egyptians and the Egyptian diet. I’ve written about it and lectured on the topic for nearly thirty years.

When I was writing a book in the early 1990s tentatively titled The Insulin Connection, the book that become Protein Power, I was initially working on it on my own. Then I was joined by my Bride as co-author when we changed publishers from William Morrow to Bantam and they changed the name of the book as well. The whole book project was nearly subsumed by a tsunami of literature research I uncovered when I dove down the Ancient Egyptian rabbit hole (which turned out to be a whole rabbit warren) on their agricultural diet and its deleterious effect on human health. It’s a multi-millennial treasure trove of nutritional information, complete with a wealth of mummy data to support the hypothesis that agriculture might have been a boon to civilization, but the devolution in nutrition it brought about was toxic for the individual civilians.

Over the span of a year or two during the writing and research phase, what turned out as, I think, an interesting and foundational chapter in Protein Power threatened to take over the whole 90,000+ words of the book. Fortunately I was reigned in, and it turned out to be more than ‘How the Egyptians Built Civilization and Destroyed Human Health’.

It was an experience for me similar to what I envision today’s social media junkies must suffer getting sucked into an endless thread of Instagram reels on some topic of interest (or sequential cat videos). One article led to another that led to five more and then three books, a membership in the Paleopathology Society, then a lifetime interest. It fascinated me then, and it still does today.

So, imagine my joy upon seeing the headline ‘First complete Ancient Egyptian’s sequenced genome’ reveals his occupation’. The article, which I encourage you to read, does speak to the forensic bone analysis that led the research team to their conclusions, but sadly disappointed me in that it doesn’t mention anything speculative or otherwise about his diet. But the whole dietary angle was catnip to me and perhaps to you as well. And we do have some clues from what they showed us.

Check out the teeth both in the image of the departed Egyptian’s skeleton (not a mummy this time, but a skeleton) in the article, as well as in their reconstruction images of what the gentleman would have looked like below. (The artist/sculptor in me is always fascinated with those kinds of things.)

You’ll see the sharp planes of the ground-flat tooth crowns characteristic of Ancient Egyptian dentition. Everybody’s teeth were ground down. The sand grit, used to help grind the wheat, made its way into their stone-ground (literally), whole-wheat bread, which, other than the sand, was NBS. And yet their bread-based diet still may have caused a plethora of ills ranging from obesity to hypertension to atherosclerosis to dental caries and abscesses. Or so say the many autopsies that have been performed on the mummified remains.

The Roman legions called the Egyptian soldiers Artophagoi (Ἀρτοφάγοι) which translates to ‘the bread eaters’ because each Egyptian soldier was rationed four pounds of dense, whole wheat bread per day; and while the average Egyptian might not have eaten quite so much of it as a working military man did, bread was the mainstay of the Egyptian diet. They supplemented their largely wheat-based nutrition to relieve the monotony of it with a few vegetables, legumes, fruits, sunflower and sesame oils, sometimes fish from the Nile and birds they obtained from trapping migratory water fowl. And there was honey to sweeten (no refined carbs or sugar) and a fair amount of beer, fermented from all that wheat, attested to by the archeological discovery of an industrial-scale ancient brewery with vast brew and storage vats unearthed in the desert near the Abydos burial grounds in Egypt. (After all, you can’t live on bread alone.)

The brewery dates to the reign of King Narmer, who ruled more than 5000 years ago and is said to have unified Egypt. I think we’ve found his secret treaty weapon.

Red meat was a rare treat (in every socioeconomic class) because oxen were more valuable as beasts of burden than as food and were only eaten sacrificially on ceremonial occasions. And pigs were primarily used to tread wheat seed into the soil for the next crop. The Ancient Egyptian diet was a modern dietitian or nutritionist’s gold standard: whole wheat bread, vegetables, legumes, fruits, fish, poultry, little to no red meat. And yet they weren’t healthy, and their skeletal remains and especially the extensive mummy record clearly tells this truth.

If the topic interests you, and you haven’t yet seen it, here’s a link to the Paleopathology lecture that I gave at Low Carb USA in Denver a few years ago.

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Odds and Ends

• Do 6,000-year-old artifacts reveal the use of lost machinery in predynastic Egypt? Or were the craftsmen just that good?

• A stint in jail and a fine for purposefully frightening a pigeon is among these 7 Strangest State Laws Still on the Books. Is your weird state law among them?

• Who didn’t say: “Be careful about reading health books. You might die of a misprint.” I’m sure he wasn’t talking about Protein Power or the Arrow. Find out who else it is you’ve been misquoting in these 10 things famous people never said

• This one got my shipwreck-diving, treasure-hunting juices flowing again. 10 Lesser Known Treasures of the World that could still be found.

• Gwada negative blood. Sounds like something from Star Trek that maybe a Klingon would have. But no. It's a newly discovered human blood type.

• Seaweed scrub on a grand scale. How an orca exfoliates at an ocean spa. More like us that you might have thought, though probably more advanced.

• Strawberries and clotted cream in London is still among the tastiest memories of my long ago summer as a college student bumming my way around Europe. Why are strawberries and cream the budget foodie staple at Wimbledon? (A: Because it’s flippin’ delicious!)

• A new study finds that entering N2 sleep—a deep phase of non-rapid eye movement sleep—may help lead to more “eureka” breakthroughs and if true the world (and I) could use a lot more of it.

• Scientists sail 140 mile route from 30,000 years ago in canoe built with prehistoric tools. My kind of cool travel adventure — or it would have been in my wayward youth.

• A rare handwritten copy of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery signed by Lincoln sold at auction by Sotheby’s for $13.7 million to a collector who previously paid $6120 a word for a signed copy of the Emancipation proclamation. The collector intends to loan the historic documents to a university for display.

• There’s been a dramatically dwindling size of Baltic cod over the last 30 years. Scientists think they’ve found an evolutionary reason.

• Study finds that brainy crows may understand geometry.

• A Lithuanian start-up says they'll be 3-D printing human organs for transplant, just as soon as they nail 3-D printed dog skin. Baby steps and all. And hey, what could go wrong?

• With July 4 weekend coming tomorrow, what better time for Stanley Tucci's genius tip for buttering corn. (Not that anybody should be eating a ton of corn, well, not regularly at least!)

• A brief history of the Fourth of July, from its inception...on July 2, the founder who refused to celebrate it on the fourth, and other historical quirky facts about our nation’s birthday.

• Have you ever wondered why are there so many roadside dinosaur displays in the US? I’ve driven coast to coast a lot, and I can attest there are plenty. But I’ve always wondered who's responsible and (more to the point) why do they do it?

• Spice-medication interactions every doctor should be aware of — or what your double pump cinnamon latte might be doing to your antibiotic or chemotherapy's effectiveness.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

I came across the video below while looking for something else on Twitter/X. This is real red neck dancing. I don’t know how to do it. And I’m not sure I’d do it even if I knew how. Ozark mountain clogging would be more my style, though I don’t know how to do that either.

These kids are just so in to it and are so good, I had to pass it along.

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. And help me spread the word.

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.