Greetings, friends. It’s a beautiful day with cloudless blue skies where I am. Hope likewise for you.

As always, let’s start with the comments, poll responses, and emails.

Comments, Poll Responses, Emails

Comments

I received a comment asking me what broths MD and I used. We typically use Kettle & Fire and Zoup Bone Broth, but we also use other brands I can’t remember the names of — what they all share in common is they don’t have bad stuff in them.

My favorite of all the broths we consume is the one MD makes herself. She does it each time we eat a roasted chicken. I had her write up her recipe for me.

Homemade Chicken Bone Broth 

There's nothing as comforting as a cup of hot chicken bone broth. And little more nutritious, especially when following a low carb, ketogenic diet. There are many NBS (no bad sh*t -- ie no emulsifiers, flavorings, dyes, or other additives) bone broths on the market, but it's pretty easy and much more economical to make your own. This recipe is basically the one we made from scratch every day back years ago when we owned a Mexican restaurant. In that case, we were making use of the chicken backs and bones and the ends of the fresh cilantro we brought in daily and the pulp and seeds from all the tomatoes we diced for guacamole and salsa and pico.

Step 1: Roast a chicken (or purchase an NBS rotisserie bird at the market). Carve the breasts and leg quarters from the carcass for consumption. Pick the carcass pretty clean of meat, then refrigerate the carcass in a zip-closure bag to use a day or two later to make broth. (Or freeze it if you can’t do it within a day or two.)

Step 2: Make the broth.

Ingredients

• 1 roasted chicken carcass (bones only), split in half down its sides so it fits in the pot better.

• 2 tablespoons duck fat, beef tallow, or lard (olive oil in a pinch)

• 1/2 onion, coarsely chopped (peels are OK)

• 1 or 2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped (leaves are OK)

• teaspoon jarred minced roasted garlic

• 3 or 4 baby carrots, coarsely chopped

• 5 or 6 cherry tomatoes, halved

• 1 tablespoon tomato paste

• 1 handful cilantro leaves and stems (10 or 12 stems)

• 1 teaspoon sea salt (or more to your taste…we like more)

• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper

• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

• Water sufficient to cover the carcass completely.

  Directions:
  

  1. Melt the fat/oil in a large stock pot over medium heat.

  2. Sauté the chopped vegetables until the onion is translucent. Stir in the tomato paste.

  3. Add the chicken bones to the pot, cover with water, add the cilantro, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Taste for seasonings; add more salt or pepper if desired.

  4. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer. Cover and cook for three hours or more. (All day is OK)

  5. Allow to cool slightly, then strain the broth into clean sealed containers for storage in the refrigerator or freezer.

  6. To serve, reheat a serving of broth on stovetop or in a cup in the microwave until nice and hot, add a pat of good butter and let it melt. Enjoy!

This broth is delicious, but it is also made out of a quality chicken. If you purchase a chicken off the rack, so to speak, you’re not going to have as good a result. I’ll have to do a deep dive on chickens someday, but US chickens, in general, suck. Most of them sold are Cornish Cross chickens, which grow quickly and do so with little feed. As you might imagine, these chickens have a lot of meat, but very little taste. And all the vitamins and minerals are diluted.

Whole Foods has a heritage breed of chicken sold as Mary’s Free Range Chicken, which is delicious both in the eating and in the broth-making later. We’ve found them in Whole Foods markets all over the place, so I assume they are pretty much in all the stores.

C-15 Fats

Had a poll respondent ask about C-15 fats. I covered them in detail just a couple of weeks ago, so check the archives.

Saturated Fats

This from an email correspondent:

“Saw this on Nina’s [Teicholz] feed just now. It’s like they’re quoting directly from your books. 

“You’ve been fighting for decades on this — hope you enjoy a well deserved victory lap, and a celebratory extra helping of bacon and eggs this morning!”

I’ll take a victory everywhere I can find one. Nice summary by Marty Makaray, though if I had to make a bet, I would bet the conversion to saturated fat came fairly recently in Dr. Makaray’s carreer.

Why Did the Majority of Doctors Act Like They Did During Covid?

John Leake is one of the writers on the Peter McCullough website and was the co-author of the book they both wrote during the midst of the Covid pandemic. I thought their book was one of the best out there in part due to Leake’s writing ability.

He wrote a brief essay a couple of days ago on the incompetence of those who were in charge of Camp Mystic along the Guadalupe River that flooded recently leaving over a hundred deaths in its wake. John was more or less blaming these deaths on the incompetence of the man who was in charge. I haven’t read about it in very much detail, so I can’t really comment on the river situation. John also commented on an array of events aside from the river driven by incompetence.

One was the behavior of doctors during the Covid pandemic, about which he wrote:

I have to disagree with John on this one. I think it had a lot more to do with medical training than with medical incompetence.

When medical students start off in their first year, they are inundated with information. They don’t have time to think—they have time only to memorize. And memorize and memorize and memorize. It gets a little better in the second year, but not a lot. It is truly like drinking from a fire hose.

I don’t know how it is now, but years ago when I got into medical school, one had to have about a perfect college transcript. People who have near perfect college transcripts are gunners. They expect to do the same thing in their first year of medical school and blow the top out of it, because it’s what they’ve always done. What they don’t realize is that they are up against an entire class of gunners. And they’ll be graded on the curve where they’ll settle out somewhere amongst all the other gunners. All of them can’t be at the top.

I was not a gunner. I came from a background in engineering where you were expected to learn concepts and apply them not cram your head with facts and regurgitate them. My first (can’t remember which class) test in med school I studied for like I always had done. I felt I knew the concepts well enough. And then I took the test and it wasn’t broad concepts; it was minutia. How many Angstroms wide is the pore in some membrane. Literally. And I had the honor of making the bottom score in the class. I quickly shifted gears on how to study and what to study for and played the board as it was set — learn minutia, learn facts, puke them out on the answer sheet. At least if you’re going to make a decent grade.

After each test in med school, the scores are posted by student number, and I can tell you that I’ve seen people walk up, look at their test score, and walk away weeping, which is absurd, because once you get into medical school, they do every thing possible to keep you in. A day or so after a test, there were office hours during which students could come in and grub for points by explaining why they put down the mark they had put down. They would argue that the question was ambiguous and could have been interpreted a different way. Some times the prof would agree, other times not. Point grubbers, we called them.

In med school I was a bit of an iconoclast [OK the Bride says that’s an understatement], but I was quite a bit different (older for sure, wiser who can say?) from the average high-achieving medical student gunner, who is uniquely qualified (selected for it in fact) to be able to cram facts in and spit out whatever it is that the standardized test or faculty member or staff doctor or head resident or whoever is in line ahead of them wants. To give the ‘right’ answer, get the pat on the head or the shiny award, and move along happily.

Once you get through the first two years of medical school, which are mainly classroom work, you head into the clinical years during which you are turned loose on patients. This can be even more stressful than the classroom days, because you are called on publicly to perform in front of your peers.

There is a hierarchy in these second two years. You, the lowly student are at the bottom. Above you are the interns, then the residents who are two, three, four, or five years ahead of you. There is the chief resident, who when the year ends will be cut loose to go into practice. Above the chief resident is the attending, who is one of the staff doctors at the medical school.

A couple of times a day, every day, you go on rounds. Each medical student is assigned a patient on whatever ward it is you’re working on. You work up the patient and come up with a treatment plan along with the intern and/or resident immediately above you. As you round, the chief resident will ask you questions about your patient, mainly to fill in gaps in his/her information.

The stressful rounds are the ones with the attending. Attendings love to single out medical students for esoteric questions about a particular disease or whatever strikes their fancy. It is not fun. The attendings have many years of experience, the medical students have very little. The attendings come in all psychological flavors. Some are helpful; some are evil. I noticed early on that the worst thing you could do as a student when asked an impossible question was to not give an answer. Any kind of answer. The worst thing you could do is stand there looking hang dog and say, “I don’t know.”

The routine was to have the whole lot of us—attending to medical student—traipse into the patient’s room. The attending would usually ask a question or two of the chief resident about how the patient was doing, then we would all move out into the hall. The attending would then start peppering the medical students with questions. If he came to me, and I didn’t have a clue, I would proffer a guess. If I were wrong, he would go immediately to someone else, who may or may not know the answer. If the med student didn’t know the answer, and said, “I don’t know,” the attending would stare at the student for what seemed like forever, then say, “Well, doc, which is it? Are you stupid, or do you just not care?”

The attendings were Gods. They told us how they wanted things done, and we did them that way from the chief resident all the way down.

There was not a lot of critical thinking going on. It was do as I say. Another saying in medical school is “watch one, do one, teach one.” Meaning if there is a procedure to be done, someone does it while you watch. Next time such a procedure is required, someone talks you through it as you do it. Next time around, you show someone junior to you how to do it.

When doctors finally go out into practice, many end up going into a group practice and picking up the procedures popular in the group. If the group is affiliated with a hospital or if it is a corporate practice, then the standard of care (SOC) must be obeyed. Charts will be audited for compliance with SOC

It should be pretty easy to understand that years of training as described above would lead to the kinds of behavior we saw during the pandemic. Just as a reminder, I’m copying John Leake’s paragraph again.

A Brief Look Into the Thought Processes of the ACIP

We’ve all heard the mainstream media scream bloody murder about RFK firing the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). We’ve heard that it’s going to be filled with rabid antivaxers and all of the dozens of available vaccines will be whisked away from those who want to take them.

I’ve thought nothing would be farther from the truth, but now after watching the video below, I feel much better.

Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep if they did shitcan most of the vaccines, but it would send many people off the deep end. So I was happy to see an in- depth conversation between two people—both ACIP members—that let me know adults are in charge.

I was especially taken with Retsef Levi from MIT. This was the first time I had actually had the opportunity to hear him speak. Robert Malone, who shared the podium with him, I've heard speak many times, including once in person in Santa Barbara. Dr Malone has made numerous appearances with Steve Kirsh, who I think is kind of a grifter, so a little of his patina has rubbed off as far as I’m concerned. Malone is very smart, and argues his points well in the video.

What struck me most about Dr. Levi is his abundance of caution and a couple of things he said. First, he said we should treat vaccine injuries like airplane crashes. Delve into them in great detail until we can figure out exactly what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. And, second, we need to apply an extra measure of caution when we are vaccinating children because they are healthy. If they were sick, then we could apply the idea of risk vs reward, i.e., the kid is sick already, so he has the risk. Let the vaccine be the reward if it works. If it doesn’t, he’s still sick, so no harm done. But if the children are healthy, they shouldn’t be given anything that could have an adverse impact on them.

This is a much longer video than I like to post, because most people won’t watch long videos. In fact, I almost didn’t watch it. But when I got started, I couldn’t stop. It should give you a lot of confidence in the way the APIC is moving.

Trump says Coca-Cola Swapping Cane Sugar for HFCS.

President Donald Trump says Coca-Cola has agreed to use real cane sugar in its drinks sold in the US because “it’s just better.”

Whether it’s just better or not, I have no idea. The glucose/fructose breakdown is about the same for both. 50/50 at best or 50/a bit more fructose. I know a lot of people who believe the taste is better with cane sure, but I’ve not recently taken a taste test, so I don’t know.

The thing that made me even interested in this article was a statement by the guy who is the Corn Refiners Association President.

This is what these people always say. Coke could just as easily say that “replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar would provide thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, increase farm income, and increase the price of corn for the corn farmer.”

It’s switching one nationally produced commodity for another.

It remains to be seen if the switch brings about any health benefits to Americans. Chercher l’argent.

MAHA Takes Off in Texas…Sort Of

A few weeks ago, Gov. Gregg Abbot of Texas signed into law a bill that will have major influence throughout the country.

The bill…

California and Texas, the two largest states by far population-wise have parleyed their citizens into making national law. Since these two states have so many people, it’s just easier for food manufacturers to make all their labels compliant with whatever Texas and/or California demand than to try to ship Texas labels to Texas and other labels to the rest of the country.

The downside to this bill, from my perspective, at least, is that “food manufacturers will not have to disclose the presence of pesticides.” If it had been California, they would have just listed the pesticides and not the other food additives, since they were selected by MAHA.

I’d like to see it all.

Odds and Ends

• Stunning facial reconstructions of 'hobbit,' Neanderthal and Homo erectus bring human relatives to life.

• Archaeologists dig into possible traces of Trojan War in Türkiye’s legendary city. It’s a mesmerizing place to visit, especially if you’ve read Homer.

• The Depopulation Bomb and the further humiliation of Paul Ehrlich of The Population Bomb fame.

• What happens when you flush an airplane toilet? How does it all work?

• Who knew chimps followed fads? Captive chimps put grass in their ears and in their rear ends to look cool, I guess. Who knows what goes through their minds?

• Archaeologists discovered an unprecedented ancient monument in eastern France that could conceivably rewrite history,

• The Texas flash floods—a tragedy that should never happen again.

• Stores of glucose in the brain could play a much more significant role in the pathological degeneration of neurons than scientists realized.

• How the ancients kept time. No one is certain when or where the first water clock was made, the oldest known example is dated to 1400 BC, and is from the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III.

• Why does US chocolate tastes strange to the rest of the world? As you might imagine, it’s because of the bad s#%t added to the American stuff.

• Archaeologists from the University of Houston working at Caracol in Belize, Central America have uncovered the tomb of Te K’ab Chaak, the first ruler of this ancient Maya city and the founder of its royal dynasty.

• What did the first land animals eat? 380-million-year-old fossil may reveal the answer.

• Why rivers split: A century-old mystery may have finally been solved.

• Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California this day in 1955 and quickly became the biggest people trap ever made by a mouse. There’s no link, just my commentary. I went to work there as a college kid in the 1960s.

• Dinosaur dirty dancing revealed in fossil footprints in Colorado.

• The world's biggest plant covers 107 acres. And I lived for a time in close proximity to it and even viewed it. Can you guess what it is?

• Oldest structures on every continent. Bit of a reach for North America but intriguing.

• What would happen if you fell into a black hole? Not that I’m advocating you do, but what it?

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the WeekOne

One of the most luminous and beautiful choral masterworks of all time. Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing it performed live multiple times with the Bride singing in the soprano section in Santa Barbara and all over Italy, with the maestro himself in tow. If there’s ever been a more luminous choral composition ever written, I’m not sure what it is. So 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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