In partnership with

Hello everyone.

I’m here to tell you that the shittification of everything has consumed the airlines completely. MD, our son, and I had a meeting in Ashland, Oregon on Tuesday morning this week. All it required to get there was two short flights, each lasting 45-55 minutes wheels up to wheels down and a short drive from Medford, OR to Ashland.

All flights both coming and going were screwed up. Our plan was to fly out of Santa Barbara through San Francisco and get into Medford/Ashland at about 5:30. We would check into the hotel, have a nice dinner, hit the rack, then get up and go to the 9 AM meeting.

After multiple delays, flight cancelations, etc, we ended up getting in after midnight. The two ‘short’ flights back were the same. Long delay at the Medford airport, so we were likely to miss our connecting flight to Santa Barbara. But in keeping with uniform airline incompetence, that flight was also delayed, so we figured we might have a chance. We sprinted through two concourses at the San Francisco airport only to discover the gate had been closed moments before we got there. Ugh!

This has happened to me a few times when racing for a tight connection after a delayed flight. I’ve always been told it is the pilot’s decision when to close the gate, and when it is closed, it is closed. This time, however, the pilot reopened the gate and let us on along with a handful of others who came before and after us. They had already rebooked us, so we had no seats. They just told us to sit wherever we could find a seat. Which we did. So we got back to Santa Barbara about an hour after scheduled.

I am forever grateful to that United Airlines pilot and the flight and gate crew and thanked him/them effusively when we disembarked from the plane.

Four short flights ended up making for a stressful 24 hours, but at least we made our meeting.

Every time I write about airline nightmares, I always get a nasty comment or four from people saying don’t waste my time blathering about airline travel. We all know it’s awful.

But does it have to be? What is the problem? There have been multiple problems with the last 10-12 flights I’ve taken ranging from mechanical issues to crews not being available. There is something wrong with the system.

Others write that they love to read my rants about travel screwups. Wasn’t much of a rant here, but for those of you who love to read about the misfortunes of others, here is the worst airline screwup story I’ve heard in a long time. I’ve missed one European flight thanks to an airline error and had to spend the night in a hotel, but nothing of this magnitude.

Learn from this investor’s $100m mistake

In 2010, a Grammy-winning artist passed on investing $200K in an emerging real estate disruptor. That stake could be worth $100+ million today.

One year later, another real estate disruptor, Zillow, went public. This time, everyday investors had regrets, missing pre-IPO gains.

Now, a new real estate innovator, Pacaso – founded by a former Zillow exec – is disrupting a $1.3T market. And unlike the others, you can invest in Pacaso as a private company.

Pacaso’s co-ownership model has generated $1B+ in luxury home sales and service fees, earned $110M+ in gross profits to date, and received backing from the same VCs behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

Invest for $2.90/Share

_{Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.}

After writing last week about the weirdness of Boulder, I had great trepidation about opening my email the next morning. Sure enough, the first two were from people writing telling me to unsubscribe them. Pretty much everyone these days is sophisticated enough to know all you have to do to unsubscribe from an email is to scroll to the bottom and hit the unsubscribe button, and you’ll be unsubscribed. Those who want to send a message demand to be unsubscribed.

As I went through the poll responses, they were all uniformly in line with my position on Boulder’s weirdness.

Boulder advertises itself as being weird, so why would people mind being characterized as such? Boulder is a gorgeous place. I’ve always said Boulder is like a flawlessly beautiful woman that you’re just not in love with. I could never get with the Boulder groove the entire time we lived there.

We split our time back in those days pretty much between Boulder and Santa Fe, NM, which is another weird place. It formally advertises itself as the ‘City Different’. But the Santa Fe weirdness didn’t wear on me or MD. We loved it. I guess we’re just more Santa Fe weird than we are Boulder weird.

What Are Shrinks All About?

When I started medical school it was with the intent of becoming a surgeon, a plastic surgeon, in fact. The first two years of medical school are basically classroom work. You get a little bit of patient contact, but it’s mainly just observing real doctors questioning patients. The rest is college-on-steroids lecture hall stuff.

The second two years are the clinical years during which you actually interact with patients. You go through multiple rotations of the major specialities : internal medicine, surgery, ob-gyn, pediatrics, and psychiatry. The senior year is pretty much devoted to electives in those subspecialties you might want to learn more about.

As I said, my intent starting medical school was some sort of surgical specialty. But I almost got hijacked by psychiatry. I had no idea I would enjoy it as much as I did. In fact, I figured I would hate it, because most of the people I knew who had taken it before I did hated it. But I loved every minute of it. In fact, I actually contemplated switching from surgery since I enjoyed it so much.

I had an excellent mentor, which helped a lot. And I learned how psychiatry really functioned. It wasn’t just talking crazy people down off the roof (though there was some of that), but rather mainly it was about helping more or less normal people solve problems they were having difficulty solving on their own. Usually, interpersonal relationships.

When seeing a new patient for the first time, a psychiatrist seeks a diagnosis. There is an entire manual of psychiatric diseases called the DSM. Once a patient is diagnosed, then there is a treatment protocol.

Most of the people seen by your average psychiatrist fall into the category of “adjustment” disorders. Most are probably adjustment disorders to adult life. You can read about them here.

What brought this all to my mind was a commentary piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the Democratic contender for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani under the title below. I encourage you to read it.

Reading the article whisked me back to the many sessions I had with my psychiatry mentor and the many, many patients, friends, and family I have observed going to therapists.

The author, himself a psychotherapist, writes:

In my view, there is a huge difference between a good therapist and a bad one. Good therapists bring about healing, and as the article says, it “builds resilience, agency and accountability.” A poor therapist promotes a downward spiral into victimhood.

Here is the difference.

Most issues bringing people to therapists are interpersonal issues. People can’t get along. Finally, one party decides to go to therapy to figure out a way to get through what seems to be an unsolvable problem. But as we all know, in most interpersonal problems, there is blame on both sides.

If the patient ends up with a good therapist, here is what happens. The therapist listens to the tale of woe, asking questions, and drawing out the patient with the goal of establishing rapport and trust. Once this is done—and it may take a few sessions—the therapist begins to confront the patient. This is impossible to do without first establishing the trust and rapport. When the therapist feels the patient is ready, the confrontation begins.

As I wrote about, in most interpersonal problems, there is blame on both sides. The therapist begins gently confronting the patient about his/her own role in the problem. It takes a skilled therapist to know when to initiate the confrontation and how hard to push it, which is all a function of how much trust the patient has with the therapist. It can be a tightrope to walk. It’s not necessarily a pleasant situation for either patient or therapist.

Over time, the patient comes to realize there is blame on both sides. Then work begins on how to solve the issue, knowing the patient is part of the issue. That’s when the healing, resiliency and agency comes about and the patient generally has a good outcome.

The bad therapist—in my view, at least—starts out the same and works to develop rapport. But instead of confronting the patient, the bad therapist tells the patient he is right. It’s all the other person’s fault. The patient is the victim, the other person involved is the perpetrator, and the therapist doesn’t solve anything. But it does make the patient feel good. He/she was right. He/she has been done badly. He/she devolves more into victimhood, but it feels good because it isn’t his/her fault. It’s all the other person(s).

I’ve seen people go to therapist like this forever. And they never improve, but they enjoy being told they are right, they are victims. The therapist makes a lot of money, the patient is happy to pay it to have a place to vent and have his/her victimhood confirmed.

The good confrontational therapist don’t always succeed. There are people out there—I know one, now deceased—who went to therapists all the time to have her victimhood confirmed. If she would have stumbled onto a good therapist, at the confrontational point, she would have been gone in a shot. She would have found another therapist in short order to make her feel good about her victimhood.

Maybe some of my readers out there who are therapists or psychiatrists can tell me what the ratios are between the two types of therapists. Are there more victimizers or more confronters? I would suspect the former.

People will pay to hear what they want to hear.

Which is what has happened to the New York Times and to a lesser extent to the Washington Post. Since we’ve gone into the digital age, newspapers have had to adapt. Not all that long ago, newspapers were supported almost totally by advertising. They could pretty much say what they wanted to say (as long as they didn’t piss off their advertisers) without concern. So they reported the news.

Now most of the big papers (probably the smaller ones too) have gone to the subscription model. The larger papers are making plenty of money, but if one of their writers writes something that their subscribers disagree with, they lose thousands of subscriptions. They’ve figured out what their readers want to read, and they provide it to them. For a price, of course. Just like the lousy therapists.

Dr. Kessler and the FDA GRAS Petition

Two or three weeks ago, I wrote about Dr.Kessler, who was appointed the FDA Commissioner by Bush I. At the time, Kessler was all in on the notion that fat, especially saturated fat, was the bête noire of the American diet. Of course, this was during the time MD and I were promoting a saturated-fat-rich, low-carb diet. Consequently, we ran up against Kessler’s (and the FDA’s) dietary recommendations all the time.

I thought when Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992 that would be the end of Kessler, and I was going to be happy to see the back of him. But, such was not the case. Clinton kept Kessler on as FDA commissioner for another term.

Sometime between then and now, Kessler must have gotten a brain transplant, because he has done a complete 180 on his nutritional outlook. He now believes refined carbohydrates are causing the obesity and diabetic epidemics were experiencing. He occasionally mentions saturated fats, but not often, and not with the disdain he now has for refined carbs.

He’s even gone so far as to write a book or two advocating low-carb diets. When I last wrote about Dr. Kessler, he was trying to get RFK, Jr. to encourage people to cut carbs as part of his MAHA agenda. To be honest, I almost couldn’t believe it.

Now he’s gone one better.

Dr. Kessler has filed a citizen’s petition to the FDA seeking revocation of GRAS status for processed, refined carbohydrates.

Here is the FDA’s definition of GRAS.

The petition Dr. Kessler filed was not a simple matter of a few pages. It is a 66 page, densely-worded document explaining precisely why processed, refined carbs should not be considered GRAS.

You can read the petition here on the FDA website. I pulled down the PDF version and put it in my Dropbox, which you can access here.

The petition is extremely thorough and is a devastating argument for why processed, refined carbs are problematic. I don’t really see the FDA ever considering carbs as not being GRAS, but, given Kessler’s standing with the government, this petition is more likely to bring it about than if I had written it.

Here is the summary.

Even though he throws in added fats and oils and salt, he is focused on the carbs.

“This petition focuses on the regulatory status of the following substances:

1. refined sweeteners, including corn syrup, corn solids, glucose syrups, dextrose, invert sugar, xylose, maltose, and high fructose corn syrups; and maltodextrin

2. refined flour and starches that are subjected to food extrusion technology, including wheat, corn, tapioca, oat and potato flour, and starches that are processed by extraction or similar technology, and

3. sucrose, refined flours, or starches that are used with emulsifiers (e.g. mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, DATEM, sodium stearoyl lactylate, polysorbates); dough conditioners and strengtheners (e.g. azodicarbonamide, L-cysteine, calcium peroxide); humectants (e.g. propylene glycol); stabilizers and gums (e.g. carboxymethylcellulose, methylcellulose); or modified starches and fillers (e.g. regelatinized starch, modified food starch, dextrins).”

(Note: My platform, despite repeated requests on my part, doesn’t allow numbered lists inside quote boxes, so I’m using the workaround of just putting those in quotes, as I’ve done immediately above.)

Taking a look at the above list of ingredients in processed, refined foods, it’s easy to see that if we’re eating off the grocer’s shelves, we’re not really eating an ancestral diet. Hell, we not even eating the diet I ate when I was a kid in the 1950s.

As you can see from the bolded text above, this petition does not apply to flour, sugar, and the other condiments usually found in the home kitchen when used at home.

After laying out the ingredients he wants to be removed from GRAS, Dr. Kessler goes into why.

Dr. Kessler goes into what he refers to as our being locked into the junk food cycle.

If you contemplate on it, you’ve got to kind of feel sorry for Big Food. Think about it. If you were running a Big Food company and needed to show growth to your stockholders, how do you do it?

There just aren’t that many ways to grow. You can grow a bit along with the population, which is ever expanding. But those are pretty small numbers. You can grow by acquiring another company. You can grow by taking business from competitors. And you can grow if somehow you get people to eat more, i.e., to increase their caloric intake.

As Kessler comments later on in the petition, “on average, Americans consume about 500 calories more daily than they did in 1970 (of which 210 are from carbohydrates, particularly flour, rice, and cereals).”

That’s close to a 20 percent increase in calories overall. Multiply that times all the people in the US, and it will account for a lot more food consumed now than in 1970.

You can’t blame Big Food for fighting for business. It’s difficult to grow if all you’re selling is meat, eggs, butter, cheese, and vegetables. You’ve pretty much got to have the snack foods that people eat mindlessly to keep up.

What I found most interesting about the petition was Kessler’s description of how food processing changed circa 1980.

What really kicked off the onslaught of processed foods was, believe it or not, corn.

But it isn’t just Big Food itself doing all this. Just as Big Pharma has its hands in the government’s pocket, so does Big Food. And Uncle Sam is as much at fault as anyone else in the obesity and diabetes epidemic.

Processed foods increase the rate at which we eat them.

Although all of the above and the rest of the petition make a great case for removing processed, refined carbs from the GRAS rating, what we don’t really have is long-term dietary studies showing harm. Or showing that people when presented with ultra-processed foods will consume vastly more calories than those who don’t.

We’ve discussed this in previous editions of The Arrow. As it stands now, there are only three randomized, controlled crossover trials looking at UPF and increased food consumption. One study by Keven Hall’s group shows that those subjects who consumed UPF ate ~500 calories more per day than those who ate minimally processed foods. But the study had people on the different diets for only two weeks with no wash out period in between. There has also been a Japanese study showing those who ate UPF consumed a bit over 800 calories per day more, but it was only a one-week study with two weeks of washout in between trials.

A recent study by Dicken et al from the UK had two groups following a UPF vs minimally processed diet for 8 weeks with a 4 week washout in between. There was a slight difference in weight loss between those following the minimally processed diet and those on the UPF diet, but not much to write home about. Those on the MPD lost about 4 pounds while those on the UPF arm lost not quite 2 pounds.

The problem with all these studies is that they are just too short. When I wrote about this a few weeks ago, I used going on a cruise as an example. When you get on the ship there is food everywhere, and you (at least I, can’t speak for others) eat like a hog. But once the novelty is over after a few days, you don’t eat nearly as much as you did the the first day or two.

We don’t know what would happen in a long-term study of, say, 6 months, or even a year. Would people adapt to the UPF diet and end up backing off the calories as time passed? Or would they—for all the reasons Dr. Kessler presented—eat vastly more and become obese? We just don’t know.

If I had to place a major bet on it, I would bet that those subjects in the UPF arm would gain weight. But that’s just a guess.

We know it happens in rats.

Dr. Kessler showed one such study. I’m sure there are many others.

The chow diet is in orange. The weight constantly goes up even on the chow diet because rodents continue to gain weight throughout their lives.

You can see what happened, though, when they added what they call “supermarket foods.” It’s not pretty. My bet is that it is driven by the increase in processed, refined carbs. In fact, it’s pretty obvious that it is. But would it work the same on humans? I suspect so, but we just don’t have the long-term studies we need to lock it in.

I know I quoted a lot from the Kessler petition, but it was just a fraction of the information there. I would encourage you to read it, because it is chock full of information.

My guess is that they will never take refined, processed foods off the GRAS list. But if they were ever going to do so, the next few years would be the time.

Are There Plastics In Canned Drinks?

I ran across this video this morning. It is pretty impressive and upsetting.

Once I watched it, I began to look for substantiation one way or another. As it turns out, canned beverages do indeed have plastic sacks inside them. But, surprisingly, studies have shown that canned drinks shed fewer microplastics than do glass-bottled beverages. And the microplastic originate from the painted caps on the bottles. I haven’t had the chance to run to the store and grab a bottle of my favorite sparkling water, Mountain Valley Water, from Hot Springs, Arkansas, MD’s home town.

As I recall, they have a metal cap on them. But I’ve never really turned it over and looked at it from the bottom.

Watching that video gave me the creeps. And discovering that all aluminum cans have plastic liners creeped me out even more.

I will put some time and effort into looking deeper into this. And will let you know what I find out.

Odds and Ends

• Why are some rabbits in Colorado growing horns on their heads? Are there really jackalopes? Surely Pfizer is working on a vax for this!

• The Alaska sale: Why Russia sold it to the United States and how the deal is viewed 158 years later.

• Did the Rapa Nui people us a technique called ‘parbbuckling’ to leverage the 12-ton hats onto their giant Easter Island Statues?

• A new hue—olo—foreign to human sight? Scientists claim to have found color no one has seen before.

• 2.6 million-year-old stone tools reveal ancient human relatives were 'forward planning' 600,000 years earlier than thought.

• Astronomers recently discovered radio waves emitted in space over 10 billion years ago.

• It’s from their moms not their dads that young chimpanzees pick up their communication styles. (Probably young humans, too.)

• MSNBC will soon be renamed as MS NOW, meaning "My Source for News, Opinion and the World." In other words, if you like the opinions MS NOW loves to report, that’s the station for you.

• The rise of carnivore babies. About time! 

• The only diamond mine in North America is in Murfreesboro, AR (near where MD grew up and the fictional town that is the setting for her romance series Caddo Bend). At Crater of Diamonds state park, where you can search for your own diamonds and keep your finds. A woman just found her engagement diamond.

• As individual as a fingerprint, they say ... or a snowflake. But in this gallery of close up actual photographs of them, snow crystals are far more beautiful, IMHO.

• Making one 18th/19th Century featherbed required the feathers of 1,700 passenger pigeons (presumably fewer geese or ducks or chickens). And at $1 a pound, feathers were pricier than a gallon of whisky at the time of the Revolution.

• Perhaps the most famous staircase nowadays would be Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven...' But of the brick and mortar type, these 11 famous (and some quite outrageous) staircases would give that one a run for the money. Of the 11, MD and I have climbed but one. We’ve got our work cut out for us.

• The roar of a lion can be heard from 5 miles away. Good thing, too, because it gives you time to beat feet. And a lion's roar isn't even the loudest sound a member of the animal kingdom makes!

• Of the 10 Most Visited Museums in the world, MD and I have been to 6, most of them multiple times. And the other 4 are a world away!

• Saturday night will be moonless, or more correctly display a 'black moon', which in itself isn't much to see. What it offers instead is a dark night for an unlighted glimpse of the galaxy.

• What is it that makes the perfect chocolate? Follow the science.

• The unusual offerings on the global McDonald's menu aren’t at all like the one on Main Street USA.

•  It's one thing to catch a falling star, but another when one lands in your pocket! The strange tale of an Alabama woman hit by a meteor.

• DaVinci's flying machine created from 500 year old drawing. What a piece of work.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

The VOTW isn’t going to be a music video. It’s a hilarious skit about climate change.

Remember, climate change is predicted by modeling. And all models show what their designers want them to show. If you think about it, it’s pretty difficult to add everything that might affect the climate into a model. When and where do you put the volcanic eruptions or the giant earthquakes beneath the sea that blast billions of gallons of water into the atmosphere. It’s pretty difficult to get it right, so most people just guess based on their ideology. At least it’s good for a laugh.

stacked.wealth

116K followers

View more on Instagram

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.