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Hello friends.

I read an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that brought back a lot of memories. The subject was the frequency of small, civilian airplanes accidentally finding themselves in restricted airspace, i.e., military or other off limit areas.

After reading the piece, I figured I’d start out this week’s Arrow regaling you with an aviation screw up not brought on by any of the commercial airlines I’ve had so much trouble with over the past few months. This one was all on me.

The journal piece opens with the story of a private pilot accidentally flying into restricted airspace.

You should give the article a look. It starts off with a video that I have clipped the still from below. Not a sight you want to see while you’re at the wheel of a Cessna.

I always wanted to learn to fly when I was younger, but I could never afford it. When the event I’m about to relate occurred, I can’t remember if I was working as an engineer, or if I had already started at the Carlsbad, CA fire department as a fireman. (I had made the decision I wanted to go to med school, but I hadn’t taken organic chemistry and a couple of other life science classes required to apply. I left the engineering firm I worked for and became a fireman because firemen are off a lot of the time. As a fireman, I was able to maintain my income and attend classes at the University of California at San Diego, hitting the MWF classes one week and the TuTh classes the next.)

Along with working as either an engineer or a fireman, I also taught SCUBA diving at a local dive shop a couple of nights a week. As it turned out, one of my students was a flight instructor and had his own plane. I worked a deal with him whereby we would trade services. I would teach him to dive, and he would teach me to fly. He had to pay for all his SCUBA equipment and I had to pay for the time on the plane—a Cessna 172.

We started off with all the various maneuvers it takes to learn to fly. On the 8th hour we were doing touch and goes, which are executed when you land the plane, but immediately goose the throttle and take off again without coming to a stop. We (I) had done three or four of them, but not very well. My instructor said, Okay, let’s do a full stop landing this time and taxi to the tower. Which I did. And wondered why we were going to the tower instead of just tying the plane down in its spot on the tarmac.

My instructor jumps out of the plane and says, I want you to go up alone and do two touch and goes and then come to a full stop landing and taxi the plane back here.

My heart was in my throat. “Am I really ready for this?”

He replied, “You’d better be. You’re relying on me too much. You’ll do fine on your own.”

He was right. I executed it all on my own. I had soloed. He signed me off as a student pilot, which meant I could fly by myself.

Now here’s where the restricted airspace story starts. On the very next lesson my instructor tells me he wants me to take off solo and fly out to the practice area, which was a sparely inhabited space ten miles or so from the airport.

Roger, I said, with a bit of nervousness.

Oh, and make sure you stay away from Pendleton.

Camp Pendleton is a huge U.S. Marine base just a bit north of Oceanside. And it was the Oceanside airport I was flying out of. And it is on the north side of Oceanside.

Above is a photo of the Oceanside airport, which is just a single runway. It was an uncontrolled field, which meant you could just fly into it and out of it at will. No radio communication was required. There was a tower that always had someone in it, but you didn’t have to communicate with them.

I loved flying out of this airport because not too far from the end of it was the Pacific Ocean. The nightmare scenario for any pilot is losing an engine on take off, especially if it’s the only engine you have. Far too many pilot’s lives have been lost when they lose an engine and try to turn the plane around and land on the runway they just took off from. It’s called the “impossible turn,” which tells you how many pilots have done it successfully. About all you can do is put the nose down and try to land in front of you. It’s nice to have the Pacific Ocean there.

Since the practice area was west-north-west of the runway, we always took off, made a right turn, and gained altitude as we flew parallel to the runway. Which was my plan.

To get you oriented, this photo from Google Earth shows the Oceanside airport at the bottom. I’ve put a straight red line over the runway. If you look at the top of the image, you will see a red circle which encompasses an airbase. You can see the black runway in the middle of it. The other red arrow is my aberrant flight path.

I was cruising along all by myself just having a helluva time when I noticed the runway. I thought to myself, I didn’t know there was an airport there. Then I read U.S. Marine and thought eff me. I realized where I was. I turned the plane on its side and made a 180 out of there.

I didn’t know what—if anything—was going to happen to me. I sped to the practice area and burned up some time doing stalls and other maneuvers, then headed back to the airport. Where my instructor was waiting with an unhappy look on his face. Before I could even get out of the plane, he said, “I told you not to fly over Pendleton.”

I apologized and asked him how he knew I did. He said Pendleton had called the tower and asked if there was a student pilot out there. They answered in the affirmative. I’m sure the folks at Pendleton saw my rapid 180, so they figured out I had figured out where I was. Nothing more ever came of it, thank God. I guess those were kinder and gentler days than today. I don’t know what I would have done had a fighter been scrambled and flown by my plane like in the video above, but I suspect that if one did, they would have had to hose my plane out when I finally landed. Thankfully no fighter appeared.

I was always careful thereafter to stay close to the Oceanside airport when I made my turns to head to the practice area. And I learned from the experience just how far a plane can travel going 100 mph. Doesn’t take long to cover a fair amount of distance.

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The Secret that Gives Chocolate It’s Great Taste

The Wall Street Journal has been a cornucopia of valuable articles this week. Now I know why good chocolate is so good.

I’m not a big fan of chocolate other than chocolate by itself. And hot chocolate, especially Angelina’s. (See more about shortly.)

I don’t particularly like chocolate ice cream, chocolate anything mixed with bread, brownies, chocolate pie (gag), or milk chocolate. But I love good dark chocolate by itself.

I’ve never really given much thought to where chocolate comes from other than cocoa beans. But now I know, and it’s not particularly appetizing.

Using genetic analysis, researchers gommed around the fermentation goo looking for microbes that might be associated with the excellent taste of good chocolate. They isolated a handful, and, sure enough, they came up with nine strains of microbes they thought to be the ones giving the great chocolate its taste.

The flavors of chocolate from Madagascar are, I suppose, the ultimate in taste. What worries me about all this is that the food technologists will figure out BS ways to give crappy chocolate—or, hell, maybe artificial chocolate—the same taste, mouthfeel, etc. of great chocolate. And then great-tasting chocolate will just become another UPF full of BS.

Hot Chocolate from Angelina Tearoom in Paris

Any time we visit Paris, MD (who has a life-long affection for chocolate in all guises) insists on a trip to Angelina on Rue de Rivoli for their hot chocolate, served in the sophisticated elegance of Belle Epoque decor; a visit there is like stepping back in time, to 1903 to be precise, which is when the tearoom was founded. Their thick, velvety, rich chocolate concoction — called Chocolat Chaud à l’ancienne or Old Fashioned Hot Chocolate — comes to your tearoom bistro table in a silver pot along with a side bowl of thick whipped cream so that you can serve yourself in the pretty china cups and dress it up with as much cream as you like. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere else we’ve ever been. After our first trip there she came home determined to try to find a recipe that would be reasonably similar. And, lo and behold…

Pretty-Darn-Close-to-Authentic Angelina Hot Chocolate

INGREDIENTS

• 1-1/2 cups (355 ml) whole milk
• 1/2 cup (120 ml) heavy cream
• 8 ounces (226 g) good-quality dark chocolate (70% cocoa), chopped
• 2 teaspoons powdered sugar or an equivalent amount of suitable non-sugar sweetener (optional in either case)
• 1/2 teaspoon espresso powder (optional, enhances chocolate flavor)
• 1 vanilla bean, split, seeds scraped (pod and seeds kept)
• Pinch sea salt (optional, but enhances chocolate flavor)

DIRECTIONS

1. Combine milk, cream, powdered sugar/sweetener, espresso powder, split vanilla bean and scraped seeds in a medium saucepan over medium heat.

2. Heat gently, whisking until small bubbles appear around the edges (do not allow to boil).

3. Remove from heat and stir in chopped chocolate until melted and smooth. Return to low heat if needed for full melting.

4. Whisk continuously for 5–7 minutes, letting the mixture thicken to your preferred consistency—it should be almost like liquid ganache.

5. Serve hot, ideally from a silver pot into china cups with a large dollop of whipped cream for the full Angelina experience

   One Family Better Off Without UPFs

Once again, the Wall Street Journal comes through with a timely article. In this case, a family of three (husband, wife and 8-y/o daughter) go without UPFs for an entire month and feel much better as a consequence.

Here is how it all starts.

The quote I bolded above is absolutely bullshit. Dr. Mozaffarian is a quote machine. But in this case he kind of out-kicked his coverage. “[The] scientific evidence is” far, far from incontrovertible. So far there have been three randomized, controlled trials on UPFs vs non-UPF foods, and all have major issues. One was a two-week crossover study with no washout, which pretty much resigns it to the dustbin. The other was a one-week crossover study that had a two-week washout, which isn’t enough. The third was an eight-week study with a four-week washout, which showed minimal weight loss between those on the minimally-processed versus the ultra-process diet. So, I would not say the evidence is incontrovertible.

People who know better should not rattle off such hyperbole without thinking. Mozaffarian’s blurb above can’t hold a candle to that of Marion Nestle, the grande dame of nutrition research, who called Kevin Hall’s two-week, no washout period study on UPFs “one of the most important nutrition studies done since the discovery of vitamins.”

When MD and I went UPF-free last year just to see what, if anything, would happen, we were surprised at how much better we felt and by how difficult it is to find foods that do not contain bad shit. Which we call NBS foods. NBS foods are hard to find.

For instance, the cream we were used to buying had gellan gum in it. We just grabbed the cream from out local grocery store assuming it was cream. After all, it said cream on the label.

Why would a dairy put gellan gum in cream? Cream is already “creamy.” Why the need for more creaminess?

Cream represents 3% to 4% of the volume of milk fresh from the cow. Some cows, Jerseys for example, have a bit higher butter fat, as it’s called. Others, Holsteins, have less. Cream is more expensive than whole milk. So if a dairy sells cream that is part milk and the rest cream, yet it tastes like 100% cream, it is more profitable than selling pure 100% cream. Dairies can do this by adding gellan gum to the mix to thicken it, so the product has the mouthfeel of cream, but without it having to be whole cream.

If you look in your grocery store, you’ll find most of the brands contain gellan gum. It’s difficult to find a pure cream that contains only cream and milk. (The reason the milk is there is that it is pretty much impossible to remove every molecule of the milk from the cream.)

Gellan gum is one of those products the FDA considers GRAS (generally regarded as safe). And, surprisingly, the FDA requires the companies that want to make a product fit the GRAS label do the testing themselves. One assumes the FDA takes a good hard look at the company’s scientific work, but after what we’ve all lived through lately, who knows? Given all the regulatory capture, It may just be a cursory glance.

Probably most food additives labelled GRAS are not harmful to the vast majority of people if consumed here and there. But when GRAS products end up consumed in abundance, they could well cause issues. As the old saying goes, the dose makes the poison.

If you’re eating a bit of a GRAS additive in one snack, you’re probably okay. But if you’re eating 73 percent of your diet as UPF, even if all of the ingredients are GRAS, then you could end up with a lot more GRAS than you bargained for. And you might end up exceeding the amount considered safe.

I know MD and I felt better last year when we started our NBS diet. That’s an n=2. I think I may have lost a little weight, but nothing massive. And the feeling better is subjective. Your mileage may vary.

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One of the issues that occupies my thinking a lot is wondering how Americans were so thin when I was a kid, yet they ate a fairly high-carb diet. The obesity rates were first measured nationwide in 1960-62 and found to be around 13 percent. The obesity rate is now above 40 percent, which is a major change.

When I was a kid, for breakfast my mother put out a plate of buttered white bread toast and a couple of boxes of dried cereal—usually Cheerios or corn flakes. There was a sugar bowl on the table and a carton of milk. In the winter, if she had time, she would make Cream of Wheat (which I loathed) or Ralston’s (which I loved), probably because of Cowboy Tom Mix.

During my childhood we moved a lot. I went to 13 different elementary schools from first grade through sixth. So I knew a lot of kids from different parts of the country. Most of them ate what I ate for breakfast, so I’m assuming they ate the same way at other meals. We pretty much all had school lunches that were the same. If not, we had bologna or some kind of deli meat sandwich, maybe with cheese, and a cookie or two, and maybe an apple.

We would all spend our money on candy bars, baseball cards (with gum in them), and other treats.

So what changed? Why the 13 percent then and the 40+ percent obesity now. Why did carbs not cause obesity then, yet now they do? Or at least are thought to by many people in the weight loss arena, including me?

The whole riddle consumes a lot of my thinking.

Gary Taubes has written a number of well-researched books on the subject, and he says German physicians had it pretty much figured out before WWII. According to them, it was carb intolerance. Remove the carbs, the weight came down. People who didn’t have carb intolerance could pretty much eat what they wanted within reason.

Problem was, while the German docs were figuring out that carbs and carb sensitivity were the issue, the US physicians had decided it was all about calories in versus calories out. And since the Germans had lost the war, their science was denigrated. Calories carried the day. (Politics had entered the scientific arena.)

Here is one of my favorite charts from the CDC (back when it was a trusted agency).

You can clearly see and inflection point circa the 1976-1980 time point. What happened then?

Well, a whole lot of things.

Just to make a list:

• HFCS entered the diet

• Seed oils started becoming a bigger part of the diet

• The enrichment of flour took a big bump—more niacin

• The fat-is-bad-for-you movement started

• People began to eat more carbs

• People began to smoke less

• Dietary guidelines came out recommending carbs

• The Food Pyramid with scant fat and 6-11 servings of cereal

• The cholesterol scare—people quit eating eggs and red meat

• UPF snack foods became more ubiquitous

All of these things could make people gain weight, but most of them haven’t been studied. What has been studied extensively are the low-fat and low-carb diets, and the hands-down winner has been the low-carb diet. Some people still believe it’s all about calories, but the numbers of those who believe that way are diminishing as more and more research comes out.

But what we’re now seeing is something akin to the hysteria in the 1980s about cholesterol. Everything nutritional back then was about reducing cholesterol levels. the bestselling book at the time was The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure, which advocated chowing down on three or four (as I recall) bran muffins per day to sweep the pesky cholesterol out of your system. The book also recommended niacin, which did lower cholesterol, but was never shown to reverse heart disease. Thus it became the niacin paradox.

If you didn’t live through the 1980s as an adult, you have no idea what the mania was like for avoiding cholesterol.

MD and I and a few others, were putting our patients on low-carb diets, while the rest of the world went low-fat/low-cholesterol.

It has been a long battle and now thousands of docs have joined the fray and understand the power of a well-constructed low-carb diet to drop the pounds, get rid of type 2 diabetes, high-blood pressure, GERD, and even reduce lipids for many people. It’s taken 40-plus years to get where we are now, where we’re not considered quacks. Where the low-carb diet is considered a legitimate treatment for most of the so-called disease of civilization. Hallelujah!

Now after so much work by so many people to bring this about, we’re suddenly confronted with UPFs. They’re everywhere. They are now—voilà—the cause of obesity, both childhood and adult. But are they? People such as Darius Mozaffarian are saying incontrovertibly that UPFs are linked (a weasel word if there ever was one) to diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. And Marion Nestle comparing Kevin Hall’s rinky-dink, two-week study with no washout period with the discovery of vitamins.

The low-carb advocates are pissed. And I don’t blame them.

Especially since at their very essence, UPFs are basically carbs. Maybe worse carbs, but carbs nonetheless. I don’t think there is any doubt that the manufacturers of UPFs add flavorings and other adulterations to the carbs in their products to make them even tastier, so people will eat more of them. Which means they are basically eating more carbs. And more carbs run up insulin, and more insulin does all the bad things that too much insulin does.

If there is an upside to all the Sturm und Drang of the anti-UPF movement, it would be that push for all the adulterants to be removed from the products. That would doubtless entice people to eat less of them. But my worry is that the manufacturers will take the adulterants out, then advertise that their UPFs aren’t really UPFs. Which will open the door to more people guiltlessly going face down in them and over consuming carbs.

It’s a complex situation. Dr. David Ludwig has written a terrific essay that is a wonderful summary in layman’s terms of the problems with the studies on UPFs. And why the tiny handful of studies that have been done are almost less than worthless. Once you read his article, you’ll have no doubt what UPFs really are and why they are so difficult to pin down.

My only addition is that I think we should work to get rid of all the gums, emulsifiers, enrichments, and adulterations. Just encouraging people to avoid those will truly—I believe—make them feel better. But getting rid of the carbs that make up most UPFs will do the real heavy lifting in terms of health.

The FDA Embraces Saturated Fat

I never thought in my lifetime I would see an FDA commissioner stand up and say saturated fat is anything but a substance to be avoided. I really never expected one to say Ancel Keys was wrong. Back when Barry Sears, MD, and I were hanging out on the low-carb/Zone Diet speaking tour, I always said the low-carb diet would become the standard diet to fix most anything. Barry said it will take at least 25 years for things to change. We were both right — I about the end result and he about how long it would take.

And now the times they are a-changing.

Take a look at this short video of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary opining on saturated fat. Who would have believed this even just a few years ago? Amazing.

Watching this made me wonder about the new Nutritional Guidelines that are to come out this year (they come out every five years). All the work of the various committees has long been finished, but all the members of all the said committees are the same industry and academic hacks that we’ve always had. I’m wondering if there is some big behind the scenes operating going on. Time is running out for 2025, so we should see something soon.

Goings On at HHS

This past week has seen a flurry of activity from the HHS that I can barely keep up with reading about, much less writing about.

Secretary Kennedy did an absolutely brilliant job today in a long Senate hearing bringing obnoxious senators to heel. I probably made a zillion typos today, because I kept clicking over to watch bits and pieces. It lasted three-plus hours, so I couldn’t just quit and watch, or I would never be able to get this issue out in time.

I hope next week to bring you some highlights.

Trump asked RFK a few days ago when he (Trump) was going to hear anything concrete about the cause of autism. RFK answered that he would let him know in September. I don’t know what we’re in for with this. They haven’t had time to do any kind of meaningful studies. Maybe they re-evaluated the data from older studies. I have no idea, but I’m dying of curiosity to learn the news.

1,000 plus HHS employees signed a letter demanding RFK’s resignation as Secretary of the HHS. I doubt he’ll comply, but I suspect he now has a list of at least 1,000 of those who are not to be trusted.

One of my favorites reported today by Politico is about Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana sucking up to Trump while trying to torpedo RFK. Cassidy, a physician, who is doubtless in the pocket of Big Pharma, was hoping, I’m sure to get Trump to push RFK away from the vaccine science.

RFK had the same answer for everyone who accused him of denying people Covid vaccines after promising not to. Kennedy simply repeated that no one is denied the vaccine. They are available for anyone who wants one. They are just off the recommended vaccine schedule. But anyone who wants on can still get one.

My favorite interaction (of the ones I got to see) was with Mark Warner, the senator from Virginia. He asked RKF if he would accept the fact that 1,000,000 Americans died from Covid. I’m sure Warner was assuming RFK would answer yes, then Warner had some trap set for him to walk into. Instead, Kennedy answered truthfully that he didn’t know how many American’s died from Covid. He said no one knows how many Americans died from Covid. Warner went absolutely postal. It was wonderful to see.

I’m mean, who does know how many people died from Covid? Hospitals were given bonuses for patients who died from Covid, so, of course, every hospitalized patient was given a Covid test. People with heart attacks, gun shot wounds, cancer, and everything else under the sun who died with a positive Covid test were listed as dying from Covid. How could anyone keep track of it? It’s a case of how many died ‘with Covid’ versus those who legit diet ‘from Covid’.

When I heard RFK was going to this hearing today, I felt angst on his behalf, because I figured he would get excoriated. Based on the parts of it I watched, he looked like he was having a good time. He can more than take care of himself under withering questioning.

I can’t wait to watch the full hearing.

Odds and Ends

• Looks like the 'Walking Tall' cold case murder has been solved. And the perp was Buford Pusser.

• Archaeologists uncover 10,000 years of Scottish hunter-gatherer history in one field in Fife.

• Psychologists have identified nine common traits of people raised by helicopter parent(s).

• Archeologists find 317 skeletons buried under a department store. And those aren’t the first.

• Researchers link fiber used in processed foods with inflammation and other health problems.

• North Koreans 'remove all traces of Kim Jong Un's DNA' from meeting room where he met Putin. I wonder why?

• The evidence keeps piling up. Climate sensitivity to an increase in atmospheric CO2 is effectively zero.

• Impress your friends. Learn how to read heiroglyphic writing in this video. 

• Man notices unusual shape, discovers 138 y/o shipwreck in Lake Michigan. Why does this never happen to me? 

• 'Play it again, Sam' and other famous movie lines that weren't said as oft quoted. And I admit to remembering most of them the wrong way! 

• How did September get its name? It isn't the 7th month after all. And what about October and November and December?

• Prettier than Paris? I don't know about that. But I’ll admit these college towns are quite pretty.  I took gross anatomy at one one of them. Our middle son went to school in another of them. And MD and I have visited several of them.

• Do you know Big Ben's real name? Or any of these other global landmarks that we know by their nicknames? Some I did; some I didn't, but MD and I've seen all but two of them

• This week marks the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic. In my earlier life I was a SCUBA instructor and before going back to medical school, I contemplated buying a salvage dive boat so I could discover famous shipwrecks filled with treasure. There's not a much more famous one than Titanic, and now through 3D reconstruction we can all 'dive' down to see it and learn all about it.

• Common OTC drug linked to neurologic damage. Haven't been a fan of it for years and try never to take it. 

• A bandwagon we’ve been on for a long while. Et tu, Starbucks? High protein coffee to hit the barista counters soon.

• Hiking in the Northeast amid the peak of fall foliage has been on the Bride's wish list for decades. She sent me this link today on the best spots to leaf peep in the US; perhaps a not so subtle reminder.

• What will they think of next? And I know someone who would pay for it. (Not I or the Bride, to be sure.) Making scratch off scratching

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

It was about 50 years ago that one of my favorite songs of the rock era debuted. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. I still can’t not listen to it if appears in a music queue. Such a phenomenal, ground-breaking piece. There have been lots of covers of it, both professional and amateur. But only recently have the surviving band members (which probably means Freddie Mercury’s estate and Brian May) deigned to let anyone translate it into another language. The group is a young South African chorus, and the language happened to be Zulu. Sounds incredible, and honestly it is. So enjoy this very unusual, amazing production of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. And let me know in the comments what you think about it.

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.

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