Whose Cup Are You Filling?

I recently read a truly inspiration essay by Derek Thompson with the title above. He kicks it off this way:

It’s a short essay, and I’ve probably posted a third of it above. You get the idea. We’ve got only a limited amount of time each day, and our own lives would be much better if we used the time wisely.

But Derek makes it seem like we are in control of the cups we fill with a given day’s water, and that isn’t totally true. This is the lead in to a catastrophe that struck MD and me over the past few days, which is why this post is so late. I filled many cups of water that didn’t have The Arrow’s name on them thanks to scammers and shitbirds. (It ultimately all worked out, so we are okay.)

We’ve been traveling and early this week MD got onto our checking account and, to her horror, discovered that our entire account had been wiped out leaving us with a minus $495 balance — in the hole! I immediately figured it had something to do with the PayPal fiasco I wrote about a week or two ago. It indeed was, and although I recovered the money the first time, the second time was vastly more difficult.

I won’t go into all the gory details, but suffice it to say, it was a nightmare. We spent many hours on the phone with the bank and with PayPal. We finally got it fixed when we got back home and went to our bank in person. We spent two hours there in addition to the many hours we’d already spent online with both the bank and PayPal. It took our going to the bank, and having a banking officer connect with the fraud department, which then connected to PayPal to get it fixed.

So, apologies for the lateness of this post. And read the whole essay above. Just remember that despite your best efforts, sometimes your water cups can get hijacked.

China, China, China

Last week’s post on freedom in China versus the US inspired a lot of feedback. Dale Saran, the author of the post I quoted from, emailed me telling me that his friend Laing, who lives in China, changed his mind a bit during Covid, as he and his family were locked in their apartment and provided minimal food by the government. That’s the problem with autocracies. If everything is going fine, life is good. If a crisis arises, the beast rears its head and freedoms people have taken for granted are suddenly no more.

One correspondent said he would give up plenty of freedom to keep from being grabbed off the sidewalk and having his kidney(s) and/or other organs removed to be made available for some Chinese bigwig or simply for sale. I don’t know how common this practice is, but I certainly wouldn’t like to live under that fear.

Others wrote about how advanced China is in comparison to the US. They have high-speed trains running all over the place and huge cities with giant skyscrapers everywhere that put US cities to shame.

Having visited China myself and having dealt with Chinese factories for the last 16 years, I’ve got my own first hand experience. When you work with a Chinese factory, you absolutely have to employ a non-Chinese third party to inspect the work done before it is shipped. If not, you will get screwed.

When you design a product, it is essential that you have a third party inspector compare your products coming off the line with the original gold standard of the way it was designed. If not, the factory will substitute poorer quality components that save them money, but not you. Over time, if you don’t have good inspectors, your products will slowly decline in quality, a phenomenon known as quality fade, which is unfortunately well known to those who work with Chinese factories.

If you don’t have a third party inspecting your products before shipping, God bless you. You won’t be in business long.

The shoddiness of factory production apparently seeps into all their construction. When we were last in China, our hosts took us on a driving tour. We saw a number of huge buildings of one kind or another that looked fairly new, but were fenced in and obviously not in use. Our host told us these buildings were condemned because they had started to develop cracks and other problems making them unsafe for human use. My take away was that building codes and construction oversight was not a high priority.

Just last week a huge bridge just recently constructed collapsed. When was the last time you heard of a large new bridge (not hit by a ship) collapsing in the US? A couple of years ago, a giant dam burst, resulting in the deaths of countless people downstream. That doesn’t seem to happen in the US.

I’m not ready to give China major props for all their fine construction just yet. A lot of their buildings do look grand, but how long will they last? The Empire State building in NYC has been around for 96 years. And that doesn’t compare to Chartres in France and Westminster in London. I don’t think any Chinese buildings even come close.

One thing that did catch my engineer’s eye when I was there was the scaffolding. Every where else I’ve ever been in world (the US and Europe primarily), the scaffolding is some combination of metal that is bolted together. In China, the scaffolding is all bamboo that is basically hand tied.

Here is what it looks like.

And here is what the tying looks like up close.

What I found so amazing about this is that this is the scaffolding they use building skyscrapers going up many, many stories.

I’m sorry for the quality of the photos, but these were taken with an early iPhone when the lenses and sensors were not nearly as good as they are today.

I just found it amazing that the folks who whip these things together can do so in no time, and according to our hosts, are fairly highly paid. It’s stunning that these workers are up there 70 or 80 stories scrambling around hand tying bamboo cane together. But it obviously works for them. And I’m sure it is vastly less expensive than the kind of scaffolding you would find in the US. Which I ended up finding a photo of so you can see the difference.

Tabs, Tabs, Tabs

I received an interesting email from a friend of mine who is aware of my constant struggle with a zillion open tabs. He sent me a screenshot of this tweet:

A couple of years ago, I wrote about my ongoing struggle with open tabs. I included this screenshot of all of my open tabs all stacked up (which, I can tell you, is difficult to do).

On the same day I get the email from my friend, I’m stuck waiting for an appointment, so I scroll through Facebook on my phone, which is the only time I ever scroll through Facebook. Anyway, I came across the ad pictured below. As you might imagine, it spoke to me.

LINK

When I got to where I could concentrate, I opened the ad and read through it. I also read all the comments, which were about 60 percent ‘This is a great app, solved all my problems!’ and ‘This app sucks, avoid it at all costs.’

So, have any of you had any experience with this Chrome extension on a Mac? If so, let me know. There is nothing I hate worse than learning about a new piece of software that if this works as advertised, it might be perfect for me. But if not… ugh! Thanks in advance.

If you would like to support my work, take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

CICO vs Nutrient Partitioning

The Menken quote above exemplifies the calories in, calories out theory of obesity. It is clear, simple, and wrong.

What could be simpler? If you’re overweight, you eat too much, and you don’t exercise enough. So, to lose weight, you simply need to eat less and move more.

But as millions of dieters have learned to their dismay, it doesn’t quite work that way.

The idea of nutrient partitioning is the opposite of the Menken quote: it is not particularly clear, it is far from simple, and it is (probably) right.

I’d like to go through one example to show you how an equal number of calories consumed of different, but seemingly similar, foods could end up generating a difference in weight gain.

We don’t have long term statistics on obesity in the US. Insurance companies kept actuarial tables on what constituted obesity in terms of height and weight, so they could charge overweight people more for insurance. But no official governmental agency kept obesity statistics (as in what is the percentage of the population that is obese) until the early 1960s. At that time, about 13 percent of the population was considered obese. Now the obesity rate has more than tripled.

You would have to think something had changed since 1960 that we could finger as the cause of the increase in obesity. The problem is, many things have changed, so it’s difficult to know if it is one change that is the culprit, or a symphony of changes.

Up until the 1960s, many, if not most, adults smoked. Smoking keeps you thin. Now just a fraction of the people smoke as compared to the 1960s. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) replaced much of the sucrose (table sugar) in the diet. At about the same time, seed oils started becoming an ever larger portion of the diet, squeezing out the animal fats. And, as a corollary to that, all of the governmental agencies were encouraging the reduction in consumption of fats in general and saturated fat in particular. Consequently, carbohydrate intake increased.

Thanks to the entry of HFCS and seed oils into the diet, snack foods began to proliferate. The enrichment of flour increased, which meant people got way more niacin than they needed, which has been shown in a few studies to cause weight gain.

There were other changes as well, but let’s leave it at that. I want to take just one of these changes to show how similar caloric intakes could end up generating different amounts of fat accumulation.

I want to focus on the increase in the amount of seed oils eaten and the consequent decrease in saturated fat consumption. A theory put forward by Peter Dobromylskyj, who writes the Hyperlipid blog is gaining some traction, and this is what we’ll be discussing. I gave a long, fairly technical talk about it back in 2018, which you can watch here if you want deeper and more specific info.

We all know that fats contain about 9 kcal per gram. Doesn’t matter if they are fats from seed oils or saturated fats from butter or beef, they all contain the same number of calories.

We all know that fats get burned in the mitochondria to provide energy. Or at least we think we do. But fats themselves don’t really get burned. Instead, when they are ripped apart into their carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms, they release high energy electrons that are transported by various high-energy-electron carriers to the mitochondria where they travel down the electron-transport chain fueling the process that actually produces ATP, the body’s energy currency.

In order for fats to be broken apart and their high energy electrons released, they must make it into the mitochondria, which they do through a process called beta-oxidation. Beta-oxidation is a process whereby a long-chain fatty acid is broken down into two carbon segments and attached to an acetyl-CoA molecule.

(Note: I’ve studied this hypothesis for so long—and even gave a talk on it (linked above) years ago—that it is all kind of simple and second nature to me. When I decided to write about it, I figured I would just whip it out. Then I started writing. And it quickly dawned on me that the process is incredibly complex and doesn’t lend itself to being quickly whipped out. I’m doing my best to make it as simple as possible. Richard Feynman once said that to really understand an issue, you have to be able to explain it to a child. Which, I guess, means I don’t really understand this, because there is no way I could explain it to a child. In fact, I would love to see Dr. Feynman present it to a child. Anyway, as I said, I’m making great effort to explain it without getting deep into the weeds. If you want more info, watch my video linked above, or read Peter’s Hyperlipid posts under the category “Protons,” or read this primer from the Broken Science Initiative.)

I’ve decided that a much simpler way to understand the process—not quite ready for a kindergarten lecture, but closer—is to look at the process from back to front instead of the other way around.

The energy currency for our bodies is almost always supplied by a high-energy molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Most of this ATP (85-90%) is generated in the mitochondria, which are the energy producing organelles within our cells.

The mitochondria generate ATP in much the same way as giant dams produce electricity. The dams back up rivers, and when the water flows through and turns the turbines in the dam, electricity is produced.

There is a membrane in the mitochondria that acts like a dam. Instead of water on one side of the membrane creating pressure, the membrane has positively charged ions called protons on one side of the membrane that increase both chemical and electrical force on one side of the membrane.

The increased electro-chemical pressure on one side of the membrane rushes through and turns a tiny turbine (actually a giant enzyme called ATP synthase) that much like a turbine in a dam churns out power (in the cell’s case ATP) as needed.

In the case of the dam, the flowing stream backs up behind the dam to provide the pressure to force the water through the turbines. In the case of ATP synthase, the backup of protons on one side of the membrane provides the “pressure” to turn the turbine of ATP synthase.

How does the pressure build up on one side of the membrane? We know how water gets behind the dam. How do all the protons get to one side of the membrane?

They are driven there by high energy electrons flowing down the electron transport chain. As high energy electrons are released into the electron transport chain, they get passed in a sort of bucket brigade fashion from one station (called a complex) in this chain to another. As they move along the chain, their energy is used to force protons across the membrane to build up pressure on one side, which is subsequently released through ATP synthase to generate ATP.

I’ve modified one of the slides from my presentation to provide an overview of what we’ve discussed so far. You can see the membrane, which I have labeled IMM, which stands for inner mitochondrial membrane. And all the complexes numbered C1-C5. C5 is the ATP synthase turbine.

You can see the protons (the little H⁺ ) are more numerous above the IMM than below, which force imbalance drives them through the ATP synthase turbine, which throws off ATP.

Now we come to the crux of the theory. Let’s leave the electron transport chain and move to the critical point: beta oxidation.

All fats have to go through a process called beta oxidation to enter the mitochondria. Beta oxidation strips off two carbon atoms at a time and through a four-step process converts them to a molecule called acetyl CoA, which then transports them to the Krebs cycle to provide energy for the mitochondria.

In the first step shown in the graphic below, a 16-carbon saturated fat (palmitic acid) will have all its carbons chipped off two at a time to make acetyl CoA. In this case, the first two carbon atoms are in the pink color. The first step in the process is to add a double bond to the saturated fat (which has no double bonds in its native state), which you can see in the step below just to the left of the two carbons in pink.

The important part of this process is in the red box. In the process of adding a double bond, a high energy electron is released to its carrier FAD, which converts it to FADH2. This FADH2 then enters the electron transport chain through ETF.

The crux of the whole process happens right here in the very first step of beta oxidation.

A saturated fat going through the process releases a high energy electron carried to the electron transport chain by FADH2.

Like saturated fats, polyunsaturated fats also go through beta oxidation. But with a big difference. Poly unsaturated fats have multiple double bonds, whereas saturated fats have none. When an unsaturated fat goes through the first step of beta oxidation, it does not release a high energy electron to FADH2 because there is already a double bond in the fat. Therefore there is no need to add another, so no FADH2 is released.

If you look down farther in the graphic, you will see another red box showing another high energy electron being released to its carrier NAD+ and converting it to NADH. This reaction happens to both the saturated and unsaturated fats going through beta oxidation.

Most fats are a combination of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Beta oxidation will then throw off an FADH2 for every two carbons in a saturated fat and an NADH for the same two carbons. But the process will just produce one NADH for each two carbon atoms from the unsaturated fat and no FADH2. So the output of their oxidation differs.

The differential between the number of NADHs and FADH2s thrown off during the above process represents the crux of the entire theory.

During beta oxidation, each time the process encounters a double bond, there is no high energy electron released. With saturated fats, which have no double bonds, there is an FADH2 released.

So the breakdown of saturated fat releases more FADH2 than the breakdown of an unsaturated fat. For example, linoleic acid (a 16-carbon fat), the most common unsaturated fat we eat (it has one double bond) throws off six FADH2s and seven NADHs. A 16-carbon saturated fat would release seven FADH2s and seven NADHs.

Obviously, if we eat more saturated fat than we do unsaturated fat, the ratio of FADH2 to NADH will be higher than if we eat unsaturated fats.

And that makes a difference.

Why?

Because FADH2 and NADH enter the electron transport chains by different paths.

The high energy electrons can enter the electron transport chain at three different points: through Complex 1, Complex 2, or the electron-transporting flavoprotein (ETF), which, for some reason, is not usually shown in graphics of the electron transport chain.

If a diet is rich in unsaturated fat (which has been the dietary recommendation of the government and most nutritionist for the last 50+ years) there won’t be a lot of FADH2 going through the ETF.

This makes a difference because the CoQ couple, seen above in blue, is a sort of traffic cop directing traffic, in this case the traffic is the electrons shuttling down the electron transport chain. As you can see from the graphic above, the feed into the CoQ couple from ETF is small compared to the others. This smaller load of electrons entering the chain does not much affect the traffic. It moves on smoothly down the chain, pumping protons across the membrane, creating the gradient that drives the synthesis of ATP.

But something happens when the load from the ETF gets high because more saturated fat and less unsaturated fat is consumed. Which is basically the diet we all consumed prior to the vast increase in the consumption of unsaturated fats from seed oils that started in the late 1970s, early 1980s.

As the graphic shows, with the increased consumption of saturated fat, more FADH2 is released to the ETF and more goes from there to the CoQ couple. (None of these figures are drawn to scale.) Once the increase in FADH2 going through the CoQ couple reaches the point at which the traffic cop can’t wave all the electrons on down the path as it did with the unsaturated fats, it starts shooting some of the electrons backward in a process called, logically enough, reverse electron transport.

When reverse electron transport takes place, the fat cells are protecting themselves from taking in too much fat and becoming distended.

Here’s how it works.

The red dotted line above represents reverse electron transport caused by too many electrons coming in from ETF (all of which come from beta oxidation). When reverse electron transport occurs, there is a backup of high energy electrons in Complex 1. All it can then do is release a free radical (SO), which converts to hydrogen peroxide H₂O₂, which interferes with the activation of the insulin receptor.

If the insulin receptor doesn’t work, fat can’t be transported into the fat cell. So reverse electron transport basically keeps fat out of the cell. The localized insulin resistance at the cellular level does not really affect overall insulin resistance, because the two are different processes. In other words, localized insulin resistance is not a disease state, whereas overall systemic insulin resistance is.

Where this whole process comes in to play with nutrient partitioning is that there is a difference in fat storage driven by the consumption of saturated fat (which we’ve consumed for thousands of years) and large doses of seed oils (which we just started throwing back in large doses fairly recently).

Fat is fat. Doesn’t really matter what kind it is, its caloric content is the same. So, if you eat 30 grams of unsaturated fats you will take in just as many calories as if you eat 30 grams of saturated fat. A tablespoon of each has an equal number of calories.

Under the rules of CICO, given that everything else is equal, it doesn’t matter if you eat 30 grams of saturated or 30 grams of unsaturated fat, you will gain the same amount of weight. Both have exactly the same amount of calories.

But in reality, the saturated fat, via it’s driving local insulin resistance at the fat cell, blocks some of that fat from getting into the fat cells. Unsaturated fat acts more like a supercharge carb and flows into the fat cell even though it is enlarging and doesn’t need more.

Now this isn’t going to happen within a day. It takes time. But if this theory is true (and I believe it is) it tells us a couple of things. First, that CICO is BS, because we consume the same number of calories, yet store less fat if it’s saturated. Second, that we really need to watch our consumption of seed oils if we’re concerned about our weight . And probably for myriad health reasons other than weight loss.

The American College of Cardiology has anointed saturated fat as being neutral in terms of health, which is a big step. I’ve advocated for a long time that saturated fat is not just neutral, but actually healthful. If this hypothesis is validated, then that is certainly true.

This is just one of the many ways in which nutrient partitioning can make a difference despite similar caloric intake. If you want to read more, take a look at this 2024 paper by Mark Friedman et al. It will explain all the experimental work done on nutrient partitioning in both animals and humans.

What I really wanted to get to this time is one of my favorite proteins and how it helps fat cells expand. But this has already gone on too long and may be too technical. We’ll hit the protein in a future issue, and I can assure you, it is simpler than this and incredibly interesting.

Power of Protein Course opens for enrollment TOMORROW!

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Odds and Ends

• Mammoth web, home to 100,000 spiders found in European cave. Not what you'd want to walk into while spelunking.

• Why is Medieval Art so weird? Not sure I can answer it, but I love to look at it. The weirder the better.

• The 10 most delayed airports in the country even before the shutdown. And I've been delayed often in a couple of them, so it didn't much surprise me.

• Are you singing enough? The short answer is 'probably not' according to this article on the surprising health benefits of singing.

• You, too can feel like royalty. 10 castles can actually book a stay in when you're in the mood to channel your inner prince or princess. MD says she's in for Ashford or the Loire Valley, but any would do.

• I've never been much into auto racing, F1 or Indy, but have always been amazed watching a pit crew change all the tires in a flash. This video shows how it's done.

• Two of my passions--Shakespeare and painting--collide in the works of John Everett Millais.

• All 11-tons of this year's Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in NYC arrived this past week preparing to be lit up December 3 by 50,000 twinkling lights and a 900 pound Swarovski Crystal star on top. Take a look at the back story of very first one -- erected by the construction workers who were working to build the plaza on the site. 

• End of an era: After 230 plus years the US Mint produces its last penny. I used to be an avid collector of coins in my youth — pennies, nickels, dimes, and more. The treasure-hunter in me always hoping to find that rare one in the pile.

• The Leonid meteor shower will peak the night between November 16 and 17 but may last until the early morning of November 18 if conditions favor. See how best to catch it in the article. MD, you can be assured, will be keeping her eyes trained skyward. She loves a meteor shower!

• Have one myself. Live with a Bride who does as well. But here's the linguistic roots of what makes a Southerner drawl?.

• First beaked whale ever seen alive surfaces. Nice to know they’re really there.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

Today’s VOTW got fed to me on YouTube while I was looking for something else. It’s a performance by Dr. Hook and The Medicine Show. When I first heard this song, I went nuts on it. I didn’t ever buy a recording of it, but I heard it enough times that I was able to pick it out on the guitar. I’m sure our kids got sick of hearing me singing it. I played it all the time, even by myself. If MD were around we could do it in sort of a chorus like the band did.

Even though I haven’t been playing my guitar much in the last few years, when I do pick it up, I almost always have a run at On the Cover of the Rolling Stone.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week. Don’t be too hard on me. Remember our bank depredation and take pity.

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.