I’ve got to apologize for being AWOL over the past few days, but I’ve been going through a difficult time. A few days ago, my oldest, best golfing buddy friend, who was just preparing to retire, suffered a huge, unrecoverable brain bleed (a hemorrhagic stroke). His wife had the docs keep him alive until all his children could get there to say goodbye. He passed away a couple of nights ago. And I haven’t felt motivated to do much of anything since other than grieve.

I have a lot of friends, but very few really close ones. This one was the closest. A true ‘brother from another mother’. So I hope you’ll understand and forgive my absence.

Here is the last photo taken of us. We don’t have a lot of photos, because we generally just go out and play golf. This one was taken when we got together a couple of years ago at Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Florida, a round we both wanted a memory of. RIP my dear friend.

Meat, Glycogen, and Ketosis

While I wasn’t able to focus enough to write on difficult subjects, I did go through some back emails and came across a non-difficult one a reader had sent me from one of Dr. Joe Mercola’s newsletters. This one was kind of beyond the pale.

As with all of medicine, nutrition is not a fully developed science. I’m in favor of a low-carb/ketogenic diet for optimal health. Others just a smart as I am, or even smarter, believe just as strongly that the low-fat, high-carb diet is best. The most we can do is to perform more and more studies until one wins out. Or maybe it will be like physicist Max Plank said about science in general: It moves forward one funeral at a time. Meaning, of course, that the old guard has to die out before the new guard can be heard.

Which, given my age, puts me in the old guard, I suppose. But there are probably more young low-carbers out there than low-fatters. And we’ve got the Public Health Collaboration in the UK that is tabulating all the RTCs comparing low-fat vs low-carb diets showing to this point the winner—in terms of weight loss and diabetes—being clearly the low-carb diet.

There are some aspects to this debate, however, that have truly been settled. Yet many people—including those who write for Dr. Mercola—seem to be totally unaware that it has. Maybe Dr. Mercola himself is, too, as under the headline it says “Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola.”

The whole Mercola piece starts off with a video of four guys critiquing a short video by a woman named Judy Cho, whom I don’t know—in fact, I don’t know any of the people in this video—discussing why a carnivore diet doesn’t cause hypothyroidism.

The four guys then jump in with condescending attitudes and the mantle of correctness to tell us all why meat causes a reduction in thyroid hormone (T3).

One of them launches off on a dissertation as to why old meat, i.e., meat that has been sitting around in a grocery store, will cause a reduction in T3, yet fresh meat won’t. Which is absolute nonsense and has been known so for many years.

A handful of scientists studied the Inuit 80 to 100 years ago and discovered that for many of the Inuit, their meat diet did not end up producing ketones in their urine. If they fed the Inuit diet to non-Inuit researchers, they all developed ketosis. Yet the Inuit didn’t.

They then fasted the Inuit for two or three days and found that they produced plenty of ketones. The researchers knew that carbohydrates blocked the production of ketones. When they coupled this knowledge (glycogen is a carbohydrate) with the fact that the ketogenic diet—primarily meat—did not produce ketones in the Inuit, yet fasting did, they postulated that the glycogen in the fresh meat inhibited ketogenesis. That was their only answer to this conundrum.

The fly in the ointment was that they didn’t have any way to accurately measure glycogen in the meat to figure out how much glycogen was really there. So they assumed—for decades—that the glycogen in fresh meat the Inuit ate prevented ketogenesis.

I don’t know when it happened, but ultimately scientists got around to figuring out how to actually test for glycogen content in fresh meat. They ended up flash freezing it with liquid nitrogen at a chilly -320F. Only then could they determine the amount of carbohydrate in freshly killed meat.

I have read about this a dozen times, but just to make sure something new hasn’t popped up in the interim, I checked with my trusted AI guide Perplexity and got the following:

As you can see, the amount of glucose in meat declines at a rapid pace after the death of the animal. Even if you cut off a chunk raw and wolfed it down immediately, you wouldn’t get much, if any, glycogen.

Why does glycogen disappear so quickly?

Think about your car. You drive it into your garage at night and turn off the key. The car is essentially dead, but some functions continue to operate. The lights stay on, the fan continues to run, the windows will go up and down for a while, and maybe a few other features continue to operate. But, ultimately, they all go dead.

Just like your car, a recently killed animal does not go completely dead all at once.

If, God forbid, you were to be shot in the heart with a high-powered rifle, you would doubtless be dead. But, like the car in the garage, parts of you would live on for a while. The muscle cells in your legs, for example, wouldn’t know you were really dead, and they would keep on keeping on, doing what they do to produce energy, etc.

In order for muscles, even relaxing muscles, to survive they need to burn fuel. Burning fuel requires oxygen. If your heart isn’t pumping blood because a bullet went through it, the muscle cells in your legs are deprived of oxygen. When no oxygen is available, muscles do what muscles do when they exercise intensely and can’t keep up with the oxygen demand: they switch to anaerobic metabolism and go after the stored glycogen.

Burning the glycogen anaerobically results in a buildup of lactic acid. When your muscles are exercising, the blood washes away the lactic acid, but even then, if you exercise intensely enough, the lactic acid build up outpaces the blood’s ability to carry it away, leading to lactic acidosis. Your exercising muscles begin to burn, and if you don’t slack off and let the accumulated lactic acid get washed away, your muscles will begin to cramp, and tomorrow they’ll likely be sore.

Same thing happens when you (or a caribou) are dead. Since there is no oxygenated blood being brought to the muscles, they burn glycogen anaerobically, producing lactic acid, which accumulates. Ultimately, the glycogen is depleted, the tissues are acidic, and no more ATP is produced. No more ATP means no power to run the calcium pumps, the cells lose calcium and the muscles begin to contract, leading to the condition called rigor mortis.

The upshot of all this is that when animals die, the glycogen in their muscles quickly degrades to lactic acid. The only way this process can be halted is to immediately flash freeze the tissue with liquid nitrogen to halt the glycogen to lactic acid conversion. Since that happens mainly in the lab and in special flash freezing facilities, any meat you purchase at the store or from your local farmer or that you kill yourself will not contain any glycogen to speak of.

The glycogen to lactic acid conversion upon death is all really basic science, not in dispute by anyone any longer. And there is no glycogen in store-bought meat, or even freshly killed meat unless it is sprinkled with -320F liquid nitrogen before you pop it in your mouth (and that would be a very bad idea).

So the position expressed repeatedly by one of the ill-informed people on the video in the Mercola article that a carnivore diet is also a high- or moderate-carbohydrate diet is absolute bunk.

So back to the Inuit conundrum. The early researchers noted that the Inuit did not go into ketosis while on their regular diet, yet did when they fasted. The conclusion they came to based on this data was that there was carbohydrate in the meat, which prevented ketosis. During a fast, there was no intake of meat, yet plenty of ketones were being formed. It was a reasonable conclusion, but a wrong one.

What they failed to grasp was that the Inuit were keto adapted. Their lifelong diet of high-fat meat had gotten their ketone-producing-and-consuming systems working in precisely-controlled fashion.

The Inuit burn ketones as they make them, so few spill into the urine. It stands to reason then that they might not have measurable ketones under normal circumstances. During the time these old studies were done, the non-Inuit, white-bread-eating, white man was the standard by which nutrition was judged. Feed a non-keto-adapted bread eater the Inuit diet, and he goes into ketosis in no time. Researchers back then figured the Inuit should do the same thing, and when they didn’t—thanks to keto-adaptation, which was not understood at the time—these scientist thought it worthy of publishing.

But if they were keto adapted, why did they go into ketosis when they fasted?

Because over years of following basically the same diet, they had ‘trained’ their metabolism to make enough ketones to meet their caloric needs along with the large measure of fat that was also a part of their diet. In full keto-adaptation, the skeletal muscles shift first to ketones for energy then in a few weeks to using primarily free fatty acids as fuel, sparing the ketones to power the brain. When the Inuit fasted, they had no dietary fat to fall back on, so they produced ketones from their own fat stores.

What about the thyroid issue?

Judy Cho, the lady the four guys all attacked in the video above is right, and they are wrong. If your T3 falls a bit on the carnivore diet, it’s probably perfectly normal. I wouldn’t worry about it if the T3 drop off came about after following a low-carb/ketogenic or carnivore diet. I would look for something else. Especially if the TSH, which is kind of the thyroid hormone gage, remains in normal territory. As long as your thyroid hormones are working as they are supposed to, your thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) should be normal; it’s the signal that tells your brain whether you need more thyroid effect.

There are two things about this platform that I have been trying to get changed to be more like Substack. One is that it will allow me to embed videos; the other is that I can link specific sections instead of the whole post. I’ve clamored mightily for both changes and have so far been summarily ignored.

About eight months ago, I wrote a long post on how the thyroid works in all this. my intent in writing this post today was to include that section. When I went to find it, I discovered it was behind a paywall. I figured out how to remove the paywall, but you’ll still have to scroll down to almost the bottom in Arrow #223. It should answer any questions you might have about diet and thyroid issues.

CAC calculations

I’ve written a couple of posts, maybe three, on how to calculate a coronary calcium score (CAC) more accurately. One of my most frequently asked questions is about this. In looking for the section on the thyroid issues above, I came across the latest post I had done on the the calculations required. It even includes a walk through of an actual CAC report. Fortunately, this one was written in Substack, so I can just give you the link instead of the whole newsletter. Here you go: CAC scoring—a better way.

Odds and Ends

Watch the first known example of a wild canid (aka a wolf) essentially fishing. The three little pigs better watch out! This is one crafty lobo.

The amazing, other-wordly beauty hidden inside American factories. Who knew?

The kiss is possibly 21 million years old, far older than the modern human race. Why do we do it?

Ancient wooly mammoth surrenders its 'fragile' RNA, the evanescent genetic molecule that isn't supposed to hang around. And they're cloning ancient RNA viruses. What could possibly go wrong? Sounds like a Michael Crichton novel plot.

Is there a difference between 'autumn' and 'fall'?

Septuagenarian albatross laying eggs since Ike was president prepares to do it again. I confess I never knew an albatross could live (let alone breed) for 75 years! And she doesn’t look a day over 50!

Why do we say 'cream of the crop'? Here are its origins.

Thinking of getting some ink? Or maybe more ink? Maybe think twice about that tattoo, at least according to the findings in this mouse study.

Ah, the species chauvinism. Why would we have assumed human breast milk was the most biologically complex of all species?? And, surprise! It turns out it's not. What is?

Blame it on Bonzo! Our love of alcohol apparently comes from our great ape ancestors!

Rare crystal Faberge egg once owned by Russian royalty fetches over $30million at auction. That's a whole lotta disposable income!

The evolutionary mystery of human blood types. When and why did they develop?

First the Louvre and now the great snail heist. Over $100 Grand in fine escargot is escar-gone!

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

MD found this one and loved it. I do, too. Jazz piano and vocal virtuoso Hazel Scott doing what she did best, singing like an angel and making the piano smoke! If you’re unfamiliar with her, take a look at the site dedicated to her genius.

In this one, before she plays simultaneously on two pianos, there’s an enjoyable little comic interlude by the trumpet player and his puppet, who assists in the solo. You don’t often see stuff like this any longer, and more’s the pity.

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 soon.

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: 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.