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Just a bit of catching up and housekeeping before we get started.

Thanks to everyone who sent me info on how to contact PayPal via routes other than the help bot, which seemed to be worthless. The message I got back was that the one out of three withdrawals that took my account to zero would be investigated and the resolution sent to me by Nov 4. Early on the morning of Nov 4, I clicked onto my PayPal account, not expecting much. Instead I found the whole amount missing was back in my account plus about $400 more dollars. The crooks must have been pulling other amounts out that I hadn’t noticed, but were discovered when PayPal investigated. I, of course, was delighted and transferred the money to my bank account immediately.

Also, thanks to all those who hopped in and found the letters RFK, Jr. was talking about. Turns out they weren’t real letters as I would imagine them, i.e., saying, Sorry, you’re right. We screwed up. Which is what I was looking for.

Instead there were two letters, heavy in legalese, saying in one case that the HHS did not do the required ongoing safety testing they said they did. But it didn’t really say that. It said they could find no documents showing they had done so. Maybe the dog ate their homework.

The second was longer with more legalese that basically said they did not use inert placebos to test vaccines. Instead they used other vaccines, which was a perfectly adequate way to test.

Anyway, here are links to the two letters. Many thanks to you who uncovered them for me.

The July 9, 2018 letter (pdf)

The January 18, 2018 letter (pdf)

Some brief housekeeping…

I’ve had a number of readers over the past couple of weeks ask me where the Like button is. It is the outline of a heart just a bit below the title of the newsletter. I guess you can only Love it not merely Like it.

Now that everyone knows where it is, I expect Likes/Loves to skyrocket. :)

The Getty, Reading, Fires in LA & Building Permits

MD and I celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary last Saturday by driving down and spending the day at the Getty Villa in Malibu. We’ve done that on umpteen anniversaries. I enjoy going to the Getty Villa, but MD absolutely loves it. She would move in if she could. And since I love her, I end up at the Getty Villa probably a little more than I would were I a bachelor.

The Getty Villa, was designed to be a re-creation of the ancient Roman Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, Italy, which had been buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It was opened in 1974, but two years later, J. Paul Getty died, and the museum inherited a huge wad of funds from his estate. In 1997, the museum was closed for a major restoration.

When MD and I first went there sometime in the early 1980s, it was difficult to get into. There was no real parking that I could see, so I left MD in the car and walked to the entrance gate. The lady there said there was no parking available on the campus and that we couldn’t even get in if there were parking, because tickets were issued only in advance or by the various public transport systems operating in the area.

I had seen buses running up and down Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), so I asked her if we rode the bus and got a ticket, would we be able to get in? She said Yes.

So, we drove back down the hill, parked on PCH and hoofed it for about a mile until we found a bus stop. We waited about 15 minutes until the next bus came along, paid our fee (which was minimal), got on the bus and signaled to get off in front of the Getty. We clambered up the hill—it’s a pretty good climb—gave the lady at the gate our tickets, and in we went.

We loved it then, but it was nothing compared to today. We ended up taking the kids to it once, but that was our only trip back until after the humongous redo that started in 1997. Since then, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been there.

It still isn’t all that simple to get in. Especially if you try to do it on the spur of the moment. Admission is free, but it costs $25 to park. And you have to set it up in advance online. Once you’ve secured your parking, you just drive in like you own the place, park wherever you find a spot in the big parking deck, stay as long as you like, and pay at one of the many automated pay stations before you leave. Couldn’t be easier.

I did find one thing this trip that disappointed me greatly.

The Getty Villa has a lovely little bookshop filled with books on antiquity, which is a subject near to my heart. The entire front of the store is a window that is sort of a display case for merchandise, of which the Getty has plenty. The back wall and the wall opposite the big long window are both chock full of books. There is a center section that usually has books on the end cap and going around the side. Last time I was there, I spent most of my time looking at the books on the end cap, which happened to be the ones I was most interested in.

This trip, the entire end cap and most of the section was bookless and filled with merchandise.

It confirms my growing worry that people are by and large abandoning reading. I confirm this every time I take a flight. If I walk back to the restroom, whenever I walk forward going back to my seat, I look at the number of people reading versus those watching some kind of video or TV show, the latter out number the former by a huge margin. I call all the videos and TV shows passive entertainment, because the video does all the thinking and imagining for you.

If you read, you have to use your imagination to know what the characters look like and sound like when they speak. If a room is described by a few elements in it, you have to imagine what the rest of the room looks like. It takes work to read, whereas it doesn’t to watch a video.

Don’t get me wrong; I love to watch shows on TV, especially Brit detective series, but I watch a few other things as well. Case in point: I can’t wait till November 16 comes around and Landman starts up again. In addition to all I watch, I read vastly more.

I’m not the only one worried about it.

Paradise Lost

I just read a Substack by a PhD prof who writes under the pseudonym Hilarious Bookbinder. HB, who has been at it for 30 years, teaches at a regional public university in the US.

He (I’m assuming it’s a he, but I could be wrong) starts out with

He says they also lie about it.

In terms of writing—these are college-level students—he says they operate on about an eighth-grade level.

He runs down a list of how students have changed since he started teaching.

He begins by showing a couple of examples of students’ responses to a fairly routine question. One is totally vapid. The other obviously comes from ChatGPT. It’s pretty easy to tell which is which.

Chronic absenteeism is a big problem. Kids just don’t show up for class. Sometimes they do the Amelia Earhart (as he calls it) and disappear without a trace.

He says many are unable to stay in their seats for 50 minutes. They just get up and walk out of the room. He knows they are going out to check their phones. The students know he will call them out if they look in class, so they just slide out for ten minutes instead, assuming everyone will think they are on a restroom break.

The students want the prof to do their work for them. They routinely request his Power Point lecture slides (which he does not provide, or his lecture notes.) I find this just incredible.

They pretend to type notes on their laptops, which he knows is BS. They’re doing everything but taking notes. If he tries to ban laptops from class, they “will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces.”

It seems to me that the inmates are in control of the asylum.

There are a handful of universities such as Yale, Harvard, MIT, and all the rest of the big name ones where maybe this isn’t the norm. I’m pretty sure the students attending those institutions don’t act like the students described above. But without doing the calculations, I would guess there are at least 300 to 400 times more students of the ilk described by HB in colleges all across the country than in one of the big name universities.

So, odds are, if you have any kind of a problem with a business issue requiring contact with a company, you are 300 to 400 times more likely to get one of the brain dead functionally illiterate ones than someone who can really help you. And it’s only getting worse. Which is why we’re in the middle of the shittification of everything.

MD and I got all of our kids reading early on. None of them reads as much as I, but they are vastly beyond the kids written about above. (To be fair, they’re Gen X, not Gen Z.)

I even got our grandkids to read at the beach. Or tried to, at least.

The little one to the far left is now 23, the lad in the middle turned 25 in April, and the babe in arms is 22. Now there are four more added to the tribe. I love this photo, mainly because my hair hasn’t changed colors yet, well there’s still more pepper than salt. And two of the three kids do seem to be paying attention.

Out of seven grandchildren, I’ve got one who is a real reader. In fact, he reads as much or more than I do. And reads serious stuff. He is at St. John’s College in Annapolis, which is the oldest, and probably the most famous Great Books school in the US. I was over-the-moon delighted that he decided to go there once accepted.

Niall Ferguson, one of my favorite historians, wrote an article recently for The Free Press titled Without Books We Will Be Barbarians. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, but I’m going to grab some of the statistics on reading in the US that are deplorable.

Here you go.

• “A recent study, based on the U.S. government’s Time Use Survey of 236,000 Americans, found that the proportion who read for pleasure has fallen dramatically since the turn of the century. On an average day in 2003, 28 percent of Americans would read; by 2023, that fell t16 percent.

• “According to a 2022 survey, 52 percent of Americans hadn’t read a book in over a year. One in 10 hadn’t read a book in more than 10 years.

• “This continues a long-running decline. The percentage of adults who read any literature not required for work or school fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2015.

• “Not only is the share of readers declining, so is the number of books they read. A Gallup poll published in 2022 found that the percentage of Americans who read more than 10 books per year fell by eight points between 2016 and 2021, from 35 percent to 27 percent.”

And then there is this:

Pathetic!

But I can see how it happens.

A couple of weeks ago, my adult kid sent me a short, but hilarious TikTok video. I didn’t have TikTok on my phone, so I couldn’t get it. He installed TikTok for me, so I could see the joke. Then I spent the next almost 40 minutes just flipping from one TikTok video to another. It was complete brain-dead behavior, but I couldn’t stop. Just one more, I told myself.

Who wouldn’t prefer that kind of brain rush, requiring no thinking whatsoever over reading a serious book? Problem is, you spend the time on TikTok, and it’s like eating cotton candy. Although I laughed hilariously over most of the TikTok videos I watched for 40 minutes, I couldn’t tell you now what they were about.

Had I spent 40 minutes reading a serious book, I would at least have a notion as to what I spent my 40 minutes reading about.

The Perils of Publishing

Not only am I worried in terms of what might happen to society if this awful trend in reading continues—which based on my own TikTok experience, I believe it will—I have personal worries. As most of you know, MD and I have been working on a revised edition of Protein Power. Once we got into it, we realized we needed a complete redo, so we basically scrapped much of what we’d begun and restructured the whole thing.

Just like reading has taken a hit over the past couple of decades, so have book sales. They are way down. And having been the author or co-author of ten books, I can tell you writing a book is an intense and time consuming process from the first word written to the actual appearance of a real hardcover book.

Since we planned to self publish the new version, it comes with considerable up front expense. With no ‘author’s advance’ from a publisher, we’ve got to pay for copy editing, for the artwork, for the cover graphics, and for the layout and printing of the book. And that’s on top of all the time we’ll spend writing the thing (on top of what we’ve spent already).

Given the way book sales have plummeted over the past few years, it makes me wonder if all the cash outlay and brain damage writing a book and pushing it through the publication process will provide any kind of financial reward. It takes many, many hours just to write the manuscript, and those are hours one can never get back if the book sinks like a rock in the market.

When we wrote Protein Power we were full of enthusiasm and were nicely rewarded as the book sold over 3.5 million copies. Writing the new one, we’ll have to spend a lot of money just to get it published. And it might sell only 500 copies. These are all the factors that keep me from throwing all my energies into it. Maybe if we could do it as a series of TikTok videos…

The Ghost of Malibu

When we drove down to the Getty, we took Pacific Coast Hwy for the last 6-7 miles. PCH has been closed for a long time since the big fires back in January of this year, but it is open now.

We were not expecting what we saw. As we drove along there were no signs of fire on the non-ocean side of the road, but there was total devastation on the ocean side of PCH.

Obviously, embers had flown from wherever the fire was on the non-ocean side to the ocean side. Last time we drove to the Getty there were the usual long runs of oceanside homes and buildings crammed together. What we found this time was that huge swathes of them were burned entirely to the ground, with only the concrete pilings holding up the former house still standing.

You can see this one house standing. There used to be an entire row of them. Just a little farther along is the photo below.

Basically, all you can see is pilings. That’s what PCH looks like for several miles until we turned into the Getty. Short strips of homes that appeared not to be damage very much, next to strips of homes that were damaged and unlivable, next to long runs of pilings. Very sad.

I wrote about the big fire back when it was raging. My commentary was mainly about how difficult it is to get building permits in California and my worry that these folks who had been completely burned out would spend years trying to get permits to rebuild.

When I saw all the devastation a few days ago, I tried to find the number of permits that had been issued. If you recall, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass both swore they would streamline the process and get people back in their homes as soon as possible.

I found an article in the LA Times from July that said permits were being given to about 15 percent of applicants at a rate of about 11 per day. Since there were 4,700 homes burned, it is going to take a while. I wouldn’t say this was an expedited process, though given how dreadfully slow it usually is, maybe this is action on steroids from the perspective of the permit givers.

When it comes to Malibu and all the houses we drove by, apparently there have been only two rebuild permits issued since the fire. I’m not surprised. Based on my own dealings with the planning offices in Santa Barbara, this is what I expected. I don’t know why these folks in Malibu don’t rise up, hire a lawyer for the group, and sue the liver out of the planning board in Malibu.

Cyclic Metabolic Switching (CMS)

Mark Mattson is a long-term researcher on intermittent fasting and all of its offshoots, of which there are many.

In the early days, researchers used mice for their experiments and discovered a lot of unexpected findings. Typically, they would put the same strains of mice in cages and give them all they wanted to eat for a couple of days. They would measure their intake, then give that same amount of food (two days’ worth) to a similar strain of mice, but would provide it all in just one day and then nothing the next.

Both groups of mice got the same amount of food, but those that got it on alternate days did much better healthwise. Even though the alternate day feedings were of the same number of calories as the two-day feeding of the control mice, those mice on alternate day feeding ended up losing a bit of weight, whereas the study group stayed pretty much the same weight.

A number of other health parameters improved. The alternate-day-fed mice lived longer, they had better health, they had nicer coats, and they made more brain-derived neurotropic factor, which correlates with greater brain plasticity.

Since the early studies, there have been countless variations on the intermittent fasting (IF) themes. Researchers have fiddled with the times spent eating vs fasting. The types of foods involved. And in pretty much all cases, when compared to plain old caloric restriction (CS), the intermittent fasting proved superior in terms of health improvement.

Dr. Mattson has now written a paper on The Cyclic Metabolic Switching Theory of Intermittent Fasting. It is behind a paywall, so I’ve stuck a copy in my dropbox for those who would like to read it.

Dr. Mattson has been working in the world of intermittent fasting for so long that he has developed a number of variations on the theme. He’s listed them in this table.

He has also created another table showing the benefits of various forms of intermittent fasting on different organ systems. This table was developed from studies of both animals and humans and is comprehensive.

As you can see from this table, intermittent fasting is a healthful option for just about every organ system in the human body. I’ve been interested in intermittent fasting for a long, long time. I went back and found the first paper I could find from Dr. Mattson on intermittent fasting, which was in 2005. Then I looked in my own blog, and found my first post on the subject in 2006, almost 20 years ago.

And, as most of you know, I’m also a fan of the ketogenic diet, which Dr. Mattson is not particularly. At least not in the long term.

Here’s what he has to say about the ketogenic diet in his paper.

Dr. Mattson and I disagree on a number of issues discussed in his quote above. For one, I figure the ketogenic diet was the standard diet of early man. It’s the diet we cut our human teeth on, prior to succumbing to agriculturalization. If almost anything goes wrong with us now, we can correct just about everything by spending some time on a ketogenic diet.

Dr. Mattson knows there are many advantages to the ketogenic diet, so he has come up with the idea of Cyclic Metabolic Switching Theory, which means the combination of any of the variations of intermittent fasting shown in Box 1 above and the ketogenic diet.

So are there advantages of combining some variation of intermittent fasting for a bit then switching to a ketogenic diet. I think there probably are. If nothing else, you get a little hormesis thrown in, and we all know that’s good.

CMS alternates between fasting periods (which induce ketosis and activate cellular stress responses) and feeding (triggering growth and repair pathways). This repeated cycle uniquely activates multiple protective systems in the body:

• Autophagy and Damage Repair: Periods of ketogenesis stimulate autophagy, the process by which cells clear damaged proteins and organelles. This prevents the buildup of cellular waste that underlies aging and many chronic diseases.

• Antioxidant Defenses: CMS increases the activity of NRF2 and sirtuins, upregulating antioxidant enzymes and DNA repair.

• Mitochondrial Adaptation: Fasting and ketosis promote mitophagy (removal of damaged mitochondria) and mitochondrial biogenesis, optimizing energy use and resilience to metabolic stress.

• Hormonal and Immune Regulation: Fasting-induced hormones like ghrelin and adiponectin bolster neurogenesis, immune function, and anti-inflammatory responses—effects amplified by CMS, but not by constant ketosis.

• Circadian Biology: CMS supports healthy circadian rhythms, enhancing metabolic efficiency, sleep quality, and systemic regulation.

• Gut Microbiome Diversity: Intermittent fasting, especially when paired with a diverse diet, increases beneficial gut bacteria and short-chain fatty acids, reducing inflammation and supporting metabolic, immune, and brain health.

Clinical trials in humans have shown that CMS via intermittent fasting improves insulin sensitivity, blood pressure, and oxidative stress in humans—even when calorie intake is unchanged—by activating these adaptive stress responses and supporting ongoing cellular repair. CMS is linked to reduction in risk for obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, fatty liver, and even cancer. Importantly, it also supports mental health and cognitive function through effects on brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and synaptic plasticity pathways. We all (I certainly) can do with a little more mental firepower and brain elasticity.

I know that most people look upon dieting as a means of weight loss. Sure, we all want to get healthier in the process, but I suspect most of us also have an eye on how we look. While weight loss, improved glucose control, and fat reduction are important, CMS's greatest value is in making the body's cellular systems stronger and more adaptable: it reduces inflammation, prevents age-related decline, and increases disease resistance. This holistic resilience—achieved by regularly alternating between cellular challenge and recovery—is more foundational and long-lasting than simply restricting calories or staying in ketosis.

In summary, cyclic metabolic switching confers the greatest benefit by toughening the body’s cellular and organ-level defenses against stress, aging, and disease, a process supported by robust human evidence and mechanistic studies.

If you think about it, the most efficient machine operates at a steady state. A steady state requires the least fuel. If you eat the same things every day at the same time, you are operating at a steady state. Which means you’ll burn the fewest calories possible.

If you shake up your life a bit and don’t eat the same things at the same time each day, you won’t be in a steady state, and your body will thank you for it.

Go keto for a day or two, then switch over and eat for only a six hour window in the day. Then switch to something else. Then back to ketosis. The cyclic metabolic switching may play hell with your schedule, but it will do your body a world of good.

Learn All About the Power of Protein

Just a reminder that our online Power of Protein course is opening for enrollment in November through Adapt Your Life Academy.

Enrollment only opens once a year and will only be open for 3 days, so if you don't want to miss it, you can join the waitlist here.

In this multi-chapter course, MD and I present the science-based facts; not only how important protein is in your daily diet, but also how eating the right amount of the right kind protein can help you lose weight, boost your health and feel fit in just weeks.  

PS: When you join the waitlist, you'll get reminders via email from Adapt Your Life Academy when enrollment opens on November 18.

Odds and Ends

• Why is there an almost perfectly straight line cutting through the geography of Scotland? The Great Glen Fault explained by SciShow.

• Time lapse mapping of the more than 30K slave ship voyages out of Africa from the 1600s to 1860. Incredible to watch and horrible to contemplate. 

• How did a British vocal scientist recreate the voice of a 3000 year old mummy? 

• There's urban slang, Gen Alpha slang, GenZ slang, GenX slang and Boomer slang. But slang is nothing ‘new’. You've likely heard of Cockney rhyming slang, but even the posh and prim Victorians had their own popular slang terms, equally as goofy and nonsensical as today's 6-7.

• MD grew up in Arkansas in a national park filled with natural hot springs (appropriately enough named Hot Springs National Park) so these 7 World Class natural hot springs caught her eye...and mine.

• And the Bride was in a righteous huff that Hot Springs National Park came in at only 61st out of the 63 National Parks as ranked by Discoverer. I consoled her that at least it wasn't dead last.

• One unusual hallmark of voracious readers is they're more likely to mispronounce uncommonly used words that aren't pronounced you’d expect from how they’re spelled. I've read voraciously since early childhood and fell victim to that very thing as a youngster, seeing the word 'facsimile' in books. Having never heard it pronounced, I read it as 'face smile'. Here are a group of other English words we pronounce oddly and why.

• Man may work from sun to sun, but a woman's work... Well take a look for yourself at what the data says about the differences in how men and women spend their days. Kind of interesting, but according to the Bride, not very surprising.

• A computing model that decodes human thoughts. Not sure if that's a good witch or a bad witch.

• Now you can have a whole Thanksgiving feast without ever eating any actual food. Not a shred of protein or good fat or phytochemicals or fiber, just a plateful of processed sugar, starch, and bad fat that's flavored like Thanksgiving staples. To speak a little 80s Valley Girl slang: Gag me with a spoon! Take a look at these seasonal Oreos. And weep along with Jesus.

• Hard to imagine the Radio City Music Hall's Rockettes have been high kicking for 100 years this year. Interesting tour through their history from humble beginnings in my home state (Missouri) before my mother was born to the icons of the Big Apple.

• A photographer captured this rainbow in full circle in a prize-winning photo. But that got me to thinking: if a rainbow has no end, where's the pot of gold?

• Are you as smart as a high school junior? Test your vocabulary with these 101 most common SAT words.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

Jim Varney was an incredible comedian and actor. He died way too young at 50 years old from lung cancer. But four packs a day will do that to a man. Our family loved one of his hour long shows about the Ernest P. Worrell family album. Each 10 minute or so segment was about one of his ancient relatives, all played by him. All were different, and all were hilarious. The one everyone enjoyed the most was his great uncle Lloyd Worrell, the meanest man in the world.

You’ll have to have a sense of humor like ours to find it as funny as we do. But whether you find it funny or not, you’ll have to admit he had enormous talent. He is fondly remembered and greatly missed by the Eades family.

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.