The Arrow #116

Hello friends.

Greetings from Montecito.

Where it is still pouring rain and cold. I won’t bore you with another weather rant.

But I might hit the weather a bit.

This next section is going to be a longish roam through a lot of subjects. Reminds me of one of my favorite comedians, the deadpan Steven Wright. I once caught him on TV years ago, and I’ve always remembered this joke he told. He said

When I first read the dictionary, I thought it was a long free-verse poem about everything.

Well, that’s what this next section will be.

When I was in college a million years ago, I helped support myself by teaching SCUBA diving. I used to take students for their checkout dives to Santa Cruz Island, one of the channel islands off the coast of Santa Barbara. We would come into the SB Marina late at night and sleep on the boat, which would leave the next morning at about 7. The boat was called the Emerald, and it was piloted by a guy named Glenn Miller. Glenn had a dog named Max. Max could free dive with goggles, and had articles written about him in the SCUBA magazines.

Glenn was a real character, and after I became an engineer and moved away from Southern California to Arkansas I always wondered what became of him. I made a trip back to the Orange County area a few years later and asked some of my old SCUBA buddies about Glenn, and they told me he sold the Emerald, built a bigger boat, sold it, and had become a helicopter pilot. Next thing I heard about him was when he died in a crash in the Grand Canyon while working on a movie.

Coming up to Santa Barbara to take students out on the Emerald gave me an opportunity to spend some time in the area. Which I fell in love with. I used to take one of my SCUBA buddies up with me to help out with my classes, and he also fell in love with Santa Barbara. We were both in college. I was in engineering school, and he was studying police science. We decided when we got out of school, we would both head to Santa Barbara, where I would work as an engineer, and he would become a cop.

As it turned out, he did move to Santa Barbara and became a cop. He retired a number of years ago. I was a year behind him in school, plus my engineering degree was a five year program, so I was really two years behind him. When I got out, I got a good engineering job offer in Carlsbad, California, which is down the coast in the opposite direction from Santa Barbara. During my time there, I started thinking about medical school. But I didn’t have some of the prerequisite courses, so I needed to go back to school to pick them up. I was mainly working out of the office on a remote site, so I figured I could take the courses I needed at University of California at San Diego, which was kind of on the way to the job site.

I ran it by my boss, and he nixed it.

As I was trying to figure out how to pull this off, I happened to see an advertisement for firemen in the Carlsbad newspaper. I knew firemen got a lot of time off, so I figured that would be the perfect job. So, I applied, went through all the physical and written testing, and got hired. As it turned out, it wasn’t all that great a job for me at least—in fact, I hated it—but it did give me the time to go back and pick up the courses I needed at UCSD.

I really did hate the job—someday I’ll write more about it if people are interested—so I bid the Carlsbad Fire Department adios about a year later and got another engineering job in Oceanside, a beach city adjacent to Carlsbad. Then I got a track on a job in Huntsville, Alabama, the city in which my grandparents lived. I moved there and worked for a year and a half or so. It was a contract job, so when the contract was over, so was the job. Then I found another engineering job in Little Rock.

It was also a contract job. And when it ended, I decided it was now or never, so that’s when I went to med school.

So, almost 30 years later, I take MD to Santa Barbara. I figured it was going to be one of those deals where you have fond memories of some place, then go back and discover it really sucks. I ended up having the opposite experience. I loved it. And MD loved it.

At the time, we had a practice in Boulder, Colorado and a house there. On 35 acres way up in the mountains. Where it snowed a lot.

We loved Santa Barbara so much, though, that we went there every chance we got. We finally decided we should get a place there instead of staying in hotels all the time. We got a realtor and looked at some properties and could not believe the prices. Double or triple Boulder prices. Five or six times higher than Little Rock prices.

Never one to be deterred, I said, Let’s get a boat and stay in the marina while we’re here. MD said, Are you out of your mind?

It wasn’t that off the wall. I had had some experience sailing. The aforementioned friend and I had rented sailboats in Newport, down in Orange County and sailed a bit.

MD was not convinced.

So, we signed up at the Santa Barbara Sailing Center, took a live aboard course with two of our sons, and ended up getting our bareboat charter captain’s licenses.

Then we started looking for boats.

They, too, are expensive. But seemed cheap, cheap, cheap compared to actual houses, or even condos in Santa Barbara.

We found an old 44 ft Nauticat down in San Pedro, and our son and our sailing instructor, Captain Laura, sailed it up the coast to SB while we were laboring away in Boulder. The boat was made in Finland and was a blue water sailor, which means you could take it around the world in the open ocean — aka blue water. It looked much like the one does at the top of the Nauticat website. We named it Paradox. Clever, no?

In case you’re wondering, the boat cost a little over $200K back then, which wouldn’t even get you a down payment for a condo in SB.

So, once we had established a toehold in SB, we started spending more time there. But MD thought it was too much like camping, so she refused to stay more than about ten days at a time.

Which brings me around to what I really wanted to get into, which is the weather here in the Santa Barbara area. Remember, a long, free-verse poem…

We got the boat in 1999 and spent the night of Y2K on it. Remember how there was this great worry that on New Year’s eve that the world was going to blow up because all the computers were going to go down on Y2K? Well, of course, it didn’t happen, but we didn’t worry, as we figured we could sail away if civilization collapsed and there was widespread looting and all the other things that had been predicted.

Once the new year rang in without civilization having collapsed, I arranged with my favorite golfing buddy from Santa Fe, to come play the great courses in Santa Barbara. We set a time in February, and we all came out.

And it rained and rained and rained. I remember taking him to one of my favorite public courses, Sandpiper, just to show it to him. We sat in the car in the parking lot and while the rain poured and watched the run off water cascade down the 10th fairway.

The only day we actually got to play during the week he was there was at a course called Rancho San Marcos, a great course that sadly no longer exists. My friend, MD, and I were going to play, but when we got there, the rain picked up. It had been threatening that day, but it started spitting rain just as we got there. We all teed off and the rain picked up until at about the 5th hole, it was coming down pretty good and as we were in sight of the Clubhouse, MD said she was out. My friend and I said, screw it, we’re playing. MD said, you’re crazy but I’ll wait for you in the restaurant by the pro shop. Which she did. She sat there with Troy Aikman, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback, who had recently retired and was contemplating moving to Santa Barbara. He, like MD, had sense enough to stay in out of the rain.

The entire time my friend was there, it poured. We all left SB at about the same time, and MD and I didn’t come back for a few months. We would come back for a week or ten days here and there, but we didn’t spend a lot of time. But the time we did spend there was usually pretty nice and sunny.

As I wrote, MD was reluctant to stay on the boat for more than ten days — two weeks max. I wanted to stay longer than a week or two at a time. We began to look for a condo. We found one, got a decent deal on it, sold the boat to make the down payment on it, and moved in.

It was a tiny condo, but it seemed like the Taj Mahal after being cooped up in the boat. We had an active practice in Boulder, so we couldn’t spend a lot of time in SB, but we did spend a little more than we did in the boat. And spent it in longer stretches.

In 2004, while we where in SB, of course (we came mainly in the winter to get away from the snow in Colorado), there came another huge rain. This one went on for days and days—the better part of three weeks. In fact, it triggered a giant mudslide/landslide that killed a dozen or so people in a little community just a few miles away. There was flooding everywhere.

Then, it didn’t rain for a few years. Not at all. And everyone, of course, is screaming drought caused by Climate Change. Then it rains. Not like it did the other times early in our time here, but pretty good rains. Then in around 2013, when we were here in the winter, it rained like crazy. Ten inches in one day!

After that, it doesn’t rain at all for five years. We’re in a drought. The reservoir for the water supply is getting low. Everyone is panicking. It’s Climate Change; it’s Climate Change! Then we get the rain in early January I wrote about last week that caused the big debris flow that killed 23 people.

Now, we’re back here trying to escape the Dallas winter, and it has rained almost the entire time we’ve been here. And it had been raining before we got here. We’ve been here for about a month now, and I don’t think there have been three days in a row that it hasn’t rained.

I forgot to mention earlier, but two years before we came here, there were huge rains in the winter. So huge, in fact, that they washed away an entire green on the aforementioned Ranch San Marcos golf course.

It seems to me that years of heavy rains interspersed with years of drought are just the standard weather pattern here. Every time there are a few drought years, the city fathers start talking about building — or actually refurbishing— a desalination plant to provide reliable water to the city. Then, just about the time they’re ready to pull the trigger, huge rains inundate the area and the desalination plant is forgotten about until we go three or four years without rain. Then it all starts up again. They did finally gut up and refurb the desal plant a few years ago.

When MD and I were in Tempe, Arizona last month for the Broken Science Initiative kick off, William Briggs gave a terrific talk, during which he showed the slide below.

In conversations I’ve had with him, and in his writings, and in his talks, Briggs always points out that models tell us exactly what the makers of the models want them to tell us. They can explain things perfectly. The creators of these models can build in projections that accurately represent what has happened in past years. They can look at the number of years that weather events have happened and precisely figure the probabilities of recurrences. They can drill down to the minutest details and figure out how to get them into their model. The models can be the absolute epitome of accuracy, but they are worthless if they don’t predict what’s going to happen with any degree of accuracy.

First it was Global Warming, then it became Climate Change. All based on modeling. And based on how the predictions have turned out, it appears the models haven’t “explain[ed] the right thing.”

This is just a sample of the countless failed predictions made by climate change hysteria mongers over the years. If you’re interested, you can find many more here, here, here, and here.

Then, of course, there is Paul Ehrlich, back in the day when people actually believed him.

Virtually every prediction Ehrlich has made over the years has turned out to be wrong. From his predictions on population growth to pollution to now climate change. All wrong so far. He’s been so wrong for so long, that he’s kind of fallen off everyone’s radar. But now, what with all the Climate Change hysteria, he just had to surface to opine. He couldn’t resist. And, of course, he’s opining, once again, that we’re doomed.

I love the subtitle of the WSJ piece about Ehrlich linked above. It succinctly says it all about him and the Climate Change hysteria:

His predictions have been famously wrong, but doom springs eternal.

Doom does indeed spring eternal.

And you might think it is because we just love to be frightened. But I don’t think that’s the real cause. I think the real cause is the same cause that drives just about everything: money. There is big money in Climate Change.

Democrats receive enormous amounts of money from one of their biggest supporters: the green energy movement. Many, many companies are making fortunes from government subsidies for green energy. And as long as We the People can be frightened with tales of apocalyptic doom couched in terms of The Science, we’re going to be approving those subsidies.

I’m not singling the Democrats out for blame here. Both parties do it.

For decades the GOP frightened the populace with tales of a nuclear holocaust perpetrated by the USSR. Because of that constant fear mongering, no one (but those on the far left) complained about the massive amount of government spending on the vast military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us against.

Now the situation has flipped. Whereas in the years since Eisenhower when the majority of the GOP were total hawks while the Dems were doves, it has now flipped. I would say the majority of the Dems are hawks, at least where Russia is concerned, while the GOP is about half hawks.

I haven’t done this exercise (mainly because I don’t exactly know how to go about doing it), but I suspect if we could see the donor lists to the various politicians we would find the big armament companies donating mainly to the Dems now and not so much to the GOP. Which is probably the opposite of what it was 20 years ago.

Politics is an expensive business, and those involved in it have to get money somewhere. And, as always, with money comes strings. Here is a blatant example. This one involves Democrats, but the GOP does the same thing. If there weren’t payoffs like this, politics as it functions today wouldn’t exist.

Sometimes it’s bipartisan. The Covid vaccines are a perfect example. Trump threw obscene amounts of money into getting the vaccines developed at, dare I say it, warp speed. All the while the Democrats were naysayers. Until they took the presidency and both branches of Congress. Then they got on the gravy train and did everything in their power to push them on everyone down to the cradle.

So you think this was done based on science, or would you reckon there might be a little payola involved?

It’s the same with Climate Change.

The only difference is that the wrongheadedness of Climate Change won’t be evident for decades. People will have long forgotten all the specific doomsday predictions, just like they’ve forgotten the ones I posted above, whereas the problems with the vaccines are here and now.

Just this morning, Jeff Childers wrote about the almost complete reversal of vaccine authoritarianism in Australia, which, along with New Zealand was just about the most vigorous vaccine police state on earth.

We got some hopeful news for our Australian friends yesterday, when news broke of the ATAGI’s new, updated 2023 covid guidelines. ATAGI is the Australian Government’s Covid Technical Advisory Group on Immunization, which has become a household word in Australia, although it’s a word usually accompanied by other household words that you can’t say in front of the children.

Anyway, forget about booster mandates! Nevermind! At this point in 2023, ATAGI only recommends covid shots for two groups: people aged 65+ and people 18 and over who are at-risk. The new guidelines actually recommend AGAINST covid shots for healthy kids under 18, or even for at-risk kids under five — the opposite of U.S. FDA recommendations.

And I was gobsmacked to see this next section in the ATAGI’s latest guidelines, which actually used the word “risks” in the section headline, and acknowledged myocarditis and pericarditis — another breakthrough! — and, though I searched everywhere, I could not find the words “very rare” or any other reassuring technical mumbo-jumbo suggesting it’s almost impossible to be injured by the shots.

You have to dig down into the linked 13-page provider information sheet to find the usual reassuring gobbledegook, and even there, ATAGI only says that the benefit outweighs the “rare risk.” Not “very rare.” Neither does it quantify the risk, which a well-respected Canadian study calculated to be 1 in 5,000.

I have a question: who should get to decide whether a particular risk is justified by a benefit? The government? Or the person taking the risk?

This is a gigantic U-turn for the Australian government. Oh, they’ll gaslight everyone by claiming they ALWAYS acknowledged the risk of myocarditis, but the truth is the authorities promised OVER AND OVER this was the “safest vaccine ever made in human history.” The fact that the Australian government has retreated from almost all recommendations and is now recommending AGAINST jabbing healthy kids is huge news.

Childers goes on to write about how sorting all this out is like working a giant puzzle. Even though you don’t have the picture on the box to look at, each piece you fit in place makes the image just a little more recognizable. And like with all jigsaw puzzles, the more pieces you get to fit, the quicker the entire picture emerges.

And he makes an important point:

We never get any pieces that don’t fit.

When was the last time you saw an article saying “21-year-old soccer player starts scoring five goals per game since getting vaccinated”? Or “Young woman with stage 4 cancer given only five months to live restores her health after being vaccinated for Covid-19.” These, of course, are exaggerations, but you get the point. Have you ever seen a news story about anything good happening as a result of someone getting the vaccine?

Yet we are constantly bombarded with stories of young people suddenly dying for no apparent reason. So much so that a diagnosis has been invented for these deaths: Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. It’s kind of like the reverse of the Pief Panofsky quote I posted a week or two ago: "If you throw money at an effect and it doesn't get bigger, that means it's not really there."

If you try to ignore an effect and it keeps popping up and hitting you in the face, that means it’s really there.

I just got a post that A Midwestern Doctor cross posted to Pierre Kory’s substack. It’s a wonderful essay that I encourage you to read about how the media is coming around on the pandemic and the vaccines. The piece contained the video below which is the perfect representation of what has happened in Washington and all over the world. There couldn’t be a better summary:

Was I right, or what?

Now with this long free verse poem about a lot of stuff under our belt, let’s turn to something specific about low-carb diets.

Low-Carb Diets and Climate Change

An article popped up in one of my feeds not long ago that was inane beyond belief, but it shows just how much the tentacles of Climate Change have ensnared journalists most everywhere. The ominous headline warned “Paleo and keto diets bad for health and the planet, says study”

Here’s what it had to say about how the study was put together.

When it comes to the more extreme ways of eating, the paleo and keto diets are on one side of the field, while veganism is on the other. Paleo dieters focus on meats, vegetables, fruits and nuts while avoiding beans and grains, while Keto practitioners dial back nearly all carbohydrates, focussing instead on meats and fats. Vegans avoid all animal products and animal byproducts in their diet.

While it's possible to find studies touting some benefits and some drawbacks on human health from both ways of eating, researchers out of Tulane University took a slightly different approach to comparing the eating plans: they tracked how much carbon dioxide paleo and keto diets release into the atmosphere versus a plant-based diet. Carbon dioxide is a key contributor to global warming trends, so understanding how it gets into the atmosphere can help mitigation efforts.

To compile their results, the researchers used information from a database they had previously developed called dataField, which tracks the carbon footprint of various foods. They also examined the nutritional impacts of the various types of diets by applying point values derived from the federal Healthy Eating Index to data from over 16,000 adults participating in the CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Study.

Okay, so these researchers used a database they created that

aggregates data on the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) and cumulative energy demand (CED) associated with production of specific foods to facilitate linages with self-selected individual diets in the US National Health and Examination Survey (NHANES).

I have no idea what the it means “to facilitate linages with self-selected individual diets,” but let’s give that a pass and just assume it does mean something. Those readers smarter than I can inform me in the comments.

Here is the conclusion of their evaluation:

They found that for every 1,000 calories consumed, the keto diet generates nearly 3 kg of carbon dioxide, while the paleo diet releases 2.6 kg of the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Vegans, on the other hand, only release 0.7 kg of carbon dioxide for each 1,000 calories they consume, meaning that paleo and keto diets create nearly four times the greenhouse gas emissions as vegan diets. In the middle of the field, omnivores–who made up 86% of those in the study released 2.2 kg of carbon dioxide per 1,000 calories. [my bold]

And what’s more, just to guilt those of us on one of those awful LCHF or ketogenic diets into thinking more about the planet than our own health, here is their recommendation.

…if only a third of omnivores switched to a vegetarian diet [they predict], the environmental impact would be akin to removing the carbon output of 340 million passenger vehicle miles on any given day.

Wow! I don’t know if they’re talking worldwide here, or just in the US of A, but the figure is impressive. Let’s say they’re just talking about the USA, which has a population approaching 340 million. That would mean that if those on an omnivore diet switched to a vegetarian diet, it would be the equivalent of every person in the USA, man, woman, and child (and binaries and all the rest of that crowd), driving 365 fewer miles per year. Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.

Let’s look at it another way.

If we look at the mass involved instead of calories, we can calculate about how much mass there is in 1000 calories of a ketogenic diet. Remember, carb and protein calories weigh 0.25 g per kcal, and fat calories weight 0.11 g per kcal. A ketogenic diet is usually around 75 percent fat, 15 percent protein, and 10 percent carb. So, 1000 kcal of a ketogenic diet would weigh around 145 g dry weight.

So, what these researchers are telling us is that by consuming 145 grams of a ketogenic diet, we are releasing 3.0 kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 3.0 kg is almost 21 times the mass of the 145 grams we ate (20.689 to be exact). So, by the simple act of eating a little over 5 ounces of ketogenic food, we’re going to generate 6.6 pounds of carbon dioxide. Hmmm.

I understand they are talking about the carbon dioxide released during the processing of the plants and animals for the 5 ounces of food we’re eating, but I still think their figure of almost 21 times the mass of the food is spurious. As we’ll see later, the authors obfuscate—intentionally or otherwise—how they determine these figures, so until they can show me clearly how they’ve come up with them, I’m calling bullshit.

I went to the actual AJCN article to see if I could make some sort of sense of this. And I couldn’t. I went to the actual database they created. I went to a paper about the database, replete with a video of the authors rambling on for four minutes and not saying anything intelligent. And came away unenlightened. Whenever people make something this difficult to sort out, I get suspicious that there is some sort of skullduggery going on. Something like this should be pretty easy to explain. My index of suspicion really got triggered when they wrote that they used the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) as some sort of multiplier. The HEI is a made up index generated by Fauci-esque people in the USDA describing what foods are “healthy.” Fruit = good. Meat = bad.

I spent about three hours rooting through all this and came away no closer to figuring out how they came up with these figures than I did before I started. Maybe you can go through the links above and do better.

Meanwhile, think about how 5 ounces of ketogenic diet food can generate 6.6 pounds of carbon dioxide.

Okay, on to other things.

But first, this. You’ll get one more of these next week. I won’t hassle you after that because the 30% discount will be gone on March 31.

LowcarbUSA San Diego Conference

As you can see, it will all take place in sunny San Diego Aug 17-20.

Here is the specific info for those who might be interested. I just discovered that if you sign up on or before March 31 and use the code MarchMadness, you’ll get a 30 percent discount on the ticket price.

Unless I change my mind, I’ll be giving an update to the mass balance theory of weight gain and loss.

MD and I met a bunch of folks who are Arrow readers at the Boca Raton conference in mid-January of this year. We would love to meet a bunch more in San Diego.

The Mitochondrial Metabolic Basis of Cancer

Okay, after my long winded explanation of how OxPhos works last week, I found the perfect picture to demonstrate it. And, strangely enough, after searching forever last week to find the perfect one and defaulting to one I created for a talk I gave, I found the one I was looking for on my own blog.

This graphic shows all the protons (H+) being pumped across the membrane by energy provided in the electrons released by the breakdown of food. The imbalance of all the H+ on one side of the membrane creates an electro-chemical gradient, or, as they call it when they talk about the mitochondria, a chemiosmotic gradient.

Since osmosis and an osmotic gradient can be a little difficult to understand, let me take a few minutes to explain it and then we can really get to the meat of it.

We’ve all heard the term osmosis, which, in the way most of us use it in general conversation, means absorption. As in learning by osmosis, meaning we’re around something long enough and it sort of seeps in; we learn it by absorbing it instead of studying it directly.

In terms of biochemistry and physiology, it has a similar but different meaning.

If you take an aquarium and stretch a semi-permeable membrane (one made to allow pure water to pass through but nothing else) across the middle of it and fill the aquarium with distilled water, the water will be at equal height on both sides of the vessel. The water can move back and forth through the membrane, so if you pour a little more into one side, the levels soon equilibrate.

Now that you’ve got your aquarium with the water level the same on each side of the membrane, you pour some salt into just one side of the membrane. Remember, only pure water can go through the membrane; the salt can’t get through. So now you’ve got one side containing salty water and the other side containing pure water with the membrane separating the two.

Since salt and water like to go into solution, the pure water migrates through the membrane. The salt can’t get through, so the salt in the water on the salty side sort of attracts the pure water through the membrane.

How much of the pure water does it suck through the membrane? All of it? A little of it? Half of it?

The answer is, it depends on the amount of salt that went into the one side.

Whatever amount went in will exert an attraction on the pure water on the other side seeking to equalize the solution. So, theoretically, all the pure water should get pulled through the membrane. But it doesn’t.

As the water goes through the membrane, drawn by the salt water on the other side, the level of the water goes up on that side. As it goes up, gravity puts pressure on the water on the salty side to equilibrate with the non-salty water on the other side.

If to begin this experiment, you had poured all the distilled water on one side of the membrane, it would have soon equalized and reached the same height on each side due to the force of gravity.

Since you now have salt on one side generating an osmotic force on the pure water on the other, the water height goes up on the salty side and down on the pure side. Ultimately the forces of osmosis and gravity will equilibrate. You will have a higher level of water on the salty side, and the difference in height will define the osmotic pressure as a function of gravitational pull. The greater the level differential, the more osmotic pressure is being exerted. And it can be measured precisely by knowing the height differential.

It doesn’t have to be salt to create an osmotic gradient. It can be other compounds. Protein, for example.

Our blood vessels are porous so that fluids can go in and out. One of the things that keeps the fluid part of blood in the blood vessels is the concentration of protein. So the wall of the blood vessel becomes like our membrane in the aquarium example above. The amount of protein circulating in the blood, mainly albumin, holds the watery part of the blood in the vessels.

Let’s look at a real-life example of what can go wrong as a consequence of not having enough protein in the blood.

The liver makes protein. So anything that damages the liver can hinder it’s protein-making ability. Fortunately, the liver has a lot of excess capacity, so it takes quite a bit to hobble it to the point it cannot make enough protein to hold the blood in the blood vessels. But it can be done.

Probably the most common way is a consequence of too much alcohol consumption over too long a period of time. Alcoholics often develop cirrhosis of the liver to an extent that it can’t make adequate protein. This results in the loss of fluid into the abdominal cavity, producing a condition called ascites. Or dropsy in the olden days.

It’s an impressive thing to see. I’ve been involved in surgical procedures during which multiple liters of fluid have been drained from abdomens such as the one above.

Now you know what osmosis, an osmotic gradient (more on one side than the other), and osmotic pressure mean.

Going back to our diagram of OxPhos above, you can see that the large number of H+ on one side of the membrane would increase the osmotic pressure on the membrane (and that’s not to mention the electrical pressure, kind of like a battery, of the H+ trying to get to the other side). It’s this pressure that is relieve by the little turbine on the far right of the image above. It allows these H+ to rush through, and, as they go, turning a little bio-turbine that attaches a phosphate group onto ADP generating ATP, the body’s energy currency.

Smart guy, that Peter Mitchell for figuring all this out via a thought experiment.

When we get to the Warburg effect in a bit, we will see old Otto himself, who was no idiot, struggling with it. Unfortunately for them, Warburg, Krebs, and all the others were biochemists looking for biochemical pathways to explain the production of all the energy the body generates. Mitchell was a membrane guy, so that’s what he looked at. And turned out to be correct.

Okay, so I guess it’s time for the Warburg effect.

The Warburg Effect and Cancer

The brilliant German biochemist Otto Warburg discovered what has come to be called the Warburg effect in 1924 when he discovered that cancer cells got their energy through the inefficient glycolysis pathway in the presence of oxygen. Warburg called the process of the production of energy via glycolysis fermentation.

Normal cells can get energy from glycolysis as well, but they get vastly more from OxPhos, which throws off ~36 ATP for each molecule of glucose as compared to 2 ATP via glycolysis. Normal cells end up using glycolysis for energy during times of oxygen deprivation, because the glycolysis pathway doesn’t require oxygen to run it whereas OxPhos does. So, for example, if you are doing a heavy workout and exceed your ability to provide adequate oxygen to the working muscle, it will default to glycolysis. But it is inefficient and you soon hit the end of your workout as the glycolysis pathway can’t produce sufficient ATP to keep you going for long.

Warburg knew of the mitochondria, which he called grana, and he knew the grana generated a lot more ATP. In 1956 he wrote

But why…are the body cells dedifferentiated when their respiration energy is replaced by fermentation energy? At first, one would think that it is immaterial to the cells whether they obtain their energy from respiration or from fermentation, since the energy of both reactions is transformed into the energy of adenosine triphosphate [ATP], and yet adenosine triphosphate = adenosine triphosphate.

He’s wondering basically why it would make a difference to the cell whether its energy came from fermentation or respiration [OxPhos], because both processes produce ATP. Then he says ATP = ATP. But then he goes on to say that the two ATPs are chemically the same, which they are, but different in structure, which they are not. Carbons, hydrogens, oxygens, and other atoms can be put together in ways in which there are the same number of each atom, but the structure is different. Which is what Warburg is talking about here. Incorrectly, as it turned out.

This equation is certainly correct chemically and energetically, but it is incorrect morphologically, because, although respiration takes place for the most part in the structure of the grana, the fermentation enzymes are found for a greater part in the fluid protoplasm. The adenosine triphosphate synthesized by respiration therefore involves more structure than the adenosine triphosphate synthesized by fermentation. [My bold]

He’s saying here that respiration takes place in the grana (the mitochondria), whereas fermentation occurs in the cytoplasm (the liquid within the cell membrane).

…it is one of the fundamental facts of present-day biochemistry that adenosine triphosphate can be synthesized in homogeneous solutions with crystallized fermentation enzymes, whereas so far no one has succeeded in synthesizing adenosine triphosphate in homogeneous solutions with dissolved respiratory enzymes, and the structure always goes with oxidative phosphorylation.

I love reading stuff like this. Warburg is noting that if you take the enzymes involved in glycolysis (fermentation) and put them in a glucose solution, you can generate ATP. In other words, these enzymes catalyze the necessary reactions to produce ATP. But if you do the same thing with the few enzymes from the OxPhos pathway, you can’t.

It will be another 20 years or so before Peter Mitchell’s idea of how OxPhos works explains it all. Knowing what we know now, it’s easy to see why the respiratory enzymes didn’t generate any ATP in a glucose solution. All that was lacking was a membrane and the various electron transport chain complexes.

Now we know that cancer cells don’t make energy the way regular cells do, i.e., via OxPhos. Instead they generate energy from glucose via fermentation. What’s even better, unlike normal cells, cancer cells can’t use ketones as fuel.

So, all we have to do is go on a ketogenic diet, quit eating sugar like this article recommends, and Bob’s your uncle. Cancer evaporates.

Well, not so fast. Laying off the sugar certainly helps, but that’s not all that’s required. Virtually all carbs turn into sugar as they go through the GI tract, so to get rid of sugar you need to get rid of carbs. Which a true ketogenic diet pretty much does.

But, sugar isn’t all cancer cells can use for energy. They can also use glutamine, which is the most common amino acid in the body.

Next week, I’ll go over where glutamine fits into the equation and discuss how we deal with it.

Within a couple of weeks, we should have this series finished.

Video of the Week

Based on reader feedback, I’m going to have a tough time coming up with something better than last week’s harmonica virtuoso. But instead of virtuoso, you’ll get virtuous this week.

The guy in the link below had a huge platform on YouTube through which he generated income via people watching his many videos. All it took was creating one little video making fun of the mRNA vaccines, and he was canceled. Not just his mRNA vaccine video, but ALL of his videos on YouTube and has been banned forever as an example to anyone else who might dare to produce such a travesty against The Science.

You can watch it here. Sorry, but Substack isn’t set up to embed anything but YouTube videos. Except Twitter.

Aha, I can embed it here on Twitter:

foundring 🇺🇸 @foundring1

🚨🚨🚨NEW REBOOT for twitter🚨🚨🚨 🎶💉🎵mRNA (Speed of Science) 🎵💉🎶 Buy: foundring.gumroad.com/l/speedofscien… Support: subscribestar.com/foundring paypal.me/foundring Videos: odysee.com/@foundring rumble.com/user/foundring Livestreams: twitch.tv/foundring #SpeedofScience #foundring

Just to give you some context, this is a parody of the MTA song, which is dear to my heart. When I was learning to play guitar in high school, this was one of the songs I learned first. Chords are simple, simple, simple. It was an old song even then, but there had been a resurgence of old folk music, so I heard it and was able to pick it out and play it.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

Before you go, take a look at what our sponsors have to offer. Dry Farm Wines, HLTH Code, and Precision Health Reports.