This week's Arrow starts with a major soul-searing rant about the incompetence of a hallowed institution. From there we discuss poisonous snake bites, orlistat and weight maintenance, vaccine treachery (including a great interview with RFK Jr, Dr. Mercola and the Randle cycle, and, as always, the video of the week. Hope you enjoy.
(In Mike's voice) "I'm leavin on a jetplane, don't know when I'll be back again". That's what it will take. You'll beat the letter, anyhow. And it's a business expense, eh?
I have a small request. Going forward, might you consider adding a type of table of contents to the top of each issue of The Arrow? Doesn't have to be links, just a listing of the headings contained in the issue. I've kept every issue of this newsletter right from the beginning, but when I'm trying to look something up that I know I read here, I have to open each issue and scroll down to the end.
Right now I want to share all you've written on mTOR with my husband. His doc now thinks he has diabetes because his BG is often 150 and higher. I told him that unless he wants 3 more prescription drugs added to his other meds, he needs to watch his carbs. I proved it to him. We started taking his BG daily on June 16. That day it was 138. By watching his carbs, in 5 days it was 110 - 115. Then he decided he wanted pizza, Chinese food, and Chicken Parm for several days in a row. I said it's his choice, but that we would continue taking his BG. No surprise, it was back up in the 130s, where it stayed until just 6 days ago when he went back to eating only 40g of carbs daily. He's hovering now between 95 and 110. Low carb works.
He still wants what few carbs he still eats at breakfast, but I want him to read about mTOR so he understands the importance of a loading dose of protein in the morning.
Well, I may do you one better. I'm strongly contemplating a switch to a different platform that has a search function. If I make the move--which, if it happens, will be in a couple of weeks--you'll be able to search for mTOR or whatever you want to search for. I'll migrate all the content here to the new platform, so you'll be able to search older issues.
"When you know something really well, it’s difficult to explain it to someone else. It seems so simple to you that you leave out steps or fail to describe the process properly. If it’s second nature to you, you sometimes think others are idiots for not being able to immediately grasp something it might have taken you quite a while to learn but that you now know inside and out."
YES!!! I was a technical writer/editor for most of my career (about 40 years) and butted heads with a lot of engineers and programmers along the way. They'd swear something was simple, and I had to explain that to someone new to the information, it was not. Especially when writing for the end user, you can't assume they know anything. Almost 30 years of my career was spent writing financial software for the end users (tellers, loan officers, GL staff, etc.). I actually loved writing for that audience and felt I was their advocate. Now that I've been retired for over 3 years and know the company never hired another writer to replace me, I shudder to think what the end users are seeing these days.
As a patent attorney, I can assure you that every last inventor tells me the invention is simple, regardless of what it is. I always reframe the invention by asking how many and which words are needed to succinctly describe the invention, and those engineers are stunned when it takes 20 pages of words and 10 drawings. Asking for flow diagrams for processes is a good way to make sure they don't omit critical information.
The patent office examiners are engineers but not their non-technical customer service staff. So if their byzantine procedures are not followed to a T and now you need to fix things, it becomes Mike's Lloyd's experience without the charming British accents. This is purposeful; if the experience is horrific, you will never forget the lesson and thus be far less likely to repeat and bother them. I am positive that this sort of thing is not incompetence, as the competent Dr. Eades assumes. This is truly directed at making sure you just lump it and not annoy them with your queries, or prepare to be burned. I can smell Mike's scorch marks all the way from the other side of the country. It's not just the patent office either; I see this so often, I assume this is a mandatory course in biz school. Our elementary school has 2 key people working the office phone, people I dubbed Dumb and Dumber. Dumber was called in later if you wanted to speak to Dumb's supervisor. Consequently no sane parents would call twice. Problem solved: there's no problem if nobody calls, right?
We need to find our Galtville and escape these people...
Oh dear Mike - your Lloyds Bank experience, and banks in general and their telephone service….or lack of. At least you were able to speak to someone who was not a bot and who spoke English - sort of, lol. I believe these problems are endemic to banking and internet services in general. Often when we phone a bank or other business here, or even a government department, we get put through to either a bot who doesn’t understand or someone on a Pacific Island who doesn’t always speak very clearly.
When we had a bank account in France due to having a house there, once on holiday I went into our branch and changed a very small detail on my account. Once back home in England I found I couldn’t log into my account which I guessed must have been because of something the clerk in the branch had done. I couldn’t contact the bank over the general internet helpline because it didn’t recognise a UK phone number which I had to enter. On Twitter they used a bot who didn’t understand that I just wanted to message with a person….after multiple tries I told the bot in English in frustration that "he" was stupid ! I then phoned the international headquarters of the bank in Paris and managed to speak to someone who couldn’t help me because they said I had to phone my branch - thankfully they gave me the number. But when I phoned the branch I had to explain the problem in my okay but not wonderful French explaining that due to whatever it was their staff had done caused my log in to stop working which meant I couldn’t do internet banking which was the only way for me to do banking to pay bills etc on the French house….eventually they understood the problem and sent a new password code via post. I did all my phone calls by Skype like you did due to high costs of international calls.
I do hope your new card reader comes soon Mike and it all works well.
PS - write a complaint by letter to Lloyds Bank about this....you can copy what you wrote here !
I may post the most recent Arrow on the Lloyds Banking Group Twitter account. It would certainly make me feel better, but I'm not sure it will help my situation get resolved any faster.
Hi MIke - I don't mean for your to post a letter to Lloyds to get your issue resolved faster but rather to make a complaint to them so they will know how bad their system can be. It might resolve your issue faster but I somehow doubt that as they probably take ages to read something, but you never know, but they really need to know how bad things can be for a customer. (hey and when I first tried to post this comment I got a red message saying "Something went wrong" !)
And send the letter to the CEO, since customer services departments are generally incompetent.
I suspect that all the big banks, at least here in the UK, have dodgy software infrastructure, as well as stupid processes. I’ve been through several of them over the years, closing accounts with each after some incident leaves me frothing with rage.
"Frothing with rage." Well put. That describes perfectly how I felt. Problem is, one is no better than the next apparently. It is a huge pain to open an account in the UK if you live in the US, so do I go through that brain damage, or do I just stick with Lloyds and go through that brain damage?
This appears to be highly compelling evidence of a premeditated crime. If it is known that there are significant variations between batches and specific groups were deliberately targeted with them, that would constitute democide.
I've known and written about the variations in batches since early on in the Covid vaccine story. I've posted the site where people can look up their batch number and find if they got a good batch or one in which a lot of people had issues. https://howbadismybatch.com/
If they sent different batches to different groups of people knowing which were good and which were bad, that is a crime.
Had I known for certain that I would be getting a placebo, I would have gotten the vax and gotten my card and saved myself a lot of hassle. But I would have had to have been certain.
My thoughts are that it will take me three to four hours to really dig into a paper like this one and come up with an intelligent response. I can't tell squat from just the abstract. So it becomes a time management issue. I've got a long list of other papers in line ahead of it. It does sound interesting, though. Thanks for sending.
My reply seems to have disappeared into the ether, probably because of, as they say, "user error" -- most likely that I didn't hit "post."
It was that I'd be strapped to a bed by orderlies if I'd gone through only an hour or two of this.
Also: Just tweeted to both you and Helen Dale, 6'2" pre-Raphaelite lesbian barrister and author who you want on your side in any intellectual spat or bar fight. Hoping she has some insight into Lloyd's. And she's Scottish and was chief of staff for an Australian MP, but I didn't see where to put all that.
She apparently is somewhere "Nepali" at an ATM? In an ATM? I was a little confused, but she has lovely manners and I think wanted to explain why replies might be delayed.
You would love her in person. I have to try to persuade her to get back here.
She is, in my personal experience (but also reflected in the character that comes through in her writing, a stand-up person in a way many are just not.
[Lloyd's of London is a British insurance market. It is different from Lloyds Bank]. Lloyds Bank has had my current account for over 50 years. Overall there have been no problems for me with a branch office 10 minutes’ walk away and, for the crucial years, there was a wonderful branch manager, called Mike, who helped me a lot. Here is the real story. Sometime in the early 1990s Mike was suddenly gone. It did not seem good. I found his home address and phone, called him and arranged to take him out for lunch. He told me how stressful the job had become; all his decisions had to be authorized from on high. He went running in Blenheim Palace grounds every day till his feet bled – only that pain quelled the stress (I guess working off the stress hormones). Then he had made a bad mistake; that was the end. He did get another job in insurance and started a running club that I later discovered my young Primary Care GP was in. About 30 years ago a dental practice opened 5 minutes’ walk from my house so I joined it. Some years later my dentist told me he had asked Mike at Lloyds for a loan to by the premise for the practice and was refused. That seemed insane to me and I guess it was refused by those Mike reported to. That’s the state of Banks. The dentist got a loan from Barclays, the manager at the time later became a personal friend of mine, and in that odd circularity of contacts played golf with my earlier GP who retired around 1998.
I signed up for Mercola circulars many years ago and they still come. Even though I thought some of his ideas over the top I have come to like him. I don’t read many articles but I did read the one you mentioned when it came because the title demanded it. At first I thought it must be a joke; as you say the explanation of mitochondrial energy generation is just wrong and that surprised me because he has written on the importance of mitochondrial function many times, and I thought the Randle cycle had long gone to the graveyard of wrong ideas. Then last week you mentioned the Randle cycle and I thought maybe I have it wrong – I didn’t think it was the Mercola article that had prompted the mention. Like your patients I have benefitted from low carb for many years.
I watched the JFK Jr interview. Indeed, it is a most concise, effective presentation of the facts. It’s not that there is any difficulty in doing a vaccine trial with a totally inert placebo, it would seem the easiest most ethical thing to do.
From your previous post on the two books on vaccination I too was struck with exactly the same two major issues. After reading that history of smallpox I realised that I had in some ways given Jenner the current environment of knowledge. But in his day people had no biochemistry and laboratories to check what was really going on. We don’t really know what Jenner applied and probably neither did he.
I had already changed it from Lloyds of London to Lloyds Banking Group, which is the real culprit.
I, too, like a lot of Dr. Mercola's information. But in this case, he was totally off-base. He listened to someone else who was off-base. But, I've got to concede, the Randle cycle isn't all that well known except to academics in the field. I can't remember now how I stumbled on it years ago. When I read Randle's paper, it didn't comport with what I was seeing in my practice. I gave a talk years ago--before Protein Power was published, in fact--in which I mentioned the Randle cycle. After the talk, Richard Bernstein came up to me and asked what the Randle cycle was. He had never heard of it. That was the first time I met him, and I soon realized that what he didn't know about diabetes probably wasn't worth knowing. And if he didn't know what the Randle cycle was, most other docs didn't. So, I don't blame Mercola for not knowing. He should have done a better job of fact checking.
I should have checked your article again after finishing my story. It’s good to know you assess Dr Mercola like I do. I also change my view of things when I get new understanding but it takes some time, I have to really know why I was wrong. What surprised me was that Mercola has successfully promoted low carb and restricted eating for so long that I would expect a rigorous dismantling of an opposite view before taking it on, especially that sugar can be good. He has also emphasized that healthy mitochondria are critical so I assumed he had a good grasp of the biochemistry. I have had an interest in biochemistry since school in the 1950s – that was from one of those wonderful teachers. When I went low carb about 20 years ago one of my friends mentioned the Randle Cycle. I checked what I could in the university library and did not find it got anywhere so I ignored it.
I remember when Pringles potato chips were in the news because of Olestra. Jay Leno was making fun of them for a while in his monologues because one of the side effects was “anal leakage”. He was having great joy with that one...
Georgi Dinkov, of Bulgarian origin, was originally a software engineer working for a large group of biochemists in a U.S. university. This group of scientists gave internal lectures for the group and Dinkov became interested and was allowed to attend for a few years. His website, Haidut, provides a continuous stream of new research studies on diet and nutrition. I've been reading it for about a year now. He now designs and sells unique herbal supplements and does nutritional consulting, I believe.
Dinkov was inspired by Ray Peat to give precedence to meat and fruit (low toxicity foods) and recommends equal amounts of fat, protein and sugar. The sugar is mostly from fruit juices and dairy. A recent independent study on Haidut showed that drinking Classic Coke/Pepsi (versions using actual sucrose) increased testosterone levels and testicle size. Dinkov says that sugar is the active ingredient and not caffeine.
Dinkov, like Peat, also views ice cream as a healthy food for some people, if it doesn't make them overweight.
I just noticed that Dinkov includes a quote from Lenin on his website which does give me pause. I know that communists don't give priority to the truth.
Dr. Paul Saladino, a strict carnivore for awhile, was compelled to add carbs (fruit) to his diet to eliminate nighttime leg cramping and heart rate problems. Other carnivore adherents firmly "reminded" him about the Randle Cycle, but he needed to give a personal health outcome precedence over theory. He believes that the kidneys release too many minerals into the urine in the absence of carbs.
I really appreciate Dr. Mike's coverage of fat and sugar utilization here. It's new information for me. But my Protein Power book burned up in a house fire long ago, so maybe I just forgot some things.
Thanks for the info. I had no idea who Dinkov is or his history. Understanding the Randly cycle requires some pretty significant biochem understanding, so a lot of folks don't really get it. Same with Wolfe's paper showing how it doesn't work as Randle described it. I have an MD/PhD friend who worked in Randle's lab as a grad student. He told me Randle was bad about fudging his data. But I had already seen Wolfe's presentation and read his paper when I learned this about Randle, so it didn't impact my thinking.
Dr. Eades, I apologize for not having any helpful advice for dealing with Lloyds. However, I can confirm that they are truly awful. I had the displeasure of encountering them when I needed to transfer a large sum of money for a house deposit. They had an extremely low, fixed daily transfer limit that couldn't be increased online or over the phone. When I contacted them, they informed me that I had to visit a local branch. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible as I was 10,000 miles away in Australia! Their response was essentially, 'Well, there's nothing we can do, sorry.' It took two weeks to transfer the money, with only small amounts being moved each day. Fortunately, we managed to complete the process just before the deadline on the house contract.
The quality of customer service in the UK has been steadily declining over many years. Most interactions are now handled by call centers staffed with low-cost employees who are restricted to following scripts. The worst-case scenario is the UK tax office; when you call them, you're usually put on hold for at least 30 minutes, and even after getting through, they can only provide information from their own website. In the end, you have to resort to sending letters via regular mail to receive a thoughtful response, which currently takes about four weeks each way between Australia and the UK.
One would think an entrepreneurial person would see a need that could be met and start a bank with decent customer service and ease of opening an account. Once word got out, that back would be overrun with customers.
I would generally advise avoiding the four major legacy UK banks (HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds, and RBS) as they tend to be bloated and inefficient. Instead, consider exploring neobanks such as Revolut, Monzo, Starling, Atom Bank, and N26, as they offer a more user-friendly online experience. However, be aware that these neobanks may not be as receptive to customers who are not UK domiciled (and they might need a UK mobile phone number to register/operate an account). If you do decide to switch, expect to encounter the same burdensome KYC (Know Your Customer) and ALM (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements with each bank, which might make the effort less worthwhile.
If your primary requirement is to have a UK account for money transfers and currency exchange, you may want to consider using Wise (formerly TransferWise) at https://wise.com/. They typically offer more cost-effective forex services compared to traditional banks.
I have a feeling you won''t appreciate my reaction to your Lloyd's of London story, but I was legless with laughter. Maybe one day you will be too? (Or maybe not . . . ) My reaction may have been because my husband just spent about 8 hours on the web dealing with BA and a car rental place in London and kept crawling downstairs from his man cave groaning about the process dealing with a website filled with burning questions and no place to answer them - and then trying to correct a mistake they'd made that proved nearly impossible to fix, until he got a very nice woman on the phone. They do do politeness well, don't they - for all the bloody good it does.
Also very glad you explained the Dinkov/Mercola concept - which had left me totally confused when I ran into it - for the nonsense it is.
Watching Kennedy is really painful at times - especially when people use "facts" like "your family doesn't agree with you," as "gotcha" moments. I thought his comeback was brilliant. Also enjoyed his talks with Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and even Bill Maher when Bill wasn't talking over him or ignoring what Bobby was trying to say.
Re - the SAEs - or even the talking point about vaccines having never been tested against placebo - how can you convince someone that something is a known fact if they just stick their fingers in their ears and say "Nope - not true." (See above conversation with Kennedy stating that fact and the dimwit Newsnation host who kept saying - over him - "but they are tested. They're always tested." )
Once I realized telephony was actually a word, I only found a couple of typos:
once you get the hang it.
get the hang of it.
asked both of the people a talked to
both of the people I talked to
Cheers, Mike - great (and not very abbreviated!) post.
People like the death's head woman who did the interview with RFK, Jr are convinced that there have been placebo-controlled trials. They just assume it not realizing that the placebo wasn't really a placebo, but another vaccine. Even when RFK pointed that out, she still didn't believe it. Even after he said he had a letter from the Department of HHS stating such, she still didn't believe it.
I just watched an interview that Bret Weinstein did with RFK jr -a "From the Vault" interview done in 2021 and only released now - which was amazing. The most disturbing thing in that video: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ocxl_Do1nx8)
was Bobby's story of Hank Aaron's death after he got the vax - I forget who set it up, but he was recruited to decrease "black hesitancy" and after getting it, Aaron died a few days later. Apparently RFK suggested that his death should be looked into since it was so soon after his vaccination - and The NY Times assured everyone that RFK was a conspiracy theorist and that they'd checked it out - and the autopsy had shown there was no connection with the jab. Long story short - Kennedy checked with the specialist the Times said had performed the autopsy - and that guy said he'd never touched Aaron - and neither had anyone else. The "death's head woman" (what a great description) on steroids. Sadly . . . .
(In Mike's voice) "I'm leavin on a jetplane, don't know when I'll be back again". That's what it will take. You'll beat the letter, anyhow. And it's a business expense, eh?
It may come to that. I hope not, though.
I have a small request. Going forward, might you consider adding a type of table of contents to the top of each issue of The Arrow? Doesn't have to be links, just a listing of the headings contained in the issue. I've kept every issue of this newsletter right from the beginning, but when I'm trying to look something up that I know I read here, I have to open each issue and scroll down to the end.
Right now I want to share all you've written on mTOR with my husband. His doc now thinks he has diabetes because his BG is often 150 and higher. I told him that unless he wants 3 more prescription drugs added to his other meds, he needs to watch his carbs. I proved it to him. We started taking his BG daily on June 16. That day it was 138. By watching his carbs, in 5 days it was 110 - 115. Then he decided he wanted pizza, Chinese food, and Chicken Parm for several days in a row. I said it's his choice, but that we would continue taking his BG. No surprise, it was back up in the 130s, where it stayed until just 6 days ago when he went back to eating only 40g of carbs daily. He's hovering now between 95 and 110. Low carb works.
He still wants what few carbs he still eats at breakfast, but I want him to read about mTOR so he understands the importance of a loading dose of protein in the morning.
THANKS!
Well, I may do you one better. I'm strongly contemplating a switch to a different platform that has a search function. If I make the move--which, if it happens, will be in a couple of weeks--you'll be able to search for mTOR or whatever you want to search for. I'll migrate all the content here to the new platform, so you'll be able to search older issues.
"When you know something really well, it’s difficult to explain it to someone else. It seems so simple to you that you leave out steps or fail to describe the process properly. If it’s second nature to you, you sometimes think others are idiots for not being able to immediately grasp something it might have taken you quite a while to learn but that you now know inside and out."
YES!!! I was a technical writer/editor for most of my career (about 40 years) and butted heads with a lot of engineers and programmers along the way. They'd swear something was simple, and I had to explain that to someone new to the information, it was not. Especially when writing for the end user, you can't assume they know anything. Almost 30 years of my career was spent writing financial software for the end users (tellers, loan officers, GL staff, etc.). I actually loved writing for that audience and felt I was their advocate. Now that I've been retired for over 3 years and know the company never hired another writer to replace me, I shudder to think what the end users are seeing these days.
Yep, the curse of knowledge. Enjoy your retirement.
As a patent attorney, I can assure you that every last inventor tells me the invention is simple, regardless of what it is. I always reframe the invention by asking how many and which words are needed to succinctly describe the invention, and those engineers are stunned when it takes 20 pages of words and 10 drawings. Asking for flow diagrams for processes is a good way to make sure they don't omit critical information.
The patent office examiners are engineers but not their non-technical customer service staff. So if their byzantine procedures are not followed to a T and now you need to fix things, it becomes Mike's Lloyd's experience without the charming British accents. This is purposeful; if the experience is horrific, you will never forget the lesson and thus be far less likely to repeat and bother them. I am positive that this sort of thing is not incompetence, as the competent Dr. Eades assumes. This is truly directed at making sure you just lump it and not annoy them with your queries, or prepare to be burned. I can smell Mike's scorch marks all the way from the other side of the country. It's not just the patent office either; I see this so often, I assume this is a mandatory course in biz school. Our elementary school has 2 key people working the office phone, people I dubbed Dumb and Dumber. Dumber was called in later if you wanted to speak to Dumb's supervisor. Consequently no sane parents would call twice. Problem solved: there's no problem if nobody calls, right?
We need to find our Galtville and escape these people...
Oh dear Mike - your Lloyds Bank experience, and banks in general and their telephone service….or lack of. At least you were able to speak to someone who was not a bot and who spoke English - sort of, lol. I believe these problems are endemic to banking and internet services in general. Often when we phone a bank or other business here, or even a government department, we get put through to either a bot who doesn’t understand or someone on a Pacific Island who doesn’t always speak very clearly.
When we had a bank account in France due to having a house there, once on holiday I went into our branch and changed a very small detail on my account. Once back home in England I found I couldn’t log into my account which I guessed must have been because of something the clerk in the branch had done. I couldn’t contact the bank over the general internet helpline because it didn’t recognise a UK phone number which I had to enter. On Twitter they used a bot who didn’t understand that I just wanted to message with a person….after multiple tries I told the bot in English in frustration that "he" was stupid ! I then phoned the international headquarters of the bank in Paris and managed to speak to someone who couldn’t help me because they said I had to phone my branch - thankfully they gave me the number. But when I phoned the branch I had to explain the problem in my okay but not wonderful French explaining that due to whatever it was their staff had done caused my log in to stop working which meant I couldn’t do internet banking which was the only way for me to do banking to pay bills etc on the French house….eventually they understood the problem and sent a new password code via post. I did all my phone calls by Skype like you did due to high costs of international calls.
I do hope your new card reader comes soon Mike and it all works well.
PS - write a complaint by letter to Lloyds Bank about this....you can copy what you wrote here !
I may post the most recent Arrow on the Lloyds Banking Group Twitter account. It would certainly make me feel better, but I'm not sure it will help my situation get resolved any faster.
Hi MIke - I don't mean for your to post a letter to Lloyds to get your issue resolved faster but rather to make a complaint to them so they will know how bad their system can be. It might resolve your issue faster but I somehow doubt that as they probably take ages to read something, but you never know, but they really need to know how bad things can be for a customer. (hey and when I first tried to post this comment I got a red message saying "Something went wrong" !)
And send the letter to the CEO, since customer services departments are generally incompetent.
I suspect that all the big banks, at least here in the UK, have dodgy software infrastructure, as well as stupid processes. I’ve been through several of them over the years, closing accounts with each after some incident leaves me frothing with rage.
"Frothing with rage." Well put. That describes perfectly how I felt. Problem is, one is no better than the next apparently. It is a huge pain to open an account in the UK if you live in the US, so do I go through that brain damage, or do I just stick with Lloyds and go through that brain damage?
Is an internet-only account any good to you? If so, I recommend Starling, a UK bank that has managed not to upset me at all for the last two years.
An internet only account would be perfect. I'll give Starling a look. Thanks for the recommendation.
On the issues of covid vaccine adverse events, I've just seen this study that the Daily Sceptic recently published.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13998
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/28/pfizer-vaccine-batches-in-the-eu-were-placebos-say-scientists/
This appears to be highly compelling evidence of a premeditated crime. If it is known that there are significant variations between batches and specific groups were deliberately targeted with them, that would constitute democide.
I've known and written about the variations in batches since early on in the Covid vaccine story. I've posted the site where people can look up their batch number and find if they got a good batch or one in which a lot of people had issues. https://howbadismybatch.com/
If they sent different batches to different groups of people knowing which were good and which were bad, that is a crime.
Had I known for certain that I would be getting a placebo, I would have gotten the vax and gotten my card and saved myself a lot of hassle. But I would have had to have been certain.
I felt for you (correction: feel for you!) -- and I would be strapped to a bed by orderlies after a few hours of what you went through!
Off topic, but just ran across this PubMed research on ketogenic diets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25973847/
Your thoughts?
My thoughts are that it will take me three to four hours to really dig into a paper like this one and come up with an intelligent response. I can't tell squat from just the abstract. So it becomes a time management issue. I've got a long list of other papers in line ahead of it. It does sound interesting, though. Thanks for sending.
Hi Mike,
I will need to read the Randle Cycle section 3 more times before I can pretend to understand it.
That said, I’d love to hear your opinion on Bart Kay’s stance on the Randle Cycle — https://youtu.be/v_pEDhDhcuI
He disagrees strongly with Dinkov / Ray Peat etc — not because the Randle Cycle has been disproven, but because these guys misunderstand it.
Seeing as you guys seem to agree on most things, I’d love your take on his Randle Cycle explanation at some point.
So many people out there I've never heard of, and this guy is one. I'll take a look at the video when I get the time. Thanks for the link.
OMG, the Lloyds thing...I am just dying from the absurd stupidity.
I died a thousand deaths over the two days I dealt with them. Still awaiting a response.
My reply seems to have disappeared into the ether, probably because of, as they say, "user error" -- most likely that I didn't hit "post."
It was that I'd be strapped to a bed by orderlies if I'd gone through only an hour or two of this.
Also: Just tweeted to both you and Helen Dale, 6'2" pre-Raphaelite lesbian barrister and author who you want on your side in any intellectual spat or bar fight. Hoping she has some insight into Lloyd's. And she's Scottish and was chief of staff for an Australian MP, but I didn't see where to put all that.
Wow! I'm glad you're on my side. I would welcome any advice Helen Dale might care to provide.
As to user error...I'm an expert at that. One of my many skills.
Hah hah...thank you. Very graceful.
She apparently is somewhere "Nepali" at an ATM? In an ATM? I was a little confused, but she has lovely manners and I think wanted to explain why replies might be delayed.
You would love her in person. I have to try to persuade her to get back here.
She is, in my personal experience (but also reflected in the character that comes through in her writing, a stand-up person in a way many are just not.
[Lloyd's of London is a British insurance market. It is different from Lloyds Bank]. Lloyds Bank has had my current account for over 50 years. Overall there have been no problems for me with a branch office 10 minutes’ walk away and, for the crucial years, there was a wonderful branch manager, called Mike, who helped me a lot. Here is the real story. Sometime in the early 1990s Mike was suddenly gone. It did not seem good. I found his home address and phone, called him and arranged to take him out for lunch. He told me how stressful the job had become; all his decisions had to be authorized from on high. He went running in Blenheim Palace grounds every day till his feet bled – only that pain quelled the stress (I guess working off the stress hormones). Then he had made a bad mistake; that was the end. He did get another job in insurance and started a running club that I later discovered my young Primary Care GP was in. About 30 years ago a dental practice opened 5 minutes’ walk from my house so I joined it. Some years later my dentist told me he had asked Mike at Lloyds for a loan to by the premise for the practice and was refused. That seemed insane to me and I guess it was refused by those Mike reported to. That’s the state of Banks. The dentist got a loan from Barclays, the manager at the time later became a personal friend of mine, and in that odd circularity of contacts played golf with my earlier GP who retired around 1998.
I signed up for Mercola circulars many years ago and they still come. Even though I thought some of his ideas over the top I have come to like him. I don’t read many articles but I did read the one you mentioned when it came because the title demanded it. At first I thought it must be a joke; as you say the explanation of mitochondrial energy generation is just wrong and that surprised me because he has written on the importance of mitochondrial function many times, and I thought the Randle cycle had long gone to the graveyard of wrong ideas. Then last week you mentioned the Randle cycle and I thought maybe I have it wrong – I didn’t think it was the Mercola article that had prompted the mention. Like your patients I have benefitted from low carb for many years.
I watched the JFK Jr interview. Indeed, it is a most concise, effective presentation of the facts. It’s not that there is any difficulty in doing a vaccine trial with a totally inert placebo, it would seem the easiest most ethical thing to do.
From your previous post on the two books on vaccination I too was struck with exactly the same two major issues. After reading that history of smallpox I realised that I had in some ways given Jenner the current environment of knowledge. But in his day people had no biochemistry and laboratories to check what was really going on. We don’t really know what Jenner applied and probably neither did he.
I had already changed it from Lloyds of London to Lloyds Banking Group, which is the real culprit.
I, too, like a lot of Dr. Mercola's information. But in this case, he was totally off-base. He listened to someone else who was off-base. But, I've got to concede, the Randle cycle isn't all that well known except to academics in the field. I can't remember now how I stumbled on it years ago. When I read Randle's paper, it didn't comport with what I was seeing in my practice. I gave a talk years ago--before Protein Power was published, in fact--in which I mentioned the Randle cycle. After the talk, Richard Bernstein came up to me and asked what the Randle cycle was. He had never heard of it. That was the first time I met him, and I soon realized that what he didn't know about diabetes probably wasn't worth knowing. And if he didn't know what the Randle cycle was, most other docs didn't. So, I don't blame Mercola for not knowing. He should have done a better job of fact checking.
I should have checked your article again after finishing my story. It’s good to know you assess Dr Mercola like I do. I also change my view of things when I get new understanding but it takes some time, I have to really know why I was wrong. What surprised me was that Mercola has successfully promoted low carb and restricted eating for so long that I would expect a rigorous dismantling of an opposite view before taking it on, especially that sugar can be good. He has also emphasized that healthy mitochondria are critical so I assumed he had a good grasp of the biochemistry. I have had an interest in biochemistry since school in the 1950s – that was from one of those wonderful teachers. When I went low carb about 20 years ago one of my friends mentioned the Randle Cycle. I checked what I could in the university library and did not find it got anywhere so I ignored it.
If you have a card reader from a different bank that will work. The card readers are usually not bank specific
Unfortunately, I don't have a card reader from a different back.
I remember when Pringles potato chips were in the news because of Olestra. Jay Leno was making fun of them for a while in his monologues because one of the side effects was “anal leakage”. He was having great joy with that one...
Yep. Same physiology as orlistat.
Georgi Dinkov, of Bulgarian origin, was originally a software engineer working for a large group of biochemists in a U.S. university. This group of scientists gave internal lectures for the group and Dinkov became interested and was allowed to attend for a few years. His website, Haidut, provides a continuous stream of new research studies on diet and nutrition. I've been reading it for about a year now. He now designs and sells unique herbal supplements and does nutritional consulting, I believe.
Dinkov was inspired by Ray Peat to give precedence to meat and fruit (low toxicity foods) and recommends equal amounts of fat, protein and sugar. The sugar is mostly from fruit juices and dairy. A recent independent study on Haidut showed that drinking Classic Coke/Pepsi (versions using actual sucrose) increased testosterone levels and testicle size. Dinkov says that sugar is the active ingredient and not caffeine.
Dinkov, like Peat, also views ice cream as a healthy food for some people, if it doesn't make them overweight.
I just noticed that Dinkov includes a quote from Lenin on his website which does give me pause. I know that communists don't give priority to the truth.
Dr. Paul Saladino, a strict carnivore for awhile, was compelled to add carbs (fruit) to his diet to eliminate nighttime leg cramping and heart rate problems. Other carnivore adherents firmly "reminded" him about the Randle Cycle, but he needed to give a personal health outcome precedence over theory. He believes that the kidneys release too many minerals into the urine in the absence of carbs.
I really appreciate Dr. Mike's coverage of fat and sugar utilization here. It's new information for me. But my Protein Power book burned up in a house fire long ago, so maybe I just forgot some things.
Thanks for the info. I had no idea who Dinkov is or his history. Understanding the Randly cycle requires some pretty significant biochem understanding, so a lot of folks don't really get it. Same with Wolfe's paper showing how it doesn't work as Randle described it. I have an MD/PhD friend who worked in Randle's lab as a grad student. He told me Randle was bad about fudging his data. But I had already seen Wolfe's presentation and read his paper when I learned this about Randle, so it didn't impact my thinking.
Dr. Eades, I apologize for not having any helpful advice for dealing with Lloyds. However, I can confirm that they are truly awful. I had the displeasure of encountering them when I needed to transfer a large sum of money for a house deposit. They had an extremely low, fixed daily transfer limit that couldn't be increased online or over the phone. When I contacted them, they informed me that I had to visit a local branch. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible as I was 10,000 miles away in Australia! Their response was essentially, 'Well, there's nothing we can do, sorry.' It took two weeks to transfer the money, with only small amounts being moved each day. Fortunately, we managed to complete the process just before the deadline on the house contract.
The quality of customer service in the UK has been steadily declining over many years. Most interactions are now handled by call centers staffed with low-cost employees who are restricted to following scripts. The worst-case scenario is the UK tax office; when you call them, you're usually put on hold for at least 30 minutes, and even after getting through, they can only provide information from their own website. In the end, you have to resort to sending letters via regular mail to receive a thoughtful response, which currently takes about four weeks each way between Australia and the UK.
Believe me, I feel your pain.
One would think an entrepreneurial person would see a need that could be met and start a bank with decent customer service and ease of opening an account. Once word got out, that back would be overrun with customers.
I would generally advise avoiding the four major legacy UK banks (HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds, and RBS) as they tend to be bloated and inefficient. Instead, consider exploring neobanks such as Revolut, Monzo, Starling, Atom Bank, and N26, as they offer a more user-friendly online experience. However, be aware that these neobanks may not be as receptive to customers who are not UK domiciled (and they might need a UK mobile phone number to register/operate an account). If you do decide to switch, expect to encounter the same burdensome KYC (Know Your Customer) and ALM (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements with each bank, which might make the effort less worthwhile.
If your primary requirement is to have a UK account for money transfers and currency exchange, you may want to consider using Wise (formerly TransferWise) at https://wise.com/. They typically offer more cost-effective forex services compared to traditional banks.
I have a feeling you won''t appreciate my reaction to your Lloyd's of London story, but I was legless with laughter. Maybe one day you will be too? (Or maybe not . . . ) My reaction may have been because my husband just spent about 8 hours on the web dealing with BA and a car rental place in London and kept crawling downstairs from his man cave groaning about the process dealing with a website filled with burning questions and no place to answer them - and then trying to correct a mistake they'd made that proved nearly impossible to fix, until he got a very nice woman on the phone. They do do politeness well, don't they - for all the bloody good it does.
Also very glad you explained the Dinkov/Mercola concept - which had left me totally confused when I ran into it - for the nonsense it is.
Watching Kennedy is really painful at times - especially when people use "facts" like "your family doesn't agree with you," as "gotcha" moments. I thought his comeback was brilliant. Also enjoyed his talks with Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and even Bill Maher when Bill wasn't talking over him or ignoring what Bobby was trying to say.
Re - the SAEs - or even the talking point about vaccines having never been tested against placebo - how can you convince someone that something is a known fact if they just stick their fingers in their ears and say "Nope - not true." (See above conversation with Kennedy stating that fact and the dimwit Newsnation host who kept saying - over him - "but they are tested. They're always tested." )
Once I realized telephony was actually a word, I only found a couple of typos:
once you get the hang it.
get the hang of it.
asked both of the people a talked to
both of the people I talked to
Cheers, Mike - great (and not very abbreviated!) post.
Thanks for the help with typos.
People like the death's head woman who did the interview with RFK, Jr are convinced that there have been placebo-controlled trials. They just assume it not realizing that the placebo wasn't really a placebo, but another vaccine. Even when RFK pointed that out, she still didn't believe it. Even after he said he had a letter from the Department of HHS stating such, she still didn't believe it.
I just watched an interview that Bret Weinstein did with RFK jr -a "From the Vault" interview done in 2021 and only released now - which was amazing. The most disturbing thing in that video: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ocxl_Do1nx8)
was Bobby's story of Hank Aaron's death after he got the vax - I forget who set it up, but he was recruited to decrease "black hesitancy" and after getting it, Aaron died a few days later. Apparently RFK suggested that his death should be looked into since it was so soon after his vaccination - and The NY Times assured everyone that RFK was a conspiracy theorist and that they'd checked it out - and the autopsy had shown there was no connection with the jab. Long story short - Kennedy checked with the specialist the Times said had performed the autopsy - and that guy said he'd never touched Aaron - and neither had anyone else. The "death's head woman" (what a great description) on steroids. Sadly . . . .