The Arrow #152*

Hello everyone.

Greetings from Dallas.

As you might have noticed, the title of this week’s Arrow has an asterisk after it. I did this because last week’s Arrow was also titled #152 when it was actually #151. I don’t know why I thought it was #152, but I did, so y’all got it that way. I had about a million emails from folks wondering what had happened to #151 since they had never received that one. I fixed it in the online version, so there is no #152 there until this week’s hits. Anyway, my apologies to all for the screwup.

It’s Official

MD is such a traditionalist. In her world, the Christmas season does not start until after Thanksgiving. (And, of course, Thanksgiving doesn’t start until after Halloween.) She becomes agitated when she sees decorations for one holiday show up in stores or in peoples’ houses before the previous holiday is over.

We returned home from Thanksgiving on the Friday after, and my morning coffee on Saturday was served in our Christmas china. It would have been served thus had we been home on Friday morning, but we were on the road.

So it is official. The Christmas season is upon us. At least in this household.

The rest of this week’s Arrow—#152—is going to be a little more video-centric than most, but what I’ve got to write about involves video in one way or another. So, let’s get to it.

Heart of the Matter

Back in 2013 I got a call from Dr. Maryanne Demasi asking if I would be willing to be interviewed about my thoughts on cholesterol and saturated fat for an Australian television show. I said I would be happy to, so we set a date.

She and her filming team came to our house on the appointed date, and she interviewed me. We even did some filming in our kitchen, most of which didn’t make it into the show. My interview was to be in the first part of a two-part series on the myth that saturated fats and dietary cholesterol are a health risk. The second part of the series was to address statins and their uselessness.

The two shows appeared in due course on the Australian Broadcast Network’s (ABC) Catalyst show, which Dr. Demasi hosted. This two-part series titled Heart of the Matter ended up being one of the most watched shows in the history of Australian television.

The audience loved the shows. But Big Pharma hated them. As did their statinator doctor lackeys.

Big Pharma and the statinators came down hard on the ABC. And then ABC came down hard on Maryanne. She ended up getting canned for producing the shows despite there being no evidence that anyone interviewed said anything that was proven wrong.

And the shows were pulled from the air. They continue to be pulled from YouTube every time someone sticks it up there. I had it posted on my own website, but when I went to look for it for this segment, I found the following.

I did find both of the shows on YouTube, but who knows how long they’ll stay up. I did download them, so I’ll have them forever. I found the second one on Vimeo, which is a little better quality than the one on YouTube. I’ll post both of them below.

Before I do, I want to give you some insight into the power of Big Pharma and how it forced a major television network to buckle despite not airing anything untruthful.

Dr. Demasi, whom MD and I have been friends with since the interview, recently gave a talk in Sydney, Australia about her experience with ABC, Big Pharma, and their pet docs. The transcript of her entire talk is on her most recent Substack post. I’ll excerpt it a bit, but you should read the entire thing.

Here is how she kicks it off.

During the covid pandemic, we heard a lot about the censorship-industrial complex and how government and industry colluded to censor scientists and journalists online.

Today I’m going to talk about my experience as a journalist in mainstream media. You’ll hear about censorship, attacks on dissenting views, and the capitulation to powerful vested interests, which were part of the media landscape long before covid came along. In essence, covid became the great revealer. [My bold]

As bad as Covid was, it certainly opened a lot of eyes as to how the national media, far from being the independent press we always thought it was, has become the handmaiden to the people in power.

It all began in 2013 - I produced a two-part series on cholesterol and heart disease. The two programs questioned the role of cholesterol as a cause of heart disease and criticised the over-prescription of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.

It rated highly with audiences over two weeks. It surpassed the ratings for all the programs in that time slot across all TV networks. It reached an audience of 1.5 million each week so, not surprisingly, ABC’s executives were congratulating us on a job well done.

The managing director of the ABC was pleased about the “time-slot crushing ratings performance”. The Head of Factual TV said it was a “much deserved public vote of confidence” in our great journalism, and the Head of TV said that “not only were the numbers outstanding, but more importantly you showed what happens when you land in the national conversation space. It gets people talking and that’s when i reckon we know we’re doing our job”. But the adulation did not last long.

Then Big Pharma and Big Med materialized wailing that they had been wronged and that people were going to die because of these shows. When MD and I opened our first of what eventually grew into a four-location chain of what are now called urgent care clinics in Little Rock, we got the same treatment. At that time, there were no urgent care clinics anywhere, so we were pioneers. We called ours Medi-Stat Emergency Clinic. And all the primary care docs in town thought we would be stealing patients from them. Whenever docs experience angst about losing patients, they never couch it in terms of stress about losing income. Instead they always cloak it in concern about patient care: “I’m just really worried about what kind of care my patients are going to get in one of those clinics.”

ABC mounted an investigation concluding that Dr. Demasi had upheld journalistic standards and none of the interviewees had said anything that wasn’t factual.

One commentator at the ABC went on national radio and claimed that people would die if they watched the program. Australians will recognise this character - Dr Norman Swan - he rose to prominence during the pandemic, making a raft of erroneous claims and false predictions about covid, ranging from the efficacy of face masks, to vaccine safety, to lockdowns.

His comments about my programs sparked a slew of national stories, which accused the programs of killing people, claiming that ABC had blood on its hands, and asking people to sue the ABC if they’d had a heart attack after stopping their statins because of the programs. To enforce the narrative, the School of Pharmacy at Sydney University came out with a study claiming that the programs would be responsible for up to 2900 deaths because around 60,000 people would quit taking statins. Basically, they were accusing us of mass murder.

It would be of great interest to go back and check the records for statin sales after the show to see if there really was a falloff. And if there was a great reduction in statin sales, it might be a real eye-opener to see if deaths from heart disease went up or went down.

You really should read the entire piece by Dr. Demasi and the comments that follow.

Let’s take a look at the two shows, which will probably seem pretty mild today. Of course, now the carnivore and ketogenic diets are all the rage and people have seen the light on statins. So when you watch, try to remember back what times were like ten years ago when these shows came out. And remember, too, that at that time, statins were still under patent, so Big Pharma was making a fortune on them.

I don’t know how long these will stay up, but if they get taken down, I’ve made downloads, so I can put them up again.

Here is the first one. Heart of the Matter Part 1 Cholesterol Myth

And here is the second. Heart of the Matter Part 2 Cholesterol Drug War

These are the longest videos I’ll ask you to watch today, but I think you will enjoy them. Maryanne did a terrific job putting these together. Thank God there are still journalists out there who have integrity. Subscribe to her Substack. She never fails to provide value.

The End of the Administrative State?

We can only hope.

The last couple of days the Wall Street Journal published a couple of articles about an upcoming case in the Supreme Court involving the SEC. Here is a synopsis of what it’s all about.

The Supreme Court appeared ready Wednesday to scale back the Securities and Exchange Commission’s power to enforce securities laws through administrative hearings rather than jury trials, in a case that could threaten similar executive-branch procedures Congress authorized for consumer protection, workplace safety and other areas.

But if the case goes as hoped (at least as I hope), it could mark the beginning of the end of the administrative state.

There are many federal agencies with great power that operate unconstitutionally. The fact that they do so can be laid at the doorstep of congress, a group of legislators who don’t want to be blamed for anything unpleasant, so they stick these agencies in between themselves and the public.

If a member of the public happens to have a lot of influence and/or money (usually one and the same), that person can appeal to his/her congressperson and intercede with the agency. But if the average Joe runs afoul of one of the regs created not by legislation, which is how laws are supposed to be made, but by fiat, then he/she is pretty much screwed.

I know because I have personal experience.

I’ve got too much other stuff to go over today, so I don’t want to get into what the issue was. That’s a story for a later day, but one I’m sure all readers of this newsletter will find fascinating.

A company I was intimately involved with received a threatening letter out of the blue from one of the administrative state agencies. It demanded we submit to them a trove of information and answer multiple inquiries into how we were promoting our business and products. I wasn’t all that worried, because I knew we had done nothing wrong.

I contacted our attorney, who told me this was serious business and that I should hire an attorney with expertise in dealing with these agencies.

At the time, our eldest son was working at a big-time international law firm. He put me in contact with one of their senior attorneys whose specialty was in dealing with this particular agency.

When I met with him, he informed me of all the steps we needed to take to deal with this. All of which would cost thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands as it turned out.

He advised trying to work with them to ameliorate the fine we were sure to get.

“A fine,” I responded. “Why should we pay a fine? We didn’t do anything wrong.”

I said let’s just sue them and be done with it. We’ll win. We’ve got all the data and science on our side.

He then proceeded to tell me the awful truth about how these agencies operate.

He said we could not sue them in federal court. At least not at first. He said if we disagreed with what they had in store for us, we would end up having a trial in front of a judge who worked for the agency. And we would lose, because people always lose in those trials.

Then, after losing, we could appeal to a sort of appellate court filled with administrative judges who also work for the agency. And we would be guaranteed a loss irrespective of how persuasive our scientific data was.

After losing there, I was told, we could then appeal that decision to the entire commission of political appointees running the agency. Again, we would be assured of a loss. Unless, of course, we had a political connection to one of the commissioners or the congressperson responsible for his/her appointment, which, of course, we didn’t.

Our new attorney told us if we went through all of those various trials within the agency, we could finally take it to federal court. And, for the first time, we would have the advantage because we could pick the federal court in which to sue. And, of course, we would pick one that has a history of being antagonistic to the agency we were in trouble with.

Okay, we’re in, says I. Let’s take them to the mat. I asked how much it would cost to get through all the agency bullshit so we could get to federal court. He responded that he had just done that with another business, and it had cost them $1.2M to do it. $1.2 million just to get to the point where we could get a trial by jury, which is a constitutional right. Which is what SCOTUS is going to rule on in the case before it as described in the articles linked above.

Since we didn’t have a spare $1.2M laying around, we decided to work with our high-dollar attorney to see if we could come to terms with the agency. Which we did, but at the cost of almost $500K. We thought we had been screwed—and we had been—but our attorney said we had hit a home run getting the deal we got. No fine. No nothing. They just went away. He said in all his career, he had never seen them give up after putting all this time and effort into a case.

But that’s the administrative state for you. Dealing with them is like having a bad cancer. You are constantly suffused with worry about what the ultimate outcome will be. Will you be cured with all the chemo, or will you ultimately succumb? And then, even after you’ve been given the all clear and told you are cancer free, it could still come back. Same with these agencies. They never say, Okay, we screwed up. You are out of the trap. Live long and prosper.

They just kind of go away, but with a warning that they are still there watching you.

We got off easy. These agencies have an incredible amount of power. All granted to them by congress, as our attorney told us over and over. In many cases—and our attorney told us the agency probably tried this with us, but didn’t have really anything to go on, so they got shut down—these agencies go to a judge ex parte (which means without the target involved being present or having an attorney present) and get a temporary restraining order, the dreaded TRO, which I had never heard of until this.

The TRO allows the agency to shut down all your business and personal bank accounts and prevents you from using credit cards or any cash you may have on hand to pay bills or even purchase groceries. And as I wrote, it’s both business and personal. When I was told this, I said, Whoa, how can they do that? We were operating through a corporation. I can see how they could shut down a corporation that they thought was in violation, but how can they go through a corporation to the individuals who work there? Even creditors can’t do that.

“Congress has granted them broad powers.” That was the answer I got for almost all the questions I asked in disbelief that things like this could happen in America.

When people get hit with these TROs, they have to hire a lawyer with no funds available to pay them. Their lawyer then has to go to court and get permission to free up enough funds to pay house payments, rent, car payments, groceries, utilities, etc. It would be a nightmare. And it is a nightmare happening to people every day. You just don’t hear about it.

It is my hope that SCOTUS finds the actions of these agencies unconstitutional and bans them from imposing monetary judgments on people who have been denied the constitutional right to a trial by jury. The finding will apply only to the SEC, the agency involved in this go-round at the court. But if SCOTUS does the right thing, then the other agencies will be next. If they don’t comply on their own. And I’m not holding my breath.

Okay, time for my plaintive plea for paid subscribers. It costs only pennies per day to get info you are unlikely to get anywhere else. Many, including the highly paid Wall Street Journal writers, can talk about the administrative state in the abstract. But how many have actually had the administrative state’s foot on their neck and survived to write about it? Not very dang many, I’ll bet. Where else can you get this kind of info?

Big Food/Tobacco Treachery

In my scanning of The Morning Brew not too long ago, I came across the video below. (The Morning Brew and The Hustle are the two non-medical newsletters I read daily. Both are free and fun to read. Both contain a lot of useful information. And both help support The Arrow.)

The video is about how Big Tobacco made snacks addictive.

An amazing statistic revealed in this video is that 68 percent of calories consumed in the United States come from snack foods or highly processed foods. Or as the person narrating the video calls them, “chemically addictive, salty, fatty, and sweet foods that Big Tobacco helped to create.” That would be impossible for me to believe if hadn’t spent a lot of time looking at other shoppers’ carts at the checkout counter at the grocery store. MD and I shop a lot at Whole Foods in Dallas, and, even there, folks load up on processed foods. All natural, organic processed food granted, but processed all the same. When we go to the regular grocery store, I see it even more.

The point the narrator is trying to not very subtly make is that first Big Tobacco addicted us to cigarettes, and now they’re addicting us to junk food. Here is a Dropbox link to the paper she discusses to help substantiate her point.

The whole idea of food addiction is controversial, to say the least. One of MD’s favorite sayings is that all white powders are addictive. But are they? I mean in the sense of a drug or tobacco addiction. I’ve got to admit that I haven’t immersed myself in the literature of addiction, so I’m certainly not an expert. Not even close.

But, the sentence the narrator read about Big Tobacco creating foods that would “leave people wanting more” isn’t really the same as an addiction. She also repeatedly talks about how Big Tobacco (and Big Food, in general, I might add) creates flavors to make people crave more of whatever it is. That also isn’t really an addiction.

Tobacco use is an addiction. I’ve read about peasants in Russia during the Stalin-induced starvations trading bits of food for tobacco. That is a true addiction. I doubt anyone starving today would trade a chunk of meat for a Twinkie.

There are other physiological mechanisms that can easily explain overeating junk food. One of the best is the incretin effect. I carved out a short couple of minute segment of a longer talk I gave a few years ago demonstrating the incretin effect and how powerful it really is.

The fact that these highly processed foods generate a huge insulin response is enough all by itself to “leave people wanting more.” The elevated insulin drives the circulating nutrients into the fat cells and muscle cells, and the nutrient-depleted blood circulating through the hypothalamus stimulates hunger. And hunger is a hard foe to beat. Especially if an open sack of, say, potato chips is right there in front of you. Just the insulin response alone can end up pretty quickly driving hunger without having to blame it on food addiction. It does set up a pretty vicious cycle of roller coaster insulin and blood sugar. I’ll grant you that.

The little video of me above shows how powerful the incretin effect is in normal, healthy people consuming just glucose orally. It is magnified in people with obesity, diabetes, and/or hypertension. It is also magnified in people consuming fat and carbohydrate together. So, you can imagine what it would be if you happened to be overweight and diabetic and chowed down on the carb-fat combo, which is pretty much what snack foods are made of.

Insulin levels off the chart.

There is one other factor I’ve mentioned before that also drives the incretin response. And that is the degree of processing of the food. Eating a whole potato provokes a smaller insulin response than does the same potato mashed. The same potato powdered then reconstituted would cause insulin to go even higher. I’ve got a short video to show that effect in action, but I’ll spare you till next week since we’re going to have video overload today.

The narrator of the video kept talking about salty, fatty, sweet foods as being so addictive. And, admittedly, salt, fat, and carb-y—think potato chips or buttered, salted popcorn—are delicious and make it tough to stop eating them once you dive in. I started wondering what salt would do, if anything, in terms of the incretin effect, so I made a quick run through PubMed to see.

In the quick search I did, I found only one study looking at salt, and it was salt mixed with amino acids. Based on this one study, it doesn’t appear that salt has much of an effect on the incretin response.

But in looking for these studies, I came upon one that was right up my alley.

It was a Danish study looking at the difference in incretin response (Dropbox link) to bread made with Einkorn wheat, an ancient variety of wheat, compared to modern Danish bread. Since Einkorn wheat has been around for millennia, many people believe it has less of a metabolic effect than does modern wheat.

The authors of this study recruited “11 healthy young men” as subjects. Knowing this, you would anticipate that whatever incretin response occurs will be blunted as compared to one provoked in an obese, diabetic subject.

They made the bread using the Einkorn wheat in three different ways.

The three Einkorn breads comprised (1) honey–salt leavened bread made by mixing whole grain flour and water, adding honey and salt, raising for 17 h and baking at 150C for 5 h, (2) crushed whole grain bread produced by soaking the grains for 12 h in tap water, grinding the whole grains, raising for 2 h, and baking for 2 1/2 h at 150C; and (3) yeast leavened bread using a conventional bread production procedure of mixing flour, salt and water, adding baker’s yeast, raising for 1 h and baking for 2 h at 220C. This latter processing procedure was also used for making the modern wheat bread, which was included as a reference bread.

What did they find after plying their subjects with all of these breads at different times?

The two minimally processed Einkorn breads generated the lowest GIP (incretin) response while the Einkorn bread that was processed in the same way as the modern Danish bread provoked similar responses that were significantly higher.

As you can see from the lower lines in the chart above, the honey-salt bread and the crushed grain bread were similar in terms of amount of GIP generated. The two breads—Einkorn and modern wheat Danish—involving more processing showed a greater response. It’s interesting to note that the honey-salt bread had actual honey added to it, yet it didn’t really bump the GIP. This tells you the fineness of the grain is more important in terms of stimulating GIP than is the carb content. At least at these relatively low added carb levels.

Here are the glucose and insulin responses.

As you can see, the glucose curves of all the varieties of bread look about the same, while the insulin levels differ as a function of processing.

I found this all fascinating as I’ve heard so many people ramble on about the virtues of Einkorn wheat. I even bought a loaf of Einkorn wheat bread once, just to try it. It kind of sucked. I thought at the time that it might be worth the lack of taste as compared to, say, sourdough bread, due to its ancient pedigree. But now I know it raised my insulin just as much as any other bread. So, no more Einkorn for me.

I’m belaboring all the incretin response business because it is so powerful and so few people understand it. If you think about 68 percent of calories in the US diet coming from highly-processed snack foods and their outsized effect on incretins and thus insulin levels, you can understand why so many people are obese. They are getting two thirds of their calories in foods that contain finely ground wheat, sugar, and fat (usually vegetable oils, which is a story for another day). Knowing what you know now about the insulin response, which has disastrous metabolic effects of its own, running it up “leaves people wanting more” as well, so is it any wonder there is so much metabolic disease rampant these days?

You can avoid the effects of most of the incretin-driven disaster if you just eat whole foods. That’s it. You’ll do better still if you eat whole foods that aren’t loaded with carbs. And if you don’t eat your carbs combined with fat.

I’m not trying to be a Li’l Debbie Downer here. I didn’t make the metabolic rules. I’m just telling you what they are. Flout them at your own risk.

Okay, we’ve seen how Big Tobacco has jumped into the processed food industry and encouraged people to eat more due to the incretin effect, though I’m sure those running BT don’t even know what that is. But did you know Big Tobacco also piled on in the demonizing of fat in an effort to divert attention away from how smoking is a major risk factor for heart disease?

Big Sugar and Big Tobacco sort of joined forces on that one. Evidence was beginning to accumulate showing sugar was a health hazard, so in an effort to distract, Big Sugar worked with Harvard’s department of nutrition along with others to shift the blame to fat.

My plan today was to get into all that as well, but I’m going to put it off till another day, too. But I really want to get into how one company, Coca-Cola, spent tens of millions of dollars to downplay the adverse health effects of sugar, the primary ingredient of most of its products.

The people running Coca-Cola did it in much the same way that Big Tobacco and Big Sugar did: by paying off scientists. That’s correct. Scientists who are supposed to be searching for truth are not always immune to the lure of the dollar.

Back in 2014 Coca-Cola funded a non-profit called the Global Energy Balance Network “dedicated to identifying and implementing innovative solutions – based on the science of energy balance – to prevent and reduce diseases associated with inactivity, poor nutrition and obesity.” At least that was the public face they put on it.

The real reason for the GEBN was to fund scientists who would promote exercise as the solution to obesity. Not diet, but exercise. Virtually everyone who has ever worked in the weight loss business knows that exercise does not bring about weight loss. Diet does all the heavy lifting.

I don’t know who said it first (I wish I had), but a common saying in the biz is that you can’t outrun a bad diet.

Why is that?

For one thing, because your body responds to exercise with hunger. Everyone was probably told as a kid to go out and work up an appetite. If you undertake a lot of exercise, you end up being hungry. I once did the calculations on how much energy an average person expended running a 5K race. Turns out it’s about 240 kcal. Doesn’t seem like a lot, but be aware that these are simply the additional calories expended on the race above and beyond those expended just by being alive, the so-called resting metabolic rate which makes up the lion’s share of total energy expenditure.

Now suppose you were the one who ran this 5K race. Do you think you might be a bit hungry after? I ‘spect so. And if you decided to drop by the Golden Arches and just indulged in a medium order of French fries—no soft drink, no Big Mac, just the weenie little medium order of fries, how many calories would that provide you? Would you believe ~350 kcal. That’s why exercise isn’t a good way to lose weight. Run 5K and eat a bag of fries and wind up +110 kcal for your effort.

And, as I said, everyone in the biz knows that. They all pay lip service to the eat less, move more, but they know move more isn’t going to do squat. Exercise does bring about a host of positive changes, but a significant weight reduction is not among them.

Now, let me say, that there are people who really get into exercise, and they usually watch their diet as well, and they do lose weight. If you do high-intensity exercise or run for miles, you can lose. But not without watching your diet. The old, Hey, I’m going to start walking a mile after dinner, so I can eat anything I want is a fool’s errand.

But the Coca-Cola funded GEBN scientists, who should know better, say just that. Watch what you eat, but just start exercising, and you’ll be okay. The point was to make people believe they were obese not because of what they ate, but because they didn’t exercise—i.e., it was their sloth, not their gluttony.

Not long after the GEBM was formed, journalists at the New York Times figured out what was going on and wrote a scathing article about it. This was in 2015, just a year before Trump was elected and ruined them.

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, is backing a new “science-based” solution to the obesity crisis: To maintain a healthy weight, get more exercise and worry less about cutting calories.

The beverage giant has teamed up with influential scientists who are advancing this message in medical journals, at conferences and through social media. To help the scientists get the word out, Coke has provided financial and logistical support to a new nonprofit organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, which promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.

“Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’ — blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on,” the group’s vice president, Steven N. Blair, an exercise scientist, says in a recent video announcing the new organization. “And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.”

Health experts say this message is misleading and part of an effort by Coke to deflect criticism about the role sugary drinks have played in the spread of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. They contend that the company is using the new group to convince the public that physical activity can offset a bad diet despite evidence that exercise has only minimal impact on weight compared with what people consume.

So sayeth the NYT when it was still a real newspaper. The entire article is well worth reading.

Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’ — blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on, and there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause. …Steven N. Blair, GEBN vice president

Thanks to the New York Times article quoted above, the GEBN quickly folded and closed its doors. As the summary shows in my Brave search engine:

It lasted almost four months after the August 9, 2015 NYT piece that so savaged it. I suspect there may be funding of something similar now, but not so public, flying beneath the radar.

Now that you’ve seen the overall purpose of the GEBN, let me show you what I believe is a specific example of their work. Below is a video of a nutritional expert discussing a recent paper on which he was an author. I’ve got to admit, when I saw the video, I, myself, was sucked in. For a bit. Then I realized what he was all about. But he was telling me what I wanted to hear at first.

Warning: The smarm content of this video is off the charts. Also, I don’t know if there was a fountain in the background or what, but there is an annoying running water sound throughout. Don’t let that discourage you from watching.

Okay, tell me truthfully. Did that make you want to puke or what?

I completely agree with him about how crappy most nutritional studies are. Most use Food Frequency Questionnaires (FFQ), which, in my view, are next to worthless. I also agree with him about the time during gestation being important, but I’m not sure it’s the most important factor in terms of future health. There is a whole science now looking at this very thing called fetal programming.

Here is a link to the paper he is discussing if you want to read it in full.

Why do I believe he was one of those recruited by Coca-Cola and the GEBN? A couple of reasons I’ll get to in a sec. I don’t know this guy. I’ve never spoken to him. There is no way I can say with 100 percent conviction that he was recruited and went along with it. In fact, maybe he believes what he is saying with all his heart, and the GEBN just came along and said you should be on our team.

But there is some evidence that makes me wonder.

First, if you look at the bottom of the paper he is discussing, you’ll see that it was funded at least in part by Coca-Cola.

This by itself doesn’t mean a lot. Many scientists are funded by industry. Often they get the funding with no strings attached. Just let the chips fall where they may. But much of that was in the days when the funding industry had control over whether or not the paper was published. Also, researchers, who are always scrambling for funding, know that if they come up with a paper that doesn’t please the funder, the likelihood that they’ll get funded again by the same company is low. But just the fact that something is funded by industry shouldn’t put you off of it.

Second, all this was done during the period Coca-Cola and the GEBN were ‘working’ with all kinds of scientists to get the people-need-to-quit-worrying-about-diet-so-much-and-start-exercising-more message out there. And this video is precisely that.

Third, I did a little digging and came across a paper in Public Health Nutrition written in 2020 looking into this entire affair. It was titled Evaluating Coca-Cola’s attempts to influence public health ‘in their own words’: analysis of Coca-Cola emails with public health academics leading the Global Energy Balance Network.

This paper discusses how the authors used a system I had never heard of until I read it there.

…during 2015 and 2016, US Right to Know (USRTK) made FOI requests to assess potential links between Coca-Cola and public health academics (i.e., FOI).

As I say, I had never heard of the USRTK. According to this paper, it is

a non-profit consumer and public health organisation that aims to increase transparency and accountability in the US food system.

I wouldn’t think it would have the weight of the law behind it like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) does, but apparently the people involved at the various institutions send them voluminous correspondence between Coca-Cola, the various institutions, and the many researchers involved. They received 18,030 pages of info, so not a small amount.

The authors of this paper winnowed these documents down to just the ones including substantive content relative to their research.

Emails that were not included reflected those containing no substantive content relevant to the research question or were those repetitive of existing points. Box 1 summarizes names and affiliations of those included.

Here is Box 1 in part:

You can see Box 1 in its entirety in the paper. But you can see Dr. Archer, the man in the video above, is on the list.

Emails from Applebaum (VP Coca-Cola) to the research group referred to particular lines of research. On 9 October 2013, in response to a BMC Health study on the lack of evidence for weight loss interventions, Applebaum emails James Hill, Steve Blair, John Peters, Gregory Hand, David Allison, Associate Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama and Edward Archer, from the Nutritional Obesity Research Center, at the University of Alabama:

“[we] need to get ahead of this in order not to lose the focus on En Bal--it’s not a simple mass balance--but this is why folks are getting confused – some intentionally… (A19) [note: En Bal refers to energy balance]”

All this might not be enough to convict someone in a court of law. And since I’m not a lawyer, I wouldn’t really know. But it seems pretty convincing to me. You can make up your own mind.

The Much Hated Red Meat

A couple of days ago, I received this email list of current papers MD Edge, an email journal aggregator site, thought I should be aware of.

Okay, to see what’s so funny and sad about this, let’s go over a few definitions. You’ve got randomized, controlled trials, and you’ve got observational studies. The latter are pretty much meaningless, and they include the majority of studies published. They have their own specialized language that makes them appear more definitive than they really are. I call these words weasel words.

They are: associated with as in red meat is associated with cancer; suggests as in the study suggests red meat causes cancer; implies as in the data implies red meat causes cancer; and linked as in red meat is linked to cancer.

Which is what makes this funny. All studies—every single one of them—attempting to show red meat causes anything are observational studies. In order to prove causality, you would have to recruit many subjects, randomize them into two groups, then have one group eat a lot of red meat and the other eat none, or very little. Then wait for ten years to see who gets cancer, diabetes, or whatever. These studies will never be done for all kinds of obvious reasons. For example, if you enjoy red meat, and you got randomized into the group that couldn’t eat it, would you comply? If they put only people who hate red meat into the no-red-meat group, then the study isn’t randomized.

So this stupid wording above “Red meat & diabetes link confirmed” is meaningless. It says one observational study, which can’t prove causality, confirms another observational study that can’t prove causality.

Insane. And this goes out to people who should know better.

Anyone Know This Guy?

I came across this in a tweet (or is it now an X) by Kim Dotcom, who lives in New Zealand.

This clip comes from this Tweet, and I have no idea who this guy is. If anyone from NZ knows, let me know, and if he’s legit I’ll let everyone know next week. If he is legit, what he says is pretty terrifying. Thanks in advance.

Great, Great, Great Book Recommendation

I just finished a terrific book. One of the best I’ve read in years. I intended to review it in this edition of The Arrow, but ran out of time. I’ll review it for sure next week. Maybe first off so I don’t run out of time. It’s by Peter Turchin and is titled End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.

Very seldom does a book change some of my most basic beliefs. This one has.

Maybe it’s best that I wait till next week, because I haven’t finished the technical appendices yet. I will have by next Thursday, however.

Video of the Week

Your going to get two for the price of one this week. I love videos like these.

First, we’ll start off with a video of Mumford & Sons after they hit it big.

Look at the size of the crowd.

Now here is a video of them singing the same song in Austin at a pizzeria in 2009. I got it from this tweet.

I love stories like these. Good for them.

Okay, time for a poll then we’re out of here.

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

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