The Arrow #161

Hello friends.

Greetings from Dallas.

Where the weather is fair. Nice and sunny for the past four or five days. Kind of like typical Montecito days. Speaking of Montecito, a big storm is looming. A Pineapple Express is headed toward the coast of California. It’s supposed to start in Canada and work its way down the coast. Expected to hit Santa Barbara/Montecito maybe tomorrow. Weather reports there are predicting five inches of rain, which could create some flooding. Thankfully, we will be here and miss it.

I’d been having trouble finding something nutritional to write about in this week’s Arrow when fate in the guise of an email list I participate in stepped in to save the day. A member of the list wrote asking if anyone on the list had a pdf copy of a particular paper. Since most of the group members are academics, a copy of the paper appeared in short order.

And my problem was solved.

Fruit, Fatty Liver, and the Halo Effect

As I’m sure you all know, the halo effect is when positive impressions about a person, brand, category, etc. influence overall thinking in a positive way about those things. If you want to know the opposite of the halo effect, think cholesterol. No one ever advertises a food product by saying “Rich in cholesterol.” To do so would no doubt limit the sales of whatever product was advertised that way. Many advertisers do, however promote their products as being “Cholesterol Free.”

Same with saturated fat. How many ads have you ever seen extolling the richness and goodness of the saturated fat therein? Not many, I would suspect.

But you can gin sales of a product by saying “Rich in Omega-3 fats,” a food component that has a halo effect. It doesn’t matter if the product in question is loaded with crappy ingredients including a list as long as your arm of chemical additives, the halo effect created by the omega-3 content makes you think the product is just dandy. Omega-3 fats? Sure! I’ll take two.

There is probably no category of food that has a greater halo effect than fruit. If it is a fruit or has fruit in it, then it’s by God good.

Almost no one sees a problem with fruit. Does’t matter if it’s loaded with fruit sugar, if it’s a fruit, it’s good for you.

I can’t tell you how many patients I’ve had sit before me as I carefully explained how a low-carb diet works by, among other things, reducing insulin levels and enhancing fat burning. As they listened, I told them in general what they should and shouldn’t be eating on a low-carb diet. Then our nurse would come in and go over in detail based on the patients’ likes and dislikes how to put together a diet that would work for them.

These patients came back to see me a few weeks later, and a surprising portion of them would tell me that they had been eating fruit as a part of their low-carb diet. Not berries or other low-carb fruits, but bananas, oranges, mangos, and other high-carb fruits.

When I explained that bananas, oranges, and all the rest were preventing them from getting all the benefits of their supposed low-carb diet, they would always say something along the lines of, But I thought fruit was healthy. Aside from their misuse of the word healthy, which is one of my pet peeves, they seemed to be oblivious to the fact that most fruits are loaded with carbohydrates, mainly simple sugars, and are far from healthful.

It didn’t help my cause that the government was hammering four to six servings of fruit and vegetables per day. And that everywhere you looked there were ads for fruit juices and the fruits themselves, all endlessly extolled as being substrates for health, thinness, and longevity.

So I or MD or our poor nurse had to deprogram them.

Fruit has such a health halo that no one even studies it. I had never seen a study in which heavy fruit eaters were compared with non- or low-fruit eaters.

Until I was gifted with this one courtesy of the academic low-carb email group.

The only problem with it is that it pushes every confirmation-bias button I have, so I have to be careful not to fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

The study titled The effect of a fruit-rich diet on liver biomarkers, insulin resistance, and lipid profile in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: a randomized clinical trial (my Dropbox link) is an Iranian study published in a rigorous Scandinavian journal looking at just what the title says.

The authors recruited 80 subjects for the study, but ended up with 72 people randomized and completing the study. (There are always subjects who don’t make it past the screening and some who bail out before completion.) These subjects were free from disease except for fatty liver as diagnosed by ultrasound and all had to be grade 2, because ultrasound is not particularly accurate at grade 1.

The subjects were screened for just about every disorder imaginable.

Individuals with viral hepatitis, diabetes mellitus, mental disorders, not-treated hypothyroidism, renal diseases, heart failures, bone diseases, gastrointestinal diseases (such as celiac), alpha1-antitrypsin deficiency, history of alcohol consumption, using of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), cholesterol-lowering drugs (such as statins), phenytoin, carbamazepine, and barbiturates (such as phenobarbital), following a certain diet; pregnant and breastfeeding women, and as well as menopause women, and smokers (smoking more than 5 cigarettes/week), were excluded.

In all, 32 males and 40 females made it through the six-month study. They were randomized into two groups (16 males and 20 females in each), one on a fruit-rich diet (FRD) and another on a control diet. Those randomized to the FRD were instructed to consume at least four servings of fruit per day, while those on the control diet were to eat no more than two servings of fruit per day.

Before we get to the results, let’s take a minute to go over non-alcoholic liver disease (NAFLD). Below is a graphic showing the progression of the disorder.

SOURCE

The above represents the progression of liver disease caused by excess alcohol intake. NAFLD is indistinguishable from alcoholic liver disease in that a slide of a piece of liver from either diagnosis viewed under the microscope looks exactly the same. The only way the two can be differentiated is by alcoholic consumption history.

The graphic is not quite accurate as it applies to both disorders.

At the start, the liver is healthy. The first indication that anything is wrong is that the liver begins to fill with fat. That first stage is called steatosis, which simply means fat accumulation. It is easily reversible.

The next step is when the liver becomes inflamed as a consequence of even more fat accumulation, a disorder called NASH in the medical parlance, but which stands for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. The -ITIS on the end of the word means inflammation.

As it stands now, no one really knows if steatosis always leads to NASH, but if it does, you don’t want to go there.

Like steatosis, NASH is also reversible up to a point. That point is when it begins to edge into fibrosis. The persistent inflammation triggers the immune system to send collagen to help repair the damage. This collagen is a typical repair response but, if the inflammation continues, more and more collagen gets deposited and the liver begins to stiffen, a condition called fibrosis. It’s sort of like scarring.

When someone has liver disease, their liver enters into a very dangerous cycle. Persistent inflammation, or hepatitis, sends nonstop signals to the repair cells to continue depositing collagen. The extra collagen stiffens the tissue like it is designed to if there were an acute injury to a healthy liver; but, instead of a signal being sent to stop the inflammation once the acute injury has been dealt with and discard the extra collagen, if the inflammation continues even more collagen is deposited, leading to more stiffening. Over time a sort of scar tissue develops called fibrosis that begins to restrict blood flow and reduce liver function and destroy healthy liver cells. Once fibrosis sets in, the situation becomes irreversible.

The next step is cirrhosis, which is a totally fibrotic liver. Cirrhosis may or may not progress to liver cancer, but either way the victim of this disorder is pretty much doomed.

Needless to say, accumulating liver fat is a situation best avoided. And believe it or not, it is common. Years ago I read a paper in which subjects were analyzed for liver fat in a general clinic in Dallas. Almost a third of them were shown to have measurable fat in their livers. And that was at least 20 years ago. What with the almost exponential increase in type 2 diabetes since then, I would bet there is a similar increase in the number of those people with fatty liver.

In this Iranian study, a whole host of markers of liver damage were evaluated, including an alphabet soup of liver enzymes: ALT, AST, ALP, and GGT. You don’t really need to know what these specific enzymes do, but increases in their concentration indicates liver cell damage. The liver is a multifunctional organ and pretty much everything it does is driven by enzymes. These enzymes are contained within the individual liver cells, where all the work is done.

If these cells become damaged due to the increase in liver fat, some of them die and release their contents, which include all the enzymes mentioned above. The enzymes are unique to liver cells, so when their levels increase in the blood, it tells you a lot of liver cells are being damaged. The higher their values rise, the more damage.

When MD and I started taking care of overweight patients using a low-carb diet, our initial labwork included a SMAC, which is a standard sort of general blood test to look at a lot of different parameters, including liver enzymes. We were shocked to discover that the vast majority of our patients had elevations of one or more of these enzymes on their initial labwork. We realized then that the overweight state usually exists in common with some liver damage. Which is bad news.

The good news was that we found these lab findings usually normalized within six weeks, which was when we did our first follow-up lab repeats.

Okay, with this didactic on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in mind, back to the study.

After six months of either eating four or more fruit servings per day (the FRD study group) or limiting it to under two servings per day (the control group), all the various parameters measured at the start were remeasured.

With pretty stunning results.

From the abstract, which I edited for easier reading:

After 6 months of intervention, the FRD [fruit-rich diet] group had significantly higher BMI (31.40 vs. 25.68 , WC [waist circumference] (113.5 vs. 100.5), the grade of steatosis, [by liver enzymes] ALT (89.1 vs. 32.0), AST (74.5 vs. 24.0), ALP (273.4 vs. 155.0), GGT (92.7 vs. 21.2), T[otal] C[cholesterol] (206.1 vs. 172.7), LDL (126.9 vs. 99.8), glucose (115.5 vs. 97.7), and insulin resistance (7.36 vs. 2.66), and lower HDL (41.4 vs. 53.8 ) compared to the control group. Adjusting for BMI and calorie intake did not change the results. [My bold]

Pretty impressive results, I would say.

Here are graphic representations of what happened to liver size (liver size usually increases with increasing liver fat) and the actual amount of liver fat.

It took me a bit to figure out what these graphics meant.

The Y-axis designated as Count is the number of subjects involved. The white columns represent the control group and the hash-lined columns are those on the Fruit Rich Diet. The graphic above shows the change in degree of steatosis (liver fat) over six months.

As you can see, most of the subjects in both groups started out with moderate levels of liver fat. After six months a large number of subjects on the control diet with moderate steatosis moved to the mild form after six months on a comparatively low-fruit diet — ie, they improved. Those on the FRD moved from moderate to severe. Clearly they were worse off as a consequence of their increased fruit intake.

Looking at another graphic, you can see what happened to liver size as a function of increased fruit intake.

You can see that at the start liver size was about the same in both groups. But after the trial virtually all subjects in the low-fruit control group saw their livers either remain normal or decrease to normal, while those on the FRD ended up with larger livers.

Don’t forget that all these subjects had fatty livers to begin with. This study clearly shows the chowing down on the recommended four plus daily servings of fruit doesn’t do the liver a lot of good. In fact, it makes the condition much worse. And, conversely, those on the low-fruit control diet saw their liver function improve and its size and degree of fat reduced.

There were really no other dietary changes. One group ate more fruit while the other ate less. Over six months the changes were pretty spectacular.

These folks weren’t on low-carb diets, so those didn’t even come into play. Just the addition of fruit to their regular diet made them gain weight, become more insulin resistant, and worsen a bunch of other health parameters. Nothing was improved by their consuming more fruit.

That’s the take home message, especially if you are on a low-carb diet. Adding a bunch of fruit will offset a lot of the good a low-carb diet will bring about. So try to shed the idea that fruit is good for you.

Now, I’ve got to issue one caveat. No one knows how this study would turn out if the subjects did not have fatty liver disease to begin with. If all the subjects had normal livers as determined by all the tests they did for the people in this study, the FRD may not have made a difference at all. Unless that study is done, we won’t know.

And I’m not sure who would fund such a study. I’d wager none of the fruit producers would. Especially after seeing this one.

While we’re on the subject of NAFLD, let me tell you about my other favorite study on the subject done by a group of British radiologists.

Radiologists are always looking for ways to use their equipment to measure new parameters. When this study was done, the usual way of quantifying fatty infiltration of the liver was with a liver biopsy, which is invasive and not always a benign procedure. They wanted to see if they could determine liver fat with their MRI machine and see if their findings correlated with liver biopsy, which literally measured the fat in the liver.

As it turned out, they could. And now MRI is the best means of measuring liver fat. The second best is with ultrasound, which the researchers in the fruit-rich diet study used. Ultrasound is vastly less expensive than MRI.

But they also wondered if MRI could determine the reduction of liver fat over time.

Low carbohydrate diets are currently fashionable for inducing weight loss, but the metabolic effects at organ level are not well understood, especially the effect on liver fat storage. Such studies require serial hepatic fat measurements, for which liver biopsy is impractical.

So, they wondered if they could determine the degree of liver fat reduction brought about by low-carb dieting.

They recruited ten "healthy" volunteers, all of whom had significant fat in their livers. (Which makes me question the word "healthy," but...)

The participants were asked to follow a low carbohydrate diet at home for 10 days, restricting carbohydrate intake to less than 20 g carbohydrate per day in the form of green salad or vegetables, but with no other restriction on total energy intake or food choice. The volunteers kept a diet diary and abstained from alcohol.

Hepatic fat measurement by MRI was performed at 4 time points; immediately pre-diet, at 3 days and 10 days on the diet and 7 days after reverting to their normal diet. The volunteers were examined at the same time of day on each occasion.

What was the outcome?

Here is a graphic of the relative change over the 17 days of the study. I added a red vertical line at the ten day point, which was when the low-carb diet ended and the subjects reverted to their regular diets.

As you can see, everyone ditched liver fat by the ten day mark. It surprised me that it happened this quickly. MD and I usually didn’t repeat liver labs until six weeks out, so we didn’t know what happened at ten days.

It’s pretty amazing that there were these kinds of changes this early on. What I read into this study—and this is based on taking care of a lot of overweight patients and spending much time reading their diet diaries and counseling with them—is that those subjects who had the best results were those who better adhered to the low-carb diet. A 20 g/day low-carb diet is tough for a lot of people to stick to. You can see that those who regained their liver fat over the seven days after termination of the study were the ones who lost the least during the ten days of the study.

Based on nothing but many years of experience, I would bet that those subjects were the ones who least adhered to the diet. Just a guess on my part, but an educated one. I could be completely off base.

But either way, ten days on a low-carb diet, even a half-assed one, gets rid of a lot of liver fat. And it looks like four or more servings of fruit per day could pack it on in six months.

You can draw your own conclusions.

The Bestest Most Funnest Way to Lose Weight

It’s easy. Go to Europe. If you’re already in Europe, then don’t go to the US.

I can’t tell you how many patients I’ve had who told me they lost weight effortlessly in Europe. I mean they didn’t go from obese to slim over a ten-day trip, but they did lose weight while eating all that Europe had to offer.

MD and I have experienced it ourselves. We have never really lost much weight during our many European treks, but we have never gained weight while we indulged in foods we would rarely eat here in the US.

I’ve heard this from enough other people to believe my experience and that of MD and my many patients were not outliers. I suspect there is something in the food—or more likely kept out of the food—in Europe that allows us to consume a lot of it without gaining weight.

Back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s in the US, people were thin. Few people were on the diet treadmill like they are today. Obesity was a fraction of the rate it is now. What happened?

Could be a lot of things. For one thing, which is a confounder in terms of diet and body weight, vastly more people smoked in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and before. It is known that smoking suppresses weight gain by any number of mechanisms, but it obviously does so at the cost of major risks for a number of terrible problems.

But it is a confounder, so we can’t just say, well, people ate better then. Though I suspect they did. At least in terms of what was in the foods then vs now.

In those days few people regularly ate out. They took most of their meals at home. My family did. MD’s family did. I think most families did. Now a huge portion of the food most people eat is prepared at restaurants. And when someone else makes it, you have no real say about or knowledge of what goes in it.

The consumption of vegetable fats has skyrocketed since the 1970s. So has the intake of high-fructose corn syrup, but not as much as vegetable oils. Here is a chart I pulled from a talk I gave on the subject a few years ago.

The lines at the bottom of the graph are of butter, lard, and other natural fats of animal origin. As you can see, the consumption of so-called vegetable oils has gone screaming upward since the late 1970s. As I explained in the talk, I could find no source for the change in saturated fat intake. So, I simply used beef intake as a proxy. And I was stunned to learn that “vegetable” and seed oils had outpaced beef consumption in the US diet.

My presentation was about the theory developed by Peter Dobromylskyj of Hyperlipid blog fame, which I believe is valid. There may be other ways that this vast increase in polyunsaturated vegetable and seed oils has harmed our collective health. Another friend of mine, Tucker Goodrich, has a theory about how consumption of these fats undermines our health. These two theories are not competing. They are probably both correct.

The Europeans have not abandoned saturated fats as much as we have in the US, and they haven’t gone down the “vegetable” oil path to the same extent.

Probably some of the loss of weight or maintenance of weight while eating in Europe could be attributed to the difference in “vegetable” oil intake.

I saved a Wall Street Journal article from a few months ago on this very topic: losing weight while eating large in Europe. I just scanned it at the time because I was between trips to Europe and Australia/New Zealand and had a thousand other things on my mind. I came across it a few days ago and discovered it meshed with my new-found obsession with ultra-processed foods.

The author of the Journal article wrote about having friends who ate their way through Europe and lost weight. Then she experienced it herself.

Americans who eat their way through European vacations sometimes come home surprised to see a lower number on the scale. I had the same experience on a recent trip to Portugal’s Azores islands, where I indulged in specialty cheeses, breads, cakes and the sweetest pineapple I’ve ever tasted—without gaining a pound.

She goes on to discuss why this might be. Of course, everyone takes more steps in Europe (or on just about any vacation, for that matter), but countless studies—even studies using doubly-labeled water—have shown that taking more steps doesn’t make anyone lose weight. Yet the myth remains firmly in place.

The writer mentions

a study in the European Journal of Nutrition that found that among adults in the U.S., 57% of calories come from ultra-processed food, compared with 12% in Europe. [Link in the original]

She goes on to write

The European Union more tightly regulates food additives, says Kathleen Holton, an associate professor in the Nutritional Neuroscience Lab at American University in Washington, D.C. About 300 to 400 additives are approved for use in food in the EU, compared with more than 3,000 in the U.S., she says.

The more I read and study on ultra-processed foods and what harms they can inflict, the more I’m convinced they are a real problem. And if we’re exposed to 3,000 of these chemicals in the US, but only 300-400 (one tenth of those in the US) in Europe, then that could be a driving force for the more easily lost weight there.

And, then, of course, there is the obligatory paragraph that must be included in any mainstream media source:

Beef and red meat consumption in the U.S. is also higher than in most European countries, says Dr. Miguel Martínez-González, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard Chan School and a professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Navarra in Spain. Some research has found links between red and processed meat and a higher risk of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some types of cancer, he notes.

All I can say is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit on and on ad infinitum. There is absolutely no evidence (a link is not evidence) that beef is harmful in any way shape or form. But the writer’s editor probably made her put it in just for balance.

Jesus wept.

Okay, time for my weekly piteous plea for paid subscribers. The incalculable joy of reading the Arrow ends up costing only about 16 cents per day. That calculates to about 1/125 of a $19.99 Whole Foods ribeye steak (when you can find them at $19.99 per pound). A small price to pay for weekly enlightenment.

What Is a Low-Carb Diet?

The short answer is: no one really knows. At least no one who has come up with a proper definition.

If you’ve been consuming 300 g of carb per day, then switch to 200 g per day, is that going low-carb? A lot of people think it is.

A new paper came out recently titled Defining “low-carb” in the scientific literature: A scoping review of clinical studies taking a look at how people define low-carb based on a survey of multiple studies claiming to be low-carb diet studies.

The authors write

We identified 508 articles (317 randomized controlled, 99 cross-over, 33 before-and-after, 12 non-randomized, and 47 other clinical trials). Most examined effects of low-carbohydrate diets in healthy adults (62.4%), 40 to 59 years old (55.5%), with obesity or overweight (66.1%). The majority reported effects on weight or body composition (29.9%), diabetes (18.7%), or cardiovascular risk factors (12.9%) as primary outcomes. Most articles (56.9%) reported percent of energy from carbohydrates, and of those, 60.3% defined low-carbohydrate diets as being ≤30% of energy from carbohydrates. Some articles (22.9%) reported grams of carbohydrates per day, and of those, most defined low-carbohydrate diets as being under ∼100 grams of carbohydrates per day.[My bold]

This is why there is a lot of confusion about low-carb diets. The results are all over the place because the way various articles define low-carb diets are all over the place. If you set the upper level of carbs at 30 percent or less (most I see use 30 percent), that means you’re getting somewhere around 150 g/d of carbohydrate based on a 2000 kcal/d diet. That’s a good start.

It’s obviously better than the 300 g/d you would get in a 60 percent carb diet, which many people recommend. But it’s not really enough—at least in my view—to get you where you want to be if you have any degree of metabolic resistance.

And in addition percentages of calories are a dumb way of looking at dietary intake. I’ve actually seen nutritional counselors of one stripe or another (there are many) tell those trying to keep their fat intake under 30 percent that if they overeat on some fatty food they need just eat some more carbs to get their fat intake for the day down under the 30 percent mark. It’s crazy. We don’t eat percentages—we eat grams. In my view, we should measure in grams.

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in 2005 defined an Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Range (AMDR) for carbohydrates as being 45 − 65% of daily calorie intake (Institute of Medicine of the National Academies Citation2005). The NAM also noted that the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for carbohydrates is below the lower limit of the AMDR at 130 grams per day across all age/sex groups (Institute of Medicine of the National Academies Citation2006). This RDA was set to account for the minimum amount of glucose needed by the brain in a day. [My bold]

Now there is some idiocy hard at work for you.

I’m always amazed at how simple minded some of the people are who make these recommendations. They are clueless about the function of ketones. And about how much glucose the brain needs. No one really knows. George Cahill in his starvation studies back in the 1960s got glucose levels down to 25 mg/dl and his subjects were fine. They were operating with full cognition at blood sugar levels that would have felled anyone not ketone adapted.

Ketones replace sugar as an energy source for just about every tissue but the red blood cells. They have to have glucose. But as we discussed last week in these pages, your body can make glucose from protein if it needs it. Consuming protein doesn’t make you run up your glucose levels, but if you need glucose, protein is at the ready (along with glucose stored as glycogen and the glycerol part of the triglycerides stored in the adipose tissue).

Someone somewhere along the way calculated that the brain uses 130 g of glucose per day. Then that was set in many peoples’ minds as a minimum never to go below. Else, I assume, they figured one would go into a coma.

I almost never consume 130 g of carbohydrate a day. I’m often brain dead, but never comatose.

As we discussed last week, protein has a slight effect on insulin. It raises it a bit, which lowers glucose, but it also stimulates a little squirt of glucagon, which raises sugar to compensate. Consequently, protein has little effect on blood sugar. Dietary fat has almost no effect on either insulin or glucagon. But carbohydrate stimulates a mad hatter’s metabolic tea party of insulin and glucose.

Common sense would then seem to dictate that to maintain metabolic stability, one should load up on fat and protein while minimizing carb intake. Especially if trying to solve some sort of metabolic issue.

MD and I try to keep our patients at or under 50 g/d. That will generally stabilize things metabolically while allowing plenty of weight loss. Dropping to 20 g/d will do even better, but lot of people won’t go that low. (Which is why I doubt the folks who lost the least amount of liver fat in the MRI study outline in one of the sections above ever got to that point even though that was the study protocol.)

The take home message here is that whenever you read about a low-carb study somewhere, always try to find what the carb intake really is. As the above study shows, it’s all over the place, yet still defined as low-carb. Before you take the results of any study you read about in the media, check the real carb count. Don’t just take their word for it that a low-carb diet was really used.

And for God’s sake don’t worry that you need 130 g of carb per day to allow your brain to function. God has you covered with ketones.

Public Service Announcement

Not only do we now have to worry about DEI in the cockpit and in the tower while flying, we have to worry about doors blowing off the plane. At least the Boeing 737 Max’s. So far, only two US airlines fly these planes: Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, both of which MD and I have flown a lot.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the door blowing off of the Alaska Airlines jet while in flight wasn’t due to lack of maintenance. Apparently. the plane came that way from the Boeing factory. Which, to me, at least, is even more frightening.

Here is an article telling you how you can determine if the flight you are booking will be on a Boeing 737 Max or some other type of plane.

No matter where your travels take you, just always remember

Every Presidential Candidate Needs to Know This

Dr. Peter McCullough tells us the question every presidential candidate needs to be able to answer.

SOURCE

I agree 100 percent. It’s going to come up, and all candidates left standing need to provide an answer.

Great Interview: Taubes and Bhattacharya

Jay Bhattacharya interviews Gary on his new book. A great conversation delving into scientific journalism and how diabetes science and treatment have been screwed up since everyone became afraid of fat. Last time MD and I spoke with Jay, he told us how his own father could have greatly benefited from a low-carb diet. And how he died way too soon as a consequence of his diabetes and the wrong diet.

SOURCE

C.J. Hopkins Trial Ends Up a Win

I just got word that C. J. Hopkins won this case in Germany. In case you haven’t heard of it, C.J. Hopkins is a writer and satirist who used to live in the US. He is married to a Jewish woman. He has written and spoken against totalitarianism throughout his career. When Bush decided to attack Iraq, Hopkins thought the US was moving in a totalitarian direction and so decided to immigrate. He wanted to move to a country he thought would be the least likely to go the totalitarian route, so based on what happened in WWII, he figured Germany would be the last to go down that road.

He hadn’t counted on Covid, however.

He wrote a book with a cover showing a masked face with a subtle swastika blended into the mask. It’s really kind of hard to see.

Since he was going against the Covid establishment, he was charged with breaking some German law about use of the swastika. He pled not guilty, fought it, and just won.

Here is his Substack description for those interested.

The Verdict

The statement he read to the court is tremendous. Below is another account of the trial describing the demeanor of the judges, one of whom was loath to let him go. She left the courthouse wearing a mask, which speaks volumes about her mindset.

Acquittal for US author CJ Hopkins

Georgia Ede’s New Book. A Must Read

Many of you may never have heard of Georgia Ede. She is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and is one of the sweetest, nicest, smartest, best educated people you’ll ever meet. I met her years ago at a conference at which I spoke. Somehow the audio visual set up was screwed up, so I couldn’t advance the slides by clicking a remote during my talk. Georgia volunteered to advance my slides. I’ve loved her ever since.

She’s a brilliant psychiatrist who, unlike many, tries to treat her patients’ mental issues with diet instead of drugs. I can tell you that were I in need of a psychiatrist, I would seek her out in a heartbeat. She is absolutely wonderful.

Georgia describes how she treated some of her own health problems with almost a carnivore diet. Once she saw the results, she was hooked and began working with her own patients nutritionally. 

She has a new book that just came out yesterday. I’ve got a copy in my hands and have been working my way through it.

Her book is a comprehensive overview of nutritional studies and why they are often so screwed up.  Below is a copy of the Table of Contents, so you can see how much the book covers.

Her advice applies not only to people with various mental issues, but to anyone who wants to use diet as a tool to restore health. The entire book is an outgrowth of her years of practice using nutritional strategies to improve brain health. Who does not want their brain to be better? Her book is the nutritional guide.

If you ever get the chance to see her speak, take it. She gives terrific talks.  And make sure her book is in your low-carb library. 

Malcolm and Medical Malfeasance

Okay, I’m going to give you a lot of homework for this week. You’ve got to watch the video below of a talk by Malcolm Kendrick. MD and I attended this talk put on by the Broken Science Initiative a few months ago. What’s more, a couple of years before, I presented him with the shirt he’s wearing in honor of his being kicked off Wikipedia.

The talk is vintage Malcolm. You’ll love it and be pissed off to the max over the snow job Big Pharma pulls on us over and over again.

Enjoy.

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Odds and Ends

• China obviously put out by Iran blocking its trade threatens action.

• Why is there so much fraud in academia?

• First ever photo of a newborn great white shark.

• Amelia Earhart’s lost plane may have been found.

• Thimerosol exposure in rats in amount an infant would get in a childhood vaccination significantly damages brain bioenergetic pathways.

• Most popular dog breeds in each state.

• The best cheeses of 2023. I’m on the hunt for the Crescenza-Stracchino.

• A stunning Gustav Klimt portrait resurfaces after 100 years.

• 1.6-billion-year-old fossils push back origin of multicellular life by tens of millions of years.

• The swastika stands for evil and mass murder. So does the hammer and sickle. Even more so.

• How your lost airline bags become someone else’s treasure.

• If England’s hedgerows were aligned end to end, they would go round the world ten times.

• Novo Nordisk, maker of Wegovy, hits half a trillion dollars in value.

• Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign?

• The US open border policy is not an accident.

• Insulin resistance making into the popular press.

• Mainstream media blocking AI bots. Right-wing media welcomes them. Since crawling these sources are how AI is trained, will there be unintended consequences?

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Okay, now it’s time for the…

Video of the Week

I get so tired of everyone referring to what happened on Jan 6, 2021 as an insurrection. It’s the word on the lips of every talking head on the mainstream media and half the people in Congress.

Here is what an insurrection really is as described by Michael Shellenberger.

SOURCE

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