Sunday, February 07, 2021
Just an announcement
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Hall and CICO part 3
Differential Metabolic Effects of Saturated Versus Polyunsaturated Fats in Ketogenic Diets
Both diets were individualised to be weight maintaining, so we can say nothing about spontaneous food intake (ie appetite, ie weight/fat mass changes). The main point of interest is the very right hand end of Figure 1:
"One participant withdrew due to hypoglycemia during the low-carbohydrate diet."
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Hall and CICO part 2
Saturday, January 23, 2021
Hall and CICO again
Peter & Raphael talk about fatty acids, mitochondria, the origins of life, covid, vaccines & keto
and I also picked this thread up on twitter, again via Raphi
which sums up why I don't do twitter. To join this discussion would take weeks of careful thought and reference trail following. However this review (DO NOT download it from SciHub!!!!!! Or if you do, make a donation. I didn't say that) came out of it:
Free Fatty Acids and Insulin Secretion in Humans
"In fact, they [FFAs] increase insulin precisely to the degree needed to compensate for the fatty acid–induced insulin resistance."
Do Lower-Carbohydrate Diets Increase Total Energy Expenditure? An Updated and Reanalyzed Meta-Analysis of 29 Controlled-Feeding Studies
People may recall I've looked at Hall vs Ludwig in the past. Of the two camps I personally favour the one with the most honest approach to the data. My thanks to David Ludwig for updating me on this latest interchange within the on-going process.
Monday, January 18, 2021
ROS (01) Insulins are ubiquitous in eukaryotes
Insulin-like signaling within and beyond metazoans
we can see that there is a recognisable insulin like receptor stemming from the common ancestor leading to both ourselves and sponges. That's pretty far back, marked by the blue lineage arrows in Figure 1 from the review:
"The convergent evolution of ligand-receptor pairs alone cannot explain however the biochemical similarities in the intracellular response to insulin observed outside metazoans, as illustrated above. One way to overcome this seeming inconsistency is by considering that independently evolved upstream components of pathways devoted to processing environmental information may have been tied to evolutionary conserved core metabolic and cellular growth signaling networks".
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Where the UK is heading perhaps (or not)
Here it is! (I can't see any way to embed and preserve Dr Ramsay's interview clip), it's in a Great Barrington Declaration tweet here
https://twitter.com/gbdeclaration/status/1349483284632375299
While I'm on the subject of brain removals, people may be aware that daily COVID-19 deaths are currently exceeding those in the spring epidemic in the UK.
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Just an update
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Monday, January 04, 2021
Sarcasm Warning
I don’t know. However: most “COVID-19 on the death certificate” deaths occur in hospitals and are reputed to be registered very promptly compared to community deaths. There is a massive need for the numbers of COVID-19 fatalities in the current situation, the government needs (and demands) these numbers fast to drive policy. This will inflate the uncorrected data through early December. However non-COVID-19 deaths are currently massively and exceptionally below normal for the time of year and these will only be incorporated in to the data more slowly than the rapidly registered COVID-19 deaths. So through early December the overall value has been correctly reported as being higher than normal because the low number of COVID-19 negative fatalities from the community (or even from hospitals) aren’t yet included. Now they are now coming in. I doubt PHE are remotely interested in assimilating this anomaly in to their estimating process (which will be based on previous years normal delay patterns of registration) but eventually the EuroMoMo absolute death data will have the truth out. Not that it will make any difference.
Why are non-COVID-19 deaths so low? People, sadly, die in some excess during the Winter. If you are hospitalised for anything at all leading to your death, the chances of you reaching your end without achieving a +vePCR test are very low. You will be a COVID-19 death and so you will be missing from other datasets.
End afterthought.
Thursday, December 31, 2020
Great Barrington Declaration (2)
Monday, December 21, 2020
IgG IgA and sniffing a virus which stinks
Saturday, December 12, 2020
IgG IgA and sniffing a virus
Reduction of influenza virus transmission from mice immunized against conserved viral antigens is influenced by route of immunization and choice of vaccine antigen
"Here we demonstrate that transmission reduction is more effective when mice are immunized against A/NP and M2 intranasally than via the intramuscular route"
Tuesday, December 08, 2020
FIP vaccines etc
A review of feline infectious peritonitis virus infection: 1963–2008
The chapter abstract summarises the interesting bits of the Pedersen's review nicely:
Coronaviridae
In Fenner's Veterinary Virology (Fifth Edition), 2017
Immunity, Prevention, and Control
Feline infectious peritonitis is not controlled easily; control requires the elimination of the virus from the local environment, whether this is the household or the cattery. This requires a high level of hygiene, strict quarantine, and immunoprophylactic measures. Because kittens acquire the infection from their queens, early weaning programs have also been used in attempts to interrupt virus transmission.
The development of a safe and highly effective vaccine remains elusive, even with the availability of bioengineering approaches. The only commercially available feline infectious peritonitis vaccine contains a temperature-sensitive mutant virus, based on a serotype II virus. The vaccine is applied to the nasal mucosa to reduce virus replication and antibody formation. Under these conditions, a cellular immune response is favored, and some protection putatively is achieved. Vaccination of infected, seropositive adult cats is not effective. In addition, experimental challenge of vaccinated cats has resulted in “early death” due to feline infectious peritonitis in some cases.
A broad spectrum coronavirus protease inhibitor drug has recently shown considerable therapeutic efficacy for treatment of cats with feline infectious peritonitis, a finding that suggests the disease might in the future be treated with antiviral drugs.
What is clear from FIP vaccination is that antibody production (or the administration of hyperimmune serum or pure IgG antibodies) in the absence of a cell mediated immune response, is lethal on challenge of kittens with a field strain of FIP virus. The serum is harmless, the IgG is harmless, the vaccine is harmless. What matters is how the disease progresses when field virus meets the antibody replete host. The effect of a vaccinia virus vector vaccine was described here (you only really need to read the title, it says it all):
Early Death after Feline Infectious Peritonitis Virus Challenge due to Recombinant Vaccinia Virus Immunization
which could reasonably be described as a bit of a booboo.
Thursday, November 26, 2020
Monday, November 09, 2020
Protons (65): Fatty acids vs glucose and ROS generation
The CoQH2/CoQ Ratio Serves as a Sensor of Respiratory Chain Efficiency
Saturday, November 07, 2020
Here we go in to Lockdown 2

Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Linoleic acid makes you hungry
Inflammatory response to dietary linoleic acid depends on FADS1 genotype
Two things come out that are worth noting. First is that, from Fig 4, that increased dietary LA mostly decreases the arachidonic acid in plasma phospholipids and cholesterol esters. I made a throw away comment in a previous post that I would expect supplementing any C18 PUFA would inhibit the formation of any C20 and C22 fatty acids. I got lucky on that one, AA levels mostly dropped with LA supplementation, one didn't change.
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Podcast with Dr Paul Saladino
I had a very pleasant chat with Paul Saladino.
It was quite a long chat and there were still lots of places that we did not have time to visit...
Wednesday, October 07, 2020
Great Barrington Declaration
This is really a job for twitter but that's not my platform.
I've signed.
Peter
Full blown linoleic acid deficiency: speculation
Tucker Goodrich emailed me the link to this lovely paper from the 1930s
ON THE NATURE AND ROLE OF THE FATTY ACIDS ESSENTIAL IN NUTRITION
and included it in a blog post
Fat and Weight Gain (a Note to Peter) and the Essentiality of Linoleic AcidTHE EFFECT OF FAT LEVEL OF THE DIET ON GENERAL NUTRITION
XIII. THE EFFECT OF INCREASING DOSAGES OF X-IRRADIATION
ON THE PROTECTIVE ACTION OF FAT ON RADIATION INJURY
"More recently, it has been observed that the survival time of male rats, as judged by the intervals at which an LD25, an LD50, or an LD75 were reached, or by the average length of survival, was progressively improved when ethyl linoleate was given in doses of 10, 50, or 100mg daily (Cheng et al., '54)."
The same lab has produced at least four studies to support this finding.
Deleterious effects of high fat diets on survival time of X-irradiated mice
"At levels of 2% or 10% of the diet cottonseed oil and margarine fat increased survival time over that on the fat-free ration. When these fats were fed at higher levels ( ie. ~ 20% or 30% of the diet), however, survival time was decreased below that obtained at the lower levels of supplementation."
My take home is that rats do, absolutely, need a few milligrams of linoleic acid. Notice that the amounts used in all of the studies are in the same ball park as found by Burr and Burr to prevent their fat deficiency syndrome. I think it is an interesting speculation that LA is particularly need to manufacture an effective membrane for the ETC, especially when electrons are going to be knocked around by x-ray irradiation over and above background radiation conditions. As the dietary dose increases then the deleterious effect of the PUFA eventually predominate, certainly in the radiation injury models.
Sunday, October 04, 2020
Prof Sunetra Gupta
The Spectator interview
I've pulled this one out from many videos because it answers the question as to what an incompetent Prime Minister says when presented with someone who is telling him that he has done everything wrong. It's near the end so I've clipped out my favourite eight seconds:
Monday, September 28, 2020
Aaargh BROKEN LINKS
https://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/10/physiological-insulin-resistance.html
the link to the paper by Wolever is broken.
The URL above the blank Pubmed page from the link is this:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=10889799&ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
and 10889799 is the PMID. Pasting this in to the search box gets you to the paper originally linked to so
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10889799/
now gives access to the abstract as:
Dietary carbohydrates and insulin action in humans
BROKEN LINKS
Over the years I have slowly learned how not to blog.
For one thing, never use hyperlinks embedded as "here" or "these people".
Always cite the paper title, then anyone can copy paste this in to Duckduck or Pubmed and they can then side step the broken link when it goes down, as it will.
In the very early days I used the Pubmed search result URL as the hyperlink. This appears to have been fine for the last 15 years or so but recently Pubmed updated and all of those links have been lost. If a hyperlink from a simple word like "here" used to go to a search result URL it will be down and even I cannot always relocate the original paper.
Sometimes even if I know exactly which paper it was it's not always possible to find on on my sprawling hard drive.
You learn these things as you go along. Damn.
Peter