rob turrell
2.9K posts
rob turrell
@rob_turrell
I used to write political speeches ... now I read historical crime fiction
Cape Town, South Africa Bergabung Mayıs 2011
1.2K Mengikuti359 Pengikut
Your liver makes about 1,000mg of cholesterol every day.
You eat, on a generous day, about 300mg.
If you eat more, the liver makes less. If you eat less, the liver makes more. The body has a target. It defends the target. It does not negotiate.
The pharmaceutical industry has built a 40 billion dollar product category around interfering with that target.
The drug is a statin. The mechanism is straightforward. It blocks an enzyme called HMG-CoA reductase. This is the same enzyme that builds cholesterol. It is also the same enzyme that builds CoQ10, which every mitochondrion in your body requires to produce energy. The drug doesn't know the difference. The drug doesn't care.
You take the drug. The cholesterol goes down. So does the CoQ10. So does the testosterone, because testosterone is made from cholesterol. So does the vitamin D, because vitamin D is made from cholesterol. So does the bile, the brain function, the muscle integrity.
You get tired. You get foggy. Your legs ache. Your libido disappears. You go back to the doctor.
The doctor prescribes something for the fatigue.
The doctor prescribes something for the libido.
The doctor prescribes something for the muscle pain.
The doctor does not prescribe taking you off the original drug.
The original drug is working as designed.
That is the design.
English
Half the people having heart attacks have "normal" cholesterol.
In elderly populations, higher cholesterol correlates with lower all-cause mortality, not higher.
Countries with the highest average cholesterol (Switzerland, France, Sweden) have lower heart disease rates than countries with lower average cholesterol.
The statin trials show single-digit absolute risk reductions over five years, dressed up as 30-40% relative risk reductions in the press release.
Cholesterol is repair material the liver synthesises when the body needs to fix damaged tissue, build hormones, and insulate the nervous system. The brain is 25% cholesterol by dry weight.
Treating high cholesterol with a drug that prevents the liver from making it is like seeing a fire engine at a fire and concluding the fire engine started the fire.
You then ban fire engines.
The fires continue.
You prescribe more drugs to ban more fire engines.
The fires continue.
At some point a sensible person asks what is causing the fires.
The honest answer is inflammation. From seed oils, refined carbs, chronic stress, metabolic dysfunction.
That person does not get invited back to the conference.
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Things that have happened since the war on cholesterol began in the 1970s:
- Obesity has tripled
- Type 2 diabetes is up tenfold
- Depression rates have doubled
- Fertility is collapsing
- Childhood myopia is endemic
- Testosterone has fallen roughly 1% per year
The advice was supposed to make us healthier.
Every metric that matters has moved the wrong way.
When a treatment makes the patient sicker, it gets reviewed.
This one hasn't been.
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What people think eggs do:
- Cause heart disease
- Clog your arteries
- Raise your "bad" cholesterol
- Kill you after three a week
- Need the yolk binned
- Demand a low-fat alternative
- Represent dietary recklessness
- A guilty little pleasure
What eggs actually do:
- Contain every nutrient required to build an entire living animal from scratch
- Deliver the most bioavailable protein on the planet
- Provide the choline your brain and liver are crying out for
- Carry vitamins A, D, E, K, B12, and folate in the yolk you were told to throw away
- Arrive in their own biodegradable packaging
- Require zero ingredients, zero processing, zero label
- Cost about 25p each
- Vanish from the guidelines whenever the egg lobby stops funding the study
The most complete food in nature spent fifty years on the most-wanted list for a crime the seed oils committed.
Charges quietly dropped. No apology issued. Have the eggs.
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Doctor: "Your cholesterol's a bit high. I'd like to start you on a statin."
Patient: "What does that actually mean for my risk?"
Doctor: "It raises your chance of a cardiac event."
Patient: "Raises it by how much?"
Doctor: "It's elevated."
Patient: "How much, in real numbers?"
Doctor: "Your LDL is above the target."
Patient: "I'm asking for the absolute risk."
Doctor: "Statins are very well studied."
Patient: "I'd still like the number."
Doctor: "There can be some muscle aches, memory complaints, slight rise in blood glucose, but..."
Patient: "That sounds like a list of new conditions."
Doctor: "Side effects are uncommon."
Patient: "What's the actual risk reduction over five years?"
Doctor: "Let me get you a leaflet."
The leaflet is produced by the company that makes the drug.
The leaflet shows the relative risk reduction in large bold type.
The leaflet does not show the absolute risk reduction.
The absolute risk reduction, buried in the trial data, comes out to roughly 1%.
The leaflet does not mention this. The doctor does not mention this. The patient leaves with the prescription.
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Plant diet for 18th century Cape slaves, 19th century sugar plantation indentured workers, 20th century gold mining migrant workers
Sama Hoole@SamaHoole
Me at the till with a trolley of mince, eggs, butter, and cream, watching the serfs load up on grains, veggies, and industrial lubricant.
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Does the constitution require race-based redress? No
The Common Sense@CommonSense_ZA
Over the past few weeks, an important public debate has unfolded between Hermann Pretorius of the Institute of Race Relations and Christo van der Rheede of the FW de Klerk Foundation over one of the defining constitutional questions of post-apartheid South Africa: does the Constitution require, or even allow, race-based redress? Here is Pretorius's reply. f.mtr.cool/dibbhircea
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@SamaHoole The Diet of Slave Owners and Free Residents (Cape Colony)
* Staples and Meat: Owners consumed high-quality wheaten bread and had access to large quantities of beef and mutton (Bird, 1823, p. 97, 105). They utilized large amounts of "sheep-tail fat" for cooking,
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8000 BC: "Plants are what we eat when the hunt fails."
3000 BC: "Grain and vegetables are what we feed the slaves."
500 BC: "Lentils and barley are the diet of the poor."
100 AD: "Bread and circuses for the mob. The legions get meat."
1200s: "Pottage and roots are what the serf gets. The lord eats venison."
1700s: "Vegetables and porridge are what the starving eat."
1800s: "The Irish are surviving on potatoes. The landlords are exporting the beef."
1900s: "Plants and grain are wartime filler. We're rationing the real food."
1950s: "Plants are cheap. Feed them to the poor."
1970s: "Plants should be the BASE of the pyramid. This is science."
1990s: "Plant-based is emerging as extremely healthy, actually."
2010s: "Plant-based is optimal. Meat is the problem."
2020s: "Plant-based is saving the planet!"
2025: "Plant-based is the healthiest diet on earth. The science is settled."
You: noticing that the diet currently being sold as enlightened and optimal is the same one every ruling class in recorded history fed to the people it was trying to keep weak, compliant, and grateful.
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@SamaHoole The Diet of Slaves in Cape Town
* Standard Government Rations: At the Government Slave Lodge, adult slaves were provided with a fixed daily allowance consisting of one pound of meat, one pound of bread, and half a pound of rice (Bird, 1823, p. 79).
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@RyanCoetzee Food is dreadful. Everything cooked in seed oils. A piece of lettuce and processed cheese for R180. Spare me …
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Café du Vin, Franschhoek. Never disappoints. And one of South Africa’s greatest wine lists.
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In 1996, a mother in the green Elgin Valley just wanted to feed her family real, healthy chicken.
Meet Jeanne Groenewald, founder of Elgin Free Range Chickens.
What she built changed South African farming forever.
She started with 100 birds in her backyard.
No big capital.
No industry support.
Just a fierce belief that chickens deserved sunlight, space, natural foraging, and lives free of antibiotics and growth promoters.
A male-dominated, battery-cage world laughed.
Jeanne refused to compromise.
By 2002 she built a state-of-the-art abattoir.
She poured her soul into animal welfare and her people. Staff became family.
Ethics became non-negotiable.
Elgin Free Range Chickens is currently South Africa’s largest independent free-range operation.
Over 100,000 birds a week.
Hundreds of jobs created.
On tables at Woolworths and premium stores nationwide.
Multiple National Female Farmer of the Year awards. International recognition for doing it right.
She proved that integrity isn’t soft.
It’s the ultimate competitive edge.
This revolution began in a backyard with one woman who refused to accept “that’s how it’s always been done.”
Big industry saw profit in cages.
Jeanne saw dignity in sunshine.
Conviction doesn’t just build businesses.
It rewrites entire industries, one chicken at a time.
English
“It's because nobody makes any money when the answer is that simple.”
Sama Hoole@SamaHoole
The experts don't want you to know this, but you can hit every nutritional need on the chart by eating steak and eggs to your heart's content. Complete protein. Every essential amino acid. Every B vitamin. A and D. Iron, zinc, selenium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium. Choline for the brain. Creatine for the muscles. CoQ10 for the heart. Saturated fat for the cell membranes. Cholesterol for the hormones. No spreadsheet. No supplement stack. No fibre app. No 30 plants a week. No fermented anything. Just a steak and a few eggs cooked in butter. The reason this gets buried isn't because it's wrong. It's because nobody makes any money when the answer is that simple.
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“Cut off their lifeblood”
Robin Brooks@robin_j_brooks
The blockade won't break Iran in a few days. But I'll say this. If the West had blockaded Russia in 2022, Putin wouldn't still be killing innocents in Ukraine. This is the only way to deal with thuggish, resource-rich autocracies: cut off their lifeblood. robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/pros-and-con…
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rob turrell me-retweet
When Ukraine agreed to give up nuclear weapons, the price that the other side had to pay had to be fair. I think NATO membership was the smallest thing leaders of Ukraine had to get in exchange for the nuclear arms. What did we get? Nothing. It was not a fair game, and a big mistake.
Not only a Ukrainian mistake, but also a mistake by other signatories of the Budapest Memorandum. These are nuclear countries. If they asked you to give up nuclear weapons, they should have provided you with a security umbrella. Perhaps a nuclear umbrella.
Ultimately, all of it was a deception. Our nuclear weapons were largely transferred to Russia. For example, strategic aircraft that Russia now uses against us in this war.
From an interview on The Rest Is Politics podcast (1/5).
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“By state-proofing, I mean the deliberate construction of social, economic, and cultural capacity that reduces dependence on a hostile or unreliable state without demanding its overthrow.”
The Critic@TheCriticMag
“The white South African response to this has been not so much emigration as selective secession from dysfunction” — @DJEloff reflects on the state of white South Africans thecritic.co.uk/not-exiles-but…
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rob turrell me-retweet
With this settlement the US is worse off in every way than it was before the war; Iran is strengthened by the huge new tolls in the Straits of Hormuz, paid by the whole world. (1/14)
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rob turrell me-retweet
It's the Dollar versus EM that's been the key leading indicator for USD direction and that's now tumbling (black). We're in a new regime for the Dollar and are going back to the 2010-2013 period, when Dollar weakness was primarily against emerging markets.
robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/regime-chang…
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rob turrell me-retweet
