@Gaurab Great post!!! I worked on rare earth silica single mode fibre lasers and amplifiers for twenty years. You got every detail right.
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Anne Tropper
22 posts
The internet runs on a coincidence of atomic physics. Erbium emits light at exactly 1,550 nanometers. Silica glass fiber loses the least signal at exactly 1,550 nanometers. One is a quantum property of a rare earth element, the other is an optical property of melted sand. They have nothing to do with each other. It is pure luck. Before erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, every undersea signal had to be converted from light to electricity and back every 50 kilometers. Each conversion degraded the signal and capped bandwidth. Erbium removed that cap. An erbium amplifier sitting on the floor of the ocean boosts signals 1,000 times and runs for decades without maintenance. 99% of intercontinental data moves through glass strands no thicker than a human hair, amplified by a rare earth element that just so happens to emit at the right wavelength. And erbium isn't even the strangest one.
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@SamaHoole A thought about this; in animals the K is mostly inside cells; the Na outside in interstitial fluid and blood plasma. In butchery the blood is drained off; the meat has less Na than the living animal. Some of us do noticeably better with extra salt - keeps migraines at bay.
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Keith's ancestor, somewhere in the ancient Near East, approximately eight thousand years ago, is seeking out a salt lick.
This is not unusual behaviour. Every large herbivore on earth does it. Deer. Bison. Elk. Cattle. Horses. Moose. They travel significant distances to lick mineral-rich salt deposits from rocks and soil.
The reason is simple. Plant matter does not contain sodium in meaningful quantities. Herbivores eating exclusively plants are chronically low in sodium. The body needs sodium for nerve conduction, fluid balance, and approximately three hundred other processes. The plants are not providing it. The salt lick is.
Keith's ancestor has grazed for eleven months on mineral-poor upland vegetation and is now standing at a rock, licking it with obvious purpose.
Meanwhile, the palaeontologists have been digging up archaeological sites occupied by human hunter-gatherers for the past forty years, trying to find evidence of Palaeolithic salt licks.
They have found none.
Not one.
No evidence of humans seeking out salt deposits. No evidence of salt trading networks in the earliest archaeological record. No evidence of the desperate sodium supplementation behaviour that every other large land herbivore has left abundant traces of.
The absence is the finding.
Carnivores and near-carnivores get their sodium from animal tissue. Animal tissue contains sodium. The predator eats the prey. The sodium arrives. They don't need extra sodium to balance out the potassium from veggies. They don't need to manage the fluid retention from carbs. No lick required.
The fact that humans never needed a salt lick is evidence, carved into the archaeological record in the form of a complete absence, of what humans were primarily eating.
Keith is still seeking out the salt lick.
Keith is a herbivore.
You are not.
Eat accordingly.
Sama Hoole@SamaHoole
I haven't used salt in two years. I want to be careful here, because salt is one of those things where the carnivore community has quietly developed a strong collective position that I think deserves examination. Salt is not an animal product. It does not appear in the archaeological record of Palaeolithic diet in any meaningful quantity. It is a mineral additive that humans adopted as a preservation technology, to stop meat rotting, not because the physiology required it. I cut it out two years ago, and the following resolved within weeks: post-workout cramps, fast heartbeat in the evening, low-level anxiety that I'd attributed to other causes, and waking at 2am to use the bathroom. All gone. The mechanism, as I understand it: sodium and water maintain a feedback loop. More sodium requires more water to maintain osmotic balance. More water increases blood volume. Increased blood volume at rest, when you're not actively losing electrolytes through exercise, puts unnecessary load on the cardiovascular system and disrupts the signalling that regulates sleep and urine production. Carnivore resolves so many things. Salt quietly undoes some of them. Worth experimenting with.
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@SamaHoole I am inexpressibly grateful to you for this post: this thing is true and I mind it terribly. I cook the very best meat I know how for dear friends, and they snip off every scrap of fat, to waste, as if I am trying to poison them.
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Here is something worth sitting with for a moment.
A significant percentage of modern humans, otherwise rational, reasonable adults, experience genuine physical revulsion at the sight of visible animal fat.
Not mild preference. Not aesthetic distaste. Revulsion. The kind that produces an involuntary recoil, a tightening of the jaw, a need to look away.
At what?
At the substance that powered human brain development for two and a half million years. At the fuel source that allowed our ancestors to survive glacial periods, cross continents on foot, and build every civilisation that has ever existed. At the dense, stable, bioavailable energy that every traditional culture on Earth sought preferentially and valued above all other food.
That thing. That specific thing. People now flinch at it.
The fat on a lamb chop. The white edge of a pork belly. The rendered dripping in a pan. Things that made humans human, now regarded with the mild horror usually reserved for something gone off.
This didn't happen by accident. This is fifty years of sustained messaging, dietary guidelines, cooking shows trimming fat before the camera, food packaging calling leanness a virtue, and a generation of doctors telling patients to scrape it off the plate.
That's not nutritional science. That's one of the most successful psychological operations in food history.
And it worked beautifully.
On us.
Sama Hoole@SamaHoole
Let's talk about the fat. Not the lean bit. The fat. The white seam running through a rib-eye that you've been told to cut off, trim away, render out, discard. The fat that gets removed before the nutrition label is calculated so the numbers look better. The fat that every chef from Escoffier to your nan's Sunday roast knew was the point. That fat is oleic acid: the same fat in olive oil, which has a Mediterranean diet named after it and a documentary about it and a very successful PR campaign that has been running since approximately 1990. That fat is stearic acid: which is neutral on LDL cholesterol, raises HDL, and is so non-threatening that even the most nervous cardiologist struggles to find fault with it. That fat is the carrier for vitamins A, D, E, and K: the fat-soluble vitamins, which are called fat-soluble because they require fat to be absorbed, which means eating the lean version of the meat and wondering why you feel nothing is a metabolic irony of the highest order. The fat is not the problem. The fat was never the problem. The fat is, in fact, quite significantly the point. Stop cutting it off.
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And why does Hannah Spencer have the same hairstyle as a three year old?
Chris Rose@ArchRose90
Hannah Spencer, the candidate in the Gorton & Denton by-election loves jetting off on holidays, despite her party’s stance on a “climate emergency”. Owns two homes worth over £1m and drives a diesel car, her party is campaigning against both. A hypocritical champagne socialist.
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What is the price of a pound of ground beef where you live?
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@MichaelRosenYes Dear Mr. Rosen - love you to bits and deeply respect your work: but re the human body you could hardly be more wrong!!! Perhaps Santa will bring you an undergraduate cell biology textbook for Christmas?
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The human body is mostly a set of bags, tubes and sticks with liquids and sludges flowing round it. There are also some tough durable bits round the edges.
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@SBakerMD Don’t know because I haven’t had anything on your list for 6 years. My worst food is fruit - a very tiny amount triggers a slight migraine aura. Optimum plant intake is zero for me.
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Carnivore isn't a diet. It's a return to factory settings.
Everything else is just complicated troubleshooting for a system that was working fine before we started adding random plugins.
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@GoodLawProject So far as I can see from the primary scientific literature, Malhotra has strong evidence supporting what he says. Have you considered that you might be on the wrong side of this argument?
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It’s three years since a complaint was lodged against a doctor who recently linked Covid vaccines to cancer at Reform’s conference.
But the General Medical Council still hasn’t taken action.
goodlawproject.org/update/when-wi…
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Every patient in this country deserves the best possible care.
That’s why we're launching NHS league tables, ranking every trust in England.
Delivering on our promise to drive up standards in our health service. Our Plan for Change in action.
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@SBakerMD Cake. Nowadays family birthdays feature steak instead. Little candles in their holders fix just as well in steak as cake.
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What was a favorite food that wrecked your health and what did you change it to to improve your health?
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@BiggestComeback My experience too; sudden complete stop to sunburn when I changed my diet 5 years ago. Mostly meat, no processed food, very low carb. My guess is that normalising insulin restores skin physiology fast. Eliminating seed oils clearly also helps, but might take longer?
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Years ago, I used to sunburn after as little as 20 minutes outside in the bright sun.
That hasn’t happened in years…
Same skin. Same sun. Zero sunscreen.
What changed?
Is it diet? Inflammation? Antioxidants? Something else?
Curious if others have experienced this too👇
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@DrSuneelDhand For me an unrestricted diet of animal only food restored within weeks my energy and my twenty-year-old body shape, but perhaps with more muscle and a slimmer waist.
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“I lost weight because I went Keto/Vegan/Carnivore/Fasted”
NO.
You lost weight because you had a calorie deficit.
The diet was simply the tool to help you achieve that.
There are NO exceptions to the rule that you have to burn more calories than you consume to lose weight
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@DrSuneelDhand Calorie restriction plus much exercise reduces but does not remove visceral adipose tissue. The improvement at some point becomes too hard to sustain.
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@DrSuneelDhand With whole food ketogenic eating you may shed dietary fat via the gut and breathe out ketone bodies; some input goes straight to output if you overeat.
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@DrSuneelDhand With calorie restriction over time I had to eat less and less just to maintain the loss and my body composition did not improve.
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@DrSuneelDhand Dear Dr Dhand, your statement about calorie deficit may be true, but it is so unhelpful to most overweight people. Human physiology can turn down the output more ruthlessly than willpower can turn down the input. On calorie-counted diets I was freezing cold and exhausted.
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@MichaelRosenYes ‘Miniseries’ - surely just a typo for ‘Miseries’?
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Every time I see the words 'miniseries', my first take on it is that it rhymes with 'patisseries', with the emphasis on the second syllable: 'minISeries'. I keep wondering what is this genre of TV?
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@natalieben This is excellent; I agree with every word! Add to your list dietary advice that made people sick; and pharma that pretended to address symptoms actually caused by bad food.
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We have to escaped the failed thinking of the 20th-century: that demands lifelong UNlearning, as well as learning
#LifeLongLearning
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