Prof BWT Kay

A sheep that is not sheared, dies. Slowly. Wetly. With flies in the fleece and a temperature it cannot regulate. The modern sheep, descended from twelve thousand years of selective breeding, no longer sheds its fleece naturally. It cannot. If left unshorn, the fleece keeps growing, traps moisture against the skin, attracts flies, develops fly strike, and kills the sheep slowly and unpleasantly over the course of a wet summer. Shearing is not done to the sheep. Shearing is done for the sheep. The shearer arrives in May. The sheep is held still for ninety seconds. The fleece comes off in one piece. The sheep stands up, shakes itself, and walks back into the field roughly four kilograms lighter and visibly relieved. The fleece becomes a jumper that will outlive three of your phones. The alternative, the one being marketed as compassionate, is acrylic. Polyester. A petroleum-derived plastic spun into fibres that shed microplastics into every wash, every wear, every breath of wind, for as long as that garment exists. Which is forever. Acrylic does not biodegrade. It only breaks down into smaller pieces of acrylic. The sheep needed shearing. The oil rig did not need drilling. Have a think about which one is actually cruel.

You may have read that red meat raises TMAO, a compound associated with cardiovascular disease. You may not have read the part where fish raises TMAO approximately fifty times more than red meat does. TMAO, trimethylamine N-oxide, is found directly in saltwater fish at high levels. It is an osmolyte that helps marine animals manage pressure and salinity. When you eat the fish, you eat the TMAO. Eating beef produces some TMAO indirectly through gut bacteria metabolising carnitine. Eating a piece of cod produces a transient TMAO spike that dwarfs anything red meat can manage. A 2020 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found no significant association between red meat intake and circulating TMAO concentrations. It found a strong positive association with fish intake. Particularly shellfish. Particularly dark-meat ocean fish. So either TMAO is a useful biomarker for cardiovascular disease, in which case eating salmon should be far worse for your heart than eating a ribeye, and the Mediterranean diet should be killing the Greeks faster than the Atkins diet is killing the Americans. Or TMAO is not a useful biomarker for cardiovascular disease, in which case nobody should be using it to scare you off beef. The researchers who flagged it as a worry have not, to date, suggested you stop eating cod. Have a think about why.

There’s been this overdone common misconception that you HAVE to eat animals to get your protein, but the truth is… ALL protein comes from plants.

There’s been this overdone common misconception that you HAVE to eat animals to get your protein, but the truth is… ALL protein comes from plants.

A calorie is a standardized unit of energy - the same regardless whether you eat steak or doughnuts. What actually matters in the body is how that energy is processed: Protein burns 20-30% just digesting it. Refined carbs only ~5-10%. You’re welcome!

Just started playing with Claude AI and it seems way more accurate with scientific publications than ChatGPT, which got the links wrong 90% of the time. They both get overall picture correct but both get specific studies wrong here and there, always need to double check.

Emotion suppression may increase the risk for earlier death

Biology is not just chemistry, it is code

The study aimed to evaluate the association between the EAT–Lancet diet and the risk of Chronic Kidney Disease. Multiple scoring systems have been invented to evaluate adherence to the EAT-Lancet diet. Pause for a moment to reflect on that. Some plant-biased researchers invented a diet back in 2019... Following this invention, other ‘researchers’ invented scoring systems to measure adherence to this made up diet. Other ‘researchers’ then use these invented scoring systems to measure adherence to this invented diet and its association with chronic conditions... This is the current state of nutritional ‘research’.🙄

Walking ~3,800 steps/day was linked to a 25% lower risk of dementia. And ~9,800 steps/day with about a 50% lower risk. If dementia runs in your family, daily walks are a no-brainer.

"The WHO classified red meat as a carcinogen." Yes. In 2015. Group 2A. Probably carcinogenic to humans. The classification was based on a meta-analysis finding that fifty grams of processed meat per day was associated with an 18 percent increase in relative risk of colorectal cancer. Let me translate that. Relative risk is the change in your odds. Absolute risk is your actual odds. The lifetime absolute risk of colorectal cancer in the general population is roughly 4 percent. An 18 percent relative increase moves it to approximately 4.7 percent. The risk has not doubled. The risk has not tripled. The risk has gone from one in twenty-five to roughly one in twenty-one, and only if you are eating fifty grams of processed meat every day for life. Smoking, in the same classification scheme, increases your relative risk of lung cancer by approximately 1,900 percent. Your risk of lung cancer goes from roughly 1 percent to roughly 20 percent. Group 1 carcinogens, the category processed meat shares with cigarettes, also include: alcoholic drinks, the contraceptive pill, wood dust, salted fish, sunlight, outdoor air in heavily polluted cities, and the profession of being a painter. Group 2A, where unprocessed red meat sits, includes: shift work, drinking very hot beverages, and the profession of being a barber. The classification reflects the strength of the evidence that something causes cancer. It does not reflect how much cancer the thing actually causes. Bacon and tobacco are not in the same league. They share a room because the room is the size of a warehouse.

Any one individual person's scans are proof of absolutely nothing of any prognostic nor mechanistic value to society at large. It seems my sadly ill-educated friend that you have a very long way to go in your learning about epistemology. Go well...

So let me get this straight... You, a layperson it seems, somehow knows more about cardiovascular pathophysiology than I do? LMAO. Secondly, you could do with some training in logic, it seems... If you want to claim something is unsafe, its YOUR responsibility to prove it.