Dave Hirschman

Retired software engineer struggling to find health in a sick world, and truth in a world of lies. Retweets & likes != endorsement, just something interesting.

[Dave Hirschman @DaveHirschman51]

"If it ever upsets you that others don't support or won't confirm what you believe is true, then it is your grasp of what is Real that should be questioned, not theirs." -- Guy Finley

[Barry J Collins @I_Am_BJC]

This is literally the thought process of liberal women.

[Edward Dowd @DowdEdward]

Pre AI: “Your carbon footprint is responsible for the humanity ending climate change.”

Post AI: “Never mind…our new magic trick needs lots of power.”

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Grass-finished beef: roughly 1.5 to 2:1 omega-6 to omega-3.

Grain-finished beef: roughly 6 to 8:1.

Four times worse. Sounds damning.

Now the same thing in grams, in 100g of beef.

Grass-finished: about 0.12g omega-6 and 0.07g omega-3.

Grain-finished: about 0.25g omega-6 and 0.03g omega-3.

The entire scandal is a tenth of a gram.

A tablespoon of soybean oil carries about 7g of omega-6.

That is fifty-six times the difference you have been arguing about, in one spoon, on one salad.

The ratio is real. The quantity is a rounding error.

Percentages are what you reach for when the absolute numbers won't carry the argument.

And every beef animal in Britain spent the overwhelming majority of its life on grass, milk and forage. The finishing period is the last few months of it.

Grain-finished cattle are grass-fed cattle with a different final chapter.

The healthiest food on earth is grass-finished beef.

The second healthiest food on earth is grain-finished beef.

There is nothing in third place close enough to be worth naming.

Turning down beef because it finished on grain is walking past the two best foods available to a human being over a tenth of a gram, while the oil doing the actual damage sits on the shelf behind you at seven grams a spoon.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1911. Cottonseed is the rubbish left when the cotton comes off the crop, and it goes into soap and lamp oil because it is inedible. Bitter, cloudy, and it stinks. Procter and Gamble hit it with caustic soda, run it through bleaching clay and steam it under vacuum until the smell is gone, because it is rancid before that. Then they harden it, print a cake on the lid, and call it Crisco.

The year is 1961. The American Heart Association, turned into a national institution thirteen years earlier by a radio contest Procter and Gamble paid for, tells a country to take out the fat it has eaten since it had teeth and put in oil from a press. Your mother changes the tin under the sink. The margarine in it began life in 1869 as churned beef fat. There is none in it now.

The year is 1985. Rapeseed was an industrial lubricant, too bitter and too high in erucic acid to eat. It is bred down, renamed canola, cleared by the FDA, then crushed and washed in hexane, a solvent refined out of petroleum, and bleached and deodorised like all the rest. Cottonseed took fifty years to reach your kitchen. This takes ten to reach everything.

The year is 1988. A businessman in Omaha buys full-page adverts headed The Poisoning of America and names the firms putting palm and coconut in your biscuits. Ralston, Borden, Pillsbury, Quaker, Keebler and Pepperidge Farm all reformulate inside a year. Out goes the lard, out go the tropical oils, and in goes partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Your biscuits, your crackers, your salad cream. Gone in twelve months.

The year is 1990. The same man turns on the fryers, and inside a month McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's have dropped beef tallow. Every fryer on every high street follows. The oil sits at 180 degrees for eighteen hours, going darker and thicker as the day wears on, and what lifts off it is aldehydes. That catch at the back of your throat outside a chip shop is the oil coming apart.

The year is 1999. Soybean oil consumption has risen a thousandfold in a century, and the linoleic acid in what you eat has gone from under three per cent to over seven. None of it passes through. It is built into the fat on your hips and the wall of every cell you own. Your grandfather's body fat and yours are different substances. Obesity has doubled and diabetes is behind it.

The year is 2015. The regulator rules that partially hydrogenated oil should never have been in food. The tub is not withdrawn. Trans fats out, palm and interesterified fat and more seed oil in, new label, same price, same shelf, same aisle. Eighty years of this, and the men who ordered it are on television explaining that the problem is your willpower.

Now it is today.

It crept in over fifty years and took everything in five.

The bottle in your cupboard was rancid before they bleached it and is rancid again in your pan.

Every step was progress. Every step was settled science.

It has never once been a food.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

People ask me why I'm so passionate about cattle, and I walk away every time thinking I let her down.

Take the trick nobody else on this planet can do. A cow walks onto a hillside that will never grow a crop, a slope too steep, too wet, too thin, too rocky, the sort of ground that breaks a plough and bankrupts anybody who tries it, and she eats the only thing living up there. Grass. A substance from which no human being has ever extracted a single calorie. Then she stands out in the rain and turns it into steak.

She is doing the impossible half of agriculture, on land nobody else wants, in weather nobody else will work in, for nothing.

The machinery is properly deranged. Four chambers, the first a fermentation vat holding tens of gallons at a steady temperature, running a microbial population she farms inside her own body and feeds by hand. She sends the food back up and chews it again for eight hours a day, producing well over a hundred litres of saliva in the process, which is more fluid than most people drink in three months, entirely to keep the bugs comfortable. She is a brewery with legs, and she is also the brewer.

Those bugs make B12 out of cobalt and grass. She grows her own vitamins in her own stomach. No plant makes it, no human can make it, and every vegan alive is buying in a tablet what she produces for free, standing up, in a wet field, while thinking about nothing.

Then she gives the lot away.

Milk, a complete food that arrives warm. Butter and cheese, which is milk built to survive a winter. Beef, carrying the heme iron and the zinc and the retinol and the creatine in exactly the proportions you need, because the assembly was done by an animal built along the same lines as you. Tallow for the pan. Leather for your boots. And dung, which grows next year's grass, so the fertiliser plant sits on the same site as the meat operation and nobody drives anything anywhere.

Sunlight and rain in one end. The finest food available to a human being out of the other. On ground that grows nothing else. Using an engine that laboratories have spent a fortune failing to copy, in a warehouse, on a grant, with a press release.

For this she has been declared an environmental problem by people who have eaten her their entire lives and could not tell you what a rumen is.

I have never met a cow that was underperforming. I have met a great many committees.

Get her on your plate and be grateful.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

UC Davis tested 54 packaged foods sold as made with avocado oil last month. Forty-eight were cut with something cheaper.

93 per cent of chips labelled 100 per cent pure avocado oil.

71 per cent of the mayonnaise. Among American-made jars, every one.

Every salad dressing tested. Not one passed.

The same lab found in 2020 that 82 per cent of bottled avocado oil was rancid or adulterated, and three bottles marked extra virgin were essentially neat soybean oil.

Supermarket own-brands, tested in 2024. Seventy per cent failed.

Olive oil has run the same racket for longer. The European Commission's own review names the most common fraud in the sector as blending sunflower, corn, rapeseed and palm into olive oil and selling it as olive oil.

They add chlorophyll and beta-carotene so it looks right in the bottle.

In India the target is ghee. Delhi police seized 1,625 kilos last October. Cheap refined oil heated with vanaspati, flavoured, coloured, tinned to resemble the real brands.

Spain, 1981. Industrial rapeseed oil, denatured with aniline, deodorised and sold in unmarked drums as olive oil.

Twenty thousand fell ill. Three hundred died in the first year.

Now notice the direction every one of those frauds runs in.

Butter has never been cut with soybean oil. Nobody has ever watered down beef dripping.

Seed oil costs fifty cents a pound. The fat you thought you were buying costs five dollars.

So the premium you pay to avoid it is the exact margin that funds putting it in.

And there is still no enforceable legal standard for avocado oil in America.

The word means whatever the bottler decides it means.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Your stomach runs at pH 1.5, acid that strips flesh and kills what lives in rotting meat. A lion is nearer 3.6. You are closer to a vulture than to any ape alive.

You have no rumen, no cud, nowhere to park grass for two days while bacteria take it apart.

Your colon is short and quiet. A chimp's is a fermentation vat and he chews six hours a day to keep it running.

Sixty per cent of your gut is small intestine, where fat and protein go in. Sixty per cent of his is colon, where plants get fermented.

Your gut shrank to pay for your brain: sixty per cent fat, a fifth of your energy at rest, the most expensive organ any animal has ever run on leaves and never could.

You cannot make B12, no plant makes it either, and running out strips the insulation off your nerves for good.

You cannot make creatine in the amounts your muscle and brain want. That comes out of red meat.

You convert plant omega-3 to DHA at about one per cent, and DHA is the substance your retina and grey matter are physically built from.

You cannot trust beta-carotene for vitamin A. Millions carry a variant that wrecks the conversion and go their whole lives never knowing.

You take iron from meat at fifteen to thirty-five per cent through a receptor built for the version wrapped in blood. From spinach, about two.

Your teeth have no grinding plates and your jaw will not swing sideways like a cow's.

Your eyes face forward. That is what a hunter is given. A prey animal never gets it.

Acid built to dissolve carcasses, a gut too short to ferment a plant, and a brain too expensive to run on one.

Everything in your biology is screaming at you to eat meat.

And you insist on a kale smoothie and a tablet.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Grass covers about a quarter of the ice free land on earth, and there is not a human alive who can eat a blade of it.

Grass is cellulose. Cellulose is glucose, the same sugar as in bread and honey, chained end to end.

The only difference is the bond holding the chain together.

Starch links its glucose one way and you carry the enzyme for it.

Cellulose links it the other way and you carry nothing.

One bond, and half the planet's surface goes from dinner to lawn.

So you eat the leaves and you get nothing. It goes in green and comes out green, which is roughly what a salad is for.

The cow opens a hundred litres of fermentation on the same mouthful.

Microbes it does not make, doing a job it cannot do, snapping the bond neither of you can touch.

Out come acetate, propionate and butyrate, and the whole animal runs on those fats instead of sugar.

Then the microbes die, wash downstream, and get digested as protein.

The cow is farming bacteria and eating the crop.

Eat the cow and you get complete protein, heme iron, zinc, B12, retinol, K2, creatine and carnosine, not one of which was ever in the grass.

The man with the leaves is doing an impression of a ruminant, badly, with no rumen and a vinaigrette.

Two and a half million years and we never grew the enzyme. We found the animal that had it and put a fence round it.

Stop chewing the lock. Eat the key.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Nearly half the fat inside a human artery plaque is omega-6 from vegetable oil.

Somebody took the plaques out and weighed what was in them.

A London team pulled them from men who had died of heart disease, then compared each plaque against the fat on that man's own body, which is a decades-long record of what he had been eating.

The omega-6 in the body fat matched the omega-6 in the plaque.

The omega-6 in the blood matched the omega-6 in the plaque.

The saturated fat matched nothing at all.

Three years later the same group counted 668 plaques taken from thirty men dead of ischaemic heart disease.

Omega-6 came to between 44 and 46 per cent of all the fat in them.

Which is what you would expect, because of how a plaque is actually built.

An LDL particle has to oxidise before a macrophage will swallow it. The macrophage becomes a foam cell. The foam cell becomes the plaque. Every cardiologist on earth agrees on that sequence.

Oxidation starts by tearing a hydrogen off a fatty acid, and it can only tear one off a polyunsaturated fat. A saturated molecule offers nothing to grab. A monounsaturated molecule barely does.

So linoleic acid is the ingredient the disease requires. It is the thing that goes rancid, gets eaten, and gets left in the artery wall.

Saturated fat cannot perform that reaction. It has never been chemically capable of it.

The Lancet printed the first paper in 1994, and the authors wrote plainly that the push towards eating more polyunsaturated fat ought to be reconsidered.

Nobody reconsidered anything.

Butter has served thirty years for a crime the frying oil committed, and the evidence was on the slab the whole time.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

1979: fasting glucose over 140 makes you diabetic.
1997: lowered to 126.
Millions of new diabetics. Same blood.

1997: prediabetes starts at 110.
2003: lowered to 100.
A third of American adults, created by a footnote.

1984: high blood pressure is 160/95.
2017: lowered to 130/80.
American hypertension goes from 32 per cent of adults to 46. Thirty-one million new patients in a morning.

2001: the cholesterol target is 130.
2004: lowered to 100, and to 70 for the high risk.
Statin eligibility expands by millions.

Eight of the nine men who wrote that 2004 update were on the payroll of companies selling statins. They disclosed it only when forced.

1994: a WHO panel invents osteopenia. Bone that is not thin enough to break, given a name and a prescription. Half of older women qualify.

Nobody got sicker on any of those dates. A committee sat down and a number moved.

The threshold drops, the market widens, and the drug is already licensed and sitting in the warehouse.

Your grandfather was healthy at 145/92. You are ill at 132/81.

Nothing about the body has changed. Only the paperwork, and who profits from it.

[Roman Bystrianyk @RBystrianyk]

60+ years of failing with flu vaccines... but let's just keep trying. Trust us.

“As of 2022, after more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines, very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been noted. As pointed out decades ago, and still true today, the rates of effectiveness of our best approved influenza vaccines would be inadequate for licensure for most other vaccine-preventable diseases… Taking all of these factors into account, it is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines… Durably protective vaccines against non-systemic mucosal respiratory viruses with high mortality rates have thus far eluded vaccine development efforts.”

[David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger, and Anthony S. Fauci, “Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenza viruses, and other respiratory viruses,” Cell Host Microbe, January 11, 2023, pp. 146–157.]

https://t.co/AqZWTA0WN5

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The fries you ate in 2024 is still in you today, which is why "everything in moderation" is a sentence that only works on substances that leave.

Linoleic acid has a half-life in human fat tissue of roughly 680 days. Two years to clear half of it. Two more to clear half of what is left.

- Year 2: half gone
- Year 4: three quarters gone
- Year 6: seven eighths gone
- Clean: closer to a decade than a diet

Sugar is gone by bedtime. Alcohol is gone by Tuesday. This one moves in.

So there is no such thing as a cheat meal. There is a deposit and a two-year mortgage on it, taken out on a Friday night because somebody told you life is for living.

Now the part that should have made the news. Linoleic acid in the body fat of American adults rose 136 per cent over the last half century. Not intake, not survey answers, not a food diary. That is what was found when researchers cut into people and looked. Your grandmother's body fat and yours are two different materials.

And it does not sit there quietly. Every time you lose weight you release it back into circulation, so the oil you fried in during 2019 gets a second run through your bloodstream on the way out. Anyone who has dropped two stone this year has spent the summer metabolising 2022.

The dietitian who tells you one meal will not hurt is technically correct and entirely useless, because nobody has ever eaten one meal.

Six years in, I can tell you the gap between year one and year four is not subtle, and nobody still counting in weeks has felt it yet.

You did not get here in a fortnight. Stop taking advice from people who discuss this in fortnights.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A woman walks in feeling fine, has a routine cholesterol test, and leaves eleven years later on nine drugs, none of which treat anything she came in with.

Nothing went wrong. That is the machine running exactly as it was built to run.

Day one: she is well. The nurse takes bloods because she has turned fifty and the computer said so.

Week two: cholesterol 6.1. Statin. She arrived a woman and leaves a patient, which is a promotion in this building.

Month nine: her legs ache on the stairs. Told statins rarely do that, and to persist.

Year one: blood sugar has drifted up, which statins are known to do. She is now prediabetic. Metformin.

Year two: metformin has introduced her to her own bathroom. She adjusts her life around it rather than mention it.

Year three: reflux. A proton pump inhibitor goes on, indefinitely, with no conversation about ever coming off.

Year four: stomach acid flattened, so B12 and iron stop absorbing properly. She is exhausted. Her bloods are described as satisfactory.

Year five: tired, aching, foggy, flat. Offered an antidepressant, and takes it, because by now she has accepted that she is simply someone who gets ill.

Year six: osteopenia on the scan. Nobody mentions she was advised at forty to keep the weights light.

Year eight: blood pressure up. Two more tablets, one to fix the ankles the first one swelled.

Year eleven: nine medications and a repeat prescription that renews itself without a human being reading it.

Her cholesterol is magnificent. She has never felt worse.

Not one of those prescriptions was an error. Every single one correctly treated the drug in front of it.

A well person buys nothing. A dead person buys nothing.

The whole business sits in the corridor between the two, and forty years of expertise has gone into keeping people walking slowly down the middle of it.

[Helen Turner @HelenTurne50027]

@Luizmd Rooted in decades of self-interest, more like!
So it looks to me anyway.

[Dave Hirschman @DaveHirschman51]

@MicroBerto 😄

[Michael Easter @Michael_Easter]

The Blue Zones—places where people supposedly live past 100 at extraordinary rates—aren't real.

A 🧵 on what went wrong: bad record keeping, pension fraud, and lots of money.

[Shoes 🇺🇸 @shoeskg57]

@Luizmd

[Luiz M.D. @Luizmd]

Pharma literally “tested” the shot for 6 months. And vaxxers went into drive thrus to get injected by complete strangers. 🤦🏽‍♂️

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1925. Your doctor says you look run down and writes down the name of a tonic, and you drink it the way you drink anything a doctor names, a bottle a day, feeling marvellous. It is radium in distilled water. Four hundred thousand bottles are sold on medical endorsement, and the steel magnate who got through fifteen hundred of them is buried in 1932 in a lead-lined coffin.

The year is 1948. Your baby is screaming with teething, so you do what the health visitor says and work a fingertip of powder into his gums, morning and night, for months. Then his hands and feet go raw and pink, daylight becomes unbearable, and the child who was babbling in the spring stops speaking. The powder is mercury, a fifth of the babies it does this to die, and it stays on the shelf until 1954.

The year is 1958. Your wife is seven months gone and they send her down the corridor for the routine X-ray, and she lies on the cold plate with her coat over the chair and thinks nothing of it. An Oxford epidemiologist has just shown that one abdominal X-ray in pregnancy roughly doubles the child's chance of dying of cancer before adolescence. The profession declines to believe her, her funding dries up, and the radiographers carry on for twenty years.

The year is 1983. Your son has haemophilia, and the new treatment means no more nights in hospital, just a vial from the fridge and a needle at the kitchen table before school. The vial is pooled from thousands of paid American donors, some of them prisoners. Around twelve hundred and fifty British haemophiliacs are given HIV this way, and the inquiry that finally says so out loud reports in 2024.

The year is 1989. You are on a ward after your heart attack watching the monitor throw an extra beat, and they start you on a tablet to stop it doing that, because obviously a heart that skips is a heart about to stop. Somebody finally tests the tablet against a placebo. Seven point seven per cent dead within ten months on the drug, three per cent on the dummy, and the trial is halted early.

The year is 1995. Your sister takes the high-dose chemotherapy with the bone marrow transplant because her oncologist calls it her best chance, and you sit in that corridor for four weeks while it takes her hair, her gut lining and two stone. Forty thousand American women go through it. In 1999 the trials find no survival advantage over ordinary treatment, and in 2000 the data that convinced everybody turns out to have been invented.

The year is 2016. Your daughter is epileptic and pregnant and stays on the medicine that has kept her seizure-free since she was nineteen, because nobody at any appointment has ever told her otherwise. That is the year the warning finally reaches the box. The risk had been in the literature since the seventies, and roughly twenty thousand British children were born into it while the paperwork caught up.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new drugs, new numbers and a fresh consensus, and he can tell you exactly what the evidence shows.

So could every doctor on this list.

None of it was quackery. All of it was the standard of care, taught in the schools, printed in the guidelines, paid for by the state.

That is what a wrong answer looks like from the inside, and you are standing in one now.

[leroy @AsSmith8]

@PolymarketSport