How the Risk Society model of “progress” explains the COVID-19 paralysis, how Zombies were enlisted in the cause, and what hope there is left of not becoming Zombies ourselves. (Note: this article was originally posted on Pearl Harbor day 2020, as a subscriber-only post on my Patreon account - to stay up-to-date with my research (except matters of urgent public interest, such as selenium and Covid-19 theories, which will always be free) in these low-employment times, please subscribe!)

“Whereas the utopia of equality contains a wealth of substantial and positive goals of social change, the utopia of the risk society remains peculiarly negative and defensive. Basically, one is no longer concerned with attaining something ‘good’, but rather with preventing the worst.

The dream of the old society is that everyone wants and ought to have a share of the pie. The utopia of the risk society is that everyone should be spared from poisoning.”
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, 1986

In the summer of late 1968, two years after I arrived in New Zealand with my family as an 8-year old, what would become known as the Hong Kong Flu arrived. We were all sick and could barely move to feed ourselves. I remember to this day the feeling of one’s sinuses and bronchial passages being encased in and fossilized by concretions of phlegm day after day. Getting back to normal, if I ever did, took forever. The Hong Kong Flu killed a million people world-wide; 100,000 of these were in the USA. When mortuary room ran out, bodies were stacked in the subways in Berlin. Given that there are many more people alive today than in the 60’s who can be killed by such an infection, the Hong Kong Flu seems a decent approximation of the virulence of COVID-19.
Yet, Woodstock, and Altamont, went ahead in 1969, at the height of the epidemic in the USA. I’ve never seen the flu mentioned in any hippie memorial. The Vietnam War went on – if the flu is mentioned in histories of the Tet offensive, it doesn’t seem to have influenced strategy or logistics.
This wasn’t a result of ignorance. In the 1966 Star Trek episode The Naked Time (series 1, episode 4), Lt (jg) Joe Tormolen is infected by an alien virus while inspecting facilities on the planet Psi 2000. We first see Lt (jg) Joe wearing a biohazard suit (with an oddly feminine-patterned facemask – the props crew, probably, having used offcuts of material bought to scantily clad the green-skinned dancing girls on some other planet) then see him put his hand under the mask to scratch his face. Even though this will not be the route of infection, the scene is included to signal that Lt (jg) Joe is the crew member who is going to catch something.

The differences in risk that appear are usually small, and the certainty is low, so why do we care so much? A few years ago I came across a blog post by documentary maker Adam Curtis which explains this important change in the function of society through the “risk society” predictions of Ulrich Beck, quoted above. Curtis says:

That was written in 1986 - and it is remarkably prescient. Because that short paragraph pretty much describes the present day mood in our society. A world where individuals are constantly calibrating risks in their lives, while politicians are expected to anticipate and avoid all future risks and dangers.

And everyone gives up on the idea of creating equality, which allows inequality to increase massively.

Beck’s book is extraordinary - because he came from the liberal left. Yet he is basically saying that in the face of these new potential risks we will have to move away from the political idea of progress and social reform - and instead hunker down in the brace position and try and anticipate all dangers that might be coming at us out of the darkness.

In 1968 a lot of people, from Ho Chi Min to LBJ to the crowd at Woodstock, had progress and social reform on their minds. Lockdown after MLK’s murder? Good luck with that. Suspend flights to and from Vietnam? Not going to happen for other reasons. The world’s machinery was simply being applied to different ends, and few thought it could or should be diverted to stop a pandemic.

At some point faith that the world could be radically changed, and that wars could be convincingly won, faded away. And science, perverted by the political and economic demands placed on it by the Cold War and the opportunities of consumerist capitalism, became a source of extra risk – leaky nuclear reactors, persistent pollutants, dodgy drugs, instead of the engine and arbiter of progress.

Curtis again:
“I think the truth probably is that it was the baby boomers losing their youth - and finding themselves unable to face the fact of their own mortality - they started to project their fears onto the rest of society. But somehow people like Beck transformed this into a grand pessimistic ideology.”

Beck’s original risk society theorem was about limiting man-made risk, but a pandemic, once you can do something about it, easily becomes such a risk; for example, jet aircraft are man-made vectors for transmitting pathogens rapidly around the world. Just as Godzilla represented the risk of nuclear power to a generation of Japanese, the Centres for Disease Control decided, about a decade ago, to use Zombies in their pandemic education programs.
You heard me right – Zombies. Imaginary monsters of undead human lineage derived from Afro-Caribbean folk tradition, and introduced to modern audiences by some relatively progressive film-makers who side-stepped any possible racist implications to create a more generalized myth of “the Other”. The Zombie film is basically an exercise in imagining genocide at a remove. You wake up one day and your neighbours are mindlessly intent on killing you and there’s nothing you can do about it – a common enough experience in mid 20th-century Europe. In the usual Zombie film, the tables will be turned, as they were in Europe. There will then be a genocide of Zombies, but it’s ethical because Zombies, though in human form and formerly known to us as our fellow humans, have become convincingly subhuman. It may be cathartic, but it’s not reassuring.

But the Zombie idea appealed to educators globally, as a way of getting kids interested in scientific concepts like exponential spread. And just as a way of pleasing kids and keeping them entertained – “look up from your video game, because this lesson’s like a video game!” – which is what education is turning into (anything too rigorous rapidly becomes financially and socially “risky”). I remember the kids coming home from school and talking about their Zombie lessons and wondering WTAF?

As discussed in an NZ Medical Journal article in 2018, the evidence that teaching kids about Zombies improves their preparedness as young adults is lacking. But it certainly allows them to see pandemics in dehumanizing terms, because no-one cares what happens to Zombies.
And so New Zealand went, overnight, from being a society where any expression of concern about immigration numbers for any reason was automatically flagged as “racist” and shouted down, to being the most “Build the Wall!” society on earth, a Hermit Kingdom jealously guarding its borders, with those members of society most progressive in normal times tending to be most vocal in defence of the new isolationism and any other restrictive measure needed to eliminate risk.
Not, I should add, that NZ’s approach has been overtly repressive – unlike Australia we haven’t implemented large fines, and have avoided violent arrests, for breaches of Covid decorum. Police are more likely to tell you that your behaviour is very disappointing and they expected better from you - and no-one wants to hear that.
As Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says, “Be Kind”. You can take this as a reference to Albert Camus’ The Plague or Ellen DeGeneres’ The Ellen Show, or both, depending on your background, but it’s been useful advice to fall back on. Like most of the government’s messaging so far, it’s on point, easy to conceptualise, and leaves little room for confusion.

Nor has the NZ government’s reaction been entirely regressive. The slow claw-back of workers’ rights by a Labour party which famously surrendered to neo-liberalism in the 1980s has if anything strengthened under Covid; wages and benefits have been increased as more workers have lost their jobs and small businesses have failed. The idea that everyone is in the same boat here – a kind of Covid-class consciousness - is generally accepted.
NZ is a small country, we all know each other, and back in the early 90’s now-finance minister and deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson, then head of the Otago Student’s Union, asked my band to play at his 21st. As bandleader I shared a common mission with Grant as host, that of keeping the party going and the inevitable Nazi skinhead gatecrasher contingent peaceful, which when you think about it is not unlike the mission of any successful left-leaning government in a democracy.

Talking about gatecrashers, QAnon and the associated plandemic theorists have indeed made inroads here. A few thousand people attended an illegal “Freedom” march in Auckland during the brief second lockdown of that city. And the right-thinking rest of NZ society – the Lockdown Liberals, to use Anton Jäger’s phrase, are being taught to see the spread of QAnon – a lab-grown virus if ever there was one - as another kind of Zombie pandemic.

(Since I wrote the first draft of this essay, NZ investigative journalist David Farrier, who is well-informed on QAnon, has begun sharing comics by Dan Vernon portraying conspiracy theorists as Zombies. One of these portrays cancelled, delusional chef Pete Evans* as a Zombie and describes the MAGA hat as a “neo-Nazi” symbol. More realistically, and more in keeping with the neo-Nazi cartoon shared by Evans that the comic was an outraged response to, the MAGA hat will go down in history as the symbol of a grifter-capitalist grab at political power - “say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.”)

Lockdown liberals also look askance on another group in NZ known as Plan B,  academics who warn that we can’t stay hermits forever, that lockdowns have both predictable and unforeseen consequences, and that we should be openly debating the alternatives whether we choose to embrace them or not.
The argument against these Covid-relativists is that it is heartless to consider the economy when lives are at stake - as if poverty no longer kills, as if life-extending medical treatments are cheap.
It's a trolly problem where the view on both lines is obscured by distance, and the categorical imperative is to preserve the lives that seem closest in time – those that would be lost to Covid – by diverting the runaway trolly off towards the lives unseen.


We’ll open the country when “we” have a vaccine, even though that will inevitably result in the infections we’ve been postponing, albeit hopefully at a lower rate. In the meantime, we seem to have done nothing in New Zealand to identify and quantify, let alone treat, the risk factors that are most likely to influence the virulence of COVID-19; from here these look like vitamin D deficiency, selenium deficiency (endemic in New Zealand), diabetes and obesity, and the polyunsaturated fat content of one’s fat stores – most of which are unintended consequences of earlier Risk Society initiatives - all of which are metabolically interlinked in their interaction with the virus, and all of which can easily be modified in whatever time we have - if the Risk Society so decides.

Ironically, we’d know a lot more about the factors influencing SARS CoV-2 virulence if we used more often the methods of the father of risk epidemiology, Austin Bradford Hill. In the 1960’s, Hill conceptualised the scientific argument against cigarettes in a way that could be seen as conclusive. Hill’s criteria are neglected today (or sometimes rewritten in order to weaken them as a form of special pleading) because, taken as a whole, they tend to screen out the small, confounded, possibly imaginary, and practically meaningless risks that are so popular for generating media articles and influencer pay-days today, like the story that inspired Curtis’s Vegetables of Truth.

We can become more like Bradford Hill, and less like Ulrich Beck, if and when we decide to stop being Zombies and start living.


* It’s a theme for another day, what caused Pete Evans, who did help expose one Big Lie and was pilloried for it by the corrupt Aussie dietetics establishment and the predatory press, to start seeing Big Lies everywhere and malign “elites” behind everything till his mind turned to mush.

I’ve been lucky enough to have worked as an extra on the latest fantasy series, and this means I have finally had the time and the freedom from digital poisoning to read some of the books I have wanted to finish.

Like Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. A Thomas Mann book is long and its characters and ideas only really come into focus in the second half. But when they do, wow. Hitler – what were the Germans thinking? Mann describes not the rise of the Nazis but the fall of reason and cults of irrationality that preceded it. And which could precede any form of extreme collectivism anywhere. What he describes isn’t the Popper analysis everyone bandied about cack-handed back when we thought, embarrassingly, that any reinvigorated conservative critique of progressive radicalism was tantamount to a fascist coup. It’s something more general, something latent in our own instinct to find the self-serving pattern of submission and permission to suit any uncertain times, and also latent in the instinct of intellectuals to make all times seem so uncertain that shit like that can be made to happen in them.
I also read four plays by Ibsen, all good and Ghosts and Hedda Gabbler being perfect marvels, the best plays I can remember having read. Seeing these plays as a bourgeoise in a Victorian theatre must have felt like finding a bomb under your seat.
I was also able to start part 2 (having already read parts 1 and 3) of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Bernard Shaw, covering the years 1898-1918. Shaw, a playwright (and disciple of Ibsen), is an unsympathetic character, with his vegetarianism, asexuality, vanity and urge to pontificate on everything, but he’s also the man who was a tireless cheerleader, inventor, and a paradoxically diligent planner for much of what we call progress in the Western world. Everyone being paid the same amount, men and women being treated by society as if they were physiologically and psychologically identical – these were Shaw’s ideas, expressed frequently enough during an age when they only seemed outlandish and attention-seeking to become familiar, if still attention-seeking, concepts in our own times. And so much more – Shaw was the original SJW, with the important exception that he could and did laugh at himself, and was prepared to do the grinding bureaucratic work needed to make civics work well – better schools, better drains, that sort of thing. And not a typical SJW either in that he courted and tolerated opposition in order to better spread his views. Thus he debated G.K. Chesterton, in debates chaired by Hilaire Belloc in a friendly but no-holds barred fashion, for many years. 

And most importantly for our purposes, Shaw was an antivaxxer who debated the most famous vaccinationist of his days, Sir Almroth Wright, regularly for decades. Wright, in fact, sought out Shaw first for publicity purposes.
Shaw’s opposition to vaccination was in part emotional (as an anti-vivisectionist), in part mystical (as a believer in a Life Force which trumped Darwinian evolution), in part envious of the prestige belonging to the freemasonry of Medicine over that of Art.
But he also sensed the role of bunkum in medicine, the unproven theories presented as fact, the faked experiments presented as proof, the corrupting influence of money, and the hollowness of appeal to authority (when the British government wanted to promote Wright’s serum they gave him a knighthood, then used his “Sir” as a selling point). 

“Shaw’s sense of vulnerability to the power of this medical elite, replacing his fear of death, gives his satire its edge…Behind these years of correspondence and controversy with Wright, and the play [The Doctor’s Dilemma] that resulted from their association, there lay a wish to take authority from the orthodoxly educated and give it to outsiders… the medical freemasonry was a closed circle of privileged people whose mesmeric power over other human beings angered Shaw.”

Most relevantly to the present day, he saw vaccination as a shameful cover-up for poverty. No need to fix the drains, supply decent housing, or feed the poor properly if you can stop a pandemic breeding in the slums, or at least the fear of one, or at least reduce the chances of it reaching the bourgeoisie, with a cheap jab. And this point – which perhaps acknowledges that vaccination can be effective, but highlights the social cost of its success – remains valid today.

Modern medical opinion, as reported by Holroyd, seems to be, that Sir Almroth Wright’s serum was worthless. There is even a theory that it, or something very like it, gave the Spanish flu what it needed to get going. I don’t have the reading or expertise to comment on that. But I do know that Wright’s certainty that women were psychologically unfit to vote was misplaced, and that his repeated opinion that “the effect of hygiene is aesthetic” was positively dangerous, even if it always gave Shaw the opening to argue the case for Art.  

Which brings us to today. Diet is an arm of hygiene just as surely as hand-washing and the avoidance of crowded indoor spaces, both effective in reducing the spread of COVID19 and other infectious diseases. We can see from China and other places that an adequate selenium level of the diet alone quite possibly reduces the case fatality rate (CFR) for COVID-19 by a factor of 4. We can see that higher vitamin D levels (a sign of good diet quality overall, and not only sunlight exposure or vitamin D intake) are associated with a greatly reduced CFR. And that higher levels of unsaturated fat in fat stores (as in the US population) increase the risk of lung damage and death when infected with SARS-CoV-2. Unsaturated fat is the main component of margarines and the cheap oils used to cook the food of the poor; white bread helps to keep it from being burned for fuel; meanwhile the wealthy eat butter and steak, and are not so prone to the storage of excess fat, despite needing to do less work.
Most of these risk factors, as I’ve said before, are actually the unintended consequences of earlier scientific error regarding the risk of skin cancer (which unsaturated oils also promote) and heart disease (which is mainly driven by the excessive insulin response to the modern diet).

A recent example of how the pro-vax narrative ignores the effects of poverty, and hygiene including diet, appeared in the blog of David Farrier. I’ve mentioned Farrier before in this blog because he’s quite a good bellwether of righteous opinion, and because he’s worth reading for his own sake. He’s the creator of an entertaining film, Tickled, about the human capacity for deception, and has a pretty good take on conspiracy theory and its psychology. But it depends whose conspiracy theory, because beneath his milquetoast veneer of kink Farrier is a bog-standard PMC worrywart and always defers to the interests of his class.

In this article on fake news written by Farrier’s friend Byron Coley, which is otherwise a pretty good guide to the conspiracy theory misinformation landscape inside NZ, we get an example of misinformation by omission, regarding the measles epidemic in Samoa, in a section on some Covid grifters who ran for parliament on the New Conservative platform.

" In April on Talano Sa’o, Tildsley spent an episode interviewing a man she described as “an unsung hero in Samoa” Edwin Tamasese.

“During the measles pandemic — which was devastating to our people, killed around seventy of our babies — he was right in the middle of it, and he was part of sharing vitamin D, vitamin A, vitamin C, and he did what he needed to do.”

Tamasese, who has no medical training, spread the false claim during the measles outbreak that authorities were “seeding” the country with measles through the emergency mass immunisation program deployed to stem the epidemic."

So far, so bad. But the story of the Samoan measles outbreak is being manipulated here. The outbreak happened after Samoa’s regular measles vaccination program was stopped, and it was stopped after two babies died from a botched vaccination. It was the deaths of these two babies, and not the activities of anti-vax grifters, that lead to the deaths of 70 children. The Samoan health service, for reasons that are still not clear, could not run a safe vaccination program. Understandably parents chose not to take further risks, until the cost of not having vaccinated their children became obvious. Samoa has a population of 202,506, and 83 people died in the measles epidemic, among 5,700 confirmed cases. New Zealand has a population of 5 million, the same epidemic was described as the worst since 1938, with 2,194 confirmed cases, and two unborn fetuses in the second trimester died as a result of the outbreak. New Zealand many have higher vaccination rates than Samoa, at least among children, but it also has a thriving population of privileged unvaccinated kids.

This is a huge difference in impact. It is the kind of inequality of outcomes that is usually attributed to systemic racism, colonization etc. But when we see a difference so extreme that it really can be interpreted as evidence of those things by anyone with eyes to see, everyone is strangely silent.
Because systemic racism and neo-colonial exploitation could be real features of life in Samoa, if New Zealand’s experience is anything to go by. What else do we call the replacement of traditional foods with imported rubbish, under a system that promotes Western dietary values? New Zealand has a large Samoan population, and New Zealand’s dietary guidelines are dismissive of all the traditional Pacific energy foods in favour of grains. The use of coconut is confused with coconut oil and discouraged in patronising statements like “The Heart Foundation considers that when indigenous people consume coconut flesh and milk along with fish and vegetables, and they are also physically active, the coconut consumption is unlikely to put them at risk of cardiovascular disease. They are in a very different situation from people who consume coconut oil along with a typical western diet.”
Which if true (and the claim is still untested, as Shaw would have recognized, but likely to be untrue) would be true of any food supplying energy. Is it also saying that coconut is unhealthy for a sedentary population? That’s also unlikely to be true.
Traditional diets, and decent diets aligned with them, have long been disrupted in the Islands by Western-trained medical freemasons and commercial traders of imported goods, often working hand-in-hand. If you want to call it structural racism I won’t stop you. But weird how silent the usual suspects are.

Would the grifter’s supplements have saved lives? A silver bullet nutritional approach to systemic deprivation is rarely highly effective, but according to the Cochrane Collaboration, the ultimate in evidence-based medicine “Vitamin A reduces the risk of death from measles by 87% for children younger than 2 years”.
Yet the Samoan authorities were telling parents to ignore the grifters. Did they throw the babies out with the bathwater, or were they also supplying the vitamins to the unvaccinated, preferably before they got measles?

I don’t know the answers. But I do read the papers, watch the TV news, and look at stories on the internet. If I don’t know then it’s likely that very few people know. They only know what they’re told, and the narrative is owned by people who won’t tell you these important things. It’s still owned by Sir Almroth Wright. There’s an alternative narrative, of course, but you certainly can’t trust the people who own that.

Which leaves it up to the people who claim to be investigative – your David Farriers and Byron Coleys – to find out the truth for us, even if this does rattle their class interests.

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By now, we've all seen them - studies that purport to show equivalent effects of LCHF and HCLF diets once diet quality is addressed and people are Eating Whole Unprocessed Foods.
The latter is a good thing, the default to go for in terms of population health; macronutrient tweaking is next-level.
But here's a question - why were almost all the original studies that validated the efficacy of LCHF diets to a skeptical medical world comparisons of ad lib low carb vs energy-restricted low fat?
To make a really low carb high fat diet (unless you want to pretend a high-protein diet is that) you're going to be using some isolated fats (cream) or refined ones (coconut oil, olive oil). There may not be sugar in your chocolate bar, but there will be cocoa butter.
This only works if in some way those isolated fats are NOT equivalent to sugar and flour.
What is the evidence for a difference?

One of the more lasting concepts in carb nutrition is the glycemic index, the average speed at which a food appears as glucose in the system. It's not perfect because sugar is only half glucose so is lower GI, but you get the idea.
High GI is worse for you.

The PURE study is good for producing null results, which makes whatever it does throw up seem a bit more reliable than most nutritional epidemiology.[1]

"In the study population, 8780 deaths and 8252 major cardiovascular events occurred during the follow-up period. After performing extensive adjustments comparing the lowest and highest glycemic-index quintiles, we found that a diet with a high glycemic index was associated with an increased risk of a major cardiovascular event or death, both among participants with preexisting cardiovascular disease (hazard ratio, 1.51; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.25 to 1.82) and among those without such disease (hazard ratio, 1.21; 95% CI, 1.11 to 1.34). Among the components of the primary outcome, a high glycemic index was also associated with an increased risk of death from cardiovascular causes. The results with respect to glycemic load were similar to the findings regarding the glycemic index among the participants with cardiovascular disease at baseline, but the association was not significant among those without preexisting cardiovascular disease."

As I've said before, everything in plants that is supposed to be good for you but isn't actually a real nutrient is probably lowering GI in some way. It's the glucose (glycemic load above) but the way it arrives in your bloodstream (GI) is more pointed.

Is there equivalency for fats? Do fats that are rapidly absorbed correlate with disease?
That would be the medium chain fatty acids, MCFA.

"In comparison to triglycerides containing LCFAs, those containing MCFAs are more rapidly hydrolyzed in the intestinal tract and do not become incorporated into chylomicrons. SCFAs and MCFAs are transported by portal bloodstream to the liver, where they are readily metabolized."[2]

And perhaps also the unsaturated fatty acids, UFA.

"Although pancreatic lipase hydrolyzes fat only in the 1 and 3 positions of the molecule, it is nevertheless possible for fatty acids in the 2 position of the triacylglycerol to be hydrolyzed. This apparent violation of the specificity of pancreatic lipase occurs because of the relative instability of both the 2-monoacylglycerol and the 1,2-diacylglycerol (Crossley et al., 1959). These molecules rearrange by migration of the fatty acid in the 2 position to the 1 or 3 position, which is readily hydrolyzed by lipase (Figure 18–3). This rearrangement is more rapid when the fatty acid is either a short-chain one or an unsaturated one, and a portion of the 2-position fatty acids may be absorbed as fatty acids rather than as monoacylglycerols (Benzonana et al., 1964)."[3]

We'll call this the fat index, FI.
Are fatty acids with a high FI worse than low-FI fats?
No.
In epidemiological studies of individual fatty acids and their associations with disease risk, the MCFAs, which are SFAs, are always more benign than the longer-chain SFAs (see table 2).[4]

"Two recent studies from the Netherlands reported largely diverging findings. In the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition study, intakes of 4:0-10:0 and 12:0 were inversely associated with ischemic heart disease risk, but no associations were found for 14:0, 16:0, and 18:0. However, in the Rotterdam study, only 16:0 intake was associated with higher risk of coronary heart disease." [see also table 2]

In an overfeeding experiment, the benefits of MCFA were obvious.[5]

"In conclusion, substitution of a small amount of dietary LCFAs with MCFAs rescues insulin action in conditions of lipid-induced energy excess."

This is because high-FI fatty acids are metabolized more rapidly, and, in the case of MCFAs, oxidized with less metabolic and hormonal effort than LCFA.[2,6]


In conclusion - if you eat carbs in bulk you will need to pay some attention to the speed at which your body absorbs them; this rules out eating purified carbohydrates.

If you eat fats in bulk, you need pay little attention to the speed your body absorbs them; you may want more fast-absorbing fatty acids in your food, but this does not rule out eating purified fats.

[1] Jenkins DJA, Dehghan M, Mente A, Bangdiwala SI, Rangarajan S, Srichaikul K, Mohan V, Avezum A, Díaz R, Rosengren A, Lanas F, Lopez-Jaramillo P, Li W, Oguz A, Khatib R, Poirier P, Mohammadifard N, Pepe A, Alhabib KF, Chifamba J, Yusufali AH, Iqbal R, Yeates K, Yusoff K, Ismail N, Teo K, Swaminathan S, Liu X, Zatońska K, Yusuf R, Yusuf S; PURE Study Investigators. Glycemic Index, Glycemic Load, and Cardiovascular Disease and Mortality. N Engl J Med. 2021 Apr 8;384(14):1312-1322. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2007123. Epub 2021 Feb 24. PMID: 33626252.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007123

[2] Schönfeld P, Wojtczak L. Short- and medium-chain fatty acids in energy metabolism: the cellular perspective. J Lipid Res. 2016;57(6):943-954. doi:10.1194/jlr.R067629
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4878196/

[3] Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Military Nutrition Research; Marriott BM, editor. Food Components to Enhance Performance: An Evaluation of Potential Performance-Enhancing Food Components for Operational Rations. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1994. 18, Structured Lipids: An Overview and Comments on Performance Enhancement Potential. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209064/

[4] Zong G, Li Y, Wanders A J, Alssema M, Zock P L, Willett W C et al. Intake of individual saturated fatty acids and risk of coronary heart disease in US men and women: two prospective longitudinal cohort studies BMJ 2016; 355 :i5796 doi:10.1136/bmj.i5796
https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5796

[5] Anne-Marie Lundsgaard, Andreas M. Fritzen, Kim A. Sjøberg, Maximilian Kleinert, Erik A. Richter, Bente Kiens. Small Amounts of Dietary Medium-Chain Fatty Acids Protect Against Insulin Resistance During Caloric Excess in Humans.
Diabetes Jan 2021, 70 (1) 91-98; DOI: 10.2337/db20-0582
https://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/70/1/91

[6] James P DeLany, Marlene M Windhauser, Catherine M Champagne, George A Bray, Differential oxidation of individual dietary fatty acids in humans, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 72, Issue 4, October 2000, Pages 905–911, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/72.4.905

Imagine a counterfactual America, an alternative history wherein it has always been a well-known and accepted fact that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone-wolf Marxist, had assassinated the President of the United States for rational Marxist reasons as well as subterranean personal ones. In this America, a school shooting by a paranoid vegan only encourages logical and evidence-based discussion of gun control and mental illness, a terror attack by Islamist hijackers is unanimously attributed to its obvious perpetrators, the Moon is American, and one cannot simply say that one has won an election which one has lost. It is an America in which Dr Fauci can sleep easy, and in which, sometimes, a virus is only a virus.
There were conspiracy theorists before JFK of course, indeed Oswald had tried to kill one of them, General Edwin Walker, the only human target he missed putting one or more bullets into. Yet the creative JFK theories have had a wider appeal across American society than the paranoic blend of European antisemitism and John Birch anti-communism indulged in by Walker and his contemporaries. Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, tried to have Walker committed after he incited the Mississippi University race riots in 1962, but libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, opposed to the coercive psychiatry that was, to be fair, something of a public menace at the time, talked him out of it. Most people knew Walker was nuts. But with JFK theory you can stay respectable enough, it’s a hobby that seems to hurt no-one. You can put your own choice of villain in the frame – the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, LBJ, the military-industrial complex, and of course the Cubans or the KGB, though it’s strange that the Manchurian Candidate option presented in film before the assassination – because it seemed believable at the time – hasn’t survived in the modern myth, which is comprised of scenarios entirely discordant with Oswald’s personal beliefs.

We know what Oswald’s political beliefs were because he wrote them down, and expressed them relatively freely to those around him, and we know how he wanted to express those beliefs because we have a reliable witness to his development as an assassin, Marina Oswald, née Prusakova, whom he married in Minsk during his defection to the USSR. A year after Lee’s death, Marina spent several months with Priscilla MacMillan, author of Khrushchev and the Arts; the Politics of Soviet Culture1962-1964. (MacMillan, a friend of Kennedy’s, had also interviewed Lee Oswald during his defection to the USSR, at which time he told her “I want to give the people of the United States something to think about” - she was the only person to know both the assassin and his victim). The book that resulted, Marina and Lee, did not appear till 1977.
Marina Prusakova, who was not told her father’s identity but came to assume he had died in a purge, and who was rejected by her mother and step-father, was raised for a time by her devout grandmother in an Old Regime style. She had sensibly decided, from her observations of Soviet life growing up, that politics was a sickness and that anyone interested in politics was sick, but she made a fateful exception for the young American who was interested in her. Marina may not have been “political” but she knew a thing or two, as this statement to a Warren Commission interviewer shows:

I look at America. It’s all wonderful. But you go to the damn grocery store and it’s 200 varieties of cereal and basically it’s only oats, corn – how many things? Just so someone can make an extra million off of that. It’s just so unnecessary. If that’s progress, if that’s abundance, how stupid is it of us to want it? Three hundred bags of poison, maybe only two or three good – that kind of progress…I don’t think we should strive for.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s solitary Marxism was the ideology that allowed an intelligent young man to compensate for the loss of his father and an upbringing by one of history’s more blameable mothers. It provided him with inspiration for grandiose fantasies and daring acts, as well as a feeling of intellectual importance that compensated for learning difficulties, diagnosed posthumously as dyslexia. Oswald had become seriously interested in politics at the age of 15 or 16 after he was handed a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed some two years earlier for spying for the Soviet Union, on a street corner in the Bronx (the effect this interaction had on him may have influenced his later decision to hand out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets in New Orleans; it seems to have also triggered a Walter Mitty fantasy life as an espionage hero which lasted the rest of his life). “I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature,” Oswald wrote in his diary. “I had to dig for my books in the back of dusty shelves of libraries,” although according to Priscilla McMillan, he came across more as the naïve angry young man than a perceptive Marxist in their 5-hour Moscow interview despite using “a good deal of Marxist language”. The Oswald that stalks the pages of Marina and Lee is also a familiar character to readers of criminal profiling books, a case-study of the violent malcontent male loner. An American outsider who married a Russian outsider, and who was closer to Russian-speaking outsiders than to anyone else outside his family back in the USA, Lee Oswald read Orwell and Dostoyevsky, listened to Rimsky-Korsakoff, Chaliapin, Rachmaninov, and Tchaikovsky, and in his more constructive activities was inspired by Marxist newspapers The Worker and The Militant. He is holding copies of both these papers in the famous photographs Marina took of him with his guns, one of which, with a Russian inscription on the back – “hunter of fascists – ha ha ha!” in Marina’s hand, signed by Oswald, was given to their friend George De Mohrenschildt, the edgelord of the Dallas Russian émigré scene who parodies anéminence grise role in their story. The Worker was the paper of the U.S. Communist Party, The Militant of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party; Oswald corresponded with both journals, in a futile attempt to establish credibility as a leader of the organized left; the March 11 1963 copy of The Militant he is holding contains a letter headed “News and Views from Dallas”, signed LH, which was the high point of his association with organised socialism in America.



Lee Oswald was a person who would lie or withhold the truth whenever possible, so that he moved in a web of misdirection, but also presumably in a state of tension lest his lies (which include a long list of needless lies on official forms) be found out. He starved himself and Marina, as his mother had starved him, and pinched pennies as she had - what conspiracy asset would have been left as bereft of financial support as the Oswalds were at times, or as dependent on the kindness of strangers, who liked Marina but rarely liked ungrateful and ungracious Lee, and sometimes feared him? He was violent and controlling towards Marina, and beat her often, but became less violent at home after his attempted assassination of General Walker altered their relationship; he was also often cruel to her, as if practicing the heartlessness essential in a great revolutionary leader, and prevented her learning English for his own reasons (so that much of the evidence in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald is the record of conversations held in Russian, remembered by someone who thought in Russian). Yet Lee, who identified as a Marxist, was never a member of the Communist party, and recognised that the USSR was less successful than the USA – his core attitude was a juvenile delinquent’s hostility to any authority he was no longer capable of idealising, and a contempt for almost all other people, but as a strongly self-entitled person of progressive views he granted, in theory, everyone else a share in what he himself felt he deserved. As a social justice warrior, he was capable of admirable performative gestures, such as sitting in the black section of a segregated courtroom when arraigned in New Orleans, without seemingly ever going out of his way to perform any act of kindness for another human being in need.

There is a Jekyll and Hyde character to Lee’s politics, in which his violent acts contradict both his written statements and his progressive activism, resembling an expressionistic caricature of 20^th century Marxism. Eleven years after his murder of Joseph P. Kennedy’s son, the Symbionese Liberation Army, collectivist Marxists with better childhoods and higher education than Oswald, embarked on a crime spree which included kidnapping the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst. Their goals, motivations and grievances were, though filtered through the kaleidoscope of LSD, aligned with Oswald’s. Both Oswald and the SLA were influenced by what Elizabeth Converse, in The War of All Against All, called “the irrational Communist belief in ultimate world victory”. At its most extreme, this belief encouraged the accelerationist heresy - the belief that as Communism was inevitable, historical upheavals within Capitalist societies brought it closer, the worse the better. The accelerationist Marxist thinks like the addict who overdoses because the sooner they reach rock bottom, the sooner they can begin recovery. Thus the Communists of Weimar Germany were taught to welcome the rise of Hitler and call the liberal democrats who opposed him “fascists”, thus Posades welcomed the possibilities of nuclear war and alien invasion, thus the apocryphal Bernie bro voted for Trump. Sigmund Freud gave us the concept of Thanatos. the organism’s compulsive drive toward dissolution back into the world; Oswald’s decisions were often thanatic – his defection to the USSR, which involved cutting his left wrist and attempting to surrender his US citizenship, his assault on the Soviet bureaucracy to get both himself and Marina back to America, the time he shot at Walker, the time he stuck a pistol in his belt and said he was going to “have a look” at Richard Nixon (defused by Marina), the similarly defused planning to hijack an airliner to Cuba, the assassination itself, his refusal to consider that he might become a target afterwards.

On the morning of the 22^nd of November 1963, Lee Oswald left $170 for Marina, whom he had, up to that point seldom allowed any cash at all, as well as the wedding ring he never took off, collected his rifle, and went to work at the Elm street branch of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. There, from a window on the East side of the fifth floor, he shot dead U.S. President John F. Kennedy and wounded John Connally, the Governor of Texas; later that day Lee Oswald would kill Patrolman J.D. Tippit with the cut-off Smith and Weston .38 pistol he had mail-ordered long before the rifle, but which had arrived on the same day.
Had Lee Oswald stood trial, his guilt would have been presented as a coherent narrative, and his motivations widely discussed, as he intended. Instead, he was shot dead two days later by Jack Ruby in an act almost as impulsive and last-minute as his own. Ruby’s motives are obscure – even more unstable and violent than Oswald, he was a heavy consumer of phenmetrazine, the new amphetamine also popular with The Beatles, was only 5 blocks from the assassination when it happened, and became paranoid that Jews would be blamed for the assassination, resulting in a pogrom.

The original complaint filed by the Dallas police department on Lee Oswald, around midnight on the 22nd of November, said that Lee Oswald did, "in furtherance of an international communist conspiracy, assassinate President John F. Kennedy,” but Oswald’s murder, and the lack of evidence against anyone else he knew, meant that charge would not be tested in a court of law.


The possibility that Oswald's political convictions may have played a decisive part in his shooting John F. Kennedy was down-played in the early 1960s because President Johnson and other officials did not want the assassination to become a casus belli with the Soviet Union. And to the public, this explanation, at a moment when capitalism was riding high, appeared ludicrous. Besides, for a Marxist, killing this president appeared wildly inconsistent. Kennedy was a liberal.
- Priscilla MacMillan, JFK and Oswald: The Inconvenient Truth

It may have also have mattered that no-one wanted to revisit McCarthyism. Sen Joseph McCarthy had been defeated by censure in 1954 and died in 1957; the House Unamerican Activities Committee lingered until 1975 but by 1963 was beginning to come under siege from an emerging counterculture that would become increasingly Marxist as the 60’s turned to the 1970’s. Overseas, US foreign policy and covert interventions would ensure the abduction, torture and death of many thousands of Marxists through the next few decades, yet in the USA the few leftists who knew Oswald were not persecuted, and the journals of which he said "you can see what they want you to do by reading between the lines" were not supressed.

In December of 1963 Dylan, then in the most activist stage of his folk career, was an attendee at a dinner event in New York hosted by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which had awarded him its annual Tom Paine Award.

“I’ve got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where — what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too — I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it would have gone — I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me — not to go that far and shoot.”

The outraged crowd then expressed its hostility to the speaker.

“You can boo but booing’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a — I just a — I’ve got to tell you, man, its Bill of Rights is free speech and I just want to admit that I accept this Tom Paine Award in behalf of James Forman of the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and on behalf of the people who went to Cuba.”

Fair play for Cuba.

Perhaps the first conspiracy theory about the assassination, after the statement of the Dallas PD, was held covertly – the branch of the CIA working on mind control research must logically have begun looking for evidence of a “Manchurian Candidate” brainwashing of Oswald by the KGB. The MKULTRA program, initiated in 1953, had failed to find any reliable form of brainwashing – they had been able to produce “vegetables” among their guinea pigs but not effective agents or reliable informants. The program’s budget would be reduced in 1964, but if there was the possibility that the Soviets or Cubans had succeeded in brainwashing Oswald then it could be kept alive, and perhaps vindicated. It was probably in this spirit that MKULTRA researcher Louis Jolyon West interviewed Jack Ruby in 1964, likely with the use of hypnosis and sodium pentothal. During the visit Ruby experienced a “psychotic break”, revisiting his delusion of a Kennedy-assassination inspired pogrom. Jolyon West, who killed the elephant Tusko with LSD and other drugs in 1962 and studied hippies with MKULTRA in Haight-Ashbury in late 1967, would later testify at the trial of temporary Marxist Patty Hearst in support of her defence’s brainwashing theory.

As Jolyon West was infiltrating the hippie subculture in search of the mind-control McGuffin, David Crosby was ending his career in The Byrds on stage at the Monterey Pop festival, by introducing the song He Was a Friend of Mine, a tribute to JFK, with a categorical statement of the most enduring of the JFK theories –

When President Kennedy was killed, he was not killed by one man. He was shot from a number of different directions — by different guns. The story has been suppressed, witnesses have been killed, and this is your country.

This moment marks the overground advent of progressive conspiracy theory, with its roots in Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial Complex warning, and its motivation in opposition to the Vietnam war, and more to the point, in opposition to the drafting of young American men, who naturally adapted conspiracy theory as a defence against the mass disposal of their minds and bodies by the State – analogous to the adoption of conspiracy theory defences today by those whose autonomy and future plans have been threatened by their conscription in the war against COVID-19. It was widely rumoured that LBJ, Kennedy’s Vice President and successor, under whom America had become most stickily entangled in Vietnam, had ordered the hit, but Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were about to show the USA, and the world, how real political conspiracies are constructed.

It was in this environment of renewed conspiracy ferment that Kerry Thornley, who had known Oswald in the US Marines and written a book inspired by his personality, The Idle Warriors, before the assassination, initiated Operation Mindfuck, with the help of Greg Hill, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Operation Mindfuck introduced the Illuminati, through letters and ads in Playboy and other “hip” publications, to the US counterculture, with the intent of parodying the counterculture conspiracy industry and serving up an anti-stupidity vaccine with a side-order of chaos and fun. But Thornley and his accomplices underestimated the forces they were toying with, especially the human tendency to believe in malign machinations that can explain one’s own apparent impotence, dehumanise those in control, and undermine the achievements of those who have succeeded in one’s place, the same need to feel one’s weakness justified as cursed and, if one can do nothing worse, curse back that fed the belief in witchcraft in the Middle Ages and that in modern Africa.
While the Jews and Freemasons theories of the Right did not go away, they were quaintly old-fashioned and smelled strongly of old library books by the 1970’s, unable to keep up with the actual conspiracies and political and cultural developments of the Nixon-Kissinger period. The Satanic Abuse panic of the 80’s-90’s was the most successful attempt to upgrade them – arguably this succeeded, to the extent that it disrupted civil society, because it aligned with Marxist Feminist agitation against sexual exploitation; sexual Satanism was a predictable manifestation of the Patriarchy, and vice versa. Meanwhile, Hunter S Thompson had created new myths of the operation Mindfuck type, giving adrenochrome its backstory and planting a rumour about senator Eugene Muskie, the less-progressive Democratic candidate for the 1972 Presidential race, being high in ibogaine, which destroyed his candidacy. Kenny Thornley, instead of mocking the operation Mindfuck theories – which he, glimpsing the truth about Oswald, had started - began acting as if he believed in one or the other or all of them. And a young Oliver Stone, after serving in Vietnam and disapproving of the whole thing, began thinking about the assassination of JFK, who was believed posthumously to have been opposed to the War in some way.
Stone’s 1991 film JFK marks the moment when conspiracy theory passed over from the counterculture and far-right into the mainstream; it featured an impressive cast of A-list actors who presumably approved of its message of suspicion. JFK was followed by The X-Files TV series in 1993, with its telling slogan “I want to believe”. The X-Files was ironic enough, unlike Stone’s breathless film, but this didn’t inhibit the mass distribution and discussion of its ideas. Both JFK and The X-Files posit an all-powerful, yet successfully concealed Deep State for which the elected US government is window-dressing and easily removed if it objects. All around the world, this gave an easy explanation to those who resented US cultural hegemony and military power but were not the type to organise against them. It helped that it was a seemingly playful explanation, one that didn’t insist on being taken seriously enough to really test, even as it established itself in the zeitgeist.
Prior to 2001 the Deep State conspiracy theories had to co-exist with the rest of the Fortean world represented in The X-Files. UFOs, Bigfoot, spontaneous combustion, the Bermuda triangle, vampires - by the end of the 20^th century, several different species of UFO-riding aliens were abducting and probing people all around the world. But after 9/11, Islamist terrorists became the aliens and monsters we watched out for and it was the US state that began abducting and probing people everywhere; reports of UFO sightings and alien abductions went into serious decline. As the plainly venal team of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld openly conspired to roll back freedoms and push the world into another unwinnable war, a spontaneous conspiracy of sorts arose to undermine their casus belli by suggesting that the terror attacks had been an inside job. This also meant not admitting that a Saudi Arabian NGO could get the better of the mighty USA, so it had cross-party appeal, but the list of progressive celebrities who endorsed or indulged 9/11 conspiracy theories is almost as impressive as the cast of JFK, and included Ed Asner, Spike Lee, Woody Harrelson, Rosie O’Donnell, Marion Cottillard and Graham Nash. Spreading a rumour like “Bush did 9/11” is a way of cursing the powerful, a displacement activity born of impotence and frustration, like spreading a rumour that your local feudal tyrant worships Bahomet because you are powerless to stop him taking what he wants from you. And 20 years later, Q-Anon is simply the aggregate of all the progressive counterculture conspiracy theories, including Kerry Thornley and Hunter S Thompson’s inventions, with a modified Satanic abuse element, and with the older Jews, Freemasons and Communists theories always sneaking back in.

It all began with Oswald and the trauma he induced in the USA on November 22 1963. As NBC News anchor David Brinkley said, as he signed off that night, Kennedy’s death was “just too much, too ugly and too fast.” In 2007 Priscilla MacMillan summed up the aftermath of the assassination in a short article for World Policy Journal titled JFK and Oswald: The Inconvenient Truth.

 Oswald's act of violence indisputably ushered in an era of unease and suspicion in American life that was not there prior to the Kennedy assassination. Oswald was not responsible for all of the damage that has befallen American society since 1963, much as he would have wished to be. Some of that damage is the result of events related only tangentially to the assassination of President Kennedy. But some of the injury can, with justice, be attributed to conspiracy theorists who have gone to superhuman lengths to avoid facing the truth. They have constructed wildly-implausible scenarios, far-out, fictitious "conspirators," and have scandalously maligned the motives of Kennedy's successor, rather than take a hard look at the man who actually did it. They have, ironically, done more to poison American political life than Lee Oswald - with the most terrible of intentions - was able to do.

Kerry Thornley thought that a little light Illuminati hoaxing would make people immune to conspiracy theories, but conspiracy theories, as The X-Files and its spin-off The Lone Gunmen have proved, are immune to spoofing; Q-Anon is a spoof of spoofs, and it has outshone them all.

If the world is ready to give Marina Oswald’s story and Priscilla MacMillan’s research and analysis the same attention it once gave to Jim Garrison’s speculations, narrative will replace montage in the JFK storytelling tradition. In the near future there will be a film, or better yet a TV series, of Marina and Lee, based on the True Crime book of that name which its viewers will queue to read. In our contemporary state of disinformation hypersensitivity, it should get a more reasoned reception from the comments section than the PBS Frontline documentary series Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald did when it rescreened in 2013. We will come to understand Lee Oswald and the ideological world he inhabited, which is closer to our own than used to be the case, because the expression of low-constraint or heretical or otherwise deviationist versions of Marxist ideas is now commonplace, because glasnost revisionism, 90 Day Fiancé, RT, and Red Scare have made Marina’s voice more relatable, and because we’re now well-used to seeing violent malcontent male loners acting out the terrorist fantasies which they developed through ideological study and travel.

Imagine a counterfactual America, an alternative history wherein it has always been a well-known and accepted fact that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone-wolf Marxist, assassinated the 35^th President of the United States.



George Henderson, Auckland, Sept 2021

Addendum:
The killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby was the real singularity that tipped America down the path to Q-Anon, as it removed Oswald from his own story. I've called Ruby's motives "obscure" above, but obscure as they are they are not beyond all speculation. Here's what I think.

Roy Cohn, as a patriotic American Jew trying to succeed in the system, persecuted Jewish American communists because he thought they gave a bad impression of American Jews - he more-or-less framed Ethel Rosenberg and brought about her execution. This was the injustice that led to the radicalization of the young Oswald.
The Dallas newspapers had been carrying adverts against JFK that in the opinion of many at the time amounted to hate speech, and some of these were signed by Jewish Republicans (the Republican party still being the old party of tolerance for many, I suppose). Ruby was concerned about this even before the shooting, and when he heard about it panicked that the Jews would be blamed for killing JFK (as, I suppose, they had been for killing Christ) and was compelled to kill Oswald to clear their name, as a kind of sacrificial lamb for his people.
Because this involved magical thinking, and because he may have found it embarrassing in his lucid moments, Ruby gave the more innocent explanation that he had killed Oswald to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of a trial.
Roy Cohn would go on to become the mentor of Donald Trump, and Donald Trump would go on to become the patron and beneficiary of Q-Anon.

This post first appeared early last year as a paywalled post on my Patreon blog. If you want to support my esoteric dietary researches, become a subscriber!

The following is an excerpt from a book by Dion Fortune - Moon Magic, most likely.
Fortune was an influential UK occultist who codified the esoteric practice of her time for the mass public. Although she died, of leukaemia, in 1948 her books later became widely-read at a time of heightened interest due to the counter-culture and modernist disruption of traditional religious and scientific belief systems.
Her observations are drawn from her personal experience of the sector of British society in which vegetarian practice was most common - the lunatic fringe.

       "The question of diet also requires to be considered in this connection. The widespread propaganda of the Theosophical Society has caused vegetarianism to be regarded as a sine qua non of occult training. This, however, is not the case. The Western Esoteric Tradition does not make vegetarianism any part of its  system, but teaches that a man should partake sparingly and temperately of the food of the land in which  he finds himself. Personally I am inclined to think that occultism and vegetarianism are apt to be an injudicious mixture for a European, the result being a hyper-sensitiveness that makes life very difficult in our hard-driving civilisation.

      Vegetarianism has to be thoroughly understood and exceedingly well done if it is to be successful, and even so, there is a goodly proportion of people who are incapable of digesting vegetable proteins, which are not nearly so easily dealt with as animal substances. Nothing but experience and experimentation can show whether a vegetarian diet suits a given person. Indigestion is not the only indication that all is not well. Loss of appetite, loss of energy, loss of weight, or a flabby stoutness are all danger signals which if disregarded will cause chronic ill-health.        Vegetarianism may agree with a person well enough at first, but after a considerable period, possibly years, they may find that they are becoming subject to neuritis, neuralgia, sciatica, or one or another of the nerve pains. This is a sure indication that a vegetarian diet is affording insufficient nourishment, not because it does not contain the necessary food units, but because the digestion is unable to assimilate them and they are passing out of the body unchanged. Wherever there is a history of neuralgic pains complicating a case of psychic disturbance, I should be inclined to suspect chronic malnutrition as the cause of a hypertrophied psychism. In such cases it will probably be found that a gradual return to a nourishing mixed diet will bring about a reduction of the hyper-sensitiveness, the undesirable contacts that have been formed will fade, and the condition return to normal. The change of diet, however, should always be made gradually lest the digestion be upset." 

Vegan diets and the risk of deficiency diseases – the story of Shelly

One of the earliest objective accounts of the effects of a vegetarian diet in English is Thomas Love Peacock’s observations of his friend, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly. I think these are interesting because Shelly’s ordeal is very similar to what enthusiastic young people subject themselves to today, and because Peacock’s dry humour can speak for the rest of us.
Quotes are from Thomas Love Peacock’s Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelly.
http://scans.library.utoronto.ca/pdf/2/41/peacocksmemoirso00peacuoft/peacocksmemoirso00peacuoft.pdf

Shelly had come under the influence of JF Newton, author of The Return to Nature, or A Defense of the Vegetable Regimen.
https://archive.org/details/returntonatureor00newt

Peacock wrote of Newton “He was an estimable man and an agreeable companion, and he was not the less amusing that he was the absolute impersonation of a single theory, or rather of two single theories rolled into one. He held that all diseases and all aberrations, moral and physical, had their origin in the use of animal food and of fermented and spirituous liquors; that the universal adoption of a diet of roots, fruits, and distilled water, would restore the golden age of universal health, purity, and peace ; that this most ancient and sublime morality was mystically inculcated in the most ancient Zodiac, which was that of Dendera…”[I will spare you Peacock’s lengthy exposition of this astrological system]

“At Bracknell, Shelley was surrounded by a numerous society, all in a great measure of his own opinions in relation to religion and politics, and the larger portion of them in relation to vegetable diet”
Shelley had published the treatise, A Vindication of Natural Diet, in 1813.
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/shelley01.htm
But Peacock was skeptical of Shelly’s claims to superior health;

His vegetable diet entered for something into his restlessness. When he was fixed in a place he adhered to this diet consistently and conscientiously, but it certainly did not agree with him; it made him weak and nervous, and exaggerated the sensitiveness of his imagination. Then arose those thick - coming fancies which almost invariably preceded his change of place. While he was living from inn to inn he was obliged to live, as he said, ' on what he could get '; that is to say, like other people.  When he got well under this process he gave all the credit to locomotion, and held himself to have thus benefited, not in consequence of his change of regimen, but in spite of it. Once, when I was living in the country, I received a note from him wishing me to call on him in London. I did so, and found him ill in bed. He said, ' You are looking well. I suppose you go on in your old way, living on animal food and fermented liquor ?' I answered in the affirmative. ' And here,' he said, ' you see a vegetable feeder overcome by disease.' I said, ' Perhaps the diet is the cause.' This he would by no means allow ; but it was not long before he was again posting through some yet unvisited wilds, and recovering his health as usual, by living ' on what he could get '.

In Edinburgh he became acquainted with a young Brazilian named Baptista, who had gone there to study medicine by his father's desire, and not from any vocation to the science, which he cordially abominated, as being all hypothesis, without the fraction of a basis of certainty to rest on. They corresponded after Shelley left Edinburgh, and subsequently renewed their intimacy in London. He was a frank, warm-hearted, very gentlemanly young man. He was a great enthusiast, and sympathized earnestly in all Shelley's views, even to the adoption of vegetable diet. He made some progress in a translation of Queen Mab into Portuguese. He showed me a sonnet, which he intended to prefix to his translation. It began — Sublime Shelley, cantor di verdade !
and ended — Surja Queen Mab a restaurar o mundo.
I have forgotten the intermediate lines. But he died early, of a disease of the lungs. The climate did not suit him, and he exposed himself to it incautiously.

On our way up, at Oxford, he [Shelly] was so much out of order that he feared being obliged to return. He had been living chiefly on tea and bread and butter, drinking occasionally a sort of spurious lemonade, made of some powder in a box, which, as he was reading at the time the Tale of a Tub, he called the powder of pimperlimpimp. He consulted a doctor, who may have done him some good, but it was not apparent. I told him, If he would allow me to prescribe for him, I would set him to rights." He asked, ‘What would be your prescription ? ' I said, ' Three mutton chops, well peppered/ He said, ' Do you really think so? ' I said, ' I am sure of it." He took the prescription; the success was obvious and immediate. He lived in my way for the rest of our expedition, rowed vigorously, was cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one week of thorough enjoyment of life.

(There is a confirmation of Peacock’s statement above in a letter Shelly wrote to Hogg in September, 1815, 'on my return from a water excursion on the Thames,' in which Shelley remarks that 'the exercise and dissipation of mind attached to such an expedition have produced so favourable an effect on my health, that my habitual dejection and irritability have almost deserted me.’)

At the time of publishing A Vindication of Natural Diet, Shelly was subject to bizarre hallucinations and phobias, an example of which is given below by Peacock

About the end of 1813, Shelley was troubled by one of his most extraordinary delusions. He fancied that a fat old woman who sat opposite to him in a mail coach was afflicted with elephantiasis, that the disease was infectious and incurable, and that he had caught it from her. He was continually on the watch for its symptoms ; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands, arms, and neck very tight, and if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him, and endeavour by a corresponding pressure to see if any corresponding deviation existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning. His friends took various methods of dispelling the delusion. I quoted to him the words of Lucretius : —

Est elephas morbus, qui propter flumina Nili Gignitur Aegypto in media, neque praelerea usquam. *

He said these verses were the greatest comfort he had. When he found that, as the days rolled on, his legs retained their proportion, and his skin its smoothness, the delusion died away.

* the gist of this quote seems to be that elephantiasis is only generated from the waters of the Nile.

New Zealand schools have introduced a climate change resource that suggests children “eat less meat and dairy”, even though teachers will not know how much meat or dairy any child in their care has eaten. Opinion pieces in the papers have called for the reduction of meat and dairy in hospital menus, not usually generous sources of such foods, despite the well-known risks of undernutrition, especially of protein, in the frail and elderly. Globally, the influential and once-objective medical journal the Lancet has hosted Eat Lancet, a coalition of vegan and vegetarian technocrats backed by processed food manufacturers, and promoted their agenda. The Guardian newspaper accepted an $886,600 grant from the backers of Impossible Foods to run a series of articles against animal agriculture.

These initiatives, aimed at remodelling our food supply in a way that favours the multinational food processing and seed-and-chemical corporations, whose control of many aspects of farming and diet is already problematic, have run far ahead of the scientific community’s efforts to understand the health effects of such dietary change.

Our hunter-gatherer past

The Neolithic Revolution was the first alteration in human affairs that is generally considered worthy of the term Revolution. In Marx’s terms, it saw a change in the means of production sufficient to form new classes aware of their identities, and thus a change in the relations between people. Early humans had fed themselves in an opportunistic, hunter-gatherer fashion that tended to favour a diet of animals supplemented with plants where and when these were available. Large animals made the best meals but gathering activities could collect many smaller ones, as well as eggs, grubs etc.

The people of the Mesolithic era discovered that some animals could be herded and some plants grown in gardens (not usually by the same community, because one activity favours nomadism and the other favours a sedentary habit) but these activities, which greatly improved food security after the decline of the prehistoric mega-fauna due to hunting and climate pressures, tended to occur at the communal level and probably did not create major class differences between the people involved.

The invention of farming

The Neolithic Revolution, which unleashed the human potential for war, creativity, and social division, resulted from the identification of the germs of plants (specifically grains and legumes) as durable sources of energy. If grains were grown (I will use grains in the wider sense of “cereals”, after Braudel, including other dried germs such as peas) and there was a surplus, this surplus would still be edible over the next year, a year when drought or pests or diseases might wipe out the other food sources that hunter-gatherers depended on. This advantage was offset by the nutritional poverty of grain-based diets, so that tuberculosis probably became an endemic disease during this period,[1] but the existence of a less-perishable surplus allowed the diversion of part of the population away from food gathering for large parts of the year, and saw the creation of armies and other workforces.

In Europe, the Neolithic Revolution is dated at around 10,000 BC and its arrangements are a matter of prehistory, but in China this change occurred later and the written record around Bi-gu or grain avoidance includes folk-memories of conflict between grain eating and grain avoiding peoples.

The history of colonisation is the history of the conquest of lactose-intolerant peoples by lactose-tolerant populations, and of non-grain eaters by grain-eaters. In the Indian sub-continent, a combination of dairy herding and a cereal diet high in legumes uniquely allowed the survival of a substantially vegetarian population, and saw the conservation of genes favouring reproduction on such a diet, including genetic polymorphisms still rare in European populations (adaptive mutations only predominate where many individuals without them have failed to survive or reproduce).[2] That the Indian social system became more aggressively class-based than any other is probably no co-incidence; prejudice against meat-eating is still used as a tool of social control against minorities, while meat-eating is one way young Indians today identify as modern and egalitarian. However there were some important exceptions to the trend – the Aztecs were a hunter-gather people who conquered and dominated the Mesolithic agriculturalists of Mexico, and the Mongols were nomadic herders and hunters whose greater stamina and independence allowed them to defeat the rice-fed armies of the Chinese Emperors (after conquering this breadbasket, the successive Mongol Khans seem to have eaten and drunk themselves to death).

Early vegetarian ideology

In the European and Asian cereal-based societies the poorest classes went without meat, supplementing cereals when possible with buttermilk or blood pudding which were more economic replacements. The rich ate as much meat as they could. The idea that an entire society might avoid meat is a recent one with its roots in religious practice, and, insofar as it has any political basis, this flows in two distinct streams – the eco-fascist, in which meat avoidance is a sign of “purity”, most humans are a burden on the Earth, and the Indian vegetarians are of course Aryans. This is something like the vegetarian vision that Adolf Hitler picked up while studying anti-Semitism with Wagner’s heirs at Bayreuth.

And then there is a Marxist-Anarchist, and latterly Intersectional, version, founded on a valuation of animal rights as inseparable from, and a logical extension of, human rights. Vegetarianism was a frequent obsession of the early British Socialists; G.B. Shaw, who derived most of his energy from dairy fat and lived to the age of 94, made himself into a well-known example, and the idea was sufficiently entrenched among the British Socialists and their milieu that H.G. Wells preserved its internal contradictions for posterity in The Time Machine. In his far-future vision, humanity has evolved into two separate species. The Morlocks are descendants of working-class meat-eaters, the Eloi of leisure-class vegetarians – all Wells’ loathing is reserved for the Morlocks, yet it is obvious they are (still) the engineering brains keeping their world running and the Eloi fed. The Eloi are useless for anything but enjoying the sunshine and feeding the Morlocks, and the discordance in Wells’ progressive values as he describes both species is as shocking as anything else in the story.   "But gradually the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages."

The first large-scale experiment in plant-based protein was attempted by the Bolsheviks. As usual, it’s hard to separate the roles played by idealism and cynicism in the story, but the bare bones are that the Soviets found their initial attempts to remodel the countryside rebuffed, blamed this on the recaltricance of the kulak class, and set out to destroy them. The problem being that the kulaks, owning most of the cattle and sheep across the Russian Republics, helped to feed the people. Beginning in the 1920s, soy experts from the USA (then the Western world’s leading soy producer) were among the many foreign technicians imported into Russia, and soy processing plants were built and soy production increased to 283,000 tonnes in 1931, the year Stalin unleashed enforced collectivisation and the terror against the kulaks (and also the Kazakhs, a herding people who suffered the largest proportionate loss of life during this period). This led to the loss of millions of animals, either killed by their dispossessed owners or mismanaged by their inexperienced new owners. The soy project was hardly able to prevent the massive famines that followed, and by 1935 soy production had dropped to 54,000 tonnes. Though soy milk would later prove useful during the siege of Leningrad, by the 1930s soy had probably only served one purpose, as a statistic needed aforehand to quell the objections of pragmatic delegates to the destruction of the kulaks and their livestock.

Today we face the revival of this idea, of plant protein that will create a world with no need for animal protein, and the remodelling of life in the countryside, with the new impetus of climate change as its driver. Livestock cycles natural carbon, meaning there is no net addition of C02 to the atmosphere – and its contribution to the shorter-lived methane precursor has not changed since 2000 (methane rises have been due to fracking, methane itself AKA “natural gas”, landfill, and rice production; methane-emitting animals have always existed on Earth in substantial numbers, and have not created a novel situation in the sense that the discovery of coal, oil and gas did). We have recently seen how much global disruption is required to reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions to 2006 levels, levels which will still warm the planet if they continue. It could be still be worth reducing agricultural cycling of CO2 through methane, which is more warming than CO2 if this is cost-free, but is it?

Why humans evolved as meat eaters

  Animal foods, and especially red meat, supply a constellation of nutrients not found together (if they are found at all) in any plant food. Nutrients are those chemicals essential for the functioning of the human organism, and plants, but not livestock, can survive well without nutrients such as amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals that are essential to humans. Surviving as a vegetarian or vegan is possible for some (perhaps assuming the genetic variants referred to earlier are present) but to thrive requires knowledge of these nutrients, where to find them, how to process the foods that supply them, or how to supplement them. Thriving as an omnivore or even a complete carnivore does not – nutritional sufficiency is the reason we evolved eating meat and other animal foods long before we learned there were such things as essential nutrients.

The reasons for avoiding meat or all animal foods can have a class basis – veganism may be taken up by educated middle-class adults, more likely to be exposed to “health food” ideas and aware of the need to supplement, some of whom then commercialise their habits as social media “influencers”. Meat avoidance is also being adopted increasingly by educated middle-class children for identity or compassionate reasons, but the poor may also avoid meat because of its cost when a loaf of bread or a packet of flavoured noodles can be bought for a dollar; these two motivations sometimes coincide when students in temporary poverty make a virtue of what they perceive to be a necessity.

Does the meat-avoiding behaviour of young people have unintended costs? Several observational studies have looked at the characteristics of meat-avoiding populations and found alarming increases in depression, anxiety and self-harm.

“The majority of studies, and especially the higher quality studies, showed that those who avoided meat consumption had significantly higher rates or risk of depression, anxiety, and/or self-harm behaviors. There was mixed evidence for temporal relations, but study designs and a lack of rigor precluded inferences of causal relations. Our study does not support meat avoidance as a strategy to benefit psychological health.”[3]

How can we explain these correlations? Why should we assume that they are causal? There are several lines of evidence to support a causal link:

1) several nutrients found in meat and animal foods are important factors in mood and cognition; vitamin B12, iron, carnitine, DHA, choline and tryptophan are some examples.[4]

2) the fatty acid mix in dairy and red meat has a similar composition to that of amniotic fluid and breast milk which has anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) effects in young animals.[5]

3) soy is a convenient and cheap replacement for animal protein; soy processing in Western diets results in a 10-fold higher level of the estrogenic contaminant isoflavone than that found in Asian diets.[6] Soy isoflavone causes anxiety behaviour in young female animals, and there is evidence supporting psychotropic and hormonal effects in humans.[7,8,9.10] Interestingly, while right-wing critiques of soy eating focus on effects it can have on young men, the scientific evidence for adverse effects in younger females, converting to HRT-like benefits after menopause, is stronger.[11]

4) other toxins found in plants, such as salicylates and oxalates, as well as problematic proteins such as gliadin/gluten and zein, may be present at higher levels in meat-free diets (but are not unique to them). A vegan mince sold in Countdown supermarkets is simply a coloured blend of soy protein and gluten, a protein linked to the risk of schizophrenia.[12]

In the New Zealand context it would be relatively easy to confirm or dispute some of these associations. Everyone admitted to hospital for longer than a day supplies their dietary preferences. The dietetic preference data from psychiatric admissions could be both linked to outcomes over time and compared with the population average distribution, or the distribution in a ward where diet is least likely to play a role in admissions.

Iron deficiency in women

Young women in New Zealand are the most likely to report being vegan or vegetarian in surveys, as elsewhere in the world. Vegans in the Gender Studies field generate papers linking meat to masculinity, with the implication that this masculinity is toxic and might be improved by a plant-based diet.[13] The corollary of this belief – that women may therefore be weakened by meat-avoidance – is never considered. In a 1980 essay by Gloria Steinem called The Politics of Food (in the collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions) she describes some of the cultural constructs by which women are deprived of the good nutrition which men use to stay dominant. The belief that men need to eat red meat more often than women may have been valid when the average man was more likely to have to survive an attack by a wild bear than the average woman, but today it is mainly women who suffer from serious iron deficiency. The rate – and the cost to the health system – is increasing in New Zealand as more women give up meat. Iron deficiency anaemia in early pregnancy is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders in children, not an outcome that will increase the mother’s autonomy.[14]

In Georg Büchner’s 19th century “working class tragedy” Woyzeck, filmed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the leading role and the subject of an opera by Alban Berg, the title character, a soldier, is subject to experimentation by a sadistic army doctor. The experiment involves Woyzeck living on nothing but peas. Peas may supply a complete protein, but Woyzeck goes insane; the deprivation being the final straw in his alienation. James Cameron, the film-maker responsible for Avatar and Titanic, is investing heavily in pea protein as if this were his gift to New Zealand. I am not sure whether he has watched Woyzeck – one would think he has.

Plant-based vs meat-based

Again, we have the specificity of plant germs as commodity; their low cost of production, long storage life and versatility of processing outcomes makes them an ideal investment and a robust one, as poverty and adversity increases their consumption, as we saw during the 2020 Lockdown Event. However, a plant-based burger is nutritionally greatly inferior to a meat burger, and that burger is often the most nutritious single food item many will people eat in the course of their day. The current push to eat a plant-based diet for “planetary health” is something that all the multinational food processors have signed up and provided funding for, and why not – Coca Cola, Unilever, Nestlé have always sold us plant-based foods. We notice that while iron-deficiency anaemia increases in New Zealand with the reason in plain sight, Nestlé scientists here in NZ are developing a more potent form of supplemental iron to add value to their products as their parent company backs the push to reduce meat.  (As usual, it’s hard to separate the roles played by idealism and cynicism in the story).

But, you may well ask, isn’t eating meat linked to an increased risk of cancer and heart disease? These associations are small to begin with, but they are also intensely confounded by social class and educational status. Supposing a factory that makes a carcinogenic chemical is hiring. Who is more likely to apply for that job – a meat eater (who will likely have a bigger family to support, among other considerations) or a vegan? Who, so to speak, eats all the pies, and needs food that is filling and nutritious without having to give it much thought? Who is more likely to work two jobs and be exposed to the disruptive metabolic effect of shift work? Carcinogen exposure and shift work are just two of the confounding variables ignored in diet epidemiology.  (That meat-eating in Western populations may symbolise or associate with labour itself – as it did for H.G. Wells when he wrote The Time Machine – is not a consideration I have found discussed in the epidemiological literature.)

Certainly one can think of mechanisms that might link meat to disease, as one can with any food, but one can also think of protective mechanisms; several of the nutrients found mainly or only in animal foods are required for various antioxidant and immune defensive enzymes, and some like carnitine and EPA even have a place in the management of heart disease.

The argument against meat-eating should not be confused with the argument for sometimes rationing a valuable food that is in short supply. The wartime rationing of meat in the UK is thought to have improved the health of the poorest by guaranteeing a greater supply than they had had previously, at a more affordable price. In Europe, the peasants who supplied the cities with meat, dairy and luxury foods such as oysters were sometimes forced by network disruptions to consume these foods – which many of them had never tasted before – with benefit to their own health.

The plant-based agenda can scarcely be expected to recognise these benefits, or understand the argument summarised by Williams and Dunbar (with regard to the vitamin nicotinamide and amino acid tryptophan in their tuberculosis paper), that if better data collection and analysis resulted in us ”…returning to our egalitarian past and redistributing meat or its components that supply NAD (avoiding both the highs and the lows between individuals and over individual lifetimes) [this] may be more effective than subsidizing corn grain (while the increased prosperity from unlocking human potential should pay for the intervention).”[1]

Progress – which includes unlocking human potential from the chains of preventable mental and physical disease – depends on good data, and we do not yet seem to collate the data required to know whether or for whom plant-based diets are safe in New Zealand.

George Henderson works as a researcher for Professor Grant Schofield and the team behind the What The Fat books and the social enterprise PreKure, which has been running free lifestyle and health programs through the lockdown. He is the author or co-author of several scientific articles and letters published by the BMJ, Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, the JAMA, and other journals, including an influential review of low carbohydrate diets in diabetes management for the New Zealand Medical Journal. A musician, songwriter and amateur musicologist, he has recently presented a series of podcasts on 20th century women composers for Karyn Hay’s Lately show on RNZ.

References:

[1] Williams AC, Dunbar RI. Big brains, meat, tuberculosis, and the nicotinamide switches: co-evolutionary relationships with modern repercussions?. Int J Tryptophan Res. 2013;6:73‐88. Published 2013 Oct 15. doi:10.4137/IJTR.S12838

[2] Kothapalli KS, Ye K, Gadgil MS, et al. Positive Selection on a Regulatory Insertion-Deletion Polymorphism in FADS2 Influences Apparent Endogenous Synthesis of Arachidonic Acid. Mol Biol Evol. 2016;33(7):1726‐1739. doi:10.1093/molbev/msw049

[3] Urska Dobersek, Gabrielle Wy, Joshua Adkins, Sydney Altmeyer, Kaitlin Krout, Carl J. Lavie & Edward Archer (2020) Meat and mental health: a systematic review of meat abstention and depression, anxiety, and related phenomena, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2020.1741505

[4] Frédéric Leroy & Nathan Cofnas (2019) Should dietary guidelines recommend low red meat intake?, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2019.1657063

[5] Contreras CM, Rodríguez-Landa JF, García-Ríos RI, Cueto-Escobedo J, Guillen-Ruiz G, Bernal-Morales B. Myristic acid produces anxiolytic-like effects in Wistar rats in the elevated plus maze. Biomed Res Int. 2014;2014:492141. doi:10.1155/2014/492141

[6] Fernandez-Lopez A, Lamothe V, Delample M, Denayrolles M, Bennetau-Pelissero C. Removing isoflavones from modern soyfood: Why and how?. Food Chem. 2016;210:286‐294. doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2016.04.126

[7] Hicks KD, Sullivan AW, Cao J, Sluzas E, Rebuli M, Patisaul HB. Interaction of bisphenol A (BPA) and soy phytoestrogens on sexually dimorphic sociosexual behaviors in male and female rats. Horm Behav. 2016;84:121‐126. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2016.06.010

[8] Tillett T. Full of beans? Early soy exposure associated with less feminine play in girls [published correction appears in Environ Health Perspect. 2012 Jan;120(1):A17]. Environ Health Perspect. 2011;119(12):A525. doi:10.1289/ehp.119-a525b

[9] Adgent MA, Daniels JL, Rogan WJ, et al. Early-life soy exposure and age at menarche. Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 2012;26(2):163‐175. doi:10.1111/j.1365-3016.2011.01244.x

[10] Hibbeln, J.R., SanGiovanni, J.P., Golding, J., Emmett, P.M., Northstone, K., Davis, J.M., Schuckit, M. and Heron, J. (2017), Meat Consumption During Pregnancy and Substance Misuse Among Adolescent Offspring: Stratification of TCN2 Genetic Variants. Alcohol Clin Exp Res, 41: 1928-1937. doi:10.1111/acer.13494

[11] Patisaul HB, Jefferson W. The pros and cons of phytoestrogens. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2010;31(4):400‐419. doi:10.1016/j.yfrne.2010.03.003

[12] Čiháková D, Eaton WW, Talor MV, et al. Gliadin-related antibodies in schizophrenia. Schizophr Res. 2018;195:585‐586. doi:10.1016/j.schres.2017.08.051

[13] Jessica Greenebaum & Brandon Dexter (2018) Vegan men and hybrid masculinity, Journal of Gender Studies, 27:6, 637-648, DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2017.1287064

[14] Wiegersma AM, Dalman C, Lee BK, Karlsson H, Gardner RM. Association of Prenatal Maternal Anemia With Neurodevelopmental Disorders. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019;76(12):1294–1304. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.2309

This article originally appeared on the Redliner blog

John Hartford wrote one of the best songs ever written, Gentle on my Mind. For me, the best version of this is Elvis Presley's - The King turns it into an anthem of deluded masculinity, he's a loser who feels insulated from his deprivation and disorganization as long as he has one lover, out there somewhere too far away, being gentle on his mind.
The 1968 Hartford song that appeared on the Lady Bird soundtrack, This Eve of Parting, made the movie.
The usual Hartford album you'll find on Spotify may be one soppy love song after another, but they have a artful flow and playfulness that keeps them enjoyable - some are almost concept albums - and the playing is next-level, Hartford being a bluegrass exponent with few peers.

Neil Strauss interviewed Hartford shortly before his death in 2001, a fragment of the interview was included in his fascinating anthology of the telling bits of interviews from his career as a music writer, Everyone Loves You When You're Dead.

Strauss says of the interview setting, "It would have been a perfect moment if not for one thing; Hartford's doctors had told him he didn't have long to live. Complications from lymphomas (a cancer of the immune system), combined with anemia, a sinus operation, and a knee problem, had worn him down. In the little time he had left on this planet, Hartford had chosen to concentrate on one thing - fiddling"

John Hartford: I tried to get real healthy about twenty or thirty years ago, and I think that's why I got health problems now. I tried to be a vegetarian and all that crap. I think it hurt me: One of my big problems right now is that I have anemia. My daddy was a doctor and he told me to be real careful at the time, and his words have all come true. Cancer has just about emptied my phone book. And I've got it too.

A local banjo player enters the house and approaches Hartford, intending to shake his hand. But Hartford greets him by waving instead. Hartford hasn't shaken a hand for as long as anyone can remember. He is scared of someone bruising or breaking his bones.

Shortly after this interview, while on tour in Texas, Hartford lost movement in his hands. He continued to host picking parties, which he watched instead of played at, until his death several months later at the Centennial Medical Centre in Nashville. He was sixty-three.

What are the odds that Hartford was right? Non-Hodgkins lymphoma (the type Hartford had) is strongly associated with gluten sensitivity.[1] Arthritic conditions may be caused by cross-sensitive autoimmunity to the starch-eating bacteria Klebsiella pneumoniae, or to gluten and related proteins (such as zein from corn or casein from unfermented milk). And anaemia is also a possible consequence of gluten intolerance (as well as vegetarianism in general). The vegetarian diet of the 1970s that Hartford and his friends might have followed was a high-starch, low fat diet based on dried grains and legumes.
"Even in non-celiac gluten sensitivity, anemia is present in 18.5-22% of patients and appears to be related to ultrastructural and molecular alterations in intestinal microvilli."[2]

Of course we'll never know exactly - but I'm willing to take Hartford's word for it.

[1] Kane EV, Newton R, Roman E. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and gluten-sensitive enteropathy: estimate of risk using meta-analyses. Cancer Causes Control. 2011 Oct;22(10):1435-44. doi: 10.1007/s10552-011-9818-4. Epub 2011 Jul 14. PMID: 21755296.

[2] Stefanelli G, Viscido A, Longo S, Magistroni M, Latella G. Persistent Iron Deficiency Anemia in Patients with Celiac Disease Despite a Gluten-Free Diet. Nutrients. 2020 Jul 22;12(8):2176. doi: 10.3390/nu12082176. PMID: 32708019; PMCID: PMC7468819.

This post originally appeared for subscribers only on my Patreon blog (October 31). If you appreciate my occasional writing on science and stuff subscribe here - it only encourages me to read more science and write about it more often!   

The location of the prostate is one of nature's mistakes - like the organization of the eye, it argues against "intelligent design" which in any case was only a philosophical fart that fundamentalist Christianity had to release in order to adjust itself to the widespread acceptance of the evidence for evolution. Because it's ended up wrapped around the urethra for no good reason, it can easily disrupt the flow of urine if it swells for any reason, and, though they don't really tell you this, pissing is essential for life.

This essay on the prostate is limited to conditions and cures I have some experience of, and I'll add a bit about cancer at the end.

I first became aware of the prostate when I found myself unable to pee after a dose of opium, that is to say, after drinking a tea or slurry made from boiled up opium poppies. I ended up catheterized and being investigated in hospital. I suspected I was allergic in this way to the poppies (though this hadn't happened before) or a pesticide. A quick google search finds no case study of prostatitis - acute urinary retention is a side effect of opioids but also affects women.[1}

So it's likely the diagnosis of prostatitis I was given was wrong - or not - I continued having urinary retention on opiates but it was never impossible to overcome as it was on that occasion. Splashing cold water on my abdomen was probably the most effective strategy.

But then later in life I came across a different sort of problem, inadequate urination so that the bladder doesn't fully empty and you keep having to get up at night. This the doctor diagnosed as either prostatitis or benign prostatic hyperplasia (if it persisted I'd presumably get a biopsy to differentiate) and I set out to manage it myself.
The hyperplasia makes sense retrospectively because I know now that I was highly insulin resistant and hyperinsulinaemic in this days, I'd regularly suffer tinnitus after meals, glaucoma, and various other symptoms. The prostatitis also makes sense because I still had Hep C and various autoimmune complications (eg Sjorgen's syndrome) related to a high viral load.
I took all sorts of prostate supplements such as saw palmetto without relief. I did hit on one herbal formula that seemed to work, it contained forskolin and dead nettle, but was expensive and hard to find. What finally worked best was treating the UTI aspect - urine backed up in the bladder, especially if there's glucose in the urine, is going to be a breeding ground for bacteria. I discovered d-mannose, this was expensive but sort-of worked. And then I hit the jackpot - hibiscus flower. Cheap as chips from Middle Eastern food stores, a strong dose worked magic.[2]
Around this time I was also going low-carb and staring to fix my hyperinsulinaemia and hep c related autoimmune issues.
How would hibiscus work? Its antioxidant phytochemical, the flavonoid or whatever that gives the flower its regal colour,, binds to surface proteins that UTI bacteria use to adhere to the wall of the bladder and urinary track where they can feast on passing nutrients. So you flush them out. And I think these bacteria irritate the prostate. Or maybe they just irritate the urethra and its mechanism for contracting or relaxing under will. PubMed says [3]

Chronic bacterial prostatitis is a subacute infection, may present with a variety of pelvic pain and voiding symptoms, and is characterized by recurrent urinary tract infections. Effective treatment may be difficult and requires prolonged antibiotic therapy.

So I think I'm right - a swollen prostate for any reason increases the risk of UTI, UTI increases the risk of swollen prostate, it's a vicious cycle and the UTI factor is easy to treat if you can find hibiscus flower (the dose in a tea bag is not enough), the overgrowth factor is easy to treat with a very low carb diet if you have hyperinsulinaemia (check the fasting TG/HDL ratio first as a good, cheap proxy for the 2-hour insulin level).

As for prostate cancer - it's said the risk of this is rising - I think there are 3 main factors - firstly, hyperinsulinaemia is a modern epidemic, it's a growth promoter and cancer promoter. Secondly, men are living longer and prostate cancer is something that's more likely to get you if you live long enough. Linus Pauling died of it at 93 and I think this can be considered a megadose vitamin C success story, especially considering he was a research chemist and had worked with carcinogens. Thirdly, diagnosis is more aggressive today and much prostate cancer is non-lethal or won't kill you faster than life will.

Low carb diets are a promising strategy for treating prostate cancer.[4]
In Europe, where cheese and organ meats are significant sources of vitamin K2, vitamin K2 intake is strongly associated with a lower risk of prostate cancer.[5]

The association was stronger for advanced prostate cancer (0.37; 0.16, 0.88; P for trend = 0.03).

That's a decent, Bradford Hill sized association - Vitamin K1 from plants had no association with risk.

ALA, the plant-based form of omega 3 fatty acid, is associated with increased prostate cancer risk.[6]

epidemiologic studies also showed an increased risk of prostate cancer in men with a high intake or blood level of ALA (combined relative risk 1.70; 95% CI 1.12–2.58).

I suspect this is due to this fatty acid being highly valuable as a synthetic substrate for cancer cells; it's a highly ketogenic fatty acid but only in a keto context, otherwise this same property of interconvertability is less desirable.

Postscript - H/T Mike Angel who added this comment to the original post:  

Here is the vulgarized version of the work being done in Israel: https://news.sky.com/story/prostate-treatment-gives-patients-new-hope-10486442 I think it's compelling. Apparently the idea came out of fertility treatments. This treatment is for testicular varicocele (I was screened for it at one stage) which is a mechanical cause of prostate hypertrophy and low testosterone (and probably the true, non-sexist cause of the "manspreading" phenomenon of a few years ago). A subject for another day perhaps.

[1] https://dom.pitt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/June2013.pdf

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30208764/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10190383/

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3757152/

[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18400723/

[6] https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/134/4/919/4757173?login=false