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There has been a lot of controversy over whether face masks decrease the spread of respiratory infections during the covid-19 pandemic. And what is the most sensible thing to do when a topic is controversial? Look at what the evidence says!

An umbrella systematic review (a systematic review of systematic reviews) was published in Canadian Family Physician in July looking to answer this question. It included 11 systematic reviews, which were in turn based on 18 randomized controlled trials, with a total of 26,444 participants. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

These trials were all carried out before the covid-era, so they were looking at other respiratory viruses, which is just something to be aware of, although covid does not appear to be markedly different from other respiratory viruses in terms of how it spreads or how infectious it is, so it should be possible to generalize from these studies. The data all come from randomized controlled trials, the highest quality type of evidence we have, and should therefore be more scientifically valid than the purely observational data that has often been used to justify mask use during the last few months. The problem with observational data is, as has been discussed before on this blog, that there is a huge scope for confounding effects. For example, people who choose to wear masks are probably taking more precautions in other ways than people who don’t, which will tend to make masks look more effective than they are.

Six of the trials looked at the use of face masks to prevent respiratory infections in the hospital, while the remaining twelve looked at the use of face masks in the community setting. We will begin by looking at the six hospital trials. Only one of them looked at masks vs no masks. The rest looked at different types of mask (mostly N95 masks vs surgical masks, although one also looked at cloth masks). It was always the hospital staff wearing the masks, not the patients, and the purpose was to see if the masks had any effect on probability of developing a respiratory infection. When the staff were supposed to wear the masks varied slightly – some of the studies mandated continuous use throughout the work shift, while others only required that the masks be worn when within six feet of patients or when caring for patients with respiratory infections. In general, around 60% to 80% of participants wore the masks as directed. This could of course be a problem, since it could make the results appear weaker if not everyone is following the study protocol, but at the same time probably makes the results more realistic, since not everyone is going to do as told in the real world either.

The one study that looked at masks vs no masks in the hospital consisted of 32 participants who were followed for 77 days. In all, one participant in the face mask group developed a respiratory infection, and one participant in the control group developed a respiratory infection, so there was no difference between the groupd. However, the study was so small that it’s really impossible to draw any conclusions from it.

Then we have four studies that were comparing N95-masks with surgical masks. These studies had a total of 8,712 participants, which is a big enough number that it should be able to find a difference if there is one. Overall, 45% of participants in the N95 group developed respiratory infections, compared with 55% in the surgical face mask group. This is an absolute difference of 10% , which isn’t too bad if the effect is real, but the difference wasn’t statistically significant.

What can we conclude? N95 masks seem to reduce the frequency of respiratory infections slightly more when compared with surgical masks, although the difference could also just be the result of chance.

Finally we can look at the one study that compared surgical masks with cloth masks. This study had 1,607 participants, of which 580 were in the surgical mask group, 569 people were in the cloth mask group, and 458 were controls. Unfortunately “control” in this study didn’t mean no mask, but rather that people in the control group could do whatever they felt like, sometimes wearing a cloth mask, sometimes wearing a surgical mask, sometimes wearing an N95, and sometimes wearing no mask, so the control group doesn’t really help us to understand anything. What were the researchers thinking?!

The people in the surgical mask group were given two new masks at the beginning of each shift, while the people in the cloth mask group were given five cloth masks to use for the full duration of the study, and asked to wash them with soap and water at the end of every shift.

At the end of the trial, 7,6% of people in the cloth mask group had develop a respiratory infection, compared with 7,0% in the control group, and 4,8% in the surgical mask group. As explained above, the control group in this study doesn’t tell us anything. The difference in performance between the surgical masks and the cloth masks was statistically significant however, and the absolute reduction was 2,8%, so surgical masks definitely seem to be better than cloth masks.

Ok, so what conclusion can we draw so far? N-95’s are possibly better than surgical masks, and surgical masks are probably better than cloth masks. Whether cloth masks are better than nothing (or for that matter, worse than nothing) is infortunately something we don’t know from these studies, since none of the researchers thought it would be a good idea to have a control group that wasn’t wearing any masks. Doh!

Anyway, let’s get to the twelve studies looking at how effective masks are in a community setting. That is after all what matters most to all the people who don’t spend their days in a hospital. Seven of these studies, with a total of 5,535 participants, were looking at families in which one person had a respiratory infection. In some of them the sick person wore a mask, in some of them the other family members wore a mask, and in some of them, everybody wore masks.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to matter who was wearing the mask, none of these studies found any difference in rate of infection between those households in which people were wearing a face mask and the households in which noone was wearing a mask. One explanation could be the low rate of adherence. Only 30-50% of participants were wearing the masks as directed, which I guess is understandable. People want to be able to relax when they’re in their own homes, and they want to be intimate with sick loved ones. Wearing a mask in your own home fits badly with thise priorities. Another explanation could be that if you’re spending hours per day in close proximity to a highly infectious sick person, the fact that you’re wearing a mask, or that they’re wearing a mask, probably isn’t going to make much difference. So all in all, these seven studies don’t tell us that much, but they suggest that there isn’t any point in anyone wearing a mask at home when a member of the household is sick.

I’ve intentionally left the best for last. Of all the studies in the review, there were two that looked at healthy university students in dorm rooms during influenza season. The two studies both lasted for six weeks and included 1,683 people. 765 were directed to wear surgical masks as much as possible, and the other 918 were a control group that didn’t wear masks at all. In practice, “as much as possible” meant four hours per day in one study, and five hours per day in the other study. This isn’t great, but I guess it’s hard to get people to wear masks more than that. The reason I think these studies are “best” is because they are the ones most relevant to the covid pandemic, where healthy people in a non-hospital setting are being told to wear masks as much as possible.

So, what were the results? Overall 18,8% in the mask group became sick, compared with 24,7% in the control group. This is a 5,9% absolute difference in favour of wearing masks. After correcting for the fact that these trials were using cluster randomization (a method in which an entire group, for example an entire dorm room, is randomized to a treatment instead of randomizing individuals), the reviewers determined that the actual absolute difference was more like 4,2%, which gives a relative risk reduction of around 17% (24,7/4,2). This would mean that for every 24 people who wear a surgical mask, you prevent one infection (100/4,2), or to put it another way, you prevent one in six infections. The result was statistically significant, just.

Ok, so what conclusions can we draw from all these studies?

First of all, when it comes to preventing the spread of respiratory infections, N-95 masks might be better than surgical face masks, and surgical face masks are probably better than cloth masks. In fact, cloth masks may not provide any protection at all! So if you’re going to wear a mask, wear a surgical mask or an N-95.

Secondly, if you or someone in your household is sick, you probably don’t need to bother wearing a mask at home. The infection will spread at the same rate within the household regardless. If there is a member of a high risk group living in the household, i.e. someone over the age of 70 with serious co-morbidities (and that individual isn’t the one who is sick), then it might make sense for either that person to spend the next week somewhere else, or for the sick individual to do so.

Thirdly, face masks do seem to slightly decrease the risk of spreading respiratory infections outside the household setting. However, it is questionable whether an intervention that only impacts one in 24 people, and that only decreases the relative risk of infection by 17%, is having a big enough effect to noticeably slow the speed at which a highly infectious disease like covid-19 spreads through a population.

Rather than require that everyone wear a mask at all times when out in public, it might make more sense to restrict mask use to specific situations, for example when interacting with high risk groups in nursing homes (and in those situations to combine the masks with face shields to create a maximally impervious barrier), especially considering that for people below the age of 70 who are otherwise healthy, the risks connected with covid are tiny.

You might also like my article about whether hydroxychloroquine has a role in treating covid-19, or my article about whether vitamin D supplements protect against respiratory infections.

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Flynn probe was supposed to be shut down in November 2016, and analysts became worried when superiors kept it open without cause.

The post Twitter Censors Clips on Soros From Tucker Carlson as Sensitive Content appeared first on The Bongino Report.

The post After Allowing 3+ Months of Antifa Riots, Portland Denies Permit to Right Wing Rally Citing Coronavirus appeared first on The Bongino Report.

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The Chinese military released a movie of the Chinese regime testing a missile against a US base over the weekend.

Chinese military video appears to show simulated attack on U.S. air base on Guam.
The video posted on Saturday is still posted at the regime media outlet The Global Times.

The Japan Times reported on the Chinese military video.

“Chinese military video appears to show simulated attack on U.S. air base on Guam”

But they got caught in stealing the video!
4chan sleuths discovered the Chinese Regime pasted together clips from different Hollywood movies for their video release.

The video scenes were stolen from “The Hurt Locker,” “The Rock,” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

Here is Hollywood versus Chinese Air Force.

Read more here.

The post WOW! 4Chan Sleuths Catch China Faking Simulated Missile Tests– Clips Came from “Transformers” and “The Hurt Locker” appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Traditional diet advice over the last fifty years, still espoused by most health authorities around the world, holds that if you want to lose weight, you need to cut down your fat intake. In the last few decades, a number of alternative diets have sprung up claiming that you should instead be cutting down your carbohydrate intake. These include the LCHF, Atkins, paleo, and more recently the ketogenic diets. But what do the randomized controlled trials say? Should you cut down on fat or carbs if you want to lose weight?

Before we get in to the meat of the article, we need to clarify one thing. There are basically four different dietary sources of energy available to humans. These are carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and alcohol. If you get less of your energy from one source, that necessarily means you will need to get a greater proportion of your energy from one or more of the others. So a low carb diet generally means you will be getting a greater proportion of your calories from fat, and a low fat diet generally means you will be getting a greater proportion of your calories from carbs.

The idea behind the traditional advice to cut down on fat is largely based around the cholesterol hypothesis, which we have recently debunked. Basically, it was thought (and still is, to a large extent) that a high fat diet made you fat and caused heart disease, which was the basis for recommending that people cut down on their fat intake.

The idea behind the low carb diets is largely based around the fact that fats and proteins are absorbed more slowly than carbohydrates, which leads to a longer lasting sense of fullness after a high fat or high protein meal than after a high carb meal. This should in turn leads to a lower overall intake of calories.

In recent years, there have been two decent quality randomized controlled trials comparing low carb vs low fat diets, one that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2014, and another that was published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) in 2018. We will look at each in turn.

The 2014 trial included 148 participants who were randomized to either a low carb diet or a low fat diet. The trial was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was carried out in New Orleans. In order to be eligible for the study, participants had to have a BMI of between 30 and 45 (30 is the lower limit for being diagnosed with obesity) and not have any other chronic health conditions. The average age of the participants was 47 years.

Participants were recruited through mailing lists, flyers, and TV-advertisements. This is important, because it means that the participants were motivated to lose weight and to start leading a healthier lifestyle. Something to be conscious of in light of this is that there was no placebo group – the purpose of this study was not to compare a diet versus placebo, but to compare two diets versus each other. This limits the data somewhat. It would have been interesting to have a third group that was getting some form of placebo treatment, in order to be able to compare the diets with doing nothing. Since the people taking part in the study were in general a least a bit motivated to lose weight, it is quite possible that they would end up losing weight over the coming year even without any specific dietary intervention.

Participants in the low carb group were instructed to keep their daily carbohydrate intake at below 40 grams per day. This isn’t just a low carb diet, it is a very low carb diet (also known as a ketogenic diet). In general, people enter a state of ketosis when their carbohydrate intake is below 50 grams per day. (Ketosis is a state in which the liver starts to produce large amounts of ketones to compensate for the lack of carbohydrates. Ketones are an alternative fuel produced by breaking down fats, which can be used by the heart, brain, and muscles when there is a lack of available carbohydrates).

Participants in the low fat group were instructed to get at most 30% of their calories from fats. Neither group was given a specific calorie target. From my perspective, this is a sensible approach, because people generally aren’t going to be willing to keep counting calories for the rest of their lives, so if a new diet is going to be effective over the long term, then it needs to be relatively effortless to maintain once new dietary habits have been formed.

Both groups were given handbooks explaining what to eat in order to meet the targets, and were provided with one meal replacement per day for the duration of the study, which was either of the low fat or low carb variety depending on which group they were in. Apart from that, the participants had follow-up meetings with a dietician weekly during the first four weeks of the study, and thereafter small group counseling sessions every two weeks for the next five months, and finally small group sessions every four weeks for the final six months.

The participants were followed up at three, six, nine, and twelve months and asked to recall everything they had consumed over the preceding 24 hours. They were also weighed, and had blood tests and urine tests drawn at each of these time points.

So, what were the results?

Overall, 80% of participants followed through with the trial. There was no significant difference between the groups in terms of likelihood of sticking with their respective diets. This suggests that both diets were about equally easy to maintain.

At baseline, the average intake of carbohydrates was 242 grams per day in both groups. The low carb group was able to decrease this to 97 grams at the 3 months mark, but was up to 127 grams at the twelve month mark. The low fat group also decreased its intake of carbohydrates, to 193 grams at the three month mark, which had risen marginally to 197 grams at the twelve month mark.

There are two things about these results which are interesting. Firstly, the low carb group was supposed to cut carbs down to 40 grams per day, but never even came close. To me, this shows the difficulty of maintaining a ketogenic diet. Having said that, they were able to halve their carbohydrate intake, which is still a significant change from baseline. Secondly, the low fat group also decreased their carb intake, which I guess makes sense, since the people taking part in the trial had all signed up to it because they wanted to lose weight and were motivated to do so, so even though there was no formal requirement to cut down on calories, it is reasonable to expect that many participants consciously did so anyway. This could obviously make any difference between a low carb and low fat diet seem smaller than it actually is, since both groups cut down on carbs.

When it comes to fats, the average intake at baseline was 34,7% of total calories in the low fat group, and 32,5% in the low carb group. At the one year mark, this had decreased to 29,8% in the low fat group, but increased to 40,7% in the low carb group.

The average weight reduction at one year was 1,8 kg in the low fat group, compared with 5,3 kg in the low carb group. The difference was highly statistically significant. At the same time, the low carb group increased its muscle mass by 1,3% while the low fat group decreased its muscle mass by 0,4% . This difference was also highly statistically significant.

But that’s not all. One common argument against a low carb high fat diet is that it might be more effective at causing weight loss, but that this is outweighed by the fact that it increases the risk of heart disease. Luckily, the researchers gathered lots of data to help us determine if that is actually the case, and based on this they calculated the ten year risk of cardiovascular disease at baseline and at one year, using a scoring system known as the Framingham risk score. In the low fat group, the ten year risk of heart disease increased by 0,4% . In the low carb group, the risk decreased by 1,0% . Again, this difference was highly statistically significant.

What conclusions can we draw from this study? Basically, the low carb group lost almost three times as much weight as the low fat group, while gaining muscle mass (the low fat group lost muscle mass). Additionally, the low carb group decreased its ten year cardiovascular risk, while the low fat group increased its risk, according to the Framingham risk score. These results strongly suggest that a low carb diet is more effective than a low fat diet, both for weight loss and for protecting against cardiovascular disease.

But before we draw our final conclusions, we’re going to look at the second study, published in 2018. This was a randomized controlled trial that involved 609 participants with a BMI between 28 and 40 (As mentioned before, 30 is the cut-off for obesity. 25 is the cut-off for overweight, so these people were overweight to obese). The average age of the participants was 40 years old. Apart from the excess weight, they had to be fundamentally healthy in order to be included. The trial was carried out in San Francisco and was, just like the previous trial, financed by the NIH. As in the previous trial, participants were followed for one year and were randomized to either a low fat or a low carb diet.

Over the course of the year, the participants took part in 22 small group counseling sessions focusing on ways to achieve the respective diet that they had been assigned to (more frequent earlier in the trial, less frequent towards the end). What participants were told to do in this study varied a bit from the previous one. Participants were told to either limit intake of fats or intake of carbs to 20 grams per day for the first eight weeks, depending on whether they were in the low fat or low carb group. After that, they were supposed to slowly add the fats or carbs back by 15 grams per week until they reached the lowest level that they thought they would be able to maintain over the long term. As in the previous trial, no specific calorie restriction was imposed. And as in the previous study, the actual amount of each substance eaten was determined by interviewing the participants at various time points about what they had eaten during the preceding 24 hours.

On to the results.

As in the other trial, around 80% of participants followed through to the end, with no difference between the groups. At baseline, the low fat group was consuming around 242 grams of carbohydrates per day while the low carb group was consuming 247 grams of carbohydrates per day. At the one year mark, the low fat group had decreased its carbohydrate intake slightly, to 213 grams per day, while the low carb group had decreased its carb intake significantly, to 132 grams per day.

Fat intake at baseline was 35% of total calories per day in the low fat group, and 36% per day in the low carb group. At the one year mark, the low fat group had decreased its relative fat intake to 29% of total calories, while the low carb group had increased it to 45% .

The average weight reduction at twelve months was 5,3 kilograms for the low fat diet group and 6,0 kilograms for the low carb group. The difference was not statistically significant.

That’s odd. The first study found a big difference in weight loss between the groups, while the second study didn’t find any meaningful difference. This is in spite of the fact that the studies were actually constructed quite similarly, and that the changes in carbohydrate and fat intake levels were similar. How do we explain that?

I have no idea. If anyone has any suggestions, please post them in the comment section. In general, the data from second study should be more reliable for the simple reason that it had over four times as many participants, which significantly decreases the risk that random chance will cause a result that isn’t real.

In terms of Framingham ten year risk score, the low fat group decreased its risk by 0,1%, while the low carb group increased its risk by 0,1% . At the end of the trial, participants in the low fat group had a 0,7% ten year risk, while participants in the low carb group had a 0,9% ten year risk. This difference between the groups is too small to be clinically meaningful, but it is quite a difference from the prior study, which found a significant decrease in ten year risk with the low carb diet.

One thing to note before we get to the final conclusion, is that the carb intake in the low carb group was around 100-150 grams in both studies. While this is low carb compared to the standard western diet, it is far above what proponents of a ketogenic diet recommend. It is possible that a more severe carbohydrate restriction would show even greater weight loss benefits. These two studies are not able to answer that question. However, the first study was aiming for a ketogenic diet and didn’t even come close, so it is also quite likely that ketosis is not a realistically achievable long term state for the majority of people, even if it is effective in theory.

Final conclusion: Basically, from these two studies I think we can conclude that a low carb diet is at least as effective as a low fat diet for weight loss. Additionally, the data from these studies does not support the idea that a low carb diet increases risk of heart disease compared with a low fat diet. As an aside, that is another nail in the coffin of the cholesterol hypothesis.

You might also be interested in my article about whether exercise is an effective way to lose weight or my article about whether salt is bad for your health.

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Walter Olson

In the destructive riots that hit Minneapolis this summer — riots I’ve argued libertarians should be in the forefront of condemning — nearly 1,500 businesses were heavily damaged or destroyed.

For many of these businesses, the Minneapolis city government adds a special insult: it won’t let shop owners install exterior shutters to protect against break‐​ins, a common practice in other cities. The Star‐​Tribune reported on the resulting frustration:

In a report justifying the rule change, Minneapolis officials argued that external shutters “cause visual blight” and create the impression that an area is “unsafe” and “troublesome.”

After looters crashed through his floor‐​to‐​ceiling windows and stole $1 million worth of booze in May, Chicago‐​Lake Liquors owner John Wolf wanted to protect himself from a repeat occurrence. … The [forbidden] investment [in security shutters] would not only prevent rioters from entering his store, it would protect his windows — which cost $50,000 to replace.

It reminds me of the controversy I wrote about in 2017, in which the Philadelphia city council moved to ban the see‐​through partitions that many corner stores install in order to deter robberies, especially of the strong‐​arm variety.

The councilwoman who sponsored that bill said that transparent partitions caused “indignity,” only happened in some neighborhoods, and “conditioned” children’s thinking in bad ways.

Notice, as with the Minneapolis worries about security shutters and property values, that the objection is not to a neighborhood’s being physically dangerous, as to the display of visible cues that might alert people to that fact. Make the visible cues go away!

Both cities’ measures show a contempt for the natural human right of self‐​defense. Some expect us to pool this right with our neighbors collectively and vest it in the authorities — even though these same authorities in practice take no legal responsibility for defending us.

Compare: gun control advocates often argue that law‐​abiding individuals must not be left with the means of self‐​defense because when guns are widely distributed, there will inevitably be some instances of misuse or accident that harm innocents.

However strong or weak you see that argument as being, it’s absent here. Metal shutters on store fronts don’t misfire and hurt anyone by accident. Acrylic partitions in sandwich shops aren’t something criminals might steal and use in later crimes.

Bans like the ones in Minneapolis and Philadelphia make the logic starker and clearer than usual: we, the authorities, hold your interest in self‐​defense, no matter how peaceful and passive the means, to be of so little worth that we will let even street aesthetics and concerns about neighborhood image override it.

The primary task of government is that of protecting individual rights. Cities like these are failing at that task.

SAY ANYTHING: Biden Flip-Flops (Again) to Support Banning Fracking Again.

VITAMIN D UPDATE: Vitamin D deficiency increases COVID-19 risk by more than 50%. I’ve been telling you to keep your Vitamin D levels up for years; this is just another reason.

SO KNOXVILLE’S BAR CURFEW ISN’T BACKED BY ANY ACTUAL SCIENCE, ACCORDING TO THE KNOX COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT:

“We’ve never said that we’ve had actual cases tracked back to bars what we are looking at and thinking about is the activity and the behavior in bars and restaurants and with drinking alcohol,” said Charity Menefee on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Knox County Health Department.

Menefee explains that although there are not clusters linked to bars or restaurants in Knox County, local contact tracing and information from other cities show that a curfew may help slow the spread of COVID-19 within Knox County.

I hope that Nashville isn’t one of those “other cities.” But seriously, we’ve had six months or more of contact tracing data. If the data don’t show bars as a problem, then “hunching” that maybe they still are isn’t science, and at this point isn’t a legal justification for a curfew.

WHEN YOU CAN’T TRUST THE NUMBERS: Bombshell: Nashville mayor’s office deliberately kept vital COVID info about bars and restaurants from the public.

The coronavirus cases on lower Broadway may have been so low that the mayor’s office and the Metro Health Department decided to keep it secret.

Emails between the mayor’s senior advisor and the health department reveal only a partial picture. But what they reveal is disturbing.

The discussion involves the low number of coronavirus cases emerging from bars and restaurants and how to handle that.

And most disturbingly, how to keep it from the public.

Disgraceful. Trust is the chief asset public health officials have, and they’ve squandered it with barely a thought. It will be a generation at least before people trust them again, even if they clean up their act, which at present seems unlikely.

WOEING: Boeing hid design flaws in 737 Max jets from pilots and regulators.

The 238-page report details how Boeing attempted to minimize both the regulatory testing and pilot training required to fly the new Max, which was being rushed out in an attempt to compete with the Airbus A320neo.

It found the company successfully persuaded the FAA not to classify the anti-stall system as “safety critical,” meaning that many pilots did not even know of its existence before flying the Max.

In doing so, Boeing concealed from regulators internal test data showing that if a pilot took longer than 10 seconds to recognize that the system had kicked in erroneously, the consequences would be “catastrophic.”

Read the whole thing.

NOW WE KNOW: If you wondered if there is a China link to BLM, wonder no more.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:

 

ROOM TEMPERATURE STARS: Citizen Scientists discover bizarre new brown dwarfs near our Sun. “Although the discovery of brown dwarfs is not a new phenomenon, the ones discovered in the recent study have a weird property — they are colder than the boiling point of water. Some even approach the temperature of the Earth and are cool enough to harbor water clouds.”

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

Have you been wondering if the Coronavirus shutdowns and delayed school reopenings might have something to do with politics and the presidential election?

You may be right.

A public health official in California named Barbara Ferrer was recently caught on tape saying that schools will likely remain shut until after the election. Sounds like she said the quiet part out loud.

FOX News reports:

LA County schools won’t reopen until ‘after the election,” health director says

Los Angeles County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer was recorded saying the country’s largest county would not reopen its schools until “after the election.”

“We don’t realistically anticipate that we would be moving to either tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools at least until after the election, in early November,” Ferrer said in a conference call with school administrators and medical staff, a recording of which was played on KFI’s “John and Ken Show.”

Her comments led the California radio show hosts, who obtained the recording, to speculate about why she chose to use the General Election instead of some other day like Halloween, as a target date, and whether the county health department and schools were trying to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Democrats.

“What does it have to do with the elections?” one of the hosts asks. “That makes no sense, she just picked a date, the elections.”

Here’s the audio. Listen for yourself:

NEW: .@KFIAM640 has obtained an audio recording of LA County Public Health Director Dr. Ferrer repeatedly saying in a conference call that she doesn't expect K-12 schools to reopen until "we are done with the election" in November. Listen to audio here: https://t.co/a9VdJS0t6n

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) September 10, 2020

Is there any other way this could be interpreted?

She's saying the quiet part loud. https://t.co/TqbgZlsFcP

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 10, 2020

Dr Ferrer told us “the science is guiding our decisions” what does science have to do with the election? We are being held hostage by a Politically motivated shut down.
WAKE UP LOS ANGELES.

— (@Rockprincess818) September 10, 2020

This is all about the election. Perhaps it always has been.

Cross posted from American Lookout.

(Image:Source)

The post L.A. Public Health Director Caught On Tape Saying Schools Will Stay Shut Until ‘After The Election’ (AUDIO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Oz is getting weird.

A shocking video from Australia shows police moving to arrest an elderly woman sitting on a park bench for not wearing a mask.

“This is unlawful, on what grounds am I under arrest?” asks the woman. An officer tells her she is being arrested for failing to provide her name and address.

“Stand up and turn around,” the officer tells the elderly woman.

A police officer is seen snatching her friend’s phone so she can’t film the encounter. “Excuse me,” the friend says, “you have no right to seize my property.”

Australian Police wanting to arrest 2 elderly women sitting in a park, watch as one of the Police officers grabs the women’s phone as she is recording. pic.twitter.com/w9mOqThiHk

— DJ SPIRAL (@DJSPIRAL_) September 7, 2020

Melbourne, Australia is in the midst of a six-week lockdown that runs until Sept. 13.

The rules:

• Must stay within 5km (3 mi) radius of home.
• Only one person from a household is allowed to shop per day.
• No more than one hour of exercise per day and groups limited to two.
• Recreational activity is banned.
• Curfew from 8 p.m. until 5 a.m.

And masks, of course, are required.

Police in Melbourne announced that they would be using surveillance drones to find people who don’t wear masks and to keep track of cars that travel further than 3 miles from home.

The post Corona Cops In Australia Move To Arrest Grandma Sitting in Park For Not Wearing a Mask appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER!

I’m pretty sure that Michael Graham wrote Redneck Nation as a warning, not a how-to guide for college administrators.

The liver is incredible. Most people think of it as a filter, but filters are physical barriers that accumulate junk and have to be cleaned. The liver isn’t a filter. It’s a chemical processing plant. Rather than sit there, passively receiving, filtering out, and storing undesirable compounds, the liver encounters toxic chemicals and attempts to metabolize them into less-toxic metabolites that we can handle.

• It oxidizes the toxins, preparing them for further modification
• It converts the toxins to a less-toxic, water-soluble version that’s easier to excrete
• It excretes the toxins through feces or urine

Bam. It’s an elegant process, provided everything is working well back there. And it’s not the only process it controls.

The liver is the primary site of cholesterol synthesis and disposal. It creates cholesterol as needed and converts excess into bile salts for removal via the bile duct. The liver also plays a huge role in the burning of fat for energy, the storage of vitamin A, the metabolism of hormones, and the regulation of blood sugar. If you enjoy burning ketones, you can thank the liver because that’s where they’re produced.

The liver supports full-body health, in other words. If it isn’t working correctly, nothing is. Everything starts to fall apart.

How do we support the liver?

It’s not one thing we do. It’s many things. It’s nutrition, supplementation, lifestyle, sleep — everything. It’s also the things we don’t do. The stakes are high, you see. Whenever there’s a grand overarching orchestrator regulating dozens of different processes in the body, you must protect it from multiple angles. A lot can go wrong. Or right, depending on how you look at it.

Since the liver is “hidden away” and you can’t really “feel” it, you may not give it too much thought. When you’re overweight, you know it. When your fitness is suffering, you consciously experience it. When your liver is overburdened or suffering, you don’t necessarily know it. That’s where doing the right things for the sake of doing them comes in handy.

So, what should you do to maintain pristine liver health?

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11 Ways to Maintain a Healthy Liver

Liver health depends on steps you take toward a healthy lifestyle, and equally as important, the things you refrain from doing. Here are some things you can to to contribute to lifelong liver health:

• Reduce linoleic acid intake
• Reduce refined carb intake
• Reduce alcohol intake
• Stop overeating, and lose weight
• Practice time-restricted eating
• Eat fatty fish and get omega-3s
• Eat egg yolks and other choline sources
• Take NAC
• Take whey protein
• Regularly deplete your liver glycogen
• Get good, regular sleep

Reduce Linoleic Acid Intake

When a patient can’t eat, they get something called parenteral nutrition — a direct infusion of nutrients into the gut. The classic parenteral nutrition consists of an emulsion of olive oil and soybean oil. It’s very rich in linoleic acid and typically leads to elevated liver enzymes and fatty liver. That’s right: the medical establishment for whatever reason just accepts that people receiving parenteral nutrition have a high chance of developing fatty liver disease.

Okay, but what’s happening here? Is it really causal? Yes. The more linoleic acid you eat, the more oxidized metabolites of linoleic acid show up in your body. The more oxidized metabolites of linoleic acid you have, the higher your risk of fatty liver. These toxic metabolites of LA are actually full-fledged biomarkers of liver injury.⁵³

The bottom line: your liver prefers smart fats like avocado oil, butter, lard, fatty fish, and olive oil over industrial seed oils.

Reduce Refined Carb Intake

The real danger of refined carbs is that they tend to be nutrient-poor. They’re basically just pure starch (or sugar). All the energy, none of the micronutrients required to metabolize that energy.

Your liver works hard to convert carbs into glucose that your body can use. When you don’t use the glucose in your blood, it gets stored in the liver and skeletal muscle as glycogen, and if you have excess after that, it gets stored as body fat. With refined carbs, it’s easy to get there.

Studies show that carb overfeeding, especially with fructose, can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease,⁵⁴ which affects how efficiently your liver works.

Of course, the combo of high linoleic acid and high refined carbohydrate is just about the worst thing possible.

Reduce Alcohol Intake

To detox alcohol, the liver converts it into the metabolite acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is far more toxic than ethanol itself, so the body then releases acetaldehyde dehydrogenase and glutathione to break down the acetaldehyde. If you stick to just a few drinks and space them out accordingly, your body’s natural antioxidant enzyme production can keep up. If you start binging, though, glutathione stores become overwhelmed and the liver must produce more. Meanwhile, acetaldehyde, which is between 10-30 times more toxic than ethanol, accrues in your body.⁵⁵

Here’s where dosage matters. The more you drink in a given allotment of time, the higher the liver burden. Your liver doesn’t metabolize ethanol all at once. It’s an ongoing physical process. It takes time, and glutathione. Glutathione is also a physical material. You need more substrate, like glycine and cysteine, to produce it. Without enough glutathione (and there’s never enough if you drink too much), your liver will incur damage and develop fat.

If you’re going to drink, do so sparingly, choose healthier drinks, and practice good hangover prevention hygiene. High linoleic acid intake, for example, mixes terribly with alcohol; a much better choice is something saturated like beef fat or cocoa butter.

Stop Overeating, and Lose Weight

The number one risk factor for getting a fatty liver with impaired function is gaining excess body fat. Don’t get fat. If you are fat, lose it. Losing weight is the number one risk factor for losing a fatty liver.

Figure out what type of diet helps you eat normal amounts, and then go follow that diet. For most of my readers, it’s a low-carb Primal or keto approach. For others, it’s full-on carnivore. And yes, there are some for whom a moderate or even high carb diet works best. Whatever satiates you is the one that will improve your liver function.

Overeating fat especially can be bad, because the extra fat doesn’t need to waste any extra steps becoming available to your liver.

Practice Time-restricted Eating

In mice fed a typical soybean oil-fructose-based lab diet, the “high-fat” kind that reliably plumps up their livers, switching to a shortened eating window eliminates the metabolic fallout. They don’t get fat, they don’t get insulin resistant, and, most importantly, they don’t get fatty or dysfunctional liver.⁵⁶

Eat Fatty Fish and Get Omega-3s

If you offset some of that olive oil and soybean oil with a blend of medium triglycerides and fish oil, liver enzymes may drop and overall integrity of the liver may improve.⁵⁷ Amazing how that works.

Fish oil isn’t the only option. In fact, eating actual seafood is ideal because in addition to the omega-3s it also provides micronutrients and macronutrients that enhance liver function. If you’re not a fish eater, supplements can fill in the gaps.

Eat Yolks and Other Choline Sources

Choline protects against fatty liver by providing the backbone for VLDL—the particle the liver uses to transport fat out  into the body. Without adequate choline, you can’t make enough VLDL for transport and the fat tends to accumulate in the liver.

Egg yolks are the best source of choline.

Take NAC

In patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, taking NAC every day for three months improved liver enzyme levels and overall liver function.⁵⁸ Taking it with vitamin C may be even more effective.

NAC is well-known for boosting levels of glutathione, the primary antioxidant used by the liver to metabolize toxins and protect itself.

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Take Whey Protein

Obese women with fatty liver who took 60 grams of whey protein per day reduced their liver fat by almost 21%.⁵⁹

Whey boosts glutathione levels and provides methionine, which the body can convert to choline when deficient.

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Regularly Deplete Your Liver Glycogen

De novo lipogenesis, or the creation of fat from carbohydrate, is a hallmark of fatty liver disease.⁶⁰ When liver glycogen is full, it becomes far more likely that your liver will turn any subsequent carbohydrate it encounters into fat for storage. If you keep liver glycogen low, or regularly deplete it, you can avoid de novo lipogenesis because there’s usually a place to store the glucose.

Furthermore, keeping liver glycogen low increases fat utilization from all over the body, including the liver.⁶¹ A few of my favorite ways to deplete glycogen:

• Train hard. I like HIIT, higher volume lifting, and sprints. Or my personal favorite: Ultimate Frisbee. Not all at once.
• Fast. Fasting is a reliable way to burn through available liver glycogen.
• Reduce carbs. Going low-carb or keto is a reliable, if slightly slower way to burn through your liver glycogen.

Get Good, Regular Sleep

Certain molecules responsible for clearing liver fat operate according to a circadian schedule.⁶² If you don’t get to sleep at a normal, consistent time, your rhythm is disrupted and the molecules can’t do their jobs.

If you hadn’t already noticed, these are good health practices in general. We keep running into this phenomenon, don’t we?

What’s good for the liver is good for the brain is good for the cardiovascular system is good for your performance in the gym is good for the mirror.

It makes things easier and harder.

You know what to do.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Do you have any other recommendations for liver health? Which of these do you follow?

The post All About the Liver, and How to Support Your Favorite Detoxification Organ appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

GOOD: Wuhan Coronavirus: Heart and lung damage ‘can repair itself.’

Whenever I write about sleep, I hear from a chorus of people who struggle to sleep through the night. Anecdotally, it seems a far more common complaint than difficulty falling asleep in the first place.

These complaints are one of three types:

1. People who have trouble falling asleep
2. People who sleep fitfully, waking multiple times throughout the night
3. Those who reliably wake once, around the same time most nights

Understandably, this is a hugely vexing problem. Poor quality sleep is a serious health concern. Not to mention, sleeping badly feels simply awful. When the alarm goes off after a night of tossing and turning, the next day is sure to be a slog. String several days like that together, and it’s hard to function at all.

I’m going to go out on a limb, though, and assert that waking up in the middle of the night isn’t always the problem we make it out to be. For some people, nighttime wakings are actually something to embrace. As always, context is everything.

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What Causes You to Wake Up In the Middle of the Night?

One of the most frustrating things about nighttime waking is that there are so many possible causes. Sometimes the solution is as simple as practicing good sleep hygiene. Other times, medical help is in order. Still other times, the solution is something different entirely.

Transitioning to Lighter Sleep Stages

Sleep isn’t a uniform state of unconsciousness you slip into when it becomes dark and, theoretically, ride until morning. It’s a dynamic process that goes in waves—or more precisely, cycles—throughout the night.

There are four (or five, depending on how you slice it) stages of sleep:

• Stage 1: light sleep, occurs right after falling asleep
• Stage 2: deeper sleep
• Slow-wave sleep (SWS): deepest sleep, a.k.a. Stage 3 and Stage 4 sleep
• REM: lighter sleep where our more interesting dreams occur (although we can also dream in non-REM phases⁴⁵)

A single sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes, during which you move from light sleep, through stage 2, into deep SWS, and back up to REM. Then down you go again, then back up, ideally at least four of five times per night.

Your sleep is also roughly broken into two phases over the course of a whole night. In the first half, you spend relatively more time in SWS. The second half is characterized by a higher proportion of REM sleep.

What does this have to do with nighttime waking?

One possible explanation is that as you transition into lighter sleep — either within a single sleep cycle, or as you move from the first to the second phase—aches, pains, and small annoyances are more likely to wake you up. These can include medical issues like chronic pain, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, or GERD. Soreness from the day’s hard workout, noise or light from your environment, hunger, thirst, or being too hot or cold might rouse you from your slumber.

If you’re waking up multiple times at night, chances are that you’re experiencing physical discomfort that you’re not able to sleep through. Sometimes it’s obvious, but not always.

Was It Something You Ate Or Drank?

While individual studies have linked sleep quality to diet and macronutrient intake (high versus low carb, for example), they are mostly small and the results inconclusive.⁴⁶ Still, you might be able to look at your diet and identify a likely culprit. For example, if your sleep problems started after going carnivore or adding intermittent fasting, that’s an obvious place to start.

A food log can help you spot patterns, such as whether eating certain foods at dinner tends to correlate with poorer sleep. Alcohol and caffeine are big sleep disruptors as well, though you surely know that.

If you’re frequently waking up to pee, you might be overhydrating, especially in the evening. More seriously, it can be a symptom of diabetes or bladder, prostate, kidney, adrenal, or heart problems. Getting up once or twice to pee probably isn’t cause for alarm. It’s worth seeing a doctor if you’re getting several times or urinating much more at night than during the day.

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What to Do About Nighttime Waking

First things first, pick the low-hanging fruit

I’m talking good sleep hygiene practices. Things like:

• Sleep in a cool, dark, quiet room.
• Minimize exposure to artificial lights after the sun sets. Use blue-light blocking glasses, and turn on night mode on your devices.
• Watch your alcohol and caffeine consumption, especially later in the day.
• Go to bed around the same time each night.

If applicable, experiment with your diet and food timing

Depending on your current diet, some experiments you might try include:

1. If you’re ultra-low-carb, try increasing your carb intake for a few weeks.
2. Try loading more of your carbs into your evening meal.
3. Make sure your protein intake isn’t too low.⁴⁷
4. Try eating your last meal earlier if you’re waking up with indigestion, or later if you’re waking up hungry.

Try a teaspoon of raw honey before bed

One hypothesis is that you’re waking up in the middle of the night because your brain gets hungry for glucose eight hours after your last meal. The honey provides some carbs to get you through.

There’s no concrete evidence for honey as a sleep aid, but plenty of people swear by this remedy. I’m not sure it’s likely to be more effective than eating a serving of complex carbs at dinner. That said, even for low-carbers, I don’t think there’s any harm in trying.

I’ll note, though, that fasting studies don’t show a link to sleep disturbances.⁴⁸ That calls the “starving brain” hypothesis into question, but I suspect there’s an important nuance here. Individuals who can comfortably do longer fasts are almost certainly also fat-adapted and, at least during the fast, producing ketones to fuel their brains. Metabolically, they’re in a very different place from a carb-dependent person who struggles to make it through the night.

Consider napping

If you’re unable to get enough high-quality sleep at night, you might prefer to adjust your sleep schedule entirely. Instead, aim for a shorter nighttime sleep period, say five or six hours, paired with an afternoon nap. This is another variant of biphasic sleeping.

Years ago, I wrote a post on how to conduct just this type of experiment. Check it out and see if it might work for you. It’s unconventional in this day and age, but I know people who thrive on this schedule.

Finally, don’t hesitate to seek medical help

Sleep issues are a symptom of many diverse health issues, including hyperthyroidism, anxiety, depression, and, as previously mentioned, diabetes, heart disease, and others. Your doctor may want to test you for sleep apnea.

The Case of Hot Flashes

Hot flashes are a common cause of nighttime waking for women of a certain age. If you endure nighttime flashes, you’re probably familiar with the standard advice:

• Sleep in a cool room
• Use moisture-wicking pajamas and sheets
• Try acupuncture or other mind-body therapies
• Add supplements like folic acid, or herbs like black cohosh or chasteberry
• Investigate hormone-replacement therapy

Unfortunately, as I’ve learned from my wife Carrie’s and many friends’ experiences, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. I do think acupuncture is a potentially helpful, underutilized tool. Mostly, though, it’s just a combo of trial-and-error plus time that seems to get most women through this phase.

Getting Back to Sleep

In the meantime, while you get to the root of the issue, here are some tips for getting back to sleep:

• Take care of pressing needs. Get up and pee, get a drink of water, or adjust the thermostat. There’s no point in trying to power through the discomfort that woke you up in the first place. Just fix it.
• Keep artificial lights and screens off. Use small nightlights to light your path to the bathroom if necessary, and wear your orange-tinted glasses.
• Do a calm activity such as reading by candlelight, deep breathing exercises, or sketching or writing in your journal.
• Most of all, don’t stress! Fretting is likely to keep you awake for much longer than simply accepting the fact that you are awake and lying peacefully in bed.

Are You Fighting Something You Should Be Embracing?

I’ve long believed that humans naturally tend to be biphasic sleepers. The idea that we should be passed out for a solid eight hours per night is a social construct not firmly rooted in our sleep biology.

Historian Roger Ekirch argues, rather convincingly I think, that before the advent of artificial light, humans across geographical locations and social strata slept in two chunks during the night. The first, usually just called “first sleep,” or sometimes “dead sleep,” comprised the first four or so hours. “Second sleep” went until dawn. In between, people would enjoy an hour, or perhaps two or three hours, of mid-night activities such as praying and meditating, reading and writing, having sex, and even visiting neighbors. This was seen as completely normal, even welcome.⁴⁹

Anthropological evidence confirms that some modern-day hunter-gatherers around the world likewise engage in biphasic sleeping.⁵⁰ Also, in one small experiment, seven adults lived in a controlled environment with 14 hours of darkness per night. Over the course of four weeks, their sleep and hormone secretions slowly and naturally became biphasic.⁵¹

Scholars argue that biphasic sleep confers an evolutionary advantage.⁵² If some individuals fall asleep earlier and some later, and most people are awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night, someone in the group is always up. That person can tend the fire and watch for danger. In fact, the waking hour was sometimes called the “sentinel” hour. According to Ekirch, it was often referred to as simply the “watch.”

Are You a Biphasic Sleeper, or Do You Have a Sleep Problem?

Waking up multiple times per night, such that you rarely feel truly rested, is a problem. However, we shouldn’t rush to pathologize a single nighttime waking. That might just be your natural sleep pattern. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’d be better off aiming for biphasic sleep either. Even if you wake reliably at the same time each night, sometimes a full bladder is just a full bladder.

The litmus test is how you feel. With a biphasic schedule, the intervening waking period should be pleasant. Your mind should feel calm and alert, if perhaps a bit dreamy. Anecdotally, many famous writers, artists, and sculptors have adhered to a biphasic schedule, believing that creativity and flow are enhanced during the mid-night hours.

Of course, you can’t tap into how you feel if waking is causing you a ton of angst. Remind yourself that waking can be normal, not dysfunctional. I know this can be easier said than done, especially if you’re sleep deprived. The thing about biphasic sleeping is that you’re still supposed to get the eight hours of nightly sleep you need, give or take. That means you have to spend nine or ten hours in bed. How many people do that nowadays?

See if you can commit to at least a couple weeks of sufficient time in bed. Push away your previous (mis)conceptions about what a “good” night of sleep is “supposed” to look like. Try to welcome rather than fight the mid-night waking. Be open to what comes next.

The post Why Am I Waking Up at 3am? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

#JOURNALISM: Clay Travis: Washington Post Acknowledges They Misquoted Me, Buries Correction.

It’s important to note what is going on here.

1. The Washington Post published a dishonest and factually incorrect article about me.

2. When I published the actual transcript of their questions and my responses to those questions the paper changed an inaccurate quote and made a notation at the bottom of an online article that almost no one would see.

3. No one at the paper reached out to acknowledge they’d misquoted me or to apologize for their error.

4. These mistakes were made even though I told the paper I was recording our interview and would publish the transcript if their article took my quotes out of context or incorrectly quoted me.

5. The only reason any of you even know this error occurred — or about how dishonest and untrue the piece they wrote was — is because I own my own media company and can demonstrate all the dishonesty in their work by publishing a transcript and response on this site.

Put simply, the paper, which allegedly prides itself on journalistic accuracy, mischaracterized and misconstrued everything I said to them and even though they only used 94 words from me, they couldn’t even correctly quote what I said and publish it in their article.

What’s more, when they were caught publishing factually incorrect information, they made a quiet alteration and refused to even notify the person they wrote about, me, that they’d corrected the error.

Think of the press as a psychological warfare operation against normal Americans and you won’t go far wrong.

The suit alleges criminal conduct, gross negligence, poisoning of nuclear workers, and contamination of Ohio communities with radioactive isotopes, causing cancer clusters, injuries, sickness and death, as well as loss of property values.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS EVERYWHERE SHOULD REJOICE. I SAID “SHOULD.” US gives first-ever OK for small commercial nuclear reactor.

HOW MANY LIVES COULD GOVERNMENTS HAVE SAVED JUST BY ENCOURAGING PEOPLE TO TAKE 2000 UNITS OF VITAMIN D AND 50 MG OF ZINC A DAY? Vitamin D deficiency raises COVID-19 infection risk by 77%, study finds.

But what’s in it for them to recommend this?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: New Tapes Show Salon Owner Luring In Unsuspecting Pelosi With Her Favorite Ice Cream.

The post Michigan Supreme Court Delivers Win for Homeowner Who Had His House Stolen Over $8 Tax Debt appeared first on The Bongino Report.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE:

A pregnant Australian mother was charged with incitement after police raided her Ballarat home this week.

The police are seen in the video raiding the woman’s home and handcuffing her in front of her family. She has absolutely no idea why they are there. The police read her her rights then cuff her. Her partner tells the police she is pregnant and has an ultrasound in an hour.

It doesn’t matter. The police tell her that her Facebook post speaking out against the coronavirus lockdown and urging friends to attend the anti-lockdown rally is against the law.

Don’t think for a second liberals and nanny-staters won’t try that here in the US.

Via 9 News Australia:

Hat Tip Adam

The post SHOCK VIDEO: Pregnant Woman Arrested in Australia for Incitement after Encouraging Her Facebook Friends to Attend an Anti-Lockdown Rally appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.