Blocked arteries

 

Sessile Mind

@SessileMind

Please, Sama, go back to the gym! That’s where you belong, using your muscles, not your brain. You’ve now inspected the fatty acids attached to cholesterol inside plaques and somehow solved dietary cardiology. By the same logic, finding oxygen at a house fire proves oxygen caused the blaze. The drainpipe cartoon is crude; your replacement is merely nonsense wearing a lab coat. The 1994 Lancet paper didn’t discover that arteries were “full of seed oil”. It examined post-mortem aortic plaques and found that their fatty-acid composition correlated with fatty acids in serum and adipose tissue. That describes what was present in established lesions. It doesn’t identify what initiated those lesions, demonstrate that the polyunsaturated fatty acids came specifically from industrial seed oils, or show that replacing butter caused atherosclerosis. “Unsaturated fat” isn’t another name for seed oil. The category includes monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids from numerous dietary and endogenous sources. Plaques also contain free cholesterol, cholesteryl esters, phospholipids, triglycerides, cellular debris and connective tissue. The reported fatty acids were largely attached to complex plaque lipids. You took one compositional category and promoted it to a dietary culprit. So typical of you. Your scab analogy fails at the next step. Atherosclerosis doesn’t require a torn artery that “invites” cholesterol through. ApoB-containing particles can cross intact endothelium and become retained by proteoglycans in susceptible regions of the arterial wall. They are then modified through oxidation, aggregation, lipolysis and other processes, provoking inflammation, macrophage uptake and foam-cell formation. Inflammation amplifies the lesion; it doesn’t explain away the particles retained inside it. You invented a wound because your scab metaphor needed one. No competent account says swallowed butter floats unchanged through the bloodstream and sticks like cold grease in a drain. Saturated fat can increase circulating LDL and apoB particle burden. Greater cumulative exposure creates more opportunities for those particles to enter and remain in the arterial wall. Refuting a children’s cartoon doesn’t refute the actual mechanism. The outcome evidence ruins your seed-oil alibi as well. Genetic variants, prospective cohorts and randomized LDL-lowering trials converge on a dose- and duration-dependent causal relationship between LDL exposure and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Long-term randomized trials also find fewer cardiovascular events when saturated fat is reduced, particularly when polyunsaturated fat replaces it. Plaques containing unsaturated fatty acids don’t reverse those findings. The pipe was always a metaphor. You responded by mistaking plaque composition for disease causation, unsaturated chemistry for industrial origin and a small post-mortem study for a controlled dietary experiment. The leaflet may have simplified cardiology. You converted one paper into an elaborate seed-oil costume.

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

The fat in a blocked artery is three quarters unsaturated, and a cardiologist has known that since 1994. The pipe story goes like this: you eat butter, the butter floats about in the blood, the butter sticks to the wall like grease in a drain, one day the drain is shut. It is the tidiest piece of medicine ever drawn on a napkin, and every part of it is wrong. Dietary fat does not float about. It is packaged in the gut, shipped to your fat stores and muscle, and is gone from the blood within hours. Plaque does not sit in the pipe like sludge; it grows inside the wall, underneath the lining, where nothing you swallowed can reach it without an invitation. And the invitation is damage: a cholesterol particle gets through the lining, oxidises, and the immune system builds a scab over it. A plaque is a scab on the inside of a pipe, not a lump of dripping in the bend. In 1994 The Lancet did the obvious thing and cut the plaques open to see what the fat inside them actually was. 26% saturated. 74% unsaturated, and more than 40% of it polyunsaturated, the fat that oxidises, the fat that comes out of a seed, the fat the butter was replaced with. So the drain was never blocked with butter. It was scabbed over a wound, and the wound was full of the stuff the leaflets told two generations to cook with instead. The pipe was a metaphor. The seed oil was a diet.

https://x.com/SamaHoole/status/2102844968930804007?s=20

Pigs and control

 

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

The pig is the only farm animal a king cannot tax, which is why kings and priests have spent 3,000 years trying to get rid of it. The sheep: - Grows a fleece you can tax every spring - Walks to the temple in a flock - Needs pasture, and pasture has an owner The cow: - Gives milk and pulls the plough - 1 calf a year - Needs more pasture, and a bigger owner The pig: - No wool, no milk, will not pull anything - Will not be driven in a flock - Lives behind the house on scraps - 2 litters a year, 10 piglets a time - Bacon weight in 6 months The first cities of the Near East ran on sheep. The temple ledgers count them by the hundred thousand and barely mention a pig. Yet dig up the poor quarters of those same cities and the ground is full of pig bone. Herodotus reports that Egyptian swineherds were the one group barred from every temple in the country. The workers' villages beside the great building sites are knee deep in pig. The pig was feeding the people the ledger could not see. It needed no land, paid no tithe and answered to no landlord. It was never the worm. The worm in pork was found under a microscope in 1835, and the ban is 2,500 years older than its excuse. Beef carries a tapeworm of its own and nobody ever banned the cow. So the men who owned the land, the flocks and the temple examined the one animal that made a poor family independent of all three, and found that it was filthy.

https://x.com/SamaHoole/status/2101328543661592643?s=20

Grok

@grok

Belief that pigs are impure/dirty emerged gradually in the ancient Near East. c. 1600–1200 BCE (Late Bronze Age): Pigs viewed as scavengers (trash, feces, carrion). Hittite texts bar them from temples. Mesopotamian sayings call them unholy, street-stinking polluters unfit for gods. Levant pork use plummets. c. 1200–600 BCE (Iron Age): Elite stigma solidifies. Egyptian swineherds excluded from temples (Herodotus later notes this). Israelite sites show near-total avoidance. c. 600–300 BCE: Leviticus/Deuteronomy codify pigs as unclean (cloven hoof, no cud). 2nd c. BCE: Becomes Jewish identity marker (Maccabees martyrdoms). 7th c. CE: Quran adopts the ban.

Memory and Lipitor

 

ama Hoole

@SamaHoole

NASA certified Duane Graveline's brain for spaceflight. Pfizer's best-selling pill erased it twice, and when the astronaut and the pill told different stories, his profession believed the pill. Understand what his mind had already been through before anyone doubted it. Flight surgeon. Aerospace research physician who studied what weightlessness does to the human body before anyone had spent a week up there. In 1965 he was picked as one of just 6 scientist-astronauts for the Apollo era, out of every qualified brain in America. There are Swiss watches that have passed fewer inspections than this man's head. In 1999, at his annual astronaut physical, his cholesterol came back high and he left with Lipitor. 6 weeks later he returned from his morning walk unable to say where he was. His wife of decades walked out to him and he treated her with the polite reserve you'd offer a woman you had never met. 6 hours, gone. The hospital wrote transient global amnesia on the file and could not tell him why a fit 68-year-old's memory had simply switched off. He suspected the tablet. He was assured, by doctors, that statins do not do that. A year on, they talked him back onto it at half the dose. 12 hours, this time. He came back as a 13-year-old. Knew his schoolmates, knew his homework, and laughed out loud at the strangers insisting he was a married father with a medical degree. A man qualified to treat astronauts could not, for half a day, have been trusted with a splinter. Now, the part that should embarrass cardiology forever. Drug safety has a formal gold-standard test for whether a medicine causes a harm: take it and the harm appears, stop it and the harm stops, take it again and the harm returns. Challenge, dechallenge, rechallenge. Graveline ran the entire protocol on himself, by accident, at a lower dose, on a brain with 30 years of NASA documentation behind it, and the result came back positive in front of medical witnesses. The profession filed it under anecdote. The harm hadn't appeared in the approval trials, and the approval trials hadn't looked. So he did what a research physician does with a finding: he published. Book after book, starting with one titled Lipitor, Thief of Memory. He built a site where the letters arrived in their thousands, from ordinary people whose fog and vanished words had been waved off as age by the same men who waved him off. He logged it all, for 17 years, until his death in 2016. The establishment had handed the world's most prescribed drug to millions of pensioners, and the pensioners' complaints about their memory were being answered with a shrug and a repeat prescription. He made the shrug expensive. In 2012, 13 years after his first erasure, the FDA quietly ordered memory loss and confusion onto every statin label in America. No press conference. No apology to the letters. Today the same drug is offered to healthy people on the strength of one number crossing a line, under the same 2 words: safe, proven. Graveline's memory came back both times, complete. Medicine's never has. It still can't recall ever being wrong.

https://x.com/SamaHoole/status/2100290103876747318?s=20

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

·

Sep 17

A biomarker became a disease, the disease acquired a lifelong prescription, and the patient became the delivery mechanism for both.

Lynx

@MAllenBidwell

Stations are a sadistic product. Every cell, every hormone, every nerve in our body and the entire brain is made of cholesterol. That is why they want to disrupt it. Make people sick. Sick people are easier to control.

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

Cholesterol is essential to cell membranes, steroid hormones and myelin. That alone should make aggressive lifelong suppression a far more serious conversation than it usually is.