Surely you don’t believe that “In Syria, [US] troops were only moved from the northern part of the country to the oil producing region in the south to protect the fields from seizure by ISIS,” Mr Giraldi?

ISIS? Pffft.

Isn’t it true that the US’s 2 purposes are (1) to deny Syria their own oil and (2) to steal and sell the oil and use the funds to defray the costs of the many anti-Syrian terrorist gangs they’ve recruited, trained and armed?

(And maybe my geography’s off, but aren’t the US-stolen oil fields in the east/north-east, trans-Euphrates, not the south? The other US dog-in-the-manger project in Syria is in the south at al-Tanf, near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders, but that’s not where the oil is.)

No, Mr. Thompson: “reducing weight is” NOT “something which can be done simply by eating less.” If there’s one fact on which there’s consensus in dietetics, it’s that calorie restriction diets are useless in the long run. To achieve ideal body weight, and to minimize virtually all degenerative conditions, we need to eat more food, by volume, not less.

More whole plants – which are high in nutrient density and low in energy density – thanks to their high fiber and water content (both calorie-free), their low fat content, and their tens of thousands of antioxidant phytonutrients.

Fewer animals and processed junk pseudo-foods – CRAP, in Doug Lyell’s words: Calorie-Rich, Animal and Processed. These pseudo-foods are the opposite of whole plants: low in water and fiber content, high in fat (and dangerous ones at that), spectacularly low in nutrient density and spectacularly high in energy density.

All the honest nutrition science of the past 30 years (i.e., not the reductionist scams of “low-carb,” keto and paleo), from population studies, to migration studies, to randomized controlled trials, including dietary interventions such as metabolic ward studies, shows that whole-food vegans suffer by far the least from diabesity (and virtually all other chronic conditions).

Less than 40% as much diabetes as omnivores, according to Tonstad et al’s studies of the 7th Day Adventists of Loma Linda, CA… the vegans among whom may live up to 10 years longer than other Californios (according to Fraser). As Adventists add animals to their diets, moving from vegan to various kinds of vegetarian to omnivore, up goes their weight… and up soars their risk of diabetes.

But why? What explains this population effect at the molecular level? Go to Google Scholar and type in “intramyocellular lipids” – which means “inside muscle cell fats” – and you’ll get a few thousand hits showing the work of such luminaries as Shulman, Petersen and Roden, and scores of others, who’ve proven since the late 1990s – complete with MR spectroscopy “photographic” evidence – that while refined sugar is certainly bad for diabetics, the main cause of type-2 diabetes (besides lack of exercise) isn’t sugar: it’s fat – both the kinds of fat we eat and the fat we wear: dietary fat and body fat.

IMCLs are also called “ectopic fats,” because they build up where they don’t belong, inside our muscles, livers and pancreases, in which organs they cause insulin resistance. They hinder insulin’s ability to ferry glucose from our blood and into our cells. Do all fats do this? No. To answer that question, type in “lipotoxicity” – which means “fat poisoning” – and you’ll find that it’s the saturated fats and trans fats in animals and junk vegetable oils which help cause the fat poisoning and insulin resistance that lead to diabetes. Whole plants protect against diabetes and its #1 risk factor, obesity.

Considering that it’s humankind’s addiction to animal-eating that’s responsible for the pandemics of infectious diseases which have plagued us only since the introduction of animal agriculture 10,000 years ago… genocidal scourges like smallpox, measles, whooping cough, typhoid fever, polio, TB, HIV/AIDS, flu, Ebola, SARS, MERS and COVID-19 – not to mention the common cold, leprosy and ‘mad cow disease’ – some would say that karma is having a say in who’s most at risk from COVID-19: animal-eaters and junk-eaters who’re overweight, diabetic, immune-compromised, hypertensive and atherosclerotic. These aren’t diseases, really – they’re “elective conditions” we choose to have by choosing to eat animals and other junk.

It’s relevant that CORONAVIRUS and CARNIVOROUS are anagrams.

This is the lesson we need to take away from the relatively benign (so far) COVID-19 pandemic: The next pandemic – perhaps of H7N3 or H5N1 flu, or another coronavirus, busy brewing out there in some massive pig or chicken concentration camp, or some live market, right now – might not be so kind. It isn’t a question of “if?” It’s a question of when. The best guess of experts like Drs Michael Osterholm and Greger? Within the next 5 years, if we carry on the way we are with factory farming, despite the pleading, for decades, of virtually all public health organizations all around the world.

(And don’t get me started on antibiotic resistance, thanks almost entirely to animal agriculture. We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to ways in which animal agriculture may soon decapitate humanity. Did I hear climate change? Deforestation?)

I admire Mr. Thompson’s work on statistics; I just wish he (and most of the rest of humankind) knew what is and what isn’t food before he brought his statistical acumen to bear on a field that he hasn’t studied and about which he knows precious little, and that outdated.

Simply put, I wish he knew how to eat.