Peter Attia

I found this discussion between 3 MDs to be one of the more enlightened ones on the subject:

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-19-current-state-omicron/

One of the big takeaways for me, personally, was that the push for boosters may be, in part, due to measuring the wrong thing, namely circulating antibodies as a measure of resistance to infection. Even when antibody levels dropped weeks/months later, it seems people still maintained B-cell and T-cell immunity.

From the link:

"A Johns Hopkins study in pre-print shows the importance of T-cell immunity in protection from COVID

-This is an under recognized part of the immune system and absent from much COVID discussion

-T cell immunity is solid against Omicron as it is for Delta"

P.S. - Here's my chance at one of my favorite dad jokes: Why have scientists been researching ants to battle COVID? Because they all have ant-y bodies... :-)

Yes, thank you!

I've gotten some directly from walmart.com in the past with no prescription.
There're a lot of other options lately, like agelessrx.com, levelshealth.com, Veri, Nutrisense, January.ai.

It may give you some life changing insights. Oversimplified, high glucose spikes = shorter life. And it's not a simple issue of carb intake. Your behavior, personal biology and dietary environment (fat? fiber? protein? stress? food sequence?) yield huge variation.

If you decide to learn more about this subject, Peter Attia is a great (if involved) start:

https://peterattiamd.com/?s=insulin

Within a couple days I learned things like I was hypoglycemic during sleep, and my daily oat milk lattes were like eating candy (maltose), whereas an outrageous French dinner left me totally level (fiber/fat).

While the US health care system as a whole is mess, I don't think it's intractable if you can attack it from the right directions. GoodRX did with pharmaceuticals, and Mark Cuban seems to be doing a good job with CostPlus Drugs. (Valisure is also pretty interesting, doing in-house validation of generics).

Marty Makary wrote a book a couple years back, The Price We Pay on the wicked knot of a problem that is US health care. For those mildly interested, there was a Peter Attia Podcast inteview a while back that covers the gist of it: https://peterattiamd.com/martymakary/

For those that want to get some color from some of the biggest problems from a clinician/practioner's perpective, I found some of these podcast episodes to be pretty great/eye opening: https://zdoggmd.com/podcasts/

Peter Attia has covered this at some length.

https://peterattiamd.com/what-are-the-side-effects-of-aspartame-stevia-and-other-sugar-substitutes/

>While an excess of alcohol sugars can cause gastrointestinal distress (e.g., if you overdo it on these you can get diarrhea), in most people they do not cause secretion of insulin from the pancreas due to their distinct chemical structure (see figure of their structures, above).

The same is true for the first group of non-sugar substitute sweeteners I mentioned (e.g., aspartame, saccharin, sucralose), with respect to the lack of insulin response. In addition to studies confirming this, I’ve also documented this in myself for xylitol (my personal favorite), aspartame (Equal), and sucralose (Splenda).

The classic problem with self reporting food questionnaires is recall of the correct information. If anyone here knows accurately how many cups of ribs they had in the last year, (unless zero) you might as well just invent a random number.

I have no idea how you would even follow someone's diet closely enough to be even 50% accurate and for how long? Until someone is dead. Nobody is doing accurate research on this because it would cost too much and consequently the "science" that is done is meaningless.

Peter Attia makes some interesting suggestions on how to improve things (from David Allison's work) here [1].

[1] https://peterattiamd.com/nutritional-epidemiology-abolition-vs-defending-the-status-quo/

They might be branded that way, but that's not what they are. They have dramatic effects on the metabolic pathway and insulin response that need to be carefully considered if you're not actually diabetic.

I recommend that you listen to the most recent Peter Attia podcast, which is a 2+ hour interview with Ralph DeFronzo (diabetes expert) where he goes deep into the effects of GLP-1 agonists on insulin response and other metabolic pathways. I came away with the impression that we're being too casual with how these drugs are being used -- if you're overweight these impacts are probably all for the good, but if you're not, it's more questionable.

https://peterattiamd.com/ralphdefronzo/