Year: 2026

Dogs have long been valued in the civilian tactical and readiness community for obvious reasons: they can alert us to trouble, deter intruders, and serve as a first line of personal and home defense. They’re an early warning system that doesn’t rely on Wi‑Fi (and can’t be hacked or jammed), batteries, or software updates.

But what if man’s best friend protects us in ways that are perhaps intuitive, but less obvious?

Nick Norowitz brought the following to my attention: a 2019 meta-analysis and review found that dog ownership outperformed statins roughly two to one.

Outcome	Dog Ownership	Statins (Primary Prevention)
All-cause mortality reduction	24%	9–17%
Cardiovascular mortality reduction	31%	15%
Prior coronary events (all-cause)	65%	~28%

Dog ownership was associated with a 24% reduction in all-cause mortality in the general population. For individuals with prior coronary events—heart attack or stroke survivors—that number jumped to 65%. Cardiovascular mortality was reduced by 31%.

Compare that to statins in primary prevention: 9–17% reduction in all-cause mortality, with absolute risk reduction of just 0.8% over 5 years. That means you need to take a daily pill for 5 years to achieve a 1.6% chance of avoiding a heart attack and a 0.37% chance of avoiding a stroke.

For secondary prevention (people who already have heart disease), statins show better results at around a 28% reduction in all-cause mortality. Still, that’s less than half the 65% benefit seen in dog owners with prior coronary events.

This is the kind of thing that’s like a smorgasbord of confirmation bias.

You know I’m all about the “ancestral” approach to health, and humans have a deep, ancestral relationship with two animals in particular: horses and dogs, so it should be no surprise that dogs can have a measurable improvement on our health. We have over 1000 generations of coexistence.  We both do better together.

The oldest known evidence of a human-canine bond consists of 26,000-year-old footprints found in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France, revealing a 9- to 10-year-old barefoot boy walking alongside a wolf or large dog.  

This discovery pushes back the timeline of human-dog companionship significantly earlier than the previously accepted 15,000 to 17,000 years for domestication. Unfortunately, our brains are just not very good at appreciating time at this scale, and just how significant a relationship that stretches back that far is.

The West, in particular, has a unique relationship with dogs (the prints were discovered in a cave in France, after all).  Islam has a pathological hatred for them, Central Americans bred the Chihuahua purely as sacrificial animals, and it’s not uncommon throughout Asia for dogs to wind up as the main course.

Once again, I digress…

Regardless, if I’m going to apply my logic consistently, I have argued many times in the past that statins are only “effective” when you look at “relative risk,” and do basically nothing in absolute terms, so twice nothing is still basically nothing.

If we do the math, statins reduce your risk from 3% to 2%, whereas dog ownership reduces your risk from 3% to 1% (over a three-year period) but without the unwanted side effects like diabetes, muscle pain, and weakness (Chris Masterjohn PhD, presented evidence in his series that statins are mitochondrial toxins).

Now, to be fair, dog ownership is not pain-free either.  You have to spend money on food, spend time training them, and make sure their needs are met.  It’s like having a toddler for 10+ years.

However, in addition to the companionship and pure entertainment value of having a dog, you also get a very effective tool in your arsenal for home defense, ranging from simply acting as an early warning system to actual, legit personal protection depending on the breed and temperament of the dog.

That’s one hell of a return on investment.

One last caveat that’s worth mentioning in the interest of intellectual honesty is that the study on dog ownership was observational, and not a randomized control trial, which means it’s difficult to control for confounding factors, like the difference in behaviors between dog owners and neurotic cat owners, or people who just don’t have pets at all.

Do dog owners have fewer heart attacks because of the dog, because having a commitment to caring for something other than themselves gives their lives meaning and purpose, or do active people tend to prefer dogs, or does dog ownership force you to be more active, or (likely) some combination of all the above?

There’s nobody who’s going to fund that study because there’s no money in it (relatively speaking).

Anybody can breed dogs in the backyard.  In fact, left to their own devices, dogs will make more dogs without any human intervention at all.  That’s a tough market to corner by abusing IP law.

Meanwhile, there are those in the Cult of Cardiology who are advocating for putting statins in the water supply (at taxpayer expense, of course), and statins are already a $16B/year business as it is.

Fuck the statins and get a dog.  In my opinion, you’ll be better off all the way around.
*Disclaimer – not medical advice. Please see below for full disclaimer and conflicts of interest statement.

Read More!

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  The Surprising Ways Dogs Protect Us
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  What Can Bees Teach Us About Nutrition?
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  You Should Be As Strong As Possible For Self-Defense (& Daily Life)
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  Warrior’s Diet: The Omega-3 Hack That Makes You Nearly Invincible in the Cold

Over the last several decades, the vegans have largely co-opted the conversation around human nutrition, which has been distorted for years by largely reducing everything to “grams of protein.” This has allowed them to make ludicrous claims to an incredulous public, like “broccoli has more protein per calorie than beef.“

Vegan Showdown: Broccoli vs. Beef

• A) the claim is demonstrably false on its face, and
• B) Let’s look closer and see what we actually get for 100 calories of broccoli vs 100 calories of beef sirloin (particularly when it comes to amino acids):
  *source: all values from cronometer

Oops. Turns out, beef has basically three times the protein per calorie as broccoli… But the story doesn’t end there. Let’s look at the micronutrient breakdown of both per 100 calories.

Amino Acid Content

Clearly, beef wins hands down in the battle of amino acids, particularly when it comes to leucine. (We’ll get more into why that matters later…)

Vitamins

Broccoli wins the contest for vitamin C and, on paper, vitamin K; however, the K in broccoli is not the active, animal-form K2. A theme we will revisit. However, beef again wins hands down for the critical B vitamins, especially B12.

Minerals

When it comes to minerals, broccoli seems to go head-to-head with beef, but once again, the iron in broccoli is non-heme, which is not the active animal form of iron, and beef blows broccoli out of the water when it comes to zinc, which is critical for hormonal health.

It’s also worth pointing out just how much broccoli you need to eat to get 100 calories worth: almost three cups! Good luck with the gastric upset and farting like a warthog after eating that much f-ing broccoli. Compare that to a less-than-normal portion of beef at a meager 62.5g to get 100 calories.

If you enjoy broccoli, it’s a fine addition to your whole foods-based diet, but my point is that it is in addition to, not a substitute for, animal products. I’m only picking on broccoli as an example. Naturally, the same logic applies to any plant food that’s advertised as being equivalent to an animal product.

Universally, they are not.

Micronutrient Density & Amino Acids

The more honest question is actually about micronutrient density, amino acid balance, amino acid ratios, digestibility, and whether a diet is truly aligned with human biology. Vegan advocacy has done a lot to “flatten the curve,” but when it comes to the conversation around “protein”, a more serious framing starts with essential amino acid adequacy and the quality of the protein source, not just the gram count.

Ancestral Health – The Dao of Human Nutrition

That is why ancestral health arguments have always been the strongest: humans are omnivores, yes, but omnivory does not mean all food sources are nutritionally equivalent.

The strongest health and longevity outcomes are consistently associated with populations and dietary patterns that include substantial amounts of animal-source foods. When people talk about Okinawa as the “Island of Pork,” or point out that places like Hong Kong eat the most animal products per capita, and until 2026 (Hong Kong was replaced by Japan, which also eats a ton of pork, in addition to lots of animal products like seafood), reported the world’s longest life expectancy, they are not making a trivial point.

They are pointing to the reality that species-appropriate nutrition matters.

This is also where the discussion gets more technical. Some plant foods can be said to be “complete proteins” because they contain all nine essential amino acids, but “complete” is a misleading word if the ratios, digestibility, and bioavailability are inferior.

Soy, for example, may check the box on paper, but that does not make it equivalent to animal protein in practice.

Leucine matters here because it is the key signal for muscle protein synthesis, and human protein needs are not just about total intake; they are about hitting the right amino acid thresholds at the right time. In practical terms, leucine is the lynchpin of protein quality in human nutrition.

And protein quality goes beyond amino acids alone. As we see from the comparison above, animal foods generally win when you consider the full package: amino acid ratios, digestibility, bioavailability, micronutrient density, and the fact that some nutrients in plants require conversion into active animal forms.

That matters because humans vary in their ability to make those conversions efficiently. Vitamin A is the cleanest example, and omega-3 conversion from plant precursors into the active animal forms is another. In other words, “technically present” is not the same thing as “biologically useful.”

The Bee Study – Species Specific Diets Matter

I want to shift to a study on honeybees because it illustrates a principle that matters far beyond insects: nutrition is not just about eating enough food; it is also fundamentally about matching the organism’s specific amino acid needs. In this study, researchers tested how bees responded when their diets either matched or failed to match the amino acid profile their species actually needs.

The important part is that the bees on the species-matched diet did better. They grew larger, were more robust, and showed better short-term nutritional outcomes than bees fed diets that did not match that amino acid pattern. That matters because it gets us out of the vague, misleading “protein” conversation and into the more precise question of amino acid quality and biological fit.

The important takeaway is straightforward: bees fed a species-specific EAA (essential amino acid) balance, one that matched their natural tissue needs, grew into larger and more robust bees than bees fed diets that did not match those needs.

The study also showed an interesting contrast with some human nutrition findings: in bees, the matched diet was associated with greater intake, whereas in humans, some research suggests that once amino acid needs are met, people may eat less overall.

But the principle is the same: when essential amino acid needs are satisfied properly, the organism performs better.

The study was only 10 days long, so it was not designed to demonstrate long-term longevity or reproductive fitness; however, there is a safe assumption based on common sense. Yes, “more study” is always warranted, and even welcome, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that within the same species, a larger bee is a stronger, more robust bee, less prone to predation from other insects, and generally more resilient.

Mo’ Protein Is Mo’ Betta

That same logic shows up in human populations, too. There is a long history of observations showing that children who eat higher-quality animal foods perform better physically and cognitively.

A commonly cited example comes from Vietnam, where families harvesting wild shrimp locally to feed children were associated with better growth and school performance. The broader point is not that one food fixes everything, but that access to high-quality animal-source nutrition can have measurable effects on development and resilience.

Conversely, a highly contentious study out of the UK showed that kids fed vegan diets were smaller than their counterparts. The 2021 University College London paper on children aged 5 to 10 in Poland, published as “Children on vegan diets are 1.2 inches shorter on average, with smaller and weaker bones, study finds.” It reported that vegan children were on average about 3 cm shorter, had 4–6% lower bone mineral content, and were more likely to be deficient in vitamin B12 than omnivorous children.

The debate should not be reduced to “grams of protein.” It should be about overall protein quality, as well as quantity, species-appropriate nutrition, and the biological reality that animal-source foods are the most reliable way for humans to meet those needs efficiently. The bee study is a useful model because it illustrates the principle plainly: when the dietary amino acid balance matches the species’ needs, the organism develops better.

Read More!

• 
  The Surprising Ways Dogs Protect Us
• 
  What Can Bees Teach Us About Nutrition?
• 
  You Should Be As Strong As Possible For Self-Defense (& Daily Life)
• 
  Warrior’s Diet: The Omega-3 Hack That Makes You Nearly Invincible in the Cold

Long before anyone knew what omega-3 fats were, these warriors might have been naturally priming the very metabolic pathways that make the human body harder, colder, and more resilient.

A primeval “metabolic hack,” hidden in plain sight.

Fit To Fight: How Cold Exposure Turns Brown Fat Into a Glucose-Burning Furnace
Understanding the 12-LOX → 12-HEPE Pathway and Why It Matters for Metabolic Health

Cold exposure isn’t just a test of toughness. It’s a full-system reset button for your metabolism—one that recruits deep biological machinery you don’t normally tap into living at 72 degrees year-round.

I’ve written before about cold exposure and the “Søberg Protocol” in my article on winter swimming. But today we’re diving into the deeper science: the biochemical pathway that helps explain why cold exposure improves metabolic health, glucose control, and overall resilience.

This comes from a major paper titled “12-Lipoxygenase Regulates Cold Adaptation and Glucose Metabolism by Producing the Omega-3 Lipid 12-HEPE from Brown Fat,” authored by Leiria, Wang, Lynes, Spite, Kiebish, Tseng, and colleagues.

It connects behavior (diet), cellular machinery (brown fat activation), and whole-body outcomes such as glucose control and cold tolerance into a coherent mechanism.

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Brown Fat: Your Built-In Heat Engine

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is “metabolically active fat”—packed with mitochondria and designed to burn fuel for heat. Cold exposure activates this tissue, pushing your body to use glucose and fatty acids more efficiently.

But activation is only part of the story.

Under cold stress, BAT increases the expression of 12-lipoxygenase (12-LOX), an enzyme that converts omega-3 fatty acids into a signaling molecule called 12-HEPE. Think of 12-HEPE as a metabolic messenger—an internal “broadcast signal” that coordinates how your body handles glucose when the temperature drops.

When cold or adrenergic stimulation hits:

• 12-LOX activity rises
• 12-HEPE production spikes
• These lipids enter the bloodstream
• And your entire metabolism shifts into a higher-performance mode

BAT isn’t just warming you—it’s giving orders.

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Cold Exposure Boosts 12-HEPE in Both Mice and Humans

Across multiple models—mice, cultured cells, and human volunteers—the pattern is the same:

• Cold exposure rapidly increases circulating 12-HEPE—within about an hour.
• β3-adrenergic stimulation (the signal your body naturally uses during cold exposure) produces the same effect.
• Lean individuals with active brown fat have higher baseline levels of 12-HEPE than individuals with obesity.

This pathway is not subtle. It switches on fast and hard.

And it correlates directly with metabolic health.

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Why 12-HEPE Matters: Better Glucose Uptake, Better Thermogenesis

12-HEPE is the star of the show.

The study demonstrates that 12-HEPE:

• Enhances glucose uptake in brown fat, white fat, and skeletal muscle
• Activates a Gs-coupled receptor, triggering an insulin-like signaling cascade
• Increases GLUT4 translocation, pulling glucose into tissues more effectively
• Improves systemic glucose tolerance
• Upregulates genes involved in glucose metabolism
• Enhances cold-induced thermogenesis

This means 12-HEPE makes your metabolism more flexible—better at using fuel, better at managing blood sugar, better at handling cold.

This is the biology behind cold resilience.

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What Happens When 12-LOX Is Missing?

Mouse models with 12-LOX deleted in brown fat demonstrate exactly how crucial this pathway is:

• Their brown fat can’t take up glucose efficiently
• Thermogenic response is impaired
• They struggle to maintain body temperature
• Adaptive thermogenesis is blunted
• Energy expenditure and gene expression profiles shift negatively

Without 12-LOX, the body loses a key metabolic gear.

This shows cold adaptation isn’t just “mental toughness.”
It’s biochemical precision.

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Obesity Selectively Suppresses 12-HEPE Production

The vast majority of adults in the US are overweight or obese. Diet-induced obesity creates another problem:

• 12-HEPE levels in BAT fall sharply
• Other 12-LOX products do not fall in the same way—this suppression is specific
• Systemic glucose control worsens
• BAT loses metabolic flexibility

But here’s the good news: administering 12-HEPE restores glucose metabolism even in obese mice, indicating a potential therapeutic route.

Cold exposure + omega-3 intake may help reawaken a suppressed pathway. While I would never suggest that ice baths are a short cut to fixing obesity, it’s a potential tool you can leverage on your path to staying fit to fight. However, no amount of “bio-hcking” is going to make up for 23 1/2 hours of bad habits. You can’t outtrain a bad diet. Getting your basics down is always Ground Zero.

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Practical Takeaways for Your Fit To Fight Lifestyle

Here’s what this means for real people trying to stay strong, lean, and ready:

1. Cold exposure is a metabolic amplifier.
   You’re not just suffering—you’re flipping a metabolic switch.
2. Brown fat is an active organ of glucose control.
   It senses the environment and signals the rest of your body.
3. Metabolic flexibility is a fight skill.
   Your ability to burn different fuels under stress determines performance and resilience.
4. Cold + movement is a powerful synergy.
   Both increase GLUT4 translocation. Together, they’re a force multiplier.
5. Your diet determines the raw materials for 12-HEPE.
   You can’t make high-octane fuel from garbage inputs.

This is where omega-3 intake becomes critical.

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Supercharging the 12-HEPE Pathway With Omega-3 Intake

Your body cannot make 12-HEPE unless you supply it with EPA & DHA —the omega-3 fatty acids found in cold-water fish.

The problem?
Modern diets are drowning in omega-6 fatty acids (especially linoleic acid from seed oils), and almost no one gets enough omega-3s.

High omega-6 intake + low omega-3 intake =
A brown fat system that can’t efficiently run the 12-HEPE program.

By increasing omega-3 intake, you provide your body with the substrate it needs to synthesize 12-HEPE and enhance cold adaptation.

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The Sardine Fast: A Real-World n=1 Demonstration

Nick Norowitz, MD, PhD, a Harvard-trained metabolic researcher, ran a fascinating n=1 experiment on himself.

Nick is extremely lean—very low body mass, very little insulation.
In theory, he should be terrible at handling cold.

He ran a month-long sardine fast—meaning sardines were nearly the only food he consumed.

A few weeks in, in the middle of a cold Boston winter, he noticed something remarkable:

He became dramatically more cold-tolerant.

This is someone who should freeze instantly on a windy New England day.
But after saturating his system with EPA and DHA from sardines, his cold tolerance skyrocketed.

Mechanistically, this makes perfect sense:

• Sardines are extremely high in omega-3s
• Omega-3s are the substrate for 12-HEPE
• More substrate → more 12-HEPE → stronger metabolic and thermogenic response to cold

Nick’s experiment is extreme, but it highlights the principle:
If you give your brown fat more omega-3 building blocks, it gets better at cold adaptation.

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How to Use Omega-3 Intake Smartly (Without Going Off the Deep End)

You don’t need to live on sardines year-round.
But increasing your intake of fatty fish can significantly enhance this pathway.

Good sources include:

• Sardines
• Mackerel
• Salmon
• Anchovies
• Herring

A few caveats:

• Too much fatty fish can raise mercury and arsenic levels
• A sardine-only diet is not a long-term strategy
• Fatty-fish “cycles” may be ideal—boosting omega-3 intake periodically to prime cold adaptation and metabolic health

Use it like a training camp:
Intensive when needed, strategic, and purposeful.

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Final Thoughts

This paper uncovers the metabolic circuitry behind cold exposure.
It shows that brown fat doesn’t just burn calories—it produces signaling molecules that improve glucose handling, amplify thermogenesis, and enhance whole-body metabolic resilience.

Got it. Here’s a replacement closing section that matches your voice and frames this properly in a Fit To Fight / preparedness context, without the AI-ish wrap-up language. You can drop this in place of the “Final Thoughts” section as-is.

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Improving cold tolerance through omega-3 intake and brown fat activation probably isn’t going to make your arm drag sharper or your timing on the mats magically better. That’s not the claim, and it shouldn’t be.

But performance on the mats is only one narrow slice of what it means to be capable.

Cold tolerance, metabolic flexibility, and glucose control live upstream from technique. They shape how well you handle stress, fatigue, disrupted sleep, caloric restriction, illness, and environmental exposure. Those things matter far more often in real life than how clean your favorite throw looks in a controlled setting.

If you strip self-defense down to “how good am I at violence,” you miss most of the problem space.

Preparedness is about being functional when conditions aren’t ideal:
when you’re cold, underfed, tired, distracted, or forced to operate outside your normal routines. A body that can efficiently regulate temperature and fuel use under stress is simply harder to break.

From that perspective, cold exposure combined with adequate omega-3 intake isn’t a performance hack. It’s resilience training. It’s about building a system that adapts instead of panicking when the environment pushes back.

That’s the deeper value here.

Being Fit To Fight means you don’t just train skills—you train the organism that has to express them, in the real world, under imperfect conditions.

Read More!

• 
  The Surprising Ways Dogs Protect Us
• 
  What Can Bees Teach Us About Nutrition?
• 
  You Should Be As Strong As Possible For Self-Defense (& Daily Life)
• 
  Warrior’s Diet: The Omega-3 Hack That Makes You Nearly Invincible in the Cold