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I read a lot. People send me interesting things all the time, and I have multiple Pubmed alerts set up to deliver studies hitting various keywords. These are quick reactions, not long measured responses. I may get things wrong. Feel free to reach out and correct me.

And if you find anything interesting for me to read and possibly comment on, drop me an email.

Running a marathon reduces brain myelin for up to 2 months: New study in “well-trained men and women.” Authors suggest myelin may act as a fatty acid reserve for extreme states of energy depletion. Not unique to marathons, as other states of “real or perceived” nutritional scarcity, like anorexia, severe calorie restriction, etc can also reduce myelin levels and impair cognitive function. Now I’m thinking about the people who run a marathon every day for a year as a challenge or viral social media promotion. Damn. I’d also be curious to see if other intense exercise modalities have the same effect. Overall, I wouldn’t worry about this too much, but it does suggest that running marathons (or training at marathon distances and intensities) too often is unwise.

New markets in atomization: As society atomizes, people live through their screens, and the traditional “bottoms up” modes of community formation disintegrate, there’s a growing trend toward paid socializing. Adult sleep away camps where campers pay to attend with the express goal of making friends, “friending apps” (like dating apps but to make friends). This will only accelerate. There’s big money in providing avenues for people to rediscover face to face living.

Similar: app that lets strangers buy tickets to random weddings. Socializing is getting weirder and weirder.

UPF override natural signals: People told to choose minimally processed food (whole food) lose more weight than people told to choose ultra processed food. Nothing else changed. No calorie counts or volumes were specified. Just “eat whole food” vs “eat ultra processed food.” On the other hand, if you’re trying to gain weight, or if you’re an active kid or teen who’s trying to eat more calories, ultra processed food can help.

Stop cellular aging: Lifting heavy things de-ages muscle at the cellular level. Old news, but it points to an essential law of Nature: movement and action block aging. When you stop using something, when you stop acting on the world, you age. Retirees often die shortly after retiring, even if their work was stressful. Man was not meant to relax forever.

Animal protein and mortality: There was an older study back in 2014 or so that said animal protein had a weird relationship with mortality. It killed you when you were young but once you reached 65, it was neutral or even protective. Okay. Well, recently a group of researchers went back over that data and determined that the original conclusion was wrong. Protein has no link to mortality, whether animal or plant. If anything, animal protein is protective against cancer mortality.

Bed rest is deadly: It literally eats away at muscle tissue. This article discusses a few things you can do to keep your muscle when stuck in bed (keep protein and calorie intake up, exercise), but what I found most interesting was the fact that even just moving beds every day is “enough” to prevent a lot of atrophy. The point is doing anything involving your muscle just to send the message that you actually do need it. What kills muscle is the total lack of movement.

Talk of an AI bubble: Zuckerberg downsizing his AI division, energy demands coming to a head, disappointing GPT-5 release… if it indeed bursts, and the millions of LLM queries people currently make every day are no longer subsidized, I worry about all the people who have come to rely on it. What happens when the random conversation you used to have with Chat GPT twenty times a day now costs $5 a pop?

Cousin marriage is bad: Marrying your cousin reduces life expectancy by at least 2 years. That’s not to mention the other negative effects, like lower intelligence, random birth defects, overall lower robustness. Consider that Rome banned most cousin marriage, as did China throughout much of its history. Consider that one of the biggest things that set Western Europe apart from the rest of the world was that the Church outlawed cousin marriage. Consider that there are countries still to this day where cousin marriage is the norm. This is such low-hanging fruit that would be an enormous boon to mankind.

Beef microplastic origin: How are plastics ending up in beef, even grass-fed beef? Turns out that prior to the shrink-wrapping process, many cuts are sprayed with an acidic solution to eliminate surface bacteria that also breaks down the plastic which is absorbed into the meat.