ExFatLoss goes back to basics — a great reflection on the fundamentals:

If all of the 1,000,000 chemicals introduced into the food supply since 1850 were at fault, then simply doing a potato diet or heavy cream diet wouldn’t lead people to easily lose a lot of fat.

… Eating potatoes does not remove any microplastics from your body. It doesn’t avoid whatever’s in the soil or water. It doesn’t replenish whatever used to be in the soil and is now missing. It doesn’t turn you into a farmer or manual laborer and it doesn’t change your genetics or epigenetics. It doesn’t remodel your (ruined?) fat cells. It doesn’t reduce air & water pollution and it doesn’t change the makeup of your kitchen & cook ware. It (presumably) doesn’t get you more sleep or reduce stress or EMF or blue light or screen time.

Unless there’s some crazy magic going on, the change is either brought about by something in the potatoes (or cream) or by cutting out something you were previously eating, and replacing it with potatoes (or cream).

Nat Friedman and his collaborators just dropped PlasticList, a project where they tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals, mostly phthalates and bisphenols. Really top-notch work here.

A reader sent us this: Los Angeles now tests for lithium, and from this report, it looks like the water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant contains 25 to 198 ng/mL lithium with an average of 92 ng/mL. That is quite a lot — the Pima had about 100 ng/mL in their water. But LA was, at least as of 2014, the #9 Leanest City in the country, though maybe things have changed since then. The reader also wanted to share this background info: She and her husband had lived in Texas for many years. When they moved to San Francisco, they both abruptly lost “1-2 pant sizes”. This was while “walking about the same amount as we were in Austin”. Then they moved to LA, and gained “+2 pant sizes” above and beyond where they had been in Texas. As before she says, “in general our diet hasn’t changed significantly, our job type hasn’t changed, we haven’t exercised more or less, etc.” This prompted her to look into the LA water quality and she found the new data in this report. 

Shakespearean: When people speak English but with German grammar. Watching this makes us feel stoned.