Nightshades are problematic for stressed and old people because the plants have mild poisons. Old people and addicts tend to not be able to handle the poisons in tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and chilis.
But for people that are nightshade-tolerant potatoes are an excellent food crop.
IIRC, someone was annoyed that do-gooders wanted to remove potatoes from the food stamp programs, because the potato is actually an almost-complete food. This has morphed into The Potato Diet, which calls for eating potatoes and only potatoes for a short period of time.
From the start of October through November in 2010,
Voigt consumed only spuds, a few basic seasonings
and small amounts of oil for cooking. His endeavor
drew attention from NBC’s Today Show, CBS News, Fox,
NPR and the UK’s Daily Telegraph.
Voigt documented his journey through a blog
( 20potatoesaday.com ). Tired of potatoes
getting a bad rap as being nothing but fattening
starch and carbs, he wanted to make a statement
that proved potatoes were very nutritious.
The theory behind it is that potatoes are the most filling food of all, so it is hard to over-eat. I tried this diet, and it works for weight loss, but it soon made me feel very unsatisfied. But with a little bit of variation, i.e. making potatoes the base and adding limited extra ingredients, you can sustain on it longer.
This is true. Most of the potatoes eaten are valuable in caloric-deprived situations, but they are not a long-term healthy food due to the thrashing they do to insulin management.
That is misleading. Potatoes are ranked as one of the most satiating foods per calorie. The problem is people put a lot of butter/oil on them. Or eat them too processed.
I've been reading that what gives potatoes a satiety boost is that they contain proteinase inhibitors. These limit your appetite by disrupting your digestion. Maybe they are more effective as a weight loss food than the raw nutrition numbers would suggest, but for an athlete that wants to cut I don't think slowing your ability to digest amino acids is a good idea.
Where does the idea that potatoes are "almost-complete" in terms of nutrition come from? If you look up nutrition facts for potatoes:
-1 potato contains 110 calories
-Lets say our hypothetical adult will eat 10 potatoes to hit 2200 calories
-The only nutrients which potatoes provide more than 10% recommended daily value are Iron, vitamins C and B6. The iron is not heme iron and therefore may actually be worth less, but we'll say it's enough just for the sake of argument. Potassium and phosphorous are close at 9% and 8%, but everything else is lower.
-The fat content is negligible, which is a problem because your brain is made out of fat
-20 grams of incomplete protein means your body can't repair muscle or bone adequately.
At least he gave credit to HN, so the diaspora could find the source. The article is interesting. I think more needs to be said about how our eyes perceive color w.r.t. led lighting.
I agree that there are lots of useless things in cars, but the tire pressure sensors on my base trim 2013 Honda recently saved me a big headache.
I recently pulled out of a business and the "low tire pressure light" turned on right away. "Hmm?" My next stop was 1/4 mile away, and it still felt okay. At the next parking lot I checked all the tires with my gauge and found one was 10psi low. On closer inspection the nail was right on top. Sure enough I'd picked up a little nail. It was a slow leak, and I wouldn't have heard the hiss. If not for the sensor I might not have noticed I'd gotten a flat until I got on the freeway.
PSA: Check your spare's air pressure. Mine was supposed to be 60psi. It had 40psi, which was good enough to get me to the tire store. I checked the spare when I got home - the tire repair crew had bumped it up to 55psi.
My dad was leaving on a trip recently. Because 'spare tire psi' was on my mind I checked his spare - it was only 25psi.
Apparently the low light performance of the full-frame Sonys is a combination of IBIS (mechanical in-body image stabilization) and Back-Side Illuminated (BSI) sensors. The Sony A6600 (APC) has IBIS, the A6700 adds BSI. Other camera manufacturers also offer BSI sensors.
Oh, my D850 has one of those. It does perform very well in low light, but those extra stops of dynamic range in my view count most when they're yielding more contrast in an adequately lit scene - admittedly a privilege, and one I can more often afford myself with the kind of shots I like to take. I do print my work, though, and there's nothing else like that to show the limits of even a very good display.
Saccharin was the first artificial sweetener, discovered in 1879. It was popular in the early 20th century, and is available today as Sweet'n'Low or "the pink packet" (generics). The chemical has an advocacy group: https://saccharin.org/ - the latest news is that Canadians can now use saccharin too (2016). Walmart and Amazon have boxes of bulk sweet'n'low for baking/etc.
~4 weeks ago I reposted a submission about Aspartame: Aspartame aggravates atherosclerosis through insulin-triggered inflammation (sciencedirect.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313574
My comment tried to put saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame potassium and sucralose into context. Aspartame is not heat stable, so it's often combined with acesulfame-K. The diet soda industry standardized on aspartame in the 1980's because saccharin has a metallic aftertaste. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313575
I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners) are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.
If you want to try saccharin-sweetened beverages, I've noticed that zero sugar tonic waters at my local grocery store (brand name and generic) use saccharin.
One important thing to mention about the history of saccharin is that it was the subject of a big scare in the 70s and 80s because rat studies showed it caused cancer. Later research revealed that the link between saccharin and cancer was much more tenuous in humans than originally suggested, and the sweetener is generally considered safe today.
When I was a kid in the 70s, our pantry had a bottle of saccharine tablets that my folks would use to sweeten their coffee. They were tiny, not big tablets, more like round little pills. They had an uncanny resemblance to a popular breath mint product.
A common prank was to put some saccharine pills in one of those mint dispensers, walk up to a sibling and asked if they wanted one while putting a real mint in your mouth. They'd take one of the fake mints, put it in their mouth, and half a second later curse you as they ran to the sink to spit it out.
All these artificial sweeteners taste terrible to me. A very "chemical" taste and especially smell to all of them, reminds me of insecticide. For carbonated beverages, I prefer plain carbonated water, though sometimes I will buy a flavored (but unsweetened) variety.
I've settled on no sugar or under 3g of sugar for this reason. They all taste weird to me. Monk fruit, stevia, aspartame, saccharin, allulose, sucralose. All of them.
My problem with monk fruit extracts is that they tend to be full of erythritol (even listing them as the first ingredient [0]), which tends to wreck my stomach. I was in a super market once and not a single product on the shelf was pure monk fruit.
I think they’re using erythritol because it’s not toxic to pets which some of the other sugar alcohols are, and disastrously so.
But all of the sugar alcohols can mess with your gut biome. Mine went nasty during the previous recession when I was chewing gum for TMJ related problems.
When you live with a pet, who eats what food is a bit of a democratic affair, not an autocracy.
Do you want to get up from the middle of a movie to go to the bathroom and come back and find that you're not going to find out who killed the leading lady tonight because you're going to spend all night in an animal emergency room getting your dog or cat's stomach pumped?
Anything on a table or in your purse or your jacket pocket is fair game.
Monkfruit doesn't come in a nice, familiar crystal form, and monkfruit extract is much sweeter per gram than sugar. For this reason, manufacturers bulk it up with some kind of sugar alcohol to make it easier to use. GP is saying they use erythritol for this purpose because the other options (e.g. xylitol) are toxic to pets.
I'm only quibbling here, and I agree with you, but an amusing factoid is that the ancient Romans used lead acetate as an artificial sweetener. It was made by boiling wine in a lead pot.
When I lived in Texas, it was practically universal to open up a cup of iced tea, grab several packs of Sweet'n'Low, rip the tops off all at once, and pour them in.
That's a good question, and I'm culturally ignorant. When I lived in Texas, my impression was that "tea" was unsweetened iced tea, to which people added their own sweetener. Then when I visited Virginia, "tea" was heavily sweetened.
My friend told me that drinking coffee with a meal instantly identified me as a Midwesterner.
> I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners) are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.
No, isomaltulose(a.k.a Palatinose) is the best. Not very sweet, but it's literally just glucose and fructose connected differently, no other off-products or metabolic consequences, just a sweet carbohydrate with slow metabolism that doesn't cause cavities and is beneficial to the gut microbiota due to the slow release of sugar, just like a good resistant starch would.
It's not as sweet, low calorie, or inexpensive, but health-wise forget being harmless, it's outright better than almost all other carbs.
Aspartame (1965) was approved by the US FDA in 1974/1981. This is commonly paired with acesulfame-K (1967) to provide sweetness in low-calorie drinks and sodas.
Saccharin (1879) was the first artificial sweetener, followed by cylcamate (1937). Low calorie sodas (Tab, etc) using these sweeteners were introduced in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the 1980’s diet sodas sweetened with the combination of aspartame and acesulfame-K reached the market.
This is at about the time the obesity epidemic took off. Correlation != causation. I think it’s interesting that the introduction and increased consumption of diet drinks paced the increase in America’s waistlines. U.S. adult obesity rates went from 15% to 30.5% to 41.9% (1980/2000/2020). U.S. childhood obesity went from 5.5% to 13.9% to 19.7% in the same period.
Others have made a case that aspartame, acesulfame-K and sucralose (discovered in 1976, US approval 1998) play a role in the etiology (causation) of the obesity epidemic: people who want to lose a few pounds switched their beverage consumption to artificially sweetened low-calorie drinks. The insulin released by the sweet taste of aspartame lowers people’s blood sugar level, thereby amplifying their hunger. This causes the diet-soda drinker to consume more total calories than if they’d had a HFCS-sweetened beverage.
There are certainly more important contributing factors to “the obesity epidemic”, but I think this is an example of simplistic science: it's technically accurate that low calorie sweeteners have fewer calories than sugar, but they are not that helpful for weight loss. I'd wager it'd be better to consume an 8oz can of HFCS soda than 12oz of 'diet' soda.
Do any of you have any n=1 stories of success or failure using artificial sweeteners? How about herbal sweeteners? If you regularly consume diet sodas, do you combine your diet drink with calories, or is most of your aspartame consumption on an empty stomach?
Aspartame does not increase insulin, unless I'm not updated on the current scientific consensus.
Also your idea is very american centric, diet sodas are mainstream around the world and most of those countries did not follow the us into the obesity epidemic.
Not at all an expert, but the brief research says that it does cause insulin creation, though due to it not being actual sugar and also due to that there is 200x less Aspartame in mass in your drinks (as it's much stronger per weight unit), then this spike is small and the organism can easily handle it.
- All artificial sweeteners when consumed on empty-stomach, causes very strong feelings of hunger in a short time. My guess is that this can more than cancel out the reduced calorie content.
I started drinking too much alcohol during the lockdown era.
I experimented with non-alcoholic mocktails. The one that works for me is diet cola + milk in equal proportions. Somehow provides the combination of richness/creaminess, sweetness, bitterness that replaces the feeling of drinking Irish cream.
Diet cola contains aspartame. Anyone know if there's a safer non-sugar version of or alternative to diet cola that I could use instead?
This just begs the next "why". Why are people eating more now?
Such a significant behavior change across a large population is not well explained by "we just did".
I'm not sure fast food consumption or huge portion sizes is a great explanation. If fast food is the problem, why does that matter if it just comes down to calories? As for larger portion sizes, would even larger portions make us continue eating? Would tiny portion sizes make us all deadly malnourished?
We do know that walking rates, across the country, have fallen significantly. In 1969, approximately 50% of children walked or bicycled to school, with approximately 87% of children living within one mile of school walking or bicycling. Today, fewer than 15% of schoolchildren walk or bicycle to school. And we see this generally across the board, where for the most part driving to work alone dominates commute habits. If the only walking you do is from the door to the car, you are not getting much routine physical activity.
This would also actually well correlate with the rate of fast food consumption, since it's primarily car-centric, and is more car-centric than other types of eating out.
I also don't think it's really any sort of secret that fast food companies like return customers and engineer the types of food that become addictive. There is a book called the Dorito Effect which theorizes that not only has artificial food become more flavorful over time, but that our industrial scale food production has made the base products less flavorful in favor of prettier or hardier varietals.
Food got way, way cheaper, including and especially convenient (ready to eat) food. Plus a race between companies selling that food to optimize flavor and marketing strategies for maximum sales, which, at some point, had to start meaning “more eating”, not “more eating this instead of something else” otherwise line could not go up.
The reason a population gains weight is way more complicated and probably best short-handed as “social”. Moving to America typically makes people gain weight. Leaving it leads to weight loss. If you’re trying to fix an overweight population, you need to look at lots and lots of things and, demonstrably (as in: the science is pretty clear), telling people to simply eat less and even very expensive high-touch interventions aimed at diet correction don’t work. Wrong tree to bark up, your solution lies elsewhere—or, probably, several elsewheres.
It seems very different and critically important. Would we have a current obesity epidemic without "optimized flavor and marketing strategies"? Because if we would not, then that is the true cause and of fundamental public health importance.
If we would have an obesity epidemic even without "optimized flavor and marketing strategies", then it is totally irrelevant.
Yes and no. I think there are two levers on the CI side of the equation and only one of them is hyper-palatability (optimized flavor); the other is simply cost. Food costs have fallen sharply, and that contributes to over-feeding. Hyper-palatability also contributes. It's not irrelevant, but not the only factor.
> This just begs the next "why". Why are people eating more now?
Have you been in a US supermarket? It's absolutely nuts and I don't think many Americans realise it.
To be bombarded with monumentally huge portions of everything is just a recipe for...well....the situation the US is in. Theres not many other countries that have whole food groups focused on cramming in as much peanut butter, jelly, marshmallow, chocolate, or whatever other high fructose corn syrup crap is being used.
Massive slices of cake prepackaged and ready to eat? Yeah why not.
50 different coffee syrup flavors? Yeah go for it.
How about a lovely massive bottle of sugary drink to wash it down? Just one? No no have a crate of 20 of the things.
Just for a comparison, look up candy on the Walmart site. Now do it on Tesco UK. Next, try the bakery, or hell even the meat isle, somehow the exact same product ends up being significantly worse for you in the US.
The orthodox reason for why people are overweight is calories in, calories out. Does it matter if those calories are a prepackaged cake or candy? In the end it is just calories.
Would gratuitously large steaks in the meat section and huge rotisserie turkeys instead of chicken at Costco produce the same result?
It seems strange to pick on certain types of foods unless believe those foods are the cause of obesity instead of just eating too many calories of any kind.
If you think cookies and candy are bad but other things are not, why? Is it that they are easier to over-eat? If so, how does that compound over time, given humans are trying to maintain homeostasis which includes a healthy set weight via satiety. Exercise induces more calorie consumption later. Over calorie consumption also induces lower consumption later. This seem like relevant factors.
It is, of course, not as easy as calories in / calories out, although the "Twinkies experiment" proved that you can in fact lose weight via caloric restriction alone. For any kind of "normal" diet insulin plays a massive role in obesity. And that bag of candy will absolutely send it to the stratosphere, especially if you consume sweets frequently. Buy a continuous glucose monitor (it's now available OTC via Stelo), and see for yourself. That's what I did.
I am aware of this, I am more trying to get those that really believe it is as simple as calories in calories out to break free from that Plato-ey over-simplified explanation.
I didn’t fully grasp how poorly our US bread approximates the real thing until I visited Europe. It’s weirdly spongy and candy sweet, and that’s the “healthy” bread in the bread aisle. Our food culture is just kind of gross most of the time, and the ersatz health food is some of the worst, as it’s been punched up with loads of organic cane juice or pear juice concentrate. Or celery juice if it’s a product that wants to claim not to have added nitrates. And, it should go without saying, truckloads of salt.
The proportion of households with a person with time and energy to prepare a healthy home cooked meal has diminished. We have sacrificed domestic life on the altar of profit.
It really doesn't have to take more than 10-15 minutes per day in total, you just have to be aware of what you're doing. I know several examples — including myself — who eat healthy food on a budget and spend very little time doing it. We had our problems with American-style food when it appeared and became popular (I had a BMI of 30.5 for several years and blamed everything but myself), but quickly self corrected before real damage was done.
Japan's easy: only about 1-in-3 households in Tokyo (and presumably the other large cities, where the majority of people live, are similar) own a car. People walk and take trains to work or to go shopping or eat out. A half hour of walking can burn upwards of 100 calories.
The typical diet is also relatively lower in bread (processed carbohydrates...with unnecessary added sugar in the US) and higher in protein. That combination is typical of any structured diet designed around controlling weight gain, such as Weight Watchers.
Fast food is also different. International menus have different items and different sizes. I've seen people express shock about the existence of things like the Triple Baconator or US soda sizes. Drinking a 32 oz of sugar-filled soda is an easy 350 calories right there, and a disturbing number of Americans "don't like water."
Konbini and ramen/soba shops also exist, so there are even more convenient alternatives to western fast food, which are often healthier in the typical portions.
They have much smaller portions across the board. Their "venti" Starbucks drink is what we call "small" in the US, and our "venti" is simply not available. Might even be smaller than small, it sure seemed like it.
I've wondered about about carb substitution. The rice, and the wheat noodles, why are they healthier? (I can understand rice somewhat: it's less processed, by certain definitions.)
Buckwheat is not wheat, soba noodles are based on buckwheat.
Not sure how large fraction of all noodles they eat are that though. Feels like there is something related to additives and other things that makes people eat more.
> Buckwheat is not wheat, soba noodles are based on buckwheat.
Whilst you're correct about buckwheat, just about all soba noodles that I've seen here in the UK are predominantly wheat based (I'm gluten sensitive, so have read a lot of product labels).
When looking for gluten free noodles in Asian supermarkets, I've only really found ones that are rice based with some rarer sweet potato vermicelli varieties.
Edit: after a brief search, I have found some Clearspring 100% buckwheat noodles which I shall have to find and buy. They also sell the more usual wheat and buckwheat version of Soba noodles.
> This is at about the time the obesity epidemic took off. Correlation != causation.
Average heights continued increasing through the 1980s. This suggests that a not insignificant chunk of the population was still in caloric deprivation until the 1990s. You can't get obesity while lots of people are still continuously hungry. For this one, correlation probably is causation.
In addition, smoking bans took off in the 1990s. Nicotine is a noted appetite suppressant. Correlation might be causation. You may be trading the problems of smoking for the problems of obesity--probably a decent trade.
> Do any of you have any n=1 stories of success or failure using artificial sweeteners?
My N=1 is that I've always liked Diet Cola drinks - a lot. I easily drink more than a couple liters a day and have since at least 1990. I have my own soda fountain at home (along with a flake ice machine). I was significantly overweight for about two decades. I'd tried a lot of different weight loss programs over the years including medically supervised. I approached each diet very diligently and put in a lot of effort - yet none ever worked long-term for me. I'd lose 10 or 20 pounds over a few months but would put it back on. I was always back where I started (or worse) in less than six months.
About seven years ago I decided to try keto. It was definitely the hardest, weirdest and strictest of any diet I'd tried but I did the entire program very diligently - just like the others. Keto worked extremely well for me, where nothing else had. The first 5-6 weeks was hard - not because I was hungry but just due to the degree of change, new things to learn and the rigorous ingredient tracking. All the other diets were much easier but I was constantly hungry. On keto it was the opposite. After the first three days, I was never hungry on keto. The challenge in keto was changing habits, learning new patterns and missing the flavors of familiar carb-heavy foods. But that only lasted about six weeks. After that my palette had been retrained and I didn't miss carb-heavy "comfort foods". I also had gotten used to the new patterns and it didn't take much extra effort or thought. Over the next 8 months I lost close to a hundred pounds, putting me back at a weight I hadn't seen since high school. I went from size 42 pants to 32 and I had abs! I lost weight so fast in the first three months, I heard some people at work suspected I had cancer or something.
To answer your question, I never changed my very heavy Diet Coke consumption during any of this. If anything, I increased it. And I've now stayed at my ideal weight for the last seven years. I stayed strict keto for the first couple years but now I'm not as strict although definitely still low carb by choice - because I feel better mentally, emotionally and physically on low-carb and because I now prefer these new foods and flavors. Doing keto helped put me in control of my weight and calorie intake through managing my blood sugar - and for me that was the key difference and a major revelation. I'm still never hungry and I can easily manage my intake and weight. If I creep up five pounds, I make a minor adjustment and it's gone in a few days.
However, I don't think keto will necessarily do the same for everyone. I've learned different people have different metabolisms as well as different preferences and ability to adapt to different changes. Strict carb management worked long term for me and Aspartame wasn't a barrier. The other counter-intuitive thing about my weight loss experience was I found early on that exercising did make me hungrier - so I stopped all exercise. While I've never been one for exercise or working out, during the 8 months I lost all the weight I became even more sedentary. I'm not suggesting that to anyone else, of course. I'm just sharing it as an example of finding what works for your metabolism, lifestyle and preferences. Interestingly, after I lost all the weight I found I started liking exercise more than I ever had and continue to today, seven years later. The typical advice is "Cut calories and hit the gym." What worked for me was "Cut carbs and hit the couch." My first week on keto I dropped almost all carbs but actually increased my calories (mostly in meat and cheeses). Once I'd weaned myself off carbs and had control of my blood sugar, cutting calories wasn't just easier - it sort of took care of itself. The whole 8 months I just counted carbs and stayed under 20 a day, while eating as much as I wanted. Without carbs driving my blood sugar and hunger, "as much as I wanted" to feel full all the time turned out to be a lot less calories. The key with the keto strategy is it only works if you execute it rigorously. Cheat all you want on calories but if you "cheat" on the carbs and go over 20g/day, even a little, you'll not only fail - you'll put on even more weight than before. I think a lot of people see that as a major downside but, oddly, for me the "all or nothing" aspect of keto turned out to be an unexpectedly helpful "feature".
My partner's lost a fair amount of weight on GLP-1 drugs and continues to drink Diet Coke like a fiend, and same thing, it doesn't seem to hurt their progress.
Very curious about that soda fountain and flake ice machine though...
Sweeteners are processed food. Timeline shows more processed food hitting the market, period. Obesity rises. Coincidence? Doubt it.
It's not just the sweetener itself. It's the whole shift. More processed crap in everything, sweeteners included. Cheaper, easier, engineered to be addictive. That's the real change that lines up with the weight gain.
Focusing just on sweeteners is missing the point. They're just one piece of the bigger processed food takeover. That's the simpler, more likely explanation.
> Broadly speaking, we eat a lot more than we used to: The average American consumed 2,481 calories a day in 2010, about 23% more than in 1970. That’s more than most adults need to maintain their current weight
Totally might be the case. I'm not sure, but I think I've seen good reasons to think this doesn't exactly line up though - increased wealth in different countries didn't match exactly, timeline wise.
"Processed food" is a term without meaning. Amost all food is processed. Yogert is processed. Bread is processed. Steak is processed. Even raw fruit is arguably processed as it is picked before being ripe to eat and then subject to an optimized ripening process (google the science behind banana shipping). All foods are either cooked or mechanically/chemically processed prior to consumption. We are aguably unable to survive on unprocessed food. Short of biting into a whole head of lettuce, or into the side of a live animal, one cannot avoid processed foods. Washing/cooking has saved us from all manner of paracites. The people who eat raw/unprocceed foods are the ones who wind up with worms in thier brains. What matters for health is the degree of processing that does not add nutrition or safety, with every pundit picking thier own arbitrary point somewhere between a healthy chopped salad and a microwaved hot pocket. Imho, just avoid anything with added sugar or salt.
"Ultraprocessed" is arguably the more important term. While also formally defined, a rule of thumb is that if the average person can't make it in their kitchen, it's ultraprocessed. These are chemicals chemicals that are used to emulsify or stabilize ingredients, preservatives, and chemicals used to improve mouthfeel and texture: like lecithin, polysorbate, sodium benzoate, maltodextrin, partially hydrogenated oils, sodium phosphates, etc. — there are tons of them. Some of them have been implicated in causing gut inflammation.
Yes, really. Nova's definition is exactly what I'm describing earlier. Here is their own definition, from the wiki you linked:
> There is no simple definition of UPF, but they are generally understood to be an industrial creation derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds. The resulting products are designed to be highly profitable, convenient, and hyperpalatable, often through food additives such as preservatives, colourings, and flavourings.
About four years ago I went to the Costco optometrist for a contact lens prescription. The O.D. said I was at the age where people start needing reading glasses, but I passed on those. It was the strongest prescription I'd ever had. After the appointment I put the contacts in the case and wore my weak glasses for the rest of the week. The day before the check appointment I put them back on my eyes - everything was crystal clear, but I couldn't read my phone.
The check appointment was with the practice's other O.D. I said the prescription would've been great for sniper shooting, but I just needed something to read the computer monitor. "You want an intermediate-range prescription." It was better, but still too strong. I used the curvature measurement to order my own prescription from one of the online contact stores. Three years later I upped my prescription by a quarter diopter.
Contact pro-tip: I use my contacts for 1.5 to 2x the rated time. Daily contacts can't be used for more than a day. 2 week contacts are good for at least 3 weeks. I've found my monthly contacts are good for at least 6 weeks. I've started using the hydrogen peroxide contact solutions: https://clearcaresolution.myalcon.com/
> even though your prescription is "correct"?
Most people have a range of prescriptions that they find acceptable. Some people's visual mechanism only 'likes' a specific prescription that might not correct them to 20/20. Developmental Optometry is a sub-specialty of optometry that considers more than acuity. This is a overview: https://www.theottoolbox.com/behavioral-optometrist-developm...
My contacts correct to 20/40 or 20/50, which are good enough for most tasks.
I've gotten back to the hotel, and I take back this comment. The hotel wifi does not seem to actually route the ipv6 address it assigns.
I bought this laptop at an electronics recycler. It came with a verizon SIM card, with service that's still working. So this ipv6 address is from Verizon, not the hotel.
> Here, we show that consumption of 0.15% aspartame (APM) markedly increased insulin secretion in mice and monkeys.
This would explain the published observations that diet soda drinkers consume additional calories in other parts of their diets: aspartame-sweetened diet soda -> insulin release -> low blood sugar -> hunger signals.
The first artificial sweetener was saccharin (1879). Saccharin is available as Sweet'n'Low (in the US, but not Canada), or as generics in 'the pink packet'. Aspartame is branded as NutraSweet or Equal, and is 'the blue packet'. Sucralose is Splenda, 'the yellow packet'. Extracts from the stevia plant are in 'the green packet'.
Aspartame was discovered in ~1965. Most of the 'traditional' diet sodas are sweetened with a mix of aspartame and Acesulfame Potassium, because aspartame is only stable in an acidic solution.
I think saccharin is relatively safe. I've personally witnessed someone deteriorate after sucralose consumption, so that's on my strict avoidance list.
tl/dr: I avoid blue and yellow. Pink is my new go-to for sweet cravings. Green is probably safe for adding a bit of sweet to your calories, unless you have a tendency to be allergic to everything.
My neighbor has a live rat trap that he doesn't need to bait anymore. The rats are doing their thing exploring, they go into the trap looking for food, and triggers the trap mechanism. When he finds a rat in his trap, he removes it to the woods outside of our neighborhood.
Senestech [0] sells an EPA-approved poison that only targets the rat's ability to reproduce. I mentioned this company previously [1], looks like their product line has expanded in the last year or two.
But for people that are nightshade-tolerant potatoes are an excellent food crop.
IIRC, someone was annoyed that do-gooders wanted to remove potatoes from the food stamp programs, because the potato is actually an almost-complete food. This has morphed into The Potato Diet, which calls for eating potatoes and only potatoes for a short period of time.
- https://spudman.com/article/all-potato-diet-eight-years-late...