There's no way 7 in 10 people were prescribed antibiotics in 2024. This looks like a simple and egregious misinterpretation of the data, which seem to be all too common. I could believe there were 700 prescriptions given in the US per 1000 people in the US population. But many of those would be repeats to the same smaller number of people. I still would say there's way too much antiobiotic use - every time doctors have wanted to give me antiobiotics it wasn't necessary.
My wife isn't with me to answer directly, so I am going off memory. She is a nurse. But I am pretty she when telling me about her day at the hospital she also mentions needing to change antibiotic for patients for various reasons. I am guessing that also counts as 1 person, multiple antibiotics. Probably considered "separate" prescriptions.
Yea that's another good point. Luckily my kids haven't had troubles with ear infections, but my sister did growing up. It like 3 or 4 times a year almost every year in elementary school and halfway through middle school that she had multiple that she needed to go antibiotics.
I've gone without a fridge for 8 years now and do something kind of like this usually - I'll cook a pot of food and then steam or boil it again after ~24 hours to reset the clock on it rotting. It's handy for things like eating a whole chicken or other large soup. I switch between being home and on the road a lot so my pot just comes with me and can be re-cooked on my car stove or my home stove. I tend to cook or re-heat once a day. Ideally I'd rather be sharing freshly prepared food with other people every meal and I do that when I can, but this works for when I'm feeding myself alone - cheaper and easier than any other approach.
Resetting it will kill bacteria, certainly. But there are a number of heat-stable toxins that once created will not be destroyed that way.
I guess you've been doing this for a while, and presumably it's been working, plus I know that historically this is how people lived. But be aware it's not risk free.
A suggestion: A pressure cooker - not for the pressure, but because they can be sealed. Heat the food, then let it cool without opening it. Kind of a less secure form of canning.
The bacteria is still there, its just dead. Along with all of its waste. Leaving soup at room temperature over night is crazy. Its usually the biggest food borne illness vector in restaurants so they usually boil then move straight to cooling.
Ive learned leaving soup out and reboiling is fairly common in some cultures which is unfortunate. Bacteria rapidly multiplies at room temperature around the world (well, maybe not antarctica).
> Ive learned leaving soup out and reboiling is fairly common in some cultures which is unfortunate.
I know next to nothing about chemistry or biology but I do cook a lot of food, and quite often have leftovers.
After many years in Germany, I got into the habit of leaving food out, and that would mostly be fine. Very rarely would food spoil, at least from a culinary perspective (I'm not disputing the presence of bacteria or harm of its waste).
However after even a few months in Taiwan I learned that this strategy is basically impossible: food left outside spoils within hours.
Given I originally come from a country that is warmer, but much dryer than Taiwan, where food doesn't spoil if left out nearly as fast, I do believe it has to do more with humidity than with temperature.
Both humidity and temperature matter, it's a complex thing going on.
But yes I'm mostly in a dry environment doing this, I haven't tried it anywhere that was warm and humid at the same time.
It helps a lot to not seal the leftovers but let them have airflow and dry out on the surface. Sealed containers with moisture in them get nasty much faster.
If the container is sealed (airtight) while it's still above the temperatures that (most) bacteria can survive at, and then cooled while sealed, it might actually do better than open-air for a while.
You'd be amazed at just how much tolerance human guts can develop for this kind of thing. I recall reading about a hunter-gatherer tribe the discoverer ran across just going to town on horribly rotten carrion. The more rotten the better.
> Leaving soup at room temperature over night is crazy.
And yet, this was common before the electric fridge. I've lived without a fridge for years and the amount of food I ate after being left out overnight would give americans a stroke.
I left a bowl of pasta with meatballs out on the table by accident on New Years Eve a handful of years ago, and aside from a power outage the whole night, it was perfectly fine the next day; most food is.
Pork is especially fine if it is properly packaged... That is part of what 'curing meat' is all about.
Most people that brought lunch or dinner to work or school prior to maybe the 1990s thought nothing much of unrefrigerated food being eaten several hours later. Laborers still often do. So do kids.
And tuna at room temperature is surprisingly good (as long as it is not rotten, or the temperature isn't too high). I mean tuna salad, although sushi is served just barely below room temperature.
I remember in grade school taking thermoses of soup for lunch, though I would never do this as an adult (and not only because it was disgustingly lukewarm five hours later).
Can confirm, have made hundreds from playing music after four years of several hours a day. Still probably only made 25% the cost of instrument and strings though.
Out of curiosity, have there been any other advances in medicine that would make it less likely that women would die from cervical cancer before hitting 30? I don't keep up on oncology developments, but I assume that this particular shot is not the only thing that has reduced cervical cancer deaths in women under 30. If they were looking at rates of acquiring cancer, that would be more focused on this intervention.
Didn't read the article, but regarding the title, this is kind of fundamental.
NIMBYs want to protect some aspects of a particular place usually because it is their home.
Capitalism largely lives on destroying particular places to benefit people who are [mostly] somewhere else.
This is the only thing happening in capitalism but it's a big part of it. The end game of this kind of capitalism is that every place is destroyed (ecologically) and it gradually grinds to a painful halt.
Maybe there's a way to have some elements of capitalism in a society that doesn't destroy places but I don't know.
> NIMBYs want to protect some aspects of a particular place usually because it is their home.
this is the reflex, and it's a sensible one to have. but the perception of what is or isnt a threat can range from something legitimate across the board ("I dont want a giant thing taking all the power and pumping my head full out sound 100% of the time near my home") to the truly detrimental ("I should get to be the last one moving into this area. Me moving to a place is good and fine; other people moving to where I live constitutes destruction. No new housing.")
NIMBYs forget they moved to where they live from somewhere, and they are not more important than other people on a societal level.
There is. That is one of those cases that it truly is good to surface, because it provides a watermark to clear. Whatever you are doing, you should have to prove that it is worth the destruction you will cause to do it. People getting to live somewhere clears that line much of the time; excesses like golf courses and yet another datacenter become gross when put into relief.
And... sometimes stats and population level studies take a very long time or (more often) are never done at all and so if we only rely on this to tell us what to do, we'll miss a lot.
There are common sense ways to reduce cancer risk that have been obvious to and practiced by many people for a long time, before the studies showed that they were right. For example, all of the many new synthetic materials and chemicals that have been found to be carcinogens. I just assume any novel chemistry exposure is a risk, to eat it, drink it, touch it, breathe it. I can't and don't avoid all of it, but I can avoid a lot of it in terms of dose, compared to people who don't think about this at all.
I'm sure someone is thinking that job loss needs to be gradual enough that they can get technology to the point of having killer drones ready to take out any individual instantly, before any uprising threshold is crossed. If the abundance of drones keeps rising and surveillance continues toward "total", then we are headed toward this possibility.
Who wants to uprise if it means instant death for the uprisers and everyone they care about?
And if things move gradually enough we are like frogs in boiling water. Think about how if many of the things openly happening today were to happen 50-100 years ago how much resistance there would have been.
The thing about the whole “frogs in boiling water” thing is that it doesn’t work. They’ll jump when it gets too hot.
To counter it with another idiom, consider the concept of having nothing to lose. Remember I’m not claiming it’ll be fun, easy, or anything like that. What I’m saying is that when push comes to shove and enough people genuinely have nothing to lose, it will not be pretty, and I’m not willing to bet on the rich and powerful coming out on top, regardless of how slowly and gradually they try to make it happen.
I think it’ll suck a lot for everyone, and specifically I’d be willing to put money on the rich and powerful wishing they’d had a little more empathy and foresight.
There are tons of possible symptoms because systemic inflammation including from dietary causes basically damages the entire body. But here's a list of some common symptoms from one source:
persistent pain,
chronic fatigue or insomnia,
joint stiffness,
skin problems,
elevated blood markers (such as C-reactive protein),
gastrointestinal issues (constipation, diarrhoea, acid reflux),
depression, anxiety and mood disorders,
unintended weight gain or loss,
frequent colds or flu.
For myself, when I eat processed food I mostly feel fatigue and low energy and gastrointestinal pain. But it's been extremely rare for me to eat these things in the last 10 years.
Most of the US population are systemically inflamed including from diet basically all the time, and most of the US population are suffering from several of the above symptoms chronically. (Not to claim that it's definitely or only because of food, but I'd bet it's a big part of it.)
So basically every possible psychosomatic and unverifiable symptom, plus a bunch that can have infinity different causes, and no clinical test for this "inflammation". Curious!
There are clinical tests for systemic inflammation. But there are also lots of potential causes of systemic inflammation, so testing for high inflammation consistently will tell you there's something wrong, but not what exactly is wrong or causing it.
> There’s a secondary argument about oxidation — seed oils go rancid at high heat, producing potentially harmful compounds. This idea is chemically real and worth being thoughtful about (don’t reuse frying oil repeatedly). But the evidence that oxidation at home-cooking levels causes measurable harm in humans isn’t there.
Even if oxidation at home-cooking levels doesn't cause harm, which I suspect that it does though to a lesser degree, two thirds of seed oil market in the US is industrial or prepared food, much of which does go rancid or is reused frying oil.
I work in an area that involves, among many other things, analysis of cooking oil in factories. It might be hard to pin down the terminology of "reused" frying oil, because many of the frying processes are continuous. The raw material goes through a vat of hot oil on a conveyer and comes out the other end dripping with oil
The quality of the oil is continuously monitored, and new oil goes in while old oil goes out in the fried food itself. The crunchy and salty aspects make it palatable to eat oil. The oil doesn't actually spend a long time in the vat before coming out in the product.
Analogous is the label on vodkas that says “distilled N times”, as if they were making it in batches using pot stills.
Vodka is made almost exclusively in industrial-scale continuous fractionating columns. The concept of it being “distilled N times” is farcical. (But technically defensible because you can map the output of the fractionating column to any arbitrary N via equivalence relationships.)
Good point that industrial use might not strictly be "reusing" - that might apply more to restaurants where they have big vats of frying oil and keep dipping food in it for multiple days. Even worse I've seen small scale home fryers where people neglect to change the oil for who knows how long - but that's probably not super common.
Absolutely agree. I don't think I'd want industrially prepared stuff fried in tallow either.
There is a chemical distinction in that tallow is mostly saturated fat which doesn't oxidize nearly as easily, so it might be less bad to fry with or re-fry with. But still.
> A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%.
…about same difference as taking statins (per the article)
Any isolation of certain compounds from whole food from other compounds would be part of what I refer to as processed. In the case of refined oils, I'd call it ultra processed just because of how much is removed - even before considering the chemical contaminants.
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