Eggs are 60% more expensive than last year in the US

High sugar in blood is bad. High sugar and high fat in the bloodstream is worse. Also, recent studies seem to show that cholesterol limits are arbitrary and don't mean much in a vacuum: there seem to be a correlation between high LDL levels and longevity—i.e. people that live longer tend to have higher levels of LDL than average recommendations. Go figure.

The important levels for health are: stable glucose/insulin system, lower triglycerides, lower trig/HDL ratio. Everything else is too noisy a signal, including just measuring dietary cholesterol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdgS3PuSuyg

There is about 10x more unesterified (absorbable) cholesterol secreted into bile than one typically eats in a normal day.

> Eating cholesterol has very little impact on the cholesterol levels in your body. This is a fact, not my opinion. Anyone who tells you different is, at best, ignorant of this topic. At worst, they are a deliberate charlatan. Years ago the Canadian Guidelines removed the limitation of dietary cholesterol. The rest of the world, especially the United States, needs to catch up.

https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-pa...

The only caveat I would is that there is weak evidence for a "dietary cholesterol hyperresponder" phenotype that is more sensitive to dietary cholesterol than the general population.

I probably have (heterozygous) familial hypercholesterolemia, so my diet (even saturated fat) unfortunately doesn't influence the (very high) levels I have anyways. I'm envious of people like you, for sure.

As you mentioned, eating whole, healthily prepared eggs and meat makes a difference. If you were getting that much egg and beef from McDonald’s you would likely be buried in the ground by now.

I used to eat like you and my blood work was horrifying, though. I’d say I was eating around 95% whole foods by volume, though I had a weakness for rice noodles and fermented sausages. I stopped that diet though and now my blood work is excellent, too.

This is a contentious but super interesting thing. There are some factors here I suspect matter a lot, but haven’t been properly proven out yet. I do think in the next decade or two we will start to get a good grasp on it.

One is gut flora and enzyme production. Essentially, where is that food broken down and what’s present as it happens? This is a big science experiment with significant variance across individuals. One common variable that’s becoming very obvious though is that people who adopt “western diets” tend to lose a staggering amount of gut flora diversity. I think this matters a lot for anecdotal but also research-oriented reasons.

I had a chronic bacterial illness which required nuclear-grade antibiotic regimens and that completely crushed me. I was burping up the most putrid gases, getting awful cramps, and having bizarre GI motility issues for over a year after; I’d never had troubles with food in my life. I’ve wondered often if I’d done my blood work before that, when I didn’t feel like garbage eating that food, if it might have looked good like yours. I really wish I started doing blood work sooner. Regardless, I wonder if gut flora can protect us from the harms that the greater body of evidence implies high amounts of saturated and trans fats can cause.

I’m totally plant-based now, and I meet countless people who say “I can’t eat like that because I just feel like shit all the time”. And I think yeah, I did too. I had to do all kinds of stuff to build my guts back up and now I’m a plant crushing machine. Had I eaten like this when I ate a lot of meat, I’d be bloated and miserable all the time. There’s no way I could handle so much fiber and sheer bulk. What your flora and system is accustomed to seems crucial to both what you’re able to eat, what you want to eat, and how well it supports your health.

As for enzymes, we know various foods stimulate enzyme production and in their absence that enzyme will reduce or even vanish — sometimes permanently. What you eat with your eggs and steak, whether it’s with the meal or 12 hours later, very well could protect you from what harms others. This kind of thing is researched and there’s growing evidence for its importance, but it isn’t clear who/when/what happens since nutrition is so incredibly diverse. I can’t wait until we understand protective mechanisms (enzymes or otherwise) better. I suppose the best known is antioxidants, but there must be so many more.

Finally, there’s the genetic factor question. We know there are hyper responders to saturated and trans fats. Are there hypo responders? I haven’t read up on that. If so, the greater body of evidence would indicate that most people are not hypo responders at all, and that saturated fat intake (animal or plant) can easily become excessive and harmful.

All of this is to say that I doubt there’s a one size fits all in any case, but since saturated fat appears to become harmful in most populations, I think people should be careful and if it’s an option, so regular blood work. I’m also not aiming to be contentious or argumentative; I find this stuff interesting as hell and love to discuss it (and learn things — I’m by no means an expert and I don’t have all the data).

I also had this diet for many years. Wait till you get older. This is a diet will run your cholesterol through the roof.

It depends on what the goal is.

If one seeks an opportunity to punish the NAACP or to chill discussion of racism, focusing just on the NAACP might be a way to do that.

Otherwise, if one seeks to end harmful astroturfing[1], then directing punishment (eg: press+fines) at the companies/lobbyists that craft those campaigns seems more effective.

As for the non-profits that get duped by bad-faith corporate campaigns, being held up as a hapless corporate stooge should provide all the aversion anyone could want.

[1] ref: https://www.techdirt.com/tag/astroturfing/

The argument should be that regressive taxes like soda taxes, much like speeding tickets, affects the poor at a much greater clip. Who cares about a soda tax or a speeding ticket when you make 500k a year? If you make that much and you want soda or you want to speed, you're going to do it. However, if you make 28k a year, the calculation is much different.

In America, poverty and race are strongly correlated (and there's causation, but I digress). Because of that, it's easy, although inaccurate, to use classism and racism interchangeably.

Calling someone racist creates a larger emotional response and is more damaging to social equity than calling someone classist.

Hence calling soda taxes racist.

at the least, tax at sales tends to be regressive, affecting poor people more than not poor, which maybe you could claim is racist. but pa constitution doesnt allow anything but flat taxes, so unfortunately theres basically no progressive taxing here. sin taxes in general i find somewhat troubling, sure its a luxury but why is this luxury deserve more tax than that.

I believe many people hold on to that sentiment because it's easier to blame a boogieman than to educate themselves on affordable, healthy diets and execute on learning to shop and cook for yourself.

I am, however, interested in bringing better educational resources and time-saving instruments to consumers. Many people grow up in an environment where they don't know how to properly shop in a grocery store. For example, you give someone a $50 gift card to the supermarket and they walk out with a cart full of crap, because it's all they knew growing up.

Then once you teach someone how to shop, they may not have experience cooking for themselves. For those of us who grew up cooking with our parents and continued to do so for ourselves, it's hard to imagine how overwhelming the learning process can be. If you grew up in a lower income environment with busy parent(s), chances are you never helped out in the kitchen with your mom or dad. They probably brought home a kid's meal from McDonalds on their way back from their second job.

Well, that's an easy fix. Ask your employer to cut your salary to ~$20k-$30k. Tell them that you're going to be in the office at 7 on-the-dot, and he can write you up if you're 5 minutes early or late; you're going to be there for 8-10 hours, w/ a 30-minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (again, write-ups for taking even a minute longer than alotted). Sell your car, get a used one (financed, of course), model year before 2012, 80k miles minimum; give the profit away (give away any savings you have, too; you can't access any of your retirement or investment accounts, either). Insist that any credit you have access to be cut severely and the rates jacked up. Sell anything you own other than your car that's worth more than $2k, give the money away. You are also now limited to going 20-30 minutes out of your way to the "good" grocery store, since you are moving to a food desert. Your mattress now comes in a box from Wal-Mart; get rid of any sleep or wake-up aids other than your cell phone. Hard mode: separate from your spouse, if you have one, and adopt as many kids as you need to get to 2 or 3.

People are not making poor individual choices. They are, collectively, subject to perverse incentives that are imposed by a regulatory-industrial complex that profits from the ill health they develop when behaving as might be expected of any normal human being of the past two centuries. Thank you for being frustrated at the state of the world; it means that you recognize that there are improvements to be made. First step: stop blaming the wrong people.

I think the challenge here is looking at numbers without factoring in reality.

A common scenario in poverty is money isn't available when it's needed. If one has $4 today for food now and will have $4 more tomorrow, their choices are to forgo eating until they can save up the ingredients or buy whatever food can be had today.

horrific. they breed frankenstein bodied animals, that this is even allowed makes me sick.

I can't say how my experience tracked or would have tracked inflation, but I can say that even before the pandemic, I did see wildly varying prices on things. Costco's large vanilla extract was once around $10 (though this was before my spreadsheet, so I don't have dates/exact prices). It was up to $35 in '18, then down to $30 a year later, and just a few days ago, I noticed it for a little over $20. But 25# of flour used to be around $6-7, and I bought a bunch the other day for ~$12. So some things up, others down.

Canada, under $4 cad per dozen which is about $3.20 USD. Saw about $4.39 when I was in San Francisco last month, I (perhaps wrongly) made the assumption that similar would be available elsewhere.

I’m just not seeing these quoted prices anywhere.

...2015.

And that's without factoring in inflation.

Not exactly the strongest counterexample I've ever seen, though (barely) technically correct.

And the last deflationary "period" (a single year) before that was ... drumroll... 1949, following 3 years of >8% inflation.

Someone who has disposable income but doesn't care would buy normal eggs before, lowering the demand for regulation-compliant eggs.

Now, the store only stocks regulation compliant eggs, so that's what the person buys, increasing demand.

To be a "free-range" or "pasture-raised" chicken you simply need access to the outdoors. So, these animals are kept in the same cramped, feces-filled hothouses that the "budget chickens" are, but there's a tiny hole in the side of the barn where they can access a tiny bit of grass. That's it.

There is no incentive for these companies to do anything above the bare minimum; you will never find a large-scale egg supplier that raises chickens in the idyllic environment you may picture in your head.

But then we went back the next day and they had a few dozen eggs.

Or: the only reason I was buying generic eggs in the first place was that they were half the price of your Pasture Raised Organic eggs. Once they are almost the same price, I might as well buy Pasture Raised Organic eggs.

Why would a seller sell them for any less than they can get? Farms tend to be incredibly low margin businesses, so selling below market is just utterly silly.

Prices are set at the margin, they are not set by cost of production other than to act as a floor where companies outright go out of business.

My parents have a coup on their hobby farm which my dad built on the weekends. It looks great and the eggs taste even better. That said, they were never under the impression this was a way to _save_ money, the math just doesn't make any sense.

For the opossums, it's a stand off, the rooster just acts tough and makes a lot of noise so you can hopefully show up and scare it off. Weasels are annoying as they'll destroy eggs. Fox are particularly problematic though. They'll easily kill a rooster and are very quiet and conniving.

Can't really substantiate this tho as I can't find online charts of oat milk prices lol

> Using the relationship in Figure 1, we calculate this as an increase of the PCE price level from 295.7 to a midpoint of estimates of 300.2, plus or minus 0.9.

> Expectation of additional debt forgiveness programs evokes a moral hazard incentive for college students to take out more loans and for universities to increase tuition rates.1 To the extent that inflation is inherently persistent, any initial price level increase would also lead to sustained inflation over the near future.

I did a deep dive this morning on the Federal Reserve's contribution to inflation, and it looks to me like interest rate hikes contradict quantitative easing. I think they had no choice but to lend more money during the pandemic, or else we might have faced the total loss of personal savings and a global depression. So they made up for that by raising interest rates later in an attempt to slow inflation. We can argue about the amounts, but their $7 trillion contribution just isn't that much when measured against the US's $23 trillion GDP IMHO.

I also stumbled onto an interesting insight. Most of our economic policies since Reagan have followed Milton Friedman. That's where the Fed's quantitative easing comes in, because it's based on the quantity theory of money (QTM) from David Hume and John Stuart Mill:

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042015/how-does-mon...

Keynesian economics (an alternative approach) rejects QTM and says that inflation comes from demand-pull and cost-push. To me this is self-evident, because even with no change in money supply, prices will rise due to increased demand when supply decreases because people are out of work.

Just so we're both on the same page, here's an alternative interpretation of inflation from the Reserve Bank of Australia, which examines demand-pull, cost-push and inflation expectations instead of QTM:

https://www.rba.gov.au/education/resources/explainers/causes...

Although they practiced quantitative easing in 2022 just like we did, and reached a similar 7% inflation rate. Which seems to indicate that they had no choice, meaning that inflation was structural outside the US too, and not due to a specific economic or political approach.

Notably, China began flirting with Keynesian economics in the late 90s. Here's an opinion piece from fee.org, which hosts the one I found supporting your initial argument:

https://fee.org/articles/chinas-flirtation-with-keynesian-ec...

Since that time, China's economy has grown exponentially and now they're eating our lunch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#/media/File:China...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

So you say that capitalism still works, but this data challenges that assumption on a number of levels.

IMHO the financial elites of the world are effectively gamblers who make long bets on how this will all play out. Based on these figures, where are they most likely to place their bets for the best return? China and the developing nations it influences.

The propaganda against progressivism, socialism and communism is a knee-jerk reaction to the two lost decades we've had in the time since, as US wages have stagnated and we've lost our industrial capacity, including the closing of 70,000 factories, which began when the George W. Bush administration did nothing to stop outsourcing, and pretty much endorsed it to enrich its wealthy contributors with short-term gains:

https://checkyourfact.com/2018/04/12/fact-check-did-the-us-l...

The US is gradually losing its petro-dollar dominance and will probably lose its global policing and empire-building abilities by the middle of this century. We'll have to start producing and paying our own way again, not just run huge trade deficits and continue importing cheap goods. A similar thing happened when England lost its colonies.

So now we're colonizing ourselves in the search for cheap labor. At least we were until the pandemic, but people woke up. Now we see how wealth comes mostly from being born with it or skimming it from workers. A point proven every day by our leading billionaires.

If wealth doesn't come from hard work or saving, that creates cognitive dissonance. Which is the best explanation I can find for stuff like the former president's election.

And that's the real danger in all of this. Not that the US might adopt democratic socialism, but that exploited and disenfranchised workers around the world could elect authoritarian leaders in a misguided attempt to thwart their oppression, which could lead to WWIII.

So price gouging doesn't come just from monopoly, but from the wealthy elites created by those monopolies who effectively control our government now. They're the conspiracy. They could use their wealth to alleviate human suffering, but they're still asleep. In other words, there's nobody at the wheel advocating for progressive change who has the means to actually enact it. Only outreach and organizing can do that. The fate of the world quite literally depends on it.

Anyway, I'm well outside my wheelhouse here, and we're below the fold so nobody will probably ever read this anyway. But I hope this clears up my position. I have no terse way to defend it, because the evidence is vast and suppressed by the mainstream media and wealthy elites who don't benefit from a reduction in wealth inequality.

Edit: I re-read your original comment, and maybe we both agree that it would have been more effective to just give everyone the $40,000 directly? Just like during the housing bubble popping in 2008, when people needed a few thousand dollars to make their mortgage payments, but the government gave the money to the banks instead, which prolonged the recession. To not print the money is not a viable option IMHO, for the reasons I stated above.

You have to hire a lawer who follows these things, interprets them. Then you have to craft new changes in the way you do things (no matter what things you do or how) to adapt, and you have to also signal that so you won't get audited/inspected (which is a huge cost in time & resources even if there are 0 violations).

And that's before the cost of the actual regulation.