lithocarpus

Do you know how canola oil is made?

It's not to say one couldn't use large scale machinery to make real healthy food in my general though.

Every study I've looked into that purported to show salt was a problem did not isolate salt, and the most likely reason IMHO that the "less salt" group did better was because they ate less ultra processed food and more natural food.

Look into the process used to make soybean oil vs the process used to make butter.

Brilliant sleight of hand by the processed food industry.

Of the fats one can eat, saturated fat is generally the least processed and most natural.

Humanity has eaten saturated fat for ever. Refined/processed oils are a completely new thing that has become a staple of the modern industrial diet. Under this law kids will be made to eat more of the ultra processed literally refined oils and less natural fat.

I wonder how much aluminum oxide we get though from disintegrating meteors and other impacts every day. Quick search suggests 50-100t of mass from meteors on average each day - similar total to the dust. Those might be more concentrated and analagous to the starlink satellites.

Whether those harms outweigh the benefits overall remains to be seen and likely will never be known unless it's really really bad, which is likely not the case here.

I'd agree more research is probably justified, but there's likely little profit in it for anyone.

Another related anecdote from my own life, I had sleep apnea from when I was a teenager. Another doctor also proposed surgery to fix my nose for that, but somehow I'd become skeptical of doctors wanting to do surgery (probably I'd heard too many stories of something going wrong.) Anyway, a year ago I fixed my sleep apnea using a nose dilator and mouth tape at night for a month. I still have overbite but mostly breathe through my nose now.

Again, not saying that surgery or intervention is always bad, but this was an even more extreme case where they wanted to do surgery to fix something that could be fixed in a much more natural and much easier and extremely cheap way, but the natural way was never mentioned by a doctor, I only heard about it from a friend 15+ years later. And it just worked, and for the past year I've not had sleep apnea - I sleep better, don't snore anymore, and can breathe enough through my nose now while exercising etc. i.e. the nose must have been able to reshape itself with the help of the dilator and necessity (because the mouth was taped). I still have overbite but I'm not sure it's really a problem especially compared with the risks of surgery.

"after hormone levels return to baseline, there's no more pharmaceutical effect" Maybe no longer directly, but with one level of indirection there certainly _could_ be.

"no plausible mechanism of action" - I haven't looked into it to understand the mechanism of action for side effects from finasteride, but certainly if it can cause side effects during use, those could impact the body in a way that causes effects that persist past when usage stops.

Same with almost anything harmful that we do to our body - ideally the damage or effect is healed and we return to baseline, but very often we don't.

There could also be an effect where someone tried it, it didn't work as well as they wanted or it caused a side effect, and this was psychologically difficult to deal with and helped lead to depression and anxiety without that being directly chemically caused by the drug. And it would be fair to argue that that's not the drug's fault.

I have several anecdotes from my own life. When I was ~18 the doctor proposed to give me jaw surgery to fix my overbite by extending my lower jaw. I asked him what the reasons for this were and he said it was mainly cosmetic. I thought this was not a good enough reason for surgery - which while often safe does also often have harmful side effects - I now know way too many people who had surgery complications that often took a long time for them to become aware of. I think I feel better about myself now for having made that choice than I imagine I would if I had a better jaw line.

It's true that some people are going to have a story where they see the cosmetic medical intervention as having been beneficial for their mental wellbeing. I'd still suggest that in many such cases there might have been other ways to get a better outcome. It's for each of us to decide.

Still, burden of proof of the safety of a drug should be on the company profiting from it.

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

Apparently around 1.4%.

So the starlink satellites dissipating could increase the aluminum oxide arriving up there by ~10% - depending which numbers are correct I suppose it could be anywhere from like 3-30%.

Apparently earth soaks up ~400-800 kg of aluminum oxide in cosmic dust each day.

So with 1-2 starlink satellites producing 30kg each dissipate each day, that's adding about 10% to this figure.

I'm not sure if the cosmic dust aluminum finds itself in the same places up there as the dissipating starlink aluminum. Maybe that could be figured out from the above paper.

This could have a significant effect, I don't know.

Not suggesting you are saying that, but there's a spectrum of what it means for behavior to be public.

Sure, my location is technically public in the sense that sometimes people see me when I go somewhere. But I would much rather not always be recorded with gps location and video and audio to be stored forever and available to those in power.

What made an imprint on me was being told by both my eye doctors that it's impossible to improve vision naturally, and then seeing it happen for me.

Another similar incident, my dentist found four early stage cavities and said eventually they would probably need to be filled, he said with enough brushing I could keep them from getting worse but there was no way to reverse it. I could see the little pits in my teeth in his mirror. That was 8 years ago, I improved my diet significantly since then and have not had any cavities since - i.e. the four small cavities that were forming are visibly not there anymore and my dentist tells me my teeth are healthy.

When I'm told it's "impossible" for my body to naturally heal or improve something, I am skeptical now.

longer story: Growing up, at the doctor's they made us look at some letters on a chart far away and I didn't realize I was supposed to tell them if the letters were blurry. I was pretty good at figuring out what the blurry letters were because there are only so many options. So they always said I had 20-20 vision. At about age 21 I was driving my dad's car and put on his sunglasses which were prescription sunglasses, and suddenly I could see the crisp detail of everything - the distant treetops, the little rocks in the field along the road. I was blown away and realized my eyes were not very good and I had been missing this my whole life. I got glasses.

Then later at 27 when I was quitting my office job to go be in nature, I stopped wearing the glasses for a combination of reasons.

Two years later at 29, I had been thinking about getting glasses again as I really wanted to see the forest where I lived in detail. But I didn't do it. But one day a few months after having those thoughts, I was lying on the deck looking up at the tall trees from underneath, and realized I could see clearly the needles in detail. I looked around at the distant mountain top and could see that clearly too. I was blown away. I don't know for sure if it happened suddenly or gradually, but part of it must have progressed pretty quickly since it was within a few months of when I had thought about getting glasses.

It's been four years now, and my eyes are still great like they were right after I noticed the shift. My right eye is really sharp and the left is also better than it was originally. And while I can't be sure, it seems like my left eye has been getting better over these years, because at first I noticed my right eye had become sharp but the left was still quite blurry. I'm constantly grateful for this, it's just about the best gift I could have ever asked for.

I don't know if I was born nearsighted or if that developed due to excessive use of books and computer from a very young age. I am still able to focus up close, at ~4 inches with my left eye and ~4.5 inches with my right. I do know for sure that when I did get glasses, they not only improved my long distance vision, but also improved my focus on the computer screen 2ft away, and I would often wear them at the computer from age 21 to 27.

Also of note, when I got glasses, the way I understood the test they did to determine my prescription, it seemed there was a 50/50 chance that the prescription would be on the slightly too-strong side rather than the too-weak side, thus training my eyes in the wrong direction. I asked the eye doctor about this and they said no it doesn't matter at all. I think it would have been wise to get prescription on the slightly too weak side so that even with the glasses my eyes might be able to train themselves in the correct direction even if very slowly. I would recommend this to anyone who gets a prescription.

There's an incentive for pharma to want people not to take care of their teeth, I don't know if they ever act on this incentive but I wouldn't be surprised.

I've found it immensely helpful for giving real world recommendations about things like this, that I know how to find on my own but don't have the time to do all the reading and synthesizing.