This week I made a donation to the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma https://www.regionalfoodbank.org/. If you live in Oklahoma please consider a year end gift. There is a $500,000 dollar for dollar match until year end. If you live elsewhere there will be a similar charity you can give to.
End of post.
People with talent and high-value skills, like most technology workers, aren’t returning to traditional offices.
How to lure employees back to the office? You can’t. Not now. Not ever. — https://www.zdnet.com/article/they-really-arent-going-back-work-from-home-is-here-to-stay/
I started working from home in 2006. I love reading articles on topics I already know a lot about.
The future of knowledge work will be a hybrid. A small percentage (like myself) will WFH 100% of the time and an even smaller percentage will work in an office 100% of the time. Most will travel to their offices a few times a month and WFH the rest of the time.
I drove a 2006 Ford Taurus for nearly 15 years and didn’t pass 80,000 miles. (short commute)
My business casual attire consists of jeans and a tee shirt.
Coffee is cheaper and tastes a lot better than office coffee too.
Poor metabolic health and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors have been associated with higher risk and severity of COVID-19.
A dietary pattern characterized by healthy plant-based foods was associated with lower risk and severity of COVID-19.
We found evidence of a synergistic association of poor diet and increased socioeconomic deprivation with COVID-19 risk that was higher than the sum of the risk associated with each factor alone.
Merino J, Joshi AD, Nguyen LH, et al
Diet quality and risk and severity of COVID-19: a prospective cohort study
Gut 2021;70:2096-2104. — https://gut.bmj.com/content/70/11/2096
In six countries, plant-based diets or pescatarian diets were associated with lower odds of moderate-to-severe COVID-19. These dietary patterns may be considered for protection against severe COVID-19 In 2884 front-line healthcare workers from six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, USA), individuals who reported following plant-based diets and plant-based diets or pescatarian diets that were higher in vegetables, legumes and nuts, and lower in poultry and red and processed meats, had 73% and 59% lower odds of moderate-to-severe COVID-19, respectively.
Kim H, Rebholz CM, Hegde S, et al. Plant-based diets, pescatarian diets and COVID-19 severity: a population-based case–control study in six countries
BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health 2021;4:doi: 10.1136/bmjnph-2021-000272 — https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/4/1/257
Eat your vegetables!
RESULTS During 170,148 person-years (PY) (median follow-up 8.5 years), 283 individuals died: 133 with type 1 (103.0/100,000 PY), 55 with type 2 (161.5/100,000 PY), 87 with secondary (1,952/100,000 PY), and 8 with other/unknown diabetes type (312.3/100,000 PY). SMRs (standardized mortality ratios) (95% CI) for the first three groups were 1.5 (1.2–1.8), 2.3 (1.7–3.0), and 28.0 (22.4–34.6), respectively. Diabetes was the underlying cause of death for 42.1%, 9.1%, and 4.6% of deaths, respectively. The SMR was greater for type 2 than for type 1 diabetes (P < 0.001). SMRs were significantly higher for individuals with type 1 diabetes who were <20 years of age, non-Hispanic White and Hispanic, and female and for individuals with type 2 diabetes who were <25 years of age, from all race/ethnic minority groups, and from both sexes.
Demographic Correlates of Short-Term Mortality Among Youth and Young Adults With Youth-Onset Diabetes Diagnosed From 2002 to 2015: The SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Study — Diabetes Care 2021 Dec; 44(12): 2691-2698. https://doi.org/10.2337/dc21-0728
CONCLUSIONS In the Danish population screened for diabetes with HbA1c, the highest risk of MACE (major adverse cardiovascular event) and all-cause mortality was found in subjects with HbA1c just below the diagnostic threshold for diabetes. Our results highlight the need for increased focus on the treatment of cardiovascular risk factors for subjects with prediabetes.
Prediabetes Defined by First Measured HbA1c Predicts Higher Cardiovascular Risk Compared With HbA1c in the Diabetes Range: A Cohort Study of Nationwide Registries — Diabetes Care 2021 Dec; 44(12): 2767-2774. https://doi.org/10.2337/dc21-1062
Differences between actual mortality and expected mortality range from a drop of about 36%, in Connecticut to an excess of 50%, in one state in the West. The median difference is an excess of 10.5%.
5 Worst States for All-Cause Mortality, Already — https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/12/02/5-worst-states-for-all-cause-mortality-already/
The slideshow for the five states didn’t work for me but the article also contains a data table for all 50 states.
I was surprised Oklahoma was not one of the five worst states.
Cryptocurrencies are a social movement based on the belief that markings in a ledger on the internet have intrinsic value. The organizers of these ledgers call these markings Bitcoin, or Dogecoin, or offer other names based on the specific ledger. That’s really all a cryptocurrency is. There’s no magic. It’s not money, though it has money-like properties. It’s not anything except a set of markings. Sure, the technology behind the ledgers and how to create more of these markings is kind of neat. But crypto is a movement based on energetic storytellers who spin fables about the utopian future to come. In a lot of ways, cryptocurrencies are like Florida land that no one ever intends to use. It has value in the moment it is traded, but only because there’s a collective belief that it has some intrinsic worth.
Matt Stoller BIG newsletter 12.07.21 — https://mattstoller.substack.com/
TBH I never really understood crypto until I read Stoller’s descriptive paragraph.
Now I understand this is something I will never “invest” my money in. Not that I ever intended to do that before today.
The study included 18,794 adults aged 65 years and older who participated in the 2015-2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Binge drinking was defined as consuming 5 or more drinks on the same occasion for men and 4 or more drinks for women. Binge drinking among older men increased from 12.8% in 2015 to 15.7% in 2019 but remained stable among older women (7.6% to 7.3%). Having a college degree was associated with a higher risk of binge drinking among women but a lower risk among men. Men who were separated or divorced were also at higher risk, but women were not. Both men and women who reported use of tobacco or cannabis in the past month were at higher risks of binge drinking.
Wiley. “Trends in binge drinking among older men and women in the United States.” ScienceDaily. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211208090023.htm (accessed December 8, 2021).
What worries me is that what we now know in the United States is even if you’ve been vaccinated against Covid, you can incubate and replicate these variants, or even perhaps the native virus, in your nose, because we have incomplete immunity in the nose in someone who’s been vaccinated fully against Covid.
Corey Casper is the CEO of the Infectious Disease Research Institute and a professor of medicine and global health at the University of Washington.
The science behind booster shots – https://www.opb.org/article/2021/08/24/the-science-behind-booster-shots/
Experts say “waning immunity” is concerning, but it isn’t as scary as it sounds. The vaccines still work, and for most people, still provide a high level of protection against severe disease. “It’s been a challenge,” says Mark Slifka, an immunologist at Oregon Health and Science University. “because some people will say, ‘well the vaccines aren’t working.’ And that’s a misconception. Vaccines are still providing 90 percent protection against mortality and hospitalization.” Breakthrough infections have increased but infections are still three times more likely in unvaccinated than vaccinated individuals. Of those infections, only 3.9 percent have led to hospitalization in vaccinated patients compared to 9 percent in those who remain unvaccinated.
Six Questions About Waning Immunity to Covid-19 Answered — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/six-questions-about-waning-immunity-to-covid-19-answered-180979135/
No political agenda here, no conspiracy theories. I’m just sharing some informative articles and hope you find them helpful as you navigate the Never Ending Pandemic.
The inventory of new single-family houses that home builders put on the market for sale rose to 389,000 in October, the highest since September 2008, according to data from the Census Bureau.
Houses for Sale, Highest since 2008, as Construction Costs Spike Most in 42 Years, Projects Stall — https://wolfstreet.com/2021/11/27/whats-behind-the-huge-pile-up-of-new-houses-for-sale-highest-since-2008-as-construction-costs-spike-most-in-42-years-and-projects-stall
“The first thing we noticed was that the small intestine increases greatly in size on the high-calorie diet,” says study leader Anika Böttcher. “Together with Fabian Theis’ team of computational biologists at Helmholtz Munich, we then profiled 27,000 intestinal cells from control diet and high fat/high sugar diet-fed mice. Using new machine learning techniques, we thus found that intestinal stem cells divide and differentiate significantly faster in the mice on an unhealthy diet.” The researchers hypothesize that this is due to an upregulation of the relevant signaling pathways, which is associated with an acceleration of tumor growth in many cancers. “This could be an important link: Diet influences metabolic signaling, which leads to excessive growth of intestinal stem cells and ultimately to an increased risk of gastrointestinal cancer,” says Böttcher.
Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health. “New link between diet, intestinal stem cells and disease discovered.” ScienceDaily. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211119155604.htm (accessed November 27, 2021).
I wonder what Dr. Lustig would say about this study?
Dr. Robert Lustig – The Sugar Pandemic – 2012 Presentation at Yale University and Dr. Robert Lustig on Sugar.
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