Carl Richards on White Coat Investor

• If you don’t regularly review content from the White Coat Investor, the amount of content Dr. Dahle (the WCI) gives away for free is massive. He recently had guest Carl Richards on the podcast. They discuss the “Behavior Gap” – “the difference between the returns an investment could achieve and the actual returns investors experience due to poor decisions based on emotions and behavior.” I didn’t know about the Society of Advice, founded by Richards. Thanks, Jon for the heads up.

Healthy Cookies

• Just found this gem at Costco, fruity cereal cookies with fiber and protein. I went back and bought 3 more bags. Rolling Pin cookies apparently also makes low carb chocolate chip cookies and a handful of standard, higher carb desserts. 

Berberine for Lipids

• A recent meta-analysis reviewed 11 RCTs involving 1386 patients to determine the effects of berberine (chemical found in some plants like European barberry, goldenseal, goldthread, Oregon grape, phellodendron, and tree turmeric) on lipids with and without statins. Berberine performed better than placebo to lower LDL and increase HDL. It might even be as effective as simvastatin in these respects (but statins have other effects that of course can be beneficial). From the abstract: 
“Compared with the placebo group, berberine could significantly reduce the total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein levels and elevate the high density lipoprotein level”
and
“Compared with the simvastatin group, berberine was effective only in reducing the level of triglyceride (MD=−0.3⁢7, 95% CI: −0.66, −0.07, 𝑃=0.0⁢2). There, however, was no statistical significance between the BBR group and simvastatin group in the low density lipoprotein and high density lipoprotein levels.”
and
“In terms of adverse reactions, the incidence of adverse reactions including transaminase elevation and muscle aches was lower in the berberine alone or combined with simvastatin group than that in the control group, while the instance of constipation was higher.”

• A very cool supplement that also has impressive effects on metabolic health, as reviewed in a paper that I will include in a future newsletter. 

Labor

• Labor Day post from Michael Easter (Two Percent newsletter) about how we have largely taken the “labor” out of our jobs. So many of us stay sedentary throughout the work day, confined to a desk in order to complete tasks and host/attend virtual meetings. Easter offers some ways to combat the dangerous health impact: 
When you get the mail, do a lap around the block. Or two or three.
Walk while taking work calls instead of sitting.
Park in the farthest spot always.
Take the stairs.
Toss on a ruck when you do chores around the house or when you walk your dog.
Use a standing desk for a couple of hours a day. Standing alone doesn’t burn many calories. But fidgeting can—and people who stand tend to shift around and fidget more.
Have exercise snacks. Set a timer and every 30 or 60 minutes run in place, walk around, or do bodyweight exercises like squats.
Do walking meetings at your office. It also leads to better conversations and ideas.
Take breaks from work by going for a short walk rather than looking up stuff on your phone or computer (I’m guilty of grabbing my phone when I need a break!).

Hydrate

• The New York Times reviews categories of products, similar to Consumer Reports, but the articles are free. In their review of the best water bottles, they provide a few options. I ended up choosing the Purist bottle. It is double-walled stainless steel; I have never had a bottle keep liquids cold this long. But the cool part is that the interior of the bottle is lined with a thin layer of glass (silicon dioxide according to the website). This makes your drink have no stainless steel (or plastic) taste. Wirecutter has been testing one of these bottles for 5 years and it still never imparts flavors into drinks. 

Quotes

British-born Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett said of her teaching style that her goal wasn’t to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.

– From Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist newsletter, see Burkeman’s reaction to that phrase:

I had a full-body reaction the first time I encountered that… Tears pricked behind my eyes. The relief! To me, the phrase meant this: you can slog through life (and I had been slogging through life) trying to ‘get on top of things’, trying to reach the point at which you feel like you know what you’re doing, trying to fix your flaws, or make yourself emotionally invulnerable… All of that is an attempt to ‘lighten the burden’, and there are a thousand self-help gurus on standby, promising to aid you in the effort.

But making the burden heavier? That means seeing that as a finite human you’ll never get on top of everything, never fully understand what makes others tick, never immunize yourself from distress. The burden of reaching that goal is an impossibly heavy one. And so you put it down. You let your shoulders drop and your muscles unclench. And then – crucially – you’re free to actually be here, actually do stuff, actually show up. You get to climb life’s mountains without lugging a huge rucksack full of steel ingots on your back the whole way, which is both easier and much more fun.