Poison Squad

• Fascinating story of a group of young men from the early 20th century who volunteered to literally eat poison (formaldehyde, borax, and salicylic acid) so that Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley could observe the effects. Before government regulation, companies would use completely insane adulterants in most foods and drinks (milk with formaldehyde, ground coffee with no coffee [but ground human bones]). 

• Wiley’s goal was to change the food system, and he did, by instigating new legislation. We are very lucky to be alive today. Check it out on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. There is also a book about the Squad.

Grail

• A review from Sensible Medicine on a paper published in New England Journal on Grail technology, referred to often as a “liquid biopsy.” In short, the study was negative – use of Grail did not reduce diagnosis of late stage cancer by theoretically catching early stages in the bloodstream. Disappointing results, but I don’t think we have seen the end of this test – an FDA advisory panel voted 10-0 on safety, 6-4 on efficacy and 7-2 on benefits greater than harms.

Carnivore bar

• Paul Saladino is a polarizing character. Funny how he keeps sliding away from his very restrictive meat only approach to nutrition. Now he eats fruit and promotes (and sells) honey. But I have to admit, these Lineage protein bars have great macros and solid taste. They take a while to chew, but sometimes that is good, makes you feel like you are eating more. 20 grams protein with some of it collagen. Thanks, Danielle for the recommendation. 

Rest

• I finally finished Sabbath, by Wayne Muller, a book worth savoring. I recommend slowing down to read these passages, and reading them more than once. I often skim through emails and other articles, which takes away most of the point of any content related to rest. 

I enjoyed these two parallel notes that capture the same idea:

1) “The wisdom of Sabbath time is that at a prescribed moment, it is time to stop. We cannot wait until we are finished, because we are never finished. We cannot wait until we have everything we need, because the mind is seduced by endlessly multiplying desires. We cannot wait until things slow down, because the world is moving faster and faster, and we cannot be left behind. There are always a million good reasons to keep on going, and never a good enough reason to stop.”

2) “Sabbath is not dependent upon our readiness to stop. We do not stop when we are finished. We do not stop when we complete our phone calls, finish our project, get through this stack of messages, or get out this report that is due tomorrow. We stop because it is time to stop.”

• Those quotes remind me of this paragraph from Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks. 

“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.”

• And all of the above pairs well with ideas in Stephanie Brown’s book Speed. Here is what I wrote in The Phoenix Club: “Psychologist Stephanie Brown treats Silicon Valley high achievers, whose compulsive success-seeking reminds her of her own alcoholism. She describes the epidemic of “speed,” an internal sense of intensity and urgency, in motion and unable to stop. The tension in these competitive circles can be contagious. Entering a room full of fellow success addicts is like an alcoholic walking into a bar – immediate camaraderie and an energetic buzz.”

Published in 2014, Speed describes the culture of Silicon Valley, plagued by a “phenomenon that is snatching people up and carrying them along, convincing them that doing ‘more, better, and faster’ is the path to happiness.” Brown writes that this compulsion “is outstripping people’s ability to manage, to fulfill all of their responsibilities, and even to cope. The idea that we literally have at our fingertips the tools to do so much more than we actually have the capacity to do well has created an impossible bind that leads to chronic stress and a sense of failure.” 

We become addicted to speed because of its connection to “the magic of instant success. … It was, and is, all about fast — the fastest search engine, the fastest connection, the fastest way to get and spread information — and the high this race produced.” Finally,“People were certain they risked failure if they took time to eat dinner with their families, go for a leisurely Saturday bike ride, or read a book just for fun. They were utterly focused on constant progress … worshipped the god of speed — anything worth doing was worth doing fast.”

• Other than the fear of getting left behind, another reason we move so fast is to stay on the surface of life. We are back to Muller in Sabbath, where writes about how medical professionals experience fear of feeling too deeply about what we see at work: 

“At a retreat, a doctor took me aside and confessed that for him, and for many of his friends and colleagues in medicine, part of their rush and hurry is fear of the terrible things they will feel in the quiet. They are so close to so much suffering and loss, they are afraid that if they stop, even for a moment, the sheer enormity of sorrow will suffocate and overwhelm them. The busyness of the medical model is in part a defense mechanism, a way to skate over the rampant, tender uncertainties of the practice of human.” 

Muller offers an analogy: “When I was a boy I learned to skip stones across a lake. If I threw the stone fast and true, it could skip clear to the other side, barely getting wet. But if I threw it too slowly, it hit the water once and disappeared. We do not want to disappear. If we slow down we might be pulled by some gravity to the bottom of our feelings, we might drown in all we have lost. So we keep moving, never finding refuge, never touching the tendernesses that propel us into a life of speedy avoidance.”

Quotes

Rest is an essential enzyme of life, as necessary as air.

Without rest, we respond from a survival mode, where everything we meet assumes a terrifying prominence. When we are driving a motorcycle at high speed, even a small stone in the road can be a deadly threat. So, when we are moving faster and faster, every encounter, every detail inflates in importance, everything seems more urgent than it really is, and we react with sloppy desperation.

– Wayne Muller