simon clark

Billie Eilish says eating meat is WRONG and people can’t claim to love animals if they eat meat 😳👀

please stop posting this one picture of a spectacularly stupid idea

Switzerland is turning the unused space between train tracks into solar power plants. A startup called Sun-Ways is piloting removable solar panels that roll out like a carpet between the rails. No new land needed, easy to maintain, and they feed clean energy straight into the grid. If the US scaled something similar across its massive rail network, it could generate enough clean, homegrown electricity to power millions of homes. This is the kind of smart, low-impact idea that gets more clean energy online without paving over more fields or wild spaces. Innovations like this show we can produce the power we need while leaving more room for wildlife and nature. Pretty cool engineering with a big upside if you ask me.

The British Vitamin D problem is not new. Britain sits between 50 and 58 degrees north. London is on the same latitude as Calgary. Edinburgh is level with Moscow. From October to March, the sun does not rise high enough above the horizon for the UVB wavelength your skin needs to actually reach the ground. You can stand naked in February noon sunlight on the south coast and produce essentially zero vitamin D. This is six months of the year, every year, for the entire history of human habitation on these islands. The British have known this, in their bones, for ten thousand years. Look at what was eaten in winter, before anyone had ever heard the term cholecalciferol: Oily fish. Herring, mackerel, sprats, kippers. Three or four times a week from October to March. A single kipper carries roughly 250 IU of D3. Cod liver oil. Spooned into every British child between 1850 and 1980, a teaspoon at a time. Distributed free by the Ministry of Food in the war on the explicit understanding that British children needed it through the dark months. Rickets fell by 90 per cent between 1940 and 1960. Cod liver oil was the reason. Liver. Eaten weekly in working households until 1985. Egg yolks from hens that had been outside in the summer. Grass-fed butter, made from cream from cows on summer pasture, the fat-soluble vitamins banked into the cream and eaten through the winter. The British solution to the British problem, evolved over centuries by people who could not articulate the biochemistry but knew, with absolute certainty, what kept the children growing through the dark months. Then between 1955 and 2010, the British removed almost all of them. Cod liver oil reduced to a niche supplement. Liver dropped from weekly to never. Oily fish consumption halved. Eggs rationed by the Department of Health on cholesterol grounds since retracted. Butter replaced with margarine carrying no fat-soluble vitamins at all. Result, by 2020: roughly half of all British adults are vitamin D deficient by the end of winter. A third of children. Rickets has reappeared in British paediatric wards. The NHS now recommends every adult take a supplement from October to March. This is the NHS recommending in 2026 what the British diet was doing automatically in 1926. The geography has not changed. The latitude is the same. The sun is still inadequate from October. The food used to handle it. The kippers are still being smoked at Craster. The cod liver oil is on the chemist's shelf. The liver is at the butcher. The butter is in the dairy aisle, behind the spreads. The sun was always seasonal. The food was the backup. The backup got thrown out. Get it back.

These are really really nice data that've gone largely under the radar In people already taking a statin, Enlicitide (an oral PCSK9 inhibitor) was tested head-to-head against other cholesterol medicines — Bempedoic Acid, Ezetimibe, or the combination Enlicitide lowered LDL more than even the combination (and was the only agent to lower lipoprotein(a) too, by ~25%)

Cutting seed oils: what people expect vs what actually happens. Expectation: this will be easy. Reality: seed oils are in everything. Crisps. Crackers. Bread. Salad dressing. Mayonnaise. Hummus. Pesto. Soup. Ready meals. Protein bars. Vegan cheese. Plant-based anything. Most restaurant food. All fast food. The "healthy" options at the health food shop. Nearly everything in a packet. Expectation: I'll just use olive oil instead. Reality: olive oil is fine. Unfortunately, it's often blended with cheaper seed oils. Make sure you trust the source. Expectation: I'll notice a difference in a few weeks. Reality: linoleic acid has a half-life in body fat of around 600 days. The seed oils you ate last year are still in your cell membranes right now. This is a two-year project minimum. Most people don't have that kind of patience and give up. Expectation: people will understand. Reality: you will be told you're worried about nothing, that seed oils are fine, that the science is settled, and that you should eat the hummus. The hummus has sunflower oil in it. Expectation: I'll just cook with tallow. Reality: this works perfectly. Buy it once. It lasts months. Costs less than olive oil. Cooks everything better. Tastes good. Expectation: I'll feel smug. Reality: yes. Unavoidably. This is one of the confirmed side effects.

Seed oils are the most consumed and most destructive ingredient in the modern food supply. Canola, soybean, sunflower, corn oil... these are industrial lubricants that were never meant to be eaten at scale. They are loaded with omega-6 linoleic acid, which oxidizes under heat, drives systemic inflammation, and disrupts your cell membranes. The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio in the average American diet is now 20:1. It should be 4:1. Read your labels. Remove seed oils. This single change will shift your inflammatory baseline.

“Serving meat and dairy at a university is akin to serving cigarettes at a lung cancer conference.” Ridiculous. 🤡