At least one decades-old study that had purported to show that the herbicide glyphosate posed no health (esp cancer) risk to humans was retracted in late 2025 (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/climate/glyphosate-roundu...). Glyphosate may be applied multiple times in a season, both to control weeds but also onto the actual desired crop (i.e. the stuff that gets turned into food for humans and for other animals) as a desiccant a week or two pre-harvest. The official line is that glyphosate that isn't absorbed directly by leaves and other above-ground plant tissues "tightly binds" to soil and is quickly and completely broken down by soil bacteria, though it is also admitted that plant roots can absorb glyphosate and that it can subsequently be transmitted throughout plants. So I would not discount the possibility that some level of glyphosate accumulation in the soil and bioaccumulation in food crops could also be occurring alongside residues from spraying.
In other words, dietary fiber in general or specific forms (e.g. Metamucil aka Psyllium husk) could be effective in lowering CRC risk or could have been so in the past but consumption of real-world dietary fiber in the current era in which glyphosate-based herbicides are in increasingly wide use could now be increasing cancer risks.
Oatmeal (if unsweetened/unflavored) has about the same GI as orange juice or cake made from some Betty Crocker boxed cake mixes and is just slightly lower-GI than the American formulation of Coca-Cola (see #333 Oatmeal (Canada), GI value of 54 ± 4 in the table at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...).
I think oatmeal and other high-GI foods are promoted as low-GI in hopes of helping wean diabetics and pre-diabetics off of even worse foods (e.g. something really bad like powdered donuts), akin to how methadone is used to try to help heroin addicts. But genuine low-GI foods would be things like eggs, cheese, or chicken breast (all with nearly 0 GI) or some raw veggies like raw broccoli or the greens in a leafy salad (in the neighborhood, roughly, of 10-20 GI). Cooking low-GI vegetables like broccoli defeats the purpose and raises its GI to around the same value as oatmeal.
I wrote oats, not oatmeal (I don't think we really use that term in the UK). AIUI "Oatmeal" can refer to various things, including high GI porridge.
I only buy steel-cut oats, which various sources on google say are around 42 GI [0][1]. I do concede that any form of oats are on the upper-end of low and/or medium, and aren't some magic super food and one should not focus just on GI.
Steel cut oats are definitely better than most breakfast cereals however.
Joel Fuhrman in his book on reversing diabates also recommends small portions of oats (but mostly says to eat veggies).
Jerath said the differences aren’t about technical skill,
but about listening to patients and choosing appropriate
care. Previous studies point to differences in the way
that female physicians communicate and engage with
patients.
[...]
Overall, patients experienced complications 9% of the time
when treated by female surgeons and 10.2% of the time when
treated by male surgeons.
If "listening to patients and choosing appropriate care" sometimes translates into simpler/less-ambitious surgeries, that could lead to this small difference in complications and possibly worse long-term outcomes vis-à-vis the actual conditions that prompted surgeries included in this, the first mentioned, study.
And:
Another study published in JAMA Surgery on Wednesday
looked at more than 100,000 patients in Sweden who’d had
surgery to remove their gallbladders. Female surgeons had
longer operation times, but their patients had shorter
hospital stays and less invasive surgeries.
Male surgeons spent a mean of eight minutes less per
operation compared with women, even after matching similar
patients, surgeries and hospitals. Complications including
bleeding, perforations of the intestine or bowel, bile
duct lesions, leakage and abscesses occurred nearly 30%
more often for male surgeons.
What if more challenging gallbladder surgeries or gallbladder removals for people with more comorbidities were more likely to be undertaken by male surgeons or those patients were more likely to be referred to 'senior' surgeons who may be disproportionately male? Or... 100k gallbladder removals in a small country like Sweden is a lot of gallbladder removals. What if, over the years during which the surgeries look at by this 2nd study, two things happened: the share of female surgeons increased and there were also advances in technique that significantly reduced complications for gallbladder removal surgeries in Sweden?
The goal is to compel the use of biometrics and personal, always-on and always-online, devices (e.g. phones) that double as personal tracking devices.
To perform even mundane functions, you will need to provide biometrics (via scans) or check-in with a device tied to you. Facial recognition, gait recognition, etc. will catch anyone venturing about without a device or one genuinely powered down.
Once you're banned from a service or your access is reduced/restricted/modified in some undesirable way, for wrong-think or wrong-speech or stepping outside your house during a lockdown or straying beyond the borders of your designated ULEZ geofence or consuming too many meat calories over a certain period, there will be no way to create alt accounts and nobody else will dare to allow you to share their access or act on your behalf for fear of incurring the same penalties.
This is truly where we're heading unless enough people wake up and stop going with the 2 steps forward, 1 step back flow.
Historically, vultures were widespread in India. But
between the 1990s and early 2000s their numbers plummeted
by more than 90%, from around 40m. The cause was
diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug that farmers began
using to treat their cattle. Though the drug was harmless
to both cows and humans, birds that consumed animals
treated with diclofenac suffered from kidney failure and
died within weeks.
According to the article, farmers were treating their cows with an anti-inflammatory drug and vultures then consumed the flesh of medicated cows and died and this was occurring on a large-enough scale to slash the populations of multiple vulture species.
The piece doesn't mention why those farmers were frequently administering diclofenac to their cows, how the vultures had been able to access dead cow flesh in large volumes up to that point, or anything about the structure of cow ownership in India. The piece is a monocle-wearing version of a "Banish Chin Wrinkles Forever Using This Weird Trick!" clickbait junk article linked via a photo of a woman holding a bell pepper against one ear and is emblematic of why I personally dislike glorified content mills like The Economist.
From what I can ascertain via a quick look around the Internet, in broad strokes, the people using diclofenac on their cows are/were small-holder (as in owning one or two or a handful of cows) dairy farmers who rely on their cows to produce milk that is consumed or used to produce other dairy products largely for their own households and maybe selling or trading a little surplus. They are/were using it treat mastitis. There are alternative NSAIDs (e.g. meloxicam) that are reportedly effective for the same purposes but less toxic to the vultures. I do not know whether alternative NSAIDs are as readily available as diclofenac, which is still available from pharmacies for human use after veterinary use was banned.
Cattle in the region could be dosed up to the gills with diclofenac or one of the other toxic-to-vultures NSAIDs without crashing the vulture population, however, if vultures didn't have access to large amounts of dead cow flesh. The slaughter of cows and the operation of slaughterhouses in that part of the world is tied up with religious and political issues unique to the region. You can find articles about the problem if you don't care for this one (from 2016): https://www.thedairysite.com/articles/4310/how-does-indias-s...
TLDR: Many sick/dying/knackered cows are abandoned by subsistence/small-scale dairy farmers rather than being slaughtered and processed for meat, leather, etc. and that's how they end up getting consumed by vultures. Larger dairy operations exist and are more able to make arrangements for their animals to be slaughtered, though political opposition and interference was (at least according to thedairysite.com, in 2016) increasing.
Sidebar recs are there, but YouTube injected a plea to turn watch history back on, an oversized block with the header "Recommendations not quite right?", followed by "When you turn on watch history you'll get more personalized recommendations." and two buttons: "Leave history off" and "Turn on history". That notification had an "X" at the top right corner to close/hide it, but the "Got it, we won't show you this hint again." message that showed when I opted not to enable watch history had no way to close or hide it.
Yes. This just began today, even though I've had watch history off for a long time, such a long time that I don't recall turning it off.
Out of curiosity, I briefly turned watch history back on and "Home" (the YouTube page that shows a mix of content you've viewed and content YT hopes you will view) returned to normal. Then I switched it back off, reloaded "Home" and got a blank page with a plea to enable watch history.
It seems as though YouTube tracks and records users' activity on the site regardless of whether or not they assent to having their watch history recorded, but wants users to explicitly assent to being tracked and having their activity recorded before YT will provide their (marginally useful in my experience) 'personalized recommendations'.
Yes, all of Google's (and Facebook and everyone else) controls regarding history and tracking of various things is for the user's benefit to keep them activated, because if you disable or delete them, you are the only one who loses access to that juicy data.
Whenever I delete an object in cloud storage, I simply whisper, "now accessible to everyone but me..."
It's a nice deception, telling you that you have control over all this tracking and history, tricking you into deleting it, and completely losing control.
I will say this, though: if you frequently open your phone or apps in front of other people and may have embarrassing stuff pop up, perhaps it's good to disable it. I found myself hiding my screen from a neighbor this week; not a good feel.
In other words, dietary fiber in general or specific forms (e.g. Metamucil aka Psyllium husk) could be effective in lowering CRC risk or could have been so in the past but consumption of real-world dietary fiber in the current era in which glyphosate-based herbicides are in increasingly wide use could now be increasing cancer risks.