What I'm Reading (June 8)

By Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA — Jun 08, 2023
Color me concerned? Walking About What does Saudi Arabia have in common with Arizona? Does the duck-rabbit illusion explain our polarization?
Image by Moki from Pixabay

 

“...after hitting a mid-20th-century peak, the roster of synthetic dyes used in Western foods began to shrink. In recent years, European countries have appended warning labels onto the products that contain them; the United States has whittled down its once-long list of approved artificial food dyes to just nine. The FDA is now reviewing a petition to delist Red No. 3, which colors candy corn, conversation hearts, and certain chewing gums and cake icings; California and New York are mulling legislation that could ban the additive, along with several others, by 2025.”

Will we willingly give up our Skittles? From The Atlantic, American Food Will Never Look Natural Again

 

My wife walks for exercise; when in New York, she is a flaneur. On a recent trip to Paris, we logged an average of 10 miles a day walking around the city.

“According to a new analysis from researchers at Virginia Tech and Rutgers University published in the journal Sustainability, just 12% of all trips in the US are walked. That’s one of the lowest walking rates in the world. Residents of Finland, Germany, France, and the UK use their legs twice as often to get from point A to point B.

And this disparity is not just driven by the US being more suburban and rural relative to other countries. The researchers found that trips shorter than 2.5 km (1.6 mi) account for 30% of all trips in the US, 36% in Germany, 37% in France, 39% in the UK, and 40% in the Netherlands. So Americans don’t have much farther to go for their outings; they simply choose to walk less.”

From RealClearScience, America Has a Big Walking Problem

 

“Several months ago, we said that seven states and approximately 40 million people could help to solve the Colorado River’s problems. We should have added Saudi Arabia.”

As it turns out, the Saudis use our water; what's up with that? From EconLife, Why Saudi Arabia Grows Alfalfa in Arizona

 

“She describes an increasingly well-supported working hypothesis called predictive coding, according to which perceptions are driven by your own brain and corrected by input from the world. There would otherwise simple be too much sensory input to take in. “It’s not efficient,” she says. “The brain has to find other ways to work.” So it constantly predicts. When ‘the sensory information that comes in does not match your prediction,” she says, “you either change your prediction—or you change the sensory information that you receive.’”

From Nautil.us, How Your Brain Decides Without You

Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA

Director of Medicine

Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.

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