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Wellness Wednesday for October 19, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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The Slime Mold guys are up to it again - this time asking people to drink large amounts of potassium chloride.. My OB thought it sounded harmless so I'm drinking about 1/8 tsp - 1/4 tsp of potassium chloride a day, though I'm not signing up for the trial as I'm pretty sure they don't want pregnant women in there. I do feel a little more energetic, we will see if that lasts or if it's just a placebo. The normal markers to assess health changes are lost to me, but I'm measuring my underbust to see if that changes over time. As a pregnant woman I am in a position where I am getting my blood pressure, heart rate, and blood samples taken regularly, so at least I'll know quickly if something isn't going well.

If potassium supplementation works, I don't know how they are going to work out their confirmation bias that it's obviously lithium causing obesity. My own assumptions regarding the obesity epidemic are that either 1) our soil is deficient in some nutrient and our body keeps telling us to eat food until we get enough or 2) it's seed oils. Potassium supplementation obviously addresses the first, for the second I wonder if potassium has an effect on ROS or oxidative stress.

I don't have time to read through the whole thing but did they have any control group for the potato diet? Eating the same thing every day in general seems like it would have an effect on calorie consumption purely by virtue of not snacking or eating for entertainment for a month.

Unrelated, but the key to understanding the global obesity epidemic probably has something to do with infant and child obesity. Something has to have gone horribly wrong in our environment if infants fed on breastmilk or formula are following the same trend as humans with agency.

Edit:

Why did they stop looking at the potassium/BMI graphs after 2017? It seems like the data after that contradicts the claims presented. Such omission of data makes me more skeptical of everything else.

No control group for the potato diet, there isn't really any other food where it would be relatively safe to eat just it an nothing else for a month. They were just trying out a weird cool trick they saw online and wanted to put statistics behind it - did eating mostly potatoes for a month without restricting calories actually lose people weight? It did! They have no idea why though, the study has no way of telling why, so now they are trying other things.