Obesity. On Freedom.
Latest obesity models. Maggie Nelson's On Freedom. Small business carbon foot print calculator. Mark Ravenhill theatre masterclass. Vitalik Buterin: profile, future of Crypto. Mingle, 31 March.
“Ukraine is a tragedy. But doesn’t impact my business. On the other hand, this China lockdown… could be a disaster.” The tone of many global industrials CEOs this week.
What following global investments shows you
Obesity + Alzheimer’s, Diet podcast
On Freedom
Small business carbon foot print calculator
Mark Ravenhill theatre masterclass
Vitalik Buterin: profile, future of Crypto
Join the UK Climate Change Committee.
The US Fed raised interest rates and changed its messaging on future interest rate rises. With the committee indication rates of 1.5 - 3% in 2022 up from 0.25 - 1.25% range, forecast 3 months ago.
The Chinese government seemingly reversed course on support for its tech, property sectors and “market friendly” policies. Recession risk (in the next 12 months) has risen over the last few months. Hong Kong is struggling with COVID and parts of China are back in lockdown.
The stock market is, in many ways, not a reflection of day to day life. Here food, energy, war dominates from what I see, but as I gave a seminar to sustainable finance masters students I observed that keeping track of global investment happenings gives you a unique insight. These insights for a curious and open mind are very fulfilling and revealing.
This is an important reason for why I’ve been pretty happy considering investments for the last 20 years and I think likely for the next 20 years as well.
Obesity + Diet. I’ve been considering the mechanism for obesity off and on since about 1998, which was not long after leptin - the “fat hormone” was discovered. From an individual perspective, my moderate conviction and current opinion is that individual variation makes general advice fairly useless, but there are observations one can make at a population level.
We observe that diabetes [technically, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM)] often appears before clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). There were signals (but in the end, mixed/failed studies) that certain anti-diabetes drugs (glitazones) were potentially effective in AD prevention. Technical review here (review of neurobiology).
Now, there are similar signals coming from anti-obesity (and anti-diabetes drugs) of a class called GLP-1s. There are differing explanations for this, and it might not be that the drugs are causal in these observations but I find it very intriguing.
So this lead me to have a chat with an obesity neuroscientist, Stephan Guyenet. He sits closer to the Energy Balance Model (EBM) with the brain as central player.
He made a point - amongst many - that I had not fully appreciated - that much of the US population may be in a pre-diabetic state and if that’s true and the drug helps, then there could be a useful impact.
We discuss the two competing obesity models: One based around a model of energy balance with the brain as one of the main central controllers (EBM), and one model which has evolved but is based more around an insulin - carbohydrate pathway. The carbohydrate - insulin model emphasizes the role of insulin from glycemic load inputs.
While not necessarily mutually exclusive, Stephan explains how the brain centric EBM can explain some data, in his view, that the carb-insulin model does not. Stephan notes much individual variability and how the naming “energy-balance” is perhaps not the best type of name for the model.
We discuss the challenge of processed foods, which tend to be easy to eat and tasty to us. Stephan notes that the combination of fat + carb (eg in chocolate!) is very appetising. We chat about the role of genetics, and satiety.
We talk about two classes of obesity drugs, one rimonabant (using cannabinoid receptor pathways) which has been withdrawn; and the other being GLP-1s. We talk about the possible role of inflammation and some intriguing data on Alzheimer’s. I ask about his view on intermittent fasting, and also on the microbiome.
I talk about my challenges with exercise and we discuss how some people probably are not wired to enjoy intensity training whereas some others are….
One of the Alzheimer’s study / GLP-1 is here. (Journal)
This is one of the latest papers on the Energy Balance Model (Feb, 2022). Here is a tweet thread on this.
This is in response to the carb-insulin model proposed by David Ludwig et al here (2018). And updated by Ludwig et al here (Dec 2021). (Journals)
On Freedom. I’ve started reading Maggie Nelson On Freedom. I find Nelson complex. She has written about identity/gender and her family in Argonauts amongst other essays. She wrote a dense poetic work on love and the colour Blue, Bluets. Many complex, difficult to define fiction and essays. These complex works, I often read 20 - 30 pages and have them dwell with me a while. So it is with Nelson’s introduction below: (skip to end for links as this is long section, but I place it here as it made me think of the slippery nature of freedom, how it might be a process rather than an event, and that perhaps freedoms comes from certain rules too, those rules shifting in time):
Why not acknowledge that freedom’s long star turn might finally be coming to a close, that a continued obsession with it may reflect a death drive? “Your freedom is killing me!” read the signs of protesters in the middle of a pandemic; “Your health is not more important than my liberty!” maskless others shout back.
And yet, I still couldn’t quit it.
Part of the trouble resides in the word itself, whose meaning is not at all self-evident or shared. In fact, it operates more like “God,” in that, when we use it, we can never really be sure what, exactly, we’re talking about, or whether we’re talking about the same thing. (Are we talking about negative freedom? Positive freedom? Anarchist freedom? Marxist freedom? Abolitionist freedom? Libertarian freedom? White settler freedom? Decolonizing freedom? Neoliberal freedom? Zapatista freedom? Spiritual freedom? and so on.) All of which leads to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous edict, the meaning of a word is its use. I thought of this formulation the other day when, on my university campus, I passed by a table with a banner that read, “Stop Here If You Want To Talk about Freedom.” Boy, do I! I thought. So I stopped and asked the young white man, probably an undergraduate, what type of freedom he wanted to talk about. He looked me up and down, then said slowly, with a hint of menace, a hint of insecurity, “You know, regular old freedom.” I noticed then that he was selling buttons divided into three categories: saving the unborn, owning the libs, and gun rights.
As Wittgenstein’s work makes clear, that the meaning of a word is its use is no cause for paralysis or lament. It can instead act as an incitement to track which language-game is being played. Such is the approach taken in the pages that follow, in which “freedom” acts as a reusable train ticket, marked or perforated by the many stations, hands, and vessels through which it passes. (I borrow this metaphor from Wayne Koestenbaum, who once used it to describe “the way a word, or a set of words, permutates” in the work of Gertrude Stein. “What the word means is none of your business,” Koestenbaum writes, “but it is indubitably your business where the word travels.”) For whatever the confusions wrought from talking about freedom, they do not in essence differ from the misunderstandings we risk when we talk to one another about other things. And talk to one another we must, even, or especially, if we are, as George Oppen had it, “no longer sure of the words.”
A CRISIS OF FREEDOM
Looking back, my decision to stick with the term appears to have two roots. The first involves my long-standing frustration with its capture by the right wing (as in evidence at the young man’s card table). This capture has been underway for centuries: “freedom for us, subjugation for you” has been at work since the nation’s founding. But after the 1960s—a time during which, as historian Robin D. G. Kelley recalls in Freedom Dreams, “freedom was the goal our people were trying to achieve; free was a verb, an act, a wish, a militant demand. ‘Free the land,’ ‘Free your mind,’ ‘Free South Africa,’ ‘Free Angola,’ ‘Free Angela Davis,’ ‘Free Huey,’ were the slogans I remember best”—the right wing doubled down on its claim. In just a few brutal, neoliberal decades, the rallying cry of freedom as epitomized in the Freedom Summer, Freedom Schools, Freedom Riders, Women’s Liberation, and Gay Liberation was overtaken by the likes of the American Freedom Party, Capitalism and Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, the Religious Freedom Act, Alliance Defending Freedom, and so much more. This shift has led some political philosophers (such as Judith Butler) to refer to our times as “postliberatory” (though, as Fred Moten notes, “preliberatory” might be just as accurate).
Either way, the debate as to where we stand, temporally, in relation to freedom, could be read as a symptom of what Wendy Brown has called a developing “crisis of freedom,” in which “the particular antidemocratic powers of our time” (which can flourish even in so-called democracies) have produced subjects—including those “working under the banner of ‘progressive politics’”—who appear “disoriented as to freedom’s value,” and have allowed “the language of resistance [to take up the ground] vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom.”
In the face of such a crisis, sticking with the term seemed one way to refuse this trade, to test the word’s remaining or evacuated possibilities, to hold ground.
The second—which complicates the first—is that I’ve long had reservations about the emancipatory rhetoric of past eras, especially the kind that treats liberation as a one-time event or event horizon. Nostalgia for prior notions of liberation—many of which depend heavily upon mythologies of revelation, violent upheaval, revolutionary machismo, and teleological progress—often strikes me as not useful or worse in the face of certain present challenges, such as global warming.
“Freedom dreams” that consistently figure freedom’s arrival as a day of reckoning (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.’s “day when all of God’s children … will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last’”) can be crucial to helping us imagine futures that we want. But they can also condition us into thinking of freedom as a future achievement rather than as an unending present practice, something already going on. If ceding freedom to noxious forces is a grievous error, so, too, is holding on to rote, unventilated concepts of it with a white-knuckled grip.
For this reason, Michel Foucault’s distinction between liberation (conceived of as a momentary act) and practices of freedom (conceived of as ongoing) has been key for me, as when he writes, “Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom.” I like this proposition very much; I would even say it is a guiding principle of this book. No doubt it will strike some as a giant buzzkill. (Power relationships? Control? Isn’t the whole point to ditch all that? Maybe—but be careful what you wish for.) This is Brown’s point when she says that the freedom to self-govern “requires inventive and careful use of power rather than rebellion against authority; it is sober, exhausting, and without parents.” I think she is probably right, even if “sober, exhausting, and without parents” is a tough rallying cry, especially for those who already feel exhausted and uncared for. But I find this approach more inspiring and workable than waiting for the “final ‘big night’ of liberation,” as French economist Frédéric Lordon has put it, “the apocalyptic showdown followed by the sudden and miraculous irruption of a totally different kind of human and social relations.”
Lordon argues that letting go of our hopes for this big night may be “the best means of saving the idea of liberation”; I tend to agree. Moments of liberation—such as those of revolutionary rupture, or personal “peak experiences”—matter enormously, insofar as they remind us that conditions that once seemed fixed are not, and create opportunities to alter course, decrease domination, start anew. But the practice of freedom—i.e., the morning after, and the morning after that—is what, if we’re lucky, takes up most of our waking lives. This book is about that experiment unending.
THE KNOT “No matter what cause you advocate, you must sell it in the language of freedom,” Representative Dick Armey (R-TX), founder of “FreedomWorks,” once said. Whatever my feelings about Dick Armey, I began this project presuming that his dictum was, in the United States, fated to remain pretty solid….
Ezra Klein had a recent podcast with Nelson on this book and other thoughts. I noted how she resolutely resists social media. I also noted Klein did a recent podcast with the games philosopher ( C Thi Nguyen) that I had podcast last year! Incidentally, I was chatting with a friend who noted I have a male tilt to my podcasts but I commented I invite more women, and more women decline. So if you know any good people (especially women) who want to be on a podcast let me know…
Reading across… Buterin’s profile (see below) is all about the freedom of Crypto…
Hong Kong has not vaccinated enough elderly…
My Climate Science podcast last year
If you have the skills, join the UK CCC
Lancet study showing Omicron less severe
Mark Ravenhill theatre masterclass
Google gave grant money to Normative and they have developed a small business carbon foot print calculator.
Finding your wife is the best Tetris player in the world.
I know different “types of money” are valued differently. For companies we often talk about the “quality of earnings”. This essay goes much further in explaining these ideas, and how you can account for selling imaginary items…
I thought this profile on Vitalik Buterin raised multiple challenges in the crypto world. The one I think about is how to use technology for good rather than for scams. Given Buterin is the father of this technology in many ways means it’s interesting how he is moving from being neutral to more vocal in fighting for the future of crypto.