👋 Welcome to Healthy, Again. I'm Max, and this publication is all about taking your health back: real food, straight talk, and time-tested wisdom, for you and your family.
01 Fauci took the Fifth 111 times
Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth 111 times on Wednesday, starting minutes into the hearing. When Rand Paul asked whether he had a red folder on the table in front of him, he took the Fifth on that too. The folder held a copy of the statute making it a crime for a subpoenaed witness to refuse to answer. One of his attorneys was escorted out by Capitol Police, and he had six more in the room. Biden's pardon covers everything before Wednesday. It does not cover Wednesday.
02 Somebody tested 43 school lunches
You have probably seen the post about 43 school lunches sent to a lab. It says they came back full of weedkiller, heavy metals and 29 pesticides, at 6,293 times the legal limit. That number is bogus. It compares food to the limits for drinking water, and every reading actually came in well under what is allowed in food. What is in our kids' lunches is still a fair question. That post is not the answer.
03 Red Bull gave the studies wings
Red Bull spent more than a decade paying university researchers to study whether mixing energy drinks with alcohol is risky. 95% of the funded studies found no added risk. 80% of the independent ones found the opposite. That research killed a New York county age limit, shaped a European safety report, and talked Health Canada out of a warning label. England banned sales to under-16s this spring. The US still has no rule at all.
04 Health tourism keeps coming up
We keep hearing about people flying out of the country for dental work and surgery. There is research on it now, and most of the Americans doing it turn out to be insured at home. They go because the copay, the deductible and the wait add up to more than a flight and a cash price. The ones who go say the savings are worth it and the trip is a bonus.
✿ QUICK HITS — ON OUR RADAR
Florida's attorney general opened an investigation into Fauci hours after he testified, saying his "lack of candor to Congress is unbelievable" (The Hill). Biden's pardon was federal, and a state case would not be covered by it.
Adults over 50 with low B12 had 33% more dementia and stroke, rising to 64% when the deficiency was severe, across 258,000 people (Frontiers in Nutrition).
13% of Americans now replace a whole meal with a snack, and 70% of snacking is unplanned (Circana).
Lower vitamin C tracked with smaller brain volume and weaker brain connectivity in older adults (PLOS One).
✿ WILD STORY
A woman spent a year on a weight loss shot like Ozempic and wound up with a hard lump of undigested food stuck in her stomach. These drugs slow your stomach down, so food can pile up instead of moving through. Doctors gave her a liter and a half of Diet Coke over twelve hours. By day two the lump was gone. Nobody really knows why soda does that.
✿ ONE GOOD THING
To end on a good one: Brandon Crouch spent three and a half years on dialysis after diabetes took both his kidneys, and last year his wife Kelly put his story on Facebook without expecting much. Twenty-seven people offered to get tested, and the match turned out to be Jessica Kocian, who lived in the same small Texas town and barely knew them. "The doorbell rang," Kelly said. "It was Cody and Jessica coming over to ask Brandon if he was ready for a new kidney." The transplant was in April. "One hundred percent, she is my angel," Brandon says.