OS 12: RFK steps in it again, protein-maxxing during Lent, demon soup hack, nicotine for the brain? new DMV pho spot in NYC
Plus, the Supreme bench press finally arrives
Good Friday, after the storm: Food dyes are back, nice wet snowball-quality snow, the week finishes up with 745 push-ups, soup’s on, Purim is just around the corner, March is to begin, and with it, the ides. Plus casein and orange juice (a winning combo), the move to cotton sweatpants (so much poly) and tennis ball juggling every day in in the ONLY health aggregation email that surfs between the lines of full health psychosis and being completely normal.
What we’re covering: peptides, plant protein, other protein, citrus-peel maxxing, tendon training, post-DHT theories of hair growth, post-calories in/out models of fat loss, GHk-Cu and Wolverine, Dr. Raymond Peat, sunlight titration, cutting season, demon zero-drop shoes, vibratory therapy (movement), cotton head to toe, cave-person skincare, physical hygiene, strength, hair and more. Nobody writes about this. Snake Super Health open secrets.
This week: RFK dithers on food dyes despite early optimism; the secretary of defense may be faking his bench press, an easy way to aggressively collagen-maxx over the winter; a new high-level Virginia-based Viet restaurant opens in New York; a macros-friendly approach to lent, the prison-Biggest Loser Venn Diagram overlap, the best restaurant in New York, nicotine and the brain, Supreme’s move into gym equipment, a gender writer says Clav is honest, Huberman tries to explain a menstrual cycle workout plan, the easiest posture hack there is, much more.
Onto it.
To me the lead story is probably/definitely Trump doing an about face on artificial food dyes: allowing them. And the A-1.9 story is the increasing number of dark health individuals rallying around this disappointment like they did on the glyphosate about-face (wrote about it last week). This is best seen through RFK’s different language about dyes… the health secretary—in the past a dark wellness bro—was either very recently softening up for this or suckerpunched by it. Thinking the latter; I listened to RFK Jr.’s Theo Von episode this week—tough; Von speaks very slowly and mostly about nothing; the episode felt longer than some Hou Hsiao-Hsien movies—and there was a distinct pro-business tilt to RFK’s speculative framing of how his legislation might shake out. Specifically, in a segment about food dyes. RFK commented that he had a number of the major manufacturers on board with the idea:
“Vegetable dyes… 40% of the industry came to us, including the entire ice cream industry, came to us and said we want to do this, help us. So we’re workig very closely with them and they’re all getting rid of it.”
He pointed to veg, dye cereals in Canada and Mexico—from the same companies—so as to highlight the reliability, and routine nature of this legislation. Anyways, that episode, released last Friday, bested by the news: it’s not happening. Food dyes, at least in foods you buy, here to stay.
The B story is that even the most esoteric, demonic influencers are rallying around the administration’s caveman leglislation here, as witnessed by this dark nutrition guy parroting some RFK talking points. The actual reality is that cereals like Fruit Loops, whether dyed or not, are often enriched with iron, which is probably “worse for you” than the dyes. (Not to scare-monger; fine now and then, but how it is.) As time passes the positions RFK has staked out about nutrition will become less and less controversial. The stance earlier news articles took against removing these dyes were wrong; the disbelief that this would happen should have been there from the start. No elected or appointed official will ever come to a normal person’s rescue.
Is defense secretary Pete Hegseth cheating on his bench? He pushed 315 last week at some sort of rally. Since the lift, there’s been a hub-bub about how real it was. Including this account, who argues that Hegseth was faking it. PH doesn’t have the frame to rep 315 on the bench, the video says, and that he was struggling on pull-ups. Since he was struggling with bodyweight, he could not be expected to rep ~1.5 bodyweight on the bench. This is probably true in a vacuum, but the Hegseth pull-up clip in the critical video was also taken at the end of a series of reps. The secretary’s pull-up form is abysmal—doesn’t engage his lats, struggle set—but he’s clearly smoked. There was a similar controversy six months ago about the pull-ups themselves: there was some footage of the defense secretary and RFK doing pull-ups, and in it there’s a clip of a struggle rep, and critiques abounded.
How to shake the bench stuff out? Hard to say. While I am sure he didn’t lift this weight, the arguments saying he didn’t here really aren’t good enough. Bad lat activation in a pull is not a signifier of bad benching. Doesn’t mean anything. There is also a B argument in the vid that the lifters in the background, cheering this fake lift, are all liars. Probably. But who can say. Ultimately this video—everyone in it, all the reactions—are what happens when a society over-prioritizes benching, and when it treats elected and appointed officials at eye level.
Supreme dropped their latest collection, clothes and accessories, lots of jackets; they took over the Sphere. The accessory line is probably their most direct and outré in a bit. Among them: a podcast mic, a coffin, a boxing ring, a toaster, a Honda generator, a Knaack chest, and, for the purposes of this newsletter, the boxing ring, a power rack (with bench and weights) and a wall-mounted pull-up bar. attachment. The rack doesn’t have a landmine attachment; to me the pull-up bar is the winner, if only because they chose best/sturdiest bar: the wall-mount version, in this case made by Tru Grit, gym equip. manufacturer. (Here’s their unbranded bar.) Coincidentally enough, Home Run, the New York xx brand, which recently collabed with Supreme, had a similar model bar outside their store, but retired it just last week, as evidenced in this video obit:
Not bad! Great video.
Are we eating enough? Sometimes I feel like the problem is we are not. Long-term caloric restriction and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. My argument here’s spurred today from a news story the other day about the lack of “nutritional balance” in prison food; that data comes from a Correctional Authority of NY study released recently. It notes that there aren’t enough vegetables, protein or fruits in the prison diet. Not a surprise. To me what’s wild is the calorie number cited in the study was 2800 daily—decent, more or less, kind of high, for a big person. When paired with data from another study, that notes American prisoners have an obesity rate of 37.6%, it’s confusing. Chad math says a diet low in fruits and vegetables is probably low in nutrients; a diet low in calories is depressing. One wonders if the culprit is trying to rein in the calories themselves—something people do when they diet for over a month at a time. It’s not worse than we think—no scaremongering—but it’s less effective:
