PREGNANCY DIETS AND SPACING IN TRADITIONAL CULTURES

Primitive groups attended carefully to a women's diet before, during and after pregnancy. They also generally expected women to space their pregnancies to ensure their children were healthier. 👇 Such groups might go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that mothers got the best possible nutrition available. When discussing the Fijian peoples he visited, who proved to be amongst the most impressive physical specimens described in the book, Weston Price, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, gives us a vivid description of the elaborate rituals and protocols that surrounded pregnancy.

Each island he visited seemed to have a different set of rules in place, but all served the same common purpose, drawing the rest of the group together in ensuring they were fulfilled.

"When I visited the native Fijian Museum at Suva, I found the director well-informed with regard to the practices of the natives in the matter of producing healthy normal children. He provided me with a shell of a species of spider crab which the natives use for feeding the mothers so that the children will be physically excellent and bright mentally, clearly indicating that they were conscious that the mother's food influenced both the physical and mental capacity of the child. The care with which expectant mothers were treated was unique in many of the Pacific Islands. For example, in one group we were informed that the mother told the chief immediately when she became pregnant. The chief called a feast in celebration and in honor of the new member that would come to join their colony. At this feast the members of the colony pledged themselves to adopt the child if its own parents should die. At this feast the chief appointed one or two young men to be responsible for going to the sea from day to day to secure the special sea foods that expectant mothers need to nourish the child. Recent studies on the vitamin content of crabs have shown that they are among the richest sources available."

FOUR WAYS TO REMOVE HEAVY METALS FROM YOUR BODY.

Toxic heavy metals are everywhere: in food, drinking water, in the environment and even in the air. They accumulate in your body, causing serious damage and even death.

Here are four simple ways to remove them from your body. 👇 PECTINS.

Supplementation with pectins, a type of dietary fibre found in fruit and vegetables, especially the peel, seems to be a reliable way to remove heavy metals from the body.

After the Chernobyl disaster, pectins were used to remove radioactive heavy metals from the bodies of children in contaminated areas.

Pectins bind to heavy metals in the gastrointestinal tract and help remove them via the feces.

One study showed that supplementation with modified citrus pectin could reduce levels of mercury in the blood by over 70% in a period of months.

A dose of 15-20 grams a day of pectins seems to be effective.

Popular teabags in polymer bags release billions of microplastics, according to a new study. 👇 Polypropylene bags were shown to release approximately 1.2 billion plastic particles per milliliter of liquid. Cellulose released about 135 million particles per milliliter and nylon-6 8.8 million particles per milliliter.

REMOVING MICROPLASTICS FROM YOUR DRINKING WATER--WITHOUT AN EXPENSIVE FILTER!

If you want to remove the majority of microplastics from your drinking water, all you need to do is heat it, so long as the water contains sufficient amounts of calcium carbonate... 👇 This new paper from China shows that there is a very simple method to remove the majority of detectable microplastics from water.

GIRONDA PRINCIPLE #3: WANT TO KNOW WHICH EXERCISE TO DO? LOOK IN THE MIRROR. ALSO: LEARN ANATOMY.

Bodybuilding is about visual impact. With that in mind, the mirror should be your guide as to which exercises you choose to incorporate in your workouts. If it’s chest, shoulders and triceps today, how do your chest, shoulders and triceps look?

Are your rear delts lagging?

Or maybe it’s your lower chest definition that’s lacking?

Only the mirror will tell you the answers to these questions, and only your knowledge of the right exercises to address each weak point will tell you how to remedy these weak points.

Let's dig a little deeper into this paper, which suggests a worrying side effect of Ozempic use could be shrinking of the heart muscle. 👇

https://twitter.com/Babygravy9/status/1859371403902095468

The researchers began with the well-substantiated observation that semaglutide use induces significant weight loss, but a large proportion of it--probably more than using conventional weight-loss strategies--is actually vitally useful lean mass.

"Although it is likely that the metabolic benefits from weight loss may outweigh modest sarcopenia [muscle loss]," they write, "this loss of lean BW could potentially lead to exercise intolerance that may reduce the quality of life in individuals at risk for or with heart failure."

There is currently a lot of research into semaglutide-induced sarcopenia. This paper is the first, however, to look at non-skeletal muscle, i.e. organ muscle. The heart, in case you didn't know, is the most important muscle in the body.

REN'S NO-CHURN PEANUT-BUTTER-CUP ICE CREAM.

I said my pistachio ice cream was the best thing you'd ever eat.

I was wrong. This is. And it takes ten minutes, four ingredients and no ice-cream machine to make.👇 INGREDIENTS

A tin of condensed milk (c.400g)
250g heavy / double cream
Smooth peanut butter (preferably organic)
100% cocoa (for dusting)

GIRONDA PRINCIPLE #1: AIM FOR DENSITY, DON'T OVERTRAIN

Each day I'll outline one of the central principles of Vince Gironda's legendary bodybuilding system.

Here's the first: do more work in a shorter period of time, and only do as much as you need to. 👇 Vince’s flagship workout was the 8x8, which he called the "Honest Workout." As the name suggests, you perform eight sets of eight reps for a particular exercise.

The devil is in the details, though, as always for Vince. You want to perform those eight sets of eight reps with as little rest as possible, increasing the density of the work you perform in order to stimulate more muscle growth.

5 Easy Fermentation Recipes

Eating fermented foods is really good for you. It was good for our ancestors too, & may have helped drive human evolution by pushing digestion outside the gut, allowing us to have shorter digestive tracts and bigger brains. Here are 5 easy recipes. FIRST: THE BENEFITS OF FERMENTATION

Scientists believe fermentation may have had a key role to play in human evolution, allowing our ancestors to grow bigger brains by shrinking their digestive apparatus. Fermentation could have allowed this to happen by allowing circulating microbes to kick off the digestion process outside the body (“external fermentation”), meaning that our ancestors could absorb more nutrients from a smaller gut.

It’s worth emphasising again that fermentation — processes of chemical transformation of a substrate (i.e. food) — can take place anywhere, whether inside or outside the body. When you let microbes sour cabbage in a jar, this is a process that is little different from what happens inside your gut or the gut of a chimpanzee or giraffe.

Here's a detailed description of some of the benefits of fermentation, from a scientific paper.

Rather than relying on the microorganisms within the gut, external fermentation is carried out by organisms in the environment or on the surface of the organic material itself. Like internal fermentation, external fermentation increases the bioavailability of ingested nutrients, specifically, the absorption of macronutrients and micronutrients. In addition, external fermentation contributes to the health and efficacy of the host’s gut microbiome, in turn, facilitating nutrient absorption. External fermentation enhances digestibility of carbohydrates and proteins. Fermentation of legumes hydrolyzes macromolecules into more easily digestible individual amino acids and sugars. These benefits have led public health scholars to recommend increasing the consumption of fermented foods in countries experiencing food insecurity and high infant mortality.

External fermentation also improves the bioavailability of micronutrients in a number of ways. B-complex vitamins produced from the external fermentation of carbohydrates can increase the amounts of B vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin, and niacin) by up to 10-fold. External fermentation can also break down ANFs [anti-nutrient factors].

Phytate, a chelating ANF, can be broken down by phytase, an enzyme that some mammals—but not humans—have evolved the ability to produce endogenously. External Lactobacillus-driven fermentation is an alternative to phytase: by lowering the pH, it provides a favorable environment for both bacterial and endogenous phytase to hydrolyze bound phytate and release minerals80. Oxalate, another chelating ANF, and tannins, ANFs which bind to and lower the bioavailability of proteins, can also be degraded through external Lactobacillus fermentations. Of note, phytate is more effectively degraded by external fermentation than by cooking, as phytase bioactivity decreases above 80 °.

External fermentation can go further than simply increasing nutrient bioavailability. It can also render poisonous foods edible. One example is the detoxification of cyanogenic glycoside in bitter cassava (also known as yuca or manioc), a common staple for hundreds of millions of people living within the Tropical Belt. If consumed unfermented, cassava’s cyanogenic glycosides are hydrolyzed by colonic microorganisms and absorbed as cyanide, causing convulsions, hypotension, respiratory failure, decreased heart rate, and death85,86. When processed properly, cell walls in the cassava tuber are broken down by Lactobacillus bacteria, permitting endogenous enzymes normally sequestered from the cyanogenic glycosides to hydrolyze the toxin. The production of lactic acid during fermentation also acidifies the environment and provides a favorable milieu for other microorganisms to contribute to the hydrolysis of up to 95% of the toxin prior to consumption.

THE BEST ICE CREAM EVER: NO-CHURN PISTACHIO.

Pistachio is the greatest ice cream of them all, but it's hard to come by, mainly because companies say it's too expensive to make properly.

Well, it isn't. All you need is three ingredients. 👇 You already know my OG no-churn ice-cream recipe from my cookbook Raw Egg Nationalism, which uses meringue mix, but this one's even simpler. The key ingredient is condensed milk, which provides an absolutely dreamy texture and richness and also means you don't have to churn.

People are talking about a preprint study that shows 0.5% of the brain by weight may be plastic. I picked this up and reported on it for @infowars, and wrote about it on my Substack, a month ago. It's bad. Very bad. 👇 Researchers looked autopsy samples taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico between 2016 and 2024 and compared microplastic levels between different organs—brain, liver and kidneys—and compared levels over time.

Here’s what they found.

In basic terms, brains contain more microplastics than the liver or kidneys, and levels of microplastics in all three organs have increased over time. The results are plotted in a series of graphs which I’ve posted below.

VINCE GIRONDA'S 6-WEEK AB SPECIALISATION COURSE.

This course does exactly what it says on the tin: it provides you with a six-week course focused on abdominal development. Add it to your normal weight-training regimen. 👇 The course is not intended for absolute beginners. Vince believed beginners shouldn’t train abs at all. For beginners, according to Vince, general training, and especially compound movements, is enough to stimulate the abdominals. Only later, after the bodybuilder has gained some experience, should they then start to train abdominals specifically.

One of my most treasured possessions is this picture of my grandfather (centre) escorting JFK from his plane at London Gatwick, in June 1963. Five months later, JFK was dead. My grandfather was posted to Libya's El-Adem airbase, with his young family, soon after. Colour versions of this photograph, and other photographs of my grandfather, are kept at the Kennedy Memorial Center, in the US.

TAMPONS ARE LACED WITH HEAVY METALS.

A new study shows that tampons are laced with heavy metals including lead, arsenic and cadmium. Every single tampon tested in the study had lead in it. 👇 The researchers analysed 60 tampons representing 14 different brands from the US, UK and EU. These included name brands and store-brand products. The samples were tested using a process called inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) to identify metals present.

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this study is absolute junk, which it is. But let me tell you one reason why, which you may not be aware of. 👇

https://twitter.com/Babygravy9/status/1798091154673512503

The study starts from the position that there must be some evolutionary reason for the persistence of genes for same-sex attraction, since they persist despite being apparently maladaptive (gay people don't reproduce).

The researchers therefore devised a "desirable dad hypothesis": that men possessing traits associated with same-sex attraction are actually more likely to be attractive to women.

Here's how the researchers describe this in the study abstract:

"Same-sex attraction, a heritable trait with a reproductive cost, lacks a comprehensive evolutionary explanation. Here we build on a hypothesis invoking antagonistic pleiotropy, which suggests that genes linked to male same-sex attraction remain in the gene pool because they have conferred some fitness advantage to heterosexual men possessing them. We posit the “desirable dad hypothesis,” which proposes that alleles linked to male non-heterosexual orientations increase traits conducive to childcare; heterosexual men possessing same-sex attracted alleles are more desirable mating partners as a function of possessing superior paternal qualities."

SUNLIGHT STOPS YOU GETTING FAT.

Apart from cholesterol, sunlight is probably the most demonised "substance" in all of health. You're told sunlight is harmful, but the opposite is true, as a new study shows. UV light makes you eat more, but it also ramps up your metabolism.👇 What the researchers found in this new study is that mice exposed to consistent UV radiation (one of the main components of sunlight) exhibited increased appetite, which could be seen not only in eating behaviours, but also in levels of the hormone leptin, which regulates appetite.

Regardless of whether or not the mice were fed a normal diet or a high-fat (i.e. junk-food diet) they didn’t gain weight. Yes, you read that right: even mice fed a junk-food diet, if they were exposed to steady UV radiation, didn’t gain weight, even when they ate more.

But how?

SOME NEW MICROPLASTIC STUDIES.

There's now massive amounts of research being conducted into microplastics and their effects. Barely a day passes without multiple new studies. Here are a few I saw on my travels today. 👇 No surprise: single-use beverage cups release significant quantities of microplastics when hot water is added to them. Interestingly, rinsing the cup with pure cold water before use reduces plastic release by over half (up to 65%).

AIR IN 99% OF CARS CONTAINS TOXIC CHEMICALS LINKED TO CANCER AND HORMONE-DISRUPTION.

A new study shows that virtually all car interiors are off-gassing harmful flame retardants. 👇 Researchers analysed the air in 101 electric, gas and hybrid cars made between 2015 and 2022, and found that 99% of the samples contained a flame retardant called TCIPP, which is being investigated as a potential carcinogen, and two others, TDCIPP and TCEP, which are already considered to be carcinogenic.

10,000 CHEMICALS LEACHING INTO FOOD FROM PLASTIC CONTAINERS.

A new study suggests that thousands of chemicals, a significant proportion of which scientists know nothing about, are leaching into foods from plastic containers. 👇 Significant numbers of these chemicals, like bisphenol A and phthalates, are linked to a variety of health problems, from reproductive issues to diabetes and even heart disease and forms of cancer.

Many, however, are totally unknown to science.

raweggstack.com/p/the-plastic-…

Eating vegetable and seed oils is bad enough, but eating them when they've been reused in deep-frying is even worse. A new study suggests that long-term consumption of food cooked in deep fryers is linked to serious neurological damage. 👇

https://twitter.com/SeedOilScout/status/1780604959211622649

Researchers divided female rats into five groups that each received either standard chow or standard chow supplemented with either a) 0.1 ml per day of unheated sesame oil, unheated sunflower oil, or b) reheated sesame oil or reheated sunflower oil for 30 days. The rats that consumed reheated sesame or sunflower oil showed increased oxidative stress and inflammation in the liver. These rats also suffered significant damage to the colon that caused changes in endotoxins and lipopolysaccharides—toxins released from certain bacteria. "As a result, liver lipid metabolism was significantly altered, and the transport of the important brain omega-3 fatty acid DHA was decreased," explains one of the researchers. "This, in turn, resulted in neurodegeneration, which was seen in the brain histology of the rats consuming the reheated oil as well as their offspring."

AUTISM AND GUT FLORA.

Yet another study has linked disturbed gut flora in early life to later onset of autism and ADHD. This one is a large-scale study of over 16,000 children born in Sweden in the late 90s. 👇 Over 16,000 Swedish children born 1997–1999 have been followed from birth into their twenties. Of these, 1,197 children, corresponding to 7.3%, have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, communication disorder or intellectual disability.