SUBJ: With GLP-1 people were nearly twice as likely to stop smoking.

SUBtitle: Age exercise: Strength, Aerobic, Mobility, Flexibility, Balance

Do me the favor to deny me at once!  Poor Richard’s |Almanac

“I’m not a vegetarian because I love animals. It’s because I hate plants.”

Aristotle argued that the path to a life well lived runs through moderation.

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SHORT NOTES:

1..With GLP-1 people were nearly twice as likely to stop smoking.

2..Exercise as You Age: Strength, Aerobic, Mobility, flexibility, Balance

3..When pregnant and not delivering on time, induction is safe and sensible.

4..Rare dangerous side effects of COVID vaccines explained for 1 in 200,000 cases.

5..Pollan thinks all living things are “sentient,” including plants.

6..Raising…doubts about materialism is the legacy of consciousness work.

7..All of Us clinical trial can explore more than 1.2 billion genetic variants.

8..Ozempic took out alcohol addiction.

9..By 2008, antidepressants were the third most common prescription drugs.

10..GLP-1 medication may agitate and numb.

LONG NOTES:

AARP: 4 Types of Exercise You Need as You Age: 1. Strength training 2. Aerobic exercises, also known as cardio, 3. Mobility and flexibility 4. Balance

The Economist Feb 14 pg 75- When pregnant and not delivering on time, induction is safe and sensible, and does not increase the risk of C-section or complications.

Science 12 Feb 2026 pg 647 –  Rare dangerous side effects of COVID vaccines explained.  1 in 200,000 had a serious side effect.  Pg 665-The elusive nature of consciousness, neuroscience’s hardest problem.  Pollan thinks all living things are “sentient,” including plants, where sentience is “the most elemental form of consciousness.” It is true that plants are sensitive to the environment in all sorts of ways, but so are simple machines such as thermostats. The only entities that we are sure are conscious are humans and our close relatives. Experiments and theories based on our consciousness could conceivably push us, kicking and screaming, to plant consciousness, but to start with plant consciousness is a stretch. Consciousness in the only creatures we know to have it seems to depend on the activation of neurons, and plants do not have any.

Toward the end of the book, Pollan declares, “Raising…doubts about materialism could turn out to be the most important legacy of the work done on consciousness since the early 1990s.” His qualms with the major theories of consciousness, all of which arise from materialist frameworks that situate consciousness squarely in the physical nature of the brain, stem from his emphasis not only on sentience and feeling but also on what he takes to be the theories’ reductionist assumption that consciousness can be explained physically.

Ultimately, this book is a wonderful phenomenological travelog, but it is less reliable as a guide to the science of consciousness.

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Data from All of Us participants (a clinical trial which I am participating in) is already leading to improvements in how doctors care for patients with certain health conditions. Researchers can explore more than 1.2 billion genetic variants to better understand health and disease. We found those new variants because we’re including communities who have not been involved in research before.

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New Yorker 16&23 Feb 2026-pg. 22 Ozempic- Once a week, researchers blindfolded Mary and injected her with a solution. They didn’t tell her whether she’d received semaglutide or a placebo. But, a few weeks into the study, she lost her taste for beer. She switched to white wine, then stopped drinking altogether. “People talk about Ozempic getting rid of food noise,” she told me. “For me, it took out alcohol noise.”  In the traditional telling, after a meal, GLP-1 attaches to receptors in the pancreas, the gastrointestinal tract, and the brain; it stimulates the release of insulin, slows the passage of food through the stomach, and signals to our brains that we’re full. It breaks down within minutes. But it’s increasingly clear that GLP-1 affects much more than eating. GLP-1 drugs, which bind to the body’s receptors for hours or days, are now being studied for all sorts of addictions… The results from the trial that Mary participated in should come out later this year, but a small study published in 2021 showed that smokers given exenatide, the first GLP-1 on the market, were nearly twice as likely to stop smoking as those given a placebo. An analysis of hundreds of thousands of electronic health records found that people with an addiction to opioids who happened to be prescribed GLP-1s were forty per cent less likely to overdose. .. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, drinking-related deaths have roughly doubled in the U.S., yet no new medication has been approved for alcohol addiction in decades. .. Schacht is still analyzing data from the fifty people in his trial, but he shared some preliminary findings. Before the study, participants consumed nearly seven drinks a day; two months later, people on semaglutide drank half as much. .. Aristotle argued that the path to a life well lived runs through moderation. Courage lies somewhere between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between stinginess and extravagance. “It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken,” he is often quoted as saying. GLP-1s have earned a reputation as “moderation molecules.” For many people, these drugs might restore a sense of control, offering a path away from excess. “GLP-1s are the most exciting drugs for alcohol-use disorder I’ve seen in my career,” Schacht said. “This could be our Prozac moment.”

By 2008, antidepressants were the third most common prescription drugs in the U.S. (although the New Yorker and science have shown that SAMe is the only antidepressant more effective than placebo), behind cholesterol medications and painkillers.

For her, the GLP-1 medication didn’t moderate so much as agitate and numb. Eventually, she decided that the psychological side effects weren’t worth the weight loss. She stopped taking the medication and regained the weight, but her mood improved. “It was pretty immediate—the return to feeling like myself,” she said.