After me lucky charms

GM🦁 This is Andrew's Apples, the tight 2-min health email for every person who has ever lived, died, or solved a noir-style mystery in their local neighborhood. Come on, let’s go!

🧭 Follow me & my Compass! In 2021, the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy unveiled “The Food Compass”, claimed to be a science-based tool to rank the healthfulness of food. Sounds legit (with a sterile, lifeless but reliable-looking website, to boot!), so tell me more, right? WRONG. Lolol. While marketed as a 2.0 version of the legendary Food Pyramid (released in 1992 promoting 11 servings of pasta/bread/cereal PER DAY), The Food Compass is a complete Groucho-glasses joke. How so? Two things. First is we need to follow the money, and when we do that, we see that the lead author receives funding from PepsiCo (soda), Unilever (snacks), Nestle (candy), and so on. Second is that the Compass - pay attention here - “found” that Lucky Charms and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are in aggregate healthier than eggs, cheese, and ground beef. Read that again. Ok, one more time. Before you say, calm down Andrew this is just one program by one university, how bad could the consequences be? Look-y folks, programs like these are precisely how public schools and institutions get “informed” on what to purchase, plus such foods get discounted via subsidies so the purchasing decisions become no-brainers. It doesn’t take a Dr. Frankenstein to see where this all goes… 🍎Andrew's Take. Let’s get this out of the way: my favorite cereal growing up in the nineties was Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. 10/10, A+, Michelin-starred, heaven-on-earth xxxperience. If I find myself at a Red Roof Inn breakfast nook or in a rough neighborhood trick-or-treating as a fully-grown 30 year old, I will smash a whole box in one sitting. No doubt. Believe it. But I’m also 9.0% body fat. Half the country is FAT (more on that below). Not big-boned and not hefty, but fat. The food education in the US is so bad it’s sad. These institutions do what many academics do best: write for a audience of 16 humans, confuse millions of others, and make said masses feel dumb to the point of throwing their hands up and saying “to hell with it, Lucky Charms it is, baby!” The only charmed one in this whole equation is the cartoonist of Lucky the leprechaun himself, and all of his profiteering beneficiaries.

📚 Silly adults, grow up. Remember Charlie & the Chocolate Factory? Roald Dahl wrote it in 1964, which went to become the film sensation Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory seven years later, helmed by a charmingly mad Gene Wilder as the candy tycoon himself. Well, Penguin Random House, the world’s second largest publishing house and the distributor of Dahl’s books, announced Friday that they will re-release the “classic” uncensored versions of his works. Why? They received considerable backlash for caving to the dominant liberal mores of “inclusivity”. This means that previous versions of his books - line by line - were altered (read: censored) whenever a gender/race/weight/mental-health related passage ‘crossed a line’. For my money, this is an interesting development given the American times we live in, and not just for publishing (who even reads in 2023?), but for all culture. From a health perspective, one relies internal inputs (genetics) and external ones (culture), and the two together sum up your health calculus. 🍎Andrew's Take. Arguably the best to ever do it, late comedian George Carlin talked about how Americans are uniquely capable of ignoring hard truths, so we invent euphemisms to confuse ourselves and ultimately not get the point. For example in Dahl’s work, let’s use “enormous” instead of “enormously fat” or “old crow” instead of “old hag” and so on. Not only does the message get watered down, but the message becomes both less effective and less entertaining. The health equivalent would be to drink a gallon of water a day, but only if the water was actually Sprite. Or to walk 10,000 steps a day, but only if the steps were “walked” by your GI Joe action figure atop your kitchen counter. It’s fake, it’s insulting, it’s naïve, and moreover it’s pathetic. There is a reason billionaires collect first-edition books, alongside their fancy cars and jets and wall art: because the original is the closest one can get to the artist’s spirit. In other words, the truth. But I guess we’re just too old for that.

🕊️ Tweet of the Day. **dabs up Kafka’s skeleton hand in the crypt**

How about them Apples? Hit me with any comments or questions.

Andrew🍎 

Andrew's Apples 🍎 The very-tight health email that enriches your genetic potential. Sign up you and your droogs here: andrewsapples.beehiiv.com