Has everyone stopped drinking?

Good morning 🦁 This is Andrew's Apples, the 2-min health email that's like digging your hand into a Halloween candy pillow case whose owner just spent six hours trick-or-treating in the best neighborhoods - you don't know what you are going to get but, hell, it's about to rock your world. Let's go.

• 🍹 Has everyone stopped drinking? In the same way that the 2010s saw vegan and gluten-free food/bev options go mainstream, dotting every restaurant's menu in NYC and LA, nondrinking has taken off the past few years, catalyzed by the pandemic. Kate Boss, Brad Pitt, famous chefs, and booze-free bars in hip neighborhoods have cemented something sticky for a new subculture of folks who hate the hangover. Some claim the health benefits or the improved sleep or the weight loss as the main reason for abstaining, but at any rate, it's happening: Nielsen data shows a 506% increase in the low-/no-booze sector since 2015. Drinking is also tied to most diseases, cancer, dementia, anxiety and depression, and is abused 7x more than painkillers. Some taste-testers of Kin Euphorics, one of the more popular non-booze "drinks," have reported feeling a buzz, and others call bullshit.

  • 🍎 Andrew's Take. Caffeine, nicotine, and ethanol are not going anywhere anytime soon. People love drugs, and no matter how many cool Brooklyn brands launch products challenging this age-old fact, you can count on their popularity continuing. Good times call for abusing them for pleasure, bad times for self-medicating. If you paid $25 for a nonalcoholic drink made from herbs, flowers, orange bitters, and licorice root, it "will" taste good. That's the power of advertising.

• 🔞 Hey, watch your mouth. A New Yorker visits West Texas. A Tennessean visits the West Coast. You more than likely have a strong opinion about how "they" run things in a place so different than home. How can they be like this, live like that? So, you keep your mouth shut and what? Save it for the group chat. A little op-ed talks about how the texting group chat, in 2022, may be the last place where you can freely speak your mind (mostly) without worrying about what it may do to your career, relationships, and even sense of liberty. That is of course unless you toe the party line. Will people ten years from now reverse this trend? Or is free speech now relegated to (a) close-knit groups who already agree with each other and (b) internet comedians?

  • 🍎 Andrew's Take. I'll take a stab here. The Biden party line is the following: live in a not-small city, Trump is the Devil, vaccine not just good but VERY good, masks, Ukraine/Taiwan flag in bio, equity, and vegan meat. The Trump party line: live in a town, the gov can fly a kite, Trump is a patron saint, vaccine mandates are ludicrous, minimal masking, USA flag, freedom, and steaks on the grill. Can these two types of people talk to each other right now? No. They can't. Too much is at stake, or so it feels. People would rather dwell in their colored bubbles than to pop their own to start one anew. I have no clue where it goes from here, but I have a feeling it's going to get weirder... and the weirder it gets, the more it will feel like fiction. I find it so interesting that contemporary authors still by and large write about the past (pre-2000) and the distant future (2050 and beyond), yet the present day is oozing with bizarre characters, plotlines, and phenomena. What do we talk about when we can't talk about anything? We talk about our lives - increasingly shaped by the partial politics of the day - with our friends and our favorite public intellectuals, inside safe, beautifully decorated bubbles of our own making.

• ⛵ To where from here? Ranting comic Tim Dillon was on Joe Rogan's show this week and made some really keen points on where the culture sits at present. Of note, he makes the point that Americans since post-WWII have been gleefully ignorant and apathetic to both each other and the rest of the world. This, he argues, led to peacetime filled with beautiful works of art in the 80s and 90s. The issue today, in contrast, is that we (1) are warring with each other and (2) refuse to enjoy the spoils of the end of an Empire. The American Empire, that is. Rome fell, and so too will America. We just do not know when. It gets pretty wild: citizens getting comically fat and addicted to content; all politicians will be celebrities (Trump, AOC, etc.), more frequent wars/disasters/disease; Russians have seen this themselves fairly recently (and when's the last time you saw a Russian smile c:)... but! He says we will "die laughing." And finally: "If you think the population is going to get smarter, healthier, and more adept at problem solving, you're on fucking crack!"

  • 🍎 Andrew's Take. Lots to unpack there so I will keep it tight: your body knows what time it is. If something (a food, a drug, a person, a thought) does not feel right in your gut, it probably isn't. My grandpa died one year ago yesterday, and while I wasn't with him the hours before he passed, I am sure he would have said, simply, to enjoy it.

• 🕊️ Tweet of the Day. Let me break down the points in this high-level tweet, bc twitter is good for quick KOs but weaker for bouts that go 12 rounds. So: Oat milk is ok only if no sugar is added (still, it is not a nutritional substitute for organic grass-fed/raw milk). Beyond and Impossible "meat" are both junk food, sorry to the vegan mafia. Canola, soybean, and corn oil are categorically bad and the food of bovine America. Calorie restriction in general is good (gives body time to rest) but when paired with the standard American diet, you are in essence running a poorly oiled machine on the fumes of low-grade gasoline. Blue light (emitted from iPhones, laptops) are ruining your sleep (try to cut at least an hour before bed). If you buy your multivitamin at CVS, you can be 99% sure it's trash, toxic, and functionally vitamin-free. Kombucha with no added sugar is great so long as sea-salted water is still your primary source of hydration (3+ liters/day of H2O). Veganism will not kill nor save you, but it will make your life more difficult - I don't make the rules of modern civilization. In the same vein, avoiding clean organic animal protein (unless you have a unique genetic predisposition) will cause more problems than it solves; it can be done but requires pretty intensive supplementation and demanding rules to the game. Similar to multivitamins, 99% conventional sunscreens are garbage - opt for mineral sunscreen (zinc oxide is the key ingredient). That's it, folks.

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

Your friend,

Andrew🍎

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