🗞️ TSAR: U.S. at-a-glance

Good Morning ⛅

Welcome to the sixth edition of The Sunday Andrew Review ("TSAR"), our Sunday newsletter. They come out on, well, Sundays. What's the point? Choose one topic and go a bit deeper. I hope you like it. Suppose you don't? Well then, good, that's settled.

In classic AA🍎 fashion, this should still only take a few min to read.

On with the show...

U.S. at-a-glance

The United States is the new cartoon network.

The title of the "Home of Innovation" is still true, but not for the reasons you'd expect. Let me be blunt: below I am going to succinctly list out our current ills in this country, all of which are tied to our overall health. In the same way that with a birth rate of zero your population will eventually die out, with a health score of zero your population too will eventually die out... emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and yes, physically too. Then, I promise, we will review some things we all should be doing to challenge gravity.

We are not toast, I repeat, we are not toast. But the oven is running way too hot and we have to reduce the pain.

• HEALTH:

  • 70% of the population is overweight or obese. Aging is the mother of all disease, but being fat is a close second.

  • 90% of the population is metabolically unhealthy. This means we are godawful at converting calories into clean energy. Unclean energy means chronic fatigue, bad sleep, dental cavities and gum disease, a confused gut, terrible skin, intractable mental illness, upside-down hormones, and probably an attitude. Specifically, this supermajority is at serious risk for type II diabetes and insulin resistance (which inevitably leads to weight gain, so see point above)

  • Low-fat myth is persistent in "doctor" circles and corporate advertising. By 1980, the myth was cemented in the culture thanks to physicians, the FDA and USDA, the food & beverage industry, and talking heads in health media. Follow the money. Fat is flavorful - it makes food taste good. So if you remove fat, your only option is make food taste good is sugar. (salt too, but only with the sugar already present, giving food a never-before-seen hyperpalatable "sweet and salty" feature that most of modern man had never experienced). Oh yeah, and it's cheaper than high-quality fat too. It's really hard to take Bill Gates seriously during his shilling of plant-based meat and lab-grown meat (huge investor in both efforts) when his pregnant-man belly is stretching his cashmere sweater thin. He looks like shit. Elon called him out on this.

  •  We spend about 2x more on health care than the OECD average (aka rich countries). Our health outcomes are a joke. Plus, of those rich countries, we have the lowest life expectancy, the highest chronic disease burden, and the highest suicide rate. The system is ranked and filed with carnival barkers and administrators that look like Batman villains.

• MR. ENTERTAINMENT:

  • You can buy a new smart TV for $100. Once you plug it in, you now have access to Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, and hundreds more. Why would you ever do anything outside your job when a bottomless pit of content awaits?

  • Ignorance is a two-way street. It's becoming very popular to say that the elites are out to get you! Reality is that they could not care less about you and where your attention goes. They have a product to sell, sure, but who doesn't? What gets talked about less is how complicit we all are in our own demise. We choose to spend two hours on TikTok every day, not them. We play games literally called Candy Crush and we mean it - no elite made you download it lol. You can blame Ted Turner and Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh all you want for making us hate each other, but the buck stops with us, every time.

  • Our phones are time machines. Time machines go backward and forward in time. If it stayed present, that would just be a regular machine. Like a blender or microwave. The sages of the past almost all agree on which of these three time slots we should be prioritizing.

  • Good or bad, words have never been this powerful. Think about politicians (from Trump to AOC), philosopher-kings on Twitter, and meme-makers on TikTok. Words are weapons, and with our brains being entertained to death, we are more impressionable than ever. This usually leads to more consumption and less building. If one country has a monopoly on words, it's the US. Hard to overstate this.

So what to do? Run.

But not from this country. Stay with the ship, even if it feels like it's sinking, like a good captain does.

Run from bad habits, bad energy, and bad people. Recession is an economic phenomenon, but it's also a mindset. Mindsets can be altered. Too many an American in the past 2.5 years never set their mind to something and as a result lost it.

When things are dark outside - it's safe to say they are right now - and your head is lost in the woods, you badly need a flashlight

LMK what you think and I'll see you Monday.

Have a nice Sunday.

Andrew🍎

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