Update: Five Bullets

Hey Y'all,
Happy New Year! Hope you enjoyed the holidays with good and hopefully weird food. I visited my friend in the Netherlands and we cooked a bunch of food for Christmas. I asked the Dutch people in the sauna if there were any "weird" traditional dishes like a sheep's head stuffed with rice and entrails or something but unfortunately they said the only thing that might be considered weird is the raw herring with onions. I had that and it was delicious. Not to worry, several days earlier I ate some "milt" (seminal fluid of fish) - cooked it w/ bacon at my home and then had it raw as sushi in Kanazawa. (See attachments)

For the new year, I want to post something here on a consistent weekly basis. Very frequently I'll start making a Patreon post and the thought process behind why it doesn't see the light of day is: "This is a pretty cool topic, I should share it with my Patrons" → Start writing → "Well, this discussion wouldn't be complete if I didn't also talk about..." or "How accurate is that? Are there other factors at play that could be the cause of this rather than..." → 45 minutes & 10 papers later → "This isn't insightful enough to actually post..." or "This isn't detailed enough to call complete." → "I'll have to get back to this later, ...I need to work on XYZ" 

So, I'll try a 5 point structure version of what I've been into (a la Tim Ferris and my friend Misha's newsletter). Please let me know what y'all think. 

Ideas I'm interested in Lately---
There's several, but lately I've been looking at the environmental impact of animal agriculture/raising beef. Two brief bulletpoints on a very complex topic:
·Several companies are trying to make bioreactors that turn inedible matter into protein for humans to eat. i.e. A cow. Cows eat grass we can't eat, turn it into high quality absorbable nutrients, protein and importantly, fat soluble vitamins. Check out one of Peter Ballerstedt's talks - https://youtu.be/cRmwobXCc4c
·What if cows actually regenerated the earth? This would have positive effects on climate change. Check out Allan Savory - https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI 

Book I'm into Lately---
·Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery
Fascinating book on the importance of something that I rarely hear discussed in conversations about climate change: Topsoil.
Quote from the book: "Conventional agriculture typically increases soil erosion to well above natural rates, resulting in a fundamental problem. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that it takes five hundred years to produce an inch of topsoil. ...While soil formation rates vary in different regions, accelerated soil erosion can remove many centuries of accumulated soil in less than a decade. Earth's thin soil mantle is essential to the health of life on this planet, yet we are gradually stripping it off-literally skinning our planet." 

Food(s) I'm trying lately---
·I've been trying raw milk lately to see what the fuss is about. Surprisingly, there's a decent amount of interesting research behind it. Specific compounds get destroyed in the pasteurization process (See attachment). I rarely drink pasteurized milk (but will put a tad in my coffee at a coffee shop) as it makes me bloated and generally "bleh" feeling. One day I drank a liter of organic pasteurized milk - got a bloaty stomach ache which made me sluggish and later had diarrhea (nothing huge, resolved within the day).
Some time later I tried drank half a liter of raw milk one day, a whole liter another day, and two liters another day. Felt fine even on 2 liters and in fact more calm with less appetite than usual. I've tried incorporating it into my diet off and on with about two weeks in between the off and on and while the "calm with less appetite" may be placebo, I swear my poop quality is upgraded at least 2 or 3 ranks as per the Bernoulli bowel scale.

Lecture I enjoyed recently---
A Mitochondrial Etiology of Metabolic and Degenerative Diseases, Cancer and Aging, presented by Douglas Wallace. An intriguing look at how oxidative phosphorylation dysfunction leads to various issues relating to metabolism, inflammation, aging, cancer, cardiomyopathy and more. 

Quote I'm pondering---
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - JFK