Your Freezer, Your Soda, and Your Bedroom

Your Freezer, Your Soda, and Your Bedroom

Three health stories caught my eye this week, and not one of them involves a peptide, a patch, or a $500 gadget that tracks your sleep so you can wake up and feel bad about it.

Go Check Your Freezer

There's an E. coli outbreak tied to frozen organic blueberries out of Chile. Seventeen people in Florida and Georgia have gotten sick, six of them ended up in the hospital, and the illnesses go back to May.

The berries that made people sick were GreenWise organic frozen blueberries sold at Publix. Publix has since pulled all lots of their GreenWise Organic Whole Blueberries and Whole Mixed Berries.

Then, a couple weeks ago, the same supplier added a Walmart product to the recall as a precaution: Great Value Organic Triple Berry Blend, the 10-ounce bag, lot code 6040 01-6, best-by date February 9, 2028. Nobody has gotten sick from that one that we know of. They traced their berries back and pulled the lot to be safe, which honestly is what you'd want a company to do, even though they probably didn’t want to.

This is one I'd actually get up and go to your fridge look for, because frozen food sits. You buy a bag in March, use half of it in a smoothie, and it works its way to the back of the freezer behind the chicken thighs and the ice packs. Six months later you're dumping the rest in a blender without ever glancing at the bag.

And freezing doesn't kill E. coli. It just puts it on pause. So if you've got one of those bags, don't talk yourself into finishing it off. Walmart and Publix will both refund you.

The Soda Study

Researchers out of Mass General Brigham followed more than 112,000 people for decades and looked at sugar-sweetened drinks and stomach cancer. The folks having at least one a day had about two and a half times the risk compared to people drinking less than one a month.

Now, before somebody forwards this to their brother-in-law as an “I told you you needed to stop drinking that crap”, that's not what it showed. This was an observational study. People who drink a soda every day tend to differ in about forty other ways from people who don't, and the researchers themselves said they don't quite know the mechanism yet.

But DEFINITELY stack it on the pile. Drinking sugar all day is rough on blood sugar. Rough on triglycerides. Rough on your liver. It isn't helping your waistline. Add "and possibly Coke" and it's still pointing the same direction it's been pointing for years. Somewhere along the way we decided 40 grams of sugar in one sitting was a normal thing to do.

Here's the part I found more interesting: the artificially sweetened drinks didn't show the same association.

I'm not telling you to go live on Diet Coke, especially because of the sweetener they use. Water or flavored unsweetened seltzers ought to be most of what you drink, and coffee, tea, and healthier soda like Zevia can fill in the rest. I still don’t recommend those types of sweeteners. But the folks who'll swear a diet soda is worse for you than a 20-ounce bottle of sugar because "artificial sweeteners cause cancer" might want to ease off just a little. This study sure didn't show that.

How Dark Is Your Bedroom?

I keep coming back to sleep and the gut as the foundation to health, because research keeps showing it. Researchers put wrist sensors on more than 11,000 people in the UK and measured how much light they were getting while they slept. Three years later, everybody got a heart MRI.

The people sleeping in more than three lux of light had thicker walls in the left ventricle, less room inside the chamber, and a heart muscle that didn't flex quite as well during a beat. Doctors call that cardiac remodeling. It's what the heart does when it's under chronic stress, and it's the kind of change that shows up years before anybody calls it heart failure.

Three lux is not much light. A digital alarm clock does that.

Now, this doesn't mean your alarm clock is going to give you heart failure. It's one study, and it's an association. But the research keeps landing in the same spot: your body knows whether it's dark, even with your eyes shut.

For almost all of human history, night was dark. Not "TV's on in the background" dark. Actually dark. Then look at the average bedroom now. Television on a timer. Phone charging on the nightstand. Blue light on the smoke detector, red light on the power strip, streetlight coming through the blinds. Plenty of people fall asleep to YouTube every single night and have for years. (don’t stop watching my YouTube channel, just do it earlier. 😂

The good news is this one's cheap. Blackout curtains. One piece of electrical tape over the LEDs. Turn the TV off and put the phone across the room. Make it dark in there.

My Bottom Line

None of this is complicated, and that's exactly why it gets skipped. Check the freezer. Quit drinking your sugar. Make the room dark.

That's a terrible headline next to cold plunges and red light panels. But I've been at this long enough to see the pattern. People go hunting for the one big thing — the supplement, the diet, the hack, whatever somebody's selling this month — while the boring stuff sits there undone. What you eat. What you drink. Whether you sleep. Whether you move. Whether you ever get outside.

Do the boring stuff for twenty years and see where you end up.

I put 3 videos you may be interested in down below if you missed them.  And speaking of somebody selling things, there are some things that can make a huge difference, like some great stuff from Primal Nutrition, including our new Vitamin D3/K2/ Calcium Supplement! And our Inner Strength creatine is back in stock!

Stay healthy,
Victor
Primal Nutrition / Southern Keto

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Let’s make this your healthiest chapter yet.