Read all labels for any “added sugars,” and do not buy any products with them. - Casey Means

in the modern West, where — unlike many indigenous and Eastern cultures — we tend to be culturally avoidant of talking about death or having curiosity about it, leading it to be an existential fear for many. So many of the texts that have stood the test of time — spanning Rumi, Khalil Gibran, Hafiz, Marcus Aurelius, Yogananda, Seneca, Lao-tzu, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and more — implore us to examine death and trust that it is both natural and not to be feared.

At the start of my residency, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed and all doctors had to get up to speed on the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), a new program under the Quality Payment Program (QPP), where a physician would now receive substantial adjustments to payments from Medicare if they met specific quality-of-care criteria. One would think that “quality” and “merit” in medicine would mean that the patient was actually getting better. But when I dug deep through the MIPS website to find the specific quality metrics for each specialty, I was shocked to see that these quality criteria were primarily based on whether doctors prescribed drugs regularly or did more interventions. Yes, a government incentive program focused less on actual patient outcomes (i.e., Did the patient get healthier?) and more on whether doctors prescribed long-term pharmaceuticals.

research has shown that people on diets who keep food journals lose twice as much weight as those who don’t.