Wonder how much AI is aiding in all these new drug discoveries...

Every few years in Korea, young adults walk into a clinic for a routine health screening. They are weighed, measured around the waist, asked about their habits, and sent home. For most of them the visit is forgettable. But because Korea keeps a single national health record for nearly everyone, those forgettable visits accumulate into something rare: a window onto the lives of millions of people, followed quietly across more than a decade. A study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine looked through that window. Researchers followed 6.3 million Koreans who were between 20 and 39 years old when they were first screened, none of whom had ever been diagnosed with cancer. Over an average of eleven years, about 152,000 of them developed one. The question was simple. Did the people who carried more weight in their twenties and thirties go on to develop cancer more often than those who did not? They did, and the pattern was steady. Among those of normal weight, roughly 1.84 in every 100 received a cancer diagnosis within ten years. Among those with what Korean guidelines call class I obesity, the figure rose to 2.24. Among those with class II obesity, it reached 2.62. These are Asian thresholds, worth noting, and they sit lower than the ones used in Europe and the Americas; class I obesity here begins at a body mass index of 25, a number many Western charts would still label as merely overweight. It is worth pausing on the size of those differences. The gap between normal weight and class II obesity, over ten years, was less than one additional case per hundred people. For any one person the shift in risk is modest. Spread across a nation of young adults, it becomes a great many diagnoses that might not otherwise have happened, and the authors found that the elevated risk did not fade as these people moved into their forties and fifties. What began in youth followed them into midlife. The more interesting finding, to my eye, had to do with the waist rather than the scale. When the researchers combined body mass index with waist circumference, a person with class I obesity who also carried abdominal fat had a higher ten-year cancer incidence than a person with class II obesity who did not. The heavier person with a leaner midsection fared better than the lighter person whose weight had settled around the organs. This echoes what we have long understood about visceral fat and its chemistry, the slow hum of inflammation and insulin signaling that seems to travel with it, and it suggests that a tape measure may sometimes tell a truer story than a scale. The cancers most strongly tied to weight were thyroid, endometrial, and ovarian. Men showed a sharper relative increase in risk, while women showed a larger absolute one, largely because the cancers most sensitive to excess weight in this age group live in the female reproductive system. Notably, obesity was not associated with breast cancer diagnosed before fifty, a finding consistent with earlier research showing that the relationship between weight and breast cancer changes direction after menopause. A few honest caveats belong here. This was an observational study, which means it can show that two things travel together but cannot prove that one caused the other. The people in it were those who chose to attend screening, which may make them somewhat different from the population at large. Smoking was not measured as finely as one would wish, and it shadows several of these cancers. Thyroid cancer in particular deserves a gentle asterisk, since Korea detects it at unusually high rates through ultrasound screening, and some of what is found may never have caused harm. And this is a Korean cohort, with Korean body composition and Korean definitions of obesity; the direction of the findings almost certainly travels, but the exact numbers may not. What remains, after the caveats, is a picture that is coherent with decades of prior work and sharpened by the youth of the people in it. The years between twenty and forty are often treated as a grace period, a stretch of life in which the body forgives most things. This study suggests the forgiveness is not complete. The weight a person carries in those years, and especially where they carry it, appears to leave a mark that persists long after. None of this calls for alarm. It calls for attention, paid early and paid to the right things: the circumference of the waist as much as the number on the scale, and the metabolic quiet that comes when both are kept in reasonable bounds. LAVV

Cult is gonna blame Biden anyways

We Venezuelans are forever grateful for the U.S. military intervention that permanently removed Maduro and Cilia. Yet, a rapid transition away from the current interim Chavista administration is critical. Only a legitimate democratic government can unlock the corporate and individual investment needed for Venezuela’s true and profound recovery. Hugo Chávez never drew crowds like this organically. @MariaCorinaYA’s leadership is indisputable, truly the most consequential force in 21st-century Latin America.

Here we go! 🇻🇪

100%

Definitely incorporating this counter defensive strategy into my training, keep up the good work @malikbidzhev

Ten days in a bed can take from an older body what a season of careful work put there. That is not a reason for alarm; it is a reason for devotion. Muscle is the tissue that clears most of the glucose insulin asks the blood to release, so every rep under load, every walk with weight on the back, every hard round that leaves you breathing is also a quiet act of metabolic insurance. We build it slowly and deliberately, because nothing about it comes fast, and we protect the building with the two things the body cannot bargain around: enough protein at every meal, and enough sleep that the night actually finishes its repair. A short illness, a bad week, a hospital stay will come eventually. The question is not whether we lose something then, but how much we had in reserve, and how quickly we return to the work.

Interesting findings.

TRUE