California's Central Valley produces 80% of the world's almonds. Each almond requires 3.2 gallons of actual irrigation water to grow. Not rainfall. Actual tap water pumped from aquifers.
One gallon of almond milk requires 162 gallons of irrigation water. Compare that to dairy milk at 8 gallons of tap water per gallon, with the rest being rainfall that falls on pasture anyway.
But here's where it gets properly grim. Almonds bloom for exactly three weeks in February. During those three weeks, California needs every pollinating bee in North America transported to the Central Valley or the crop fails entirely.
Commercial beekeepers truck in 31 billion honeybees. That's two-thirds of America's entire managed bee population, all concentrated in one valley for three weeks. The bees are packed into trucks, driven across the country, dumped into almond groves drenched in pesticides, worked to exhaustion, then packed up and shipped to the next crop.
The mortality rate is catastrophic. Beekeepers report losing 30 to 50% of their hives annually. That's billions of bees dead. Not from natural causes. From being used as disposable pollination machines for your almond milk.
The pesticides don't help. Almond groves are sprayed with neonicotinoids which scramble bee navigation systems, fungicides which weaken their immune systems, and herbicides which eliminate the wildflowers they'd normally forage on between almond blooms.
Meanwhile the aquifer depletion is permanent. The Central Valley has sunk 28 feet in some areas from groundwater extraction. That water took 10,000 years to accumulate. It's being drained in decades for almond milk.
Your vegan latte killed more bees and used more water than a year's worth of dairy milk. But it's got "plant-based" on the label so you're definitely saving the planet.
its occurred to me how much phones are stealing not only our awareness but our memories. The days I remember the most are the ones I didnโt have a phone, and even the events I went to where I didnโt take pictures are the ones I can recall the easiest. Phones are making our core memories more shallow, less
Memorable
weโre less present.
Seriously concerned what memories kids growing up with cellphones will have or even remember vs kids growing up 50 years ago
Iโve been beating around the bush for years. Thereโs something wrong with your brain if you think sugar is the problem when your food is full of things like soy and cottonseed oil, TBHQ, BHA, BHT, polysorbate-80, carboxymethylcellulose, carrageenan, mono- and diglycerides, titanium dioxide, MSG, hexane-extracted flavorings, pesticide residues like glyphosate, heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and arsenic, acrylamide from high-heat processing, PFAS and phthalates leaching from packaging, mineral oil residues from machinery, and synthetic vitamins sprayed back in after the foodโs been chemically stripped of nutrients.
None of this is food. Sugar is.
Nike has released shoes with 22 independent nodes that activate brain sensory areas, which increase relaxation, reduce anxiety, and heighten awareness (called alpha brain waves). This is the result of over 10 years of neurological research!!
Honestly I am even impressed with the ability to manufacture and scale a shoe with 22 individual nodes attached to the bottom.
Getting each pin in the exact spot to trigger mechanoreceptors, accounting for shoe size, stiffness, cushion, its an extremely interesting engineering perspective as well.
Itโs so exciting to see big brands move towards treating the body as a system vs a reductionist approach.
#training #science #sport