🌊 Field Notes: Summer Covid wave, Best Roasted Vegetables Ever, how smartwatches are clueless about rest
Plus, helping your body recover from a colonoscopy
Hello, dear friends, and Happy August! How are you today? My GI system is in a bit of achy turmoil after the routine colonoscopy last week; it usually needs a few weeks to reset itself. (Many people are back to normal in 24 hours, but some of us with sensitive systems take longer.) How? For me, that means extra rest (I’m attempting to get to bed earlier, a laughable quest in the summer with an elementary-age kid) and foods that are extra soothing, such as bone broth (I like Kettle & Fire chicken broth), tea, scrambled eggs, soup, and smoothies.
Here are this week’s Field Notes, 6 things related to illness and wellness I’ve run across lately:
1} Where's My Rest Badge? What Our Devices Still Can't Recognize (Culture Study newsletter) — Anne Helen Petersen writes about her watch that has GPS and tracks respiration and heart rate with emojis and encouragement: “It’s a stupendously good running watch. But like every other supposedly smart device, it doesn’t quite understand rest.” She continues: “If my watch can measure something as complex as heat acclimation, why can’t it offer a Recovery Mode? An obvious setting (not hidden under layers of menus) you can toggle on when you’re sick, when you’re rehabbing from injury, when you’re forcing some rest after a big event — or that you keep toggled on if, for whatever reason, your body needs longterm rest. It seems so obvious and yet somehow impossible, as if these brilliant computers on our wrists have no capacity to understand a ‘goal’ as anything other than the constant push for more.” She adds: “I want validation for an unscheduled week — or month — on the calendar. I want a smartwatch that does those little explosive emojis when it sees that my body was tired and I listened to it.” Yes!
2} Riding the COVID-19 waves: 2023 style (Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter) — Dr. Katelyn Jetelina writes: “We find ourselves in the middle of a COVID-19 wave. Again. If this summer follows the previous three, we should expect ~10-15% of Americans to get infected.” She runs through recent updates and tips in a helpful list. In related news: Biden administration opens new office to study long COVID response, NIH begins clinical trials (ABC News) and Brain fog and other long COVID symptoms affect millions. New treatment studies bring hope (Associated Press). Long Covid is real, and an estimated 7.7 million to 23 million Americans have developed Long Covid. It’s a relief to finally see serious government attention to its study and treatment.
3} Is Aspartame Really Linked to Cancer? (Parent Data newsletter) — Economist Emily Oster dissects the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer’s recent 2B categorization of aspartame, which named it “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” But as Dr. Oster explains, it is very hard to tell for sure whether there is a link between aspartame and cancer, and the four classification levels are confusing. She writes: “The answer, I think, lies in why the IARC has a hard job. They could ignore aspartame. But once researchers start writing even not very high-quality papers on aspartame and cancer, it becomes hard to ignore. And once they start studying it, the standard they are holding these data to is fairly extreme. To put something in the category 2B, ‘possible carcinogen,’ group requires only believing there is a possibility, not a probability. Ruling out the possibility of some relationship is a challenge.” She sums it up: “To the reader who asked: Please enjoy your Diet Coke without thinking about your mortality.”
4} Dr. Maya Shankar: How to Shape Your Identity & Goals (Huberman Lab Podcast) — This is an in-depth, fascinating, two-and-a-half-hour conversation with neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman interviewing cognitive scientist Dr. Maya Shankar about our understanding of ourselves and how we change. She emphasizes that we are changing all the time and may not notice how changes we go through affect who we are. In one section, Dr. Shankar, who was a serious violinist and in the Julliard pre-college program as a teenager, shares how her body and nervous system literally grew up around the violin. Her right shoulder is slightly elevated compared to her left because of the thousands of hours holding a violin, and she has light scoliosis in her spine. “It feels intimate in a way,” she says. “Wow. The shape of my body — my architecture — was defined by this instrument.”
5} Pediatrician Dr. Phil Boucher’s Instagram (@philbouchermd) — I’ve been appreciating Dr. Boucher’s measured advice on everything from molluscum spots to not talking about BMI at check-ups to handling a 4-year-old’s meltdown. (His readers’ comments can also be insightful.) In that last case, he suggests that rather than yelling and getting upset over what seems like an irrational meltdown, viewing it as a temporary storm, staying calm with the child, and letting it run its course: “There’s a storm that I don’t have control over that is passing over my child. And I’m going to be the umbrella.”
6} Best Roasted Vegetables Ever (The Wednesday Chef blog) — This favorite recipe from Luisa Weiss turns a pile of farmers market veggies into a kind of super simple ratoutille. The trick is to cut the veggies small and roast them in a pile lower and slower with lots of olive oil. Luisa is the author of Classic German Baking and My Berlin Kitchen (affiliate link to her bookshop; a great summer read); she also writes a wonderful newsletter with recipes, book recommendations, and glimpses of her life in Europe, Letter from Berlin. She says about this recipe:
“What you will get, at the end, are vegetables that have sort of contracted and shrunk and sweetened. They get wholly infused with the flavors of the herbs, garlic and oil. The potatoes turn into potato candy — all chewy and sweet and incredible. The tomatoes lose all their moisture to the pan, but miraculously retain their shape, so you get little bombs of tomato flavor now and then. The onions snake their way throughout, perfuming every bite. The eggplants soften into silk. And all together, ooh, it's just so good…”
Doesn’t that sound amazing? I think I’ll be making it this week again, too.
I hope you have a sweet week ahead full of nourishing foods and moments.
To our journeys,
Brianne
p.s. I’m thinking of using the Substack Notes or Chat (honestly, I don’t know the difference!) to post a hello on Mondays to you with a note asking what we each want to do this week to care for ourselves and then a check-in on Friday asking how it went. Would that be helpful?