Their daughter is 16, the boyfriend 18.

Edit: it clicked after I posted. You mean it’s more than “mildly”. Agreed.

Brain no work today.

I have mast cell issues, so a bit similar. I still get the occasional food flare up, but just giving my guts a break works wonders.

I intermittent fast the majority of days and have done so for nearly the last decade. I have a chronic illness that affects my GI tract, among other things, and it helps a lot.

Not getting hangry is a huge perk. Once my flight got stuck for hours in a small town airport with no food nearby. I was watching people get so weird about not eating for a few hours, but I was able to just be okay.

You’re fine! I had to ask myself why I cared so much, and it’s because I love radishes but they also wreck my guts. I have no problem eating them cooked, though the spicy/snappy flavor goes away because that’s the sulforaphane/phene.

It’s yet another vegetable humans love because of the thing it makes to keep animals from eating it. We’re culinary masochists.

Sulforaphane is heat labile, so cooking breaks some of it down. Broccoli and cabbage are fairly low in it, while Brussels sprouts and radishes are quite high. Radishes also have high amounts of sulforaphene, a related compound with similar properties. So it might be cooked vs raw, quantity consumed, -phane vs -phane/-phene, or something else entirely.

Only the R-isomer is found in any appreciable amount in nature, so it’s probably not that unless you’re eating research radishes.

It’s likely the sulforaphane, the compound that doesn’t actually fight cancer at all. Similar to the sulfur containing compounds in onions, it’s an irritant created when radish tissue is damaged to repel pests. In mammals, it irritates the lining of the digestive tract and causes the lower esophageal sphincter, which normally keeps stomach acid from refluxing, to relax.

I can tell you, I’m a real molecular/microbiologist!

Tl;Dr: It’s mostly bunk.

Most of these services don’t analyze your entire genome*, but instead just regions of genes, looking for something called SNPs: single nucleotide polymorphisms. DNA is composed of four nucleobases, commonly represented by their initials: T and A, C and G. A SNP is a spot on a gene where there’s some variability in these, e.g., a C or A or even a T instead of a common G.

Through whole genome sequencing and statistical analysis, these companies were able to identify frequency trends in SNPs according to where the person lives and their self-reported ancestry. Now they use a cheaper, less comprehensive (but still fairly accurate) process to look for the SNPs that data suggests are most strongly correlated with different regions/ancestries and dole out your supposed ancestry.

There are problems.

Conclusions are only as good as your data, and the data are often based strongly on self-reporting, which in science terms is often referred to as “super fucking inaccurate”.

SNPs aren’t static - every child has some, about 20 to 60, that their parents don’t have. Many detrimental SNPs can lead to death, so most that persist have no effect, though some are weakly detrimental or, even more rarely, beneficial. That means there’s a limited pool of viable options, so your kid might have spontaneously developed a few strongly associated with a region they’re not at all connected to. You have a few too, as does your coparent and all of your parents. Through a couple of generations of new SNPs, a person’s ancestry results can shift. Through random chance and no new SNPs, one might inherit a combination of SNPs commonly seen in other regions, simply through the right combination of ancestors not at all from that area.

Some SNPs are better than others. Those on what are called “highly conserved” genes, i.e., fuck this gene up at all and you die, tend to be less common and more stable. If a defined group has an unusual SNP or SNPs on these regions, it’s a far better indicator of relatedness than a SNP on a gene for something like vitamin C synthesis, which we have but the process is broken so it doesn’t matter if we break it more.

In summary, these services are built on data of varying quality (shitty data) and moving targets of variable utility (shitty targets).

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

*If you can swing it, genome sequencing and analysis can be really interesting and useful for healthcare decisions. You can learn a lot about how you, specifically, work, and we’re learning more all the time.

Just be sure to get sufficient sequencing coverage, at least 30x if you want “good enough”, 100x or more if it’s medically vital and/or you’re looking for rare genes. 1x is fairly worthless, paying for it is a waste of money.

I also find it maddening, not only because it’s silly, but because the analysis is largely crap anyhow.

My mother’s family touted their “Irish heritage for three generations”, then quickly shut up when their genome analysis “proved” they were instead largely English. I’ve had to point out Ireland and England’s relative positions and ask them if they thought anyone in our ancestry might have ever moved from island to island. Maybe consider that they were from somewhere else in Europe even earlier? Now they’re “Irish” again.

Point entirely missed, JFC. They were Irish, their ancestors were maybe English, and way back, their ancestors were definitely African, but I don’t see them getting into African cultural heritage. Thankfully.

You’re United Statesians. I get the draw: they’re looking for genuine but effort-free connection, identity, and belonging in a country whose dominant culture is homogenization, commoditization, and exploitation, but their search for culture through tenuous connections to long-dead ancestors instead of family, friends, and neighbors is just as hollow and unfulfilling.

Don’t obsess about great³-Grandpa Pádraig’s life harvesting peat from the bogs; he’s long dead and probably would have hated you. Embrace what and where you are and utilize and improve what you actually have.

Oh hell yes. I take Jornay, so I take it before bed. If I take it with food, it kicks in later and doesn’t seem as strong, so I take it on an empty stomach at 21:00 now.

I also notice differences between days, mostly based on if I’ve gotten enough sleep or not and if I’ve been eating well and staying hydrated. Doing both makes my ADHD symptoms noticeably better.

I was thinking a “poorly aimed” bottle rocket “from a neighbor kid”.

Did you eat it? Because they’re delicious.

I assume the spiders would have died, and now you have delicious, brined cooking bananas!

I can’t tell if you’re joking or not. Unless a home is small, effectively airtight, filled with people, and the doors and windows are never opened, oxygen concentrations aren’t going to fall enough to be impactful.

Same! Mine have a passthrough mode that pumps through what the microphone picks up but lets you select how much. I leave a little on because I feel weird if I can’t hear what’s happening in my surroundings.

It claims to have 18k users. I didn’t see their criteria for “active”, though.

All men are people but some men are more people than others.

And US society reinforces that behavior by shaming men for being vulnerable or showing weakness and teaching others that a crying or otherwise emotionally vulnerable man is something deserving of shame and contempt.

A great example is online advice articles about handling relationship issues: so much advises that stoicism is the only option, otherwise your girlfriend/wife will lose their respect and attraction for you.

I had an ex-girlfriend mock me for crying during our breakup and know many men who have encountered similar shaming treatment from other men and women. It’s brutal.

Age is the big factor. It does two things:

1. Eggs gradually lose water, which introduces more air into the air cell and between the membrane and the shell, making it all a bit looser as you peel.
2. The pH increases, reducing the attraction/attachment of the boiled egg white to the membrane, which is why fresh egg shells are more likely to tear strips of white off as you peel.

Eggs in the US can be up to 60 days old at the time of packaging, then are considered good for another 45 days. Large flats of eggs can contain eggs from multiple batches of varying age, so some eggs might be two weeks old and others two or more months.

Agreed, ice bath is only important for me if eggs are super fresh, which makes them harder to peel, or if I need them to stop cooking fast, like if I am making soft boiled eggs or have the sudden realization I started boiling the eggs and walked off at least five minutes ago but neglected to set a timer.

I’m not ADHD, you’re ADHD!

My dad’s go to from the 1980s all the way up to his death in the 2020s was “fuckme42069” . He was an OG Neckbeard.