Posted on by Jo Gent

I Do Have Regrets

July 1, 2025 was not a good day.

Some things about me are improving as I age. I easily maintain my weight, I sleep great most nights, I rarely feel cold, and my daily life is relaxed and easy, because I’m retired so I do mostly what I want. On the other hand, I am physically less able than I prefer, have a few aches, am slower to accomplish tasks, and can’t remember and/or forget a lot of small things.

One thing has always been true of me and still is: When stressed, I my brain freezes.

The most horrifying example of this in my life happened in Exeter, New Hampshire on a family trip. We stopped at a park on one of the smaller numbered roads, perhaps route 27, and for some reason we lost track of our three-year-old and he showed up in the middle of the street. People started shouting and I looked up to see something impossible, namely, a small boy in the road facing a car stopped directly in front of him. His head hardly cleared the grill; I don’t even know how the driver saw him. I froze. My brain simply did not accept that this could be happening.

My husband raced past me into the street and snatched him up. Similar things have happened to me several times. If I’m nervous about a deadline, or trying to get something done in a hurry, I’ll forget the most basic things, for example my own zip code. Or I won’t be able to log into my computer, something I do multiple times a day, because I forgot my password. Stress sets my brain function to Off.

Interestingly, this wasn’t a problem in the workplace. Maybe because high tech work requires one to show no fear? I don’t know, but I faced many stressful situations at work with relative equanimity usually, and wrath occasionally, but never with brain dysfunction. But that was then.

The second most horrifying incident happened this morning. After months of tens of daily tries to schedule a visa interview online, I got through. Instead of Please try again, the screen said Choose your appointment time. I was stunned, but quickly clicked on the next step, which revealed that there was literally one appointment left in August. My husband had been up a lot of the night trying, and we knew for sure August appointments weren’t opened yesterday, so this meant that they were going very quickly.

I thought I nabbed that appointment but there were more steps, and soon I got to one that didn’t work. The computer wanted me to download a picture, yet it simply would not accept the one I had. I started to edit. I was using my phone rather than my computer, and I quickly realized I didn’t know how to fix it. I woke my husband and explained the issue and we both started working on it, but to no avail. There was a timer running and we didn’t manage to get through the registration process before it expired.

in retrospect, I realized I probably could’ve just skipped that step, or maybe entered a picture of something else then edited it later. I’m not sure. But basically I lost all my reasoning ability and freaked out and focused on this particular step without thinking it through. My husband was helping very much, but he had just woken up and he took my word for it that what I needed was this picture, which was a perfectly logical thing for him to think. I was the one whom logic deserted.

The bottom line is we had an appointment for a brief shining moment but now we don’t have one, and it will be another month before the September appointments are open. Things are getting worse at the San Francisco consulate. When the June appointments opened, they filled in four days. When the July appointments opened, they filled in one day. When the August appointments opened, today, they filled in two hours, which I know because I called to see if anyone could help me. The opening dates vary and are never announced; you just have to keep trying.

This is a big deal for us because an August appointment was our last chance of keeping our original schedule. Now we either can’t go to Spain at all, or we have to sell our house and move somewhere else before we move to Spain. We will probably do the latter because every single day another significant right is abrogated in our country. But this was a big, big blow. I wept. My husband cancelled his appointments and slept. We are both battling some despair and realizing we have to make a new plan but not feeling like doing it.

I used to say these are “first world problems,” but I don’t believe I live in the first world at the moment. I want to. That’s why this is so fraught, and fraught makes my brain freeze more likely.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 2 Comments

My Struggles with RFK

I hate to get sick, which means I’m a big fan of vaccinations: I estimate I’ve gotten 21 since I moved here nine years ago, but I bet I undercounted. In order to protect people who actually can’t get vaccinations, we need a pretty high level of compliance. For those two reasons, I’m distressed that RFK is insinuating that vaccinations aren’t important, and not encouraging them. One of our goals for moving to Spain is to get out of here before flu season hits.

On the other hand…

…I do agree with other things RFK talks about. Those of us who have observed the crash in public health in the United States over the last 60 years find is a little hard to be very impressed by the usual experts. One of my friends told me she was so comfortable with the research over the past 20 years. The past 20 years! The US medical establishment has pretty much been getting an F-minus on public health over the past 20 years.

So the biggest problem with the establishment position RFK = wrong, mainstream doctors = right, is that it’s observably untrue. Instead of bolstering their influence on the public, this pronouncement just reminds everyone of the other untruths we have been told, such as that either party cares about working class jobs, or would take any action that discomfits major donors.

This came to my attention today because of an article about Vani Hari, aka the Food Babe, in the New York Times. Vani has a family and personal background as a prominent Democrat, but she’s working for RFK now because, like so many of us, she was able to turn her health around by changing her diet, and not in the way the doctors recommend, yet she never got establishment Democrats to support that message any more than Republicans would. Specifically, she worked closely with the Obamas in the 2012 presidential campaign, then Barack reneged on a promise to support GMO labeling and Michelle touted Subway as an example of a healthy food source.

Vani became famous in part by forcing industrial food purveyors to remove toxic ingredients using public pressure, and she’s had some big wins, including getting Kraft to remove that nasty yellow dye from macaroni and cheese. All the other first world countries already required Kraft to use paprika for coloration before Vani took them on, and now our kids get that advantage too.

Now that she has changed political sides, the left is going after Vani in a big way. One person quoted in the NYT article said: The desire to oversimplify and demonize what seems scary dovetails really well with a right-wing worldview. But Vani is not oversimplifying or demonizing, she’s sharing solutions that work. The chemicals in ultraprocessed foods combined with their base of highly industrialized, i.e. nutrient-free, farm products are demonstrably deleterious to public health.

The NYT also had this to say about Vani’s change of teams: [I]t has bewildered many on the progressive left who felt they owned what food historians call the good-food movement. So people who have come up with a group of things they think we should eat that has resulted in epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and dozens of autoimmune diseases, think because they branded that advice the “good-food movement” we should embrace it?

Results are more convincing that marketeering.

NYT also mentions that Trump supporters who once dismissed dietary interventions as part of the “nanny state” school of government are championing organic produce and trying to rid schools of ultraprocessed foods. That’s great news, right? In the context of the article, it sounds like the authors think it’s a negative.

I let a lot of the nonsense NYT and The Guardian write about nutrition rest unchallenged, but today I took the bait, and here I am, defending worm brain and his piece of the Trump destruction juggernaut. What a world.

Posted on by Jo Gent

No Drama Living

My husband and I had a consultation with a financial planner based in Italy today. Financial planning is very different in Europe, and he explained some of the changes we would need to make were we to move to Spain, which is our intention, although execution of our carefully constructed timeline is tenuous, mostly because the Spanish consulate in San Francisco is extremely busy right now.

One of the biggest differences is a dearth of places to leave money where it could earn interest. For variety of reasons, European banks don’t want to stash money, and not only do they not pay interest for the privilege of doing so, they often charge. Out of curiosity, I asked, What do Europeans do with their retirement funds?

The planner told me they mostly don’t have retirement funds, that salaries are lower there, so most people don’t set aside savings. That sounded terrible to me, until he explained it.

Europeans, he said, don’t view retirement as a time to stop working and start doing whatever they like to do. They spend their entire lives doing whatever they like to do; no one works 14-hour days, or stresses themself out to make a killing, or has to work multiple jobs to survive. They tend to live in the same house until it’s paid off, raise their families, and form communities, and nothing much changes when they retire.

Remember, he said, there’s no cable news in Spain recycling the headlines of the day into more headlines, endlessly. People aren’t barraged by frantic assertions that they need to act quickly to avert the next disaster. Speculation and fanaticism do exist in the realms of sport, celebrities, and the royal family, but not in a way that derails the routines of daily life.

Elections, he said, come and go without most people spending a lot of time on them, because there is not a lot to worry about. No political entity is going to take away health care, or close schools, or use legislation to “reverse” the discoveries of science. That’s why when a pandemic comes, or there’s a nationwide power outage, the people are mostly calm and compliant.

No Drama Living.

Now I’m really looking forward to moving. I try for No Drama Living every day, and as a retired person willing to ignore the news and able to live as I like on my retirement funds, I succeed most days. But the drama is lurking just around the corner, popping out in a guy you meet at a party whose daughter was arrested at a protest, or a member of your dance troupe who lectures on the “failings” of the “other side” during a team dinner.

Since I am an American, I also feel some obligation to keep up with the current dismantling of our society, mostly by skimming NYT and The Guardian daily, occasionally by contacting a representative or supporting an organization. I also delete quite a few inflammatory emails, despite spending considerable time unsubscribing.

My husband and I are moving, but our friends and family are not, so I’m sure I will always want to keep an eye on what is going on here. But I can easily picture it becoming more of a background hum then a headache-inducing stress. Should I try to be the person who makes the difference? I may have aged out of that behavior.

Or maybe that’s only a thing in the movies. Civil, stable, locally-oriented living is optimal for humanity. Without supervillains, no superheroes are required.

Posted on by Jo Gent

Drowning in Sorrow

Most of the time I’m not, but the moments happen.

There was one this morning. I read about a young Indonesian man, married to a US citizen, caring for their disabled baby, applying to be a permanent resident. He had a good job in a hospital, until ICE came in and told his work colleagues to call a fake meeting in the basement so it could nab him.

They complied. Jesus wept.

ICE doesn’t need any real reason to nab anyone now, but sometimes it enjoys pretending it has one. In this case it retroactively revoked his visa, set to expire in 2026, by changing its expiration date to sometime in March of this year. Then it picked him up based on criminal activity which involved graffiti years ago. The victim had traveled outside the country and returned multiple times since that misdemeanor (not punishable by deportation) offense.

Criminal activity is one of our new opposite word/phrases, like merit hire, as in the sentence, Current US cabinet members are merit hires.

These stories of individuals, usually men around the ages of my sons, illegally torn from there homes and jobs and families and deported if they’re “lucky,” or imprisoned in harsh conditions with no legal recourse if they are not, affect me much more than the threat of losing Social Security or the US betraying the good guys and joining the bad guys. It’s horrific for even one person to be snatched from their life for no reason. Are we just going to get used to this happening again and again?

Well, we have certainly adapted to regular school shootings.

Things are going well for my family and for me, and yet we live in the midst of increasing rancor and lawlessness of the worst kind, that perpetrated by authorities and fueled by capitulation. Now happiness now often seems gratuitous, and our right to pursue it a slender, shreddable veneer.

I haven’t blogged in a while because, well, they always start out like this. I will regain equilibrium shortly and probably not feel like this for a while, maybe even days. But I needed to acknowledge the situation today. Every room is filled with elephants.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 3 Comments

Why We Might Move

My husband and I are in the process of considering a permanent move to Spain. It is complicated and somewhat expensive, and we have not committed to doing it, but we are seriously investigating our options. We’ve already worked with an immigration lawyer to determine that there is a visa for which we would qualify and received quotes for medical insurance. We have a couple of tax consultations scheduled.

We like the lives we led here during the last nine years, but we don’t think there is a possibility of those lives continuing. Some people are startled that we would consider this, perhaps because they think United States is the best country. We realize it is somewhat craven to abandon our country, but we’re not sure it still exists.

No one can predict the future, but we have some ideas about what may happen. I decided to list them in a blog post because I get the Why? question a lot, and I would like to be able to answer it thoroughly. Here are some of our expectations based on our observations of the current situation, not in any particular order.

  • If the government takes $2 trillion-or-so out of the US economy, it will collapse, leading to a depression here or even worldwide.
  • Now that the US is not tracking disease factors either at home or abroad, and both vaccine development and vaccine usage are at historic lows, the next contagious epidemic disease will be much worse than the last one. Local outbreaks have already begun.
  • Mass firing of working scientist as well as elimination of grant programs has already virtually stopped medical research by the government, so we may lose ground quickly in medical science.
  • Reversal of environmental protections will lead to disruptive extractive industry activities and reduced air and water quality.
  • Reversal of gun control laws will increase–is it even possible?–our level of everyday, anywhere gun violence.
  • Gutting of agencies that maintain safety in areas like food supply and air traffic will result in more foodborne diseases and airplane crashes.
  • Gutting of agencies involved in emergency response will increase loss of life and property for future hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and wildfires.
  • Gutting of agencies that gather data on natural phenomena such as weather will reduce our ability to predict extreme events as well as the efficacy of our weather-based industries such as agriculture.
  • Deporting all of our “illegal” immigrants, which seems to include many non-criminals with paperwork in progress, will drastically reduce both the amount of crops we can get from farm to table and the amount of construction we can complete anywhere, exacerbating the food and housing problems we already have.
  • The states that removed women’s reproductive rights already have increased numbers of babies with birth defects as well as increased infant and maternal death rates. This will expand throughout the country should these laws become federal.
  • As far as we can tell, rule of law has been replaced by fealty as the basis of our justice and legislative systems, meaning that even routine services such as passport issuance could be decided based on envelopes of cash or how deeply one’s head is bowed.
  • With unqualified, unvetted personnel leading our security services and even our military, we will lose access to global security intel, making us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
  • The rise of the white male patriarchy systematically dismantling equal rights for people of all religions, ethnicities, and genders threatens most of the population–all women, for example–and is disturbing to us specifically.
  • The elevation of the concept of transferring the country’s wealth from poor and middle-class people to extremely wealthy people is virtually codified already, and seems to be accepted by most. We believe this will degrade the lives of ordinary Americans.
  • We find some of our country’s current policies morally wrong, including abandoning Ukraine, abandoning NATO, eliminating all of our health- and nutrition-based charitable efforts worldwide (USAID), aligning with Russia, seizing assets of other sovereign countries, and trying to force the European Union to be as mean-spirited and anti-citizen as our leadership is.

Any parent reading this will realize that the worst aspect of moving would be being even farther from our adult children, although being far from our friends will be a very close second. I have been trying to encourage the kids to move to another country for several years now, because at their ages they have many more options than we do.

So far they do not agree with me, and perhaps you do not either. Maybe you understand it a little better now, or maybe you just think we’re crazy. Maybe we will move, and maybe it won’t work out. Life was always a bit like a roulette wheel, but it seems to be spinning faster now.

Posted on by Jo Gent

Is My Job Bad for My Health?

Recent news, by which I mean an item recently reported as news although it actually is not news because we’ve known it for a long time, indicated that authorities in the United States now believe that no amount of alcohol is good for our health. The New York Times, always quick to jump on trends whether it can add useful information or not, posted an article in which someone interviewed a fellow whose career involves wine and asked him how it felt to have a career that’s bad for your health.

News flash, by which I mean something you know already because it’s, well, obvious: Since the start of the industrial age most humans have had careers that are bad for our health.

For example, any job that involves doing the following for multiple hours per day:

  • Sitting;
  • Focusing your eyes at a distance of less than 30 inches;
  • Staring at a backlit screen;
  • Being indoors in a home or office that contains any building materials, furniture, equipment, or decorative items that could not have existed 200 years ago;
  • Repetitive motion of your hands and wrists;
  • Standing in the same place;
  • Repetitive bending or stooping;
  • Lung, nose, or skin exposure to toxic substances; and perhaps even
  • Consuming alcohol or ultraprocessed food.

There are occupations that might be hazardous but don’t have to be if you’re careful, well-trained and use recommended procedures and gear, such as working with firearms or munitions, criminals or the mentally ill, heavy equipment, pathogens, or wild animals. Risk-takers such as trapeze artists, skydivers, giant wave surfers, free climbers, and stunt pilots can mitigate their risks, though occasionally some participants will be injured or killed. The thrill, they say, is worth it.

Decades ago I read that forest ranger was the job with the longest health span. That makes sense; the person is outdoors, getting a lot of exercise, looking into the far distance, and surrounded by nature, which is calming to humans, as long as it doesn’t include a predator bearing down on us. Primary and secondary school teachers also seem to be quite healthy, enjoying active retirement for decades, possibly because their work involves movement, occasional outdoor excursions, and a variety of focal lengths. It isn’t really correct to consider children a health threat.

Preindustrial-style family farming is not in my view a healthy employment choice, at least not the kind that involves growing plants in artificial rows created by destroying natural environments. If nothing else, it disrupts your circadian rhythm for most of the year, especially if you are one of the 40% of humans who are not morning people.

I’m retired though, so every day I can choose whether to prioritize my health or not. Often I do not; To be human is to make bad choices. Then there are those aging considerations, the real possibility of doing a head plant after you trip over a chair or burning down the house after leaving the gas burner on. So even if you survived your unhealthy job, as I did, more obstacles await.

I hope this post is not a source of stress to anyone! If we strive to be kind and caring to everyone every day, no matter what we did the day before, we have a good chance to live with no worries and no regrets.

Posted on by Jo Gent

A Pharmaceutical Even a Paleo Dieter Can Love

The New York Times, which I recently disdained on this site for its health coverage, published an article on November 19 about Ozempic, an excerpt of which follows:

Ozempic users…aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack…the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant. “Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,” a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: “And I love it.”

I would suggest to that Redditor that Wegovy revived his taste buds. Nitpicky?

I had been under the impression that drugs like Ozempic, aka GLP-1 agonists, block ghrelin, the hunger hormone, but I was wrong. Instead, they emulate a hormone called GLP-1, which stimulates the pancreas to release insulin and blocks the pancreas from releasing glycogen. Insulin reduces blood glucose levels and glycogen increases them, so GLP-1 agonists overall reduce blood sugar. They also slow digestion and increase the feeling of satiety.

It does not appear that AI was used to create these drugs, but they share with AI products the characteristic of their human creators not knowing how they actually work, and this aversion to ultraprocessed foods seems to be a surprise to their inventors. The NYT article is filled with quotes from patients who were delighted to realize what a strawberry, for example, really tastes like, versus the processed flavoring versions of strawberries they have had up to now. They uniformly seem pleased with the new things they were tasting and uninterested in returning to diets of Campbell Soup and Pepperidge Farms. One spontaneously volunteered, I eat a lot of kale.

That may be going too far.

Big Pharma hangs out with its friend Big Ag, and they agree that this is Not a Good Thing! Yes folks, I know this comes as a shock, but gigantic corporations really don’t want us to eat real food. So many Americans are taking these drugs that there has already been an impact on sales of ultraprocessed food, and the industry is fighting back hard. There are at least two prongs to the strategy: make new foods that taste good to people on GLP-1 agonists and make new foods that taste more like real foods.

As long as they *aren’t* real foods, that is. In order to generate extreme profits, they must be ultraprocessed foods. So how it that going?

The author tasted some of these new offerings and found them inferior to “ripe Rainier cherries” and other natural foods. He writes, The mild flavor profiles and engineered textures…were similar to existing packaged foods [sic], like Betty Crocker cake mixes and Tyson Grilled & Ready chicken strips.

In other words, ultraprocessed foods taste like ultraprocessed foods. Those of us trying to eat outside the industrial food system already know that not only are real foods tastier, they also slow digestion and increase satiety, and we don’t even have to give ourselves a shot every week. However, not everyone can do this on their own, so suddenly I find myself considering being in favor of a pharmaceutical. It’s not just about weight-loss; there are many chronic illness associated with eating ultraprocessed food.

Pharmaceuticals are synthetics engineered from nature for extremely high concentrations of the active substance, which allows them to have manageable dose sizes and to produce quick results, but also produces side effects. So do GLP-1 agonists have any severe side effects? Yes, though rarely: Pancreatitis, medullary thyroid cancer, acute kidney injury, and worsening diabetes-related retinopathy.

So if you can discipline yourself to eat outside the industrial food system for maybe 4-8 weeks, your body will likely make the adjustment on its own. I was astounded by how quickly I not only didn’t miss but also didn’t want all the things I stopped eating, and more important, loved my new food choices. If that’s not you though, maybe consider the drug.

The doctors will tell you you have to stay on it for your entire life. I wonder if someone came to love real food by using a GLP-1 agonist and then discontinued the drug while maintaining the healthy diet, would their new taste preferences persist?

Corporations will not be doing any research to answer that question for us.