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Key Highlights

• The skin microbiome is a community of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms that help protect the skin and support its barrier.
• Dryness, redness, sensitivity, breakouts, and uneven texture can signal skin irritation or microbiome imbalance.
• Over-cleansing, harsh detergents, frequent exfoliation, antibacterial products, and overloaded routines can disrupt the skin’s natural balance.
• Support the microbiome with a gentle, non-foaming cleanser, less exfoliation, barrier-friendly moisturizers, and daily broad-spectrum sun protection.
• Choose skincare based on transparent ingredient lists, and introduce new products one at a time to identify potential irritation.
• A plant-rich diet, adequate sleep, and stress management can support skin health alongside a consistent skincare routine.
• OM Botanical follows a food-grade ingredient philosophy, uses minimal processing, and retains the natural colors and compounds of botanical ingredients in its skincare formulas.

You’re doing everything right. You cleanse twice a day, layer serums, and add a new active every time your skin acts up. Yet the dryness, redness, or breakouts keep coming back. Often, the problem isn’t that your routine is doing too little. It’s that it’s doing too much to the living ecosystem on your skin.

So, how do you improve your skin microbiome? You stop fighting your skin and start supporting it: cleanse without stripping, protect your barrier and acidic pH, cut back on harsh ingredients, and feed your skin with whole, minimally processed botanicals.

In this guide, we answer what the skin microbiome is and why it matters, then walk through the signs it’s out of balance, what disrupts it, and the practical steps that help bring it back.

What Is the Skin Microbiome, and Why Does It Matter?

It’s the community of microorganisms that live on your skin’s surface, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, and even microscopic mites. Far from being a threat, most of the microbes in the skin’s natural ecosystem help protect it.

The relationship between the microbiome and skin is a two-way partnership. Researchers now describe the barrier and the microbiome as constantly influencing each other: when one weakens, the other usually follows. That’s why microbiome care isn’t a separate step. It’s the result of a routine that respects how skin actually works.

At OM Botanical, our microbiome skin care products​ are built around that partnership, supporting your skin’s own defenses instead of overriding them.

Why Does the Skin Microbiome Matter for Healthy Skin?

A balanced skin microbiome helps your skin defend itself, hold on to moisture, and stay calm. When it falls out of balance- a state called dysbiosis- skin tends to become drier, more inflamed, and more vulnerable to irritation and infection.

1. It Supports Your Skin Barrier and Hydration

Beneficial microbes work alongside the outer layer of your skin to keep moisture in and irritants out. A resilient barrier, in turn, gives those microbes a stable place to live.

2. It Depends on a Slightly Acidic pH

A large multicentre study found that natural skin surface pH averages around 4.7, below the commonly assumed 5.0 to 6.0. Skin below pH 5 showed better barrier function, moisturization, and less scaling. The same research found that an acidic pH helps resident bacteria stay attached to the skin, while an alkaline pH encourages them to disperse.

3. It Helps Keep Visible Irritation in Check

A stable microbiome makes skin less reactive. When that balance tips, irritation, redness, and flare-ups are often the first visible signs.

What Are the Signs Your Skin Microbiome Is Out of Balance?

Common signs of an imbalanced skin microbiome include persistent dryness, tightness, redness, sensitivity, breakouts, dullness, and uneven texture. These signs often appear together and tend to worsen when you add more products.

• Dryness and tightness: Skin feels stripped after cleansing and never seems fully hydrated.
• Redness and sensitivity: Products that used to feel fine suddenly sting or flush.
• Breakouts and congestion: Blemishes appear even though you cleanse diligently.
• Dullness and uneven texture: Skin looks tired and rough despite exfoliation.

This is where we, at OM Botanical, differ from most of the industry. Our founder, Sudhir Shah, is a molecular biologist who started formulating after watching his son struggle with severe eczema, and we built our plant-based skin care on a simple Ayurvedic principle: if you can eat it, you can trust it on your skin.

What Disrupts the Skin Microbiome?

The most common disruptors are over-cleansing, foaming detergents, over-exfoliation, antibacterial products, UV exposure, stress, and overloaded routines. Most of them work by stripping your skin’s natural oils or pushing its pH away from its acidic sweet spot.

• Over-cleansing and harsh detergents: Foaming cleansers can strip the lipids your skin and its microbes rely on. Even plain tap water can temporarily raise skin pH for up to six hours, according to the same pH research.
• Over-exfoliation: Frequent scrubs and strong acids thin out your skin’s natural protection.
• Antibacterial products: They don’t distinguish between helpful and harmful microbes.
• UV exposure: Unprotected sun exposure stresses both the barrier and the microbes living on it.
• Stress, diet and the gut-skin axis: Research increasingly links the gut and skin microbiomes, so what happens inside shows up outside.
• Overloaded, heavily processed formulas: The more synthetic fillers, fragrances, and stacked actives you apply, the more your skin has to manage.

This last point came up again and again when we surveyed our customers about what bothered them in mainstream skincare.

People told us about tightness after cleansing, stinging from “gentle” products, and routines that kept growing just to manage side effects. We used those answers to shape our formulas, so they fix the frustrations instead of adding to them.

How Can You Improve Your Skin Microbiome?

Here’s how to improve your skin microbiome: cleanse gently, exfoliate less, choose formulas with a functional base instead of water, use minimally processed food-grade botanicals, support your barrier, wear mineral sunscreen daily, simplify your routine, and care for your gut. We break down each step below.

1. Switch to a Gentle, Low-Stripping Cleanser

Your cleanser has the biggest daily impact on your microbiome because it touches your whole face, twice a day. Skip foaming detergents and look for a creamy, non-foaming formula that removes dirt and oil without leaving skin tight.

We created our OM Botanical’s Complete Face Cleanser for exactly this. It’s aloe-based, non-foaming and made without synthetic detergents, fragrance, preservatives or alcohol. Papaya and pineapple enzymes gently lift buildup, while licorice and chamomile calm visible redness. It also scores 96/100 on Yuka, an independent ingredient-rating app.

If you’re switching from a foaming cleanser, give your skin one to two weeks to adjust. That transition is your skin rebalancing, not a sign that the cleanser isn’t working.

2. Pull Back on Exfoliation

If your skin feels raw, stings, or looks shiny-tight, you’re likely over-exfoliating. Gentle enzymes in a daily cleanser are usually enough for most people, and they let your barrier and microbiome recover between uses. This kind of non-invasive skincare for skin microbiome balance works with your skin rather than forcing it.

3. Look at the First Ingredient in Your Formula

Turn over almost any moisturizer or serum, and the first ingredient is water. It’s an inexpensive filler that evaporates from your skin.

We do it differently. Aloe vera juice replaces water as the base of our formulas, so the very first ingredient provides soothing hydration and helps deliver the botanicals that follow. A more functional base lets us do more with fewer ingredients, which means less for your skin and its microbes to manage.

4. Choose Food-Grade, Minimally Processed Botanicals

If you’re wondering how to restore your skin microbiome naturally, start with what you put on it. Our rule comes from Ayurveda: if you can eat it, you can trust it on your skin. That’s why we favor familiar, food-grade ingredients like aloe, cucumber, licorice root, and seed oils over heavily refined synthetics.

Minimal processing also explains why our products aren’t bright white. Our Daily Dew Balancing Moisturizer is naturally green from spirulina, and our Complete Face Cleanser is tan from licorice and papaya. Color variation is normal for botanicals. It’s a sign the plants still carry their natural pigments and compounds.

We also use whole-plant extracts rather than isolating a single “active” molecule. Plants contain hundreds of compounds that evolved to work together, and that ingredient synergy supports several skin functions at once.

5. Support the Barrier With Skin-Compatible Oils

A strong barrier gives your microbiome a stable home. When you shop for the best skin barrier repair products, skip heavy occlusives that sit on top of the skin and look for lightweight, skin-compatible oils.

• Jojoba oil closely resembles skin’s own sebum, so it softens and replenishes without clogging pores.
• Red raspberry seed oil is naturally rich in antioxidants that help skin feel balanced and nourished.

Our formulas pair skin-compatible plant oils like these with an aloe base, so hydration feels light but lasting.

6. Calm Visible Irritation With Soothing Botanicals

Redness and reactivity are often your microbiome’s way of asking for less, not more. Soothing botanicals help skin settle.

• Licorice root helps calm redness and even out tone.
• Cucumber draws in moisture while calming irritation.

7. Protect Skin From UV Every Day

Daily sun protection protects both your barrier and the microbes living on it. We prefer mineral protection from non-nano zinc oxide, which sits on the skin’s surface to block UVA and UVB rays.

Our Sheer Mineral Sunscreen SPF 40 uses 20% non-nano zinc oxide in an aloe base with raspberry seed oil, leaving a soft matte finish with no white cast. Our Daily Dew Balancing Moisturizer also contains non-nano zinc oxide for light everyday support.

8. Simplify Your Routine and Rely on Ingredient Synergy

More products rarely mean healthier skin. Each extra layer adds more ingredients for your microbiome to cope with. Balancing skin microbiome health is easier with a short routine of well-formulated, multitasking products, and a short routine is easier to stick with.

9. Support Your Skin From the Inside

Because the gut and skin microbiomes are linked, what you eat matters. A plant-rich diet with fiber, colorful fruits and vegetables and fermented foods supports your gut, and potentially your skin. Sleep and stress management matter too.

Which OM Botanical Ingredients Support a Balanced Skin Microbiome?

Our key ingredients for microbiome-friendly skin are organic aloe, licorice root, jojoba oil, cucumber, red raspberry seed oil, non-nano zinc oxide and, for body care, Dead Sea magnesium chloride. We chose each one to soothe, hydrate, or protect without stripping the skin.

• Organic aloe: Replaces water as our base for soothing hydration and better ingredient delivery.
• Licorice root: Calms visible redness and helps even tone.
• Jojoba oil: Sebum-like moisture that replenishes without clogging pores.
• Cucumber: A botanical humectant that hydrates and calms irritation.
• Red raspberry seed oil: Antioxidant-rich nourishment that helps skin feel balanced.
• Non-nano zinc oxide: Broad-spectrum mineral UV protection that stays on the skin’s surface.
• Dead Sea magnesium chloride: A natural mineral source we use in our body care.

Across our range of microbiome skin care products, we combine these ingredients so they work together, rather than relying on one “miracle” ingredient.

How Can You Build a Microbiome-Friendly Routine With OM Botanical?

If we had to describe the key steps for maintaining healthy skin, they’d be simple: cleanse gently, treat, moisturize, and protect. A microbiome-friendly routine needs just four steps in the morning and three at night. Here’s the routine we recommend.

Morning

1. Cleanse: Massage the Complete Face Cleanser onto damp skin for 30 to 60 seconds, then rinse.
2. Treat: Apply our Vitamin C E Ferulic Rutin Serum to brighten and even tone.
3. Moisturize: Follow with the Daily Dew Balancing Moisturizer for light, breathable hydration.
4. Protect: Finish with Sheer Mineral Sunscreen SPF 40.

Evening

1. Cleanse: Use the Complete Face Cleanser again to remove the day’s buildup.
2. Treat: Apply our oil-based Bakuchiol Serum for smoother-looking skin without the irritation many people associate with retinol.
3. Nourish: Seal in moisture with Young & Bright, our peptide-rich moisturizer.

Body

• Hydrate: Use our Magnesium Body Lotion, made with natural Dead Sea magnesium chloride in an aloe base.
• Protect: Apply Mineral Body Sunscreen SPF 30 before time outdoors.

How Long Does It Take to Restore the Skin Microbiome?

Most people notice their skin feels calmer and less tight within a few days of gentler care. Visible changes in redness, breakouts, and texture usually take several weeks of consistent use.

Expect a short adjustment period of one to two weeks if you’re moving away from foaming cleansers or heavy actives. When it comes to restoring skin microbiome balance, consistency matters far more than adding new products, so give a simplified routine time before judging it.

Why Choose OM Botanical for a Healthy Skin Microbiome?

Ever used a cleanser that left your face squeaky and tight, or a “gentle” serum that stung on contact? Too much skincare promises to fix your skin and ends up fighting it.

Our founder, Sudhir Shah, a molecular biologist with Ayurvedic roots, knew there had to be a better way when his son struggled with eczema in college. So he started blending small batches in the family kitchen. By 2011, that kitchen had become OM Botanical, and we still make every bottle in small batches in Apex, North Carolina.

That kitchen-table thinking still guides us: aloe instead of water, ingredients clean enough to eat, color straight from the plants, and formulas shaped by what our customers tell us in surveys.

Skincare never replaces a dermatologist, but if you want a routine that lets your skin do its job, explore our plant-based skincare.

Conclusion

Improving skin microbiome health isn’t about adding the next trending active. It’s about giving your skin’s natural ecosystem the conditions it needs to do its job: gentle cleansing, an acidic pH, a strong barrier, daily sun protection, and fewer, better ingredients.

That’s the approach we’ve built OM Botanical around. We start with aloe instead of water, choose food-grade, minimally processed botanicals, keep their natural color and shape, and build every formula around what our customers tell us. Support your skin instead of fighting it, and it will often find its own balance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do probiotics for skin microbiome health actually work?

Research into topical probiotics, prebiotics, and postbiotics for skin microbiome support is promising but still developing. For most people, removing what disrupts the microbiome, such as harsh cleansers and over-exfoliation, makes the biggest difference.

What should you look for in skin microbiome products?

Look for a gentle, non-foaming cleanser, a functional base such as aloe instead of water, minimally processed botanicals, mineral sun protection, and a short ingredient list. The best skin microbiome products support your skin’s own defenses rather than replacing them.

What are the benefits of microbiome skin care?

The main microbiome skincare benefits are calmer, better-hydrated skin, fewer flare-ups of redness and breakouts, and a stronger barrier over time. Because microbiome skin care works with your skin instead of against it, routines also tend to get simpler.

Can natural or plant-based skincare disrupt the microbiome?

It can if it’s harsh. A plant-based label doesn’t guarantee a gentle formula. Check for foaming detergents, high alcohol content, or heavy fragrance, and look at what the first ingredient is.

Why is the skin microbiome important for overall health?

Your skin is your body’s largest organ and its first protective barrier against the outside world. Its microbial community helps support the immune system, keeps harmful bacteria in check, and plays a key role in overall health.

How does gut health affect the skin microbiome?

Your gut microbiome and skin are closely linked. Gut dysbiosis, an imbalance of gut bacteria, can drive systemic inflammation and inflammatory responses that may show up as skin inflammation and other skin concerns.

Can lifestyle habits support a healthy skin microbiome?

Yes. A balanced diet, regular physical activity, good sleep, and stress management support a healthy gut and healthy bacteria on your skin. Together, they help control inflammation and support your skin’s health from the inside out.

Why doesn’t OM Botanical use foaming cleansers?

Foaming detergents can strip good bacteria and leave skin tight. Our Complete Face Cleanser is creamy and non-foaming, so it removes buildup without upsetting the balance of good and bad bacteria or weakening the skin barrier.

How does OM Botanical fit into a microbiome-friendly skincare routine?

Start with our Complete Face Cleanser, add a targeted serum, then follow with the Daily Dew Balancing Moisturizer and Sheer Mineral Sunscreen SPF 40. This simple skincare routine avoids harsh skincare products and respects the skin’s natural microbiome.

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This content is brought to you by Rasheeda Vicky

Photo provided by the contributor.

The post How to Improve Skin Microbiome With Plant-Based Care? appeared first on The Good Men Project.

I was holding a wooden spoon. The jollof rice was simmering on the stove. Marcus walked through the front door, dropped his keys on the side table, and walked straight into the living room. He turned the TV on. Low. He didn’t say my name. He didn’t ask about dinner. He just sat there, staring at the screen, radiating a heavy, thick quiet that filled the entire apartment. I stood in the kitchen for a minute. Then five. Then twenty. I reheated his plate twice. I stopped tasting the food. I just listened to the volume of the television. I spent the next two hours trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

Sound familiar?

That silence is a language. It is a very specific, well-practiced protocol. Here are seven things that quiet is actually saying to you.

1. The punishment is a recalibration.

When someone punishes you, they want you to know you made a mistake. That requires them to actually explain what you did. Marcus never explained. His silence was a recalibration. It was a system reset. He was putting me back into the exact position he wanted me to occupy. The quiet was the tool. The silence was his way of managing the temperature of the room until it reached a level he found comfortable.

Think about the mechanics of it. If he tells you what you did, you have a chance to defend yourself. You have a chance to argue. You have a chance to say, “That wasn’t my intention,” or “That’s a misunderstanding.” The moment he gives you the specific charge, he gives you a courtroom. He gives you a chance to negotiate.

The silence removes the courtroom entirely. You are guilty without a charge. You are serving a sentence without a verdict. And the beautiful, terrible efficiency of it is that you will spend hours, maybe days, trying to guess the charge yourself. You will review every conversation. You will replay every glance. You will become the prosecutor, the defense, and the judge all at once.

And the worst part? I let him do it. I sat in that kitchen and I built the entire case against myself. He just sat on the couch and waited for me to hand him the verdict. I gave him exactly what he wanted. I named my own crime.

2. Your anxiety is the supply line.

He sits in the living room and he waits. He listens to you moving around in the kitchen. He hears you stop stirring the pot. He feels you getting smaller and smaller in the other room. He is waiting for you to break. He is waiting for you to walk into the living room and ask, “Are you okay?” or “Did I do something?” Your anxiety is the food he is eating. He does not want an apology. He wants to watch you squirm. Your discomfort is the reward.

This is the part that took me the longest to understand. I thought he was waiting for a resolution. I thought he was waiting for us to talk it out. He was waiting for the supply. The supply is your nervous energy. The supply is the sound of your footsteps getting faster. The supply is the moment you finally walk into the room with your voice shaking and your hands cold.

A man who is genuinely upset will eventually want to resolve it. A narcissist will let it sit forever if it keeps you in that state of panic. Because the panic is the point. The panic means you are still orbiting him. The panic means he is still the sun in your solar system. And when you finally bring him his plate, warm, because you reheated it twice, he will look up as if he has just noticed you. He will be calm. He will be fine. And you will be exhausted.

3. The environment does the talking.

He never raised his voice. He never needed to. The TV volume was the real conversation. The way he dropped his keys. The specific angle of his shoulders when he sat on the couch. He manages the atmosphere because the atmosphere is harder to argue with than words. You cannot confront a man about the way he is sitting on a couch. You cannot fight the volume of a television. The environment becomes the weapon.

Words are evidence. You can quote words back to someone. You can say, “You said this on Tuesday.” But you cannot quote an atmosphere. You cannot say, “You sat with your shoulders at seventeen degrees of hostility.” You cannot take the volume of the television to a therapist and say, “Look at what he did.”

So when you try to explain it to someone, you sound crazy. You sound like you are overreacting. You sound like you are reading into things. And he gets to sit there with his clean hands and his quiet voice and say, “I was just watching TV. She’s the one who started the argument.” The environment is his alibi. It is the perfect crime because there is no physical evidence. It is just a feeling in the room that you cannot prove.

4. You are treating his quiet like a sacred text.

You sit in the other room and you try to decode it. You run through your entire day in your head. You check your messages. You analyze every interaction you had with him yesterday. You are bringing all the meaning to the table. There is nothing to decode. It is just a wall. You are the one building the story around the void.

I used to do this for hours. I would sit in that small apartment and I would read his silence like a scholar. I would look for clues. I would look for the moment I ruined the evening. Maybe it was the joke I made at dinner. Maybe it was the way I answered the phone. Maybe it was the fact that I asked him about his mother. I would build entire theories of the crime. I would draft apologies in my head.

I was doing all the work. He was doing nothing. His silence was empty. It was a blank space. He was not sitting in there composing a thesis about my failure. He was probably watching a football match. I was giving his silence a weight and a meaning it did not have. I was the one giving it the power.

5. The architecture of your response is older than him.

I learned to fix a man’s silence long before I met Marcus. I learned it in a house where a man’s quiet was treated as his absolute right, and a woman’s job was to tiptoe around it. The church taught me that peace was my responsibility to maintain. The culture taught me that a man’s silence was something to be respected and cared for. Marcus didn’t invent this. He just stepped into a role I had already been trained to accept.

This is why leaving Marcus did not fix the pattern overnight. I thought I was just dealing with one difficult man. I was dealing with a script that had been handed down. My grandmother knew that script. My mother knew that script. It was the script where the woman is the emotional thermostat of the house. If the temperature drops, she has to fix it. If the man goes quiet, she has to coax him back out.

Marcus knew the script too. He knew the playbook long before he met me. He knew that if he went quiet, I would automatically start performing the role I had been trained for. He did not have to teach me. He just had to activate what was already there. The silence was the cue. I was the actor.

6. The quiet gives him the alibi.

This is the part that kept me in the kitchen the longest. The silence protects him. If he yells, he is the bad guy. If he storms out, he is the bad guy. But if he just sits there quietly, he gets to look calm. He gets to look reasonable. The silence makes you look like the crazy one when you finally snap and ask him what is wrong. He is hiding inside the quiet. He is using it as a shield so you can be the one who loses control.

I remember the first time I broke. I walked into the living room and I raised my voice. I was exhausted. I had been waiting for three hours. I said, “Why are you doing this?” And he just looked at me. He looked at me with that flat, calm expression and he said, “I was just sitting here. You are the one shouting.”

That was the moment I realized the trap. His silence was the bait. It was designed to make me look unstable. He used my reaction to prove that he was the reasonable one and I was the problem. He hid behind the silence and let me be the monster.

7. He needs you to narrate your own defeat.

He wants you to be the one who breaks. He wants you to walk into the living room and say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, what did I do?” He wants you to take the blame so he does not have to be the bad guy. He wants you to do the work of restoring the peace. He wants you to perform the apology. You are the one giving him the script.

Because if he speaks first, he has to make a claim. He has to take a position. But if you speak first, you hand him the victory. You hand him the apology he did not have to ask for. You hand him the confession he did not have to prove.

This is the final act of the protocol. The silence is just the mechanism to get you to this point. The goal is your voice, shaking in the living room, asking him what you did wrong. Once you do that, the system resets. He can be benevolent. He can forgive you. He can tell you it’s okay. And you will feel relieved. You will feel like you survived. You will feel like you fixed it. And you will be back in the kitchen next Tuesday.

It all boils down to this: the silence only has power because you are standing in the kitchen waiting for him to turn the lights back on. The silence is a vacuum. It has no authority. The moment you stop trying to read it is the moment it stops working.

I went to the bathroom during one of those Tuesdays. I locked the door. I looked at myself in the mirror. I realized the silence only worked because I was in the room to be managed. I walked out of the bathroom, picked up my car keys, and went to my sister’s apartment. I did not ask permission. I did not explain. I let the silence sit in the living room with him. He is welcome to it. He can keep it. I took the air supply with me.

The minute you stop being the audience, the show is over.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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Photo credit: Ali Aziz on Unsplash

The post 7 Things a Narcissist’s Silence Is Really Saying appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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You notice your boyfriend has started following someone new on Instagram. Maybe it’s a woman you don’t recognize, an old friend, or an account that suddenly keeps appearing in his feed. Naturally, you wonder when he followed them.

Checking someone’s Recent Follow activity sounds simple. After all, Instagram displays a Following list on most public profiles. But identifying the newest additions is much harder than scrolling through a list of usernames.

Several tools claim to help, including Snoopreport and DolphinRadar. But how much can they actually reveal, and is paying for a tracker worthwhile?

We compared Instagram’s free features with two dedicated tracking services to understand what works, what doesn’t, and where personal curiosity can become unnecessary suspicion.

Can You See Who Your Partner Recently Followed on Instagram?

The short answer is yes, in some circumstances, but Instagram itself doesn’t provide a reliable history.

When you open someone’s public Instagram profile and tap Following, you can see the accounts they currently follow. What you cannot see is the exact date each connection was established.

Instagram removed its Following Activity tab in 2019. That feature previously displayed selected actions by accounts you followed, but it was never replaced with an equivalent public activity history.

Some people assume that usernames appearing at the top of a Following list represent the newest connections.

Unfortunately, that assumption is unreliable.

Instagram’s list order is not a guaranteed chronological sequence. An account followed months ago might appear above one added yesterday.

This matters because drawing conclusions from an incorrectly interpreted list could create a disagreement over something that never happened.

To identify new follows more reliably, you need observations from different points in time.

Option 1: Checking Instagram Manually for Free

Before considering a paid tracker, Instagram’s existing features are worth exploring.

You can open a public profile, examine its Following list, and search for particular accounts.

If you’re wondering whether your partner currently follows someone, this may be all you need.

Tracking changes is more complicated.

One approach is to take screenshots of a Following list at regular intervals and compare the usernames. Another is to maintain a spreadsheet recording which accounts were visible during each check.

The advantage is obvious: both methods are free.

However, there are limitations:

• A screenshot captures only part of a potentially long Following list.
• Instagram may display accounts in a different order during later visits.
• A changing following count does not identify which accounts were added or removed.
• Manual comparisons cannot establish an exact follow date.
• Private-account restrictions still apply.

For an occasional question, a manual check may be sufficient. Maintaining a reliable history across several weeks requires considerably more effort.

Best for: Checking an existing connection or occasionally comparing visible information without paying.

Option 2: Snoopreport for Organized Follow Tracking

Snoopreport specializes in tracking Instagram activity data from public profiles.

Its main advantage over manual checking is that it organizes available activity into ongoing reports rather than leaving users to compare screenshots themselves.

The service’s Recent Follow feature is designed to show which accounts a tracked public profile started following during a reporting period.

Users enter an Instagram username and add the account to their dashboard. No Instagram login credentials are required, and the tracked account does not receive a notification.

What Can Snoopreport Show?

Snoopreport offers weekly and monthly activity reports covering:

• Accounts the tracked profile recently followed.
• Accounts it unfollowed.
• Captured likes on posts and Reels.
• General activity patterns and optional AI-generated interest summaries.

For someone interested in a partner’s online connections, the most relevant information is the list of newly followed accounts.

Rather than guessing from Instagram’s ordering, users can examine changes recorded during a particular week or month.

However, these reports do not reveal the exact moment a follow happened or explain why someone followed an account.

Pricing and Limitations

Snoopreport’s Personal plan costs $4.99 per month and covers two public Instagram accounts.

Larger plans cost $14.99 for ten accounts or $44.99 for 100. Retrospective reports are available separately at $1.19 per account per week.

The company also acknowledges incomplete data coverage, stating that reports may capture up to 75% of an account’s public actions.

It cannot access private accounts, messages, story views, or hidden interactions.

Best for: Users who need a structured record of observable follow changes across several weeks rather than a one-time snapshot.

Option 3: DolphinRadar and Its Recent Follow Tracker

DolphinRadar is another service offering Instagram activity tracking, including recent follows and unfollows.

Like Snoopreport, it focuses on public account information and does not require access to the tracked person’s Instagram login.

DolphinRadar’s Recent Follow Tracker establishes an initial Following list and looks for newly detected accounts in subsequent observations.

The company explains that its displayed timestamps indicate when an account first appeared in its results, not necessarily when the person followed it on Instagram.

This distinction is important.

If a username appears in a new report, that doesn’t always establish that the follow happened at that precise time.

DolphinRadar also offers wider Instagram analysis features, including interest-related insights and story tools through other products.

Pricing and Limitations

DolphinRadar’s dedicated Recent Follow Tracker costs $6 per month on a monthly plan, with an annual option starting at $4.16 per month. Unlike its standard Social Insights subscription, which starts at $4.49 per month for one tracked account, the Recent Follow Tracker offers unlimited account searches. This makes it a different pricing model from Snoopreport, which starts at $4.99 per month for tracking two public accounts.

Best for: Users who want a dedicated recent-follow tool and may also be interested in additional Instagram analysis features.

A Recent Follow tracker is most useful when the question involves changes over time, rather than simply checking whether one connection exists.

However, neither paid service provides a complete or infallible history.

What His Recent Follows Actually Mean

Finding an unfamiliar account can provoke uncomfortable questions, especially when trust in a relationship already feels uncertain.

But the meaning of a follow is rarely obvious.

Someone might follow a colleague, a fitness instructor, a musician, or an old school friend. Instagram recommendations can also introduce accounts that have no personal connection to the person following them.

A new connection does not establish romantic interest, private communication, or infidelity.

There is also a difference between obtaining information and interpreting it fairly.

The American Psychological Association has discussed how checking partners’ social media and experiencing jealousy can be associated with relationship dissatisfaction.

Tracking may answer a factual question, but it does not necessarily resolve the concern behind it.

If a particular account makes you uncomfortable, a direct conversation about expectations, boundaries, and online behavior may provide more useful answers than additional monitoring.

When Is Using an Instagram Tracker Worth It?

Before paying, consider what you actually want to know.

If you’re simply curious whether your boyfriend follows a particular person, checking his visible Following list is usually enough.

If you’re trying to establish when an account appeared, manual comparisons can provide an approximate observation window.

For ongoing research into publicly observable activity, a tool such as Snoopreport or DolphinRadar can organize information more conveniently.

But using a tracker repeatedly to search for signs of wrongdoing may become counterproductive when the real issue is trust.

A Recent Follow report can identify an observed connection. It cannot determine whether that connection is meaningful.

Final Verdict: Which Instagram Tracking Method Is Best?

There is no single solution for every situation.

Instagram’s built-in features are free and useful for checking current connections. Manual tracking can reveal some changes, but it becomes difficult to maintain.

DolphinRadar offers dedicated following updates and additional Instagram monitoring products.

Snoopreport is a practical option for users who want weekly or monthly records of likes, follows, and unfollows from public accounts, with transparent entry-level pricing.

The most important limitation applies to every option: none can tell you why your partner followed someone.

If you’re considering a Recent Follow tracker, use the information as context rather than evidence of someone’s intentions.

Ultimately, knowing who your partner follows may satisfy curiosity. Understanding what those connections mean to your relationship usually requires something technology cannot replace: an honest conversation.

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By Diego Hernandez-Saavedra and Yi-Heng (Hank) Huang

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Previously Published on theconversation.com with Creative Commons License

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By Hannah Docter-Loeb

When the wind drops or clouds block the sun, Europe’s electricity system needs other sources of energy that can respond to changing demand. Hydropower can play an important role here. Hydropower plants can increase or lower output as demand shifts, while some can store water to generate electricity later, when it is needed most.

For Alkiviadis Tromaras, a manufacturing and mechanical engineer and researcher at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) in Greece, making the most of hydropower’s flexibility is not simply a matter of producing as much power as possible. It is about skillfully balancing many different variables.

Operators must balance changing water levels, weather forecasts, equipment maintenance and environmental requirements, including managing water conditions that can affect aquatic life.

Tromaras led a three-year EU-funded research project called Di-Hydro that developed AI and digital technologies to help plants make better operating decisions while taking environmental constraints into account.

“We want to make hydropower plants smarter, more digitised and more flexible,” he said.

Why hydropower matters

Hydropower is already an important part of Europe’s renewable electricity mix. In 2025, it was the EU’s third-largest source of renewable electricity after wind and solar, accounting for 25.9% of renewable electricity generation, according to Eurostat.

In her State of the Union speech on 16 September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for Europe to “double down on our affordable, homegrown, clean energy” and to “develop storage.” Hydropower is well placed to answer both calls, offering the flexibility and storage needed to integrate variable sources such as wind and solar into the electricity system.

“

We want to make hydropower plants smarter, more digitised and more flexible.

But hydropower faces its own challenges. The water that powers the plants is becoming harder to predict. Climate change is altering rainfall and snowmelt patterns, and increasing the risk of both droughts and floods.

“In general, the amount of water may be the same, but it is distributed in a different way across the year,” said Nicola Crippa, a product manager for hydropower optimisation software at Italian firm MAS Consulting.

This makes accurate forecasting increasingly important. Knowing how much water is likely to arrive – and when – can help operators decide when to generate electricity and when to conserve water for later.

“It allows us to produce energy when it’s more needed, and cover the load demand in the hours of the day when more energy is required,” Crippa said.

Hydropower must also operate within environmental limits. Its effects on wildlife, river systems and water conditions are already addressed by EU environmental legislation, making it important to understand what is happening in and around a plant.

Rehearsing decisions digitally

One way researchers are tackling these challenges is by creating a digital version of a hydropower plant known as a digital twin.

The virtual model can be fed with information from the real plant and used to simulate different situations. Machine learning algorithms can then help identify patterns and predict what might happen under different weather, water flow or operating conditions.

“They offer information to the user – the hydropower operator – and allow them to run different scenarios in a risk-free digital environment,” said Tromaras. “You can leverage the information that every tool is able to produce, so in the end it allows you to take more informed decisions.”

The idea is not to replace the people running the plants. Instead, the digital tools can give operators a better picture of what may lie ahead, allowing them to compare different options before making a decision.

For example, if a large amount of water is expected to arrive, or if the coming months are likely to be unusually dry, operators can modify how they run the plant in response.

According to Tromaras, testing showed that the decision-making platform could produce more efficient operating decisions, while also considering environmental constraints and regulations.

Sensors for water and machinery monitoring

The researchers also developed sensors that can provide a more detailed picture of conditions around a hydropower plant.

Some monitor water quality and environmental conditions, including dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity, temperature, ammonia, algae and E. coli. Changes in any of these can signal problems for life in the water.

“All of these parameters can affect aquatic organisms, so it can give an ‘early warning’ of what is happening in the reservoir,” said Tromaras.

The researchers combined sensor readings with historical information to develop systems for monitoring water quality upstream and downstream of hydropower plants. The aim is to give operators a clearer picture of environmental conditions and help anticipate changes.

“

It will take a lot of effort to digitise all the systems, but it needs to be done.

Other sensors turn their attention to the machinery itself. Wireless devices can continuously monitor factors such as acoustic emission, vibration, pressure and temperature, helping to identify early signs of wear or damage.

That could allow maintenance to be carried out before a small problem becomes a major failure, potentially reducing downtime and helping plants operate more reliably.

These approaches were tested in different settings, including hydropower facilities in Greece, Italy and Serbia. The sites allowed researchers to explore different challenges, from structural and machinery monitoring to water quality and water flow forecasting.

Making old plants smarter

One of the challenges is that Europe’s hydropower fleet is far from uniform. Plants vary considerably in their age, technology and existing level of digitalisation.

“The digitisation level across Europe is very different,” said Crippa. “It will take a lot of effort to digitise all the systems, but it needs to be done.”

That is why the researchers have focused on tools that can be adapted to existing hydropower plants rather than assuming every facility can start from the same technological base.

Bringing together researchers, technology developers and hydropower operators was also important, said Tromaras, because it allowed the digital tools to be developed and tested against real-world needs.

“Bringing all of these partners together from the different countries was very important because we just have more expertise together,” he said.

The work, which ran until September 2026, has now reached the point where the researchers are looking beyond the initial test sites and seeking further opportunities to put the tools into practice.

The wider goal is not to change what hydropower does, but to help it respond more intelligently to a changing energy system – while keeping an eye on the rivers and ecosystems on which it depends.

As wind and solar take up a growing share of Europe’s electricity mix, that ability to balance power, water and nature could become increasingly important.

Research in this article was funded by the EU’s Horizon Programme. The views of the interviewees don’t necessarily reflect those of the European Commission. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.

—

This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation magazine with Creative Commons Attribution

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Next week, Blizzard will release a brand new World of Warcraft. But it’s not an expansion. World of Warcraft: Forever is a new pillar—standing alongside the retail and Classic versions, attempting to answer a question the community has been asking for years: what would it look like if Classic weren’t a frozen specimen, but a continuously growing “Year One Azeroth”?

The beta will launch globally on November 4, 2026, at 3 PM Pacific Time. Your existing World of Warcraft subscription or game time will be sufficient; no additional “base edition” purchase is required. However, what truly made players treat it like the live version even during the beta phase was its sheer amount of content: nine new dungeons, two new raids, three new zones, over 1000 new quests, a brand-new playable race, the Celestial Elves, and race-class combinations never before seen in the original game. In the words of executive producer Holly Londale, the beta’s reception was “sparkling,” but she dared not call it “Lightning” for fear of bad luck.

The beta version is already much bigger than a beta version

When Clay Stone, the associate production director, said those words on the BlizzCon stage, his voice carried a lingering sense of shock: “We may never again have the chance to stand on the BlizzCon stage, announce a brand new World of Warcraft, and receive this kind of response.”

Londale told GamesRadar that the idea for Forever had been brewing for “quite a long time.” The community wanted “Classic+”, and Blizzard listened, collected data, and turned it into a project they themselves hadn’t fully anticipated. The population cap on the test servers was increased multiple times, and a public stress test was conducted, but even so, “every day went by, we thought, okay, things should calm down now—but it just got bigger.”

Stone added a very practical point: “From an operations and management perspective, you certainly hope that players treat the beta version as the full version, but you don’t even dare to dream that it will actually happen. But our players did.”

This means that November 4th won’t be a quiet “new server launch.” It’s more like releasing a floodgate that’s already full. If you plan to play, the server load, the final fine-tuning of the leveling pacing from 1 to 60, and the back-and-forth between the developers and the community regarding racial skills and traits will all directly impact your experience in the first few weeks.

Controller support: A signal more important than “convenience”

Forever is the first version of World of Warcraft to support gamepads natively. It’s not just a “usable” version that relies on plugins; the official version features a gamepad-oriented interface, a dedicated action bar, and a complete input layer.

In the interview, Londale placed this decision within a larger framework: the goal is to make WoW “where you want to play; and at some point, with whatever you want to play.” Given the context of the Xbox Helix discussions, controller support is clearly more than just a convenience for living room players—it’s Blizzard laying the first step towards a more flexible platform future.

But for the average player, the most direct conclusion is simple: Forever’s controls are not based on the same logic as the retail version or Classic. If you plan to use a controller for your first run, it’s best to build muscle memory before November 4th, rather than figuring out the controls after entering your first dungeon.

Forever’s gold rules are completely different from what you’re familiar with in WoW

This is where many returning players are most likely to come with incorrect expectations.

Forever does not have WoW Tokens, paid tier progression, and GDKP is explicitly prohibited. Blizzard demonstrated its strong stance against RMT during the testing phase: over 2100 buyer accounts were banned, and approximately 1600 seller or bot accounts were dealt with. In other words, Forever’s economy is not an extension of the “token-anchored + gold-flowing system of the live servers,” but rather a system strongly tied to gold and labor time.

This doesn’t mean gold is unimportant. Quite the opposite: 100 gold for a level 40 Apprentice Riding skill and 1000 gold for a level 60 Proficient Riding skill. Add to that profession materials, raid consumables, and auction house transactions, and gold becomes a real constraint on decision-making at every stage from level 1 to 60. However, Forever’s gold acquisition logic leans more towards “earning income incidentally while leveling up”—mining, herbalism, and skinning follow the questline, rather than specifically stopping to farm gold. Low-level materials are in high demand for profession leveling during the initial launch period; a single piece of ore or a stack of herbs often fetches a higher price per unit on the auction house than after grinding for hours at max level.

How should WoW Gold and third-party services be integrated into this framework?

If you found this article because you’re considering buying gold in WoW, it’s important to clarify: Blizzard’s economic rules mean that the risks of buying gold are on a completely different level compared to the official release. Blizzard has explicitly included buyers in their crackdown, and the ban data from the testing phase demonstrates the strength of their enforcement. The safest sources of gold remain in-game gathering, crafting, and auction house pricing – especially in the first few weeks after launch, when the profit margins for low-level materials are often unexpectedly high.

However, the reality is that some people will inevitably face the choice of “not having enough time, but still wanting to keep up with their friends’ progress” at some point. If you ultimately decide to treat third-party sellers as an option that you need to at least thoroughly research, rather than an overlooked blind spot, then “Buy WoW gold at the MMOEXP online store” is one of the most frequently mentioned references in the player community. MMOEXP has a dedicated WoW Forever Gold page, categorized by server, faction, and quantity. It has accumulated a large number of reviews on Trustpilot, supports 24/7 customer service and order tracking, and delivery windows are usually marked in minutes. Its role is not a “security guarantee”—under Forever’s rules, no third party can give you such a guarantee—but rather to provide you with at least a relatively transparent starting point where prices and processes can be compared horizontally before making a decision.

In other words: focus on playing seriously first, and earn your first earnings from riding skills through data collection and professional expertise. If you really need to consult third-party resources, treat MMOEXP as the first page you should open for comparison, rather than randomly clicking on the first pop-up link in a search engine.

Forever is not meant to replace anyone

When asked in an interview whether the player community would split, Clay Stone answered frankly: “We don’t know what the future holds, but we’re excited to see how players move. Some players will love where they are now, and some will eventually find Forever. It’s going to be an interesting journey.”

This attitude itself clarifies Forever’s positioning: it’s not a replacement for the retail version, nor is it a modified version of Classic. It’s a parallel “Year Zero Azeroth,” with its own independent content pacing, economic rules, and gameplay. Your existing subscription can access it, but once inside, you’ll be facing a world where you need to relearn the rules.

After November 4th, an additional entrance will be added to Azeroth. If you plan to go there, think about two things first: how your level 1-60 path overlaps with gathering, and whether your expectations for WoW gold align with Forever’s economic design. The rest is up to that thing that’s already proven in the beta – it really made many people want to play World of Warcraft again

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This content is brought to you by James Oliver.
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“If you believe it, you can achieve it” is nonsense. Reality always wins. Belief’s power shows up in what it does to you.

Beliefs shape:

• What you see.
• What you feel.
• What you do.

Successful leaders shape belief.

#1. Belief Directs Attention

What you believe shapes what you see.

Leaders who believe people are lazy notice every mistake.

Leaders who believe people can grow notice potential.

A team that believes leadership doesn’t care sees every oversight as proof.

#2. Belief Shapes Emotion

Expectations create emotion.

You rise when you believe success is possible.

When you believe failure is inevitable, setbacks validate negativity.

The same situation feels different because belief changes anticipation.

#3. Belief Energizes Action

Knowledge isn’t enough. You can know exactly what to do and still fail to act.

People act when they believe effort matters. Employees pull back when they believe nothing will change.

Leaders build resilient teams by providing convincing reasons to keep going.

10 Leadership Beliefs

1. People can grow.
2. Curiosity builds confidence.
3. Progress beats perfection.
4. Accountability demonstrates respect.
5. Feedback fuels improvement.
6. Assumptions should be challenged.
7. Trust grows through consistency.
8. Success is a team activity.
9. Problems create opportunities.
10. Purpose energizes persistence.

Some beliefs imprison. Others liberate. Choose beliefs that strengthen and inspire action.

What beliefs hold leaders back?

What belief would make you a better leader today?

How to Believe in People – Leadership Freak

This post is inspired by Nir Eyal’s book, Beyond Belief.

—

Previously Published on leadershipfreak with Creative Commons License

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By Tara Moroz

“Science-backed.” “Clinically proven.” “Clinically studied.”

I see phrases like these constantly in advertising for supplements and other consumer health products. They are meant to sound reassuring because they seem to answer an important question before we even ask it: Does this product actually work?

In Canada, companies cannot simply say whatever they want. Health Canada’s current advertising-policy page points advertisers to the Guidelines for Consumer Advertising of Health Products. Those guidelines say therapeutic claims must stay within a product’s authorized Terms of Market Authorization, and that statistics, journal articles and study results must be consistent with – and not expand – the product’s Terms of Market Authorization.

The Competition Bureau’s current guidance on performance claims adds another layer. Claims about a product’s performance or effectiveness must be based on an “adequate and proper” test conducted before the claim is made, and the testing must support the general impression created by the marketing.

So, there are rules. Yet there can still be a gap between a claim being supportable and a consumer understanding what evidence supports it.

Consider Elevate, a natural health product sold in Canada by Blue Star Nutraceuticals. On the company’s Canadian product page, Blue Star says the product’s key ingredients have been “scientifically shown” to support several outcomes, including a 25 per cent increase in memory quotient, 54 per cent preservation of reaction time and 41 per cent reduction in memory errors. Elsewhere on the page, it says every ingredient is “backed by science;” describes Elevate’s ingredients as “backed by clinical studies;” and labels them “Science Backed Ingredients.” The studies cited for the three numerical claims concern Huperzine A or Ginkgo biloba rather than the finished Elevate formulation.

The company’s own technical white paper, linked directly from its product page, makes that distinction explicit. It says the document summarizes “ingredient-specific evidence” supporting the product’s licensed uses and that the mechanisms described “do not imply clinical outcomes for the finished product.”

Elevate is also an authorized natural health product. Health Canada’s Licensed Natural Health Products Database lists Natural Product Number (NPN) 80109809 as active and marketed, with authorized uses including helping to enhance cognitive function in adults, helping to enhance memory in adults and helping to support peripheral circulation.

None of this establishes that Elevate’s advertising is non-compliant, and I am not suggesting that it is. The example illustrates a different problem: “science-backed” can sit on top of several very different kinds of evidence.

A plausible mechanism can help explain how something might work. But an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality framework on mechanistic evidence separates mechanistic knowledge from direct evidence linking an intervention to a clinical outcome. Animal evidence can take us another step, but it still has important limitations. A systematic scoping review of animal-to-human translation found wide variation in how well animal findings translated to humans. In practical terms, a result in animals does not by itself tell us whether the same benefit will occur in people.

Even human studies do not all answer the same question. A BMJ meta-epidemiological study found that randomized trials using surrogate primary outcomes reported larger treatment effects, on average, than trials using final patient-relevant outcomes. And a meta-epidemiological study of how evidence changes after first trials found that results often changed as more evidence accumulated; large initial effects were especially likely to diminish.

Who funded the research matters, too. A Cochrane systematic review of industry sponsorship covering drug and medical-device research found that industry-sponsored studies were more likely to report favourable efficacy results and favourable conclusions. That review was not about wellness products specifically, so it cannot tell us whether the same association applies in this market, or how large it might be. But it does show why funding source is relevant when deciding how much confidence to place in evidence used to market a product.

Canada’s natural health product system itself recognizes that evidence is not one-size-fits-all. Health Canada’s guidance for natural health products making modern health claims says evidence requirements vary with the proposed claim and the product’s risk profile: higher-risk, higher-level claims require stronger and more certain evidence, while lower-risk claims can be supported by lower-level or less certain efficacy evidence when there is high certainty about safety.

Obtaining an NPN is meaningful. Health Canada says a natural health product must be safe, effective and of high quality to be licensed, and that an NPN means the product has been authorized for sale and is safe and effective when used according to the instructions on its label. But an NPN beside “science-backed” advertising still does not tell a consumer whether the evidence being highlighted came from the finished product, an ingredient, one study or a larger body of research – or who funded it.

That transparency question especially matters online. Health Canada’s current preclearance page says independent preclearance of health-product advertising remains voluntary for industry, although Health Canada strongly recommends it. Industry remains responsible for meeting federal advertising requirements.

The Canadian Public Health Association’s October 2026 position statement on digital platforms and online harm adds a broader public-health perspective. It says misleading marketing content can promote ineffective or harmful products, with potential consequences including financial loss, delayed or unsafe treatment and increased health-system costs. CPHA also calls for “defined standards for advertising on online platforms.”

CPHA describes digital literacy as essential but cautions that foregrounding it as a policy solution can deflect public attention and platform accountability. That principle is relevant here. Canadians can ask whether the finished product was studied, whether the outcome mattered, who funded the research and whether the finding has been independently replicated. But expecting every consumer to reconstruct an evidence hierarchy while scrolling through an advertisement is asking a lot.

A useful next step is greater transparency. When health-product advertising prominently invokes science, it should make clearer what kind of evidence is being invoked. If the supporting studies concern individual ingredients rather than the finished product, that distinction should be prominent. Digital promotion of licensed natural health products could make the NPN and authorized Health Canada claims easy to access where the marketing claim appears.

Those are policy options, not an argument that every wellness product should be regulated like a prescription medicine.

The underlying principle is simpler: scientific language should not carry more certainty than the evidence itself.

If a company wants to borrow the authority of science to sell a health product, consumers should be able to see what kind of science they are being asked to trust.

—

Previously Published on healthydebate.ca with Creative Commons License

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By Emily Payne, Sentient Media

The crops we feed farm animals like soy and corn are a big part of the meat industry’s massive environmental footprint. Producing these crops accounts for more than two-thirds of agricultural land use, fertilizer-driven pollution and a large share of related greenhouse gas emissions. But another, often-overlooked part of animal feed hides farther up the supply chain — in the mines that supply minerals to boost farm animal diets.

When we factor in the environmental costs of sourcing these minerals, both emissions and also harms to wildlife and biodiversity, meat’s impact is even greater. And it’s not just meat, according to researchers, it’s also fish, dairy and other animal-sourced foods.

A new study in Nature analyzed data from 109 peer-reviewed life cycle assessments for farm animals. These are basically estimates of the environmental footprints of farmed animals over their entire lifecycle. The authors looked at literature that included cattle, pigs, chickens, fish and crustaceans and found that 64% of these assessments excluded minerals entirely. Only one-eighth of studies accurately modeled the impact of mineral supplements used.

“We think a lot about the biotic ingredients, the wheat or maize or forage fish, whatever it is,” study author Beth Penrose tells Sentient. Penrose is an associate professor of pastoral systems and sustainability at Charles Darwin University in Australia. “Quite rightly so, because that’s a large percentage of a lot of these kinds of feeds, but we don’t really think about the mineral bit.”

The Impacts of Minerals Are Often Left Out

Producers use minerals to help optimize farm animal growth and productivity, but they also play a critical role in health and welfare. Feed crops don’t always provide animals with the nutrition they need, and supplements help fill the gaps: calcium and phosphorus to build and maintain bones; potassium, sodium and magnesium for muscles and disease prevention; manganese for metabolic support and zinc, copper, selenium and iron for immune defense.

These supplements typically make up small amounts of feed, less than 5% for salmon and less than 3% for cattle. While not all animal agriculture systems use supplements, the authors note that even small amounts of minerals added to feeds for billions of farm animals worldwide can add up to millions of tons consumed per year — a potentially significant blind spot in current environmental assessments.

The omission of minerals from lifecycle assessments is even more apparent when broken down by species: 84% of fish and crustacean studies omitted mineral supplements, compared to 73% for cattle, 50% for chicken and 48% for pigs.

Penrose explains that this disparity is likely because farmed fish are given feed pellets with proprietary mineral formulations, while livestock are typically fed direct mineral supplements. This makes it more difficult for researchers to model their impact: “in that industry, the balance of micronutrient stuff is the secret sauce in a way that’s not true for pigs and cattle.”

For example, in 2020, Norwegian salmon were fed almost 2 million metric tons of feed. Assuming phosphorus makes up 0.94% of feed, the authors estimate associated emissions could reach 163,700 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent — equal to more than 400 million miles driven by an average gas-powered car.

The authors also note that minerals in aquaculture feed are particularly important to investigate, because companies are increasing levels as they transition away from fishmeal and oil toward plant-based feed. Climate change may also play a role: As ocean temperatures rise, farmed fish may need more supplementation to maintain healthy mineral levels.

A Hidden Supply Chain

Mining is responsible for a range of health and environmental impacts. Mines threaten thousands of endangered species globally and are linked to severe air pollution, deforestation, water depletion and contamination and environmental damage from waste-management failures.

But Penrose says connecting those impacts to animal feed is challenging.

Many feed companies don’t know where and how the minerals they purchase are sourced. This likely explains why, among the 36.5% of life cycle assessments that accounted for mineral supplements, two-thirds used a proxy mineral in their calculations, such as calcium carbonate, rather than modeling the impact of specific feed formulas.

But the precise impacts of minerals vary depending on factors like mining methods, geology, chemicals used for extraction, processing requirements and the distance they travel to the end customer. While a proxy is better than ignoring minerals altogether, Penrose says, in terms of sustainability, “it makes much more difference about where you get it from than what you’re actually buying.”

Minerals also tend to have longer supply chains: Producers buy feed from feed companies, which buy minerals from mineral companies, which buy minerals from mining companies. And “the longer chain you have, the less easy it is to follow these things through for the information to flow,” Penrose explains.

The Limits of Life Cycle Assessments

Even if the information were available, Marty Matlock, a professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of Arkansas, suspects many life cycle assessments omit minerals because of what’s called the 1% rule, a commonly used cutoff for the scope of a life cycle assessment. If the material makes up less than 1% of the product, analysts typically exclude it from the analysis.

“The 1% rule is abused all the time. Sure, it may be below 1% for the particular system being analyzed, but cumulatively, it’s significant,” Matlock tells Sentient. He thinks many of the studied life cycle assessments “missed impacts because of assumptions made in their methodologies.”

What Extraction Costs

Mining is deeply embedded in the global agricultural system: Phosphorus and potassium are key ingredients in the estimated $290 billion commercial fertilizer industry, in addition to minerals in feed additives.

“When it comes down to it, we dig stuff up out of the ground and we either burn it or you eat it. That’s what we do. We’ve been doing this for 10,000-plus years,” says Matlock. “Ain’t nothing free in this world;” this is just part of the “cost” of animal agriculture, he says.

Given their importance to both animal health and welfare and global food security, Matlock and Penrose emphasize that in our current global food system, it’s not possible to end mining for these minerals completely. But standardization and better information can help weigh the costs and benefits of feeding a growing population.

“If we’re going to provide a nutritious diet for 10 billion people without destroying the biosphere, eating the planet, we are going to have to understand where those true costs are,” says Matlock.

More information from the mining companies could have positive ripple effects.

For example, if mining companies shared geographically specific information about the minerals they source, this could enter independent databases like Ecoinvent, which is commonly used to build life cycle assessments. According to Penrose, finding the information is “hard, but not impossible,” and feed companies could help.

“The feed industry is massive, absolutely massive,” says Penrose. “They actually have a really big lever that they can pull to be able to demand better.”

This article originally appeared in Sentient at https://sentientmedia.org/the-hidden-mining-cost-of-meat-and-seafood/.

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Buying glasses can be confusing, and you might have a lot of questions:

Does this pair make my head look weird?  

How come none of them seem to fit right?  

Why does it cost so much to use my own eyeballs?

In this guide, I’ll discuss finding the right style of glasses for your face shape, how to shop for glasses, and how to save money on eyewear.

Considerations When Buying Men’s Eyewear

Anyone can develop a need for corrective lenses, regardless of gender. However, some eyewear-buying issues are more likely to affect men:

• Style advice. Eyewear fashion guides are often geared toward women. While men can certainly find advice on choosing glasses, there tends to be less style-focused content specifically for men.
  • If you’re on the lookout for more style advice, this guide to men’s glasses frames goes through some trendy styles.
• Women can have sizing issues, too, but men may be more likely to encounter frames that feel too tight or become stretched out with regular wear.
• Anyone who plays high-impact sports or works in a physically demanding job may be harder on their glasses. These activities are more common among men, which can make durability an important consideration when choosing frames.

How to Get the Right Size of Glasses

Let’s start with finding the correct size of glasses for your head. Here are several ways you might identify your size:

• If you already have a pair of glasses that fits you perfectly, the easiest solution is to look on the temple arms. The size should be printed there.
• If you haven’t found a pair that fits well, you can either try different pairs in a brick-and-mortar store until you land on the right size, or measure your head.
• Some stores offer to measure your head for you. If not, you can do it yourself at home with a tape measure.

The first step in measuring your own head is checking for frame width, as this is a common area of concern for poorly fitting glasses. Stretch the tape measure or hold a ruler across your face, right below your eyes, to get your frame width.

Next, get your bridge width by measuring the bridge of the nose.

Finally, measure the length along the side of your head, right about the ear, for your temple length.

Pro tip: Always check your measurements by trying on a few pairs in the size you’ve identified to ensure they’re comfortable.

Finding the Right Glasses for Your Face Shape

Once you’ve narrowed down the size of frames you need, you’ll probably find yourself staring at a bunch of racks of glasses. If you’re shopping online, you might be looking at a page offering a large selection or asking you to choose a glasses shape.

What to do? First, start with this guide to finding the right style of glasses for your face shape:

Round face

If your face has smoother angles, and your forehead, cheekbones, and jaw are wider, you probably have a round face. This face type goes well with the clean lines of rectangular or square glasses. Round or rimless lenses generally don’t work as well for round faces.

Oval face

These faces are broader at the cheekbones, but narrower at the forehead and jaw. A number of styles work well for this face type, but the frames should be wider than the broadest part of the face (usually the middle). You might consider a geometric shape, but avoid oversized glasses.

Square face

Square faces are roughly equal in size from top to bottom, with strong angles and solid jawlines. Round or oval lenses do a great job balancing the face’s angles.

Heart-shaped face

Defined by a wider forehead and cheekbones and a narrower chin, this face type benefits from frames that are slightly wider than the forehead. Bottom-heavy lenses are also a great idea; you might consider classic aviator glasses in a modern update.

Diamond faces

This type of face has wide cheekbones with a narrower chin and forehead. It differs from an oval face with sharper angles instead of a smoother, curved look. Like square faces, diamond ones benefit from round or oval lenses. Or, try a style with a strong browline to emphasize the upper part of your face.

Top Looks by Face Shape

Here are some of my top picks for the face shapes listed above.

Round Face: Oakley AIRDROP OX8046

These rectangular frames are ideal for adding definition to a round face. AIRDROP also gets great reviews for comfort, and it offers multiple size options, accommodating frame widths of up to 59mm.

Oval Face: Prada PR 14WV

These Prada spectacles for men feature a strong bridge in a medium frame to provide balance for an oval face.

Square Face: Ray-Ban RX3447V

The Ray-Ban round metal RX3447V eyeglasses​ will help soften the angles of a square face.

The frames come in multiple color options, from a classic black to a more eye-catching gold.

Heart-Shaped Face: John Varvatos VJV195

For a new take on the aviator style, check out the VJV195 model. The large, bottom-heavy lenses complement heart-shaped faces in a modern geometric shape, joined by the classic double bridge.

Diamond Face: Nike 8138

I like the gentle curves of the lenses and strong browline for diamond faces. They also have a sleek look that draws the eye upward and emphasizes the forehead.

FAQs

I have a job with a lot of physical activity and need a durable pair of frames. What should I look for?

Frames made from titanium or Flexon memory metal tend to be more durable. As for brands, Ray-Ban and Oakley are two that come up a lot in conversations about durable glasses. You might consider the Ray-Ban RX8265V JACK TITANIUM, the Ray-Ban RX8773D, or Oakley Metal Plate OX5038.

How can I find more affordable eyewear? 

Shop around, especially online. Check various online eyewear retailers, such as EZContacts. You can often find affordable frames from big-name brands at this retailer.

You may also be able to use your vision insurance or HSA funds to pay for eyewear. Check your plan details to see what’s covered.

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By Liz Carey

As more rural hospitals close and access to healthcare clinics and physicians gets harder for rural residents, researchers in Duluth, Minnesota, are looking at the impact transportation has on rural healthcare.

At the University of Minnesota Duluth, researchers and faculty members are working with the Arrowhead Regional Development Commission to find ways to sustain and re-imagine healthcare transportation. Arrowhead is a development organization serving northeastern Minnesota, specifically the counties of Aitkin, Carlton, Cook, Itasca, Koochiching, Lake and St. Louis. The goal of the organization is to bring together governments and citizens to identify regional needs and solve problems.

For Beverly Sidlo-Tolliver, principal planner at Arrowhead, the need to look into the issue came when she was working in healthcare. While she was attending a workshop on dialysis, the issue of transportation came up. Just two weeks prior, one of the medical transport companies had pulled out of the Arrowhead region of the state, she said.

“What really stuck out was that there wasn’t any process established, from the state, dictating that when these providers pulled out, that there were certain steps they needed to take to make sure that the patients scheduled [for dialysis] still had a ride,” Sidlo-Tolliver said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.

“They pulled out and people were scrambling. There were at least two people who did miss their dialysis that was scheduled with this provider and ended up hospitalized,” she said. “That really revealed to me the need to really dig into the system in place.”

Her efforts to determine how to change the system were met with requests to come up with numbers about how many people it was affecting.

Working with Empowering Small Minnesota Communities to research the issue, David Beard, a professor and researcher at UMD, joined Sidlo-Tolliver to interview a wide range of people in rural communities in their region over the past year to get insight into what the issue is and how to fix it.

The solution for rural residents is not as simple as hiring a driver, or getting volunteers to drive patients to the hospital and back, they said.

“People don’t understand it’s not like it is in Duluth where you can call a cab or an Uber,” Beard said. “In some cases, getting to an appointment and back is a day-long project.”

“We’ll have people from small towns who have a medical crisis, they’re brought to Duluth; sometimes from as far away as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” Beard said. By car, Duluth is nearly two hours west of that state line. “They have to figure out how to get home. There are commercial providers that can do that, but the costs are high, the arrangements are complicated, and the Medicaid and the state regulatory systems do everything they can to make it economically challenging.”

Additionally, lack of transportation can keep patients from getting follow-up care or getting routine testing. Skipping dialysis can exacerbate chronic conditions, Beard noted as an example.

“Miss your dialysis appointment, and then two days later, you’re in the hospital,” he said. “Or miss your annual colonoscopy, and you miss early detection on something that becomes life-threatening later. We never want someone to believe that their inability to get a ride could be a contributing factor in death.”

It’s an issue that impacts the profitability of hospitals themselves, Beard said.

“It’s been verified that it takes, on average, eight minutes to reschedule every missed appointment,” he said. “There’s some research that looks at the drag that creates on hospitals. How many missed appointments times eight minutes per appointment? How much money is lost in billable hours when people miss appointments and need to reschedule them?”

And as the patients sit in hospitals taking up beds and other resources waiting for someone to come pick them up, those are resources that can’t be used to treat other patients, another money loser for hospitals regardless of whether they are rural or urban, he said.

The problem is complex, Sidlo-Tolliver said. The people doing the driving need to be certified in order to have their time reimbursed by Medicare or Medicaid. The drivers need to be trained how to transfer a patient from a wheelchair to a car, or what to do if the patient has a medical emergency in transit.

“My research has been on creating consistent coordination and facilitation of the providers that provide this transportation in the region,” Sidlo-Tolliver said. “One of the things that is also an issue is the ‘unloaded miles.’ The unloaded miles is an issue when a provider is driving to pick up that individual. During that part of the trip, they are not reimbursed. So, they are unloaded, and then they get the person, now they are getting paid, and they drop them off. But when they return to their home city, that is unloaded miles. And Medicaid doesn’t pay for unloaded miles, so their reimbursement rate is not reflective at all to the (total) cost of that ride to the providers.”

Getting certifications to become a qualified medical-transport driver is extremely cumbersome, she said, requiring licensing from two separate state agencies, the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Transportation. That extra certification creates high barriers to entry, which decreases the number of people willing to provide those non-emergency rides.

The solution may be in changing the way healthcare providers view transportation, not as something that is the patient’s problem, but part of healthcare itself, Beard explained.

“Doctors envision transportation as the patient’s problem to solve, not an intrinsic part of how we envision the healthcare system,” Beard said. “What does it mean for the county or the state to imagine that offering transportation is part of their responsibilities, right? To not see transportation as an add-on outside the healthcare system, but to see providing non-emergency medical transportation as an intrinsic part of how we care for each other.”

Viewing the issue differently could help change not only awareness of the problem, but also help create solutions, he noted.

So far, after a year of interviews, the researchers are continuing to look into the problem and come up with possible solutions. A documentary created from the research is also on its way. But showing how many people need those rides is no longer a focus of the research, Sidlo-Tolliver said.

“As we went through this process, the focus maybe was better set at even the number of “one” is an issue,’” she said. “If one person is going to suffer, or possibly die, because they cannot access the healthcare they need due to this issue, that’s enough [to act].”

Regardless of whether it means providing five rides or 5,000 rides, Sidlo-Tolliver said, the people who use the transit are the main reason to provide the transportation services.

“Those people are people, and they deserve to access the things they need to live just as well as anyone who could operate a car,” she said.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 

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Look closely at the shattered glass of that vehicle in Mississippi and the twisted metal of that park bench in Ukraine. They are mirrors reflecting the ultimate cost of our collective silence.

We are drowning in a sea of contextless noise, and the cost of our cultural disorientation is being paid in the most horrific currency imaginable: the lives of our children. Whether in the war-torn landscape of Eastern Europe or the asphalt wasteland of an American retail parking lot, the machinery of unchecked power operates on the same terrifying fuel our absolute systemic apathy.

Just days ago, a Russian Shahed drone tore through a peaceful park in Nova Vodolaha, Ukraine, instantly killing an innocent 1-year-old girl named Anhelina as she sat in her stroller. Almost simultaneously, a political climate of unchecked disinformation continues to manifest in systemic failures that endanger vulnerable infants domestically.

Consider the harrowing parallels in Mississippi, where 1-year-old Kohen Wiley was shot and killed by law enforcement in a Walmart parking lot. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch recently released a terse statement declaring the officer’s fatal use of force “justified” and declining criminal charges.

In both cases, the state has insulated itself from accountability, leaving the public to parse the wreckage through a broken informational ecosystem.

The upcoming midterm elections are not a routine exercise in partisan loyalty; they are a direct referendum on accountability. If we continue to look away, if we fail to hold the architects of this chaos accountable at the ballot box, then the blood on those strollers belongs to us as well. We must demand absolute transparency, force the release of withheld evidence, and vote out the officials who tolerate the slaughter of the innocent.

The immediate reaction to both tragedies exposes a profound structural rot. As the images of a blood-stained Ukrainian stroller circulated on social media, President Donald Trump stood before reporters and brushed aside the ongoing slaughter.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Kohen Wiley’s death sparked by a chaotic police response to an alleged shoplifting call involving diapers and baby supplies. The online discourse rapidly devolved into victim-blaming. Commentators demanded to know if the mother had a receipt, treating the potential theft of basic necessities as an offense worthy of a summary death penalty for an infant.

This isn’t just a failure of diplomacy or local policing; it is a profound failure of basic media literacy that acts as a shield for institutional cruelty. We live in an era where the public square is curated by tech billionaires like Elon Musk, whose algorithmic structures actively deprioritize objective reality in favor of engagement-driven outrage and sanitized political narratives. When a platform elevates alternative facts and buries raw truth, it desensitizes the populace.

We saw this play out in real-time when the official state narrative claimed the driver tried to run officers over. Yet, the independent autopsy conducted by Dr. Roger Mitchell and released by civil rights attorney Ben Crump told a completely different story: Baby Kohen was killed by a shotgun wound to the torso that entered from the right side of the vehicle, not the front.

The bullet holes through the side passenger window physically shattered the state’s claim that officers were directly in the path of an accelerating car. Yet, because of our abysmal media literacy, a leaked and potentially curated version of the video footage was weaponized online by partisan outlets before the grieving family could even review it with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI).

We swipe past a murdered child to argue over edited video clips, completely unequipped to separate state propaganda and institutional narratives from human atrocity.

This curated chaos allows politicians and state actors to manufacture alternative realities entirely free of consequences.

On the international stage, the administration can diminish air defense support while allies wave away the mounting casualties. Domestically, the state protects its own, using bureaucratic delays to hide evidence while a media-illiterate public argues over property damage.

Our collective paralysis is reinforced by our own apathy at the polls. When we treat voting as an abstract exercise, we abdicate our oversight of the very systems that govern life and death. The politicians who cultivate this climate of chaos rely on a disengaged electorate. They count on the fact that the news cycle will move on, and that no one will demand real structural reform.

To break this cycle, we must direct our outrage toward explicit local accountability measures. We cannot allow local leadership to remain comfortable. Activists with the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency have been relentlessly pressing the Board of Aldermen during their bi-monthly meetings, but grass-roots anger must translate to structural consequences. We must demand the immediate, official public release of all unedited dashcam and store surveillance video.

More importantly, we must establish independent, civilian-led police oversight boards with subpoena power to strip the Mississippi Attorney General’s office of its ability to quietly rubber-stamp the killing of Black children.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously warned, “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” By allowing our screens to numb us into political paralysis, we are choosing the side of the oppressor.

We cannot separate the global tolerance for war crimes from the domestic tolerance for state-sanctioned violence against Black and brown children in our own neighborhoods. They are symptoms of the exact same disease: a society that has lost its moral compass because it can no longer distinguish a verified fact from a state-sponsored lie.

The upcoming midterm elections are not a routine exercise in partisan loyalty; they are a direct referendum on accountability. If we continue to look away, if we fail to hold the architects of this chaos accountable at the ballot box, then the blood on those strollers belongs to us as well. We must demand absolute transparency, force the release of withheld evidence, and vote out the officials who tolerate the slaughter of the innocent.

Look closely at the shattered glass of that vehicle in Mississippi and the twisted metal of that park bench in Ukraine. They are mirrors reflecting the ultimate cost of our collective silence.

If a system can gun down a one-year-old child over a box of diapers, or erase a toddler with a drone strike while the world bickers over the politics of the response, then the concept of human rights is an illusion. We have traded our empathy for algorithms and our outrage for convenience. Every time we walk into a voting booth and accept the status quo, or worse, skip the ballot entirely out of cynicism, we are signing the warrant for the next tragedy.

The universe does not judge us by our intent; it judges us by what we tolerate. And right now, our tolerance for the slaughter of infants is written in the ink of our own profound, unforgivable indifference.

If you believe in restoring truth to our public square and demand real accountability for those who foster this climate of violence, make your voice heard. Register, show up, and vote in the upcoming midterms to hold these leaders responsible.

Voter Registration & Accountability Action Kit

Take Action: Midterm Voter Resources & Accountability Tools

Don’t let apathy dictate the future. Use these resources to verify your status, check your ballot, and ensure your voice is counted in the upcoming midterm elections:

• Check Your Voter Status & Register: Visit Vote.org to check your current registration status, register to vote, or request an absentee ballot in less than two minutes.

• See What’s On Your Ballot: Use Ballotpedia to view a comprehensive breakdown of the local and federal candidates running in your specific district, including their legislative records on civil rights and institutional oversight.

• Track Local Police Accountability: Find out how to get involved with local grassroots oversight initiatives via the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) to help push for independent civilian boards in your community.
  

photo credit – AP

The post The Ghosts in the Stroller: How Algorithmic Apathy and Political Chaos Are Costing Infant Lives appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Sanjana Bhambhani

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Brooklyn native Terrell Eleby was 26 years old when he was convicted of a crime that he says he did not commit. He was at a game of cards with his then-wife Rosa Buie when the crime occurred, he says, and Buie was not called to testify at his trial.

Today, he’s in his 60s and has stage four cancer, but is still fighting his conviction from inside a maximum security prison in Wallkill, NY.

Eleby is one of over 50 people who wrote to New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations with their claims of innocence in the past couple of years, as part of an investigation into wrongful conviction reviews across the state. Some said they have waited over a decade to have their cases re-investigated by local or statewide conviction integrity units, departments housed within district attorneys’ offices that are tasked with evaluating wrongful conviction claims.

“It’s becoming quite obvious to me … that I will never receive a just and fair re-investigation,” one incarcerated individual wrote in a letter. “I’m left to pray for a miracle,” said another.

Most of the people who wrote to New York Focus and CJI, including Eleby, had legally represented themselves in the process of applying for conviction reviews. Eleby gathered the records from his case, but could not get hold of a transcript the court had lost and some documents the DA’s office denied him access to, he said. He submitted his application to the Brooklyn CIU in 2013. Ten years later, he received a one-page letter stating that his case was closed.

“No one has embraced my plea for justice,” Eleby wrote in his 2024 letter to New York Focus and CJI.

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn DA’s office said that they had not found “a shred of evidence” of Eleby’s innocence and that the Brooklyn CIU didn’t exist in 2013, even though reporting showed .that the Brooklyn CIU was formed in 2011, and its  first exoneration occurred in 2013.

This video brings Eleby’s letters and story to life, with the help of Greg Mingo, who served over 40 years in New York’s prison system himself before receiving clemency.

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The first message hit my phone almost a month after I left. After I walked away from a relationship that had long ceased to be what I so desperately believed and hoped it could be.

The day I walked out was pitch black. The mental image of her — the woman with whom I had spent six strange, turbulent years — felt unreal, at times terrifying.

What is hoovering? It’s not about love, and it’s certainly not about missing you. It’s an attempt to test control and top up emotional supply. It usually requires minimal time and energy on their part. A “like” here, a text there, just tossing a hook into the water to see if anything bites.

I knew with absolute certainty that I needed to sever all communication. Not to stroke my own ego or play games, but simply to allow my fried nervous system to settle and reconnect with myself. Not to mention navigating real-world chaos: changing jobs, fixing my car, and absorbing sudden extra costs.

The First Hooks

I was on a quiet walk around a local lake when my phone buzzed. Her message. After a month of total silence. And mine.

She wrote that she hoped I was doing well and sent warm regards to me and my two kids from a sunny Adriatic island. It was school break, and I knew her well enough to recognize this as her classic reset after weeks of working herself to the bone at 150%.

A few minutes later, another text arrived: “The dog says hi, too.” How cute.

The dog my children and I had poured our hearts into raising and training over the past four years.

At first, I couldn’t even process what was happening. Is this real, or am I dreaming?

All I knew was that I couldn’t respond. Mustn’t. In the world of someone who thrives on drama, any response is an invitation for a new complication.

That message felt like being struck across the face, only for the same person to invite you for coffee thirty minutes later, asking how you are. Zero logic. At least not in my world. But in hers, it was completely normal behavior.

Will he bite? she was likely wondering.

My response was nothing.

Escalation and Digital Ghosts

A month passed. Then came a polite request asking if I would dog-sit while she went on a trip. She even strategically offered to pay me for taking care of the animal. What a generous offer.

I politely declined.

Meanwhile, as I was still processing the wreckage of the last few years and wondering why I had tolerated things that now felt unimaginable, something bizarre happened right after New Year’s.

A few Google Photos albums were still shared between us, and I hadn’t bothered to delete them. One Tuesday evening, a notification popped up: She had added new photos to a shared album. Photos from an event three years ago.

She knew I would notice. The notification explicitly showed who, when, and what was added. Nothing else attached.

My reaction? Nothing.

I had my hands full navigating my new job and processing the trauma. The fog was slowly clearing, my feelings were settling, and the realization was taking root: I should have ended this relationship long ago. But insights arrive at their own pace, as fast as my consciousness could absorb them.

Yet, the testing wasn’t over.

Physical Reminders

One day, I arrived home to find a cardboard box sitting right outside my front door. Inside were a few trivial items left at her apartment — an old bag and a pair of shoes I had forgotten about.

A box at my doorstep was a quiet, uninvited reminder: “I know where you live. I still have access to you.”

My reaction? Nothing.

A few weeks later, a colleague at work whose office is just a few hundred meters away called to say she had something for me. My ex had dropped by her office for lunch (they were acquainted from before) and left some remaining items for her to pass on to me.

She could have easily dropped them off at my workplace directly, but she chose a middleman. Clever. Calculated.

My reaction? Nothing.

The Final Attempt and Digital Breadcrumbs

A year passed. I am doing better. Good.

I reached a milestone in my recovery where a day or two would go by without a single thought of her crossing my mind. For anyone deep in a trauma bond, that is huge progress.

Then, another text arrived. It looked like an apology. She was apologizing for accusing me — a year prior, as I was leaving — of taking some coat hangers from the apartment. Now, twelve months later, she realized I hadn’t taken them and wanted to apologize.

I stared at it for a few minutes and simply deleted the message.

That was my only reaction.

She had previously unfriended me on Facebook and disconnected on LinkedIn, which felt strange at first, but then I thought: Good, that’s fine. Until I noticed she was regularly watching my Facebook stories. Since we aren’t friends on the platform, she has to manually search for my profile to view them.

What does that tell me? After a full year?

Rinsing the Glass

I’ve come to realize something fundamental.

If drops of dye keep dripping into a glass, no amount of clean water you pour in will ever turn it clear as long as the source remains.

And I want clean water. I need clean water. that’s not ego.

It wasn’t easy. There were times my ego urged me to write back — to prove her wrong, to hold her accountable, to list everything she had done.

And another quiet voice wanted to explain things one last time, hoping that maybe now she would understand… maybe… something.

Thankfully, I did none of that. Deep down, I know that trying to rebuild a relationship that broke so fundamental is an illusion. If it failed that destructively the first time, a second attempt won’t magically be better.

The anger and resentment have mostly evaporated, transforming into fuel to do things differently, to forge a new path, and to validate myself from within.

I even feel occasional flashes of gratitude that this toxic relationship happened — which surprises me. But everything in life happens for a reason.

If you refuse to be a victim, learn the lesson, and use it for your growth, then it served its purpose.

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You step up to the counter and want a lot of protein. You do not want a 1,000 calorie nap afterward. Then the line moves, and you order on instinct.

That is how a “healthy” bowl goes wrong. A Chipotle burrito bowl runs from 420 to 910 calories, depending on what you stack inside.

I run a free Chipotle nutrition calculator, so I spend a lot of time inside this data. Below are the numbers that matter if you want a high protein Chipotle order. Every figure comes from the official Chipotle nutrition PDF (March 2025).

Why Most Guys Order Protein by Guesswork

Most men know they want protein. Few know how much their order delivers. The menu board lists names, not grams. The numbers sit in a PDF most people never open.

Guessing costs you in two ways. You may eat less protein than you think. Or you may buy extra calories you never wanted. A burrito tortilla and a regular order of chips alone add 860 calories.

A simple rule fixes this. Pick your protein first, then build everything else around it. Use this order at the counter:

1. Choose a bowl if you want to skip the tortilla.
2. Pick chicken, and double it if you train hard.
3. Add beans or rice based on your goal.
4. Choose a lower-sodium salsa.
5. Add fats on purpose, such as guacamole, not by accident.

Which Chipotle Protein Gives You the Most Protein?

Chicken wins. It has 32 grams of protein in a 4 ounce serving. That works out to about 17.8 grams per 100 calories.

Barbacoa and steak come next, at roughly 14 grams per 100 calories. Carnitas and honey chicken trail behind. Sofritas, the tofu option, has 8 grams. It suits plant based eaters better than lifters.

Steak has the fewest calories at 150. Barbacoa has the most sodium among the meats at 530 milligrams. Want a full side by side on calories, fat and sodium? See this Chipotle chicken, steak and barbacoa comparison.

Does Doubling the Protein Make Sense?

Often, yes. Double chicken gives you 64 grams of protein for 360 calories. That is the best protein return on the menu.

Doubling also doubles the sodium. Here is how the three popular choices compare.

Double barbacoa carries 1,060 milligrams of sodium before you add anything else. Chicken is the safer double.

Three High Protein Bowls, Built by the Numbers

Each total below is the sum of the listed items from the official PDF. All three use tomatillo green salsa and skip the burrito tortilla.

The Cut bowl is the efficiency pick. It delivers about 14 grams of protein per 100 calories. The Bulk bowl adds 210 calories of rice for only 4 more grams of protein.

Choose by goal. Cutting weight? Order the Cut bowl. Need fuel for a heavy training day? The Bulk bowl earns its calories.

Four Add-Ons That Quietly Undo a High Protein Order

Protein is rarely the problem. These items are.

• Burrito tortilla:320 calories and 600 milligrams of sodium, with only 8 grams of protein. A bowl skips all of it.
• Chips: A regular order is 540 calories. A large order is 810.
• Honey vinaigrette:220 calories and 850 milligrams of sodium for a salad topper.
• Cheese and sour cream: Cheese gives 6 grams of protein for 110 calories. Sour cream gives 2 grams for 110.

Guacamole is a good fat source, but it costs 230 calories per serving. Plan for it. Do not stack it on top of cheese, sour cream and chips by accident.

Watch the Sodium, Too

The American Heart Association points to 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day as the upper limit for most adults. The Cut bowl uses 1,090 milligrams, which is nearly half of that. The Bulk bowl uses more than half.

Three swaps trim sodium without touching protein:

1. Salsa: Tomatillo green salsa has 260 milligrams. Fresh tomato salsa has 550. The swap saves 290 milligrams.
2. Rice: Brown rice has 190 milligrams. White rice has 350. Both are 210 calories.
3. Protein: Chicken has 310 milligrams. Barbacoa has 530.

Skip the vinaigrette, too. It alone has 850 milligrams.

Quick Answers

How much protein is in Chipotle chicken? A 4 ounce serving has 32 grams of protein and 180 calories.

Which Chipotle protein has the least sodium? Chicken, at 310 milligrams per serving.

Is a bowl better than a burrito for protein? A bowl keeps the same fillings and skips the tortilla. That saves 320 calories and 600 milligrams of sodium. The tortilla adds only 8 grams of protein.

How accurate are these numbers? Chipotle says its serving sizes are approximations. Scoops vary by location and by who serves you. Use the numbers to plan, not to track to the gram.

The Bottom Line

A high protein Chipotle order is easy once you know the numbers. Pick chicken, order it in a bowl and choose tomatillo green salsa. Skip the chips and the vinaigrette.

Do that, and you can reach 72 grams of protein for about 505 calories. Order on instinct, and a bowl can climb toward 910.

Nutrition values come from the official Chipotle nutrition PDF (March 2025). Portions vary by location. This article is general information, not medical advice. The author is not affiliated with Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc.

About the author: Mexican Grill Nutrition is an independent site with a free Chipotle nutrition calculator and menu guides built from Chipotle’s official nutrition data.

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By Orion Rummler, The 19th, This story was originally published by The 19th

This story was originally reported by Orion Rummler of The 19th. Meet Orion and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric has reached the point where accusing Democratic candidates of being transgender is not only commonplace, but encouraged by the president of the United States — including into the eleventh hour of the midterms.

President Donald Trump has taken to calling Annie Andrews, the Democratic Senate nominee in South Carolina, a “trannie,” which is a derogatory slur for transgender people, usually women. He used it in a Truth Social post this month, accusing Andrews of being “in favor of Transgender for Everyone.” He used the slur to describe her several times at a recent rally in South Carolina.

Andrews isn’t the only one. This spring, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller declared that Senate candidate James Talarico is transgender, amid baseless speculation among conservatives that the Texas Democrat lacks testosterone. Vice President JD Vance also suggested at a rally this month that Talarico is gay, via a no-homo disclaimer about his own love for a man in the crowd.

Andrews is not transgender, and neither is Talarico (who also isn’t gay). But that doesn’t seem to matter. What does matter is that these Democrats have a chance, however slim, of being elected in deep-red states. Talarico and Andrews are running surprisingly competitive races against Trump-backed candidates in a midterm cycle that may see Democrats sweep states across the country or even take the Senate.

And in response, top White House officials have apparently decided that calling them gay or trans is a viable political strategy. As Republicans pour millions into anti-trans attack ads, their strategy on the campaign trail is becoming increasingly personal.

Wielding transphobia to browbeat political opponents is a decades-long tradition. And sometimes, it had consequences — including for titans like Walter Winchell, a newspaper columnist, radio commentator and pioneer of tabloid journalism who shaped media culture into what it is today: politically charged, fast-paced and full of pundits.

In the four weeks leading up to the 1956 presidential election, one of Winchell’s radio sponsors received complaints from listeners offended by Winchell’s attacks on Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee running against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Facing boycotts, the pharmaceutical company asked the radio network to get Winchell to stop. Instead, he escalated things.

“A vote for Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen,” Winchell wrote in his nationally syndicated column on election night.

Jorgensen was well-known to Winchell’s audience: She was the most famous transgender woman in the world. She was an international celebrity known as the “ex-GI” who became a “blonde beauty,” the first widely known person to go through a gender transition. When the biggest voice in media compared her to a presidential candidate, he drove another nail into the coffin of his career. His Sunday night radio show was subsequently canceled.

The point of that barb was to challenge Stevenson’s masculinity, said Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union. In the press, Stevenson was often portrayed as more effeminate than Eisenhower, a five-star Army general.

“We thought [the] Democratic nominee last night was his usual cute, fruity-voiced self,” the New York Daily News wrote in 1952, the first year Stevenson ran for president against Eisenhower.

The song remains the same. Republicans have spent months questioning Texas Democrat James Talarico’s masculinity. This spring, Fox News host Jesse Watters described him as “effeminate,” “pre-pubescent” and a “gay vegan,” while questioning how he could be 37 and not married. (Talarico has a long-term girlfriend).

In his last moments on the campaign trail on behalf of Republican candidates, Trump has doubled down on this rhetoric.

“Darline’s running against a radical-left lunatic named Tranny Annie Andrews, who would be the most extreme and crazy left-wing politician ever elected in this state,” Trump said to cheers during an October 21 rally in South Carolina. Darline Graham, sister to the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, is Andrews’ opponent.

During an October 27 rally in Texas, while stumping for Talarico’s opponent, state attorney general Ken Paxton, Trump said of the Democrat that “no politician in history has been more obsessed with turning your young boys and girls transgender.”

Trump didn’t call Talarico gay or trans — although he did mock the candidate for knowing drag queens and mimed him struggling to eat meat by gesturing at his own mouth, slurping loudly and exclaiming, “I love the meat, ahhh! I love it, look!”

Political transphobia is often used as a way to validate a certain kind of manhood, Branstetter said — one that comes at the expense of other people. And the public’s appetite for that has only grown.

“For the president’s base, they’ve built themselves a media ecosystem that constantly talks about trans people,” she said. “Part of that is loving a scapegoat and taking pleasure in demeaning somebody else.”

That ecosystem is thriving. Republicans have poured $280 million into anti-trans ads across the country this election cycle, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the country’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group. And those ads are being used to influence key races. AdImpact, which tracks ad spending, found that transgender minors are a key topic in Republican broadcast airings targeting the Texas Senate race. And in GOP ads in the race for North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, one of the country’s most expensive House races, transgender sports are a primary focus.

We didn’t get here overnight. During the last midterms in 2022, HRC tracked $50 million in ads targeting LGBTQ+ people. That year was a turning point: Republicans embraced anti-trans rhetoric like never before. In one notable instance, the GOP candidate for Nevada attorney general, Sigal Chattah, tweeted that America needs fewer “trannies.” When a local news station asked her to respond to criticism over the slur, she said she was just taking cues from society.

“The word ‘tranny’ is used in Hollywood, it’s part of the American culture. This isn’t a word that is taboo. It’s still being used,” Chattah said. “If the use of that word is offensive to a group, absolutely I would apologize to that group, but at the same time, I think in the grand scheme of things, the change needs to come on a much bigger scale.”

Chattah lost her 2022 race for Nevada attorney general. But the use of that slur in politics has only continued to grow.

South Carolina Republican Tim Scott has also started referring to Andrews as “tranny Annie.” Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who recently lost her bid for South Carolina governor, repeatedly used it during her time in Congress, perhaps most famously at a House Oversight committee hearing on government spending. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth regularly uses the slur. He recently declared that there will be “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” in the U.S. military.

The slur is both an outdated artifact and a simple attempt to stir outrage by using a naughty word, Branstetter said. It’s meant to demean trans people while also creating a spectacle.

“When I hear the word ‘tranny,’ what I’m thinking of is bawdy 1990s, 2000s jokes or daytime TV,” Branstetter said. “It’s an affinity for an older era, when you could demean trans people and expect not to hear from them about it.”

The party has continued to invest heavily in political transphobia. That peaked in 2024, when Trump’s campaign at one point spent $19 million on two television ads targeting trans rights. Within weeks, those ads were aired over 50,000 times.

Overall in 2024, per AdImpact, $215 million was spent on anti-trans ads during the presidential race, culminating in the now-famous “Kamala is for they/them” ad commissioned by the Trump campaign.

To Alison Gash, professor and chair of political science at the University of Oregon, the rise of anti-trans rhetoric is tied to the rise of Christian conservatism. Activists found political stardom in the 1980s by rallying behind ballot measures banning same-sex marriage and abortion.

“The Christian conservative branch of the Republican Party realized they had the perfect culture war companion to their focus on anti-abortion politics: denigrating gays and lesbians. They took this as far as they could,” Gash said.

Anti-gay efforts, including opposition to marriage equality, helped catalyze the Christian conservative movement, she said. Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, was a setback — but it wasn’t the end. Transgender people were gaining rights in schools, sports, and bathrooms. Republicans saw a political opportunity in that, Gash said.

“Conservatives realized they could make the same ‘protect children’ argument in the context of trans rights as they had with gay and lesbian rights,” she said. As the money grew, the rhetoric became more extreme and more personal.

But this ultra-personal rhetoric isn’t new — it’s just gained a wider audience.

Years after Jorgensen was name-dropped in the media during the 1956 presidential race, she found herself pulled into another political turf war.

In October 1970, a month before the midterms, Vice President Spiro Agnew, known as something of an attack dog for President Richard Nixon, called Sen. Charles Goodell of New York the “Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party.”

Goodell, who Agnew often called a “radical liberal,” brushed off the comparison to Jorgensen. So did his wife, Jean.

“I think Charles’ record — five sons — is enough to show the stupidity of such a remark,” Jean Goodell told the press.

The New York senator ultimately lost his reelection bid. And Jorgensen never got an apology from the vice president, who doubled down by calling her a publicity seeker. But she was made a public figure against her will: Jorgensen was outed as a trans woman by the press years before Winchell’s attack. And now her name had become a favored insult of the vice president.

In this moment, Branstetter sees another example of how political transphobia boils down to insecurities about masculinity. Goodell, a critic of the Nixon administration, was being singled out as a traitor to his party — and his gender.

“What he was saying was that he had switched sides, right? And in switching sides, he had emasculated himself,” she said. “In part, I think it is an attempt to smear an opponent with the stain of trans people’s existence.”

To check your voter registration status or to get more information about how to vote and what’s on your ballot, visit vote.org.

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Photo: unsplash

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At The Good Men Project, we are proud to syndicate reporting from The 19th, an independent nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, policy, and power. We value their work because it helps make visible something that is too often treated as secondary or niche: you cannot fully understand public life without understanding how gender and race shape who gets heard, who gets protected, and who is asked to carry the consequences when systems fail.

We believe these stories belong here because the questions The 19th raises are also human questions. They affect families, schools, health care, faith communities, citizenship, safety, and the everyday experience of belonging in a democracy. They also intersect with many of the conversations we care about at GMP, including masculinity, identity, care, fairness, and the social expectations that shape people’s lives long before they have language for them. If we want a more honest conversation about how to live well in a rapidly changing world, we need reporting that looks clearly at power, rights, and whose stories get centered. That is one reason we are glad to share their work.

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At The Good Men Project, we are proud to syndicate reporting from The 19th, an independent nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, policy, and power. We value their work because it helps make visible something that is too often treated as secondary or niche: you cannot fully understand public life without understanding how gender and race shape who gets heard, who gets protected, and who is asked to carry the consequences when systems fail.

We believe these stories belong here because the questions The 19th raises are also human questions. They affect families, schools, health care, faith communities, citizenship, safety, and the everyday experience of belonging in a democracy. They also intersect with many of the conversations we care about at GMP, including masculinity, identity, care, fairness, and the social expectations that shape people’s lives long before they have language for them. If we want a more honest conversation about how to live well in a rapidly changing world, we need reporting that looks clearly at power, rights, and whose stories get centered. That is one reason we are glad to share their work.

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The post The Transphobic Political Playbook Is Older Than You Think appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Look at this Rugrats Thrilljoy Pix!

Rugrats was a smash hit when it came out. This animated show ran for many seasons, had a few films and a spin off show which was also quite popular. A number of years ago a new show came out which ran for two seasons and brought back many of the original voice actors. Fans love these characters and collecting items based off of them. Recently a Tommy Pix! was announced and here are my thoughts on this news.

(c) Thrilljoy Collectibles

Tommy (Hero) Pix!

This is a pretty cool looking Pix! The hero turned out well and captures the personality of this character perfectly. The chase and super chase make a lot of sense for this character and fans are going to be eager to add them to their collections. You can learn more about this collectible here.

(c) Thrilljoy Collectibles

Reptar (Chase) Pix!

This Tommy ‘Rugrats’ Thrilljoy Pix! drops November 6th. You can follow Thrilljoy Collectibles on Instagram.

(c) Thrilljoy Collectibles

Reptar (Super Chase) Pix!

The post Check Out This Tommy ‘Rugrats’ Thrilljoy Pix! appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Noah Fromson

For millions living with type 2 diabetes, heart disease remains one of the greatest threats to their health.

Researchers at Michigan Medicine have uncovered a mechanism that may explain why sotagliflozin, an FDA-approved diabetes medication marketed as Inpefa, reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke. In a series of laboratory experiments, the research team found that the drug helps prevent excessive platelet activation, a process that can lead to dangerous blood clots that block flow to the heart and brain.

The findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, provide new insight into cardiovascular benefits of the drug that extend beyond blood sugar control.

“A drug that can both decrease the risk for diabetes along with the risk for having a heart attack or stroke could be a turning point in our ability to safely treat this growing population in the US and abroad,” said Michael A. Holinstat, Ph.D., M.S., co-senior author and Professor of Pharmacology, Internal Medicine, and Surgery at University of Michigan Medical School.

Sotagliflozin and heart attack, stroke risk

Sotagliflozin belongs to a class of medications known as sodium-glucose cotransporter (SGLT) inhibitors, which lower blood sugar by blocking the proteins responsible for glucose reabsorption. Unlike the widely used SGLT2 inhibitors, which primary act in the kidneys, sotagliflozin, targets both SGLT2 proteins in the kidneys and SGLT1 proteins in other organs.

Over the past decade, SGLT2 inhibitors such as empagliflozin (Jardiance) and dapagliflozin (Farxiga), have become a mainstay of type 2 diabetes treatment. Over 20% of patients are taking the medications.

Sotagliflozin has demonstrated an unusual ability in clinical trials. Unlike medications that only target SGLT2, the drug reduced the risk of ischemic events such as heart attack and stroke.

To better understand why, researchers conducted a head-to-head comparison between sotagliflozin and the empagliflozin, or Jardiance. While sotagliflozin limited platelet activation in blood samples from both healthy volunteers and people with type 2 diabetes, empagliflozin had little to no effect.

The team also found that sotagliflozin made platelets less likely to stick together and form blood clots. In mice with injured blood vessels, the drug reduced clot formation by approximately 60%, compared with just 5-10% in animals treated with empagliflozin.

“These experiments showed that sotagliflozin has a unique effect, and blocking SGLT2 alone is not enough to inhibit platelet aggregation,” said Eugene Chen, M.D., Ph.D., co-senior author and Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at U-M Medical School.

“Sotagliflozin may offer additional protection against blood clots, potentially lowering the risk of heart attack and stroke.”

What makes sotagliflozin different?

Researchers then asked whether SGLT1 inhibition alone could explain the drug’s anti-clotting effect.

Removing SGLT1 from platelets in mice reduced blood clot formation by about 40%. However, removing it genetically or blocking it with a SGLT1-selective inhibitor drug called mizagliflozin did not fully reproduce the effects of sotagliflozin.

This suggests that sotagliflozin may help prevent blood clots through additional mechanisms beyond blocking SGLT1 in platelets.

They also believe SGLT1 in endothelial cells, which line blood vessels, may influence platelet interactions and clot formation, a possibility that warrants further study.

“Sotagliflozin appears to be in the sweet spot because compounds that have higher levels of SGLT1-selective inhibitors can cause gastrointestinal issues,” said Bertram Pitt, M.D., co-author and Professor Emeritus of Internal Medicine at U-M Medical School.

“We think this could be a wonder drug with potential to offer benefit for many conditions.”

Sotagliflozin is approved for treatment in adults with heart failure, as well as those with type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease and other cardiovascular risk factors.

Researchers say in future studies of the drug, they would also like to evaluate the effects on patients with other conditions, such as chronic kidney disease and atrial fibrillation.

“The search for medications that reduce the risk of life-threatening blood clots without increasing the risk of bleeding has continued for decades,” Holinstat said.

“Sotagliflozin has now been demonstrated to serve both functions and may represent the next advancement in prevention of blood clots, heart failure and stroke in patients with and without diabetes.”

Holinstat and Chen are both members of the Caswell Diabetes Institute.

Paper Cited: “SGLT1/2 inhibitor sotagliflozin, but not SGLT2-selective inhibitor empagliflozin, attenuates platelet activation and thrombosis,” Journal of Clinical Investigation. DOI: 10.1172/JCI201899

Additional authors: Livia Stanger, Ph.D., Krista Goerger, Xu Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., Pooja Yalavarthi, Andrew Rickenberg, Adriana Yamaguchi, Ph.D., Mariane Flores Nascimento, Ph.D., Ashleigh Kilgore, Heeseo Kim, PharmD, Xiaokang Wu, M.D., Ph.D., Yanhong Guo, M.D., Ph.D., Anna R. Dahlgren, Ph.D., Jifeng Zhang, Ph.D., Jordan A. Shavit, M.D., Ph.D., all of University of Michigan.

Funding/disclosures: This work was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (F31HL179940, R35HL150784, R01HL109946), the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32GM140223), and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (T32TR004371) of National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH

The work was also supported by the American Heart Association and Lexicon Pharmaceuticals.

Michael Holinstat is a consultant and receives research funding from Lexicon Pharmaceuticals. Bertram Pitt is a consultant for Lexicon Pharmaceuticals. The remaining authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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Previously Published on michiganmedicine.org with Creative Commons License

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