Kennedy’s remarks come from congressional hearings today. He claims AI, while “very dangerous” has the opportunity to “develop new drugs and personalized medicine for every citizen.” Please, a moment of silence for my sanity.
Cook once said Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind would be ‘about health.’ If true, he’ll get much of the credit.
I don’t make a habit of featuring Verge writers in the comment of the day, but since Nilay’s testosterone levels were the impetus for Victoria Song’s latest Optimizer column, on Whoop’s hunt for new health metrics, it only felt fair to air his response.
Nilay Patel:
Cmon everyone wants to see what I’m like jacked on literally 10x the testosterone
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MAHA is obsessed with these wearables — for all the wrong reasons.
In a recent Optimizer, I wrote about how influencers use viral trends to undermine trust in medical science and profit. Well, here’s an example of the consequences in this STAT op-ed penned by a doctor: people are starting to trust untested peptides peddled online over drugs with decades of evidence.
Not because they’re so ugly, it’s because Garmin wearables that track skin temperature during sleep — like the Fenix 8 and Forerunner 970 — can now feed that data to the FDA-cleared Natural Cycles birth control app to show the wearer’s daily fertility status.
They’re hyping up next-generation reactors as a way to meet data center energy demand. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has lost more than 400 people, largely those working on safety.
“The regulator is no longer an independent regulator — we do not know whose interests it is serving,” former NRC chair Allison Macfarlane tells ProPublica.
Who’s to say? Not Grüns’ clinical study.
The phrase is being used to describe the horizontal lines or wrinkles that naturally develop across your neck, and may be exacerbated by constantly looking down at your phone. It sounds like yet another way to sell cosmetic treatments to people by making them feel bad about themselves.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Econ writer Kyla Scanlon notes that a lot of society’s current obsessions — peptide stacks, prediction markets, the manosphere — have all the hallmarks of people coping with feeling out of control. “The reason we can’t solve our problems is not lack of tools or information — it’s that the dominant method (add, optimize, measure) is the wrong method for the problem (figure out what’s poisoning you.)”
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[Kyla’s Newsletter]
The WSJ reports that Means needs the support of every Republican senator to become surgeon general — and she doesn’t have it. The reasons are plentiful, but if you want a rundown, I detailed how Means expertly uses the wellness grifter playbook to spread hokey ideas and sow distrust in health institutions.
Boy kibble, proteinmaxxing, protein washing. The wellness Wild West’s obsession with one macro is getting out of hand.
A sick dog, desperate owner, and a bunch of chatbots made for a great story. The actual science was much messier.
Casey Means says her “Good Energy habits” can prevent cancer.
Technically, it’s food. (It doesn’t taste like it.)
The team is constructing the Human Flatus Atlas, bringing modern wearable monitors to bear on digestive health, measuring the frequency and intensity of farts. The team even had to create an artificial butt that could pass gas on command while developing the prototype. According to the Wall Street Journal:
In the current study, the Human Flatus Atlas app asks participants to take a picture of everything they eat and drink. Researchers could analyze that data, seeking correlations between diet and the sensor’s main metric: the total volume of gas passed in a day.
Skinfluencers swear topical salmon-sperm serums will make your skin glow. The reality is a bit less impressive.
HBO’s medical drama has been teasing out a smart story about what makes gen AI so tempting and concerning.
Oura is lobbying for relaxed wearables regulation. It has a point, but is regulation even the problem here?
This Politico story is a fascinating deep dive into Oura cozying up to the government. What caught my eye is a tidbit that Oura is lobbying lawmakers for a “digital health screener” device classification process that would sidestep the more intensive FDA clearance process for medical devices.
[Politico]
But here’s Dave Wiskus, founder of the Nebula streaming service, on how AG1 did not pass muster as a sponsor. If you’re curious to learn more, may I point you to this week’s Optimizer?
Athletic Greens is ‘clinically backed.’ What does that even mean?
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is “scaling back” plans for the coach and will instead roll out some of what it had been working on into the Heath app over time. Maybe not the worst idea.
The search for the contents of my mystery “GLP-3” vial leads further into the wellness wild west.
The withdrawal from the World Health Organization makes good on an executive order Trump issued on his first day in office. Per The New York Times:
The up-in-the-air status of the flu vaccine is just one of countless global health matters that are left hanging in the balance by the United States’ withdrawal. Global health experts are deeply concerned that if a novel bug similar to the coronavirus emerges, a lack of international coordination will lead to death and disaster.
The Washington Post has an excellent piece (subscription required) debunking this viral theory. If the levels of EMF radiation measured at the 49ers’ practice facility weakened ligaments, we’d all have torn ACLs. When cornered, Peter Cowan, the self-proclaimed expert who popularized this theory, admitted he had no hard evidence and moved the goalposts:
In an interview, Cowan acknowledged he hadn’t seen any research specifically on EMF damage to muscles and tendons; he drew connections from other studies and his own observations as a clinician, he said. He also didn’t know the 49ers started practicing in Santa Clara so long ago. If he had, he would have broadened his research to track the rising number of cell towers in the area. He said he remains “confident” the substation contributed to the injuries.
Planet-heating carbon and methane pollution had actually fallen by around 20 percent over the past decade, but ticked back up again in 2025 as the Trump administration slashed environmental regulations.
The US Environmental Protection Agency also announced this week that it plans to stop calculating the economic benefits of improved health from cleaning up air pollution.
New US dietary guidelines promote more protein and beef tallow, potentially moving Americans further away from a low-carbon diet.
Unlike the consumer-facing ChatGPT Health announced Wednesday, the new OpenAI for Healthcare products launching today are designed do things like create reusable templates for discharge summaries and patient instructions, or analyze medical evidence to apply to specific patients.
ChatGPT for Healthcare is already being used by healthcare organizations like Boston Children’s Hospital, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.
