Does metformin "promise" to extend life?
It may promise a lot of things, but until I see RCT data, I'm not convinced that we should put an old anti-malarial drug in the water. Metformin, I mean. And that RCT would be the TAME Study. Observational studies of metformin and cancer have been promising, but...
In two controlled trials involving patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, a notoriously difficult cancer to treat, metformin failed to provide any benefit.
So I'll hold out ultimate judgement until after the TAME Study. But this smells a little like 20 years ago when pharma invented osteopenia to sell bisphosphonates, and then tried to encourage "prophylactic" treatment of even osteopenia. (metformin link via marginalrevolution.com)
Are our cooking efforts sabotaged by the substitution of beet sugar for cane sugar?
Brown cane sugar -- a combination of sugar and molasses, both inherent in the sugarcane plant -- is produced naturally as part of the process of refining white cane sugar by the traditional method, crystallization.
Brown sugar from C & H Sugar Co. and other cane refiners uses the process, but beet sugar is different. It's made by refining the sugar all the way to the final white granular stage, stripping off all the molasses because beet molasses is unfit for human consumption (it's recycled as cattle feed). Then cane molasses is added back into the sugar through a process called "painting."
Painting coats the granules but does not necessarily penetrate them -- the molasses can sometimes be rubbed right off.
As with white sugar, these different types of sugars act differently in the kitchen.
The best medical analogy for this seems to be the auto-substitution of in-class medications by insurance formularies. Detemir substituted for glargine, for example.
Is medicine a "low-impact" profession?
The folks at 80,000 hours think so, noting that the number of people whose lives will be extended by a single doctor is low, or "pretty modest," as they say:
This analysis confirms the contentions above: physician density is negatively correlated with burden of disease16; the social determinants of health explain more of the variance in health outcomes than physician density17; there are steeply diminishing returns between increases in physician density and decreases in burden of disease16. Further, the ‘bottom line’ figures (which are likely optimistic) suggest an additional doctor adds four health years for every year they work. This is a lot less than can be accomplished through even modest donations to effective charities, and so suggests the ‘direct impact’ of medicine is pretty modest.18
(link from slatestarcodex.com)