What makes ultra-processed foods so bad for your health? | Myths are clouding the reality of our sustainable energy future | Eight Popular Misconceptions About Personality

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You Might Like � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium What makes ultra-processed foods so bad for your health? - The Economist    FOOD SHOPPING has become a dangerous pursuit. Nutritional horrors lurk on every shelf. Ready-meals are packed with salt and preservatives, breakfast cereals are sweeter than chocolate bars, and processed meats are packed with nitrite-preservatives, which can form harmful compounds when cooked. A new term is catching on to describe these nutritional bad guys: ultra-processed foods (UPFs). In his new book, “Ultra-Processed People”, Chris van Tulleken, a doctor and television presenter, argues that UPFs dominate the food supply in rich countries, and are also creeping into diets in low- and middle-income countries. As they proliferate, so do concerns about their effects on human health. Just how bad are UPFs, and what do they do to us? The concept of UPFs was devised by Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian scientist, in 2009. His team of nutritionists observed that although people in Brazil were buying less sugar and oil, rates of obesity and type-2 diabetes were rising. That was because they were instead eating more sugar, fats and additives in packaged snacks and pre-made meals. In response, Mr Monteiro proposed a food classification system to take into account the degree of processing involved in the food supply. Processing can make healthy foods unhealthy: fruit, for instance, goes from healthy to unhealthy as it is desiccated, squeezed or sweetened. Mr Monteiro’s system, called Nova, puts foods into four “buckets”: unprocessed and minimally processed foods; processed culinary ingredients; processed foods; and ultra-processed foods. This allows more fine-grained distinction between different degrees of processing. Thus staples such as rice, oil or flour, which all require minimal processing for consumption, do not belong in the same category as a Twinkie. Continued here Myths are clouding the reality of our sustainable energy future -     Heatwaves, floods and droughts across the world are a wake-up call. We need to cut fossil fuel use fast, reducing CO₂ emissions to around zero by the middle of the century. To do that, we must electrify as much as possible, decarbonise electricity supply and use hydrogen, bioenergy, and carbon capture in applications where direct electricity use is not feasible. Global electricity supply needs to expand by around four times; transmission grids must grow from 70mn km to around 200mn km; we must boost electric cars from 25mn to over 1bn. That implies big increases in mineral supply — seven times more lithium will be used per annum than in 2022, with copper use doubling. Faced with this challenge, fears are multiplying — that mining will use huge quantities of scarce water, high lithium prices will make electric vehicles impossibly expensive or discarded solar panels will create a landfill disaster. We need to separate myths from real concerns — the Energy Transitions Commission’s latest report aims to do that. Continued here You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Eight Popular Misconceptions About Personality - Forbes    There is a solid science for understanding who you are, how you differ from others, and why you do what you do, but it is largely ignored. 1) There is no consensus about how to measure personality: Not really. In fact, mainstream scholars in personality research (as well as more broadly in the social sciences) agree that the Big Five framework provides a universal taxonomy for describing, assessing, and explaining individual differences in people’s typical or default emotional, behavioral, and cognitive tendencies. These consistent psychological patterns explain what makes you you, and how you differ from others: your emotional stability, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to new experiences. Furthermore, there is also categorical evidence suggesting that well-validated self-reports are a reliable way to assess personality, not so much because people are particularly aware of who they really are (or genuinely interested in telling us), but because of systematic patterns in how people present themselves: whether they are taking an assessment, answering questions in a job interview or date, most people are extremely consistent and predictable, and this is what well-designed personality assessments capture (more in point 2 below). Note that the same people who are highly skeptical about the accuracy of personality assessments - as well as those who question the robustness of "personality" as a construct - still construct theories about their own and others’ personalities, though relying on their own (flawed) intuition, social stereotypes, and prejudices, including people’s culture, gender, race, nationality, socioeconomic status, and appearance. Disbelieving in personality equates to assuming that everybody is the same, and ignoring the richness of diversity and individual differences underpinning the dynamics of social interactions and interpersonal behaviors. To be sure, personality assessments are not perfect, but, when correctly designed and validated (and backed by supporting data) they are more accurate than the vast majority of alternatives, and come with 100-years of research, including thousands of independent studies and meta-analysis highlighting their predictive power across a wide range of settings and outcomes. Alas, many if not most assessments are far from scientific and of rubbish quality (not an academic term), giving personality assessment a bad rep. However, the same is true for most music, movies, books, restaurants, and wines, which is why evaluations of quality tend to focus on the best rather than the worst product in a given category. 2) Personality tests are bad measures of personality: Although this is probably true for the vast majority of assessments, it is certainly not true for all. In fact, thousands of independent academic articles show that many assessments are reliable and valid measures of personality, which is typically highlighted by their consistent and significant correlations with a wide range of real-world outcomes, from academic to job performance, job satisfaction, employee engagement, leadership emergence and effectiveness, health and wellbeing, happiness, relationship satisfaction and longevity, life expectancy and mortality, counterproductive work behaviors, stress, aggression and anger management, and parasitic and antisocial behaviors. Indeed, there are few constructs or variables in the social sciences which are as widely and strongly predictive as personality, and evidence shows that even our Spotify playlist, Netflix streaming preferences, credit card statements, and Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feed convey accurate information about our personality (more on this in my latest book, which explores the human-AI interface). If personality assessments didn’t work, it would not be possible to predict any of these outcomes, or explain the above associations, and one of the most indicative signals for the power of well-designed assessments is that they work even when people are motivated to "fake good" or game the answers in self-report questionnaires. In fact, the ability to lie and manage impressions on an assessment is a sign of social adjustment, likability, and emotional intelligence, which is why people who do so tend to do better in life than those who are just authentic or unfiltered when they disagree with statements such as "I love meeting people" or "I like most people I meet", or are as disinhibited and impulsive as Elon Musk. Continued here

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