Bonjour! Welcome to this week's digest. This is a very special "It's All Good" edition of the digest (no, we are not sponsored by Gwyneth Paltrow's cookbook... YET ;D), where I rebound from a tough week to bring you a bunch of intriguing content. This week's topics include nutrition real talk, using finance to improve your life (really), endurance, mindful phone launching, and reputation. Enjoy!

• (MINDFUL) ANDROID LAUNCHER - Siempo
• ARTICLE - Grub Street: The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right
• PODCAST - Rad Awakenings #40: Mihir Desai, The Problem with Optionality
• PODCAST - The Upgrade: How to Increase Your Endurance, With Author Alex Hutchinson
• ARTICLE - Aeon: Say goodbye to the information age: it’s all about reputation now

• Just tell me. Ethical concerns aside, which diet is the best: vegan, vegetarian, or omnivorous? We don’t know, because the study to prove that any one diet is “best” for human health hasn’t been done, and probably can’t be. So, for our health, the “best” diet is a theme: an emphasis on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, and plain water for thirst... In any event, the diet to which we are adapted is almost certainly much better for health, and reversing illness, than the prevailing modern diet. There is abundant evidence of disease-reversal with diets of whole, minimally processed food; plant-predominant diets; and even plant-exclusive diets.
• If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that carbs are evil. This is probably the silliest of all the silly, pop-culture propaganda about diet and health. All plant foods are carbohydrate sources... Sure, but, I should still avoid carbs, right? Exactly the opposite is true. You cannot have a complete or healthful diet without carbohydrate sources... Why have I been led to believe that carbs are evil? Highly processed grains and added sugar are bad, not because they are carbohydrate, but because they’ve been robbed of nutrients, they raise insulin levels, and they’re often high in added fats, sodium, and weird ingredients. Carbs are not evil; junk food is evil.
• I want to lose weight. Is diet really more important than exercise? Yes. It is much easier to outeat running than to outrun all of the tempting calories that modern marketing encourages us to cram in. Both diet and exercise are important to health, and exercise is important in weight maintenance. But to lose weight, the preferential focus needs to be on controlling calories in, more than calories out.
• What should I care about on nutrition labels? Calories, fat grams, or sugar grams? The best foods don’t even have labels, because they are just one ingredient: avocado, lentils, blueberries, broccoli, almonds, etc.  Okay, sure. But what about the ones with labels? When foods do have labels, look for a short ingredient list of things you recognize as actual food.
• What if I hate lettuce? Do I really needs to eat my greens? Greens are all good, and one of the few foods you can eat pretty much without limit. These plants are all very low in calories and highly concentrated in diverse nutrients: antioxidants, fiber, vitamins, and minerals.
• Listen, I am a very busy New Yorker and sometimes I eat the occasional PowerBar for lunch. Is that bad? Many power bars have nutritional profiles similar to Snickers. Generally, power bars are closer to junk than to real food.
• What is the final verdict on eggs? Are high-cholesterol foods cleared to eat? Yes. Most levels of high blood cholesterol are not from dietary cholesterol but from saturated and trans fats. Moderation is key.
• What about sugar substitutes and artificial sweeteners? Probably better than sugar, but almost certainly worse than a wholesome diet of foods naturally low in sugar, which then leaves room for a bit of sugar when something sweet is a treat.

• The principal-agent problem is the defining problem of modern capitalism... enterprises of scale where you need to separate management and ownership... In the context of our own lives, we often find ourselves serving as the agents of other people's expectations... A lot of us find ourselves in our thirties or later living out someone else's idea of what a life is. That's being an agent for some invisible principal in your head. And a lot of what life is about is becoming your own principal, defining the nature of your life.
• Once you win, you attribute it all to skill, and you never attribute it to luck, and that's when you become a jerk. That's the attribution error problem in life... All good things that happen are my doing, and everything bad that happens in the world is the world's doing. And in a way that's the only to survive, because otherwise you will just get crushed, because it's mentally so hard to do, because you know you're losing all the time.
• We're taught to go around and collect options, and options can take the form of credentialing, experiences, or actual investments and opportunities. But the challenge with that is that you're just left with this portfolio of options, but you don't do anything... Options are supposed to enable risk taking... But I observe people addicted to buying safety nets, addicted to buying options, thereby undercutting the most central lesson of options, which is to take a big risk... We want to be able to enjoy the idea or the potential of something, rather than committing to it.
• People in finance love leverage because it lets you do things you have no right to do. You get to buy and control assets you have no right to control... You bind yourself, you commit yourself. And when you commit yourself to a very serious obligation, you get to do things that you have no right to do.
• In general, people are under-levered. By that I mean they don't make enough commitments to other people, they tend to shy away from them, and they don't realize that most great things in life come from commitments.
• The science is clear on this, that people who embed themselves in a set of meaningful relationships, and commit to each other, are the happiest and the healthiest... Most of the regrets that people have about life are about not making more commitments...
• When you fail, people leave you. So highly accomplished people, that's what they worry about the most. They worry that the people around them are there because they're successful. And then when they fail, not only do they fail, but then they'll be alone... You come to feel... that the people who are around you are around you because you are successful... And then the fear of failure is coupled with the fear of being alone.

• Endurance is the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.
• We're often confronted with situations where there are things we think we should be doing that run counter to what our immediate instincts are telling us to do... In the modern world there's definitely a disconnect... We have to fight against this, this urge to save energy and protect ourselves.
• The subjective experience is that you can't... What the science is now showing us is that this is an illusion in a sense, there are ways we can trick ourselves... to change the limits of our endurance, and that has nothing to do with your body.
• People underestimate the train-ability of endurance, both physically and mentally... Athletes will be willing to accept the pain for longer... it's a result of psychological coping techniques they've developed through years of training.
• If you can live in the moment, that's a way of allowing yourself to get closer to your limits.
• Limits are not limits, limits are suggestions.
• You have to become aware of your internal monologue. There are words and thoughts going through your head during any stressful situation... Interrogate those thoughts, what is it you're telling yourself?
• You have to find things that you can believe with a straight face. And the easiest way to have justified true belief is to do something... That's why most progress is incremental, whatever you do, you know you can do that plus a little more.

• We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others.
• In the average-case scenario, you trust newspapers, magazines or TV channels that endorse a political view which supports scientific research to summarise its findings for you. In this latter case, you are twice-removed from the sources: you trust other people’s trust in reputable science.
• Without an evaluative judgment about the reliability of a certain source of information, that information is, for all practical purposes, useless.
• What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.
• Whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities?
• According to Frederick Hayek’s book Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), ‘civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess’.