lose

Artists are starting to ask their fans not to poop at concerts, even if they lose their place

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Olivia Rodrigo has confessed that she recognizes her most devoted fans by smell. They are the ones who poop in the front rows, unable to stop looking at it even for a moment. Behind the eschatological joke there is a somewhat more controversial fact (if possible): the front row at concerts is currently so expensive that many fans are not willing to lose their place for a squeeze. The fans have greater strengths. At KISS Breakfastthe morning show on the British station KISS FM, the hosts asked Olivia Rodrigo about the most uncomfortable place she had ever had to go to the bathroom. The singer redirected the answer: has been to concerts and festivals where people wear diapers to stand in the front row, not move and do their business on siteand he noticed that closeness firsthand. “I’ve smelled it,” he said. It’s not the first. Other artists that make you want to. The first time he noticed the problem was at his concert in Hyde Park in June 2025: it is a venue that prohibits leaving and re-entering once the entrance has been scanned. There he read a fan’s poster announcing that I wore diapers to last in the front row. She is not the first artist: years before, in 2023, during Taylor Swift’s Eras Toura wave of fans was detected showing off their diapers so as not to miss a single minute of the more than three-hour repertoire. ‘Glossy’ magazine documented how content creators taught how to put them under their dresses and recommended the most discreet diaper brands. Part of the problem. The question is funny, but there is an aspect of this story that is not so funny. Rodrigo kicks off The Unraveled Tour in Hartford (Connecticut) next September, a tour of 86 dates around the world. Prices already confirmed by Ticketmaster range from $83.40 to $799.50. General court access is around $250 and VIP early entry packages to the pit will be between $540 and $554. With these amounts, it is normal that if a fan is willing to wait up to ten hours in line to get a good spot, they are also more than willing to piss themselves. The image of the hysterical fans who can’t hold their pee is replaced by a sadder one: the design of the venue penalizes going to the bathroom, and the fans have to manage as best they can. We can discuss whether there are artists who really deserve all this ordeal, but the point is that live prices are not going to go down, and as we have seen in phenomena like Bad Bunnyconcerts are the new place where you have to be. With or without diapers. They all smell. Rodrigo is not the only one who has suffered from the issue in recent weeks. At a concert by folk singer-songwriter Noah Kahan in Philadelphia on June 26, someone didn’t even put on a diaper: defecated directly next to the seats. Kahan approached him the next day at Days later, in Toronto, he had the public recite an oath: upon entering the premises you sign a social contract by which you should not do belly on the floor. The size of the artist (and the age of the audience) who goes to see Rodrigo or Taylor Swift and who goes to see Kahan is different, so perhaps the proximity in time of this eschatological drift of the concerts may be coincidental. But of course, it articulates a story about how concerts have become luxurious and very expensive prisons that restrict us from the most basic needs. Of course, it opens the door to highly expressive means of claiming for crowding and delays. Header | NRK P3 In Xataka | In 1966, a professor traveled to Cartagena to meet John Lennon. And thanks to him Spain began to learn English

We have been told that drinking water on an empty stomach helps you lose weight. Scientific evidence says otherwise

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The Internet and social networks are full of supposedly easy tricks that promise almost miraculous results with a minimum effort for our body. One of these tricks is a habit that many people do as if it were a ritual: drinking a large glass of water, “yes or yes”, as soon as we get out of bed in the morning. This simple gesture promises to ‘wake up’ the intestines, activate the metabolism and promote weight loss. It’s a myth. What we hear on social networks is not always true, since we must face a large number of myths that have no scientific support behind them. And right now the best scientific evidence does not support this idea, Although it is true that drinking water increases our energy production. Thermogenesis. To understand where this widespread myth comes from, we must analyze the term “water-induced thermogenesis”, that is, the ability of our body to begin producing energy after drinking a glass of water. Here is a classic study In the medical literature it was observed that the consumption of 500 ml of water managed to increase the metabolic rate by around 30% during a period of 30 to 40 minutes. But although this percentage may seem incredible, the reality is that the acceleration of the metabolism translated into a total expenditure of 24 kilocalories. That is to say, its effect was so small that short-term weight loss was hardly going to be noticed due to this. It has been verified. Subsequent research in the fields of endocrinology and nutrition has attempted to replicate these data in different contexts. We have one of the examples in a clinical trial that evaluated the physiological effects in overweight or obese people, where an increase in energy expenditure of 24% was found for 60 minutes after ingesting 500 ml of water. But again it was seen that this slight temporary metabolic rebound does not imply a fat loss that is relevant in itself. On the scale. If now, instead of staying in the laboratory, we go to the real effect that this habit has on patients, we find that the narrative of water on an empty stomach as a slimming remedy loses much of its support, since the scientific evidence on weight loss attributable to water consumption is, in general terms, limited and of low to moderate quality. And the studies that have been done, despite pointing to weight loss, have a follow-up that is too short and a methodology that prevents giving a firm conclusion about applying this recommendation. The power of water. That dismantling the myth of a glass of water on an empty stomach is anticlimactic does not mean that hydration has no value in a weight control strategy. And the evidence suggests that drinking water helps to lose weight indirectly, since the mere fact of modifying the diet to go from a high consumption of sugary soft drinks or industrial juices to drinking water eliminates hundreds of calories a day with little effort. In addition, various trials suggest that drinking water before meals makes us feel full much sooner, which will reduce the amount of calories that we end up eating and, therefore, advancing a little further in the diet. Images | engin akyurt In Xataka | We believed that with Ozempic, people who lost weight exercised more. we believed wrong

“We will lose one like this every year”

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In 1790, a retired military man named Hayman Rooke stumbles upon a gigantic oak tree in Sherwood Forest and describes it as a “majestic ruin” that even then seemed to be nearly a thousand years old. The tree would end up taking its name and surviving more than two centuries after that discovery. Today, his death leaves an uncomfortable question. The fall of a giant. The Major Oakthe monumental Sherwood oak linked for centuries to the legend of robin hoodhas died after more than a thousand years of life. Its disappearance is not only the end of one of the oldest and most emblematic trees in Europe and the entire world, it is also the most visible image of how some of the great modern evils have begun to claim even that which seemed eternal. This year it did not produce a single leaf. The giant that survived wars, kings, empires and revolutions could not overcome a chain of increasingly dry and scorching summers. The Major Oak in 2006 The great invisible enemy. The experts point out several accumulated factors, but there is one that stands out as the great “cancer” that has accelerated its fall: the global warming. Over recent years, extreme heatwaves and prolonged drought have put the tree under constant stress, especially following the historic summer of 2022, when the UK surpassed for the first time 40 degrees. Ancient oaks are designed to withstand centuries, but not to adapt so quickly to a climate that changes at an unprecedented speed. The lack of rain in the last five years and record temperatures have been, according to its caretakers, a decisive factor in its collapse. The Major Oak, by Henry Dawson (1844), Nottingham Museum When saving can also harm. The History of the Major Oak It is also the story of how human intervention, even well-intentioned, can alter natural processes that had been in operation for centuries. Over time, metal chains, supports, concrete fills, and lead and fiber coatings were installed to keep it standing. The problem is that the ancient oaks they age “inwardly”: They drop branches, reduce size and concentrate resources. Forcing it to maintain its giant frame caused it to continue sending water to branches it should have already sacrificed. The result was a kind of internal exhaustion that ended up strangling his own vital system. A collapsed root system. The underground analyzes revealed a devastating panorama: impoverished roots, suffocated and practically disconnected from their environment. Decades of mass tourism (about 350,000 visitors a year) compacted the soil until make you less fertile and less alive, while ancient changes in the water table due to mining aggravated the situation. During the last three winters tried to aerate and regenerate the soil to restore microbial life, and the first results were encouraging. But it was too late. The tree barely sprouted last year and this year it just didn’t wake up. The symbol of a silent extinction. The most disturbing thing is not that the most famous tree in the world has died, that too, but what it represents. According to the Woodland Trust“we will lose a tree like this every year. They do not have any specific legal protection and we are losing them because they are not given the value they deserve”, a phrase that completely changes the dimension of the problem. This is neither an exception nor an isolated relic: the monumental trees andthey are disappearing silent due to neglect, urban development, tourism, disease and, to top it all off, extreme weather. They are the “white rhinos” of British forests, almost unrepeatable organisms that take centuries to form and can disappear in just a decade. The death that continues to give life. Be that as it may, and although the Major Oak is deadwill still stand. And that matters. Its dead wood continues to be a fundamental ecosystem for insects, fungi, birds and hundreds of species that depend on this type of habitat at some point in their life cycle. In fact, a quarter of all forest species need dead wood to survive. Even without leaves, it remains one of the largest trees in Europe and retains irreplaceable biological value. In a way, his final lesson is precisely that: even in death, he still sustains life, although the warning is clear. If a thousand year colossus has fallen, many others may already be following the same path. Image | Nilfanion, Marcin Floryan In Xataka | Lowering the temperature of cities is as simple as filling them with trees: just what Spain is not doing In Xataka | There are people who plant tomatoes. This couple is planting chairs, and they turn out so well that they are selling them for a fortune

“Heat makes the bread lose moisture faster”

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Bread is one of the most wasted foods in Spain. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Foodin this country 58.8 million kilos of bread are thrown away per year. Nine kilos per house. That’s more than 5% of the total raw products wasted. And in summer it is worse. Because, cAs José Roldán says, the best baker in the world in 2025When the heat is high, it is advisable to stop using cloth or paper bags. You have to do things differently because, in short, “bread is preserved differently in summer.” What does ‘preserving bread well’ really mean? In reality, under the word ‘preserve’ two different physical processes are mixed that respond differently to high temperatures: On the one hand, we talk about ‘desiccation’ (that is, the loss of moisture). This is accelerated by heat. On the other, there is what we could technically call “hardening by starch retrogradation.” Basically, it is a process by which the crumb recrystallizes and, in principle, it is quite independent of humidity. When we talk about heat worsening the preservation of bread, it is because the two processes overlap and accumulate. The good news is that, finally, we have solutions. In summer, neither cloth nor paper. Let’s not fool ourselves, for most of the year, the cloth bag is a solution that works well. As Roldán explainsthe fabric allows the bread to breathe, something positive in certain circumstances. However, that same characteristic is the problem when temperatures rise. “With the heat it makes it lose moisture faster,” he clarifies. In the end, it’s not just that the bread dries out sooner; is that it loses part of the texture that is so difficult to achieve. So? What options do we have? If we want to keep the bread fresh, the Córdoba baker is clear: a plastic bag. Yes, I know it sounds strange, but it makes sense: plastic is the best option to better preserve the interior moisture of the bread. It is true that it can cause the crust to lose crunch or even make the bread chewy; But they are minor problems that have an easy solution by giving them a heat stroke. In any case, it is not Roldán’s preferred solution. For the best baker of 2025the best way to preserve bread is to freeze it. As he explains, buying good bread, cutting it into slices and putting it directly in the freezer is a perfect way for it to last a long time. Above all, because it can be recovered in a matter of minutes. “Enough a touch of grill or oven and you have freshly made bread. Of course, it is important to pack it airtight. It is the best way to ensure that moisture from the freezer does not come into contact with the slices. Well insulated can last up to six months without much problem. In Trends | Bakers agree that, when the heat arrives, bread must be preserved in a very different way from the rest of the year. In Xataka | We have been eating bread with “hidden salt” for so long that we have forgotten its true flavor. That’s going to change

How the nutrition revolution has allowed human beings to lose two hours in the marathon

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“Today I had two slices of bread, honey and tea for breakfast” This was Sabastian Sawe’s brief response to the journalist who had answered what he had had for breakfast that morning. It wasn’t an elevator conversation. It was not pure curiosity among office colleagues before facing a day in front of the computer. Although the answer could very well have been the same. Sawe is not just anyone. Sawe is the fastest man on the planet when it comes to covering 42,195 meters. Sawe is, as of yesterday, the winner of the London Marathon, the recordman of distance and the first person to break down the mythical barrier of two hours in distance. A barrier that was considered unattainable just a handful of years ago. But to round off the accumulation of impossible things that were experienced yesterday in London, Sawe is not the only human to run at a sustained pace of 2’49″/km, repeating the effort up to 42 times and an agonizing and endless 195 metres. Yomif Kejelcha entered just 11 seconds later. Of course, he will have the more than deserved consolation of being the fastest debutant in the history of the distance. Jacob Kiplimo must have been astonished when he realized that the 120 minutes and 28 seconds it took him to cover that same distance had only been enough for him to be third when just two hours earlier they would have made him the new world record holder. All of them are the pure embodiment of a sport that has experienced a revolution in a handful of years. “Yomif didn’t have breakfast on race day,” Alfonso Beltrá, CEO of Holy mother. Beltrá is the founder of a Spanish sports nutrition company, which grew up in cycling but has pivoted to athletics. A few weeks ago, Beltrá himself defended on the Find Your Everest podcast that they were sure that they could be the ones to break the mythical barrier. High competition is the result of research and results that put the athlete in front of a challenge that ends up being decided by details. The differences are minimal and nutrition is what has ended up tipping the balance. A revolution to make the impossible possible Although neither Sawe nor Kejelcha ate a copious breakfast as the most undocumented logic dictates, neither of them stood at the starting line empty. Their stomachs were, but the important thing was that their glycogen stores were bursting with energy. “He doesn’t have breakfast at all on race day, we have a specific drink with 100 grams of carbohydrates that he finishes two hours before the race and another product that we will launch in three months. Then he warms up and six or seven minutes before leaving he drinks a gel with caffeine and 45 grams of carbohydrates,” Beltrán tells us about the Ethiopian athlete who ate 145 grams of carbohydrates before departure. “That’s why we skipped the kilometer five aid station, we couldn’t put in more,” he emphasizes. A very similar amount would have been handled by Sawe’s team. The Kenyan athlete took, in addition to the two slices of bread with honey, a Drink Mix 320 by Maurtena company that has revolutionized sports nutrition in recent years. This is equivalent to 80 grams of carbohydrates and added a Gel 100 that provides another 25 grams of carbohydrates. The total sum between energy drinks, gel and breakfast adds up to about 140-150 grams like Kejelcha. It is a figure similar to taking 200 grams of pasta before running. And then, the performance began. Kejelcha uses Santamadre gels diluted in the appropriate proportion of water to take them with bottles and facilitate ingestion. Sawe, for her part, opted for Maurten’s Drink Mix 160 drink at the first three aid stations (kilometers 5, 10 and 15). In the fourth (km 20) take a little less drink, about 130 ml, but take a gel with caffeine. And from here, at kilometers 25, 30, 35 and 40, 130 ml is prescribed but of the Drink Mix 320, which has a greater carbohydrate load. It is believed, however, that a drum fell. In total, Sawe’s intake remained at about 115 g/h of carbohydrates. Sabastian Sawe race protocol. Click on the image to go to the original post. The figure is very high and unthinkable just a few years ago. And, despite this, it pales in comparison to what was planned for Kejelcha. From Santamadre they explain to us that the final objective was to move around 140 gr/h of carbohydrates in this case. “It’s about keeping your deposits full for as long as possible, being aware that you will always be in deficit, losing more than you earn,” says Beltrá. In this case, they do confirm that the athlete had problems at kilometers 25 and 35, where he lost the bottles. “That coincides with the decline that they experienced at kilometer 41″, laments the CEO of Santamadre who, he emphasizes, for them a debut like this shows that “we don’t know their ceiling. When he arrived he was upset for losing the race, he asked us for forgiveness for losing the two bottles… he wasn’t aware of what he had done, nor did he know it when he hugged me at the finish line.” In this case, Kejelcha used Santamadre gels diluted in water. The limit is set, according to the Spanish company, by the athlete’s own stomach. “The protocol has to be personalized. We have controlled all the variables since we started working together, all meals, rest, body temperature, glycemic peaks… the nutritional strategy was studied to take into account the glycemic index of each moment,” Beltrá explains to us. Kejelcha was, in fact, the only athlete among the first finishers to use a different brand than Maurten. This brand revolutionized athletics with the sponsorship of Eliud Kipchoge and has been the leader in recent years thanks to its famous Hydrogel. With this gel, the brand managed to encapsulate … Read more

OpenAI is the most successful company on the planet. Also the one that plans to lose 85,000 million dollars in a single year

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Something special is going to happen in 2026: both OpenAI and Anthropic are going public. This will finally mean that individual investors can invest in them and bet on their future with their money. It will be the definitive exam for the credibility of companies that have grown exceptionally in recent years but also They have burned the money as if there were no tomorrow. But be careful, because there is a compelling reality here: they are going to continue burning it in an even more astonishing way. The two sides of the IPO. The Wall Street Journal has had access to the financial documents submitted to investors before the IPOs proposed by both OpenAI and Anthropic. They reveal extraordinarily striking data that have two sides. Amazement and concern with OpenAI. For example, OpenAI has indicated that it will almost double its revenue this year. According to their forecasts, they could become profitable in 2026 if one excludes the cost of training their models (which are stratospheric, of course). But there is the other reality: OpenAI expects to spend $121 billion on computing power in 2028, so even doubling revenue it will lose, attention, $85 billion. No company has ever lost this amount of money and survived, but OpenAI not only promises that it will survive, but that those losses will end up being almost anecdotal. I tell you the truth, but only part of it. Both companies wanted to show two different versions of reality when talking about how they present their profitability. In one, the very expensive model training processes are included, and in others in which these costs are excluded under a heading called “computing for research.” Excluding those costs, OpenAI is on track to achieve a small pre-tax operating profit this year. Anthropic also promises to achieve this if its most optimistic scenario comes true. Excluding the cost of training models, both OpenAI and Anthropic could be “profitable” this year. Source: WSJ. Until 2030, no real profitability. If the costs and investment in model training are included, OpenAI indicates that it will end up being profitable in 2030, a fact that They had already planned a long time ago and that could not hide a forceful reality: the company has not only not stopped spending money until now: it is going to continue spending it, but to an even greater extent with projects like Stargate to the head. Saying that in 2026 they will be profitable if we do not consider training costs is like an airline telling us that it is profitable excluding the cost of fuel. Anthropic, by the way, expects to be fully profitable in 2028. Revenues growing fast, costs even faster. In addition to those training processes, both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending billions of dollars every year in inferencea section that is beginning to be even more important at an operational and strategic level. Currently, these inference costs represent half of each company’s revenue, although inference technology is expected to becomes cheaper and therefore the costs too. Here, however, there are two big differences between both companies: OpenAI: most ChatGPT users do not pay to use the service, so OpenAI assumes these inference costs without making them profitable. According to OpenAI, this facilitates adoption and will allow users to become subscribers in the future, something that is not happening too much at the moment. Anthropic: This startup has managed to win over many companies that pay to use their models, and it is evident that the company is absolutely focused on making you pay to use their models if you want to use them. And if not, Tell OpenClaw. Betting on the future. The companies and venture capital funds that have invested billions in OpenAI or Anthropic have made a bet on the future. They have blind faith that these companies will end up taking over the world, so the fact that today they are still not profitable does not scare them… or not enough to withdraw from this expensive race. Both have experienced spectacular growth that serves as an argument for investors. In addition, the growing interest of companies in integrating AI solutions by paying for them has boosted Anthropic and even caused OpenAI to reorganize and change its strategy. Less fireworks and hypemore focus in what makes money. The IPO as a trick to survive. Both companies are going to continue burning money like there was no tomorrow in the coming years, but now they hope that investors will be the ones to sustain their businesses. The amount of money they will need has made even the Nasdaq make things easier: It will allow newly listed companies to join its renowned index more quickly, giving them access to larger capital reserves. Now it will be the public market and to a large extent the individual investor who will decide whether they want to bet on that future or not. A small survey. Would you invest in OpenAI or Anthropic if it went public? It is evident that both companies generate different impressions, and although their strategies and ways of doing things are different, it is clear that this public sale offer is going to be very striking when it occurs. So, it is a good time to find out a little about what you, the xatakeros, think about this financial movement of these companies. Image | TechCrunch | Wikimedia Commons In Xataka | NVIDIA has so much money that it is becoming something different: the largest startup incubator in the world

In London more and more people lose money when they sell their house. The question is whether it is the canary in Europe’s mine

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Located north of the Thames, Tower Hamlets is one of the districts most emblematic from London. In fact, it covers a large part of the East End, the historic center of the capital. For years (like most of the city) it also represented something else: a juicy market for those who wanted to invest in housing and achieve high returns. Not anymore. In 2025 about 30% Of the owners who got rid of their homes in that neighborhood (mostly apartments) had to do so for less money than they paid at the time. And it’s not just something that happens in Tower Hamlets. What has happened? That in London housing is no longer an infallible business. This is suggested at least by the latest study published by Hamptons, which reveals that in 2025 Londoners were the Britons most likely to lose money from the sale of their properties. Even more than its neighbors in the northeast of the United Kingdom, who have spent years leading the ranking. “Rising London house prices are no longer the safe bet they once seemed,” concludes the report, which is supported by the Property Registry. What do the figures say? that last year 14.8% of people Those who sold their home in London did so for less money than they originally paid. It may seem like a modest percentage, but it is striking for several reasons. To begin with because it is the largest in the entire United Kingdom. The national average is 8.7% and there are British regions where this indicator is much lower, such as Wales (6.2%), East Midlands (6.7%) or West Midlands (6.9%). London has effectively ousted Nort Easth, which had dominated the sales ranking with losses for the last decade. Is Tower Hamlets a unique case? No. Tower Hamlets is the London district where the trend is best appreciated, but is not the only one in which a significant proportion of homeowners (28.2%) have lost money by getting rid of their homes. In the City, 26.2% of sellers closed transactions in “red numbers”, in Kensington & Chelsea 22.4%, in Westminster 22.1% and in Hammersmith & Fulham 20.8%. Curiously, in the cheapest district of London, Barking & Dagenham, only that indicator is much lower: 5.3%. “In some cases, even homeowners who bought a decade ago risk getting back less than they paid, something almost unthinkable in 2015. And for many the sums are small,” the study insists. “In the coming years it is likely that more sellers will have missed out on the price boom that London experienced between 2012 and 2016, as they bought at the peak of the market.” Is there more data? Yes. The Hamptons report raises some interesting ideas. For example, most of the sales with losses (close to 90%) were carried out by apartments. If we talk about houses, the photo is somewhat different. Hamptons technicians recognize that in 2025 the average seller in London pocketed 172,500 pounds more than what they originally paid when purchasing their home, but they insist on the increase in sales at a loss: if in 2019 they represented 5.9%, in 2025 “red” operations already represented 14.8%. Is it the only report? No. Over recent months, more analyzes have been published showing that the London property market is not going through its best moment. There is talk of a price drop of 5.1% at the end of 2025 (which takes the market even further away from the 2022 data) and even from a sluggish prime housing market that will not rise until at least 2028. “In London, the growth of house prices is no longer a safe bet,” he explains to Financial Times Aneisha Beveridge, Hamptons manager. There is studies which show that prices are declining in half of London’s neighborhoods, leaving a “two-speed” market: that of the most expensive (and volatile) areas and the cheapest, which has demonstrated greater resilience. In December Bloomberg warned that homes worth more than two million run the risk of depreciating, losing almost 5% of their value in one year. What is the reason? The big question. When explaining the London trend the analysts they point out several factors. One of the main ones is the regulatory change, marked by the end of discounts to the purchase of housing and a greater penalty for the purchase of second homes and houses as investments. The authorities have also focused on the prime segment, rethinking the status nom-dom for large foreign fortunes and raising local taxes for the most expensive properties. Added to the above is the influence of Brexit, the exorbitant prices that London reached in 2022 or how difficult it is for families to access the market, partly because the cost of rent neutralizes the ability to save. The question that some are already made is whether London is an isolated case or should be understood as a canary in the mine for other European capitals. Image | Benjamin Davies (Unsplash) In Xataka | Housing is getting so expensive that in the United Kingdom there are already people opting for plan B: living on boats

We have been believing for years that intermittent fasting is the definitive weapon to lose weight. Science has another idea

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During the last years, the intermittent fasting has gone from being something exceptional to becoming a nutritional strategy that there is more and more talk and that it has more followers behind it. And it is no wonder, since the promise is quite seductive as it does not focus on what you eat, but on when you eat, activating different metabolic switches to accelerate fat burning. Although there are also detractors behind. New data. The Cochrane library, considered a great world reference, published a few days ago a great review about intermittent fasting that acts as a bucket of cold water, since it suggests that this diet does not offer superior benefits to conventional weight loss diets. The backup. We are not talking about a small study whose validity can be questioned, but in this case the Cochrane researchers analyzed 22 randomized controlled trials that added up to a total of 1,995 participants. overweight or obesity. The objective here was to compare different fasting modalities, such as going 16 hours without being able to eat with eight hours of eating, fasting on alternate days or 5:2 diet compared to classic calorie restriction or inaction. What they found is that, when pitting intermittent fasting against regular dietary advice, the difference in weight loss is virtually zero. The data. Getting into the matter, when intermittent fasting was compared With standard calorie-restricted diets, the mean difference in weight change was a minuscule -0.33%. This difference can translate into that intermittent fasting may result in little to no difference in weight loss with the traditional method. Regarding quality of life, such as the feeling of energy, no difference was seen and, regarding the levels of total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol and triglycerides, fasting did not prove to be a panacea either, yielding results of “little or no difference” compared to the control diets. The small print. One of the most critical points of the Cochrane review is the certainty of the evidence, which they rated mostly as “low” or “very low.” This does not mean that the studies are poorly done, but rather that there are important limitations, such as risk bias, inconsistency in results, and lack of precision. But there is one fact that should worry anyone who decides to opt for this diet independently, without medical advice, since, although the evidence is uncertain, some studies pointed to associated side effects specifically to fasting. These include headaches, nausea, cold intolerance or even insomnia and lack of concentration. What is not yet known. Perhaps it is the most revealing thing about this scientific study, since there are still many unknowns surrounding intermittent fasting that invite further research. In this case, none of the 22 studies included data on “patient satisfaction,” which is important because we don’t know if people prefer to go hungry for a few hours in exchange for eating more later, or if they hate the process. And being comfortable with a diet is essential so that you don’t abandon it halfway through. In addition to this, none of the studies pointed to the relationship that may exist in chronic diseases that require significant dietary control, such as diabetes, and which is very common in the population. But one of the big problems in science today is duration, since most studies lasted less than 12 months. We don’t know if fasting is sustainable or safe beyond a year. It is not a miracle diet. What we do know is that intermittent fasting works, but the key point is that It is not superior to the tools we already had as a calorie restriction accompanied by a balanced diet and exercise. For the average patient, this is actually good news: it means that the The best diet is the one you can stick to. If someone finds it easier to skip breakfast with a 16:8 fast than to count calories at each meal, fasting is a valid tool. But if fasting causes headaches, you’re not missing out on any “magic” metabolic benefits from eating three times a day. Although in this process the most important thing is always to be advised by personnel who are qualified in nutrition to be able to have the best dietary plan, to have real objectives and, above all, not to get frustrated along the way. Images | VD Photography In Xataka | We believed that a vegetarian diet guaranteed longevity. In extreme old age, the data says just the opposite

Snacking between meals is not a lack of will, but a battle that we lose in our brain

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A fairly typical scene in the lives of some people can unfold in the middle of the afternoon or even after dinner, where an inner force drags us to the pantry or the refrigerator to have some chocolate or some small pecking. And although this is something that we try to justify within a “lack of will”the reality is that our brain and hormones are fighting a battle with us in which we usually lose. And to understand what is happening here, you have to look at the scientific literature. A sleep problem. Blame lack of sleep of an imbalance in our hormones is undoubtedly one of the most solid pillars of current metabolic medicine, and the truth is that it is not any type of myth. This is something that was evidenced in a study published in 2004 which showed that when healthy young people restricted their hours of sleep, an endocrine disaster occurred. Here, your levels of leptinwhich is the hormone that sends the satiety signal to the brain so that we stop eating, plummet, while ghrelinwhich is the hormone that tells us to keep eating, it shoots. Greater intake. The result here cannot be other than consumption of 328 extra kcal per day through snackslooking almost exclusively for quickly absorbed carbohydrates because our brain is telling us that we need foods that provide us with energy quickly. Although in truth it is something that is not needed, so these foods directly end up forming more fat deposits. A more recent review goes further and confirms that even a single night of bad sleep is enough to disrupt insulin and orexin, physiologically preparing us for a day of uncontrollable cravings. Eat dinner early. This is something that in many countries, such as France, is totally normal, but not in Spain. Here the science is pretty clear because it has been more than proven that our body does not process food in the same way at 2:00 p.m. as it does at 10:00 p.m. Here the different trials suggest that aligning our meals with circadian rhythms drastically modulates appetite hormones, so eating while our central biological clock is active reduces the average daily germin levels and increases satiety hormones in the evening. This is the same as what a study published in 2023 which confirms that eating at times aligned with sunlight improves the synchronization between the central biological clock and the peripheral clocks in the different organs. The message we should take home here is that eating early literally turns off the physiological desire to eat at midnight because the body understands that the eating cycle has ended and the repair cycle begins. Protein to calm satiety. In this case, the field of nutrition has stopped focusing only on calories to focus on the hormonal response that each food generates in our body. The different reviews suggest that eating around 25-30 grams of high-quality protein per meal not only optimizes muscle protein synthesis, but also suppresses appetite in the long term and, therefore, reduces the temptation to snack between meals. A 2020 meta-analysis corroborated Likewise, seeing that this amount of protein in a meal reduces ghrelin levels and increases the production of hormones that inhibit appetite, such as famous LPG-1 on which medications such as Ozempic. Stress and cortisol. Snacking has an important emotional and brutal stress management component, since it has surely happened to you that when you have more things on you that’s when you eat the most. This is where scientific literature defines hedonic hunger as the strong desire to eat for pure pleasure, in the total absence of physical need for calories in our body. And the blame lies in the extra production of cortisol, which is the hormone classically related to stress. But the most interesting thing here is that in people who eat because of an “emotional” desire and not because of a physiological need, it was seen that when they already saw that a stressful situation was going to come (such as exam time for students), ghrelin levels increased. In this way, if you are nervous, bored or mentally tired, the brain will ask for food rich in fats and sugars, such as sweets, as a dopaminergic compensation mechanism. And here it is not that you are hungry, but that there is great stress. Images | Madalyn Cox Denny Muller In Xataka | We believed that a vegetarian diet guaranteed longevity. In extreme old age, the data says just the opposite

lose the market that matters

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Anthropic has closed a financing round of 30,000 million dollars that doubles its valuation to 380,000 millionjust four months after being valued at 183,000 million. The operation is led by the Singapore sovereign fund GIC and Coatue, with participation from NVIDIA and Microsoft. Bang. The company has already raised more than $57 billion since its founding in 2021. OpenAI continues to have the leadership in valuation with half a billion after its last round of 40 billion at the end of last year, but now it faces a threat that is growing faster than expected. Between the lines. The numbers explain an uncomfortable paradox for OpenAI: ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion queries daily and takes the consumer market by storm… …but Anthropic controls 32% of the LLM business market according to Menlo Ventures, compared to 25% for OpenAI. And in programming, the distance is even greater: 42% versus 21%. OpenAI has seen its enterprise share fall from 50% in 2023 to 25% todayjust when this segment is emerging as the most profitable and predictable. If the consumer chatbot doesn’t turn out to be the winning horse in this race, Sam Altman has a big problem. The contrast. Sarah Friar, chief financial officer of OpenAI, acknowledged in Davos that they have gone from 70/30 consumer-business to 60/40, with the expectation of reaching 50/50 this year. The transcript of the interview CNBC Bring all the details. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, boasts of maintaining an 80/20 business-consumer ratio from the beginning. Anthropic reports recurring revenues of more than 14 billion, with growth multiplying tenfold annually for three years. And customers spending more than $100,000 annually have increased sevenfold in 12 months. Yes, but. Neither of them is profitable yet: Anthropic projected gross margins of 40% by 2025, but lowered his expectations by 10 points due to inference costs 23% higher than expected. The servers rented from Google and Amazon weigh more than calculated. OpenAI faces the same problem as both turn to the market every few months to fund the next phase. That is why both are considering IPOs between this year and next. Unexpected twist. The launch of Claude Code in December has accelerated enterprise adoption in a way that perhaps no one anticipated. The tool has not only doubled users in a month, but has consolidated the perception of Claude as “the serious option” for companies compared to ChatGPT. If companies value something, even more than the end consumer, it is stability and predictability. And Anthropic has been able to capitalize on that demand. Missing? Temporal context: By the time Apple reached a valuation of 380 billion, it had already been in existence for almost four decades. He sold Macs, he sold iPods, he sold iPads. It was already going for the iPhone 5s and its annual profit was 50 billion dollars. Anthropic reaches the same figure without being profitable, compressing decades of value creation into just a few quarters. It is not necessarily wrong, especially with the recent good dynamics of Claude’s company, but it remains to be seen if these models can sustain those explosive revenues and convert them into profits before the market loses patience. In Xataka | Featured image | OpenAI, Anthropic

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