For decades, we were told to avoid full-fat dairy. New research says otherwise

Moderation is key - don't eat a whole butter cow in one sitting

University of Toronto

Full-fat dairy may not be the health villain it has long been portrayed as, according to a new study finding that three daily servings did not worsen weight, cholesterol, or insulin resistance over 12 weeks. 

Researchers also observed improvements in blood pressure and nutrient intake, raising questions about longstanding recommendations to choose low-fat dairy.

For years, people have been encouraged to choose low-fat or fat-free dairy products to protect their hearts and manage their weight. But growing scientific evidence suggests that full-fat dairy may not carry the health risks many have come to expect.

A new Canadian study led by University of Toronto professor Harvey Anderson adds to that evidence. Researchers found that adults who consumed three servings of full-fat dairy each day for 12 weeks did not experience harmful changes in body weight, body composition, energy metabolism, or blood cholesterol levels compared with participants following a diet containing little dairy.

Even more surprisingly, participants who consumed more dairy showed improvements in blood pressure and obtained greater amounts of several important nutrients.

The findings, published in The Journal of Nutrition, raise new questions about longstanding dietary recommendations and suggest that the health effects of dairy may be more complicated than its saturated fat content alone would indicate.

Why Full-Fat Dairy Has Been Discouraged

For decades, nutrition guidelines in Canada and many other countries have recommended choosing low-fat or fat-free milk, yogurt, and other dairy products. The main concern has been saturated fat, which can raise levels of LDL cholesterol in the blood.

Often called "bad" cholesterol, LDL can contribute to fatty deposits in the arteries. Over time, this buildup can increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular problems.

Because full-fat dairy contains more saturated fat than reduced-fat alternatives, health authorities have traditionally encouraged people to limit their intake.

However, research examining what happens when people actually consume full-fat dairy has produced a more complicated picture.

Check the track records of RI nursing homes and rehab facilities

Advocates for Better Care in Rhode Island launches two free public tools to help Rhode Islanders choose and track long-term care

From an Advocates for Better Care in Rhode Island press release in SteveAhlquist.news 

ABC-RI announced the full public launch of two free, searchable websites that, for the first time, let Rhode Island families, caregivers, and policymakers look up and compare the inspection history, quality trends, and ownership of every licensed nursing home and assisted living residence in the state.

The two tools are:

• Assisted Living Inspection Records: Plain-language summaries of every Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) inspection report for licensed assisted living residences, with links to the original reports, a map view of every facility, a printable checklist of questions to ask on a visit tailored to each residence, and the site in English and Spanish.
• RI Nursing Home Dashboard: CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) quality, staffing, and inspection data for every Rhode Island nursing home, built from federal data going back to 2019 and updated monthly, plus a plain-language guide to choosing between a nursing home and assisted living and who pays for what, also in English and Spanish.

None of this has been available to the public in a usable form before. Rhode Island’s assisted living inspection reports exist only as individual PDFs filed in dozens of separate folders in RIDOH’s Google Drive, with no index and no way to search or compare across facilities. 

CMS publishes some of this on its own consumer site, Care Compare, but only as a single current snapshot, with no historical trend data or inspection summaries. The full underlying dataset behind Care Compare is released nationally as a massive raw file that, in practice, is not something a family or even most researchers can open and use. ABC-RI built both tools to take data that has technically always been public but was never usable and turn it into something anyone can search from a phone.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Definitely use databases to help you rule out facilities with poor ratings and add high-rated facilities to your list for consideration. 

BUT before making any final decisions, I strongly urge you to GO VISIT! Go in person, WITHOUT an appointment and ask to look around. Of course, they will insist you be accompanied, and that's OK. 

Consider factors you don't generally see in databases - e.g. smells, noise, crowding, interactions between staff and residents, the expression on patients' faces. You will see differences between facilities only detectable by visiting.  - Will Collette

Midterm Wave Sets a Course for ‘Medicare for All’ Fight

Incoming Democratic leadership take heed

By Kate Wells 

Fifteen years working as an emergency room nurse has convinced Kim Bogan that the only way to fix the American healthcare system is to tear it down and start over.

Her patients arriving for triage are sicker than ever. They can’t afford many of the prescriptions they get in the ER. And sometimes when patients die, she wonders if she could have saved them had she not been caring for five or six other people at once.

That’s why she spent the past year shuttling between 12-hour shifts at this city’s Sparrow Hospital and campaigning for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat who made “Medicare for All” a signature issue in his congressional campaign and is now a senator-elect.

But she realizes that just because progressive candidates successfully campaigned on some form of the policy in states such as Texas, Iowa, Maine, and Michigan, it doesn’t mean Medicare for All will be an easy sell. “Nobody expected that,” Bogan said.

Medicare for All typically refers to a government health program that would guarantee Americans coverage by replacing most or all private insurance. Critics are already pointing out that, even in a blue wave as massive as the 2026 midterms, the most vocal Medicare for All champions generally won by smaller margins than more moderate Democrats.

Stephen Miller helps Trump cope with 2026 election loss

And here he goes!

Though, thanks to Ukraine, the 2026 results may have been affected by machines (or the lack of them):

Air traffic control fiasco on Friday - some of the back story

 This happened on Thursday:

Then this happened on Friday:

But don't worry, the Trump Administration knows what to do:

US poised to lose measles elimination status—what does that mean?

A national shame

Sarah Boden

The United States is on the brink of losing its measles elimination status, a celebrated distinction it has held since 2000, when the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) determined the country had interrupted endemic transmission of the virus.

The country's status is being reconsidered at a meeting of a PAHO commission in Washington, DC, starting today and lasting through Friday. 

Countries that have eliminated measles still have occasional outbreaks, often stemming from international travel. In these rare instances, public health agencies can intervene before the extremely contagious virus becomes endemic. 

'A loss of achievement'

But in the United States, measles outbreaks are both sustaining themselves and seeding new outbreaks, creating a perpetual state of transmission, explained epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH, director of Brown University's Pandemic Center.

"It's just like popcorn: outbreak, outbreak, outbreak, outbreak. All over the country," she said. "They grow in size, and then they shrink. And then they move somewhere [else]."

More than 5,100 cases of measles have been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2026, though it's conceivable that number could surpass 7,000 before the end of the year. In the year the nation eliminated measles, the CDC reported just 85 cases.

So far, at least eight people in the United States have died from measles in 2026, as well as three last year. And for the first time in generations, congenital measles—passed from an infected pregnant woman to her newborn—poses a serious threat to public health.

Major trial challenges how doctors decide who really needs statins

Calcium scans - are they worth it?

European Society of Cardiology

A major clinical trial has raised new questions about how doctors decide who should take statins to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Researchers found that using heart scans to guide treatment decisions produced the same observed rate of major cardiovascular events as traditional risk assessments, even though the scans led to far fewer recommendations to begin taking statins.

The findings, presented during a Hot Line session at ESC Congress 2026, also revealed a striking difference in how consistently patients took their medication. Those advised to use statins based on calcium buildup in their coronary arteries were substantially more likely to follow their treatment recommendations.

Although the results suggest that heart scans could help doctors make more targeted treatment decisions, the trial did not establish that the scan approach was as effective as conventional risk assessment. Researchers say additional studies are needed to determine whether it offers a better strategy for preventing cardiovascular disease.

Why Predicting Heart Disease Risk Remains a Challenge

Cardiovascular disease remains the world's leading cause of illness and death. Much of this burden comes from atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), which develops when fatty deposits known as plaque accumulate inside arteries, restricting blood flow and increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Coronary artery disease and ischemic stroke are two major forms of this condition.

Several common factors increase the likelihood of developing ASCVD, including smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol. Doctors use these factors to estimate a person's cardiovascular risk and determine whether preventive medications are appropriate.

The Politics Behind the Art You Already Know

Hidden in Plain Sight

By Dominick Conidi, Alexandria Shaner , Bill Fletcher Jr 

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

You know this art. But do you remember what it was actually about?

Hidden in Plain Sight uncovers the politics inside the songs, films, books, and images millions of us already know—and asks: What happened to the message?

Art is powerful. It can help us recognize that problems we experience as private are often collective. It can help us imagine alternatives, and see new possibilities for change. That’s also why powerful institutions work to manage culture: by suppressing some ideas, commercializing others, stripping away context, and turning radical critique into something safe.

But meanings can be reclaimed.

Look again. Recover the story. Imagine more. And follow the series as we explore how culture can help us build the power and possibilities for a better world.

Click here to download our 1-page PDF guide!

Transcript:

You know this song.

You’ve heard it at sporting events. Political rallies. Fourth of July celebrations.

But listen to the verses.

A young man is sent to Vietnam. He comes home. He can’t find work. The country that used him for war has little use for him now.

Born in the U.S.A. is a song about war, class, and abandonment. And somehow, it became a “patriotic” anthem, dismissing the original intent of the piece.

How does that happen?

You know this one too. Fun. Catchy. Impossible not to sing along with.

But listen closely.

You put in the hours. Someone else takes the credit. You make the money. Someone else gets rich.

Forty years later, millions of people still know exactly what she’s talking about.

Millions of people know these works. Far fewer remember what they were actually saying. And sometimes, the forgetting does political work.

In this series, we’re going to take some of the songs, movies, books, and images millions of people already know—and look again.

Some of these stories will be familiar. Some may surprise you. And some may make you hear or see something you’ve encountered a hundred times in a different way.

Through the series, we’ll ask what happened to the message—and what it can still tell us about power, liberation, and the world we might build.

The Message Didn’t Disappear. We Stopped Hearing It.

You don’t always have to ban a dangerous idea.

You can take away its context. Leave out the inconvenient parts. Turn the critique into entertainment. Put the rebel on a T-shirt. Sell the anger back to the people who felt it in the first place.

And after a while, the work becomes so familiar that we stop hearing what it’s saying.

Take Pink Floyd’s Money. A song about greed. About a culture that treats wealth as a measure of human worth. Today, it can sit comfortably inside celebrations of wealth and business success.

Or Fortunate Son. A song about class privilege—about the children of the powerful escaping war while working-class people fight it. Now it can play almost anywhere as a burst of generic American rebellion.

The sound remains. The target gets blurry.

That doesn’t mean the art has failed. It means there’s another struggle over the art.

Who gets to tell us what it means?

Sometimes, They Just Leave Out the Verses

Everybody knows This Land Is Your Land. For generations, children have sung it as a simple celebration of America.

But Guthrie wrote verses that many people never learned. Verses about private property. Poverty. People going hungry.

In one, a sign says:

Private Property.

And Guthrie answers:

The other side didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.

Suddenly, the song is asking something much more difficult:

Who gets to own the land? Who gets excluded? Who gets to make the rules?

The song survived. So did the question.

The part that disappeared was the connection between the two.

Trump's obsession with gold decor is way more sinister than you think

The color of autocrats

By Thom Hartmann

Key takeaways

• Grand Construction Projects: Trump is focused on gold decorations, marble columns, triumphal arches, and massive ballrooms, prioritizing them over issues like healthcare, inflation, and housing.
• Historical Parallels: Similar to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Ceaușescu, and Louis XIV, these projects aim to impress, dominate, and create a personal legacy through monumental architecture.
• Threat to Republican Ideals: By turning the White House and DC into symbols of his personal power, Trump challenges the founders’ vision of a modest republic where government serves the people, not glorifies a ruler.

Trump is trying to get his construction projects done before Democrats can stop him when they take control of Congress in two months after last night’s spectacular victories. There’s an urgent reason for that, from his perspective.

Monday afternoon, on the eve of the midterm election, Trump stood at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and delivered his closing argument.

But instead of talking about healthcare, inflation, housing costs, education, or the challenges working families and farmers are facing as the result of his and the GOP’s policies, he went off on an extended, rambling rant about fountains, marble, the “arch,” and his other construction projects. And, repeatedly, about Corinthian columns.

As Barack Obama noted last week, Trump has an obsession with gluing gold-painted decorations to the walls of the Oval Office; Obama called it “arts and crafts.” He’s covering things with gold trim, gold gilded picture frames, elaborate ornamentation, and even regilding monumental statues in DC. He’s torn down the White House’s East Wing, is building a massive ballroom, is ripping up an historic DC golf course, and wants a triumphal arch.

What’s going on here?

Just ridiculing this as “arts and crafts” misses an enormously important aspect of what Trump’s up to; this isn’t simply the vanity of a former real estate developer who likes shiny stuff.

Historians will tell you that there’s a long and disturbing history of brutal authoritarian leaders, particularly fascists, being obsessed with architecture, massive construction projects, and remaking capital cities in their own images.

And now Trump’s doing it to America and few people seem to realize its importance.

— Adolf Hitler was obsessed with architecture; he spent countless hours with Albert Speer planning the transformation of Berlin into “Germania,” a gigantic imperial capital with buildings designed to dwarf anything built by previous civilizations. His proposed People’s Hall would have a dome nearly 1,000 feet high: Hitler wanted buildings so massive that ordinary human beings would feel insignificant standing before them, buildings that would last like the monuments of ancient Rome.

— Benito Mussolini did the same thing in Italy, demolishing historic neighborhoods in Rome to construct grand avenues and massive government buildings; he was deliberately invoking the architecture of the ancient Roman Empire, saying his fascist regime was the rebirth of Rome’s long-lost “greatness.” Future generations, he said, would see his buildings and remember his name and its imprint on the Eternal City.

— Joseph Stalin, who called himself a communist but ruled like a fascist, planned an enormous Palace of the Soviets featuring a gigantic, larger-than-life statue of Lenin.

Don't expect to get a lifeline

Save on home heating oil

Affordable Rhode Island celebrates Rep. Megan Cotter's win

Affordable RI celebrates four general election wins

From an Affordable RI press release, SteveAhlquist.news

Affordable RI celebrated a successful November 3 general election, with all four of its priority candidates winning their races: Megan Cotter in House District 39, Nelly Burdette in Senate District 17, Veronicka Vega in House District 49, and Zakary Pereira in House District 22. In addition to supporting the election of Amy Santiago in House District 7 in the primary.

The four victories reflect growing support for leaders who put affordability, economic fairness, and opportunity at the center of their campaigns. Together, these candidates are committed to addressing the rising cost of living and making Rhode Island a place where working people can afford to live, raise a family, and build a future.

Metformin given within a week of COVID-19 slashes risk of long COVID, death by 53%, paper notes

Popular diabetes drug offers new benefit

Meghan Holohan

Long COVID—or new-onset symptoms or worsening health conditions after SARS-CoV-2 infection—can lower quality of life. Finding a way to prevent it would be a welcome relief for those worried about the long-term effects of the viral infection. 

A study published last week in the Journal of Medical Virology finds that US COVID-19 patients prescribed metformin, a medication that treats prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, within six days of COVID-19 infection were less likely to develop long COVID or die. 

“Metformin prescription within the week following documented SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a 53% reduction in LC/D [long COVID or death] over 6 months in this primarily Omicron-infected sample,” wrote the authors, led by researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School. 

Somebody signed me on to Donald Trump's email fundraising list.

Thank you to whoever did that because I would have missed messages like the one below

By Will Collette

If only this could be true:

THIS COULD BE MY FINAL WEEK AS PRESIDENT READ MY CRITICAL REFLECTION Never in the history of my Presidency have I sent anything quite like this to my supporters. Dear Will, this is your only warning. What I’m about to share with you is emotional - PREPARE YOURSELF. READ MY CRITICAL REFLECTION The Rose Garden is almost sacred at night. When the cameras are gone and the noise of the day finally fades, it stops being a backdrop for press conferences and power plays. It becomes what it was always meant to be: a quiet, living garden right beside the White House. And last evening, in what could be my final 4 weeks as President, I took some time to reflect on the last 10 years we have shared as I strolled alongside the rose bushes. READ MY CRITICAL REFLECTION Here's what the White House under Trump actually looks like: The "Sacred" Rose Garden has been paved over and now looks like the patio at Mar-A-Lago Your faith in me still humbles me more than I can put into words. From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, I have always been able to count on your support. From an unproven, underdog political candidate to the leader of our nation's GREATEST movement in history, you have always stood by my side. Even when it would have been easier to write me off. For the past decade, the Radical Left has done everything in their power in an attempt to destroy the MAGA coalition. They came for me, my family, friends, and above all: my supporters. People like you, Will. When the chips were down, you stared evil straight in the face and never flinched. You put your career, family, and even LIFE on the line to continue supporting me, and I will never be able to thank you enough. Every single day I wake up, I pray and thank God for his blessing of being able to be your President.  And every night I go to sleep, I pray for the opportunity to spend one more day fighting to make America Great Again. And in the Rose Garden late last evening, I made one final prayer before leaving: That my supporters will keep their trust in me one final time and help see the rest of my mission through. As you read my message, the Radical Left all across the country are rallying. From our cities to the countryside, dangerous socialists and communists are preparing to destroy our Republican Majorities in the House and the Senate. I refuse to go quietly and allow the Radical Left one final victory. After everything we have built - after the strength we restored, the borders we secured, the voices we gave back to forgotten Americans - we cannot stop when we are so close to Making America Great Again. Here, in the Rose Garden, I’m not asking for your support as President. I am asking for your support as a fellow American who will do anything for his country. I am asking for one more show of faith. One more offering of trust. Please, stand with me today. > Thank you & God Bless

Sen. Whitehouse criticized for plan to ease project permitting

A bill in Congress would speed up project approval. Is this good or bad?

Barry Schiller in SteveAhlquist.news

Have you heard about the “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act,” S5653, introduced in the United States Senate? From its name, it certainly sounds like a good thing, but it has actually split the environmental movement.

It is a 417-page bill with 4 sponsors, two from each party, one of whom is our own Sheldon Whitehouse, long a climate leader. The bill purports to be about permitting reform, intended to reduce delays so the U.S. can build projects more quickly, especially in energy.

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is thinking of renewable energy, and is quoted in the press release saying Americans “want lower energy bills, and they want more clean energy. Our permitting reform plan gets us a long way toward both of those goals. 

If we can pass this bill, we will flood the grid with clean, affordable energy and make data centers start paying their fair share. Like all major pieces of bipartisan legislation, this bill is a compromise. We believe it is a compromise that will result in a brighter, cleaner, more affordable future.”

Renewable energy firms, worried about getting transmission lines built, support the bill, as does the Citizens Climate Lobby, which claims it will “unlock a huge amount of clean energy development.” But because the bill can also speed up fossil fuel development, it has support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Mining Association, natural gas interests, and apparently the Trump administration, which wants to speed up projects like oil wells, coal mines, gas pipelines, and nuclear energy.

But some environmental groups oppose it, as the bill limits time for public comment, restricts judicial remedies, and narrows the scope of environmental review. The New York Times summary of the bill says “it puts new limits on landmark environmental laws such as the Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts.” The latter inspired a 4-page letter signed by more than 200 environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth, the Western Environmental Law Center, and the Center for Biological Diversity, detailing why the bill is objectionable.