🍎 Nutritional "dark matter" 😴 #1 sleep exercise 🧬 Old 90s Babies

🍎 Nutritional "dark matter" 😴 #1 sleep exercise 🧬 Old 90s Babies

Scientists don't know what food is. Wait…what?
🏠 WFH loneliness 💪 Regrowing Limbs 🎓 Perfectionism boom Reading 🍎 Nutritional "dark matter" 😴 #1 sleep exercise 🧬 Old 90s Babies 4 minutes Next 🤖 Best friend bot 🐠 Fish oil flop ☕ "Coffee liver"
Scientists don't know what food is. Wait…what?
June 28, 2026 Sign Up | Shop

I watched the US v. Turkey World Cup game on a plane, and it hit me…

Planes are sneaky-good venues for sports! Everyone's packed in like stadium seating, watching together, high-fiving after goals.

Or maybe it's just a World Cup thing. Or the flight I was on.

Either way, it was electric (until the last minute).

As always, please forward IQNEWS to a friend if you're a fan!

STORY OF THE WEEK

Science is sequencing your sandwich

image: self

Scientists don't know what food is. Wait…what?

Protein, fat, carbs, water - these make up the majority of weight in food. But the vast majority of total compounds in food are a complete mystery.

99.4% of the molecules in your fridge are "nutritional dark matter."

And this mystery material likely holds the key to understanding disease risk, healthy aging, and why different diets affect people differently. High stakes!

Welp, the new field of "foodomics" - which merges genomics (genes), proteomics (proteins), metabolomics (cell activity) and nutrigenomics (diet's impact on genes) - is on the case.

Initiatives like the Foodome Project have catalogued ~139,000 chemicals in our food and have started linking them to specific disease processes.

Takeaway: we're a few years away from sequencing food like we sequenced DNA decades ago, which may decode the ideal diet for any given person.

IN OTHER NEWS

Sleepy yoga, news burnout, inverse age impact...

image: self
Downward Doze
A meta-analysis of 2,500+ people found yoga beats every workout for sleep. 30 minutes 2-3 times a week is the sweet spot. Stretching exercises finished dead last.
News Blues
Bad news news: a record 40% of people now actively avoid it, according to Reuters. Our brains can't handle constant sensational updates (IQNEWS excluded, of course).
Anti-Decline
Yale tracked 11,000+ over-65s for 12 years and found nearly half got sharper or stronger, not weaker. Decline isn't a given, and optimists about aging aged best.
Women Winning
Across five studies, Berkeley found people trust women more in negotiations. Financial outcomes were the same, but everyone's feelings about deals were better.
"Old" 90s Babies
Tracking 154K people, WashU found those born in the 1990s show a 92% bigger biological age gap vs others. Health issues are showing up sooner in this group.
HACK OF THE WEEK

Narrate your keys placement

image: self

You put your keys down "just for a second," and ten minutes later you're ransacking the couch cushions in pursuit of lost treasure. Yikes!

Tracking devices like AirTags are cool and all…but there's a simpler answer.

When you set something down, say where, out loud.

"I'm putting the screwdriver next to the microwave," for instance.

Saying it massively outperforms thinking it. Psychologists call it the "production effect": saying something triggers your brain to file it away more concretely.

SHOWER THOUGHTS

1. You've never seen an entire movie because you blink.

2. The object of golf is to play the least amount of golf.

3. Once you have a Ph.D., every meeting you go to becomes a doctor's appointment.

4. The first person to inhale helium was probably relieved that the effects wore off quickly.

5. There are two E's in "bee," but they're both silent.

POST OF THE WEEK
image: X
QUOTE / TIL / WORD / TRIVIA
Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
Today I learned Honey never really spoils. Archaeologists have found 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that's still edible, because its low water content and acidity make it nearly impossible for microbes to grow. (more here)
ultracrepidarian [ ul-truh-krep-ih-DAIR-ee-un ] - noun
A person who gives confident opinions on subjects they know nothing about.
Every holiday dinner has one ultracrepidarian explaining why your food is secretly killing you.
Q: Which of these is actually a berry, botanically speaking?
A. Strawberry
B. Raspberry
C. Banana
D. Cherry
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By Will Nitze - Let's connect on LinkedIn!

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