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health and longevity · the day's top 6 · june 13th
storyflo · health and longevity
Jun 13, 2026 · 14 min listen
Listen · storyflo · health and longevity
health and longevity · the day's top 6 · june 13th
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This post is sponsored by Thrive Market I am always looking for ways to make my life easier and Thrive Market, my go-to online grocery store, continues to be a place where I get my monthly and weekly basics. With your Thrive Market membership you get access to top organic and non-GMO brands at up to 30% off and with the membership at $5 a month, it basically pays for itself in savings. I order my pantry staples like pasta, canned beans, anchovies, avocado oil and cleaning products on repeat and know that I will never run out. Use my exclusive link here and you will receive $20 off your first 3 orders and a $60 free gift when you sign up today. Plus this week only, enjoy 25% off top products in their big Summer Essentials Sale which ends tomorrow. Sometimes the best dishes come out of digging in your fridge or pantry and doing like a mini challenge with yourself and what you can make out of the items you have to hand. I made this the day before a travel day and had some shallots that needed using and found a half empty jar of roasted bell peppers and I always have Calabrian chilis to hand. Trust me, buy a jar of them and you will be shocked at how often you reach for them. This one is so easy as the blender does all the hard work. You do nothing more than a rough chop on the shallots and smash a few garlic cloves. It’s perfect for a week night when you really don’t want to do a whole lot of cooking but still want to eat really well. It’s also beautiful. And creamy without having cream in it. A winning dish on so many levels. You will love it. Serves 4-6 Ingredients: 4 large shallots or 2 medium yellow onions – peeled and roughly chopped 3 tablespoons of a good flavorful drizzling olive oil – I used Umbrian Gold 1/2 teaspoon Maldon salt 1 large red roasted bell pepper – I used the ones from a jar Calabrian chilis in oil – I used 3 tablespoons which is fairly hot, 2 tablespoons for medium and 1 tablespoon for very little heat 2 whole peeled smashed garlic cloves 5-7 cherry tomatoes 1 box of pasta or 16 ounces – I used a penne shape but any short pasta would work well here 1/3 cup microplane grated Pecorino Romano Finish with a drizzle of olive oil, final dusting of Pecorino and a small pinch of dried oregano salt or just dried oregano Method: In a small to medium lidded soup pot, add the shallots, olive oil, roasted bell peppers, salt, garlic, tomatoes and Calabrian chilis. The prep is almost minimum as you just roughly chop the shallots and you leave the bell peppers, tomatoes and garlic whole. Cook on medium heat until you start to hear a sizzle. Then cover and turn down to medium low and cook for 20-25 minutes or until all the shallots are soft. You don’t want any color on these and cooking them in a higher sided soup pot helps with that. After 25 minutes the shallots, tomatoes and garlic are very soft. Remove and put in a high speed blender and blend until smooth. The high speed blender is what makes the sauce creamy without adding cream. I love how smooth it is. Cook the pasta in boiling salted water that is as salty as the sea. Cook until 1 minute under the package instructions for al dente. Add the blended sauce to a saucier or large pan and then add the Pecorino. Give it a good mix. Now add the pasta directly to the saucier with half a ladle of cooking water. Mix well and it’s done. If the sauce is too thick, add a touch more water. You want it to be silky smooth. Plate up on to a large serving platter and give it a final dusting of Pecorino, a drizzle of good olive oil and then the faintest pinch of dried oregano salt or just dried oregano. It’s hard to stop eating this one. The kick from the Calabrian chilis make it very more-ish. You just want to keep eating it. This is a wonderful dish as Summer gets into full swing. Serve it with a big plate of grilled vegetables and grilled lamb chops or with a big arugula salad and swordfish steaks and you have a perfect meal. Enjoy! Xx Corre
June feels like a gentle step toward summer, and the new weekly menu reflects that shift. It leans on bright, seasonal ingredients—think frozen corn, roasted tomatoes, and a comforting soup that feels just right for the longer days. The dishes aim to capture the simplicity of warm-weather cooking while acknowledging that we’re still in a transitional period.
The menu is designed to be flexible, offering fresh flavor pairings and culinary lessons that don’t require a full‑on summer commitment. It’s meant to meet diners where they are, whether they’re looking for a quick, seasonal bite or a more involved dinner experience.
For the best experience with Restaurant Dropout, the recommendation is to use a desktop browser. Subscribers can dive straight into the new menu, and those who prefer more control can build their own meals from a library of hundreds of sauces, marinades, breads, grains, and proteins, or pick from over a hundred past weekly menus.
If the current selection isn’t a fit, there’s no pressure—customers can customize or switch to another menu at any time, keeping the dining experience both personal and adaptable.
(MedPage Today) -- Several top pro athletes and their surgeons say a modern version of an old tool is shaving weeks off the recovery time for certain injuries. And some top doctors think this is only the beginning. Cy Young Award winners Tarik...
I work in the world of health, I'm a functional diagnostic practitioner (FDN-P), someone who has personally navigated autoimmune conditions, and I no longer have health insurance. I know how that sounds. But stay with me. Here’s what I was tired of: paying money every month to a company that tries its hardest not to take care of me (quite literally). High monthly fees, massive deductibles, ridiculous charges for things that would cost me one-tenth of the price if I just paid cash. Surprising bills showing up months later, after I thought everything was taken care of. Not being able to see the doctors I actually wanted to see. As someone who works in the health world, I see this system crush people every day. And I mean crush. Not just financially -- though that part is devastating enough -- but in the way it wears people down over time. The way it trains you to expect less. The way it makes you feel like fighting for basic care is just part of the deal. Like… imagine being sick, not getting answers or support, and then also having to pay $$$ and fighting with the people who are supposed to be helping you. Or maybe you don’t have to imagine… because millions of people are dealing with this exact situation. Healthcare costs are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. Even though 92% of people are insured. Read that again. The majority of people going bankrupt over medical bills have insurance. The coverage isn’t protecting them. In a lot of cases, it’s part of the problem. Eventually, I realized that the problem isn’t that healthcare is too expensive. The system is designed to keep it that way. Insurance companies are not incentivized to keep you healthy. They are incentivized to collect premiums and minimize payouts. Those are not the same thing. And once you see that clearly, it’s very hard to keep handing them your money every month and pretending otherwise. So I switched to CrowdHealth. FYI, this is NOT a sponsored article. No one paid me to post this. I am passionate about encouraging more people to QUIT HEALTH INSURANCE!! To be clear, CrowdHealth is not insurance. It’s a peer-to-peer community where members fund each other’s medical bills directly. No middlemen. No networks. No billion-dollar insurance corporations sitting in the middle, profiting off denial letters and administrative delays. And no, it’s not some cult lol. Here’s how my costs break down: I pay $60 a month for membership. I contribute a maximum of $140 a month to help fund other members’ bills. If I ever need care, I pay the first $500 of every health event -- and the community pays the rest. That’s it. No deductibles. No copays. No surprise invoices. You go to the doctor, ask for the cash pay price, and pay your bill directly. For emergencies, CrowdHealth can step in and negotiate on your behalf before you pay. For planned care -- labs, imaging, surgery -- they prenegotiate prices ahead of time, often saving around 70% compared to what the billed rate would have been. And, yeah, you’re going to ask: “Well, what if my bill is a million dollars?!?!” There have been bills submitted to CrowdHealth that are over $1M, and they have been covered. The patient only had to pay $500 out of pocket. (There was a guy who accidentally shot himself while fishing and had to be helicoptered to the hospital… not cheap!—but he only paid $500). Three reasons. First, CrowdHealth attracts people who prioritize their health. Members tend to eat well, move daily, and take real responsibility for their own well-being. That self-selection matters. A healthier pool of people means lower costs across the board -- for everyone in the community. It’s a model that rewards wellness instead of profiting off disease. That’s a fundamentally different incentive structure than traditional insurance, and it changes everything about how the math works. (No smokers allowed, and restricted to individuals under 260 lbs (males) and 220 lbs (females)). Second, cash pay pricing is real, and it’s significant. When you tell a provider you’re paying cash, the price drops -- often dramatically. That’s because insurance introduces layers of bureaucracy, middlemen, and inflated billing codes that drive prices through the roof. None of that overhead exists to benefit the patient. It exists to serve the system. Remove it, and the actual cost of care looks completely different. Third, professional negotiation. CrowdHealth has a team of professionals who negotiate bills on your behalf, either before or after care is received. This is where the numbers get hard to ignore. A heart attack billed at $240,000 -- negotiated down to $20,000. A cardiac condition billed at $140,000 -- negotiated down to $10,000. A fall requiring surgery billed at $55,000 -- negotiated down to $3,000. Every single one of those patients still only paid $500. That’s it.
A note before we begin: this essay is for people who are attempting to live with open, uncensored complexity that can include rich internal worlds, rapid associative thinking, high perceptual sensitivity, and the particular experience of being more on the inside than you can ever fully show on the outside. This essay is a reflective piece for educational and personal exploration purposes only. It does not constitute clinical advice, psychological assessment, or medical guidance of any kind. If you are concerned about your mental health or the mental health of someone you know, please seek support from a qualified mental health professional. The distinctions drawn in this essay are offered as orientation, not diagnosis. Only a qualified clinician who knows you can make that determination. Let’s start with the thing nobody says out loud. There are thoughts and inner experiences you don’t share. Not because they’re dark or dangerous. Because they’re too fast, too connected, too layered, too far from where the conversation currently is. Because the last time you tried to explain the full version of what was happening in your mind, you watched someone’s expression shift in a way that made you decide, quietly and permanently, to keep more of it inside. You’ve become skilled at the edited version. The translated version. The version of yourself that fits in the room without alarming anyone. But privately, honestly, in the 3am version of yourself that doesn’t perform for anyone, you’ve wondered. If someone could actually see inside this, would they be okay with what they found? The racing. The connecting. The pattern recognition that never turns off. The way you can be in a conversation and simultaneously three conversations ahead and also noticing the power dynamic and also making a connection to something you read four years ago that suddenly explains everything and also feeling the emotional register of the room at a frequency most people don’t seem to be picking up. All at once. Always. You’ve wondered if that’s ‘normal.’ You’ve wondered if you’re normal (you’re not, and I love that). And the wondering itself feels like something you’re not supposed to admit. So let’s admit it. Right here. Together. There’s a reason the most creatively alive, perceptually sophisticated, systemically intelligent people tend to live close to what we might call the edge of typical. Not over the edge. At it. Close enough that what you know about certain clinical descriptions feel uncomfortably familiar even though you know, from the inside, that what you’re experiencing is not what those descriptions are actually pointing at. The edge is uncomfortable. It is also, not coincidentally, where everything interesting happens. Paradigm shifts don’t come from the middle of the distribution. Neither do the frameworks that change how fields think, the art that makes people feel seen in ways they didn’t expect, the therapeutic relationships that actually move something, the ideas that arrive ten years before the culture is ready for them. Those come from the edge. From minds wired for maximum sensitivity, maximum connectivity, maximum range. Minds that pay for that capacity with a particular kind of discomfort. A particular kind of loneliness. And a particular experience of their own interiority that can feel, on the harder days, genuinely destabilizing. You are not destabilized. You are calibrated for something most environments were never designed to accommodate. Those are different things. Knowing which one you’re in matters enormously.
Lucy’s flight arrived right on schedule and touched down safely, a simple but reassuring reminder that reliable travel can still happen.
When the market ran out of tuna, the kitchen pivoted to a salmon nicoise salad, turning a minor inconvenience into a fresh, tasty alternative and highlighting the value of flexibility in everyday meals.
After weeks without baking, the near‑weekly ritual of making challah returned, and the dough rose and baked beautifully, providing a grounding sense of accomplishment and comfort.
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