Conclusion That Egg Consumption Reduces Alzheimer's Disease Not Very Significant

A study in the peer reviewed Journal of Nutrition claiming a 47% reduction in clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's during life due to eating at least one egg a week, is much weaker than it appears at face value. 

The results (based upon a clinical diagnosis during life) were consistent with benefits as low as 17% within the margin of error.

 

And, the clinical diagnosis rates weren't very accurate. Post-mortem examination of the brains of more than half of the sample (578 cases) found a 56% false negative rate for clinical diagnosis during life and an 18% false positive rate for clinical diagnosis during life. This casts doubt on whether the lifetime clinical diagnosis data is meaningful at all, given its immense inaccuracy. 

The results when based on autopsies were consistent with benefits as low as 10% for two or more eggs a week.

Both these results are only modestly better than the p=0.05 statistical significance threshold, and the fact that the cases where Alzheimer's disease was accurately diagnosed showed less of a benefit, also casts doubt on the significance of this study. None of the evidence supporting the author's hypothesis that dietary choline intake was the protective factor was statistically significant, and none of the results were significant at anything close to the p=0.01 level. This significance, moreover, is overstated, because the study fails to adjust for the inaccuracy of the clinical diagnosis process or for the uncertainty in the result caused by self-reporting of what people ate. 

Dietary self-reporting is particularly problematic in a population where a large percentage of the reporters will ultimately be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in less than ten years. It could be that many people who don't report weekly egg consumption did so because their memory was not good enough to remember everything that they ate in the last month due to having undiagnosed or subclinical levels of Alzheimer's disease, rather than being due to actually eating fewer eggs.

The sample size is small, so the statistical significance of the result is modest. The total sample was 1024 people, and only 370 of them did not eat at least one egg a week.

Also casting doubt on the result is the fact that there was no dose-response effect (i.e. eating more than one egg a week is no better than eating one egg a week, and eating no eggs is not significantly different from eating 1-3 eggs a month) and indeed, eating more than one egg a week reduced the benefit in individuals who had post-mortem exams done, relative to those who had one egg a week.

The average diagnosis at 6.7 ± 4.8 years from the start of the study is also soon enough after the study began, that given strong evidence in the literature (which is not mentioned in the literature review in the study) that Alzheimer's disease starts at sub-clinical levels decades before it is diagnosed in many cases. So, the diet of the people in the study during the study period probably didn't influence the outcomes.

Finally, while the study controls for 13 potential confounding factors (of which some, like education, didn't vary significantly between the subgroups), it could easily have omitted an important factor. And, it doesn't prove cause and effect either. For example, it could be that having undiagnosed Alzheimer's disease influences your body in a way that you don't like eating eggs as much.

Thus, while the study might justify further research, its conclusion the weekly egg consumption greatly reduces Alzheimer's disease onset risk is too weak to make a life choice based upon, or to recommend clinically, despite the fact that their best fit benefit purports to be as much as a 47% reduction in the risk of getting Alzheimers. Indeed, if anything, the details of the data tend to favor some uncontrolled for confounding factor that is merely mildly correlated with egg consumption.

The failure of the study to engage with many of these issues in a forthright manner also casts doubt on the quality of the peer review at the Journal of Nutrition for this study.

The study and its abstract are as follows:

Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder with increasing prevalence due to population aging. Eggs provide many nutrients important for brain health, including choline, omega-3 fatty acids, and lutein. Emerging evidence suggests that frequent egg consumption may improve cognitive performance on verbal tests, but whether consumption influences the risk of Alzheimer’s dementia and AD is unknown.

Objectives: To examine the association of egg consumption with Alzheimer’s dementia risk among the Rush Memory and Aging Project cohort.

Methods: Dietary assessment was collected using a modified Harvard semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire. Participants’ first food frequency questionnaire was used as the baseline measure of egg consumption. Multivariable adjusted Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to investigate the associations of baseline egg consumption amount with Alzheimer’s dementia risk, adjusting for potential confounding factors. Subgroup analyses using Cox and logistic regression models were performed to investigate the associations with AD pathology in the brain. Mediation analysis was conducted to examine the mediation effect of dietary choline in the relationship between egg intake and incident Alzheimer’s dementia.

Results: This study included 1024 older adults {mean [±standard deviation (SD)] age = 81.38 ± 7.20 y}. Over a mean (±SD) follow-up of 6.7 ± 4.8 y, 280 participants (27.3%) were clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia. Weekly consumption of >1 egg/wk (hazard ratio [HR]: 0.53; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.34, 0.83) and ≥2 eggs/wk (HR: 0.53; 95% CI: 0.35, 0.81) was associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s dementia. Subgroup analysis of brain autopsies from 578 deceased participants showed that intakes of >1 egg/wk (HR: 0.51; 95% CI: 0.35, 0.76) and ≥2 eggs/wk (HR: 0.62; 95% CI: 0.44, 0.90) were associated with a lower risk of AD pathology in the brain. Mediation analysis showed that 39% of the total effect of egg intake on incident Alzheimer’s dementia was mediated through dietary choline.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that frequent egg consumption is associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s dementia and AD pathology, and the association with Alzheimer’s dementia is partially mediated through dietary choline.

Yongyi Pan, et al., "Association of Egg Intake With Alzheimer’s Dementia Risk in Older Adults: The Rush Memory and Aging Project" 154(7) The Journal of Nutrition 2236-2243 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2024.05.012.

Context For The Latest Episode Of The Cambodia-Thailand Conflict

Not so long ago, international wars were viewed as a thing of the past, after a long lull at the end of the 20th century (with the brief, but notable exception of the Gulf War in 1992, which was prompted by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), leaving only insurgencies and cross-border fights with military forces not sponsored by recognized sovereign countries. 

But, the 21st century has proved that this lull was only temporary. We've seen the Russia-Ukraine War (in 2014 and 2022 to the present), there have been military clashes as recently as this year between India and Pakistan, Israel and the U.S. have attacked Iran (which has also struck Israel), the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have recently engage the Houthi regime that is the de facto ruler of Southern Yemen after it attacked merchant ships off its coast, and there have been low intensity naval clashes between China and the Philippines in the past couple of years. A six day war between Cambodia and Thailand this month has added to that roster.

The latest round in a 118 year old border dispute related to a historic Hindu temple built by the Khmer Empire during what were the Middle Ages in Europe, near the current border between Cambodia and Thailand, led to a six day military conflict between the two countries that left at least 38 people dead and displaced at least 310,000 people, until a cease fire took hold yesterday. The two nations have had military clashes for hundreds of years, even before the ambiguous 1907 map that is at the root of this particular border dispute took hold. 

Shots were heard early on Thursday morning near Prasat Ta Muen Thom, an ancient temple on the disputed border between the two countries. Senior commanders from the Thai and Cambodian militaries agreed to de-escalate one of the bloodiest border conflicts between their nations in decades on Tuesday.The deal seemed to end, at least for now, [six] days of fighting that killed at least 38 people. More than 180,000 people in Thailand have evacuated from areas along the border, while in Cambodia, more than 130,000 people have fled their homes.

Each nation accused the other of firing first.

The Thai Army said on July 24 that Cambodia had fired rockets into civilian areas in four Thai provinces, prompting Thailand to send F-16 fighter jets to strike targets in Cambodia.

Cambodian officials said that Thai soldiers had opened fire on Cambodian troops first, at a temple claimed by both nations, called Prasat Ta Moan Thom by the Cambodians and Prasat Ta Muen Thom by the Thais. They said Cambodian forces returned fire some 15 minutes later.

The ownership of Prasat Ta Muen Thom / Prasat Ta Moan Thom is disputed by the two countries. Cambodia’s de facto leader, Hun Sen, claimed in a social media post that a Thai military commander had “started this war” by ordering the closure of the temple on Wednesday, and opening fire on Cambodian troops the next day. Thailand has accused Cambodia of starting the conflict.

The temple is in disputed territory, and people there speak Khmer, the official language of Cambodia, as well as Thai — highlighting the cultural overlap. The area is known for ruins from the Khmer Empire, which lasted from the ninth to the 15th century.

Arguments about where the border should be, and who owns the temples in the region, have led to decades of disputes. In 1962, the International Court of Justice awarded Cambodia sovereignty over the Preah Vihear Temple (known as Phra Viharn in Thailand), another temple about 95 miles away. In 2013, the court, the top judicial body of the United Nations, tried to clarify the 1962 decision. It said that Cambodia had sovereignty over the immediate area around that temple, but it left unresolved who controlled a larger disputed area. The border disputes can be traced to a 1907 map created during French colonial rule in Cambodia. The two countries interpret the map differently. Military fighting has broken out intermittently since 2008, but the last time that a major clash turned deadly was in 2011.

The two countries have had occasional military clashes and nationalist rivalries for hundreds of years.

The quoted material above (and below) is all from today's New York Times, but I have reordered the quoted material to be more readable, in this particularly poorly structured and edited article (which also includes duplicated sentences), and as a result, have not specifically noted where I omitted parts of the story. 

The cease fire was negotiated by Malaysian diplomats, with input from the U.S. and China.

The U.S. does not have particularly strong ties to either party in the conflict and wasn't directly involved in it, even though it claims to have participated in the peace negotiations, so news coverage of the conflict was relatively modest. But, the U.S. has historically favored Thailand, a constitutional monarchy which was one of the few countries never to fall to colonial powers, since it generally speaking sided with the West in the Cold War, over Cambodia, with its history of one of the most violent communist revolutions in history, which China has tended to favor.

An equally interesting aspect of the latest conflict is that Thailand's prime minister was suspended from office by a Thai court for controversial statements made not long before the shooting broke out, which is a political tactic that would be unavailable in most countries (but might be desirable if the grounds for it were suitably defined), in which the status of the prime minister would be primarily an issue for the parliament. Also, relatively few countries recognize the intermediate sanction of suspending a head of government without actually removing the head of government from office.

The border tensions have already contributed to a political crisis in Thailand: On July 1, a Thai court suspended the prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, because of comments she made about the dispute.

In June, Ms. Paetongtarn spoke by phone to Hun Sen, who is . . . Mr. Hun Manet’s father [Hun Manet has been the prime minister of Cambodia since 2023], to discuss the escalating border tensions. Mr. Hun Sen has had close ties to [Ms. Paetongtarn's] father, Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister of Thailand and the leader of a powerful political dynasty, as well as one of the country’s richest men.

Mr. Hun Sen posted a recording of their call, in which Ms. Paetongtarn seemed to disparage Thailand’s powerful military and take a deferential tone. She called Mr. Hun Sen “uncle” and told him that she would “arrange” anything he wanted.

In response, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Bangkok to express their outrage. Although Ms. Paetongtarn apologized, she has faced pressure to resign.

TFR And Coupling Rates

The total fertility rate (TFR) is a point in time estimate of the number of children that the average woman has over a lifetime, compiled from a population weighted average of the number of children born to women of each age.

The "coupling rate" is the percentage of adults who are married to, or cohabit out of marriage with, a partner.

Note that these are trend line figures and not absolute numbers with 2010 set at 100.

The strong implication of this data is that in the last thirty years, in developing and developed countries, declining rates of child bearing are mostly a product of declining rates of couples living together (whether or not they are married), rather than being mostly due to couples having children at a much lower rate due to wider use of contraception (which probably is the biggest factor in undeveloped countries).

The Recent History Of Russian Military Aggression

Russia has been trying to rebuilt its Soviet era empire for a while, but the Ukraine War and the defeat of Syria's regime, has forced it to back off.

As the Russian military’s demand for weapons has left Moscow unable to fulfill promised exports, countries such as Armenia are turning to other suppliers in Europe and India; other regional states are purchasing weapons from Turkey and even China. And as Russia has withdrawn forces and equipment from its military bases in the Caucasus and Central Asia to redeploy them to Ukraine, countries in both places are resolving conflicts that Russia has long exploited for its own benefit. Improved cooperation within the wider region is also creating new opportunities to enhance trade connectivity and build alternatives to transit through Russia. By reducing the dependency that once defined their relationship with their former hegemon, countries in the region have become increasingly capable of engaging Russia (and other powers) on favorable terms.

And yet if history is any guide, Moscow could go to extreme lengths to preserve its regional dominion. In 2014, before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia annexed Crimea and intervened in the Donbas region; earlier, in 2008, it invaded Georgia. Today, the Kremlin maintains a proprietary view of not only Ukraine but also many other countries. Ukraine and Belarus remain Moscow’s top priorities, but the Kremlin also aspires to a kind of suzerainty over Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Moldova and maintains a more distant post-imperial regard toward the remainder of Central Asia. 

The 2023 Russian Foreign Policy Concept, the strategy document outlining parameters and priorities for Russia’s foreign policy, resurrected the term “near abroad” to describe these countries, pointing to their “centuries-old traditions of joint statehood, deep interdependence … a common language, and close cultures” as a justification for efforts to keep them within Moscow’s sphere of influence. Once the fighting in Ukraine winds down, the Kremlin will almost certainly ramp up its attempts to coerce other neighbors to join Russian-backed multilateral bodies, strengthen economic ties, adopt Russian-style laws targeting civil society, and accept a larger Russian military and intelligence presence on their territory.

From Foreign Affairs magazine.

The Proportion of Two Parent Families Has Been Rising Since 2005

According to this source replying on U.S. census data, the percentage of children living with two parents (71.1%), as of 2023 (the most recent year for which final figures are available), is the highest it’s been since 1991 (34 year ago).

This is unsurprising given record low teen pregnancy levels.

At the low point, in 2005, this percentage was 67.3%. In 1970, it was 85.2%. It was 87.7% in 1960.

The Air Force Plans To Phase Out B-2 Bomber By 2030

In a continuing reshuffling of Department of Defense procurement under the Trump Administration, the Air Force now wants to retire the B-2 stealth bomber with the similar, but smaller and more modern B-21 stealth bomber, in just five years, rather than its previously planned 32 years from now. 

The current plan is to buy far more B-21s (at least 100) than the current fleet of B-2 bombers (which is under 20).

The B-21 is almost ready for prime time, having made its first flight in 2023,  and almost unprecedentedly for a project of this scale, is under budget. The lower cost is a result of accepting the limits of current technologies (which have still advanced significantly from the B-2) rather than trying to push beyond them, and of resisting the temptation to make the bomber supersonic or giving it air-to-air missile capabilities. It's smaller size also reduces the per bomber cost.

The B-21 will have a smaller bomb payload than the B-2, the B-1, or the B-52, despite having a similar global range. While the B-2 Bomber can carry two 30,000 pound GBU-57 MOP bunker buster bombs (the largest in U.S. service which it entered in 2011), a capability highlighted in a recent B-2 bomber strike on nuclear facilities in Iran, it will carry, at most, a single 22,000 pound "next generation penetrator" which can be delivered from a greater distance, from a platform that is more stealthy in the first place, and is more accurate, but has a smaller warhead. The 22,000 pound NGP is about the same size as the C-130 delivered MOAB GBU-43 bunker buster bomb.

Does this moderately degraded capability, that has been used only once and didn't exist until 2011 matter?

It would take about three B-21s to deliver the same amount of ordinance as one B-2. But the plan is to buy more than three times as many B-21s as the current fleet of B-2s. Even the 30,000 pound MOP bombs used in pairs in Iran did not, however, as briefly claimed after the strike, decisively destroy the deep nuclear facility bunkers there anyway.  

A tactical nuclear weapons, like the Cold War 51 pound Mk-54 Davey Crocket with a yield of 10-20 tons of TNT, could do the same, but would require crossing the threshold to using nuclear weapons. 

This would be a yield about 1,000 times smaller than the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in World War II. The Hiroshima A-Bomb weighed 9,700 pounds (including 64 kg of Uranium-235) producing a 13-18 kiloton yield, and the Nagasaki A-Bomb weighed 10,300 pounds (including 6.2 kg of Plutonium-239) producing a 19-23 kiloton yield.

Realistically, one of the main missions of the B-21 would be to launch anti-ship missiles against a feared large Chinese fleet trying to invade Taiwan, and for that mission, a 22,000 pound bomb load is more the sufficient and quantity matters more than quality.

The Air Force has just announced an earlier retirement of the B-2 bomber by 2030. This is the second time that this has happened. This budget driven decision means that “…new B-21 must replace—and not be additive to—much of the existing bomber fleet. The Air Force had previously planned to operate the B-1 and B-52 until 2040, and the B-2 to 2058.” In addition, the Air Force has almost zeroed B-2 modernization.  

This may eliminate the U.S. ability to deliver the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (GBU-57/B or MOP) which is by far the most effective U.S. conventional weapon against hard and very deeply buried targets. The B-2 bomber is the only U.S. bomber cleared to deliver the MOP. It is also the only current U.S. bomber that can penetrate advanced air defenses. 

At about the same time, the Air Force accelerated the development of the Next Generation Penetrator (NGP) which would be carried by the new B-21. The NGP will be significantly lighter (no more 22,000 pounds) compared to the MOP’s (30,000 pounds). It will be superior to the MOP in some important respects. It will have a standoff capability, which is very important against advanced air defenses and substantially greater accuracy. However, it is unclear that it will be equal much less superior to the MOP in attacking and destroying large, hard and very deeply buried facilities such as Fordow in Iran. Moreover, at this point the NGP is untested. 

. . . 

The NGP has 8,000 pounds less weight available for high explosives which is only about 20% of the weight of the MOP. This is usual for penetrators which have to be built very heavy and strong to survive rock and reinforced concrete penetration. In addition, a significant part of the NGP weight will be the rocket motor which will further reduce the weight available for high explosives. Thus, it is possible that the NGP will be less effective than the MOP against large, hard and very deeply buried targets such as Fordow.

The B-21 bomber, the world’s first sixth generation aircraft, is an enormous improvement over the B-2 in most respects. It clearly has much greater stealth. The Air Force has characterized its stealth level as “extremely low observable.” Reportedly, its radar cross section has been reduced from .1 square meter in the B-2 to either .0001 or .0004 in the B-21. This would greatly increase its ability to penetrate advanced air defenses. Its stealth is much more robust than the much older technology which was used in the B-2. This will substantially increase bomber combat availability. The aircraft carries advanced sensors and electronic warfare capabilities. The B-21 has an open systems architecture which will facilitate future upgrades. Northrop Gruman has done an incredibly good job in bringing the B-21 into existence actually under budget. When the contract award was announced in 2015, many doubted whether this was possible.

However, the B-21 was designed in a period of defense budget starvation under the Obama Administration. It was deliberately made less capable than it could have been. Retired Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz, wrote in his memoires that the Next Generation Bomber (NGB, sometimes called the 2018 bomber) “‘…had grown too big’ and was carrying too many missions and requirements. It was to have an air-to-air missile capability for self defense.” This original concept for the NGB was de facto terminated in 2008 although it was described as a delay. The need to minimize B-21 costs (no more than $550 million per aircraft in 2010 dollars) resulted in an adoption of a low technical risk strategy, a smaller bomber, no possibility of it ever having a supersonic capability and a production equipment limitation on the possible production rate. Some analysts believe that stealth must be combined with supersonic speed to deal with the long-term projected threat environment and that the number of penetrating bombers must be doubled.

The size and weight of a bomber has a significant impact on its costs. For most missions the B-21s bomb load is sufficient. However, good capabilities against hard and very deeply buried facilities require the maximum practical bomb load. 

. . . 

It is clear that the B-21 is significantly smaller and lighter than the B-2. (The B-2 itself is also substantially lighter and smaller than the other U.S. heavy bombers, the B-52s and B-1s). According to noted aviation journalist Bill Sweetman, “The B-21’s resemblance to the original B-2 bomber design is close, but it is a smaller aircraft, with a wingspan estimated at 132 ft. compared with the B-2’s 172 ft., and is approximately half the empty weight.” If so, this would make it an advanced medium bomber with intercontinental range. The payload of the B-21 is clearly limited compared to the bombers it is replacing. Sweetman and a number of other aerospace journalists have reported that the bomb load of the B-21 is about 20,000 pounds. Christian Orr, editor of the National Security Journal, writes, “If Mr. Sweetman’s estimates are accurate, that would cast serious doubt upon the newer warbird’s ability to carry the 30,000-lb. (14,000 kg) GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bomb immortalized by its usage in the Midnight Hammer strikes.”

There are many reports that the B-21 can carry a single MOP, but this appears to largely be speculation. There is no official confirmation of this and it appears unlikely. If the weapons load is limited to about 20,000 pounds, it cannot carry even a single MOP. There are reports of higher bomb load numbers for the B-21 but the limitation of the weight of the NGP to 22,000 pounds suggests that the lower estimates of the B-2 bomb load are more accurate.

Even if the B-21s were able to carry the MOP, they certainly would be unable to carry more than one compared to two on the B-2. The MOP was originally designed to be used two at a time to maximize the probability of target destruction.

From here. 

In other military procurement news, the U.S. Navy is extending the life of three cruisers from 2026 to 2030. The U.S. Army is adding four new Patriot Missile battalions. And, the U.S. Marine Corps has ordered 44 of its new air defense systems for about $32.52 million:

The MRIC (Medium-Range Intercept Capability) is a mobile and modular air defense system developed specifically for the U.S. Marine Corps to provide a medium-range intercept capability against a wide array of aerial threats. Designed to operate in expeditionary and contested environments, MRIC fills a critical capability gap between short-range systems like the Stinger missile and long-range assets such as Patriot. The system is capable of intercepting cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and indirect fire threats such as rockets, artillery shells, and mortars.

Education Reduces Poverty

Education reduces poverty through economic development in economies that use this resource to make its economy more skilled. Specifically, it helps the poor in developing countries and not just a wealthy elite.

This article quantifies the role played by education in the reduction of global poverty. I propose tools for identifying the contribution of schooling to economic growth by income group, integrating imperfect substitution between skill groups into macroeconomic growth decomposition. I bring this “distributional growth accounting” framework to the data by exploiting a new microdatabase representative of nearly all of the world’s population, new estimates of the private returns to schooling, and historical income distribution statistics. 

Education can account for about 45% of global economic growth and 60% of pretax income growth among the world’s poorest 20% from 1980 to 2019. A significant fraction of these gains was made possible by skill-biased technical change amplifying the returns to education. Because they ignore the distributional effects of schooling, standard growth accounting methods substantially underestimate economic benefits of education for the global poor.

Amory Gethin, "Distributional Growth Accounting: Education and the Reduction of Global Poverty, 1980-2019" The Quarterly Journal of Economics, qjaf033 (July 22, 2025).

Macroeconomics Is An Art Not A Science And Is Influenced By Politics

Don't trust Republican economists when it comes to GDP during Republican Presidencies or the benefits of tax cuts.

Using a novel dataset linking professional forecasters in the Wall Street Journal Economic Forecasting Survey to their political affiliations, we document a partisan bias in GDP growth forecasts. Republican-affiliated forecasters project 0.3-0.4 percentage points higher growth when Republicans hold the presidency, relative to Democratic-affiliated forecasters. Forecast accuracy shows a similar partisan pattern: Republican-affiliated forecasters are less accurate under Republican presidents, indicating that partisan optimism impairs predictive performance. This bias appears uniquely in GDP forecasts and does not extend to inflation, unemployment, or interest rates. 

We explain these findings with a model where forecasters combine noisy signals with politically-influenced priors: because GDP data are relatively more uncertain, priors carry more weight, letting ideology shape growth projections while leaving easier-to-forecast variables unaffected. Noisy information therefore amplifies, rather than substitutes for, heterogeneous political priors, implying that expectation models should account for both information rigidities and belief heterogeneity. Finally, we show that Republican forecasters become more optimistic when tax cuts are salient in public discourse, suggesting that partisan differences reflect divergent beliefs about the economic effects of fiscal policy.

Benjamin S. Kay, Aeimit Lakdawala, and Jane Ryngaert, "Partisan Bias in Professional Macroeconomic Forecasts" SSRN (2025).