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The Reset Series™
Vitae Weekly Reset — Issue #43
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On What the Number Stands In For
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Four of this week’s pieces turned out to share a problem I hadn’t planned for. In each one, the number everybody relies on is measuring something next to the thing that matters.
Sleep trackers are good at spotting sleep and poor at spotting wakefulness, and wakefulness is what defines middle insomnia. A ten-year follow-up found people regained every kilo they had lost while keeping part of their visceral fat reduction, and the lower diabetes risk afterwards tracked the fat rather than the weight. “Low testosterone” turns out to be whichever figure a guideline settled on, and the UK’s guideline threshold moved from 8 to 12 nmol/L between 2017 and 2023.
The ADHD review published this week makes it explicit. Recorded diagnoses among 6 to 11-year-olds have risen more than six-fold since 2000 while population prevalence looks broadly stable — and the review couldn’t settle the over-diagnosis question, because nobody has run a recent prevalence survey.
We’ve also rebuilt the Gut Reset and taken it out from behind the signup. It’s this week’s deep dive, and it turned out to be the same problem all over again.
— The Vitae Team
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This week on the Vitae blog
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The 2026 ADHD Review: What It Found, and What Changes
The independent review reported this month and the government responded on 9 October. Its answer on over-diagnosis is more careful than either set of headlines suggested.
Read →
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Middle Insomnia: Why You Wake at 3am and Can’t Get Back to Sleep
Waking in the night is normal; the hour afterwards is the problem. The popular explanations — cortisol, blood sugar, magnesium — are far less established than they sound.
Read →
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What Is Visceral Fat, and How Do You Reduce It?
A ten-year follow-up found the weight came all the way back while part of the visceral fat loss stuck, and it was the fat, not the weight, that tracked later diabetes risk.
Read →
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What Causes Low Testosterone — and Can You Reverse It?
Guidelines disagree about what counts as low by a margin of 50%, which makes the threshold the most consequential thing about the diagnosis.
Read →
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Silver Has Beaten Gold Before. It's Doing It Again.
From 1974 to 1987, silver more than doubled gold's returns. After 2008, it beat gold five-fold in three years. Since March 2020, silver is up 402% against gold's 186%. Our research team's free playbook explains why, and how the team would position.
This week’s deep dive
The Gut Reset: why diversity isn’t the target
Most gut-health advice is organised around one number. Diversity — more species, healthier gut. It’s what the tests report, what the supplements promise, and what almost every article on the subject is built around. It’s also a measurement sitting next to the thing that matters.
A trial this year, still a preprint so hold it loosely, put 147 adults on a high-fibre diet for six weeks. Their measured diversity fell, while the microbes that produce butyrate increased, their gut transit shortened and their sleep quality improved. The number went down; the three things measured underneath it went up. A 2024 review across animal and human microbiomes found no clear link between diversity and health at all, with several diseases showing high diversity rather than low.
That doesn’t make the usual advice wrong. Thirty different plants a week is still a target worth having. But the reason isn’t that it raises a score — it’s that different plants feed different microbes, including the ones that turn fibre into butyrate, which is what the cells lining your colon run on. That’s what the Gut Reset is built around, and it’s now free to read in full, with four-week trackers and a sources list.
Read the full piece →
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Quick wins for this week
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Measure your waist, not just your weight
The scales can stay still while the fat that matters moves, in either direction.
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If you’re awake and getting frustrated, leave the bed
Go and do something quiet until you feel sleepy. Don’t watch the clock.
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Ask which threshold they used
Any “low” result is a number set against a cut-off somebody chose, and the cut-offs disagree.
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Count plants, not species
Thirty different plants a week is a prompt to vary what you eat, not a test to pass.
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Nvidia Is Worth Nearly 19 Times Every Silver Miner Combined
The whole silver mining industry is valued at about $0.29 trillion. Nvidia alone is worth $5.41 trillion. That's why modest inflows can send silver stocks sharply higher. Our research team's free report explains how the silver market really moves, and where the opportunity is now.
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The Reset Companion
Work through any Reset with Sage
Pair any of the Reset guides with Sage, your Reset Companion, for check-ins, reminders and support as you build the habits. The first 30 messages are free.
Meet the Reset Companion →
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There’s a reason this keeps happening, and it isn’t that researchers are careless. The things worth measuring in health are mostly slow, internal and expensive to look at. So we measure what’s cheap and quick instead, and then — because the proxy is the thing we can see — we start optimising the proxy.
Mostly that’s harmless. It stops being harmless when the proxy and the thing come apart, which is what every piece this week describes. A tracker that says you slept fine. A weight that hasn’t moved. A testosterone reading that’s normal under one guideline and low under another. A diversity score that falls while the gut underneath it improves.
The useful habit isn’t distrusting numbers. It’s asking what any particular number is standing in for, and whether that’s still the thing you care about.
— The Vitae Team
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