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December 23rd, 2025

Jason Kratz
2 min read
December 23rd, 2025
Photo by Max Beck / Unsplash

Harvard’s New Health Bombshell: It’s Not Sleep Loss or No Exercise—It’s These 15 Daily Habits Silently Destroying You

Some serious problems with this article not the least of which is that the author doesn’t actually provide a link to the “groundbreaking Harvard health study”.

Problem areas:

4: Drinking Coffee Before Water

Harvard’s hydration research warns:

Waking up dehydrated + caffeine = compounded fatigue, headaches, and cortisol dysregulation.

You think coffee wakes you up.
It actually worsens the crash.

You get a lot of water from a cup of coffee. And for people who drink it regularly caffeine isn’t really a diuretic:

According to multiple studies, ranging from a 2003 review of research dating back to 1966 to a 2014 clinical trial that compared coffee to water ingestion in 50 men, caffeine can be a mild diuretic in large amounts for people who aren't accustomed to it. But caffeinated drinks consumed in moderation provide the same hydration as non-caffeinated drinks.

Then we’ve got:

13: Not Drinking Enough Water Until You’re Thirsty

Thirst = already dehydrated.

Harvard’s hydration studies link this habit to fatigue, overeating, headaches, and mood instability.

Myth-busters 1 and 7 here say enough about that. It is only in very modern times that normal people who aren’t doing much are walking around with bottles of water out of fear of “dehydration”. Somehow humankind has made it this far without that.


I’ve been messing with Google Chrome again. I’ve found the AdGuard AdBlocker browser extension to be about as good with the Manifest Version 3 version as the older, now unsupported by Chrome, Manifest Version 2 version. Given the limitations the folks at AdGuard have done a fabulous job.


The “Year of Analog” incoming. I’ll write more about that later in a separate post but today I picked up a new entry-level (well, not too entry level) Audio-Technica turntable and have a small tube phono pre-amp on the way. Excited to try them out tomorrow after the pre-amp shows up!


It’s amusing to me that the tech bros are talking about how we’re going to have AGI in two months and Claude can’t do simple email searches (well, simple for a person) yet and our “smart homes” have gotten dumber.


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