their badge. Wow, not everybody. That's interesting. Who of you have started their badge? No, more or less the same. Who didn't do anything with their badge yet? Oh, quite some. Who wants to do something with their badge when they are at home. Wow. Who has written something for the badge? Wow, you're amazing. Who has used something somebody else wrote? Wow. You have quite a crowd. Are you ready? Okay, so you have the crowd for the badge. They are very interested to get more about it. Have fun with the badge team. Thank you. All right. We're here with three now. I hope the others will join us before the end, because, of course, we want to thank everyone. And I would like to start with this little throwback to the last badge talk, because this over-engineering as a way of life. The last time, this was a second cost fallacy as a way of life. So this may be an improvement. In this talk, we would like to take you on a little journey through, well, how we came to be here with this device. A little bit of history on, well, how did badges even come to be and what was there before? What do we manage to deliver? How we managed to deliver that and the challenges on the way. Some challenges we experienced throughout the end of our journey. And also, what does the future hold? Because this is a pretty cool device. But, I mean, if the camp ends, does the badge adventure end? And finally, some shout-outs to cool things we saw happen with the badge during camp. So I think you all have this device. I don't see everyone wearing one. Where are your badges? Yeah, okay, it's raining. That's a good excuse. Fair enough. But, of course, this badge is not your ordinary conference badge. I mean, I think you all know this, for example. Everybody who's been to normal conferences will have seen something like this. It can be a credit card-sized badge or something else, but it always has your name on it and maybe the company you work for or the organization you're attached to. And it gives people an introduction to you, which lowers the threshold to talk to you, which is nice if you want to network, of course. But how did we get from there to here? Well, actually, it may surprise you because, of course, there are a lot of differences, a lot more components. We now have batteries and lots of chips on it and proto area. And it all started here in 2006 at DevCon 14. This badge, it was as fancy as what we know now for badges. But DevCon had badges with distinctions between categories of visitors, I think some of you will know. And they wanted to reduce counter-fitting of badges, so they designed something that was hard to copy, at least in the time span needed to do so. So they made a badge with a little microcontroller on it, a button, and two LEDs that would blink in a pseudo-random pattern. And there were different versions for visitors, for VIPs, for organization, et cetera. And then the next year, it evolved to this. It suddenly had a display. And this could display your own text. It had a couple of touch buttons. These are touch buttons. And it had a battery that lasted long enough to last a conference. This was a do-it-yourself matrix display consisting of a couple of SMD LEDs. And so this was kind of the first badge with a real display. Then the year after, suddenly it had badge-to-badge communications and SD card reader on the back. People were hoping for the first badge-to-badge worms during this DevCon. And then two years later it jumped to Europe. As far as we could figure out, so don't pin me on this, as far as we could figure out, this was the first European event badge. Electronic hackable event badge. It had a display. You could play games on it. It had Easter eggs. It was hackable. It had badge-to-badge communications via LEDs. So this actually already looks a lot like what we know today as badges. And then the fancy badge pandemic started. A lot more fun than the other pandemics you may know of. First, in 2011, I think, we had the Rocket 2012 tilde from EMF. The radio 2015, 2016, we had this new version of tilde also from EMF. And then 2017, the Shaw badge. And this was the first event badge for this Dutch series of quadranial hacker events. And we are really proud of it and also set an example and the direction of where we apparently could go. Because this badge, of course, it's a nice piece of kit. It looks good. It has a cool display which stays on if the power goes out, et cetera. This display made it very well readable in direct sunlight. So it was actually very usable as a badge. And it's run on MicroPython. So the menus and all apps, they were written in MicroPython, which means it's really easy to make apps for it. This was also amplified through the hatchery, which was created for this badge. The hatchery where you can submit your own little Python eggs or apps and share them with everyone else. People can download them on their badge via the hatchery client on their badge. It has a serial UI, which means you can connect it to your computer via USB and then program on it via USB, via the serial interface. And this makes it really easy to develop and prototype whatever you want to make. So basically what this badge did was it brought app development and MicroPython to the masses, which is pretty cool for something that's only intended to show your name. Only intended, quote, unquote. So then the question came around Hacker Hotel 2020, what can we possibly do that will be even cooler than a MicroPython ePaper badge? Well, we wanted to do something with FPGA development because FPGAs are kind of like magic smoke, which you can manipulate using bit streams. I won't go into the two technical details right now, but if you can do stuff with FPGAs, that is a really powerful tool in developing for all kinds of devices and applications. We wanted it to be usable after the event because if you have a badge that becomes eWaste after the event, that's not very sustainable. And also, well, why not make something that actually lasts that you can use that is fun, that adds value as, for example, a tool for radio applications or visualization that has educational value, like teaching people a MicroPython or FPGA development. And we also wanted to reuse and grow the Shot 2017 ecosystem where you can share your apps and let other people partake in all the fun things you make. So these were our goals as we set out to create a new badge. And I would say we were pretty successful because we delivered a working badge at the start of camp. We didn't need to do last minute soldering, sweatshops or flashing. More than over 100 apps were created and published at camp. And at least 1600 badges, probably more, but the stats were reset somewhere between yesterday and today, were actually activated and connected to Wi-Fi at the event, which is half. That's pretty good for an event badge like this. And finally, we were able to introduce or at least give access to FPGA development to a lot of hackers because all 3,200 visitors of this event have received this device. And even if they decided to enjoy the camp and go to talks and not fill with their badge at camp, the tool chain that has been built around this badge and everything else will be available after camp. It will be improved after camp. So people can still use it and learn from it and share it when you go home in a day or a week. Hi, everyone. Of course, we did last minute things. So I'm gonna try to do a presentation here. No guarantees. So when we started this journey, we had the Shab badge. We knew why we built that. We saw the EMF 2016 badge. This is amazing. We want one, too. So we made a badge, a nice square, not much artwork, but functional with an E-ing screen. That's also his biggest limitation. You can't really play games on it. It's a bit slow. People still made a lot of fun stuff for it. So when we started prototyping this new badge, one of the first things we did was we got rid of the E-ing screen and went back to the screen that EMF used on their badge. Color, fast. You can play games on this. We added an FPGA because we want to introduce people to new technical challenges. And we added an STM32 because we wanted the USB connection to be more than just a serial connection. We wanted people to be able to use it from a web browser via web USB, use tools to upload apps in an easy way. We partially succeeded in doing that. And the hardware is there. So this is not what you got. You got a way more fancy badge, right? It's not a square. Because we are just engineers, right? We know how to do cool hardware, but we don't know how to do an actually cool badge. So we got into contact with Tilda Industries. Thank you, Nicolette, for doing an amazing job on getting an actual badge, a piece of art that you can wear with pride. It's a long journey towards actually getting a badge done. As you can see here, we went to many design iterations. And we almost settled on this one on the left. And then we decided, no, we actually want to be able to play games on it. So we made it into sort of Gameboy-like thing. But still, you can see the process of going from a square to through many iterations towards what you have around your neck today. We also want to give a shout out to people who joined us virtually. We have, I hope I say this correctly, Uri Shaget, who makes the Wokwi simulator. He can actually fully simulate an ESP32, not just MicroPython, not just upper level things. No, he can fully simulate an ESP32 in the browser using JavaScript. And for this event, he made a virtual version of the badge so people could experiment with it, program for it, even before it has all started. Awesome work. And I also want to give a shout out to Carlos, who joined us a little bit later, almost when the event just started, he showed up and said, I got a cool thing. I got Ice Studio. So we tried to introduce people to the FPGAs, but then you have to install tool chains. And you have to do Verilog, which is a completely new language for most. This tool, which now has support for the MCH 2022 badge, allows you to drag and drop blocks of logic and connect them in a graphical way. It's really cool. Be sure to check it out. And of course, nothing is perfect. I mean, the badges work, so we're not quite far. But a lot of you might have experienced the red kite of death, as we call it, just a badge that does nothing with a blinking red LED. We actually managed to put the wrong logo in the sponsors wheel. Sorry, lettuce. We fixed that in the OTA update. And we actually had some major problems with the battery charging circuit. So, yeah, let me explain what happened with the red kite of death. Apparently, when you have crystals, they need load capacitors. And those load capacitors make sure they start up correctly that they can get going. And when you specify a bill of materials for your Chinese partners, be sure to specify what load capacitance you need. I didn't. Luckily, I wasn't the only one. We actually found out that Adafruit made the same mistake. So they actually already patched this in the SDK. We put a little bit of extra delay in the boot loader. So before it starts trying to access the flash chip, it waits a while, and it fixes everything. So if any of you have intermittent failures with the badge not starting, the kite turning red, please tell us. Come to the badge stand. We'll also publish a file that you can drag and drop onto a USB drive that appears when you put the badge into boot loader mode. That will also fix the problem for people who will find out about this after the event. Yeah, it's always in the details, right? So again, details. Instead of using an ideal diode, which prevents current from flowing back into the battery from your system bus, instead of making that with passive components, I thought, well, we can do this more fancy. We can get chips for that now. So I found this really cool chip, which on the front page of the data sheet says, oh, it has reverse blocking. It doesn't let current through in the reverse direction. Yeah, problem is on page seven, it actually says only when the chip is disabled. So make sure you check that. We only figured out that we actually were putting five volts in the battery a couple of weeks before we started production. That's not nice. And actually, how did that happen? Well, on the prototypes, we actually made sure to disable this chip.  And key night, people might spot the mistake I made there. I should have put the 10K resistor in series with the USB voltage so that it actually acted as a voltage defider. I didn't. And I only noticed this afterwards, of course. So yeah, the result was some leakage voltage from the diode could actually cause the chip to turn off. So your badge wouldn't work on battery. And yeah, we figured this out. Well, okay, it all seems fine when you connect it without this extra circuit. So we just removed it. That's why you now no longer have the bypass diode. Because, well, current can flow and reverse through the chip. Don't do what I did. So the one warning that I give to all of you is don't touch the battery chip if you've been charging your badge for a while. It gets quite hot. Otherwise, everything worked out. And as you saw in our early design, the prototype, we used an STM32. And we used some extra chips like IO expenders and a fancy DAC chip for the audio. And none of those were available anymore. The chip shortage was, of course, a major thing for every electronics designer. And luckily, we got most of the more rare chips, the microcontrollers, the special stuff, the FPGA, from our sponsors. So a huge thanks to those people who made sure we actually got the parts. But yeah, we couldn't get everything. So we had to do some last minute changes. We switched to the amazing RP2040 processor by Raspberry Pi. So actually, the co-processor that does some board management things is actually very powerful. And I've heard some people working on a way to actually get more firmware into the flesh of the RP2040 so that you can do more than just co-processor work on it. Look forward to that. And I will now hand the microphone to Julian, who's going to tell you about the software challenges. Yes, thank you. There is a lot of software that had to be made to make this batch possible, of course, among which is graphics because I just wasn't satisfied with what we had.  No big... So, there's a new graphics library, which is, I hope people find it cool and not confusing. I tried to make it not. The drivers for various bits of hardware were actually mostly rewritten as well, because there did exist drivers, but most of them were proprietary blob form, and we didn't like that very much. So, one of the drivers, I think it was the B&O sensor, was like only a few weeks before camp, actually, a fully working driver. And I was watching that, and I was going like, oh no, this sensor isn't going to be usable. The native apps which are running on the ESP32, I think actually turned out really great. Someone called SpriteTM made the pocket sprite little Game Boy sized thing, which had ESP32 multi-boot. And it didn't really look like it, but I don't know who that was. Someone here probably Renzo was like, ESP32 multi-boot. We need that. So, we got in contact with SpriteTM and adapted his code. There were some fixes, turned it into a component, so now anyone that wants to multi-boot on an ESP32 can import the AppFS component and just boot multiple firmwares from one ESP. There were also some software fixes to hardware problems happening, but those aren't too interesting. There was a software bug in ESPIDF v3, which is what the Shabaj used to run, which basically made SPI completely useless. Now, we haven't gone into detail about the design just yet, but the FPGA is connected to the ESP32 with SPI, which means that the only way to use it is if SPI actually works properly. And that meant porting all of MicroPython from ESPIDF v3 to ESPIDF v4. I still don't know how they managed to do it, but it worked out in the end. All right, so now you know how we got here, or at least the red line. How did we get here? And now it's the question, where do we go from here?  So, first of all, our web development team have already been working on a new version of the hatchery with an improved UI and improved architecture overall. And the goal, I mean, I'm not promising that this is what it's going to look like, but our goal is to make the hatchery an online IDE for your batch. So you plug in your batch, you can type your code in your browser, run it on your batch and upload to the hatchery all from the same environment. This would, of course, make it really easy to experiment, to try new things, and most of all, to just have fun and get an entry into this world of app development. Because if you don't need 10 different tools and you don't need to install all kinds of tool chains and programs to actually build stuff for your batch, you could just do it from your browser, which is enabled by web USB. Then, of course, more people are going to do it, which is what we want. And then the same goes for the FPGA. Carlos, who has been working like a madman for the last weeks to get his examples and native support for the batch in the software package iStudio, is still working on more examples, also with support for the display, to enable people to just drag and drop their logic and to explore what the potential of an FPGA actually is. Because this program allows you to drag and drop, but also to view the verilog that it produces and to edit that. So it's both compatible with total beginners and with more advanced users who know verilog and who want to expand the functionality of existing blocks or of their designs. And then there's also a human factor. Very important, because this is a project we all do for fun. It has turned out it's very important to set clear expectations. Because, well, we all do it for fun, but what you can do for fun, how far that drives you, that differs very much from person to person. And this has caused earlier projects, people burning out or not sleeping the nights before the event because stuff had to be done last minute or people rage quitting because things didn't go as smoothly as we would have wanted. And this project, again, wasn't perfect, but we think it's really important to stress that it's not only technical skills you need to function in a team like this because, of course, we want to build cool stuff, but we also want to have fun. We want to keep everybody happy and we want all team members to be able to enjoy the results and not be hindered by, well, things that weren't as they expected. Then, of course, with clear expectations also comes clear communication. I guess that's logical. Having a roomy planning, I can really advise this. This project ran from about February of 2020 until today. And it's still running. So we had two and a half years to develop this badge and still some things like the web development part had to happen last minute. So if you want to have a badge in three years, please start now. Because if you have a roomy planning, then there is space to reinvent, to really let everybody contribute. And if you want to cram everything into a year of work, then the scope of people who will be available to help with that level of dedication will be really limited, of course. And finally, keep the vibes positive. Because if people are having fun, they will go to great lengths to contribute. I mean, we had a couple of people swoop in at the last minute to help us with documentation and preparing workshops. We had a guy from Spain join us online because he wanted to add native support for our project to his software package. And it all happens because we are all enthusiastic about what we're doing. Because we have made something cool and we want to share it. And we want to help other people also, if possible, profit from that success.  And also we want, it's a double-sided win-win situation. Then the Rense. Okay, well, fun. I can do this section. I didn't know that. We saw a lot of awesome stuff happening on the field. You saw people with extra big antennas. Of course, you need good Wi-Fi reception. We saw someone with a CO2 sensor, like a big external CO2 sensor connected to the PMOD connector of the FPGA. We just casually said, yeah, I made a bit stream that like converts from a UR to SPI. So I can read it on the ESP32. I'm like, okay, awesome. Great job there. People made a case for the badge. And that was a knob for the joystick. Really cool. Makes your badge look way more fancy. I highly recommend you search for this case and the joystick knob and everything on Thingiverse or wherever people publish things nowadays. You'll find it. And I also want to give a shout out to a really cool talk that we saw about fault injection. Look that one up if you weren't there. It's probably streamed online as well. They used our badge as a target for fault injection. And specifically, they got really cool results with the FPGA Mandelbrot app. So normally, you can like zoom in on very cool repeating patterns. And by applying electromagnetic pulses to the right places on the back of the badge, they actually got completely random structures out of it. So that's really cool. And the app still worked. So you could browse through these completely randomly generated things. Yeah. And I actually have no idea what GNU Taylor is. So, Renier? Yeah. So this is a project that was brought to our attention, I think, yesterday. Someone built support for GNU Taylor. I'm not sure how to pronounce payments, which are device to device payments over NFC. This is a, as far as I know, a payment system that allows people to pay anonymously, but not untraceably.  But it could mean that in the future, we might see, for example, support for batch to batch payments via NFC, because this is an open source project. And of course, it would be fun if you could securely and safely give people money if you think their work is cool, or if you think their app is cool, without anything outside of your badge. We just thought that was a cool project. No guarantees. No guarantees. So this was our last slide. And before we go to the Q&A, I would just like to thank everybody who contributed to this batch. I am not going to list those names because I'm definitely going to forget people. But can everybody from Badge Team who is here please stand up? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine people standing here probably because of this. Wow. Yeah. And then please keep in mind that our Telegram group, our core development Telegram group is right now 29 people strong. So I know a couple of them are not at the event. They were external contributors. Some of them have COVID and can't attend this talk, unfortunately. And then, of course, there are also our sponsors who sponsored the FPGA, led the semiconductor, the sensors from Bosch, the production for which we partnered with on at China, and the ESP32 we got sponsored by Expressive once again. Thanks a lot. And now we have room for questions. Yes. Thank you first for giving us the talk and for working on this device so long and for giving it to us all to play around with. Yes, other questions. If you have questions, please go to the microphones. First question, please. Hello. So I've really enjoyed dinkering around with the batch. And I was wondering how did the process go from the Shell 2017 batch team to the current team? What kind of handover was there? How did the exchange of ideas go? Can you explain something about it? Thanks for the one question I hope we wouldn't get, but I want to give a shout out to Sebastian, who did an amazing job managing the team. And I really hope we're going to do a club mat or a beer together soon, but lots of things happened there. And well, some things we're not proud of, but the end result is here. Thanks. Yeah, this is exactly why we included the human factor into the presentation, because this team has had a lot of adventures. And for some people, it meant at some point, they didn't want to be here anymore in the team. And we want to improve on that. And we have had some changes in the team. And we are keeping looking forward, trying to improve our vibes, trying to improve the way we work together. Because as the complexity of these badges go up, the need for professionalism and also for keeping it all together and fun is growing. So yeah, it's kind of a separate adventure from the technical stuff. And it also means that the team is very fluid. So every event has its own team. Does anyone have like a bug zapper? But yeah, I think for this event, development went a lot more smoothly in terms of, well, HR compared to previous events. Thank you for this answer. Next question, please. Information for follow-up. At multi-boots, I hear something like application file system. Is that correct? So with AFS, I will find more information on it. If you look at our GitHub, there's a repository called ESP component app FS that contains everything you need, including a little instruction on how to apply the change to the boot loader in your project. And it should allow you to load files into a special file system that automatically aligns all the firmware's correctly. And you can then call a function to tell the boot loader to boot into that firmware. This was all written by Jeroen Sprite. Most people he will probably know. He made the pocket Sprite. We just made sure it works on the latest development environment. Thanks. Thank you. Next question, please. FPGAs were famously sort of closed environments until the Lattice chip got basically reverse engineered. As far as I know, Lattice has never sort of publicly even acknowledged the existence of this open tool chain. Do you have any experience with people from Lattice about what they think about the whole process? I don't know the details, but they seem to be a little bit divided even inside the company. And the batch is also fully compatible with their proprietary tools, which will probably result in more compact designs and faster routing or something. But we had a lot of fun with the open source stuff on this, because, well, we're hackers, right? And also, I'm not going to name names because I don't want these people to be flooded with requests. But we had some help getting Lattice to sponsor us for this batch by someone who already had good contact with them and was collaborating with them on multiple projects. So shout out to this amazing person. I'm sure you know who you are if you're hearing this. Next question, please. Hi. Do you have any plans to backport some features to the SHA batch? For example, the IPFS? Yes. We are looking to improve backwards compatibility with the SHA batch. For this event, we focused on getting everything to work in the first place. But yeah, we do have plans to make sure as many apps as possible from the SHA batch will also work on this batch. But of course, there's different peripherals, different display stack. So we can't guarantee everything will work, but we are doing our best. Thank you. Thank you. We have at least two more questions. Does that also mean that if I spent a lot of time in making the next killer batch app, there is a high probability that it also will work on the next batch? There is no way we can guarantee that. But when we asked Espressif, hey, Espressif, would you like to sponsor us? We couldn't even finish the sentence and they already sent over boxes of chips. I really hope they will sponsor us again if they do. And yes. Next question, please. Hi. I'm a bad person. I use Windows and closed software. So I can confirm that the lattice radiant works on the batch so you can use the closed tool set. Also as a bad person, I connected my batch to my Windows machine and I got a nice pop-up saying, oh, Microsoft Edge detected a batch. Here's where you can get the documentation. What was that? A lot of pain. Go for it. You didn't show the fancy HDMI stuff. I blame it on the guy who planned the preparation for this talk, which is me. We tried to just have a little fun at camp. We wanted to prepare the batch talk and show some slides from the batch. But hey, I mean, didn't this work? Yeah. Okay. So it's a good point he's mentioning. Using the FPGA, someone here, I think it was Sylvan, right, made a bit stream which allows us to duplicate the display on the batch to an HDMI output using a PMOD module. So we would have been able to show some slides from the batch on this screen. And of course, it's useful for demos for anything you would like to do with sharing your tinkering on the batch with other people. So if you would also like to do this, check out. It's definitely on GitHub. And maybe he also has some modules left through to buy? Nope. Okay. But you can get them online. Next question. I just want to thank Rense for regrowing me every morning. I started up by batch. Phenomenal achievement. Lots of, I'm very, very impressed by this. Just out of interest and it's okay if you don't want to tell me, but what's the cost price of one batch? Ballparking. With or without sponsored components? Oh, that's a good question. Let's say without, if I would want to make this just... I think without sponsored components, we would land at around 18 to 20 euros a piece. I think it's more like 20 years after sponsoring. You're holding a 50-year device in your hands here and it's just cost-price. There's a lot of really cool stuff on there. Okay. So I have 2,500 colleagues and I have budget.  I think most of us are available for commercial things as well. That's all I need to know. Thank you very much. Any other question? Doesn't seem so. Well, this was a batch team. I think it was a very fascinating but also funny experience to have you here on stage. Thank you for being here. Thank you for building this and thank you for having me around.


I'm often asked what my opinion about a diet or a disease is. Who cares what my or anyone else's opinion is? All we should care about is what the science says. What does the best available balance of evidence publish to the peer-reviewed medical literature have to say right now? Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast, I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Did you know that by age 50 about half of all men and women will experience hair loss? The majority of age-related hair loss is genetic, but even identical twins can have dramatically different heads of hair based on their diet and lifestyle. In our first story, we look at whether biotin or zinc supplements have any role in preventing hair loss. Studies show that by age 50, approximately half of men and women will experience hair loss. No, it's not caused by washing your hair too much or brushing your hair too little to the many myths out there. The majority of hair loss with age is genetic. For both women and men, based on twin studies, the heritability of baldness in men is 79%, meaning about 80% of the difference in hair loss between men is genetically determined, but that still leaves some wiggle room. Even if you have identical twins, identical twin sisters in this case, with the same DNA, one can have more hair loss than the other thanks to increased stress, increased smoking, having more children, or having a history of high blood pressure or cancer. Smoking can contribute to the development of both male and female pattern baldness because of the genotoxic compounds in cigarettes may damage the DNA in hair follicles and cause microvascular poisoning in the base of the follicle. Other toxic agents associated with hair loss include mercury because it seems to concentrate about 250-fold in growing scalp hair. In fact, maybe the reason Shakespeare started losing his hair was due to mercury poisoning from syphilis treatment. Thankfully, doctors don't give people mercury anymore. These days, as the CDC points out, mercury mainly enters the body through seafood consumption. So doctors should consider screening for mercury toxicity when they see hair loss since there's something we can do about it. Instructing patients to reduce fish intake and repeat blood tests could offer relief of symptoms in uncovered dietary habits that may be a source of heavy metal-induced hair loss, though admittedly sometimes heavy metal can lead to too much hair. What about nutrient deficiencies as a cause of hair loss? After bariatric surgery, the most frequent nutrient deficiency symptom is hair loss, but that's because they've had their anatomy rearranged to cause malabsorption on purpose. In general, there is little evidence to suggest that vitamin and mineral supplementation benefits people unless they're actually deficient. For example, we've known for centuries that scurvy, severe vitamin C deficiency can cause hair loss, but once you have enough vitamin C such that your gums are in bleeding, there's no data correlating vitamin C levels and hair loss once you have a certain baseline sufficiency of vitamin C. It's also a myth that supplements containing zinc will increase hair growth unless you have zinc deficiency, like if you're an alcoholic or something. But if you have normal zinc levels in your blood, taking more zinc won't help and in fact can have negative side effects, same thing with taking iron supplements. The most common ingredient in top-selling hair loss products is vitamin B7, also known as biotin. Yes, biotin deficiency causes hair loss, but there are no evidence-based data that supplementing biotin promotes hair growth and severe biotin deficiency in healthy individuals eating a normal diet has never been reported. But if you eat raw egg whites, you can acquire a biotin deficiency since there are these compounds that attach to biotin and prevent it from being absorbed. But other than rare deficiency syndromes, it's a myth that biotin supplements increase hair growth. But hey, why not just have the attitude, can't hurt, might help? Because of the lack of regulatory oversight of the supplement industry. And in the case of biotin, interference with lab tests. Many dietary supplements promoted for hair health contain biotin levels up to 650 times the recommended daily intake of biotin.  Also, the tests they do to see if you've had a heart attack so it could potentially even be life or death. And in terms of poor regulation, as I've done tons of videos about, there are all sorts of supplement manufacturer shenanigans. For example, this outbreak in which hundreds suffered selenium toxicity because they had an Oopsy and put 200 times the dose and so it ended up causing hair loss. And the same thing can happen with getting too much vitamin A. Next up, we look at the pros and cons of the drugs finasteride and minoxidil for hair loss. Any consumer looking on the internet for treatment for hair loss is exposed to a multitude of remedies. However, we only have good evidence for efficacy for the FDA-approved drugs. Finasteride, sold as propitia, and minoxidil sold as rogaine. It's considered a myth that all the patented hair loss supplements on the market will increase hair growth. And they may actually be more expensive, with over-the-counter supplement regimens costing up to more than $1,000 a year, whereas the drugs may only be $1 to $300. The drugs can help but can cause side effects. The propitia can diminish libido and cause sexual dysfunction, while the topical minoxidil can cause itching. To understand why there are so many hormonal side effects for propitia, like impotence, testicular pain, breast enlargement, you have to understand how the drug works. Androgens, male hormones like testosterone, are the principal drivers of hair growth in both men and women. We know this from studies a half-century ago that show that castration of men stopped hair loss. Why exactly were they being castrated? Due to eugenics laws in the United States, when mentally handicapped persons were castrated or had their tubes tied against their will, so-called retarded persons were routinely sterilized without their consent or knowledge, and we, the United States of America, was the first country to introduce eugenic laws, which were later upheld by the US Supreme Court. In the 1930s, a vocal proponent complained that the Germans are beating us at our own game. Anyways, testosterone is the primary androgen circulating in the blood and can be converted to dihydrotestosterone, which is even more powerful, by an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase. And that's the enzyme that's blocked by a propitia, so it inhibits the souping up of testosterone. That's why women are not supposed to take it, since it could feminize male fetuses, whereas for men, it has the sexual side effects like erectile dysfunction, which can affect men for years, something the drug companies had to disclose for the last decade. A difficulty in achieving an erection that continues after stopping the medication. Side effects that may even be permanent, up to 20% of subjects reporting persistent sexual dysfunction for six or more years after stopping the drug, suggesting the possibility that it may never go away. What we think might be happening is that the drug may actually structurally change the part of your brain responsible for sexual function. And indeed, though blood levels of hormones in users with persistent effects appear normal, if you do a spinal tap and look at the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding their brains, neuro steroid levels do appear to end up being altered. So it's recommended that prescribers of finasteride, as well as potential users, be aware of the potential serious long-term risks of a medication used for a cosmetic purpose. To date, no new interventions are used routinely in the treatment of male or female pattern baldness. Given the side effects of the current drug options, there's a need for alternative treatments. So what about foods, things we could eat to combat hair loss? That's exactly what we're going to explore next. Endrogenic or endrogenetic alopecia, also known as male or female pattern hair loss, is one of the most common chronic problems seen by dermatologists. Wait, so it's called male pattern hair loss and female pattern hair loss?  Okay, either way, it's characterized by progressive hair loss predominantly of the central scalp. I've talked about hair loss supplements. I've talked about hair loss drugs. What about foods for hair loss? What role might diet play in the treatment of hair loss? Human experiments with fecal transplants offer a clue to how powerful our microbiome is with repulsive improvements in hair loss after a fecal slurry made from freshly passed stools from a donor was administered into another person's colon. And not just by a little, totally bald guy starts growing back hair a few months after a fecal transplant and a little over a year later completely regrown. The moral of the story is not to drink brown smoothies, but to keep your good gut bugs happy. Population studies have found that male pattern baldness is associated with poor sleeping habits and the consumption of meat and junk food, whereas protective associations were found for the consumption of raw vegetables, fresh herbs, as well as the frequent consumption of soy milk. Drinking soy beverages on a weekly basis was associated with 62% lower odds of moderate to severe hair loss, raising the possibility that there may be compounds in plants that may be protective. Complementary and alternative medicine treatments boast the ability to cure hair loss safely with less side effects than conventional medicine. However, it's important to look beyond the overarching claims in marketing to critically review the literature. For example, many studies have little relevance because the evidence was obtained on shaved rodents, like, hey, let's smear shaved mice with bee venom. And even when they do clinical studies on actual people, sometimes there's no placebo control, so we have no idea if the food had anything to do with it. There has been a randomized double blunt placebo-controlled study of compounds in hot peppers and soy, showing significantly higher promotion of hair growth. OK, but what kind of doses were they using? 6 mg of capsaicin a day and 75 mg of isoflavones. OK, what does that translate out to in real food? You can get 6 mg of capsaicin in just a quarter of a fresh jalapeno pepper a day. That sounds pretty doable. And you can get 75 mg of isoflavones eating 3 quarters of a cup of tempeh or just straight soybeans. Soy nuts are even more concentrated, dry roasted soybeans, but given the formation of advanced glycation end products in high-fat, high-protein foods at high temperatures, I'd suggest avoiding routinely eating roasted or toasted nut seeds or soy. There's also been a randomized double blunt placebo-controlled trial of pumpkin seed oil. Where did they get that idea? In 2009, a study out of South Korea found that randomizing men with BPH in large prostate glands to just 320 mg of pumpkin seed oil a day, that's about 1⁄6 of a teaspoon, so just like a few drops a day, improved urinary flow rates. Urinary flow continued to kink off and decline in the control group, but those taking the equivalent of just like eating two single pumpkin seeds a day saw significant improvement. That would seem to be an anti-androgen effect, so maybe it would help with hair loss? Seems to work in mice when used topically, but what about in people just eating pumpkin seeds? Couldn't hurt. Sadly, we often throw away pumpkin seeds, squash seeds, watermelon seeds, and they actually have a rich repertoire of nutrition, but you don't know if they actually work for hair loss until you put it to the test. 76 men with male pattern baldness received 400 mg of pumpkin seed oil a day, hidden in capsules, or they took capsules filled instead with a placebo for a few months. Again, that's only like eating two pumpkin seeds a day, maybe 2½ pumpkin seeds, and they measured scalp hair growth with all sorts of objective and subjective measures, and after 24 weeks of treatment, self-rated improvement and satisfaction scores in the actual pumpkin seed oil group was higher, and they objectively had more hair, a 40% increase in hair counts compared to only 10% in the placebo group. In the pumpkin group, 95% remained either unchanged or improved, whereas in the control group, more than 90% remained unchanged or worsened. Given such a pronounced effect, might we be worried about sexual side effects? They looked before and after, an index of erectile dysfunction, and found no evidence of adverse effects. We would love it if you could share with us your stories about reinventing your health through evidence-based nutrition. Go to nutritionfacts.org slash testimonials. We may share it on our social media to help inspire others. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, or studies mentioned here, please go to the Nutrition Facts Podcast landing page. There you'll find all the detailed information you need, plus links to all the sources we cite for each of these topics. For a timely text on the pathogens that cause pandemics, you can order the e-book, audiobook, or hard copy of my last book, How to Survive a Pandemic. For recipes, check out my second to last book, My How Not to Diet Cookbook. It's beautifully designed with more than 100 recipes for delicious and nutritious meals. And all the proceeds I receive from the sales of all my books goes to charity. NutritionFacts.org is a non-profit science-based public service where you can sign up for free daily updates on the latest in nutrition research via bite-sized videos and articles. Everything on the website is free. There's no ads, no corporate sponsorship. It's strictly non-commercial. I'm not selling anything. I just put it up as a public service as a labor of love as a tribute to my grandmother, whose own life was saved with evidence-based nutrition.


We are continuing on the 10 characteristics of people of paradise and the people of success in the world and hereafter. Today, inshallah, we'll talk about two characteristics that are very essential. The fifth century reminds us about these beautiful ethics that we can embody in our lives in order to be successful in the dunya and in the Akhara. He says, with the creation, with human being, with the general public, be fair. Fairness and justice is really at the foundation of Islam and just being fair to everyone, not just to the people that you love and you care about, but being fair to everyone. This is why the beautiful hadith that the seven categories of people that will be under the shade of God on the day that there's no shade. One is a sultan that is a adhan that a just ruler, someone who's just and fair to the people that he is ruling. And this is why that's a high maqam to be a person of justice and fairness. And well, one of the things that in the societies when societies breaks down is when merchants and when cooperation become unfair, and they start cheating in people. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said, he said, a target of a merchant that is that is trustworthy.  He said, with the prophets and with the truthful and with the martyrs. This is the rank of a trustworthy and honest merchant. Look at the rank of him that he they will be with the prophets and with the city and we talked about the city in the first session, that that's one of the highest maqam to have this is why Abu Bakr. Siddiq is the greatest, the best of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala creation after all of the prophets. His highest maqam is is that we can achieve is to be a Siddiq. So these merchants who are trustworthy who are honest, they will be because with the prophets and with the Siddiq and with the martyrs because this is the importance of being fair to the to the creation to Allah's creation to everyone. And this is why merchants are dealing with everybody every day with the community. So if the merchants are dishonest, then the whole society will break down. And so the next thing that he says he said, with the scholars be humble, be respectful and honorable. This is what it means when you have a while though when you humble yourself because all the man is to be elevated the all the man the Quran says, Are they the same? Those who know and those who do not know this is a rhetorical question that the answer is in the question. It's also obvious Allah is not even answering that because the the the stations of the The stations of the The scholars, they are the heirs of the prophets. Why? Because the prophets, they don't leave behind dinar and dirham, gold and silver. What they leave behind is and whoever clings onto this path of knowledge and go after knowledge. They are on the path of the prophets. And this is the nature of the prophets, they leave behind knowledge, all of the prophets, and especially our prophet psalallahu a.ç he said, That the preference of of a Aalim over a Abid, a regular worshiper, is the same as the moon over the stars. And look at the moon. The moon and the stars, as we know, they all get their light from the sun, but the moon gives it out to the people on the earth in the middle of the night so they can see, they can see their path, illuminates the path for people on earth. This is the nature of people of Il is that they need to be elevated honored in our tradition. This is part of our tradition. The Hadith of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, he said that when if you, if a person goes on a path of knowledge, Allah will make a path for him to paradise. And that path will always be open until he stops learning, until he returns from that path. And he said that even the fish in the ocean will make dua for the seekers of knowledge, for those who are on the path of knowledge. And this is why honoring the scholars, honoring the ulama is part of our tradition. This is the, you know, not only in Islamic tradition, if you look at Aristotle and Socrates, what they say about their teachers, because teachers, the parents and teachers, these two things, there's a beautiful piece of tradition from Sa'adi, Rahmet al-Alayi, who there was a king who sent his child to the school. And he gave him a loa, they used to write on a loa tablet. It was like the tablets with the wooden tablet. Now we have the digital tablets, but the wooden tablet, they used to write on it. And I remember we had it when we were kids and going to the mosque and learning as children. But when he went, he said he gave him a loa, like really made out of silver and gold. And it was really ornamented really well because he was the son of king. But on the loa, he wrote a line of poetry for his son. He said, He said the bitterness of your teacher is better than the kindness of your father. In other words, go and learn. And even if your teacher is a little bit bitter, it's okay because they're trying to bring out the best out of you. This is what they're trying to do. The teachers are always there to bring the best out of their students and to make their students better than them. So honoring teachers is part of our tradition. One of my teachers said to me many, many years ago, he said the Quran, the first conversation that Allah is having in the Quran when he creates the human being, he says, And Allah taught Adam the names of all things. He told me that he said, Look, Allah's introducing himself as a teacher. Allah taught Adam the names of all things.  This is an amazing honor to be on this path that Allah's introducing himself as a teacher. And may Allah give us still feel to be people on the path of knowledge and to be people who honors knowledge, who honors the ulama and honors this path that we have a path of learning and teaching, inshallah. JazakAllah khayran, inshallah tomorrow night we'll end with the last two advice of Haji Abdullah al-Ansari on the top 10 characteristics in qualities of the people of success in the dunya and people of success in hereafter. JazakAllah khayran, wa salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.


And these cattle right now are still just they're just kind of trotting around, but so this early in the set What I'm looking for is just anything that will stop and get a hold of him whereas most of the cows in here right now You're not gonna write them down because they're still just meandering But what when one stops and looks at him and gets a hold of him Then I'm gonna write that cow down and then keep watching her through the settling Like right there when he bumped in the middle of him that that little gray cow right there Walk him back when he bumped all those cows She was one of the only ones that actually took it and looked at him and and got a hold of his horse So we're gonna we're gonna recognize that and write her down Yeah, I want to honor him and not when they do see him they don't panic they get a halt But you don't want to see him get a halt panic For instance like you you ever find one of those fairly Fairly easy You see like this gray horn cow. It's nervous. It's a nervous cow is hunting a friend She's so tight her head's low when she gets out there when she sees freedom she tries to get closer to her See what he's got right here. He's looking at the gray brown one with the navel on the outside here And this is the first gray cow we talked about Yeah, very first cow we talked about and the one we mentioned all the time is the one he's trying to get in the hole See he's got options like the yellow moly we talked about there's the carpet saddle