Author Archives: Edward Brownlee

About Vitamin D | WebMD

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Experts aren’t sure if a lack of Vitamin D leads to depression or if it’s the other way around.

But studies show a link between the two. Research is ongoing to see if raising your vitamin D levels can help with symptoms and boost your mood.

Additionally, scientists are still figuring out exactly how well vitamin D can treat or even keep you from getting the influenza virus.

One study showed taking vitamin D drops in the winter helped lower the number of Japanese schoolchildren who got the flu. It’s clear it’s an important part of a healthy immune system. Your body can’t fight germs well if it doesn’t have enough.

And, healthy vitamin D levels can slow bone loss. It also helps ward off osteoporosis and lowers your chance of broken bones.

Doctors use vitamin D to treat osteomalacia. That’s a condition that causes soft bones, bone loss, and bone pain.

Vitamin D Deficiency

About 4 out of 10 Americans don’t get enough vitamin D. If yours is low, you might not eat enough foods with it. Or you might have a health condition that stops you from absorbing it. Or you might just need more sunlight.

Problems converting vitamin D from food or sunshine can set you up for a deficiency. Factors that increase your risk include:

  • Age 50 or older
  • Dark skin
  • A northern home
  • Overweight, obese, gastric bypass surgery
  • Milk allergy or lactose intolerance
  • Diseases that reduce nutrient absorption in the gut, such as Crohn’s disease or celiac
  • Being institutionalized
  • Taking certain medications such as seizure meds

Using sunscreen can interfere with getting vitamin D, but abandoning sunscreen can significantly increase your risk for skin cancer. So it’s worth looking for other sources of vitamin D in place of prolonged, unprotected exposure to the sun.

Make sure you take Vitamin K with Vitamin D

Vitamin K is an essential nutrient that helps your blood clot and your bones grow the way they should. It also may help prevent the bone disease osteoporosis and protect you against heart disease. You can get vitamin K from certain foods, and most diets in the United States contain enough of the daily recommended goal (90 micrograms for women and 120 micrograms for men).

References:

  1. https://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/ss/slideshow-low-vitamin-d

Buffet’s Owner’s Earnings

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Owner earnings (OE) is a valuation method detailed by Warren Buffett in Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report in 1986. He stated that the value of a company is simply the total of the net cash flows (owner earnings) expected to occur over the life of the business, minus any reinvestment of earnings.

Owners’ earnings, also known as cash flow for owners, remains one of the more accurate measures of how much money we can make from an investment and helps calculate intrinsic value.

The formula for owners’ earnings is as follows:

OE = Net income + Non-cash charges – Maintenance Capex +/- Changes in working capital Where the below:

  • Non-cash = depreciation, amortization, impairment + other charges
  • Maintenance Capex = Cash a company spends to maintain normal biz operations.
  • Changes in working capital = adding the items under “Change in operating assets and liabilities” from the CF statement.

We will use a combination of cash flow statements to find the numbers.

To simplify some of this maintenance, the capex is an imprecise number that Buffett didn’t define precisely.

Many suggest different calculation methods; we will use the CF number to simplify.

Using $MSFT as our guinea pig for the year ending 2022. Below are the numbers taken from the financials:

  • Net income = $72,738
  • Non-cash = $16,260
  • Capex = ($23,866)
  • Changes in working capital = $446

Plugging in the numbers for $MSFT, we get:

Owners Earnings = $72,738+$16,260-$23,866+$446 = $65,578

Per share = $65,578 / 7,496 = 8.74

When compared to current P/FCF equals 8.70

Use these criteria to eliminate 95% of stocks:

Revenue growth 12%
Shares outstanding <2%
Net debt to FCF below 5x
Free cash flow growth +15%
Return on Invested capital +15%
Earnings per share growth +15%

12 companies that qualify:

 

Fasting Mimicking Diet

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A fasting-mimicking diet is a type of intermittent fasting.

A growing body of research conducted over the past decade or two have suggested that fasting – or abstaining from eating food – for certain periods of time might pay significant health dividends, such as improved weight management, lowered risk of developing type 2 diabetes and a reduced risk of cancer.

Fasting-mimicking is “a low-calorie diet designed to mimic fasting without fasting,” explains Dana Ellis Hunnes, a senior clinical dietitian at UCLA Medical Center and assistant professor at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in Los Angeles.

The approach effectively “tricks” your body into thinking you’re fasting while you’re actually still taking in some food. The eating period lasts five days, a time span that’s been associated with the benefits of fasting.

The rules of the fasting-mimicking diet are fairly straightforward. You’ll be tricking your body into thinking you’re fasting by removing most of the calories you’d typically eat each day.

The general idea on the fasting-mimicking diet is to consume 800 calories or fewer on fasting days and to adhere to a ratio of macronutrients that are roughly 10% protein, 45% fat and 45% carbohydrates. The fasting period lasts for five days and should be undertaken once per month until your target weight has been achieved.

The diet lasts for five days, and the approach breaks down as follows:

Day 1: You consume 1,100 calories. Of those calories, 11% should come from protein, 46% from fat and 43% from carbohydrates.

Days 2 to 5: You’ll consume just 725 calories per day, with a macronutrient breakdown of 9% protein, 44% fat and 47% carbohydrates.

During each of the five days, you should consume a minimum of 70 ounces of water. This fast period should be repeated once per month for a minimum of three months to achieve optimal results, Dilley explains.

References:

  1. https://health.usnews.com/wellness/food/articles/what-is-the-fasting-mimicking-diet

Green Grass

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The phrase “Is the grass greener on the other side?” is a common way of asking if something that seems better or more desirable than one has is so. It is based on the proverb, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”, which means that people tend to be dissatisfied with their situation and always think that others have it better, even if they don’t. The proverb has been traced back to ancient times, but it became popular in English after a song by Raymond B. Egan and Richard A. Whiting in 1924.

The phrase can be used in different contexts, such as relationships, careers, lifestyles, etc. For example, someone unhappy with their marriage might wonder if the grass is greener on the other side, meaning if they would be happier with someone else. Or someone bored with their job might think the grass is greener on the other side, meaning they would enjoy a different career more. However, the phrase also implies that the grass is not greener and that changing one’s situation might not bring the expected happiness or satisfaction. It is a way of reminding people to appreciate what they have and not to idealize what they don’t have. A counter-phrase that expresses this idea is “the grass is greener where you water it, ” meaning that good situations come from the effort and attention you put into them, not from dreaming about them.

How Did You Fail This Week…Embrace Failure

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“Failure is not the outcome; failure is not trying. Don’t be afraid to fail.” ~ Sara Blakely, Spanx Founder and CEO

There is tremendous value in embracing your mistakes and learning invaluable lessons from them. Failure is nothing to be afraid of.

Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, said that as a child, her father encouraged failure and as would pose an unusual question to her and her brother over dinner: “How did you fail this week?”

“He encouraged us to fail, and not to be afraid of it,” she told me. “If we didn’t have something to tell him that week, he would be disappointed.”

When Blakely tried out for the cheerleading squad and was “horrible and didn’t make it,” he high-fived her. When she revealed that she lost her campaign for senior class president, he told her that was amazing.

Blakely says she learned to find her hidden gifts in moments of disappointment or error. Instead of locking up in fear when things go wrong, she says people must find the beauty in these moments.

 

References:

  1. https://leaders.com/articles/women-in-business/sara-blakely-spanx/