Alexander J. Stein

This is something I had posted on LinkedIn , but as there it’s not publicly accessible (and I cannot share it e.g. on Bluesky ), I reposted it here.    Last week I was in hospital, again, for the  10 th time or so within the past year (whether for emergency room admissions or routine hospitalisations due to  my cancer ). But why do I post about it now? For two reasons. Because, overall, the staff are amazing – whether support staff or medical staff, trainees or senior physicians, front-line staff or those behind the scenes! They are so friendly, helpful and understanding, it’s really impressive. (And to be honest, I’m probably not the easiest pa tient.) I’m just very grateful for these people.    So on the one hand, this is a shout-out to these wonderful professionals! During COVID they were clapped as heroes, but then forgotten. And yet, here they are, still continuing to do good, day-in and day-out. But on the other hand, this i...

(I migrated this post from Tumblr, where I had posted in on 29 June 2025; it was last updated on 15 Jun. 2026.) As the argument “ultra-processed” comes up over and again to malign certain food groups (like plant-based alternatives), I thought compiling a short overview might be in order… In classification systems like “NOVA”, the category of “ultra-processed” food (UPF) is ill defined and it lumps together a hotch-potch of different foodstuffs, some of which can be bad for your health, some are neutral, and some may even be beneficial. Whether one should be concerned about eating a “UPF” very much depends on which kind of food it is. (It’s bad if it’s made of meat or relates to sweetened beverages.) Generally, judging an outcome based on the process it was made with is not a very rigorous approach: Forging iron is not bad because it can be used to make swords. After all, it can also be used to make plough shares. What may be bad are swords. This means the final products (swords vs plo...

Sometimes (rarely) I posted something on Tumblr, but I now found out that Tumblr started to put posts behind a log-in wall, i.e. the full posts can no longer be read by the general public. So I had to find an alternative and decided to give it a try with Blogger.