How healthy living nearly killed me | A.J. Jacobs

730,393 views ・ 2012-01-03

TED


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00:15
I've spent the last decade
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subjecting myself to pain and humiliation,
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hopefully for a good cause,
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which is self-improvement.
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And I've done this in three parts.
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So first I started with the mind.
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And I decided to try to get smarter
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by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica
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from A to Z --
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or, more precisely, from "a-ak" to "Zywiec."
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And here's a little image of that.
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And this was an amazing year.
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It was really a fascinating journey.
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It was painful at times,
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especially for those around me.
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My wife started to fine me one dollar
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for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation.
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So it had its downsides.
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But after that,
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I decided to work on the spirit.
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As I mentioned last year,
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I grew up with no religion at all.
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I'm Jewish,
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but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian.
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01:15
(Laughter)
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Not really.
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But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage
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by actually diving in
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and trying to live it and immerse myself in it.
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So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible.
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And from the Ten Commandments
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to growing my beard --
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because Leviticus says you cannot shave.
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So this is what I looked like by the end.
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Thank you for that reaction.
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(Laughter)
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I look a little like Moses, or Ted Kaczynski.
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I got both of them.
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So there was the topiary there.
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And there's the sheep.
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Now the final part of the trilogy
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was I wanted to focus on the body
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and try to be the healthiest person I could be,
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the healthiest person alive.
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So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years.
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And I just finished a couple of months ago.
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And I have to say, thank God.
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Because living so healthily was killing me.
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(Laughter)
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It was so overwhelming,
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because the amount of things you have to do,
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it's just mind-boggling.
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I was listening to all the experts
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and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers.
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And they were telling me
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all the things I had to do.
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I had to eat right,
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exercise, meditate, pet dogs,
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because that lowers the blood pressure.
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I wrote the book on a treadmill,
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and it took me about a thousand miles
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to write the book.
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I had to put on sunscreen.
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This was no small feat,
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because if you listen to dermatologists,
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they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen.
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And you have to reapply it every two to four hours.
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So I think half of my book advance
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went into sunscreen.
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I was like a glazed doughnut
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for most of the year.
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There was the washing of hands.
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I had to do that properly.
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And my immunologist told me
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that I should also wipe down
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all of the remote controls and iPhones in my house,
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because those are just orgies of germs.
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So that took a lot of time.
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I also tried to be the safest person I could be,
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because that's a part of health.
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I was inspired
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by the Danish Safety Council.
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They started a public campaign
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that says, "A walking helmet is a good helmet."
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So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking,
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but also for walking around.
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And you can see there
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they're shopping with their helmets.
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(Laughter)
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Well yeah, I tried that.
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Now it's a little extreme, I admit.
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But if you think about this,
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this is actually -- the "Freakonomics" authors wrote about this --
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that more people die on a per mile basis
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from drunk walking
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than from drunk driving.
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So something to think about tonight
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if you've had a couple.
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So I finished,
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and it was a success in a sense.
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All of the markers went in the right direction.
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My cholesterol went down, I lost weight,
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my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant.
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So that was nice.
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And it was successful overall.
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But I also learned that I was too healthy,
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and that was unhealthy.
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I was so focused on doing all these things
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that I was neglecting my friends and family.
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And as Dan Buettner can tell you,
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having a strong social network
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is so crucial to our health.
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So I finished.
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And I kind of went overboard
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on the week after the project was over.
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I went to the dark side,
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and I just indulged myself.
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It was like something out of Caligula.
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(Laughter)
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Without the sex part.
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Because I have three young kids,
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so that wasn't happening.
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But the over-eating and over-drinking, definitely.
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And I finally have stabilized.
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So now I'm back
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to adopting many -- not all; I don't wear a helmet anymore --
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but dozens of healthy behaviors
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that I adopted during my year.
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It was really a life-changing project.
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And I, of course, don't have time to go into all of them.
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Let me just tell you two really quickly.
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The first is -- and this was surprising to me;
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I didn't expect this to come out --
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but I live a much quieter life now.
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Because we live in such a noisy world.
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There's trains and planes and cars
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and Bill O'Reilly, he's very noisy.
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(Laughter)
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And this is a real underestimated, under-appreciated health hazard --
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not just because it harms our hearing, which it obviously does,
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but it actually initiates
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the fight-or-flight response.
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A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going.
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And this, over the years,
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can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage.
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The World Health Organization just did a big study
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that they published this year.
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And it was done in Europe.
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And they estimated
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that 1.6 million years of healthy living
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are lost every year in Europe
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because of noise pollution.
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So they think it's actually very deadly.
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And by the way,
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it's also terrible for your brain.
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It really impairs cognition.
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And our Founding Fathers knew about this.
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When they wrote the Constitution,
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they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall
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so that they could concentrate.
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So without noise reduction technology,
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our country would not exist.
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So as a patriot,
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I felt it was important to --
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I wear all the earplugs and the earphones,
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and it's really improved my life
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in a surprising and unexpected way.
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And the second point I want to make, the final point,
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is that -- and it's actually been a theme of TEDMED --
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that joy is so important to your health,
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that very few of these behaviors
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will stick with me
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unless there's some sense of pleasure and joy in them.
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And just to give you one instance of this:
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food.
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The junk food industry
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is really great
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at pressing our pleasure buttons
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and figuring out what's the most pleasurable.
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But I think we can use their techniques
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and apply them to healthy food.
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To give just one example,
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we love crunchiness, mouthfeel.
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So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness
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into a lot of my recipes --
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throw in some sunflower seeds.
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And you can almost trick yourself
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into thinking you're eating Doritos.
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(Laughter)
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And it has made me a healthier person.
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So that is it.
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The book about it comes out in April.
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It's called "Drop Dead Healthy."
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And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour.
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That's my greatest hope.
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So thank you very much.
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08:33
(Applause)
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