• An elite athlete said following a vegan diet helped her reduce symptoms of chronic illnesses. 
• She said worrying less about protein allowed her to find foods that worked best for her body. 
• Her typical diet includes lots of fruit, which she said has boosted her energy and recovery.

As a personal trainer in her early 20s, Jennifer Hintenberger seemed healthy on the surface.

But internally, she was suffering. Her symptoms — including hair loss, severe acid reflux, kidney problems, and difficulty breathing — made her feel decades older.

"The doctor said, 'It looks like I should be talking to a 60-year-old man,'" she told Business Insider.

Now 43, Hintenberger said that transitioning to a vegan diet more than a decade ago helped her manage chronic illnesses like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

The Canadian athlete has since won gold medals and set multiple world records in kettlebell sport and will compete at upcoming events with the Vegan Strong PlantBuilt roster.

Hintenberger said habits like eating lots of fruit for energy, worrying less about protein, and avoiding digestive irritants like gluten help her feel and perform her best.

Cutting out dairy and meat helped her reduce bloating and digestive issues

Hintenberger never expected she'd go vegan, but severe health issues made her desperate for a change.

"I started this journey because I was sick of being sick," she said. "I had symptoms that lasted weeks that turned into months that turned into years."

Her symptoms included bloating, constipation, acne and itchiness, light-headedness, lethargy, and sleep paralysis, along with other digestive issues.

At one point, she was traveling with a client and was in so much pain she was unable to eat normal meals and resorted to boiling prunes to try to get some nutrients and calories.

"I just wanted to rip my skin off. I hated being in my own body," she said.

A doctor said her issues were related to stress but also poor digestion and recommended an elimination diet.

Hintenberger gradually cut out potential trigger foods, realizing that dairy, meat, and gluten had been worsening her symptoms.

At first, she was concerned about getting enough protein, but Hintenberger found that she didn't need as much as she thought to thrive.

"Plants have all the protein you need to be strong, to be healthy, to be competitive," she said.

She stopped tracking nutrients and focused on eating what seemed to work best for her body, prompting a big improvement in her kidney issues, which can be exacerbated by eating too much protein.

Quitting fad diets helped her lose weight and boost her performance

Earlier in her life, Hintenberger struggled with food addiction and binge eating. But following a strict high-protein, low-carb diet along with an intense exercise schedule didn't seem to help.

"No matter how much I trained or how healthy I ate, I was always gaining weight," she said.

It was only by letting go of her weight loss efforts that Hintenberg saw the changes she was looking for.

Focusing on meeting her nutritional needs and switching to a plant-based diet eventually helped her lose more than 70 pounds.

"The most powerful thing was changing the way I ate. When I finally stopped eating to lose weight, I lost weight," Hintenberger said. "Now I don't care about my size, I care if I have energy."

She eats lots of fruit for better energy and performance

When she was on fad diets, Hintenberger used to avoid fruit, fearing the sugar and carbs would cause health issues and weight gain.

"I was afraid of fruit, told to eat high-protein and low-carb, that fruit is the devil," she said.

As a world champion in kettlebell sport, she now eats as many as 20 servings of fruit a day.

Her typical day of eating includes a green smoothie, bananas, mangos, cherries, and often lots of watermelon as a snack. She rounds out her nutritional needs with her staple energy balls made from almond butter and vegan chocolate chips. Later in the day, she has hearty vegan dinners like curry, tacos, or Thai food.

Hintenberger said eating a plant-based diet has helped her recover more quickly from exercise, and continue gaining strength so she can stay at the top of her sport.

"I'm never one to push veganism, but I genuinely want to be an example of health as we age," she said.

• EV charging is so bad it's driving people back to fossil fuels.
• Lack of charging infrastructure is already a barrier for many would-be EV buyers.
• The last thing the auto industry needs is people ditching their EVs.

Issues with charging have nearly half of electric vehicle owners in the US considering going back to fossil fuels – the latest bad sign for the EV transition.

A recent consumer study conducted by McKinsey & Co. found that 46% of US EV owners surveyed are likely to switch back to a gas-powered vehicle, compared to a global average of 29% of EV owners who reported they will likely switch back to an internal-combustion engine.

The top reason respondents listed for ditching their EV was a lack of charging infrastructure. Other charging issues high on the list included a lack of charging at home and the impact of long-distance driving.

Range anxiety and access to charging infrastructure have long been considered one of the top barriers to electric vehicle adoption, but the revelation that these same issues may drive current battery-powered car owners back into gas-powered cars is a new blow for the already rocky EV transition.

While there are plenty of shoppers interested in an electric vehicle, the options on sale today are often too big, too expensive, or not practical enough to replace a gas-powered car.

Car companies are already scrambling to adjust to a sudden change in the electric vehicle market in order to draw more new customers. The slowdown in electric vehicle sales growth has rocked everyone from Ford to Tesla, denting sales and forcing executives to rethink their long-term plans for electric vehicles.

While the industry has made great strides in electric vehicle range and battery charging times, huge holes in the infrastructure make certain areas nearly impossible to navigate without a gas-powered engine.

McKinsey's study found this issue to be particularly acute in the US, which had the second-highest rate of respondents say they're considering ditching their EV. (In first place was Australia, with 49% of respondents saying they are likely to switch back.)

America's high placement shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Charging infrastructure here has long been a hot-potato issue, which has held back efforts to build more chargers.

While a push from the automotive industry to fund charging infrastructure has led to a boom in public charging stations in the last two years, these have largely been money-losing ventures.

On the government side, the Biden Administration has set aside $7.5 billion for charging infrastructure with a vow to add 500,000 EV charging stations by 2030. But that effort in reality has played out slowly so far, with only a handful of stations going live since the funding was approved two years ago.

Addressing charging infrastructure is already high on the industry's list of priorities when it comes to removing barriers to adoption, but the fact that it might also drive existing EV owners away only amplifies the issue.

• Russia's navy is set to receive more than 40 vessels this year, Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.
• Putin says Russia's naval upgrades will "drastically improve its combat potential."
• Russia's war against Ukraine has seen its navy weather significant losses.

Russia has been working hard to bolster its naval capabilities, the country's leader Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

"A lot has been done in this area, as our navy is getting new ships," Putin said during a meeting on shipbuilding issues, according to Russian state media outlet TASS.

Russia's navy is set to receive more than 40 ships and boats this year, said Putin. This exceeds the 33 and 24 vessels it received in 2023 and 2022, respectively.

The boost in naval capacity, Putin said, is part of Russia's wider plans to "comprehensively upgrade the navy, including its ship, aircraft, and coastal components, as well as the infrastructure of bases."

He added that the upgrades to Russia's navy will "strengthen its positions in the strategically crucial areas of the world ocean" and "drastically improve its combat potential."

The move would certainly provide a boost to Russia's navy, which has weathered significant losses ever since the country invaded Ukraine in 2022.

In February, the head of the UK's armed forces, Adm. Sir Tony Radakin, said that 25% of Russia's vessels in the Black Sea had been "sunk or damaged" by Ukraine.

"Putin's continued illegal occupation of Ukraine is exacting a massive cost on Russia's Black Sea Fleet, which is now functionally inactive," UK defense secretary Grant Shapps said a month later.

Russia's defense ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

• Taylor Swift's Eras Tour boosted hotel prices in Portugal, Spain, and Sweden but not France.
• France's larger population and hotel capacity diluted the economic impact of Swift's concerts, analysts said.
• Upcoming shows in smaller European countries may see higher accommodation prices and inflation.

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour has made it to five European countries so far. The sold-out shows have boosted accommodation prices everywhere except one country: France.

Among the four countries Swift toured in May, three saw an increase in month-on-month hotel prices this year compared to the last three years, according to a Monday report from BMI, an analytics subsidiary of Fitch Solutions.

Portugal, Spain, and Sweden's hotel prices in May increased several times' their 2021-2023 average. But France saw a drop in accommodation inflation. The researchers did not analyze this month's shows in the UK.

Researchers at BMI attributed the difference to France's larger population and greater hotel capacity compared with the other tour stops, which may dilute the impact of the American pop star's concerts.

The 290,000 people who attended the six shows split between Paris and Lyon only make up 0.43% of the French population.

"France regularly hosts large events and has a very well-developed tourism industry and airports, suggesting strong capacity to host large numbers of domestic and international arrivals," the researchers wrote in the note. The country is weeks away from the summer Olympics kickoff.

But upcoming Swift shows in the Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, and Switzerland all have the potential to boost prices, given that those countries' populations are all under 20 million, the report noted. Swift's current tour takes her to 51 shows across 18 European cities.

The Eras tour has had a massive economic impact on other countries. The concerts rally tens of thousands of fans who spend big on restaurants, lodging, and visiting local attractions. Some Swifties will travel hours — and across countries — to attend a concert.

In the US, where the singer performed 53 shows, about 600 concertgoers surveyed by QuestionPro said they spent $1,300, on average. Swift has been mentioned on companies' earnings calls to explain demand upticks and by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, which highlighted post-pandemic record hotel demand from her stop.

MBI analysts looking at US data found that concertgoers can spend four times the gross costs of tickets, affecting inflation in local economies. In Chicago, Eras tour dates led to 96.8% hotel room occupancy, an all-time high for the city, per the BMI report.

The fanfare is alive across the world. Swift doesn't perform in Italy until mid-July, but hotels in Milan are already booked and busy.

"Our analysis and data shows that hotel prices in Milan are on average 45% higher for the nights of Taylor Swift's shows in the city in July 2024, compared to the weeks before and after the show," Ben Julius, the founder of a tourism company called Tourist Italy, told Business Insider.

Earlier this year, Singapore's government incentives of nearly $3 million per show to get Swift to perform in the city-state sparked controversy and led to inter-regional political debate.

• US astronauts took shelter on the ISS after a Russian satellite broke up nearby, NASA said.
• The satellite, RESURS-P1, was decommissioned in 2021 and recently created over 100 pieces of debris.
• Space agencies have been trying to reduce space junk like this from decommissioned assets.

US astronauts on the International Space Station were told to take shelter for about an hour after a Russian satellite broke up nearby, according to authorities.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said on Thursday evening that American crews took cover in their spacecraft at about 9 p.m. Eastern Time due to the satellite break-up.

That's about 1 a.m. for the astronauts, who follow UTC time on the ISS.

NASA said its instructions were a "precautionary measure" and that crews were told an hour later they could resume their normal activities.

Meanwhile, US Space Command said the destroyed satellite was the Russian-owned RESURS-P1 decommissioned in 2021.

The satellite's collapse on Wednesday at about 4 p.m. UTC created "over 100 pieces of trackable debris," Space Command added.

"USSPACECOM has observed no immediate threats and is continuing to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain," its statement said.

LeoLabs, a company that tracks space movements, wrote on X that it was tracking over 180 fragments drifting in orbit after the break.

"We expect this number to increase in the coming days. We are actively analyzing the debris cloud to characterize it, identify a potential cause, and estimate the impact," the firm wrote.

By LeoLabs' estimation, the RESURS-P1 was about 13,200 pounds and held a "nearly circular orbit" when it split.

The Russian satellite was an observation tool capturing high-resolution images that allowed the viewer to distinguish objects on Earth about 1 meter apart.

Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said in January 2022 that the satellite had been inactive since late 2021 due to the failure of its onboard equipment after operating 3.5 years longer than expected.

Satellite breakups in low Earth orbit can often pose hazards to other satellites, spacecraft, or space stations because of the debris they release.

Debris can sometimes stay for decades in close orbit before Earth's gravity pulls it into the atmosphere and burns it up.

Space agencies have been working to reduce space junk in low Earth orbit as more satellites are decommissioned, primarily because the resulting debris raises the risk of spacecraft crashes.

In October 2023, for example, the Dish Network was fined $150,000 for leaving a retired satellite in the wrong place.

The preferred way of disposing of a retired satellite is typically to send it further away from Earth, reducing the risk of interrupting space activities near the planet. Another way is to allow the satellite to fall into the atmosphere, where it will be burned.

• President Joe Biden had a rough night at his first presidential debate of the year.
• Biden's performance on Thursday was riddled with gaffes and stumbles.
• Turns out "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart thinks the debate was a disaster for Biden too. 

Jon Stewart has weighed in on Thursday's presidential debate and he thinks it was a disaster for President Joe Biden, 81, too.

"The Daily Show" host went live following the debate, where he poked fun at Biden's performance against his rival, former President Donald Trump, 78.

At one point in the debate, Biden misspoke while defending his accomplishments in healthcare policy, saying that his administration had "finally beat Medicare."

Trump quickly jumped on Biden's misstep: "Well, he's right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death, and he's destroying Medicare."

"Okay, a high-pressure situation. A lot of times, you can confuse saving Medicare with beating it," Stewart joked.

"I'm sure it's not something that repeated throughout the debate, causing Democrats across the country to either jump out of windows or vomit silently into the nearest recycling bin," he continued.

But Biden, Stewart said, also seemed to run into trouble during the debate even when it wasn't his turn to speak. Biden was seen grimacing, looking stunned, and with his mouth hanging open while Trump spoke — and Stewart highlighted that in a supercut he played on the show.

"A lot of people have resting 25th Amendment face," Stewart said, referencing the section in the constitution that establishes processes in case of a president's death.

"I'm not a political expert, but while Biden was preparing at Camp David for a week, did anyone mention he would also be on camera on a split screen?" he continued.

This isn't the first time Stewart has called attention to Biden and Trump's advanced ages.

When Stewart returned to "The Daily Show" in February, his first monologue touched on Biden's and Trump's fitness for the Oval Office.

"These two candidates. They are both similarly challenged," Stewart said. "And it is not crazy to think that the oldest people in the history of the country to ever run for president might have some of these challenges."

Last month, Stewart told audiences at the "Netflix is a Joke Fest" that Biden is so old that he "shouldn't be president."

"I know you know how fucking old he is, and I know you don't want to say it because Trump is so scary, but he's so fucking old," Stewart said. "I'm not saying that Biden can't contribute to society, he just shouldn't be president."

Representatives for Biden and Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

• The first presidential debate on Thursday was a disastrous night for President Joe Biden.
• Donald Trump fired off a number of lies and misleading statements about his record.
• But Biden frequently stumbled with his words, doing little to allay concerns about his age.

Former President Donald Trump, 78, may have lied throughout the first presidential debate of the 2024 election, but the evening still may have provided a lift for his campaign as President Joe Biden, 81, struggled to find his footing during the debate.

Trump and Biden had their first face-off on Thursday evening, breaking with election norms by holding a debate months before voters head to the polls in November.

Minutes into the event, which was hosted by CNN, viewers were forced to confront their presumptive presidential nominees: a recently convicted felon former president with a penchant for lying and a current president whose raspy voice and stumbling words are doing little to convince voters that he can push through a second term.

In the end, facts may not have mattered at all.

"Debates can be lost at any moment, but they can only be won in the first 20 minutes," Evan Siegfried, a former GOP strategist and crisis communications specialist, told Business Insider. "Unfortunately, Joe Biden lost all chances of winning."

In true Trump form, it didn't take long before he started spewing misleading or false information about his and his opponent's presidential records.

On the US economy, Trump said it was incomparable to history throughout his term. In reality, the pandemic brought in a major recession, and employment plummeted. Economic growth, even without factoring the impacts of COVID-19, has actually been stronger under the Biden Administration, according to The Associated Press.

On the US-Mexico border: Trump claimed that Biden will open the floodgates for immigrants. In reality, Biden has enacted restrictions on asylum applications and is on track to match the number of deportations Trump executed during his administration.

On foreign relations, Trump also lied about the US's trade deficit with China. "We have the largest deficit with China," he claimed. But the deficit has been at the lowest level since 2009, The New York Times reported.

CNN's fact-checker, Daniel Dale, estimated that Trump said false or misleading statements 30 times during the debate. Biden made misleading or false statements nine times by comparison.

But lying on the record has become expected behavior for Trump, and on Thursday evening he forcefully delivered.

For Biden, the debate could have been an opportunity to flex some of the strides he made during his administration, and in a few moments, he did — but not while convincing viewers that he's still fit for the job.

A constant narrative that has been swirling around Biden is that the 81-year-old political veteran is too frail for a second term, despite the president's insistence and the assurances from his White House doctor.

A report from Special Counsel Robert Hur in February said that Biden's memory and advanced age were reasons not to charge the president for his handling of classified documents.

As a result, a major onus was on Biden to prove that he's still mentally and physically fit for the job.

Throughout the Thursday debate, Biden's voice sounded raspy as the president struggled at moments to hold in a cough. He stumbled through his answers and rebuttals. In a few cases, his statements were incomprehensible.

"We finally beat Medicare", Biden said at one point. Trump, accordingly, pounced.

"His voice sounds terrible; he looks terrible," Siegfried, the ex-GOP strategist, told BI.

Even prominent Democrats agreed that Thursday was not Biden's night.

"I think there was a sense of shock, actually, on how he came out at the beginning of this debate," former senior Obama White House advisor David Axelrod said on CNN. "How his voice sounded — he seemed a little disoriented at the beginning of the debate. He did get stronger as the debate went on, but by that time, I think the panic had set in."

Still, the true impacts of Thursday's debate will be hard to determine since the event was held so far out from the election, Siegfried said.

"That's a question we can't answer because we've never had a debate this early," Siegfried told BI. "Remember, Obama stumbled in the Denver debate against Mitt Romney in 2012, and people started saying it's over, but, a few weeks later, he got right back up on the horse and showed that it was just a onetime thing. We're not going to have this until the next debate in September."

"It's going to be months of this narrative," he added. "And it's been a narrative that's been out there for the length of his presidency."

• Biden's debate performance on Thursday is earning him little praise in the US.
• Both Trump and Biden are disliked in China, but people focused especially on the latter's demeanor.
• On Weibo, he's being mocked for "looking like a robot" after people said he was barely blinking.

As the first presidential debate of 2024 wrapped up on Thursday evening, China started dunking President Joe Biden for his oratory style.

His performance, marked by confusing remarks, mumbling, and a hoarse voice, was so lackluster that it had prominent Democrats voicing questions about their support for him. Business Insider's Bryan Metzger and Brent D. Griffiths called it a "complete disaster."

Neither presidential candidate is popular in China. Former President Donald Trump is often the subject of memes claiming he's secretly a Communist Party member trying to destroy the US from within.

As both men walked onstage in Atlanta, people joked that one was "trying to prove he's not crazy, and the other trying to prove he's not stupid."

But Biden has been taking the brunt of the jokes on Weibo, China's version of X. Minutes after the debate closed, a topic saying he was "looking like a robot and barely blinking" began picking up steam.

It didn't matter what either man said about the economy, veterans' affairs, or foreign policy — Chinese people just cared about how they looked and sounded.

"Obvious signs of dementia," one person commented on a post from Russian state media RT that showed a clip of Biden's furrowed brows.

"In today's first TV debate, Trump won," wrote the popular blogger Housha Moonlight. "It doesn't matter what the debate was about. The key is that with wit and flexibility, Trump successfully highlighted the old and dying appearance of the sleeping king."

"I'm worried that Deng Deng will die suddenly during this debate," another poster wrote, referring to a nickname for Biden.

To be sure, Weibo is a heavily moderated platform, but it can be useful for observing narratives and language that survive the scrutiny of censors.

A common criticism in China toward US democracy is how old its leaders are. Biden is 81 this year, while Trump is 78. Xi Jinping, the leader of China, is 71.

Indeed, the debate on Thursday prompted hundreds of posts and comments remarking on the ages of both candidates.

"Thanks for the hard work of two old veterans," one person joked.