Sunbathe Your Mushrooms

Sunbathe Your Mushrooms

Before your next batch of mushrooms hits the pan, give them a short sunbath. Fresh button mushrooms from the store usually carry less than 1 microgram of vitamin D per 100 grams. Their cells are packed with ergosterol, which plays the role cholesterol does in animals, and ultraviolet light converts it into vitamin D2, much like sunlight makes vitamin D in your skin. In a German test at midday in midsummer, sliced mushrooms reached 17.5 micrograms per 100 grams after 15 minutes outdoors and 32.5 after an hour. Slicing matters because it exposes more surface to the light, so slices beat whole caps given the same sun.

The honest caveat: results swing with season, latitude, time of day and cloud cover, so a gray spring afternoon won’t match those numbers. The good news is that the vitamin holds up afterward. A 2018 review in the journal Nutrients found sun-treated mushrooms usually stay above 10 micrograms per 100 grams through their best-before date, and pan-frying without oil for five minutes kept about 88 percent. Fifteen minutes on a sunny patio table, and your dinner borrows a trick from your own skin.

BMJ Publishes Cholesterol Study

BMJ Publishes Cholesterol Study

(Tom: The only cholesterol study you will ever need to read.

For every 30 point drop in cholesterol, death risk rose 22 percent.

Read that again.

For every 30 point drop in cholesterol, death risk rose 22 percent.)

In 1968, researchers ran the largest randomised trial ever done on saturated fat.

Over 9,000 people in Minnesota state hospitals were split between animal fat and corn oil for years.

The corn oil group’s cholesterol dropped hard.

The full results never got published.

The raw data sat on magnetic tapes in a basement for over forty years.

A researcher named Christopher Ramsden tracked those tapes down in 2013 and ran the numbers the original team never released.

For every 30 point drop in cholesterol, death risk rose 22 percent.

The lower the cholesterol fell, the faster people died.

In the over 65s, each drop of roughly half a point on the cholesterol scale carried a 35 percent higher death risk within two years.

The trial is real.

It was double blind.

It was the gold standard design.

And it found the exact opposite of what dietary guidelines were about to be built on.

It sat unpublished for over forty years while the low fat, high vegetable oil advice became national policy.

This was not a small study lost in the noise.

It was the largest of its kind.

And the finding that mattered most never reached a single doctor’s desk for four decades.

Vitamin C plus DMSO

Vitamin C plus DMSO

A 30 percent vitamin C solution dissolved in DMSO cleared 86 percent of basal cell skin cancer lesions within eight weeks in a clinical trial. In a randomized study published in Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, researchers tested a topical mix of high-concentration ascorbic acid and dimethyl sulfoxide, a solvent that helps substances penetrate deeply into the skin.

Applied twice daily for eight weeks, the combination produced complete clearance in 13 of 15 lesions (86.7 percent) among patients with low-risk basal cell carcinoma. This rate exceeded that of the standard topical treatment imiquimod, which cleared 8 of 14 lesions (57.1 percent). The vitamin C–DMSO formulation also caused fewer side effects and avoided the lasting skin hypopigmentation sometimes seen with conventional topical therapies.

Because basal cell carcinoma is the most common form of skin cancer worldwide, these early results suggest a possible low-cost, non-invasive option. Larger trials are still required before the approach can be adopted as standard care.

[Burke, B., & Bailie, J.-E. (2022). Randomized trial of topical ascorbic acid in DMSO versus imiquimod for the treatment of basal cell carcinoma. Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, 148, 112710. DOI: 10.1016/j.biopha.2022.112710]

Immune Tolerance – Dr Datis Kharazian Functional Medicine Specialist

With a majority of the population reporting food intolerances it pays to ask why this is the case far, far more so than it was previously.

The function of the immune system is to detect and respond against perceived harmful agents. The fact that our immune systems are more and more classifying various foods as harmful is cause for concern.

Immune tolerance is the term used to describe how reactive an immune system is to non-pathogenic elements. A person with optimal immune tolerance does not have food intolerances. Someone who has lost immune tolerance is, to a greater or lesser extent, intolerant to various foods.

The immune system does not react to fats and carbs, it reacts to proteins. More specifically to a specific sequence of amino acids. The amino acid sequence for a food can change with cooking and can also be matched across different foods.

This explains why a person with food sensitivities who never eats shrimp may test sensitive to shrimp – because the amino acid sequence in shrimp is similar to those foods to which they are sensitive.

And, interestingly enough, this similar amino acid profile explains why I have a similar reaction to non-dairy milk alternatives to the one I have to cow’s milk and sometimes to non-gluten containing breads to wheat breads.

A class of immune cells called T cells are vital to our health. They are severely compromised by a lack of Vitamin A and D and a lack of adequate movement. Stress devastates regulatory T cells.

Dendritic cells are on the surface of the gut. They are the samplers that test whether or not a protein is potentially harmful.

When they return a false positive, reporting a normal food as potentially harmful, this is lowered immune tolerance.

Another class of immune cells are called Secretary IgA. They are called an aminoglobulin. They surround and coat the incoming food via saliva so the dendritic cells in the gut do not have to sample everything.

(From a presentation given as part of the Food Sensitivity Summit.)

Heinrich Schliemann – The Greatest Adventurer in History?

Heinrich Schliemann

John Leake writes:
Christopher Nolan’s recent film, The Odyssey, reminded me of Heinrich Schliemann (the man who is credited with discovering the ancient city of Troy in 1873. I’d always heard he was an enterprising man, but I had no idea—until I read his biography today—about the extraordinary life he led. Everything about it strikes me as so wildly improbable that no writer of fiction would dare make it up.

Schliemann was born in Neubukow, Mecklenburg in 1822, the son of an impoverished Lutheran pastor. According to his autobiographical accounts, when he was a boy of eight, he read Homer’s Iliad. When his father told him that the city of Troy might have actually existed in ancient times, he resolved to find it when he grew up.

When he was a teenager, his mother died and his father ran off with another woman, leaving him to fend for himself. For years he worked as a laborer and then as a grocer’s apprentice before seeking his fortune abroad.

In 1841, he boarded a ship bound for Venezuela, but the vessel was wrecked off the Dutch coast. He survived and made his way to Amsterdam, where he learned to speak Dutch with astonishing speed and got a job in a trading house. He spent all his spare time studying foreign languages, never going to the pub, socializing with friends, or pursuing girls. He eventually acquiring proficiency in Russian, French, English, Spanish, and several other languages, including ancient Greek.

Finish reading: https://open.substack.com/pub/petermcculloughmd/p/the-greatest-adventurer-in-history