Category: General Interest

What began as a story about curcumin’s protection against fluoride-induced brain damage opens into a deeper revelation: turmeric’s essential oils may help awaken the brain’s regenerative intelligence.

https://open.substack.com/pub/sayerji/p/the-spice-that-protects-the-brain

Dr. Pete Sulack writes:

I want to share something this week that sits right where faith and science meet.

Researchers gathered eighty-nine randomized controlled trials, the gold-standard kind, and asked a question I find fascinating: can calming the mind actually change the body’s immune system? The analysis was published last year, pulling together decades of research.

The finding: mind-body practices like meditation, prayerful stillness, and slow breathing measurably lowered inflammation and improved immune function. Not in theory. In bloodwork.

Here’s the mechanism, because it matters. When we live in chronic stress, the body floods with cortisol and adrenaline. Those hormones are useful in a real emergency. But when they never switch off, they quietly suppress the immune system. They lower the activity of your natural killer cells, the very cells whose job is to find and clear abnormal cells. They tilt the whole body toward inflammation.

So fear is not only a feeling. It has a chemistry. And that chemistry works against the terrain.

Here’s what moved me. The reverse is also true. In one clinical trial, patients who practiced just thirty minutes of guided stillness three times a week saw significant drops in C-reactive protein, one of the main markers of inflammation in the body. Thirty minutes. Three times a week.

For the audience reading this, I think this is some of the most hopeful science there is. You may not be able to control your diagnosis or your next scan. But you can decide whether your nervous system spends the whole day in a war it does not need to fight.

This is why faith has always been my first pillar, not my last. When Scripture says be anxious for nothing, that is not only spiritual comfort. Peace is medicine your body can read.

So here is your invitation today. Ten quiet minutes. Sit with a Psalm, or your breath, or simple gratitude. No phone. Let your shoulders drop. You are not wasting time. You are lowering inflammation and telling your body it is safe.

I’ll be praying for you today.

Standing with you,

Dr. Pete Sulack

Research has shown that exposing sliced white button mushrooms to direct sunlight before cooking dramatically increases their vitamin D2 content because UV-B light converts ergosterol in mushrooms into vitamin D2. Slicing the mushrooms first increases the exposed surface area, making the process more effective.

One well-known study found that just 15 minutes of midday sun significantly increased vitamin D2 to levels comparable to fatty fish (about 704 IU per 100 g of fresh mushrooms&). Other studies have reported even larger increases depending on sunlight intensity and exposure conditions.

Dr. Derrick Lonsdale is a name most patients have never heard, but his decades of work on thiamine deficiency changed how I evaluate a specific cluster of symptoms.

Thiamine, vitamin B1, is a cofactor for enzymes central to how your cells produce ATP through the citric acid cycle. Classic thiamine deficiency is beriberi, which most doctors were trained to picture as a historical disease. Lonsdale’s clinical work documented a subtler pattern: fatigue, gut motility problems, dizziness on standing, and autonomic symptoms that don’t fit neatly into a beriberi diagnosis but respond to thiamine repletion.

This overlaps heavily with what gets labeled dysautonomia or POTS in younger patients. Racing heart on standing. Gut that slows to a crawl. Brain fog that’s hard to describe.
High-carbohydrate, low-thiamine diets, chronic alcohol use, and gut absorption issues can all deplete thiamine status, and standard bloodwork rarely catches it because serum thiamine isn’t a reliable marker of tissue-level deficiency.

I want to be direct about where the evidence stands. This is not as extensively validated in large human trials. It’s clinical pattern recognition built over decades, and I treat it that way, not as settled science.

But when a patient has cycled through cardiology, GI, and neurology with no answers, thiamine status is one of the places I look next.

Struggling with dizziness on standing, gut motility issues, or unexplained fatigue no specialist has solved? Get my Free Balance Toolkit — comment BALANCE.

Research: Lonsdale D. “Thiamine and magnesium deficiencies: keys to disease.” Med Hypotheses. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Lonsdale+thiamine+deficiency+dysautonomia