Wendell Berry sums up our current health predicament perfectly…
“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”
— Sam Knowlton (@samdknowlton) September 2, 2022
Today we share a recipe from the herbalist Todd Caldecott that makes a delicious, earthy syrup that helps build the blood. Visit the blog post on the Food as Medicine website that contains this recipe. I’ve made this several times and have never been disappointed. I would eat it even just for the taste.
Althaea Herbals offers a free, 90-minute course titled Medicinal Mushrooms for Cancer Care.
And in this podcast episode you can hear Travis Cartwright of Althaea Herbals speak about related subjects:
The link of extreme heat to biological aging has not been looked into with great depth. By contrast, the effects of extreme heat on health are much better understood. New research in 2025, first from the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and then from the University of Hong Kong, point to the appearance that heatwaves accelerate aging, especially for manual labourers.
See the studies for more information:
Chen, S., Liu, Y., Yi, Y. et al. Long-term impacts of heatwaves on accelerated ageing. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02407-w
Eun Young Choi, Jennifer A. Ailshire. Ambient outdoor heat and accelerated epigenetic aging among older adults in the US.Sci. Adv.11,eadr0616(2025) .DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adr0616 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr0616
It’s not new to hear that it’s ideal to get Vitamin D from the sun and food, but to hear of a strong opposition to Vitamin D supplementation, that’s less common.
I have not had time to investigate this yet, but as I’m finding it interesting and will dig into this further, perhaps others might find it interesting as well.
It was this X post that caught my eye:
Jim Stephenson will present on “vitamin” D facts you won’t hear from the mainstream at our Wise Traditions conference that’ll be held October 17- 19 in Salt Lake City Utah. He characterizes the obsession over the serum 25D level to be a scam. We don’t recommend vitamin D… pic.twitter.com/YvUZH13uoE
— Weston A. Price Foundation (@WestonAPrice) August 29, 2025
I remember reading studies showing that those who supplemented with Vitamin D had less URIs and less severe symptoms when they got URIs, or something to that effect. We have a whole thread of Vitamin D that will be linked to at the bottom of this post. So as alwyas, read everything with care and skepticism and let us discuss and share our findings in the forum so we can all benefit from each other’s inquiries. I thought I also remembered reading several studies where the evaluated the safety of supplementation and I don’t remember there being any concerns (unless one was going overboard with dosage).
“…proximity to coastal waters (within 50 km) was positively associated with life expectancy, while proximity to inland water bodies (≥20 km2) was negatively associated with life expectancy.”
This study found a statistical assoctiation between living near the ocean and a longer a life expectancy. They mention potential cofactors like how living near the ocean correlates with a higher socioeconomic status and results in exposure to less extrememe weather, amongst other significant factors. And this inverse finding, the reduction in life expetancy with proximity to inland water bodies, at first may be counterintuitive but when you consider it’s being compared against the advantages of living near an ocean, significant differences arise (this is explained in the paper).
Do read the study for additional information:
Yanni Cao, Ria Martins, Jianyong Wu. Unveiling complexity in blue spaces and life expectancy. Environmental Research, 2025; 281: 121981 DOI: 10.1016/j.envres.2025.121981