“What is it about peppers that makes them so refreshing?” One of the delightful bonuses to studying medicine in Hungary was the opportunity to be constantly reminded of the contribution Hungarians make to, well, everything. The legendary Albert Szent György was reputed to have asked this question, or something very…

How much should you take? How much is enough and how much is too much? The recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamin D is between 400 and 800 international units (IU) depending on your sex and age. That’s enough to prevent rickets, the only deficiency disease with which this essential…

I’ve written elsewhere (https://secondsixty.substack.com/p/water) about why we don’t need to drink the copious amounts of water the health experts recommend. Here I would like to discuss the benefits of running huge amounts of water through your body, mostly through sweat. When you drink large amounts of water, it is absorbed…

A Japanese Zen master sits perfectly still in a quiet room with electrodes pasted to his smooth scalp. In the next room a scientist watches the electroencephalogram, or EEG, the readout of the monk’s brainwaves. After a few minutes, the scientist rings a bell. …

I’m holding a big, juicy lemon in my hand. I squeeze it and roll it around. I smell that tangy, tart aroma. I cut the lemon, put it to my mouth and suck on it. What is your mouth doing, right now? There is no lemon. Just an idea clearly…

If you’ve spent any time at the gym, you’ve seen people putting in long stretches on the stationary bike, reading or watching TV to kill time. Or maybe they’re listening to music to take their minds off their routine. If you want results, this is about as far from the…

If you spend any time doing yoga, you learn that how you breathe is an important part of the practice. What Westerners have less appreciation for is that the yoga of breath control — pranayama — is itself an independent field of yoga apart from the asanas and mental work. …

Hindu and Buddhist traditions describe a series of four to seven chakras (from the Sanskrit for “wheel”) located along the spine, which are hubs of energy collection and distribution. So elaborate are these descriptions that they each have their own physiological significance, seed syllables, sounds, subtle elements, colors, and even…