Root Wellness

09/01/2026

Weight lifting

09/01/2026

08/31/2026

Chronic stress is not simply “high cortisol.” Repeated activation of stress-response systems can disrupt sleep, cardiovascular regulation, immune signaling and metabolism. Long-term psychological stress is also associated with higher cardiovascular risk, potentially in part through inflammatory pathways. Responses vary widely, and much of the long-term evidence is observational.

PMID 28932967; PMID 37007994.

08/30/2026

Alzheimer's doesn't begin at 70.

The pathology runs for roughly 20 years before it earns a name, which puts the work of preventing it in the hands of people in their 40s and 50s, not people already sitting in a neurologist's waiting room.

Roughly 7.4 million Americans aged 65 and older are living with Alzheimer's dementia, and the Alzheimer's Association projects 13.8 million by 2060. At age 45, lifetime risk is about 1 in 5 for women and 1 in 10 for men.

The anti-amyloid drugs do clear the plaque. The people carrying it decline anyway. Dale Bredesen's image is a roof with 36 holes in it: patch one, and the water keeps coming through the other 35.

Only 5% of cases are familial. The other 95% are built, over decades, out of exposures and behaviors that are still open to you.

👉️ Comment BRAIN and I'll send you my article on how to prevent Alzheimer's and cognitive decline, including the 7 most important things you can start today.

Disclaimer: The information shared in this post is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional for specific medical guidance and treatment.

08/27/2026

stool sample may still carry traces of medications you stopped taking years ago.

Researchers linked gut-microbiome sequencing from 2,509 Estonian Biobank participants with five years of prescription records. Of 186 medications examined, 78 showed evidence of a carryover effect from past use.

The signal was not limited to antibiotics. Previous use of proton-pump inhibitors, antidepressants, benzodiazepines, beta-blockers and metformin-class drugs also tracked with differences in gut bacteria. For several antibiotics, antidepressants and benzodiazepines, associations were still detectable more than three years after the last recorded prescription.

The study also included repeat samples from 328 people, collected a median 4.4 years later. When participants started or stopped certain medications, including some antibiotics, PPIs and antidepressants, their microbiomes shifted in broadly similar directions.

This does not mean these drugs permanently damage the gut. Prescription records do not prove every dose was taken, and disease, diet, age and polypharmacy can confound the associations.

The more important point is methodological: your microbiome may reflect medication history, not just what you are taking today.

That matters because studies can otherwise attribute bacterial differences to diet or disease when part of the signal may come from a drug stopped years earlier.

Aasmets O, Taba N, Krigul KL, et al. PMID 40910778.

08/23/2026

Your gut bacteria make B vitamins. That part is well established. The part nobody talks about is what some (or most, in some cases) of those vitamins do before they ever reach you.

Researchers assessed 256 common human gut bacteria for the genes to build all eight B vitamins: B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, and B12. Each vitamin could be made by roughly 40 to 65 percent of those microbes. Some bacteria carry every pathway. Others carry none and cannot make a single one on their own.

So the ones that cannot make their own get them from the ones that can. Inside the colon, B vitamins move between bacteria. Producers synthesize them, non-producers take them up through dedicated transporters, and the whole community stays fed. The vitamin is a shared currency that keeps the ecosystem running.

This is the part that reframes how you think about a B vitamin. It is not only a nutrient for you. It is a growth substrate for them. A bacterium that depends on outside B vitamins lives or dies by whether its neighbors are producing enough. Change the supply and you change which species can survive. In that sense a B vitamin behaves like a prebiotic, feeding specific members of the community rather than your own cells.

That also explains a strange finding: changing the composition of your gut bacteria can shift your B vitamin requirements. The microbes are both a source and a sink. They produce these vitamins and they consume them.

One honest limit. We can measure how many gut bacteria carry these pathways. We can show the vitamins moving between species. What we cannot yet cleanly measure in humans is how much of the bacterially made supply crosses your gut wall versus how much gets used up inside the community first. The colon does have transporters for several of these vitamins, so it is not nothing. The exact amount that reaches you is still being worked out.

The takeaway is not that you can skip B vitamins from food because your bacteria have you covered. It is that the vitamins inside your gut are doing a second job you never see, running an economy among the microbes that live there.

Magnusdottir et al., Front Genet, 2015
Yoshii et al., Front Nutr, 2019
Gholami et al., Cancers, 2023

08/20/2026

I didn’t sleep long last night… had to take an animal into the emergency vet. Getting ready this morning, my hair was getting on my nerves—particularly the grey ones. Well I pluck one and now I’m mad—the roots are my natural color. I usually inspect them but this morning being in my foul mood, I instantly pulled it out. *sigh*
I’ve been on a mission to rebalance myself so my hair can turn back to its natural color (bc it can!) luckily I have many more hairs that I haven’t pulled bc the roots are my natural color.
If you haven’t seen the post on hair below 👇🏼 (on why your hair turns grey)—check it out!