Dr. Vanderwater

05/26/2026

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My Life's Work Explained

05/23/2026

The Science of Kindness

05/19/2026

The Benefits of Kindness & a Kind Heart

05/14/2026

This study is about the effects of technology on children ( cell phones and tablets ) and how parents supervise this vs play outside.

A new survey of U.S. parents by the Institute for Family Studies suggests that kids are still overprotected in the real world and underprotected online.

05/07/2026

**1. Life does not get easier; you get stronger.** That is one of the hardest truths to accept because everyone waits for life to calm down before they start living. They tell themselves things will be easier after school, after a specific job, or after a certain phase. However, you are stuck on the same difficulty setting forever. Think about a video game: the enemies do not slow down or become easier. In fact, they get harder. The only reason you survive later levels is that your character has more health, better armor, and sharper instincts. Life works the same way. Constantly seeking growth and improvement is what makes life easier.

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**2. Comfort is more dangerous than failure.** Comfort is sneaky. It whispers that you have time and convinces you that staying put is safer than trying. Years pass that way quietly. Failure slaps you awake. You miss a shot, lose an opportunity, or fall short in public. It can sting painfully, but it teaches fast. Comfort teaches nothing. It lets time slide by while you are just idling and doing nothing. One day, you look back and realize that nothing went terribly wrong, but maybe that was the problem all along.

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**3. You can outgrow people you love.** This hurts because nobody warns you about it. You imagine growing up together, celebrating the same milestones, and staying in sync forever. Then one day, you realize your conversations feel smaller, and your goals do not fit in the same room anymore. You start wanting things you are not ready for—better habits, bigger risks, or a different pace—and it creates tension. This happens not because either of you is wrong, but because you are moving in different directions. Holding on too tightly can slow both of you down. Letting go feels like betrayal, but sometimes it is just honesty. Not everyone can follow you into your next chapter, and forcing them to will only tear the pages.

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**4. You can be the villain in someone else's story.** No matter how carefully you choose your words or how pure your intentions feel, someone out there will misunderstand you. Someone will twist your actions into a version where you are the bad guy. Trying to explain yourself to people committed to mischaracterizing you drains something deeper than energy—it drains your spirit. Think about how exhausting it feels to argue with someone who has already made up their mind about who you are. You can try to convince them with everything you have, and that effort will never change their verdict. Do your part, act with integrity, and then let go of the desire to be the good guy in everyone's story.

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**5. Someday is a lie.** It sounds harmless at first: someday I will start working out, someday I will make that move, someday I will finally take this seriously. If you have something important that you want to do, start it now. If it feels uncomfortable, that is good. It should feel uncomfortable. Nothing important in life comes easy. If it is not on the calendar or already in motion today, it is not a plan. It is a fantasy in your head that feels productive because it lets you delay action without guilt.

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**6. Health is a debt you pay later.** Your body quietly keeps score of every late night, every skipped meal, and every day you promise you will take care of yourself later. The bill does not arrive right away. It is an unseen debt, which is why it is easy to ignore. Then one day, your energy disappears. You wake up tired even after sleeping, your focus fades, and small tasks feel heavy. That is when you realize physical health was never just about looking good. It was the foundation of your mood, your patience, and your ambition. Health is a crown only the sick can see. You do not notice it while you have it, but once it cracks, everything feels much harder.

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**7. Being nice is not the same as being good.** Nice is a behavior, while good is a character. You can be good without being nice, and you can do the right thing without people thinking you are a nice person. Niceness is absolutely a positive thing, and the world would benefit from more kindness. But when it is forced or overdone, it teaches people that their needs come last. Being good requires courage. It means saying no without over-explaining and letting someone be disappointed instead of betraying yourself. If being nice costs you your boundaries, it was never goodness to begin with.

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**8. You are judged by your actions, not your intentions.** Inside your head, you are the hero. You meant well, you tried, and you had good reasons. The world does not see that. The world only sees what happened when it was laid out in front of them—the promises that sounded sincere but never turned into anything. Intentions feel comforting because they protect your self-image. Actions are uncomfortable because they require you to follow through. Having a good heart does not erase the consequences of what you actually did. You do not live in the story you tell yourself. You live in the results that you leave behind.

05/04/2026

Dietary Patterns & Cancer Risks (An Observational Study of 1.8 Million People)

A new study published in February 2026 in the British Journal of Cancer followed nearly 1.8 million people across multiple countries to examine how different dietary patterns relate to cancer risk.

It is the largest analysis ever conducted on vegetarian diets and cancer.

The findings were both important and nuanced.

We often think of cancer as beginning at the moment it is diagnosed.

But biologically, cancer develops over many years. Long before a tumour becomes visible, cells are responding to the conditions around them—metabolism, inflammation, hormones, and immune signaling.

What we eat is one of the most consistent exposures shaping that environment.

What the study found
To understand how diet might influence cancer risk, the researchers grouped participants into several dietary patterns:

Meat eaters—people who regularly consumed red or processed meat
Poultry eaters—people who avoided red meat but consumed poultry
Pescatarians—people who ate fish but avoided other meats
Vegetarians—people who avoided meat and fish but consumed dairy and/or eggs
Vegans—people who avoided all animal-derived foods
Researchers then compared cancer incidence across these groups.

Compared with meat eaters, vegetarians had lower risks of several cancers, including:

21% lower risk of pancreatic cancer
28% lower risk of kidney cancer
31% lower risk of multiple myeloma
12% lower risk of prostate cancer
9% lower risk of breast cancer
Pescatarians also showed lower risks of colorectal, breast, and kidney cancer.

But the findings were not uniformly protective.

Vegetarians had a nearly doubled risk of squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagus. Vegans had a 40% higher risk of colorectal cancer compared with meat eaters—though that estimate was based on only 93 cases across seven studies, so it should be interpreted with caution.

Why this study matters
Nutrition research is notoriously difficult. People do not eat in controlled laboratory conditions for 20 years. They eat in the middle of real lives—shaped by culture, income, habits, stress, family patterns and health beliefs.

That is why this study is notable: it pooled data from nearly 1.8 million participants across three continents, making it the largest analysis ever conducted on vegetarian diets and cancer risk.

Importantly, the analyses were adjusted for BMI, smoking, alcohol use, physical activity and reproductive factors, meaning the associations observed appear to operate independently of these known confounders.

What might explain these findings?
The study was observational, so it cannot prove cause and effect. But the authors proposed several biological explanations worth understanding.

On the protective side, vegetarians in these cohorts generally had lower BMI, lower saturated fat intake and higher dietary fibre intake than meat eaters.

For prostate cancer, the authors noted that lower consumption of animal protein may reduce circulating levels of IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1)—a hormone implicated in prostate cancer development.

For kidney cancer, they pointed to evidence that high animal protein intake may place additional metabolic strain on the kidneys. Supporting this, a biomarker of kidney injury has been shown in prior studies to be significantly lower in vegetarians and pescatarians than in meat eaters.

The elevated risks are equally instructive.

The higher risk of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma among vegetarians may relate to lower intakes of riboflavin and zinc, nutrients more abundant in animal foods and increasingly recognized as important for esophageal mucosal health.

For vegans and colorectal cancer, the authors suggested a link with calcium intake. Vegans in these cohorts had the lowest calcium consumption of all groups. Both the World Cancer Research Fund and analyses from the Million Women Study have identified calcium as one of the strongest dietary factors associated with colorectal cancer risk.

The deeper point is that vegetarian diets are defined by what is excluded, not necessarily by what is included.

A poorly planned vegetarian diet—low in key micronutrients and high in refined carbohydrates—may carry its own risks. The authors were explicit about this.

What this does not mean
This study does not mean that becoming vegetarian guarantees protection from cancer. It does not mean meat eaters are destined for disease. And it does not mean all plant-based diets are equivalent.

The point is not dietary identity. It is dietary pattern.

More whole plant foods. More fibre. Less processed meat. Nutritional completeness—not ideological purity.

Life is medicine
The body is always being shaped by the ordinary.

By the accumulation of small, repeated exposures—what we eat, how we sleep, how we move, and how much chronic stress the nervous system is asked to absorb.

This is what I mean when I say life is medicine.

Because the body is constantly responding to its environment—and we are learning that we have more influence over that environment than we once thought.

Dr. Punam Rana is a medical oncologist and co-lead of Meditation in Oncology at Humber River Health Research Institute. She writes about the intersection of evidence-based oncology, mindfulness, and integrative healing in her newsletter Life is Medicine.

05/01/2026

Take a Hike

🥾 Hike for Hospice is THIS SUNDAY and we'd love to see you there! 🌿

Join us at Sunnidale Park (265 Sunnidale Rd) on May 3 for a morning of remembrance, community, and walking together in support of Hospice Simcoe.

There's still time to register: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/hospice-simcoe-seasons-centre/p2p/Hikeforhospice2026/

Here's what to expect:

🕙 10:00 AM – Activities & donation drop-off
🕦 11:30 AM – Opening ceremony
🚶 11:50 AM – Hike begins

A family-friendly 2km route through the park, followed by free lunch, memorial signage along the way, and team photos.
Dogs and strollers welcome, rain or shine!

💙 A very special thank you to our incredible sponsors who make this event possible. Presented by Adams Funeral Home & Cremation Services, and supported by so many generous local businesses and organizations, your commitment to our community means everything. We couldn't do this without you. 🙏

💙 We'll see you Sunday.

04/25/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1KkoW2hz2k/?mibextid=wwXIfr

"Dopamine = pleasure" is one of the most pervasive and inaccurate simplifications in popular neuroscience. 🧠 Decades of meticulous research, crystallized in a landmark 2025 review from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, has established that dopamine is primarily a learning signal — specifically, a "prediction error" signal that encodes the difference between what the brain expected to happen and what actually happened, driving the continuous updating of behavior, belief, and decision-making.

When an outcome is better than expected, dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area fire in a burst, signaling "that was a positive surprise — update your model." When an outcome is worse than expected, dopamine activity is suppressed below baseline, signaling "that was a negative surprise — revise your approach." 🔬 This prediction error mechanism is not just the basis of reward learning — it underlies language acquisition, social cognition, motor skill development, and arguably every form of knowledge the brain accumulates throughout life.

The implications for understanding psychiatric and neurological disease are profound. Addiction hijacks this system by flooding dopamine circuits with artificial prediction errors, trapping the brain in an escalating cycle of expectation and disappointment. Parkinson's disease, which destroys dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra, impairs not just motor function but also learning flexibility and decision-making. Schizophrenia may involve aberrant dopamine signaling that generates false prediction errors, causing the brain to find spurious patterns and meaning — contributing to delusions and hallucinations. 💊

Understanding dopamine as a learning optimizer rather than a pleasure molecule opens entirely new therapeutic frameworks for addiction, psychosis, and learning disorders. 🌍

Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus, Neuron, 2025

04/17/2026

The Strait of Hormuz : Why This Waterway is so Important Globally, and so Difficult to Maintain the Fee Flow of Internationally Important Products ( the video shared made this clearer to me)

Kudos to whomever made this video.

03/31/2026

https://www.compoundingquality.net/p/how-to-mentally-handle-tough-times?r=7eyxb&utm_medium=email

When in doubt, zoom out.

03/31/2026

Good News. Hopefully, this goes to ZERO

In 1980, roughly a third of American adults still smoked. Now here’s a figure from 2024: 9.9 percent. That’s the share of American adults who smoke ci******es, according to data from the National Health Interview Survey analyzed in a paper published this month in NEJM Evidence.

It’s the first time the rate has fallen below 10 percent in the history of the survey. In the language of public health, smoking in America is now officially “rare.”

This decline — from 42.4 percent in 1965 to 9.9 percent, over about 60 years — is one of the great public health achievements of the modern era.

It didn’t happen because of a single breakthrough or a miracle drug. It happened because science, policy, litigation, and sheer collective will chipped away at the problem for six decades against the fierce resistance of one of the most powerful industries on Earth.

Read more about why the decline in smoking proves that large-scale, long-term progress is possible — even when the odds seem impossible — here: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/484165/smoking-tobacco-cancer-health-centers-for-disease-control?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhfacebook&utm_content=app.dashsocial.com%2Fvoxdotcom%2Flibrary%2Fmedia%2F657001966