Victoria Lee, MD

Science | Story | Soul
Wellbeing physician bridging ancient wisdom and modern science to empower individuals and communities to thrive in mind, body, and spirit

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

7/ His central finding: the prescription is personal. In the same setting, the most stressed people calm the most.

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

6/ The forest scientist, Dr. Yoshifumi Miyazaki confirmed that relaxation can be measured with one signal: heart rate variability. The same number a wearable reads on your wrist overnight.

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

5/ It takes very little. Ninety seconds of looking at forest imagery may lower activity in the right prefrontal cortex and tip heart rate variability toward rest.

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

4/ Eight weeks of meditation leaves more gray matter in the hippocampus. Experienced meditators show a quieter default mode network, the system behind mind-wandering.

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

3/ Forest-bathing trips can raise natural killer cell activity, a marker of immune surveillance. The effect is still measurable more than 30 days later.

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

1/
Your body knows what a forest does to it before your mind does. Here is what the science says is happening when you walk into the trees.

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

2/ A forest walk may lower blood pressure. Sympathetic, fight-or-flight activity falls. Parasympathetic, rest-and-recovery activity rises.

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

1/ My Oura ring showed green recovery every morning across eleven days in Japan. I was sleeping three to four hours most nights. The data made no sense until I learned what the water was doing. 🧵

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

7/ Dr. Shinya Hayasaka, Tokyo City University: health benefits increase with frequency. Even weekends count. Minimum threshold: 38°C. "What we can measure outpaces what we can explain."

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

8/ The organisms in the food and the organisms in the gut are part of the same community. When one falls silent, the other grows poorer. Every culture with a fermentation tradition understood this. The science arrived late. Full essay in the newsletter. 🔗 https://t.co/Pjs8UqfokP

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

1/ My grandparents kept jars of fermented food on every counter. I pushed most of it away as a child. Then a study of 93,000 Japanese adults told me what those jars had been doing all along. 🧵

[Victoria Lee, MD @VictoriaLeeMD]

7/ Only 12.3% of Japanese adults now eat traditional pickles daily.Down from over 80% in 2005. My grandparents fermented as a matter of course. My parents still do, but w/ less variety. My generation buys from the supermarket. Each step feels small. The cumulative distance is not