A walk in the forest is better than an apple for cancer?

JUNE 24 — “It’s like the solution to everything is exercise,” a friend complained to me.

Yes, I replied, while sending her yet another study, all of them saying pretty much the same thing — eat right, exercise and don’t stress out too much.

Just the other day I was reading about the effects of what the Japanese call 森林浴 (Shinrin-yoku) or forest bathing.

No, it’s not about forest nudism but simply about spending time in Nature.

Nippon Medical School clinical professor Dr Qing Li decided to study the health benefits of forest bathing, the results which were published in a paper: Effects of forest environment (Shinrin-yoku/Forest bathing) on health promotion and disease prevention — the Establishment of “Forest Medicine”. 

From observations, trees transmit phytoncides, compounds that have an effect on our bodies’ Natural Killer (NK) cells that work to identify and eradicate cancer cells, increasing their number as well as the levels of anti-proteins such as perforin, GRN, and GrA/B.

The paper is not suggesting you should replace chemo with a walk in the trees; it’s more surmising that forest bathing helps strengthen your immune system, with particular effects that will help stave off cancer.

What is also interesting is that this increased activity in NK lasted for up to 30 days after a session.

Perhaps the urge to hike, camp or pursue other recreational activities in Nature is our bodies telling us what is good for our health.

It’s a shame that in the next decade or so more of our forests are being decimated if not for palm oil, but condos or the newest scourge: data centres.

I wish people would consult the I Ching rather than ask ChatGPT if they should have toast or oatmeal for breakfast.

Casting three coins and attempting to infer the meanings of the hexagrams would probably be a better use of your time. 

You cannot trust LLMs; their inner workings do not follow what a human would call logic, dependent on probabilities and algorithms.

The I Ching, I find, like many other tools of divination, is not really about seeing the future but understanding yourself. 

If, say, you flipped a coin, in the end the actual result might not matter because the real answer is what you are hoping to get. 

What will you do, then, when you can no longer hide behind your indecision and are faced squarely with what you truly desire?

Right now my desire is to see less AI-slop writing on my socials, it’s so aggravating.

I tried web searching what time the nearest train station would open and I noticed the AI summary (which I never use, it’s wrong more than half the time) confidently stated the station would be open at 5.30am.

Reader, no RapidKL station on the Kelana Jaya line has ever opened before 6am.

It’s now one of the hottest summers ever recorded in Europe with temperatures exceeding 40°Celsius in, of all places, Paris.

I miss the days when people took things like the ozone layer seriously and some rando wasn’t insisting climate change was a hoax.

But despair will not help me. 

All I can do for now is to find that time, once a week, to walk among the trees because it is good for my mind and body, before the whole of Klang Valley becomes, as Joni Mitchell sang, just one paved parking lot.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.