Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 6 – Children


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Why Don’t They Win

There are moments, usually late, usually quiet, when honest thinking can be had. When you zoom out and see the ecosystem around children not as a collection of caring institutions, but as a set of incentive machines. And incentive machines, unlike grandmothers, do exactly what they’re built to do.

MAKE MONEY

Tonight I sat with some difficult thoughts about the state of primary services for children in the United States. The deeper I look, the clearer it becomes that money, not well-being, drives most decisions shaping a child’s life. And the imbalance is not trending in a positive direction.

Children Continue To Lose From My Viewpoint

Approximately two-thirds of a child’s daily nourishment comes from school food programs, which too often rely on ultra-processed, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor products. Outside of school, the dominant food environment is similarly saturated with highly engineered foods that optimize profit, shelf life, and palatability rather than health. Kids are micronutrient starved, but calorically overfed. Biological systems begin to fray early. Biochemistry no longer meets cellular needs. Children develop disease and we are asked to medicate or worse rationalize away that this is NORMAL…..

Enjoy Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 5 – Relationship Balance


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Finding Relational Balance


Relational balance falters when one person needs the other to feel safe or whole. A parent in a strained marriage or carrying childhood wounds may lean on a child for comfort. The child, loyal and loving, tries to meet that need. Over time, this can harden into dysfunction.

Years ago, I cared for a mother and son locked in a budding enmeshed relationship. She could not draw boundaries. She absorbed his pain, projected her own trauma onto him, and smothered him with anxious love and control. She tightly managed his world yet set no limits on how he treated her or others. By four, he was out of control. She was exhausted and indignant, insisting he was sweet while enabling every behavior. Her fear of becoming her own restrictive parents left him both fused to her and furious. Therapy was suggested. It was rejected….

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #107: Sundeep Dugar, PhD – Drug Discovery


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On today’s episode of Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast, we welcome a scientist whose work has quietly shaped the cardiovascular health of millions around the world.

Dr. Sundeep Dugar is a pharmaceutical innovator, inventor, and industry leader with more than three decades at the forefront of drug discovery. He is best known as a co-inventor of ezetimibe — marketed as Zetia® — a landmark cholesterol-lowering medication that transformed lipid management by targeting intestinal cholesterol absorption. He also co-inventor of the combination therapy Vytorin® (ezetimibe plus simvastatin), expanding treatment options for patients at high cardiovascular risk. For this groundbreaking work, Dr. Dugar and his colleagues received the prestigious 2005 National Inventor of the Year Award from the Intellectual Property Owners Association and the Heroes of Chemistry award from the American Chemical Society. Across his career, Dr. Dugar has contributed to more than 140 patents and has authored over 70 scientific publications, reflecting a lifetime devoted to translating chemistry into real-world therapies.

He is currently the founder of Aayam Therapeutics, where he leads efforts to develop innovative, accessible medicines through collaborative global research. He also serves as Co-Chief Executive Officer of Blue Oak Nutraceuticals, advancing a novel mitochondrial-targeted compound known as Mitokatlyst™, designed to stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis and cellular energy — with potential implications for muscle strength, metabolic health, cardiovascular function, and inflammation. He is the first one to decipher the mechanism by which exercise induces mitochondria levels. Mitokatlyst mechanism of action mimics this process.

Dr. Dugar’s scientific journey spans continents and some of the world’s premier institutions. He earned both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Organic Chemistry from the University of Delhi, completed his PhD in Chemistry at the University of California, Davis, and pursued postdoctoral research at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and at Cornell University.
Today, we’ll explore the story behind major pharmaceutical breakthroughs, the science of mitochondrial health, and what the future of therapeutics may look like when innovation meets global accessibility.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Sundeep Dugar.

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 4 – Relationships

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Literature Review:

A) “Establishment of the gut microbiome during early life is a complex process with lasting implications for an individual’s health. Several factors influence microbial assembly; however, breast-feeding is recognized as one of the most influential drivers of gut microbiome composition during infancy, with potential implications for function. Differences in gut microbial communities between breast-fed and formula-fed infants have been consistently observed and are hypothesized to partially mediate the relationships between breast-feeding and decreased risk for numerous communicable and noncommunicable diseases in early life. Despite decades of research on the gut microbiome of breast-fed infants, there are large scientific gaps in understanding how human milk has evolved to support microbial and immune development.” (Davis et. al. 2022)

Main Takeaways:

First 1000 days matter a lot for microbial and immune development: Infancy is a critical window when the gut microbiome is assembled and the immune system is learning to respond to microbes and external exposures. Patterns set early can ripple into infection risk, inflammatory diseases, and atopy later in life.

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 3 – Beyond Behaviors Chapter 4


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Chapter 4 of Beyond Behaviors is often read as a continuation of the neuroscience laid out in the first three chapters. That’s understandable, but it slightly misses the point. By the time Dr. Delahooke gets to Chapter 4, she’s largely done making the physiological argument. She now pivots to a far more practical and, frankly, more uncomfortable question: What does this mean we actually do as caregivers?

This chapter is less about how the nervous system works and more about how we work, how we observe, interpret, and respond to children in real time. It’s a chapter about attunement, not theory. About shifting from reflexive reactions to intentional caregiving. About learning to read the child in front of you, not the rulebook in your head.

The first major move of Chapter 4 is the insistence on personalized attunement, ditching the plural child. Or better yet, focused on the N of 1 child. There is no “average child” in her framework. There is only this child, with this nervous system, in this moment, in this space and time. How beautiful! Integrative Functional Medicine’s credo, treat the whole person as you find them and as they are biologically.

Attunement here is not sentimentality. It’s data gathering. Dr. Delahooke asks caregivers to become skilled observers of patterns rather than judges of behavior. What time of day does dysregulation tend to show up? After which transitions? After eating? After playing video games? In which environments? With which sensory demands? With which people? It is sleuthing the underwater potion of the iceberg of behavior.

Importantly, she pushes caregivers to stop assuming intent. The question is not “Why is my child doing this to me?” but “What is my child’s nervous system experiencing right now?” That single frame shift collapses an enormous amount of unnecessary conflict. It moves the adult from adversary to ally. It walks away from shame and blame towards love and support…..

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #106: Nayan Patel, PharmD – Glutathione


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Welcome back to Dr. M’s Women and Children Firsts Podcast. Today’s conversation sits at the crossroads of chemistry, skepticism, and clinical innovation.

Our guest is Nayan Patel, a pharmacist with more than three decades inside the world of drug formulation and delivery. He is an alumnus of the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy, where he now serves as adjunct faculty, teaching advanced biochemistry and compounding science. Over the years, he has become an international educator on one molecule that refuses to stay quiet: glutathione.

Dr. Patel is the founder of Auro Wellness, launched in 2011 with a specific mission—stabilize glutathione and solve its delivery problem. His work led to the development of the Auro GSH™ Antioxidant Delivery System, a topical approach designed to improve absorption of this notoriously fragile molecule. He is also the author of The Glutathione Revolution, a deep dive into how glutathione influences detoxification, aging, energy production, and immune resilience.

If you’ve spent time in integrative medicine, you’ve heard glutathione called the “master antioxidant.” That phrase can sound like marketing, but the biology is real. Glutathione is a three–amino acid peptide central to redox balance, mitochondrial function, immune signaling, and cellular survival. It does not just neutralize oxidative stress; it regulates how cells respond to it.

The challenge is delivery. Oral glutathione is largely broken down in the gut. IV glutathione works, but it’s impractical for most families. Precursors like NAC depend on intact metabolic pathways that may not be operating optimally in states of chronic stress or inflammation.
Dr. Patel asked a disruptive question: what if the bottleneck isn’t production—but delivery?

Today we unpack the science and the skepticism around transdermal glutathione. Can a molecule like this meaningfully cross the skin barrier? What does stabilization actually require? And how does independent pharmaceutical innovation differ from traditional drug development pathways, which are often constrained by economics as much as biology?

For those of us caring for women and children—where oxidative stress, immune dysregulation, mitochondrial strain, and toxic burden intersect in everything from complicated pregnancies to neurodevelopmental challenges—this conversation matters. Not as a silver bullet. Not as a miracle spray. But as an exploration of foundational physiology and thoughtful delivery science.

This is a discussion about how molecules move, how systems adapt, and how asking better questions can reshape clinical practice.
Let’s dive in.

Dr. M

Auro Wellness

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 2 – School Food

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School Based Nutrition – Why is it happening this way?

There is a quiet experiment happening in American childhood, and we should stop pretending it’s benign.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when I attended school, school food was far from perfect, but it existed in the context of something essential: it was mostly prepared on site, minimally processed (but changing in that direction) and not laden with additives and chemicals (Yet). Oh, and most children still ate meals prepared at home at almost every other occasion. Dinner wasn’t aspirational or Instagram-worthy, but it was routine. Real food. Cooked by someone who knew the child, at a table where nervous systems could downshift. School lunch was a supplement to that structure, not the metabolic foundation of a child’s life. That has all changed in a short 50 years. Mirroring the change in weight and childhood disease prevalence.

• 1970s – some processed foods begin to enter school cafeterias at scale
• 1980s – preservatives and additives become routine
• 1990s – ultra-processed foods dominate

In 1994, new standards were added: This table lays out how much of each food group schools were supposed to offer over a week under the 1994 standards. These were the first nutrition-focused meal standards the USDA put into place:

For Breakfast (all grades K–12):
Fruit: 2.5 cups/week
Vegetables: 0 cups/week
Grains/Bread: 0–10 oz equivalent/week (depending on combinations of grains and protein)
Meat/Meat-alternative: 0–10 oz equivalent/week
Milk: 5 cups/week

For Lunch (split by grade levels):
Fruit: K–3 also 2.5 cups; grades 4–12 get 3.75 cups/week
Vegetables: still 0 cups/week (no separate vegetable requirement yet)
Grains/Bread: at least 8 oz eq/week
Meat/Meat-alternative: 7.5 oz eq/week for breakfast; 10 oz eq/week for lunch
Milk: 5 cups/week

(Hopkins 2015)

What’s notable, reflected in the structure of this table, is that vegetables weren’t required at all yet, and the standards were very much food-group based, not ingredient-level nutrient quality checks. That created space for schools to rely on industrially produced entrées and sides that technically met volumes of grains or proteins but could still be ultra-processed products with long ingredient lists, many of these foods would meet a NOVA class 4 classification (the worst type). Think fruit cup in sugary syrup…..

Dr. M

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