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The Biology of Belief — what science now says about why spiritual practice makes us healthier
Emily Rose Adams
April 08, 2026
Hi, After a little break, I'm so excited to be back with The Health Review newsletter — and a big hello to all our new subscribers! 👋 I hope you're enjoying the spring weather.
Over the past weeks I've been focused on getting the podcast in front of more people and attending health and wellness events, and it has been so rewarding to hear from listeners all over the world. My mission for 2026 is to bring more education around the nervous system, burnout, and how we can connect more deeply with ourselves — in a world that feels crazier than ever. If you've been listening to the show recently, you'll know we've been exploring topics like the vagus nerve, digital detox, neuroplasticity, and what AI is doing to our brains, with some brilliant guests who are right at the cutting edge of their fields. Thank you for being on this journey with me. Every stream, share, and subscription really makes a difference.
In this week's newsletter, alongside the most interesting health and wellness stories from recent days, I'm sharing some research on spirituality and the biology of belief. The word spirituality gets thrown around a lot in the health and wellness space — but there's rarely much discussion about what it actually means or what it does for our health. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
Emily x
This week’s edition covers:
🧬 Health News: A major cancer detection breakthrough, why the difficult people in your life could be ageing you faster, and new research on coffee and your brain
🧠 Feature: The Biology of Belief — what science now says about why spiritual practice makes us healthier
🎙️ Podcast: A nutritionist's honest guide to GLP-1s, ultra-processed food, and how to eat well in the modern world
☕ Your morning coffee might be quietly protecting your brain
A landmark study following over 130,000 people for up to 43 years found that moderate consumption of caffeinated coffee or tea was linked to an 18% lower risk of developing dementia, with the benefits appearing strongest at 2–3 cups of coffee or 1–2 cups of tea daily — and even held true for people genetically predisposed to dementia. Published in JAMA, this is one of the longest and largest studies ever conducted on the topic. Decaffeinated coffee showed no such benefit, suggesting caffeine itself — alongside polyphenols — plays a meaningful role. It's an observational study so causation can't be confirmed.
☀️ Your vitamin D levels in your 30s might shape your brain decades later
A study published on April 1, 2026, in Neurology Open Access found that people who had higher vitamin D levels in early midlife were more likely to have lower levels of tau protein in their brains years later — and tau is one of the key proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease. The study involved nearly 800 people with an average age of 39, none of whom had dementia. All participants had vitamin D measured at the start; brain scans followed an average of 16 years later. It's observational — so not proof of cause and effect — but the lead researcher noted that midlife is a time where risk factor modification can have a greater impact. Given that a third of participants had low vitamin D levels, this feels like a genuinely useful nudge to get yours checked.
🩸The £20 blood test that could screen for multiple cancers at once
UCLA scientists have developed a simple and cost-effective blood test that, in early studies, shows promise in detecting multiple cancers, various liver conditions, and organ abnormalities simultaneously by analysing DNA fragments circulating in the bloodstream. The test — called MethylScan — works by reading chemical tags on DNA that change when cells become diseased. At a specificity of 98%, meaning very few false positives, it detected about 63% of cancers across all stages and roughly 55% of early-stage cancers. Achieving an effective sequencing depth requires only 5 gigabytes of data, which would cost less than $20 to process. It's early-stage research that needs larger trials, but the vision is clear — a single, affordable blood test that acts as a health radar for the entire body.
😤 The difficult people in your life may be ageing you faster…
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at what researchers call "hasslers" — people in your close social network who regularly make life harder. Each additional hassler is associated with faster biological ageing, with especially pronounced effects when the hassler is a family member. The team used DNA methylation-based biological ageing clocks — essentially measuring how fast cells are ageing — and found that for each additional hassler a person regularly interacted with, their pace of biological aging increased by about 1.5%. The researchers are clear this doesn't prove direct causation, but the message is an interesting one! Who we spend time with may shape not just our mood, but our biology.
The Biology of Belief
What science now says about why spiritual practice makes us healthier
A few years ago, if someone had told me that having a spiritual practice could measurably reduce my risk of dying early, I would have smiled politely and moved on. I was interested in evidence and things you could measure.
But it feels like spirituality is everywhere right now. Scroll through Instagram or sit through any health podcast and it won't be long before someone — a wellness influencer, a longevity researcher, a celebrity — mentions their meditation practice, their sense of faith, time in nature, their sense of something bigger than themselves. The word gets used a lot but rarely gets explained.
As it turns out, the data is pretty interesting on this.
Over the past two decades, researchers at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the NIH have been looking at what happens in the body when people engage with spiritual practice. Not just going to church — the broader stuff like meditation, time in nature, ritual, a genuine sense of connection to something beyond your own life.
Let's start with meditation. A meta-analysis of 89 randomised controlled trials shows that regular mind-body practice consistently brings down cortisol — your main stress hormone — and reduces inflammation. One key marker researchers track is IL-6, a protein that signals inflammation and is linked to depression, heart disease, and faster ageing. Meditation brings it down. There's also early research suggesting long-term meditators have better-preserved telomeres — the tiny protective caps on our chromosomes, like the plastic tips on shoelaces, that wear down with stress and age. Not definitive yet, but consistently pointing in the same direction.
Then there's nature. Japanese scientists have spent years studying shinrin-yoku — forest bathing — which is really just spending mindful time among trees. Time outdoors calms the stress response, activates the part of the nervous system responsible for rest and recovery, and drops cortisol meaningfully. One University of Michigan study found a 21% per hour reduction from nature experiences of just 20 minutes. Some of this appears to come from phytoncides, compounds released by trees, which seem to directly strengthen immune function.
And then there's awe. UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner describes it as a fundamentally spiritual emotion — that feeling of smallness in front of something vast. His research measured seven positive emotions and their effect on inflammation. Awe came out on top. Not happiness, not love. It could be a piece of music that catches you off guard, a view that stops you or the world feeling bigger than your problems.
A Harvard study following over 74,000 women for 16 years found that those with a regular religious practice had significantly better mental health, lower rates of depression, and lower rates of substance use — even after accounting for lifestyle and social factors. Viktor Frankl argued decades ago that meaning is one of the most powerful buffers against suffering. Neuroscience is beginning to find the biological evidence for exactly that.
None of this requires a religion, or any particular set of beliefs. What seems to matter is something more fundamental — connection, wonder, searching, the sense of being part of something larger than yourself.
Further Reading:
A Nutritionist's Honest Guide to GLP-1s, UPFs & How to Eat Well in the Modern World | Rob Hobson
This week on The Health Review I'm joined by award-winning nutritionist Rob Hobson — and this is one of those conversations that manages to be both eye-opening and reassuringly sensible at the same time.
Rob has spent over 20 years cutting through nutrition noise, and what I love about his take is that he doesn't speak in absolutes. He brings nuance to conversations that are usually very black and white — whether that's GLP-1 medications and what they're actually doing to people's nutritional status, the ultra-processed food debate and the grey areas most people miss, or why the UK's relationship with food is in the state it's in and what would genuinely change it.
We also get into something that doesn't get talked about enough — the hidden nutritional risks for the millions of people now taking Ozempic and Mounjaro without proper dietary support. If you or someone you know is on these medications, this episode is essential listening.