Saturday September 19, 2026 12:30 am est

If you walked through a farmers market in Central New York this week, you saw it - bins of apples, towers of butternut squash, bunches of dark kale, and Concord grapes at their peak. It's not just pretty produce. Right now, these are the most affordable, most potent natural medicines you can put on your plate.

Instead of chasing an exotic superfood from halfway around the world, fall is the time to eat local and seasonal. Your body is preparing for less sunlight, more time indoors, and the start of cold and flu season. These five foods directly support that transition.

#### 1. Apples - More Than Fiber

The old saying holds up, but for better reasons than we thought.

Apple skin is rich in **quercetin**, a natural flavonoid studied for its role in supporting a balanced inflammatory response during allergy season. The flesh is rich in **pectin**, a soluble prebiotic fiber that feeds beneficial gut bacteria - and gut health is where about 70% of your immune system lives.

**How to get the most from it:** Always eat the skin, and pair your apple with a small handful of walnuts or a spoon of peanut butter. The healthy fat and protein blunt the natural sugar rise and keeps you satisfied.

#### 2. Butternut Squash - Natural Vitamin A, The Right Way

Butternut squash is one of the richest food sources of beta-carotene, which your body converts to vitamin A for eye, skin, and immune health. Unlike high-dose supplements, food-based beta-carotene comes with fiber and potassium.

**How to get the most from it:** Roast it with olive oil. Beta-carotene is fat-soluble - you absorb far more when it's cooked with a healthy fat than when it's eaten raw.

#### 3. Kale - The Fall Bone Supporter

As we start spending more time indoors, kale offers two nutrients we need: calcium and vitamin K1. Lacinato and curly kale at peak season are tender and less bitter than mid-winter kale.

**How to get the most from it:** Don't eat a huge raw kale salad on day one if you've been eating light summer foods. Lightly massage chopped kale with lemon juice and olive oil for 2 minutes, or quickly sauté it. The acid helps reduce oxalates and makes the minerals more available and easier on digestion.

#### 4. Walnuts & Pumpkin Seeds - Small Foods for Mood and Sleep

As daylight shrinks, many people notice changes in mood and sleep. Walnuts provide ALA, a plant-based omega-3, and natural melatonin. Pumpkin seeds - now harvested fresh - are one of nature's best sources of zinc and magnesium, two minerals that support restful sleep, prostate health, and steady blood sugar.

**How to get the most from it:** Think of them as an afternoon medicine, not a topping. A small handful, raw and unsalted, around 3 PM is more satisfying than chips and helps curb the evening carb craving.

#### 5. Concord Grapes - New York's Antioxidant

We can't talk about September in New York without Concord grapes. Their deep purple skin is packed with polyphenols including resveratrol. They are at their absolute peak for only a few weeks.

**How to get the most from it:** Eat them whole and seeded if you can find seeded - chew the seeds lightly. Freezing them makes a perfect natural replacement for sugary desserts.

### Your Pulse Recipe: Harvest Sheet Pan

This is my go-to for the next two weeks. Four ingredients, one pan.

**Ingredients:**

- 1 medium butternut squash, cubed

- 2 firm apples (Honeycrisp or McIntosh), sliced

- 1 large bunch kale, torn into pieces

- 1/3 cup raw pumpkin seeds

- Olive oil, rosemary, sea salt, black pepper

**Method:**

1. Toss squash and apples with 2 tbsp olive oil, rosemary, salt and pepper. Roast at 425F for 20 minutes.

2. Add kale and pumpkin seeds tossed in a little more oil. Roast 7-8 more minutes until kale is crisp at the edges.

3. Finish with a splash of apple cider vinegar.

Serve warm as a side, or over quinoa or lentils for a full meal.

The best natural healthcare this time of year isn't in a bottle. It's in season, local, and at its most nutritious right now. Shop this weekend, eat what is peaking, and let your farmers market be your pharmacy.

One of the most powerful weapons wielded by psychiatrists and their supporting establishment against people targeted by psychiatric tyranny across the USA is not a needle or a locked ward. It is the ability to rally the public to go along with a lie, to insist that what is true and obvious is not true.

This is how the railroad works. The targeted person is subjected to real abuses that anyone can see, and then the system organizes a collective denial of that reality. Family, neighbors, employers, police, judges and the public are enlisted to nod along with the official line: that didn't happen, that isn't happening, you are mistaken. Once that manufactured unreality is in place, the rest is easy. The person can be railroaded into the psychiatric system, labeled, detained, and forcibly placed onto drugs that do destroy their brains and other vital organs.

The chemical assault is presented as treatment, but its effect is destruction. These drugs dull cognition, damage the nervous system, ravage the body, and break the will. That is not a side effect, it is the function. A drugged, discredited person is easier to control, easier to dismiss, and easier to destroy.

Alongside the drugs come two other essential tools of this machinery of madness: stigmatization and cruel, deadly blacklists. The psychiatric label itself becomes a stigma that follows a person everywhere, a mark that tells the world not to believe them. The blacklists are quiet but absolute, shared between systems to ensure that doors stay closed. Housing, benefits, medical care, credibility in court, all quietly denied.

So when targeted people try to discuss what is actually happening to them, they are dealt with as if they are delusional by design. When they speak of real psychotronic surveillance and torture, of being tracked, targeted, and tormented in their own homes and bodies, they are called psychotic. When they speak of real education and job discrimination, of being pushed out of schools and workplaces, they are called paranoid. When they speak of real financial and social issues, of being impoverished, isolated, and systematically cut off from support, they are called delusional. Every true complaint is inverted and used as further evidence that they belong in the psychiatric system.

This all leads in one direction, which reveals the actual goal of this psychiatric tyranny. It is not mental healthcare. It has nothing at all to do with mental healthcare. Its goal is the total destruction of targeted people, the slow and methodical erasure of their health, their livelihood, their reputation, and their lives.

Through this machinery, the USA reveals itself as an atrocious human rights abuser, a criminal civil society that tortures and murders innocent people 24/7, all while calling it help.

Dr. Howy was not the kind of man the system knew how to handle.

He was 62, soft-spoken, with a garden that fed half his block and a free clinic on Tuesdays where he taught breathing, nutrition, and how to get off sugar. He had never raised his voice in his life. The kids on the street called him Dr. Howy Bear because he hugged everyone.

What made him dangerous was that he wrote things down.

For three years he had been collecting letters. Not his own. From former patients of the state psychiatric system. Nurses who quit. A mother whose 19-year-old son went in for anxiety and came out 60 pounds heavier, diabetic, shaking, unable to remember his middle name. He posted them on his blog with names redacted, dates, dosages, and the billing codes.

He called it "The Machinery."

The first retaliation was polite. A letter from the medical board about an anonymous complaint. Then another. Then a call from a hospital administrator he had once considered a friend, saying, "Howy, you're making people uncomfortable."

Then the machinery started in earnest.

It began with unreality. That was the most powerful weapon, exactly as Howy had written.

A rumor moved through his town that Dr. Howy wasn't sleeping, that he was rambling about conspiracies. It wasn't true. Anyone who had seen him that week saw him weeding tomatoes at 6 a.m., making house calls. But people went along with it because it was easier to go along. The pharmacist who had filled his prescriptions for a decade suddenly said he seemed "a little off." The neighbor who borrowed his ladder said he heard him shouting at night. He hadn't shouted.

That manufactured unreality was the key that unlocked every door. Once the public agreed that what was true and obvious was not true, that a pleasant, peace-loving physician was actually unstable, they could railroad him.

They did it on a Thursday.

Two men in plain clothes and a psychiatrist Howy had publicly criticized for over-medicating foster children came to his clinic. They had a paper. Emergency evaluation. Danger to self or others. Howy laughed, because it was so absurd, until he saw they were not joking.

"I'm not a danger to anyone," he said. "Call any of my patients."

"That's what we're concerned about, Dr. Howy," the psychiatrist said gently, for the record. "The grandiosity. The letters. The fixation."

At the hospital, the process was swift and sealed. Every real thing Howy tried to discuss was entered as further evidence that he belonged in the psychiatric system.

When he tried to talk about the patients who had told him about psychotronic surveillance and torture, the constant humming, the sleep deprivation, the way they were targeted in their own apartments, the evaluator wrote "persecutory delusions, shared."

When he tried to talk about real education and job discrimination, how his own referrals were now being rejected, how two universities had pulled his speaking invitations after calls from the psychiatric association, the evaluator wrote "paranoid ideation regarding professional status."

When he tried to talk about real financial and social issues, how his bank had frozen his small business account after a "concerned citizen" report, how his stigmatization was now complete, how his name had appeared on a hospital blacklist that meant no ER in the county would take his calls, the evaluator wrote "delusional financial concerns, social withdrawal."

He was given a shot that night for "agitation." He had not been agitated. He asked what it was. He was told it would help him think clearly. By morning his tongue was thick, his hands trembled, his vision blurred. He knew exactly what the drugs did. He had documented it for years. They do destroy brains and other vital organs, slowly and then all at once, and that was the point.

A young nurse whispered to him while taking vitals, "Dr. Howy, I read your blog. I'm so sorry."

The plan was total destruction. Not treatment. Not care. Erasure. A pleasant, peace-loving man who exposed abuses would leave with no practice, no reputation, no health, and a chart that would follow him forever, ensuring that anything he ever said again could be dismissed as history of mental illness.

They had not counted on his garden.

On the second day, his neighbor Mara, who he had taught to make elderberry syrup, showed up with his cat carrier and a paper bag. Inside the bag were his notebooks, which he had left in his potting shed. She had remembered where he hid the key. She looked at the guard at the door and said, loudly and clearly, "He is not delusional. You are holding the wrong man. And everyone in town knows it."

She didn't get him out. But she got the notebooks out.

Last week, his blog published them all. Every letter. Every dosage. Every name of every psychiatrist who had signed the order.

Dr. Howy is still inside, for now. He sits by the window in the ward, humming, waiting for the tremor in his hands to pass. The system that calls itself healthcare has done what it was designed to do to people who tell the truth.

But outside, people are finally reading what he wrote on his blog, and they are starting to refuse to go along with the lie.

Fiction by Dr Harold Mandel