What would you do if I told you that if by this time next week I was going to check in on your health, and if you weren't sick, I was going to kill you? Call me a health terrorist. Either you find a way to guarantee you'll be sick, or you'll be dead. What would you do? How could you not just increase your risk, but actually guarantee that you will be ill?
This is a question I always ask my students when we talk about common colds, flues, and other contagious illnesses. Instead of having them think about staying well, I turn their thought process around and make them come up with ways to get sick. Most classes give me the same responses to start. Things like don't wash your hands; hang around others who are sick; spend time in a school or day care; or touch others who are sick, and then touch your nose or eyes. When I get those responses, I then come back with a question: will that guarantee you will get sick? Remember your life is on the line. At this point I get usually get blank stares, since we've been taught by society to focus so much on minimizing germ transmission that they rarely have any concept of what it takes for our bodies to really get sick.
If you want to guarantee illness, you must first look at what it takes to keep yourself healthy. Will washing your hands guarantee health? How about being around only healthy people? If you never go to a school or day care, will you never get sick? Look at all those who are always around sick people, and rarely get sick themselves. How does that work? Being and staying healthy has very little to do with germ exposure. Your risk of getting sick is much more determined by how you take care of yourself, than how often or what type of critters to which you expose yourself.
As we move into the cold and flu season, this is an especially important concept to discuss. How can you reduce your risk of getting sick? It all comes down to looking at the host, and not spending so much time on the bugs.
1. Make sure you are getting adequate high quality rest. Not only is it important to sleep for an adequate amount, but it is also important to make sure that it is good quality. That means without the TV or radio and the room as dark as you can get it. This is true for not only adults, but also kids. Nightlights disturb our sleep.
2. Eat a diet that consists of adequate protein, has lots of veggies, and is as unrefined as possible. Sugar is an immune suppressant, and directly competes with vitamin C to get into your cells. The more processed your food, the more your body has to process it to get rid of its waste. If you can't tell what type of plant or animal it came from, think twice (or thrice) about putting it in your system.
3. Drink plenty of water. Dehydration is a common occurrence in our population. We tend to "hydrate" with soda, fruit juice, milk, energy drinks, and coffee, all of which dehydrate instead of hydrate. If you don't have enough water in your system, it's like having the toilet full of waste without water to flush it down. Things get plugged up and start to smell.
4. Keep your vitamin D levels up. I discussed this in a previous blog, but one of the issues with cold and flu season is dropping vitamin D levels. Have your level checked, and make sure you're in the 65-80 ng/ml range.
5. Learn to handle stress better. Your immune system is suppressed by stress, and that stress can be mechanical from your spine as much as emotional or chemical. If you are not handling stress well, you will not be able to fight off those bugs, and getting a regular chiropractic adjustment has been shown to stimulate the immune system.
6. Protect yourself from temperature swings. We've been enjoying some great weather for the past few weeks, but we all know winter is on its way, and it will soon be freezing cold outside. Does being cold cause us to get sick? Yes and no. When our body temp drops, we become more susceptible to infection, and when we put ourselves in a position to not stay warm when we're outside, that's exactly what happens. Bundle up, keeping the head and ears warm and protecting the neck from wind. It seems these are the areas that are most important to keeping ourselves in the best shape.
So, if you were the health terrorist, and I was the victim, what would I do? I'd stay inside all day long; eat crappy food and drink lots of processed fluids; stress myself out; don't sleep; and go outside in the cold and wind in shorts and a t-shirt for as long as I could stand it. Would this guarantee my illness? Maybe not guarantee, but it's as close as I can get. Focus on yourself instead of the bugs, and chances are, you won't have to worry about the bugs.
Look for future blogs that will give more information and insights into improving your health with natural health care. You can also visit my website, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Mom's Stress Isn't Trivial
It's the time of year to pull out the pile of research that I've collected about how stress affects the human body. Next month I have to be prepared to articulate eight hours of lecture to chiropractors about not only how it changes us, but also what we can do to help our patients reduce the effects. There are many results of stress that are startling to those that haven't studied the subject, but some of the most shocking deal with the consequences of stress during pregnancy.
Men and women are different, plain and simple. From a physiological viewpoint, there are certain reactions that are predominantly male and others that are female. There are certain conditions that are more prevalent in one sex than the other. In regards to stress, this holds true as well. Men and women react differently to stress. They have the same basic response, but how the body ends up expressing itself is different. There is both a masculine and a feminine reaction to stress.
Women generally have a slower, but exaggerated response to stress, taking longer to start, but secreting higher levels of hormones that stick around longer. They tend to retain their memory function better during stressful events, but stress disrupts their sex hormones more than men. While men feel a "fight or flight" reaction, women are more prone to "tend and befriend". Women also exhibit more ruminative thinking, where they rewind the event over and over. There are significant differences in stress response between the sexes, and it relates to how their hormones are supposed to work in the body.
In the lecture, after I've described the different reactions, I discuss how the stress reaction changes over time, starting with prenatal exposure. Here are two statements that I think need to be shouted from the loudest media outlet available:
"Prenatal stress exposure may pre-program the brain to increased susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disorders" and "Prenatal stress exposure to males causes physiological and stress reaction feminization". (links to the full text articles are at the end of this blog)
In plain English, that means that if mom is stressed, especially during the early part of her pregnancy, the baby can suffer life long consequences, including an increased risk for conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. In addition, if the baby is male, they likely will develop a physiology that is more female than male, and their reactions to stress will follow in that female mold instead of following a traditional male pattern.
Do we really want our little boys to end up physiologically like little girls? Does anyone want their kids to end up with a lifetime of emotional suffering? I would hope the answers to both questions are a resounding NO! Then why are we not telling women at their first prenatal visit that they need to do whatever they can to reduce their stress level for the health of their baby? Why aren't expectant fathers, brothers, grandparents, and even coworkers being told that the best thing they can do for the new baby is reduce the stress level of the expectant mother? Are we afraid that moms and dads can't handle the truth? Granted, this research has only been out for a few years and was done on mice, but there is research that hits the media outlets almost before it is published in the journals and no researcher in their right mind would ever consider doing this on humans. Extrapolation from animals to humans is all we have on pregnancy models. I would think that at the very least magazines like Parenting, or Pregnancy and Newborns would have this as their cover story at least once a year.
Some research relies on word of mouth for its publicity, and it seems that prenatal stress exposure and its long term consequences is in that category. For the health of not only our families, but of our society as a whole, I believe it is imperative that we help our pregnant mothers understand that they hold the long-term health of their baby in their minds. Increasing their stress levels can have profound negative effects on their babies. Anyone who cares about that baby should make it their priority to minimize the stress exposure of mom. Mom's stress isn't trivial, it's paramount to the health of our future generation.
Look for future blogs that will give more information and insights into improving your health with natural health care. You can also visit my website, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.
The Neuroendocrinology of Stress: A Never Ending Story
Examining the Intersection of Sex and Stress in Modeling Neuropsychiatric Disorders
Men and women are different, plain and simple. From a physiological viewpoint, there are certain reactions that are predominantly male and others that are female. There are certain conditions that are more prevalent in one sex than the other. In regards to stress, this holds true as well. Men and women react differently to stress. They have the same basic response, but how the body ends up expressing itself is different. There is both a masculine and a feminine reaction to stress.
Women generally have a slower, but exaggerated response to stress, taking longer to start, but secreting higher levels of hormones that stick around longer. They tend to retain their memory function better during stressful events, but stress disrupts their sex hormones more than men. While men feel a "fight or flight" reaction, women are more prone to "tend and befriend". Women also exhibit more ruminative thinking, where they rewind the event over and over. There are significant differences in stress response between the sexes, and it relates to how their hormones are supposed to work in the body.
In the lecture, after I've described the different reactions, I discuss how the stress reaction changes over time, starting with prenatal exposure. Here are two statements that I think need to be shouted from the loudest media outlet available:
"Prenatal stress exposure may pre-program the brain to increased susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disorders" and "Prenatal stress exposure to males causes physiological and stress reaction feminization". (links to the full text articles are at the end of this blog)
In plain English, that means that if mom is stressed, especially during the early part of her pregnancy, the baby can suffer life long consequences, including an increased risk for conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. In addition, if the baby is male, they likely will develop a physiology that is more female than male, and their reactions to stress will follow in that female mold instead of following a traditional male pattern.
Do we really want our little boys to end up physiologically like little girls? Does anyone want their kids to end up with a lifetime of emotional suffering? I would hope the answers to both questions are a resounding NO! Then why are we not telling women at their first prenatal visit that they need to do whatever they can to reduce their stress level for the health of their baby? Why aren't expectant fathers, brothers, grandparents, and even coworkers being told that the best thing they can do for the new baby is reduce the stress level of the expectant mother? Are we afraid that moms and dads can't handle the truth? Granted, this research has only been out for a few years and was done on mice, but there is research that hits the media outlets almost before it is published in the journals and no researcher in their right mind would ever consider doing this on humans. Extrapolation from animals to humans is all we have on pregnancy models. I would think that at the very least magazines like Parenting, or Pregnancy and Newborns would have this as their cover story at least once a year.
Some research relies on word of mouth for its publicity, and it seems that prenatal stress exposure and its long term consequences is in that category. For the health of not only our families, but of our society as a whole, I believe it is imperative that we help our pregnant mothers understand that they hold the long-term health of their baby in their minds. Increasing their stress levels can have profound negative effects on their babies. Anyone who cares about that baby should make it their priority to minimize the stress exposure of mom. Mom's stress isn't trivial, it's paramount to the health of our future generation.
Look for future blogs that will give more information and insights into improving your health with natural health care. You can also visit my website, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.
The Neuroendocrinology of Stress: A Never Ending Story
Examining the Intersection of Sex and Stress in Modeling Neuropsychiatric Disorders
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Introduce Your Kids to Food
Obesity is on the rise, as are immune system disorders like allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. Much of this, I believe, comes from the choices we make in our diets. As adults, we have control over what we put in our mouths, but our kids rely on us to make good choices for them. Infants especially are at the mercy of adults to make the best choices for what goes into their mouths. Yet, when I see what parents are feeding infants, I am often flabbergasted. Either most parents don't understand the impact of what they are doing, or they haven't ever been taught what's best. Let's talk about how we introduce our kids to food.
Recommendations are pretty consistent when it comes to infants and diet: breast milk is best, and formula is a distant second. Dietetic and pediatric organizations alike recommend nothing except breast milk or formula for the first six months of life. That means no juice, cow's milk, cereal, or anything else. The reason for this is simple. Infants are designed to absorb milk from mom undigested, with whole proteins made and absorbed. When we introduce foods before the pores in the intestines have begun to close, we set our kids up for a significantly increased risk for allergy related conditions; everything from true allergies to asthma to autoimmune conditions like type I diabetes. Increasing the immune response can also lead to general inflammation; one factor we see that leads to obesity. Early introduction of "real" food is detrimental to the long term health of your child.
"But my kid isn't sleeping through the night" or "they seem hungry yet" is a common thing I hear when I make this recommendation. Shouldn't I add cereal to the formula? Absolutely, positively not. Breast milk is about 54% saturated fat. While formulas range in their nutrient content, none have as high of fat content as breast milk, and most of them have polyunsaturated fat. By adding less fat, formula generally increases its carbohydrate content instead, and by having polyunsaturated fat, overall, the formula is less nutrient dense; it takes more to keep the baby full. Research has shown that fats and protein keep us full, while carbohydrate generally increases our appetite. By adding cereal, which is difficult for the infant to digest, the parents are also introducing protein that often causes immune reactions, and starts the road to an overstimulated immune system. Instead, I recommend parents add what keeps the infant full: fat. Yes, I said add fat to the formula to keep them fuller longer. Start with a small amount of organic unrefined extra virgin coconut oil, and increase it until they seem satisfied. This is a fat that is easily absorbed, utilized, and as similar as we can get to the fat in breast milk.
At six months of age, parents can start adding in "real" food. The question comes in though, as to which foods to start with. Often, parents are told to start with rice cereal. While rice is minimal in its allergenicity, I take a different approach. Of all the foods out there, which category do we see the least allergies with, and which foods do we want our kids to eat the most of? Is it rice cereal? Will eating rice cereal improve our health throughout our lives? Probably not. The foods we want to eat the most and are the least allergenic are vegetables. Why not start there? Pick out those vegetables that we want them to eat the most of, and introduce one per week; broccoli, spinach, carrots, peas, squash, and whatever else you can find green, yellow, or orange. By adding in one per week, you can watch for any potential reactions the immune system may start and identify which food is the likely culprit.
After introducing all of the vegetables, you can move on to fruits, with a few caveats. There are certain foods which should not be introduced to children under the age of two. These include all berries, shellfish, nuts, and peanuts. Those are the classic food allergies, and safest to be kept away for a longer time. So, with the exception of berries, start adding in fruits, again, one per week. Avoid those infant "desserts", since they often add extra sugars and may contain berries. Use the fruits as the child's dessert, but always start with the vegetables in the meal. After all, how does broccoli taste after a nice sweet apple or pear? Don't let them decide, be the parent.
By the time all of the fruits and veggies have been introduced, the child with be almost a year, and you can move on to proteins and/or cereals. Personally, I see no reason to add cereal to their diet. It's bland and they can get plenty of carbohydrate from the fruits and veggies they'll be loving by this time. Stick with the proteins (meats) instead. After a year, you can start the introduction of milk and eggs if you choose. While dairy has been promoted as a base for your child's health, we'll talk in later blogs about how we've been duped into buying a refined product that has much less benefit than we are led to believe.
Kids' palates develop early, and starting them on foods in the wrong order can make it much more difficult to introduce foods that can help them live long healthy lives. My approach to introducing foods is focused on not only getting the most important food group in early (veggies), but also on minimizing the risk of allergic reactions later in life. If every parent used this approach, would we see a reduction in allergies? I can't prove it, but common sense says we would. Even if it wouldn't, getting the veggies in early gives them nutrients they won't get anywhere else, and hopefully sets their taste so they will eat more of them throughout their life.
Look for future blogs that will give more information and insights into improving your health with natural health care. You can also visit my website, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.
Recommendations are pretty consistent when it comes to infants and diet: breast milk is best, and formula is a distant second. Dietetic and pediatric organizations alike recommend nothing except breast milk or formula for the first six months of life. That means no juice, cow's milk, cereal, or anything else. The reason for this is simple. Infants are designed to absorb milk from mom undigested, with whole proteins made and absorbed. When we introduce foods before the pores in the intestines have begun to close, we set our kids up for a significantly increased risk for allergy related conditions; everything from true allergies to asthma to autoimmune conditions like type I diabetes. Increasing the immune response can also lead to general inflammation; one factor we see that leads to obesity. Early introduction of "real" food is detrimental to the long term health of your child.
"But my kid isn't sleeping through the night" or "they seem hungry yet" is a common thing I hear when I make this recommendation. Shouldn't I add cereal to the formula? Absolutely, positively not. Breast milk is about 54% saturated fat. While formulas range in their nutrient content, none have as high of fat content as breast milk, and most of them have polyunsaturated fat. By adding less fat, formula generally increases its carbohydrate content instead, and by having polyunsaturated fat, overall, the formula is less nutrient dense; it takes more to keep the baby full. Research has shown that fats and protein keep us full, while carbohydrate generally increases our appetite. By adding cereal, which is difficult for the infant to digest, the parents are also introducing protein that often causes immune reactions, and starts the road to an overstimulated immune system. Instead, I recommend parents add what keeps the infant full: fat. Yes, I said add fat to the formula to keep them fuller longer. Start with a small amount of organic unrefined extra virgin coconut oil, and increase it until they seem satisfied. This is a fat that is easily absorbed, utilized, and as similar as we can get to the fat in breast milk.
At six months of age, parents can start adding in "real" food. The question comes in though, as to which foods to start with. Often, parents are told to start with rice cereal. While rice is minimal in its allergenicity, I take a different approach. Of all the foods out there, which category do we see the least allergies with, and which foods do we want our kids to eat the most of? Is it rice cereal? Will eating rice cereal improve our health throughout our lives? Probably not. The foods we want to eat the most and are the least allergenic are vegetables. Why not start there? Pick out those vegetables that we want them to eat the most of, and introduce one per week; broccoli, spinach, carrots, peas, squash, and whatever else you can find green, yellow, or orange. By adding in one per week, you can watch for any potential reactions the immune system may start and identify which food is the likely culprit.
After introducing all of the vegetables, you can move on to fruits, with a few caveats. There are certain foods which should not be introduced to children under the age of two. These include all berries, shellfish, nuts, and peanuts. Those are the classic food allergies, and safest to be kept away for a longer time. So, with the exception of berries, start adding in fruits, again, one per week. Avoid those infant "desserts", since they often add extra sugars and may contain berries. Use the fruits as the child's dessert, but always start with the vegetables in the meal. After all, how does broccoli taste after a nice sweet apple or pear? Don't let them decide, be the parent.
By the time all of the fruits and veggies have been introduced, the child with be almost a year, and you can move on to proteins and/or cereals. Personally, I see no reason to add cereal to their diet. It's bland and they can get plenty of carbohydrate from the fruits and veggies they'll be loving by this time. Stick with the proteins (meats) instead. After a year, you can start the introduction of milk and eggs if you choose. While dairy has been promoted as a base for your child's health, we'll talk in later blogs about how we've been duped into buying a refined product that has much less benefit than we are led to believe.
Kids' palates develop early, and starting them on foods in the wrong order can make it much more difficult to introduce foods that can help them live long healthy lives. My approach to introducing foods is focused on not only getting the most important food group in early (veggies), but also on minimizing the risk of allergic reactions later in life. If every parent used this approach, would we see a reduction in allergies? I can't prove it, but common sense says we would. Even if it wouldn't, getting the veggies in early gives them nutrients they won't get anywhere else, and hopefully sets their taste so they will eat more of them throughout their life.
Look for future blogs that will give more information and insights into improving your health with natural health care. You can also visit my website, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)