Herald article #2, healthy diet

Earlier this month I spent a week in Portland, Oregon attending the first International Conference on Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine. This event was attended and presented by leaders from around the world, 19 countries in all. Each day started out with a leading PHD presenting the most recent studies on Diet and Exercise, followed by a leading clinical practitioner (MD, Cardiologist, Nephrologist, or Orthopedic surgeon) presenting on how they were having consistent, remarkable results from applying these nutrition and exercise protocols to their patients. The topics covered were: Hypertension, Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, Autoimmunes, Cardiovascular, Type 2 and Type 3 Diabetes and more. These are all disease processes which are heavily influenced by lifestyle, and when you strip away all the technical biochemistry, neurology, and physiology of the presentations, what was left at the heart of things is actually the gut. The problem with our gut is Inflammation, sustained and ever increasing, because of our poor diet. This starts out on a very small scale, one in which you really have no idea that it is happening. The gut and its microbiotic flora are of key importance to good health. 80-90% of all serotonin (your feel good neurotransmitter) is manufactured in the gut. Your thyroid produces 2 forms of hormone, the majority of which is inactive and must be activated in your gut. 80% of your Immune system is located in your gut and communication from these immune cells to your nervous system is thru your microbiota. So how do you create and maintain a healthy gut lining and microbiota? It all starts with your mother, she provides you with your first inoculation of microbiota as you travel through the birth canal during delivery, ( it does not happen with a cesarean). So it is extremely important for women considering childbirth to get their gut in order. For all you mothers to be and the rest of us, here is a beginners list of items to grow a healthy gut: Diet, Exercise, Stress Management, and Sunlight, all big words that don’t mean much unless we put some specifics to them. You’ve all seen that commercial where the actor in the white lab coat says “when diet and exercise are not enough” , well that is a marketing statement, with no truth to it, because when you are given correct information about diet and exercise and you are compliant, they work every time. So here is what a health promoting Diet consists of: First, It should be plant based, with a minimal amount of starch/carbohydrate and maximal amounts of nutrition, yes, at every meal, even breakfast. The cruciferous family of veggies provides the most nutritional bang for your buck (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts, kale, turnips, and radishes). These veggies provide major and trace minerals, phytonutrients, enzymes, anti-cancer factors and more. Second, a variety of nuts and seeds (almonds, walnuts, macadamia, pistachio, flax, pumpkin, sunflower, chia, quinoa, and hemp). These provide your body with healthy fats, fiber and protein. Other healthy fats include avocados, olive oil and coconut oil. Third, “lean protein”, fish, chicken, beef, and eggs. Lean protein comes from animals that have been grass fed, or from animals that are wild. It does not come from animals that are fed cheap grains (soy, or corn). Fourth, fruits, limited to small berries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries. These provide powerful nutrition with minimal fructose. Fifth, pre-biotics, such as garlic, onions, inulin and probiotics in the way of fermented foods, sauerkraut, kim chee, miso, pickles, kefir, yogurt, kombucha. These foods feed and fortify the health promoting microbiota population of your gut. Look for our article next week when we discuss the foods that have gotten us into this unhealthy mess and also what are the best types of exercise.

Herald article #5 , Exercise

In the last few articles I detailed what a Health Promoting Diet looks like and what a Chronic Disease Promoting Diet looks like. Now I will do the same for Exercise. If you are given correct information and you are compliant, it will have a huge impact on your health, as far as stopping and reversing chronic disease. Depending on where you are on your unique health curve, determines how long it will take to create this impact. There is as much mis-information out there about exercise as there is about diet. So what does a truly healthy exercise program entail? It must makes you sweat: promoting the release of toxins, stimulating the firing of neuron pathways/better brain function), resetting receptors in cell walls to reduce insulin resistance and restore your energy metabolism processes. It must have a strengthening component: minimally it focuses specifically on extensor muscles, those that keep us upright in gravity. These are the muscles on the back of the body from the waist up and the muscles on the front of the body from the waist down. This is an absolutely crucial part of your exercise equation, and without it you will have decreased brain function, decreased metabolism, and decreased joint mobility. It should have an interval training component: this is actually how we live our lives, short spurts of energy not marathons. This is very versatile and can be applied to a number of different exercises, 30 seconds as hard as you can, followed by 90 seconds of easing back, for around 8 sets. This form of exercise promotes the greatest production of DHEA (growth hormone) and reversal of insulin resistance. Exercise done on a machine such as the ROM fall into this category. It should have an aerobic component. Don’t get stuck in the old myth that a good exercise program is running a 10K or marathon. For most walking is a mode of transportation not exercise. Aerobics by itself leads to reduced lean body mass (reduction in healthy muscle). Aerobics increases free radical cell damage. It also reduces muscle cell fuel (glucagon) and to replace this your appetite is increased, leading to excess calorie consumption. It should have a meditative and breath control component such as Yoga and Tai Chi. It should promote integrated movements; your body’s muscle and fascial systems were designed to work best as a whole not individually. One way in which we damage our bodies is by repetitive movements that rely on singled out muscles. There is a fantastic program(Foundation Training.com) that came out last year that restores healthy movement patterns teaching these systems to move as one. What you eat and when you eat has a huge affect on your exercise routine results. Sugar, especially fructose, ingested 30 minutes before your workout and up to 2 hours after will have a defeating effect. A small amount of protein ingested 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after will maximize gain. Wow that is quite a list, so if you are only performing aerobic training, you are missing the boat. There is no one exercise and there is no precise equation that can tell you how much of each of these you should perform. Start with a balance of variety, pay attention and adjust to how your body responds. Just like diet, where we all need proteins, fats and phytonutrients from veggies, the amount of each is unique to the individual. Exercise is the same, your workouts need to cover certain essential elements, of which the amounts are unique to the individual. Also, like diet it is important that exercise is part of your lifestyle, not just a short term attempt to lose a few pounds.

herald article #4, GMO

Last week I spoke about the bad and ugly in our diet, covering Grains, Dairy, Cheap Vegetable Oils, and Industrial Farmed Meats. Today I will cover GMO and another large culprit that I left out, Fructose. Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) are created by taking one or more genes from one species and forcing it into the DNA of another species. Such genetic cross-breeding between incompatible species can never occur in nature. The two main types of GMO foods are Herbicide-Tolerant crops and Pesticide-Producing crops. Herbicide-Tolerant crops, are designed to withstand otherwise lethal doses of chemicals. Roundup Ready crops are in this category. Glyphosate residue (from roundup ready), enhances the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical residues and toxins in the environment. This disrupts normal body functions and induces disease. Glyphosate is found in most commonly consumed foods in the Western diet courtesy of GMO sugar, corn, soy and wheat, Interestingly, your gut bacteria are a key component of glyphosate’s mechanism of harm. Roundup is suppose to be harmless to animals and humans because the mechanism of action it uses (which allows it to kill weeds), called the Shikimate pathway, is absent in all animals. However, the Shikimate pathway is present in bacteria, and that’s the key to understanding how it causes such widespread systemic harm in both humans and animals. The bacteria in your body outnumber your cells by 10 to 1. For every cell in your body, you have 10 bacterial microbes of various kinds, and all of them have the Shikimate pathway, so they will all respond to the presence of Glyphosate! Glyphosate causes extreme disruption of the microbe’s function and lifecycle. What’s worse, glyphosate preferentially affects beneficial bacteria, allowing pathogens to overgrow and take over. At that point, your body also has to contend with the toxins produced by the pathogens. Once the chronic inflammation sets in, you’re well on your way toward chronic and potentially debilitating disease. Pesticide-producing crops, designed to produce a toxic protein inside the plant itself, which kills bugs that eat the plant by causing their stomachs to rupture. These are the so-called Bt crops. A study published in February 2012 shows that this Bt toxin is capable of breaking open human cells, causing the same kind of disruption in the gut of humans as it causes in the insects it kills. We are talking about gut permeability ("leaky gut"), which can predispose you to all sorts of health problems. An eye opener presentation is "Genetic Roulette-The Gamble of Our Lives", winner of the Top Transformational Film of 2012 by Jeffery Smith. The health promoting diet we have been talking about in previous articles, does not include most of the current list of GMO’s (corn, soy, wheat, and sugar). If you do consume these products read the label and make sure it is stamped NO GMO (and is preferably organic). Ask your local grocer to stock GMO FREE products. Use your shopping dollars to vote for NO GMO. Now the last of the health deteriorating culprits is High Fructose Syrup. I know everyone has seen the TV commercials where they tell you there is no difference between cane sugar and corn sugar, well I don’t know how they get away with it, but it is simply not the truth. Sucrose/Cane Sugar and Fructose/Corn Syrup are different types of simple sugars. After they are separated apart and broken down in your body they are metabolized using completely separate pathways. Cane Sugar/ Sucrose is broken down into mainly Glucose. Glucose is utilized by every cell in your body for energy, but Fructose is shuttled to your liver where it is metabolized into fats and a variety of waste products, one of which is uric acid. Uric acid drives up your blood pressure by inhibiting the nitric oxide in your blood vessels. Nitric oxide helps your vessels maintain their elasticity, so nitric oxide suppression leads to increases in blood pressure. Fructose consumption also leads to decreased signaling to your central nervous system from the hormones Leptin, Ghrelin and Insulin. These are key signals in regulating how much food you eat, as well as your body weight, all contributing to increased food intake and weight gain. Decreased Insulin and Leptin signaling is also a main cause of diabetes and a host of other obesity-related conditions. So what are we left with? Go back to our healthy diet which contains moderate amounts of small berries as your fructose source, no processed foods, and no soft drinks. If your going to take part in these bad items read the labels and pick the best choice of the evils, cane sugar over fructose, and by the way agave is at the top of the bad fructose list. If all of the above information does not convince you to get fructose products out of your diet, then ponder on the fact that mercury is used as a preservative for fructose products. Way too much information, so we will wait till next week to take a look at healthy exercise.

Herald article #3, the bad and the ugly in your diet

"Health Talk by Dr. Dean R. Brock, DC, APC Last week we talked about the good part of a healthy diet, now lets cover the bad and ugly parts, the foods that have brought on the overwhelming numbers of chronic diseases. The top culprits would have to be Grains, Dairy, Cheap Vegetable Oils, GMO and Industrial Farmed Meats. Grains were never intended to be consumed by humans, they are a cheap food capable of providing large amounts of calories to avoid starvation. Three serious problems associated with grains are the lack of nutrition, the large blood sugar spike and gut lining damage. A huge additional note on blood sugar is that it is the major contributor to hypertension. The insulin spike it induces causes the kidneys to retain sodium; this fluid retention raises blood pressure. Everyone has heard of gut disorders such as Celiac, which is associated with the ingestion of gluten (found in several grains). Gluten causes damage in everyone, but some individual's genes make them more susceptible to far greater damage. Lectins are also in all grains, beans and legumes and they create the same gut damage as gluten, in everyone. Lectins destroy connecter proteins that hold cells together, thus creating a “leaky gut” . So a gluten free diet using other alternative grains, merely avoids the damage from gluten and does nothing about the damage caused by lectins. Everyone benefits from a grain free (flour free) diet. Cows Milk, what is its purpose? It is a unique biological secretion of the mammary gland endowed by nature to fulfill the entire nutritional needs of a neonate. It provides immune system start-up and growth hormones (estrogen & testosterone precursors) to stimulate proliferation. So if you are not a four legged neonate, it is not for you. Now if you add on top of that what industrial farming has done to the cows, by feeding with grains instead of grass, injecting growth hormones and using antibiotics because the cows stand in their own excrement 24/7. They also decrease the age of starting to milk the cows and have increased the duration of milking. Pushing the productivity to extremes has made a food not intended for humans even worse. There are sufficient numbers of quality studies pointing to milk as the root cause of acne. More and more studies are linking milk to cancer, which is what happens when you ingest something that upregulates and over expresses system functions. There are also sufficient studies showing how cows milk induces hyperglycemia and promotes insulin resistance. So what do you do? Heard of Almond milk? Yes, milks made from nuts, they are a great source of healthy fats and fiber. Stay clear of soy, and read the labels for bad additives such as caregeenan and fructose. Better yet make your own, it is a simple process that just takes minutes. Vegetable oils, when produced under conditions that allow in oxygen and do not control high temperatures, yields a highly oxidized product that when used by the body as a building block of a cell wall, results in a stiffer, less fluid and less functional organelle. What we should be cooking with is a saturated fat, like coconut oil or tallow. These saturated fats due not undergo chemical changes at higher temperatures. Olive oil is also very good for us, however; it is a mono-unsaturated fat and it should be used raw, it is not for cooking. Maintaining it at high temperatures changes its chemical structure turning it into a trans fat which is a very unhealthy building block in cell walls. Additionally, when the industry turns these cheap oils into saturated fats (trans & hydrogenated) with electricity and hydrogen to extend the shelf life of a processed food, they have created a very damaging substance. The much maligned red meat is your best source of iron and B-12 and if it is fed properly (there is the problem), it is a phenomenal source of essential fats. Because Industrial farmed beef are fed cheap GMO grains (corn & soy) instead of their natural food of grass, the result is a meat that is high in a very bad form of saturated fat, very low in mono saturated fat (the good stuff), very low in omega 3 fat (the good stuff) and very high in a bad form of omega 6. Industrial farmed pork has the same bad fat profiles, in addition to issues with viruses and bacteria due to living conditions. Industrial farmed chickens have extremely high levels of arsenic. So meat being a major source of protein, and an essential macro nutrient, that we must have, what do we do? Buy from a local rancher that does not use antibiotics or hormones and only grass feeds. Fish, is an excellent source of protein but must be wild caught. If the package label does not say wild caught, don't buy it and certainly don't eat it. Farm raised fish is not a healthy alternative due to the environment they are raised in and the food they are fed, which can contain high levels of Polychlorinated biphenyls(PCBs), and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE), both toxic and linked to cancer. Since we have covered so much this week, and so as not to dilute the information and give you a change to absorb it, we will continue our discussion next week with exercise. Also coming soon an entire article will be devoted to GMO or genetically modified organisms.