Disc Damage

Several people have been asking me about disc problems lately and it seems that more people than ever are developing this spinal problem.  The intervertebral discs are cartilage shock absorbers that are found between nearly every bone of the spine.  They function to allow the spine to move and also to create space between the vertebrae allowing room for the nerves to exit the spinal cord and communicate with the body.  The discs were built to last – they are inherently one of the toughest structures in the body.  So why are disc problems so common?

The discs are thought to be like a jelly donut with a tough outer ring surrounding a gel portion on the inside called the nucleus.  This nucleus is what can bulge out placing pressure on the delicate nerves.  The problem with the discs is that at around 18 years of age, the outer ring hardens preventing blood flow from getting into the discs.  This is what makes disc damage so difficult and why they don’t heal very well.  The only definitive way to know if you have a disc problem is through imaging such as an MRI.  However, disc problems are accompanied by numerous symptoms including spinal pain, radiating pain or numbness into the arms/legs, increased pain when coughing, sneezing, or “bearing down” to lift something or even when having a bowel movement, and muscle weakness.  It’s important to realize that every one of these symptoms can occur without disc damage from misalignment of the spine or also from pressure on the nerves from different muscle imbalances or even arthritic pressure (stenosis).  That’s why an MRI is the best source of determining what’s going on.  It’s also important to know that discs can heal!  The problem is that because of the limited blood flow, healing can take 6-12 months.  The most common methods of treatment for disc damage include traction, anti-inflammatory medications, steroid injections, chiropractic adjustments, physical therapy, and generally surgery as a last resort.  In any form, the treatment of these injuries is no fun.  That’s why, like everything else, prevention is the key!

Like any form of degeneration in the body, disc damage is related to inflammation and excessive wear-and-tear.  When looking at prevention, you need to consider all components – the physical, chemical, and emotional.  Emotional stress increases inflammation and impacts our inflammatory hormones.  It also increases our sensitivity to pain.  Exercise, yoga, meditation, and prayer are all proven forms of stress reduction.  Our internal chemistry is a key to healthy discs so we must watch what we put into our bodies.  Smoking is known to be one of the very worst factors for discs because it pulls minerals out of the cartilage making them inherently weak and brittle.  Likewise, an inflammatory diet consisting of sugars, processed carbs, and trans-fats is a recipe for any degenerative process such as disc damage.  Your steroid hormones help reduce inflammation, but to produce these chemicals, you require omega 3 fatty acids and vitamin C.  This is why proper supplementation including fish oil and a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is key.  Finally, the physical:  from everything I’ve studied, excessive weight, lack of exercise, poor posture, and prolonged sitting is torture for the intervertebral disc.  This is also the cause for spinal subluxation (misalignment) which is proven to place imbalanced pressure on discs.  Maintaining proper spinal alignment through posture, regular chiropractic adjustments, and physical exercise is yet another way to protect these delicate tissues and prevent damage over time.

Fed Up

I know that many of you have had the opportunity see the movie Fed Up.  In fact, nearly 100 people came to our community showing of the film at the Red Bicycle a couple weeks ago.  If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie focuses on the American obesity epidemic and how our modern diet is directly linked to the chronic disease that afflicts approximately 80% of our society as the primary cause of death. 

We've always been told that the solution to weight loss is to eat less and exercise more.  This implies that obesity is simply a matter of calories in versus calories out.  But what if not all calories are created equally?  Obviously exercise is necessary for better health and it should be looked at similar to getting a vital nutrient.  But if you’re trying to exercise yourself out of obesity or excess weight while eating the wrong diet, you’re fighting an uphill battle that you will never win.  Modern science and the rules of physiology prove that the quality of the calories ingested is what really matters.  For instance, when you take in a healthy, natural carbohydrate such as a vegetable or most fruits there are calories from sugar.  But those calories are bound to fiber that slows the release of sugar into the bloodstream thereby keeping insulin levels low and allowing those calories to be burned more slowly.  This is normal physiology from healthy food.  However, when you ingest the sugar that’s in junk food such as soda or candy or even a processed carbohydrate such as white bread, snack foods, or most cereals, there’s not much fiber there.  This causes a large surge of sugar that raises blood sugar, increases insulin, and immediately gets sent to the liver to be stored as cholesterol and fat.  This is unhealthy physiology that leads to obesity and chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and stroke.  It’s all about the sugar including the processed sugars such as high fructose corn syrup.  Believe or not, the same phenomenon happens with the fructose found in fruit juice and even with artificial sweeteners found in diet drinks and foods.  Unfortunately about 80% of the food you find in the grocery store has added sugar or artificial sugars.  As a result, between 1977 and 2000, Americans have doubled their intake of sugar.

Hopefully, this is all impactful information to you, and I could go on.  But how do you make change and how do you get your family to begin cutting the sugar?  The first step is to begin planning your meals in advance and make a real commitment to get back into your kitchen and start cooking real food – this is the stuff that is found on the perimeters of the grocery stores and rarely sold in a cardboard box or plastic bag!  We’re doing a couple other things to help you with this.  First go to our Facebook page titled “Rivertown Fed Up Challenge.”  This site will support/teach you how to eliminate sugar from your diet for 10 days and see what changes you experience.  Secondly, we’re working with North Madison Christian Church to show Fed Up a second time and follow it up with an expert physician who will help teach you how to make change.  This will be happening in the coming months and I’ll share the details once we have everything finalized.

Stress Solutions

After over 280 issues of this column, it can be a struggle to find new things to write on.  Fortunately I have several avid readers that forward me material they believe people should know about.  This week a dear friend sent me a new article on adrenal fatigue.  As I’ve indicated in the past, this is a phenomenon that I believe is a much bigger issue than most health professionals give credit.  Our healthcare system is so busy treating the symptoms that result from adrenal fatigue that they never get time to uncover the ultimate cause.  But if you know what to look for, you can often self-diagnose adrenal problems and address them before they require more aggressive symptomatic treatment.

Your adrenals are thought to be your stress organs because they produce and release the stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin.  They also produce sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone, some dopamine and about 30 different steroid hormones.  These hormones are why your adrenal glands are intimately tied to the function of your thyroid, pituitary, kidneys, reproductive system and even your brain function.  But just like any muscle or other organ, your adrenals can become fatigued through overuse.  In the case of these vital glands, the stresses that tax the adrenals include: lack of sleep, sugar and processed foods, stimulants such as caffeine and nicotine, excessive activity (work, overtraining), and of course emotional trauma and stress.  All these factors move us into a stress physiology more commonly known as fight/flight mode.  This is a good thing if you need to fight or escape from a tiger, but it’s a terrible thing on a day-to-day basis.  There are many signs and symptoms that you might be dealing with adrenal fatigue.  These include: arthritic tendencies, body aches/pains, extreme fatigue, low blood sugar and low blood pressure, light-headedness and dizziness upon rising from sitting or lying down, salt and sugar cravings, sleep disturbances, infertility and reduced sex drive, hair loss, depression, migraines, menstrual difficulties, blurred vision and severe allergies.  Of course these are merely symptoms and many of these can be tied to other health problems as well.  The preferred adrenal test can be done through blood or saliva testing to check the cortisol and DHEA levels.

Like most any health problem, when treating adrenal imbalances, the cause is the cure.  There are several strategies that help support the adrenal glands such as B-vitamins (especially B5), Omega 3 fatty acids such as fish oil, vitamin C, magnesium, and various other herbs.  We use a product called Alkadrenergy that works particularly well.  However, unless you desire to take these products for the rest of your life, you must ultimately address the lifestyle factors at the root of the problem.  Much of this involves changing your routines.  For instance, you should go to bed at the same time and try to get close to eight hours of sleep each night.  Exercise is critical to reduce stress, but don’t over-train.  If you’re stressed with your work or personal life, make time for stress relieving activities such as yoga or meditation.  Some people just need to learn to say no and not do everything for everybody!  Fruits and vegetables actually have a sedative effect that will help relieve the fight/flight response whereas most processed foods and sugars feed it.  Likewise, consuming quality fats and proteins such as raw nuts and coconut oil can be helpful as well.  In some cases, adrenal imbalance is caused by food allergies and going sugar-free or gluten-free is the best solution.  Regardless of whether you’re suffering from adrenal fatigue or not, stress is indeed the “silent killer” and all of these lifestyle and stress-relieving strategies are helpful for promoting a greater state of health and wellness in addition to relieving adrenal stress.

Burning Fat

Last week I discussed the importance of body composition and that maintaining adequate muscle over fat is considered to be the most important factor in longevity and aging gracefully.  This week I happened to find an article that discussed the two most important methods of improving this body composition by reducing fat.  Obviously, these methods are diet and exercise, but this particular article included some specific strategies and associated science to get the best results.

Regarding exercise, when it comes to improving your fat-to-muscle ratio, all the research agrees that high intensity interval training (HIIT) is the optimal method.  As I’ve written in the past, HIIT involves warming up for two minutes followed by increasing and decreasing your workout intensity to raise and lower your heart rate for 16 more minutes and finishing with a two minute cool down.  You can do this when you run, swim, bike, or any other kind of cardiovascular workout.  The reason HIIT delivers such impressive fat-burning results is because there are several benefits to raising and lowering the heart rate repeatedly.  First, this workout burns more calories during workouts, but also during recovery time.  According to the American College of Sports Medicine, the calorie burn is 6-15% greater than other workouts.  Perhaps most importantly, HIIT workouts increase human growth hormone and testosterone.  These two hormones combined are a potent formula for building muscle at the expense of fat.  Finally, HIIT is more efficient – you can achieve a better workout in 20 minutes than most do in an hour.

In a very similar way, because of its efficiency in fat burning, there is a method of eating that is getting a great deal of attention.  Intermittent fasting may be the best way to shed excess fat and prevent the most common forms of chronic illness.  This method helps regulate your insulin by shifting your metabolism into a fat-burning state rather than and sugar-burning state.  There are several strategies for intermittent fasting, but all of them require you to take 2-3 days each week where you don’t eat for approximately 16-20 hours.  The most popular method was proposed by Dr. Crystal Varaday where you eat whatever you want every other day and you fast on the alternate days.  A more health-conscious model was proposed by a Dr. Mosley who believes it’s better to eat a diet low in sugar and processed carbs three days per week and fast on just two days.  With both of these methods, you are allowed a single 400-500 calorie meal (snack) during fasting days and only water and tea after that.

The benefits of both of these fat-burning strategies are very impressive and well researched.  If you’ve struggled with weight loss and shedding belly fat, I encourage you to learn more about both of these methods and really understand how and why they work.