Spices

The Journal of Medicinal Foods published a top-ten list of herbs and spices that decrease aging.  Mostly due to their antioxidant values, this list included spices such as: cloves, cinnamon, allspice, apple spice, pumpkin spice, Italian spice, oregano, marjoram, sage, and thyme.  As a general rule, all herbs and spices are health-promoting largely due to their inherent minerals and vitamins.  With this in mind, I uncovered some specific cooking spices that have been well recognized in boosting health.

If you are looking to boost your general immune function try the following:  Licorice can reduce inflammation by boosting the steroid production of the adrenal glands.  Turmeric and oregano act as very strong antioxidants which will reduce stress to the immune system.  To help with other inflammatory and infectious disorders try these:  Cloves, ginger, and nutmeg all reduce inflammation and help fight against bacteria.  Likewise, cinnamon helps fight various bacteria and has even been known to kill E. coli and assist with urinary tract infections.  Although it’s only been proven in mice studies thus far, nutmeg has elicited significant reductions in anxiety and depression and also insomnia.

In addition to its immune benefits, turmeric has also been proven to provide numerous anti-cancer benefits.  Turmeric is a spice that is mostly found in Indian food where rates of colon, breast, prostate, and lung cancers are all 10 times lower than what we see in the U.S.  How does it do this?  Numerous studies have found that turmeric inhibits the production of tumor cells, it boosts liver function to help detoxify, and it also helps destroy mutated cancer cells so that they cannot spread through the body.  Just like the rest of these spices, turmeric only works if you cook with it and this only happens when you are in your kitchen cooking real food.  Don’t look for many of these spices when you are going out to eat.  My advice would be to look up a few recipes containing these spices that you could start cooking routinely.

The only downside to turmeric is that most of it is bioavailable at 15%. This means that however much you eat or take in a capsule is only getting into the cells at 15%. Inflavonoid by Metagenics has solved this problem. When they combine curcumin (the active ingredient in turmeric) with fenugreek fiber, absorption into the cells is increased by 45 times making it that much more effective. We carry this as a regular supplement in our office if you’re interested in trying it.

Remaining Afloat

I want to put a name to a concept that I’ve reported on multiple times in the past.  In 1993 a term was coined to explain the wear and tear on the body and what happens when our levels of physical, chemical, and emotional stress become greater than our ability to adapt.  The term is allostatic load and it explains the physiological consequences to the nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system as they become compromised as a result of chronic stress.

When the body is in a state of balance and responding appropriately to life’s stresses and everything is working as you were designed, you are said to be in a state of allostasis.  The stresses that accumulate over time and have been proven to accelerate the aging process and the likelihood of disease are known to increase our allostatic load.  An easier way to think about this is as if you were floating in a raft in a pool on a calm, warm day.  This would be a state of allostasis.  However, if your kids started cannonballing into the water, making waves and began to place rocks in your raft, this would be equivalent to increasing your allostatic load.  As more rocks are placed in the raft, you begin to sink deeper and you would likely begin to kick and paddle to stay afloat.  However, you can only maintain this struggle for a limited time.  Eventually, because you begin to fatigue or more rocks are placed than what you can fight against, you will inevitably sink.  Staying afloat in this analogy is equivalent to maintaining health and a normal physiology.  The rocks are analogous to our physical chemical and emotional stresses whether they are traumas, poor posture, sedentary lifestyle, sugars and other inflammatory foods, toxins, emotional stressors like worry, anger and guilt and even lack of proper sleep. 

In the body, as these stresses increase and allostatic load increases, different hormones such as epinephrine and cortisol increase to cause problems in the gastrointestinal tract and circulation, along with increased nervous system activity, higher blood pressure and cholesterol and a weakened immune response.  Fortunately, you can work to remove the rocks out of your raft and decrease your allostatic load.  By removing interference to the nervous system from misaligned vertebrae, this is what chiropractic care does.  Likewise by increasing circulation, relaxing muscles, and decreasing stress, this is what massage and acupuncture do.  Meditation, exercise, proper diet and sleep all function to decrease your allostatic load.  The point of this discussion is that stress is real and it can sink you, but with some discipline and a little work you have numerous methods to decrease your load and remain afloat for a long and healthy life.

Remember When?

Most of us 30 years of age and older may recall the tradition that when you were found to have an ailment or early sign of disease you were told to change your diet, exercise, or reduce stress and then prescribed a medication for a short period of time until you could be re-evaluated to see if you’d made the appropriate changes.  Do you wonder what happened to those times?  Not long ago, I saw a presentation by one of the world’s top economists who explained why things have changed. 

The change did not start with your doctors; it started at the pharmaceutical companies where this economist worked before going to work at the White House.  He explains that drug companies are public traded corporations, thus decisions are made largely at shareholder meetings where economic prosperity rules.  Around 25 years ago, a trend came about to promote what are called “lifestyle drugs.”  These are drugs that manage your symptoms and blood values but these drugs would be recommended for extended periods of time and often the rest of a patient’s life.  In a corporate shareholders’ meeting, this was the right decision because it made the most economic sense.  I believe it was an easy sell for the doctors too because they were tired and frustrated of making lifestyle recommendations such as proper diet and exercise that patients often did not comply with and as a result not many were getting better.  Lifestyle drugs lowered blood pressure and cholesterol numbers, reduced symptoms of arthritis, depression, and indigestion and so everyone was happy.

My question is this – if you are diagnosed with, let’s say, high blood pressure and you use a drug to manage your numbers, do you still have high blood pressure?  What happens when you go off the drug?  100% of the time, your numbers will go back up unless you’ve made the appropriate lifestyle change to address the cause of your high blood pressure (or virtually any other illness) in the first place.  My challenge to you is this – surprise your doctor.  Ask what you could/should be doing to address the cause of your symptoms so that you can eventually get off your medication and then go do those things!  This is the only way you move out of a symptoms management “sick-care” model and back into a model of true health.