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. 

Think Posture is Insignificant?

As a professional who looks at the spine, I believe we’re at an all-time low in postural awareness.  In my experience, you will find less than 10% of the general population who displays the ideal anatomical posture.  Why is this?  Most likely there are a multitude of reasons from too much time sitting in desks, in cars, on the couch or in front of the computer, to a general lack of exercise, to the stress of heavy backpacks and purses, to improper mattresses and chairs.  In regard to the neck and shoulders I believe all the time people spend looking down to play handheld games, to text, and even to read, places undo stress on the neck and shoulders.  Get the books and gadgets up so that you aren’t looking straight down!  More than anything, I believe the problem is poor habits simply because most people don’t care that much about proper posture.  Here’s some research to hopefully make you care.

In the past I’ve discussed the model of tensegrity which proves that the bones of our spine and skeleton are never supposed to be rubbing together.  Only when posture and alignment are compromised do our joints “rub” creating the imbalanced stress that contributes to arthritis.  If this greater risk of arthritis is not motivation enough, a recent journal article proved the relationship between head/neck posture and pulmonary (lung) function.  As the head goes forward in posture (as it does with most) the resulting loss of the proper curvature of the neck will reduce normal motion of the head neck and shoulders and as the study showed, it will reduce breathing, oxygenation to the cells, and proper nerve flow.  They even found that incidence of asthma was greater in those with improper neck curvature.  This really should come as no surprise as the first chapter of any physiology book will state that our anatomy dictates our physiology!  The researchers found that proper posture is critical to your autonomic nervous system which contains the nerves that run all your organs and glands.  In particular, they found that changes in neck posture affected the Vagus nerve that controls the heart, lungs, and much of the digestive system.  The positive side of the study is that they found that loss of curvature to the neck could be restored through, chiropractic, specific exercises and improved habits and awareness.  And when the curvature improved, so did breathing, oxygenation, and nerve flow to the organs.  Watch your posture and especially make proper posture a priority to your kids!

Inflammatory Insights

In the past I’ve vilified inflammation and pointed out that inflammation is at the root of every disease.  However, I’ve also been known to point out that the body is always smart and most everything that occurs inside the body is actually a perfect response to a stimulus or stressor from our environment.  Thus, if the latter is true, there must be a reason for the redness, swelling, and pain associated with inflammation.  In this article I’d like to point out some of the benefits of this natural reaction of the body and provide strategies for dealing with chronic inflammation.

The inflammatory response is a natural defense mechanism that is triggered whenever body tissues are damaged or threatened by trauma, irritating chemical toxins or viral/bacterial infection. Most of the body’s defense tools are located in the blood and inflammation causes swelling and stretching of the blood vessels so that white bloods cells, large proteins focused on tissue repair and different hormones can move into the tissue to initiate the healing process.  The swelling also helps to dilute any harmful chemicals in the area and bring in large amounts of oxygen and nutrients.  Acute inflammation has even been shown to be important for immune function including increasing the body’s ability to mediate T-lymphocytes which are the white bloods cells associated with fighting infection and eliminating cancer cells.

The problem occurs when acute inflammation becomes chronic as this is a sign that the body is not healing appropriately.  This phenomenon is much more common with people that have a lower level of health due to high stress, poor sleep, lack of exercise, poor diet, toxicity, and a generally weakened immune and/or nervous system function.  The typical approach to treat chronic inflammation is to use corticosteroids.  Dr. Andrew Weil, in his book Spontaneous Healing, reports “I consider them (steroids) dangerous drugs, much misunderstood, abused and over prescribed. Steroids are toxic, cause dependence, suppress, rather than cure disease, and reduce the chance of healing by natural treatment. Moreover, they weaken immunity.”

My experience is that you have to start by restoring health to the body in order to heal from chronic inflammation.  First, get rid of the chemical toxins by doing a detox and cleaning up the diet while drinking large amounts of water.  This is imperative!  Next, supplement with an omega 3 such as fish oil, heal the gut with probiotics, and take in adequate minerals or green food supplements to alkalize the body’s pH.  Focus on stress reducing methods such as meditation and yoga and make proper sleep a priority.  Chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, cold laser, and physical therapy can often be of huge benefit.  Finally, once you start feeling better, start off slow, but commit to regular exercise to finish it off.  While there are other factors that can help, this is a basic formula for recovering from any chronic inflammatory condition.

Why Vitamin C

Colds, flu’s, bronchitis, and allergies seem to be at an all-time high this winter and many people are looking for relief.  As for myself, I’ve always had luck taking doses of Vitamin C and a product made from coconut called Lauricidin.  But does Vitamin C really work, and if so, why does it work?

Vitamin C is well documented to repair collagen – in fact, it’s necessary.  Collagen is fibrous connective tissue that lines the surfaces of the skin, blood vessels, bone, and tendons. Likewise, recent research showed that 3000 mg of Vitamin C had the same anti-inflammatory effect as the prescription Celebrex for symptoms of joint pain.  This is likely because Vitamin C helps the body produce the steroid hormone Cortisol.  This makes it a great supplement for joint injuries and inflammatory conditions.  Vitamin C is also proven to thin the blood and raise HDL – the good cholesterol.  At the same time, evidence shows that the nutrient helps clean artery walls thereby helping prevent arteriosclerosis.  Finally, an Oncologist named Dr. Simone reported that high doses of Vitamin C with its strong antioxidant properties deprives rapidly dividing cells such cancer cells, viruses, and bacteria of oxygen and glucose.  This is the key for fighting infections.

Vitamin C competes for the same receptor sites on the cell membrane as glucose.  These sugars are known to increase inflammation, stress the immune system, and feed the unpleasant cells just mentioned.  By blocking glucose from entering the cell, Vitamin C helps prevent these unpleasant consequences.  The lesson to learn here is that it’s sugar that is the real problem.  Yes, supplementing with Vitamin C appears to help your body fight off infection more quickly by diminishing the negative effect of glucose.  But you can accomplish the same results by eliminating or at least limiting sugar from your diet.  The last thing to remember about Vitamin C is that your kidneys will only process 1000 milligrams at a time and if you take too much during a day, water will be drawn into your colon resulting in loose bowel movements.

Maintaining Balance

Since chiropractic is about restoring proper alignment and motion to the spine to remove pressure and tension off the nervous system, once you’re aligned or adjusted, why do you go back out of alignment?  This is one of the best questions I’m frequently asked and the answer is not only the key to success with your chiropractic care, but success with health in general.  Just like everything else in the body, the spine and nervous system are dynamic and in a state of constant adaptation.  I’ve written in the past that we are designed for health.  This is not 100% true.  We are designed to maintain a state of balance or homeostasis and health is related to your ability to maintain that homeostasis. Maintaining homeostasis is directly related to the ability to adapt to your individual level of physical, chemical and emotional stress.

In terms of spinal alignment, the physical conditions that may get you out of balance can be traumas, repetitive activities at work, poor posture or something as simple as a poor mattress or chair.  Many times what prevents people from “holding” their adjustments especially as we age is a lack of muscle tone and stability.  This is why spinal exercises are such an important part of your care.  Chemically, different toxins can insult and imbalance the body.  We are what we eat.  A great deal of research has proven that people will not hold their adjustments or maintain other aspects of homeostasis when they are acidic.  When you are acidic, you become more easily inflamed.  To reduce acidity, minerals are required which means you must eat the proper amounts of fruits and vegetables.  Emotional stress can often be the biggest one.  Feelings such as worry, guilt, anger, and frustration put us in a state of stress physiology which alters the function of our organs, hormones, muscles, and joints.  Replacing these feelings with positive thoughts and practicing stress reduction is critical. 

Understanding these guidelines of homeostasis and health are relatively simple.  Making change and putting them into practice can sometimes be a challenge.  Your doctors should act as a coach to help guide you, but applying these principles is up to you.  If you’re interested in more information on making lifestyle changes for better health, contact our office to learn more about our wellness program.