Longevity

Of all the subjects written in this column for the last six years, I suppose more articles have been written about longevity than any other subject.  This must make it appear to the reader that I’m obsessed with living forever.  On the contrary, I simply believe that with longevity comes a more fulfilling life through better health and vitality.  I also believe that success leaves footprints.  If we can follow the footprints by those with longevity, we learn how enjoy better health.  Fortunately, there are known predictors of longevity that can be measured.

Some of the keys to long life I've covered in the past.  For instance, maintaining low insulin levels is critical.  This means eating a diet low in sugar while high in fiber and low glycemic foods such as vegetables.  Physical exercise is also key to keeping insulin levels at bay.  The number one predictor of longevity is body composition.  This means keeping your percentage of muscle high while keeping your fat levels at a minimum.  Just like insulin, maintaining muscle requires regular physical exercise, a low-sugar diet with adequate high quality protein.  But don’t forget about stress!  High levels of emotional stress will elevate insulin and make it difficult if not impossible to build muscle at the expense of fat.  At a training seminar for our 8 Weeks to Wellness program, one of our presenters spoke about another marker of health and longevity – Phase Angle.  In a sentence, phase angle measures the health of our individual cells.  Our bodies are a community of about 100 trillion cells and we’re only as healthy as these individual components.  If our cells are sick, we are sick or heading that way.  Phase angle is measured by a piece of equipment called a bio-impedance machine.  It’s simply an electrical device that measures how quickly a micro-current travels through the body.  This current travels through our body fluids, our muscles, our fat, and our individual cells.  As the current travels through the cells, it is slowed (mostly by the cell membrane) and it bounces through the cells.  The feedback from this current will tell us if the cell wall (membrane) is healthy, if the cell is full of fluid, or dehydrated, and if the electrolytes are in balance.  A low phase angle indicates that there is cell death occurring or breakdown of the cell membrane.  Cell membranes are broken down by oxidative stress and inflammation.  This is simply poor lifestyle (toxins, sedentary lifestyle, stress, inflammatory diet).  One particular toxin that damages cell membranes is arachidonic acid.  Where do we find this?  In all processed grains!  One of the things that helps increase phase angle is proper fatty acids – in particular those found in fish oil.  Vitamin E has also proven beneficial.  There is no drug that improves phase angle; only healthy lifestyle including regular physical exercise and proper diet and nutrition.  By now, I hope you’re seeing the trend regarding health and longevity.  If you’re intrigued by your body composition or this phase angle, it is something we now do for every client upon their initial exam as part of their Wellness Score.  We’re offering this score at a discount for the month of November for just $27.

Seasonal Solutions

With the colder, wet weather, I've been seeing more people with flare-ups of chronic problems and complaints of various aches and pains.  While, I suppose on one hand this is good for business, on the other hand, there are some simple solutions to deal with these aggravations that we all should consider as the seasons change.

In following this column, you should already know that it’s been proven that low pressure fronts in the weather do indeed increase the inflammation associated with arthritis, allergies, sinus problems, and general aches and pains.  Likewise, you should also know that inflammation has been implicated with pain as well as every disease known to man.  If you can win the war on inflammation, you feel better and live a longer, healthier life!  So, if the crappy weather increases inflammatory problems, how do you overcome this, outside of moving to a less threatening environment?  The obvious solutions are the same lifestyle strategies that help any health problem – eat better, mover better (exercise), and think better by reducing stress and getting proper sleep.  These should always be your long-term strategies.  However, there are a few short-term approaches that can give you some quick relief.  At this time of year you should always think about taking or increasing your vitamin D.  The only way to truly know if you’re low in vitamin D is through blood testing, but it is generally accepted that D can be safely taken at 4-5000 I.U.s per day especially through the winter months until we begin getting our D naturally from sunlight again in the spring.  Vitamin D is particularly important for dealing with seasonal affective disorder, more commonly known as the “winter blues.”  Another common solution is fish oil and vitamin C.  The C and the omega 3’s from fish oil are necessary ingredients for all the steroid hormones produced by the adrenal glands.  These are your body’s natural anti-inflammatories.  In fact, 3000 milligrams of vitamin C have been proven to be as effective in reducing inflammation as prescription medications without the nasty side-effects on the kidneys and liver.  There are also some less scientific “folky” methods of reducing inflammatory pain.  Possibly the oldest remedy is organic apple cider vinegar.  While the reason for its results are largely unknown, cider vinegar can be very effective at reducing joint and arthritic pain and some studies have even shown that it reduces blood sugar and insulin levels.  It’s thought that 2 tablespoons of vinegar in the morning diluted in water or juice is the best way to achieve results.  Vinegar is very acidic so make certain you dilute and use the dark, organic variety.  In the end, reducing inflammation has much to do with antioxidants.  These are the little chemicals that fight against free radical damage.  Fruits and vegetables are your primary source of antioxidants, but as I've mentioned before, green tea is a super anti-oxidant.  Use a combination of these strategies along with a healthy lifestyle and this should help you get through another long cold winter much more easily.

Brain Boost

One of the very first articles I wrote for this column was about the benefits of physical exercise for improving memory and preventing disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.  The good news is that nearly four years later, this information is still true.  In fact, some newer research reported in a recent book titled, The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain shows that exercise is absolutely vital for memory and proper brain function.

It wasn’t that long ago that the physiology books and med-school instructors taught that loss of brain cells was permanent and irreversible.  Fortunately, this was simply not true.  In the past, I’ve shared the research that emotional stress will shrink the cells of the hippocampus (considered to be the memory center of the brain).  One recent study proved that regular exercise will actually enlarge this memory center by 1-2% per year throughout life!  If you’re wondering how exercise can do all of this, the experts believe it’s because of the increased blood flow to the brain.  They also believe that physical exertion develops new nerves and increase nerve-protecting compounds.  Finally, numerous studies have shown that exercise alters the damaging proteins in the brain that are directly linked to Alzheimer’s.  Researchers also believe that you don’t have to dedicate large amounts of time to get a brain boost – as little as 20 minute workouts can improve long-term memory.  In one study of elementary students, they found that 40 minutes of exercise every day increased IQ by nearly four points on average and the fittest students scored 30% higher on IQ testing than average students.  In adult studies, employees who exercise regularly are about 15% more efficient at their jobs.

In most of these studies, it appears that the type of exercise doesn’t really matter as long as you’re getting appropriate exertion to get the heart pumping and increase blood flow to the brain.  Studies involving weight training, walking, running, and other forms all generated similar results.  The key is to know your target heart rate and get up to 90-100% of your target several times throughout the workout.  The only catch to all of these studies is that if you are looking to improve the brain, the exercise needs to be regular and routine.  In a recent rat study, they found that stopping exercise for just three weeks duration resulted in the nerve cells of the brain to begin to decrease and memory to suffer.  In a second similar study where the rats had only been exercising for a short time (10 weeks) followed by three weeks of inactivity, they determined that the benefits of the exercise were lost and the memory and nerve development was the same as those rats that had always been inactive.  The moral of the story is that exercise needs to be done and it needs to be done regularly!  But if you’re worried about aging gracefully and preventing the emotional hardship that goes with losing memory and dealing with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, this information is still great news and should give you hope and motivation.

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.