You Ate What?

by on 03 Feb 2014
in Diet and Nutrition / Food Allergies
Share via emailShare on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedIn Share

I want to talk to you today about a really insidious little substance that may be significantly affecting your health. Here are some hints: It’s not just in Chinese food, it causes more than just headaches, and there’s a really good chance that you had some today.

Yep, I’m talking about MSG, also known as monosodium glutamate. What’s the big deal? Well, glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter that can have effects in areas much more far reaching than just your taste buds.

Excitatory neuro-whatever, you say? I know it sounds like mumbo jumbo, but allow me to explain…

A Little Physiology

A neurotransmitter is a substance that your nervous system uses to transmit a signal from one nerve, or neuron, to another. Your brain, and the rest of your nervous system, is made up of literally billions of neurons, and they each use various kinds of neurotransmitters to convey different signals to each other.

Glutamate is excitatory in that it stimulates any nerve that it acts upon, causing it to have a higher propensity to stimulate other neurons to perform functions that are as widely varying as your nervous system itself. This could be anything from causing a muscle to contract to getting your heart to beat a little faster.

Conversely, an inhibitory neurotransmitter is one that would cause the neuron it acts upon to be less likely to fire. It’s this balance of excitatory and inhibitory signals that determines what nerves fire, what signals are received, and the balance of your brain chemistry.

The actual molecule glutamate is an amino acid. Amino acids are the building blocks of protein. Put a bunch of them together and you have a strand of protein, which might be a muscle fiber or a pigment that makes your eyes a certain color. Individually, however, amino acids have varying roles and functions in the body.

The sodium part of monosodium glutamate is added to make the entire MSG molecule more stable, so that the effects of glutamate are more long lasting.

So What’s the Problem?

MSG stimulates the nerve endings in your taste buds, making the food you eat seem to have a more intense flavor. If you were part of a food study, being asked to rate the taste of a food on a scale of 1 to 10, you’d say the MSG-laced food might rate a 7 or 8, while the one without it would be down around 3 or 4.

The problem is that the effects are not confined to your taste buds. After you swallow it, MSG can go on to stimulate neurons all over your body, causing anything from headaches and heart palpitations, to numbness and shortness of breath.

Being a basic amino acid, glutamate obviously exists in nature, so you might think it’d be a relatively harmless substance. The form of glutamate we get with MSG is not the same as what you find in nature, however.

The processed MSG you consume actually ends up having a high percentage of molecules that have a geometric shape that is a mirror image of that found in nature. This is problematic for the body in much the same way that left-handed people have trouble from time to time working in a world that is dominated by right-handers.

Even though our two hands are identical in design and function, trying to use your left hand on a device designed for the other can be an exercise in frustration.

This simple difference in the MSG created in the food lab can make a big difference in how our bodies react to and process the substance. Additionally, there are many contaminants that come along in the typical MSG creation process that are known carcinogens.

The Labeling Game

On your average food label, you don’t see the phrase “monosodium glutamate” on too many things. This is because that particular phrase is reserved by the FDA for use by a product that has at least 99% processed freeglutamic acid (PFGA). PFGA is a term used to describe the processed, synthetic variety of glutamate mentioned above.

This means that a product can be 98% PFGA, with essentially all of the problems and side effects of MSG, without ever being listed as such on a food label. Instead, what you get are label names like “yeast extract”, “yeast nutrient”, “textured protein”, “hydrolyzed protein”, “gelatin”, and dozens of others. Additionally, labels like “flavor”, “flavoring”, and “natural flavors” may also contain high amounts of processed glutamate.

Regardless of the reason for its use, these products most likely carry all the inherent problems and sensitivity issues of run-of-the-mill MSG. (There is a much more comprehensive list of all the names under which processed glutamate might be hidden at http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html.)

Furthermore, any item on a food label that you know has ingredients, but does not list them, should be suspect. A classic example is a from a popular brand of canned tuna. The ingredients listed are “tuna, water, vegetable broth, salt”.

We know “vegetable broth” has ingredients. In this case, the “vegetable broth” is simply “hydrolyzed vegetable protein” (see our list above) and water. In other words, the only reason “vegetable broth” is added is to get MSG (orPFGA) into the product.

The intent of most of these products is the same: to enhance flavor based upon the properties of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate. There is also a percentage of products that add in PFGA or MSG for their preservative and stabilizing properties, making foods or chemicals less susceptible to the effects of things like heat, light, or acidity.

The common flu vaccine FluMist, according to the CDC, includes MSG as a stabilizer. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not shoot something into my nostrils, to be absorbed by blood vessels just inches from my brain, that includes anything like MSG in it.

The Effects

By far the most common symptom I see in the office from MSG is headaches, particularly migraines. If I mention the possibility of MSG, the usual response I get is, “But I haven’t had any Chinese food recently!” Education about just how many places you can find MSG then begins.

Rashes, redness, stomach discomfort, or “brain fog” are examples of just a few, varied symptoms patients notice that they stop having once they make a concerted effort to eliminate their MSG intake. Once you know MSG is the problem, anytime your particular symptom crops up again, the question to ask isn’t so much “why am I having this headache?”, but rather “what new thing did I eat recently?”

Taking this approach allows you to get better and better at keeping MSG out of your system, keeping you where you want to be: pain free.

Regardless of whether you experience clear symptoms from MSG exposure, my recommendation is to stay away from the stuff. The health of your brain and nervous system isn’t worth a food company’s experiment to try and make their snacks tastier!

0 comments - Leave A Comment

You Didn’t Sleep Wrong

by on 02 Feb 2014
in Back Pain / Diet and Nutrition / Food Allergies / Neck Pain
Share via emailShare on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedIn Share

Referred Pain Can Be A Pain In The Neck

How many times have you awakened some morning in the not-too-distant past to find that you have a new ache or pain? Trouble turning your neck. Pain around your shoulder blade. An uncomfortable lower back.

Where does this pain come from? Did you “sleep wrong”? Was the bed too hard? Too soft? Why, of all mornings, is it bothering you on this one?

The sensations we have in our bodies are not random. The perhaps unimaginable complexity of the human system can make what we experience seem random. But just because the pattern is too difficult for us to figure out doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.

So when we wake up with pain in a muscle, a common assumption is that the problem is right there with that muscle. This may seem self-evident, but it’s not quite so easy. Let me explain.

If your phone keeps ringing over and over from an annoying prank caller, the “symptom” you experience is your discomfort from the phone constantly ringing, disturbing your peace. The problem doesn’t start with the phone, though. It started with the prank caller on the other end of the line.

Bodies have a similar mechanism, where a problem in one area can send a signal that shows up elsewhere.

Take heart attacks, for example. You might have heard that a common symptom experienced during a heart attack is pain in your chest that can spread into your left arm and shoulder.

What does your arm and shoulder have to do with your heart? Not much, except that they share part of their nerve supply from similar levels in your spinal cord.

A common explanation for the shoulder and arm pain experienced by heart attack sufferers is that your brain misinterprets the flood of information it receives from an organ in trouble.

Instead of having us perceive this influx of information as a problem with the organ itself, our brains interpret the signals as pain and discomfort in a part of our bodies that are much more accustomed to those sensations. This kind of discomfort is called referred pain, since the pain is originating one place, but showing up in another.

What makes things interesting is that just about every organ we have seems to have a referred pain pattern.

You might have gotten up one morning, for example, with a “crick in your neck”. Pain into one side of the neck — typically, but not always, the right side — that might radiate down around your shoulder blade.

Patients come in from time to time with this kind of pain. The usual explanation goes something like, “Well, I must have slept wrong or something.” In many cases they’re surprised to find out that the source of their pain has little to do with how they slept, and a lot to do with their gall bladder!

The gall bladder has a referred pain area that usually covers the right side of the neck and shoulder, down around the shoulder blade. As such we have to rule out gall bladder trouble as a source of their pain anytime a patient presents with this kind of pattern.

It’s likely that the crick in your neck is more highly correlated with what you ate the night before than the position in which you happened to fall asleep. Fatty foods, spicy foods, or foods to which you may be allergic can frequently irritate the gall bladder.

After a good physical exam, if gall bladder irritation turns out to be the source of the problem, I have to advise the patient to avoid re-irritating the area with the foods mentioned above. Bile salts and pancreatic enzymes can also be helpful to reduce the load on the gall bladder while it recovers from the episode.

In short, if pain around the shoulder and neck turns out to be referred from the gall bladder, no amount of soft-tissue work will resolve the problem alone.

Since most organs appear to have a referred pain pattern, the gall bladder example used above is just one scenario where a visceral, or organ-related, source must be considered for what might appear to be a structural problem.

Seemingly structural problems can have visceral components. Likewise, a structural problem can have a very direct impact on our organ function.

The job of a truly holistic practitioner is to evaluate all facets of your well-being to help you improve your complete health.

0 comments - Leave A Comment

Your Body Is Not Trying To Heal

by on 01 Feb 2014
in Health Care / Stress
Share via emailShare on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedIn Share

Stress is used as an explanation to cover everything from an outbreak of cold sores to a full blown heart attack. But how do we get from a nebulous concept like stress to a symptom that’s not at all subtle, like a headache in the middle of the night?

Last time we explored the varied forms of stress and we got a broad view of how it leads to illness. In this article, I’ll go over how our bodies actually respond to the varied stresses it is placed under. Understanding this will leave you much more prepared to handle health decisions and challenges you’re faced with every day.

I’ll start with an example that I use with a lot of my patients.

Let’s say a person — we’ll call her Jane — has recently twisted her ankle. As a result, she’s walking more towards the inside of her foot to avoid the pain she experiences when she gets too much weight on the outside.

Jane does this for a week or so, and the pain in her ankle seems to resolve.

A couple of weeks go by with her ankle feeling pretty good, though perhaps just a bit stiff from time to time. However, now the inside of her knee is hurting.

She doesn’t know why this started, but she’s found that, without really even thinking about it, if she just shifts her weight a little bit to the outside of her hips her knee stops hurting.

Jane continues to hold herself this way and six or eight weeks go by without her knee or her ankle hurting. The problem she has now is that her hip has started to bother her.

No change in position or amount of time resting make the discomfort go away.

This is the state she is in when she walks into my office, complaining of hip pain. So put yourself in the doctor’s shoes for a moment, and tell me: where is Jane’s problem?

From experience, I can tell you that if we just address the spot where she’s having discomfort — around her hip — we won’t get very far. She’ll either have no relief at all, or the pain will be back in short order.

Our fictitious patient has essentially layered herself into a problem that won’t go away until we remove the layers in the order that they came about. That is, we have to address the hip, knee, and foot — and typically in that order — to provide our patient with complete relief and optimal healing.

We tend to layer problems on top of each other, and it’s only when we’ve layered so much that our bodies have nowhere to go that we then have pain, discomfort, or some other symptom that won’t go away. Addressing these issues in order is a process that doctors for over one hundred years have referred to as “peeling the layers of the onion”.

The question you might ask at this point is: why wouldn’t the body just heal the original problem and be done with it?

The big concept to get here is that, contrary to popular belief, the body’s main priority when it is hurt is not to heal. The body first and foremost is trying to survive.

Let’s use an analogy.

Imagine you’re sitting in a house somewhere and all of a sudden you feel a huge earthquake begin. You look up and see the ceiling cracking. It seems like the whole house could come down on top of you at any minute, so you start to run to the door to get outside.

Before you make it to the door, though, you find a big bookcase that you had in the hallway has fallen over. It and the dozens of books that were placed upon it are now strewn on the floor in front of you, blocking your path out of the house and away from imminent danger.

Given this scenario, would you take the time to carefully stand the bookcase back upright, and then proceed to neatly place all the books back on their proper shelves in the appropriate order?

Probably not.

Chances are, you’d use whatever strength you had to quickly push the bookcase out of the way, and throw the pile of books in whatever direction was most convenient so you could get out the door fast.

You’re not worried about what the mess looks like right now, as you have survival as your first priority. You know there will be plenty of time later to come back and pick up the mess.

You hope so anyway. But what happens if you come back, and instead of having time to clean up, you now have to deal with a tornado, or a fire, or a family crisis?

The books might just get pushed to the side somewhere, maybe even preventing you from getting easily to the kitchen, bathroom, or bedroom.

Our bodies work very much along the same sorts of principles. Systemically we deal with problems in order of priority, stacking things on top of each other without necessarily having fixed the last thing.

Basically, we adapt to the problem at hand in order to remain functional and survive against the onslaught of stresses that each of us encounters every day. True healing is something else entirely.

Healing, like an orderly cleaning of our traumatized house above, requires time and energy. If that time or energy is concentrated on something else, problems will pile up, and it will require additional, focused energy to neatly clear out the adaptational mess that has developed.

My time as a doctor is spent helping people find their way out of the maze, frequently addressing issues that people might have thought they had completely dealt with ages ago.

What they didn’t realize is that they simply adapted to whatever problem they had, without really healing from it.

Jane never really healed from her twisted ankle. The pain stopped, yes. But she never addressed the altered gait or lack of muscular support that she had from the original trauma.

Each adaptation we layer on top of a problem requires energy. Having to walk over or around the pile of books that used to be on the bookcase takes more energy than simply walking the straight path that used to exist before things fell over.

Every additional adaptation that gets added on requires more energy, until it becomes all we can do just to navigate our little mess of a house.

The effort it takes to clean up the mess (or “heal” from the problem) will take an additional, one-time expenditure of energy. But over the long haul the energy saved in having a clear path will be far greater.

Knowing this along the way can save lots of time, energy, and discomfort. Just like addressing small messes along the way is a lot easier than a complete house cleaning, getting aches, pains, or injuries you might experience evaluated before they become unmanageable will keep your physical, mental, and emotional house in order.

0 comments - Leave A Comment