We recently covered food allergies and the dietary choices that make your hormones the happiest. We’re going to round out our nutritional plan by discussing two important concepts, blood sugar stability, and what it means to choose “high quality” foods. Making dietary choices that stabilize your blood sugar is one of the most important things you can do for your health.
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Why is one person tall and skinny and another short and stout? How can someone eat a 2000 calorie meal and not gain a pound, while another struggles to keep weight off eating a mere 1000 calories a day? When we gain weight, why do some of us pack it on right over that unattainable six-pack, and others only seem to gain from the hips down?
We all have unique bodies. And much of their individuality is determined by how our different hormone-producing glands do their thing. Today, we’re going to talk about that, and how you can tailor your diet to help your glands along, allowing you to look and feel better.
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Is your head spinning yet? With all the information flying around about food – high or low carb, high or low fat, pro or anti carcinogenic, pro or anti inflammatory, synthetic or natural, organic, grass-fed, pesticide free, GMO – how do you make sense of it all? No doubt, dietary information can be dizzying.
Finding a good approach to your diet works best by following some general, baseline principles. If we keep these in mind, wading through the weeds of health information to find the truly good stuff becomes much easier.
There are four areas I typically cover when getting a patient on the right dietary track: Food Allergies, Glandular Dominance, Blood Sugar Stability, and Food Quality. We’ll start with food allergies, and cover the rest in upcoming articles.
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Stress comes in many forms. Most of us understand this intuitively. For example, we know that we feel “stressed” when we have a hard day at work or when we’re carrying a heavy load.
We use the word to describe an intense emotional event, and to convey what is happening to a wooden board bent to the point of breaking.
While the concept seems natural, the actual term “stress” hasn’t been around very long. It wasn’t coined until a researcher by the name of Hans Selye came along in the 1950s.
On the other hand, the idea that people and things could be subjected to environmental irritants has been around for a long time. D.D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic, made this observation back in the late 1800s.
Palmer divided these irritants, or forms of stress, into three categories: mechanical, chemical, and psychological–or what he called “traumatism, poison, and auto-suggestion.”
An example of mechanical stress might be wearing an uncomfortable pair of shoes all day.
Chemical stress might arise from a food allergy or a toxin from unfriendly bacteria.
Psychological stress is perhaps the most well known, and can surface from any conflict such as a fight with your spouse or a bout with an unreasonable boss.
An important thing to understand about all forms of stress is that they’re cumulative. That is, you can’t separate the different varieties of stress and somehow recover from them independently.
If you spend the weekend playing touch football (mechanical stress) and have a looming work deadline early in the week (psychological stress), and as a result of your time crunch, scarf down fast food filled with sugar and hydrogenated fats (chemical stress), then it shouldn’t be a surprise when you’re worn down and sick by Friday!
Selye actually determined this half a century ago when he would stress lab rats in various ways and then observe how their bodies responded. No matter what form of stress, the eventual breakdown always followed the same pattern.
Humans also follow this pattern, and if we don’t make an effort to relieve the various forms of stress placed upon us, we end up sick, injured, or both.
So if various forms of stress can make us sick, then what exactly is health? It’s easy to understand that we feel good until mechanical, chemical, and psychological stressors (MCP) add up and we break down.
But what about that point in between when we have a fair amount of MCP, but we’re not yet sick or injured in any noticeable way (i.e. we don’t have any symptoms)?
That space in between the level of stress we’re currently under, and the level we have where we start experiencing symptoms is called “resistance”.
These ideas are best demonstrated with the stress chart at the top of the page, devised by Dr. John Bandy of Austin, Texas.
The chart reads like a thermometer, with our total exposure to environmental stress (or MCP), reflected by the “Now” point on the chart. Again, various types of stress can contribute to our total stress. Anything from marital strife, to fatty foods, to exercise can add to our overall stress level.
The point “D” on the chart is the Disease point. This is the point at which we begin to exhibit symptoms. “R” then, is a graphical representation of resistance. If the next big stress we are subjected to exceeds our current supply of resistance (“R”), then we experience symptoms of illness or disease.
At any given point in time we have varying amounts of resistance. It varies within and between individuals based on how healthful our diet is, what our job is like, how much exercise we get, whether a loved one recently passed away, and whether we’ve just been exposed to a “bug,” just to name a few factors.
That is, it varies based on how much MCP we’re experiencing.
So health, then, is that state in which we still have some resistance, keeping the level of environmental irritants that we are experiencing from producing symptoms. We are “unhealthy” (or experiencing “disease”), when MCP exceeds our resistance.
Any stress reduces the amount of resistance you have, bringing you closer to a state of disease. These concepts are well described in Dr. W.D. Harper’s book, “Anything Can Cause Anything.” The title gets to the crux of the matter: just like any expense — be it business or pleasure — will deplete your bank account, so too will any stressor deplete your overall reserve of health.
We’ll explore these ideas more next time to understand how we survive and adapt to all the stress that is around us!
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!
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.
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