March 2008 Newsletter
Want LOTS more Energy Today?
There are some very simple things we can do which will immediately give us more usable energy, and it can start right now!
- Drink more water. The actual formula for just how much we need is to take your body weight and divide that by two. You need to drink that many ounces of water every day. Water is like liquid oxygen. It goes directly to tissues and does not have to be digested or processed. Milk, beer soft drinks, tea, Perrier, juices, power drinks are not water. Water is water and that is it.
- Balance your carbohydrates with your proteins. Most of us consume six times more carbs than protein. If you have pasta, make sure it is about equal in volume/amount to the meat you must have with it. If you have a bagel, put low fat cream cheese on it. For breakfast, have cottage cheese with fruit. For a snack, have an apple with peanut butter or cheese. This will slow down the sugar spike of the carbs and will slow down the insulin production. This is huge for energy!
- Exercise more. Some cardio workout just three times per week for 30 min is enough to push the blood thru the tissues and get you producing high-energy compounds in your body! Exercise moves the joints and keeps calcium in bones. It also cleans out waste products from tissues that have been produced all day.
- Take organic multi-vitamins and minerals daily. Unfortunately most of the food we eat is empty of natural nutrients. It is almost impossible to eat complete meals with our busy schedules and mass produced foods we consume.
Doing these simple things along with getting your body running at 100% thru chiropractic is a sure formula for more energy. Just do any of these and you will begine to feel the results. A big bonus is that you will start to lose weight! Not bad – More energy, less weight - I’ll take some of that!
Winding Down For Sleep
Sleep is so important, yet we let ourselves get so busy that we no longer make adequate time for it. We can live something like two months without food, somewhere around thirty days without water, but just over one week without sleep! Seven to eight hours of regular sleep are crucial to maximum performance. Many people say that the reason they go to bed late is because they have a hard time falling asleep anyway, so why not stay up and watch a movie! Then they fall asleep in a chair or on the couch and have poor quality sleep till they wake up and finally get into bed. Getting ready for sleep is a winding down process that needs to be followed.
After 10p.m. there are critical signals of tiredness, and when these are ignored, the body kicks into an activity phase as though it was daytime, and this can continue until 2a.m. Those people who then go to bed at midnight find it difficult to shut down their mental activity. You should have a routine with a regular bedtime and prepare yourself for bed so your body winds down in readiness for sleep. It should involve avoiding coffee, cigarettes and alcohol late at night because they all disrupt sleep. Half an hours walk after dinner helps digestion as well as the winding-down process. You can listen to relaxing music and have a hot bath with a soothing essential oil added – anything to make sure your body registers bedtime. The main point is to avoid starting anything that activates the mental process.
Chiropractic Care Helps Reduce Anxiety
News stories stemmed from a published report appearing in the September issue of the peer-reviewed periodical, “Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research” (JVSR). The report was a case study of a 19-year old female diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) who suffered from psychiatric symptoms as well as other problems for two years. This case study noted that this patient’s previous medical treatment had included multiple emergency room visits; private specialists; and a rotation of drug therapies including Paxil, Xanax, and Celexa all of which had failed to help her. The patient’s history also included at least three motor vehicle accidents over several years, including one where her head shattered the windshield.
The articles note that according to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety is the most common mental health illness. It affects more than 19 million people ages 18-54. Patients suffering from General Anxiety Disorder make three to five times more visits to doctors’ offices and emergency rooms and the Anxiety Disorders Association reports that direct healthcare costs and lost productivity of these conditions cost more than $42 billion per year.
In December the patient started chiropractic care for correction of nerve interference called “subluxations”. This patient’s results were then documented over a four month course of care. It was observed that medication was discontinued successfully. Additionally, the articles noted that after a four-month course of chiropractic care, the young woman reported an 80% reduction in her anxiety symptoms, including a 90% decrease in her headaches. The patient was able to resume a normal lifestyle without resorting to prescription or over-the-counter drugs.
The research was co-authored by Dr. Madeline Behrendt, Associate Editor of JVSR, and Dr. Nathan Olsen, a chiropractor in private practice in Boise, Idaho. They noted in their conclusion that, “These improvements suggest positive changes in mental health function may be associated with subluxation correction from the application of chiropractic care.”
Dr. Behrendt additionally commented, “This young woman spent two years in crisis, going from emergency room to private specialist, spending thousands of dollars for tests and drug therapy, without any resolution of her problems. A simple, non-invasive spinal screening ultimately provided the findings that made the difference: her spine was subluxated, impinging on nerves, and altering the proper function of her nervous system.” Behrendt continued by asking, “How many other people are suffering unnecessarily because they are missing the proper screening?”
Childhood Asthma And Chiropractic
It is estimated that up to 15 million people suffer from asthma. Of those, 14.8 million are children under the age of 18. Last year there were 198,000 hospitalizations for asthma. In that same sample year, 342 people under the age of 25 died due to this problem. In money terms, the direct cost of managing a patient with severe asthma has been estimated at more than $23,000 per year. The following statistics about asthma come from the Better Health & Medical Network.
- Asthma has increased 46% from 1982-2007 with an 80% growth in children under 18
- In the 5-17 age group, asthma causes an annual loss of more than 10 million school days per year
- Asthma accounts for more childhood hospitalizations than any other childhood disease
- Children with asthma spend approximately 7.3 million days per year restricted to bed rest
- In 2007, there were 7.1 million physician visits for asthma
- Health care costs for asthma were estimated to be $6.2 billion, which is almost 1% of the total US health care costs
- More than 5,200 Americans died from asthma in 2006
Recent articles in publications such as “The American Chiropractor”, and “Today’s Chiropractic” describe strong links between people who suffer from these conditions and nerve interference from abnormal spinal biomechanics. An article appearing in the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research Vol. 1 No. 4, also demonstrated the positive effects of chiropractic care on 81 children with asthma.
According to Richard Pistolese, research assistant for the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association, “Based upon information currently available, chiropractic care represents a safe non-pharmacological health care approach, that may be associated with a decrease in asthma-related impairment, reduced respiratory effort, and a decrease incidence of asthma attacks.” Pistolese goes further to say, “The correction of vertebral misalignments is a non-invasive procedure, which could reduce or eliminate the need for medication, and potentially ease the severity of the asthmatic condition.”
Fish Oil May Be More Effective Than Prescription Medications
Swiss researchers performed a meta-analysis of 97 clinical studies to compare the efficacy of fish oil, statins, fibrates, resins, niacin, or diet alone on mortality rates compared to placebo. Significant risk reductions for overall mortality were observed with fish oil (23% reduction) and statins (13% risk reduction). For cardiovascular mortality, significant risk reductions were observed with fish oil (32% reduction), resins (30% risk reduction) and statins (22% risk reduction). The authors conclude that statins and fish oil offer the most favorable overall benefits by reducing the risk of both cardiac mortality and overall mortality. The greatest risk reduction was observed in the fish oil group.
Football and chiropractic
With football teams clashing it out on the field chiropractors are not far behind. There is significant chiropractic participation in US professional football. In a survey, 77% of National Football League (NFL) trainers reported referring a player to a chiropractor, with 45% of the NFL trainers reporting that they themselves had seen a chiropractor. In addition 31% of NFL teams have a chiropractor officially on staff, and an additional 12% of teams refer players to chiropractors.
If you play football or any sport, you’ll find that chiropractic spinal care will help your speed, coordination, and reaction time. In one study athletes under chiropractic care had an 18% faster reaction time than controls. Sometimes the difference between winning and losing can be hundredths of a second. With that in mind, chiropractic might make the difference between first places and everything else.
Vitamin K shots: Dangerous and Unnecessary?
Hospitals like to administer a synthetic, fat-soluble vitamin K injection to all newborns that is 100 times the daily requirement! If a mother is not malnourished, however, there is no proof that there is a vitamin K deficiency.
The vitamin K shot includes chemicals such as phenol (carbolic acid?a poisonous substance distilled from coal tar), propylene glycol (derived from petroleum and used as an antifreeze and in hydraulic brake fluid) and acetic acid (an astringent antimicrobial agent that may drastically reduce the amount of natural vitamin K that would have otherwise been produced in the digestive tract), formaldehyde (a cancer-causing agent used to embalm bodies), mercury (the most poisonous naturally occurring element) and benzyl alcohol.
Large doses of vitamin K are linked to childhood cancers, leukemia, jaundice and other severe reactions, including death. Animal studies link vitamin K to liver damage, kidney damage and death. Additionally, synthetic vitamin K has never been studied to see if it causes cancer or impairment of fertility. A Lancet study reports, “We conclude that healthy babies, contrary to current beliefs, are not likely to have a vitamin K deficiency…the administration of vitamin K is not supported by our findings…” (6)
The Many Evils of Soda
Hands down one of the worst “food” items you can put in your body is soda, aka pop. And not just regular cola, we’re talking diet, root beer, and all the rest. The scary part is how many ways it can mess with your body. The sugar alone in non-diet sodas has been linked to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay. One can of regular soda has approximately 10 teaspoons of sugar. Try putting 10 teaspoons of sugar in your hand and eating it all at once.
Many people try and avoid these problems by switching to diet sodas, but unfortunately there are other ingredients that cause just as serious of health problems. The phosphoric acid that is in both regular and diet sodas interferes with your body’s balance and storage of calcium leading to weaker bones. There have been many studies that prove drinking soda on a regular basis leads to more frequent bone fractures in both teenagers and adults. How does it do this? Well, all soda is extremely acidic (coke has a pH of 2.5, battery acid has a pH of 1.0, our body’s normally have a pH of 7.4), and therefore is harmful to our bodies. To neutralize the acidity of the soda, our body turns calcium into an alkaline compound. Where do we store nearly all of our calcium…yup, our bones.
So drinking soda regularly forces the body to take calcium out of the bones and use it up.Going back to pH for a moment, studies have shown that our bodies need to be in an alkaline state(between 7 and 14 on the pH scale) to function properly and be healthy. When we are in an acidic state(between 0 and 7 on the pH scale) our body’s are significantly more susceptible to many diseases like cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, kidney and gall stones.
In fact, cancer can not exist in an alkaline environment. Lab tests on terminal cancer patients show their pH level to be around 4.5, much lower than our ideal 7.4. Drinking an occasional can of soda may not cause you to break your leg or get cancer, but on the other hand, wouldn’t it be better to make those little changes in our lives that help our bodies stay healthy, balanced, and functioning in the most optimal way possible? Switching to another beverage, like a bottle of water, may not give you that 15 minute caffeine and sugar rush, but you’ll end up feeling better in the long run anyway.