bones Archives - Hudson Valley Chiropractic & Wellness

Barefoot: 5 reasons to ditch your shoes for better health

April 18, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

People going barefoot is not something you see often in modern Western society outside of a swimming pool or similar body of water. And what a shame! There are many health benefits to be gained from going barefoot.

April is National Foot Health Awareness Month, so before I get into some of the specific benefits let’s talk a little first about your feet, what they are capable of, and a little bit of their anatomy, because form = function.

Fun fact: 25% of your muscles & bones live below your ankle. (Another fun fact: your foot is a hydrostat. That means it can change its shape without changing it volume- like an elephant’s trunk.) There are 33 joints that make up your foot and your foot has a very similar anatomy to your hand. Now, imagine for a moment what your life would be like if an evil person came along and put your hands in casts from the moment you started crawling around on them and you wore these casts 75% of your day. It wouldn’t be pretty right? Your hands would be more like paddles or fins than hands. You certainly wouldn’t have all the dexterity that you do now. Wearing stiff shoes from the first moments of walking is really no different.

‘Sure Doc, but we don’t walk on our hands like we walk on our feet. Shoes protect our feet from glass, and sharp rocks and things like that.‘

True enough. But again, that is because most of us walk around on altered foot. If we have a shoe to protect our feet, we don’t build up callouses or tougher skin on the soles of our foot. With shoes, the muscles and other tissues of the feet become weaker and lose their ability to respond quickly and reflexively to sensory stimuli from the bottom of the feet. Remember those 33 joints in your foot? In a fully articulating foot, you have the ability to move them independently of each other, allowing you to ‘lift’ one part of the foot off of a sharp object without unweighting or lifting the entire foot.

Imagine that I took your hand and quickly & forcefully pushed the palm of your flattened hand down on a table. Your hand would stay flat. Now imagine we repeated this experiment, but this time I placed a tack, sharp side up, on the table and lined up your hand to land right over top of this. Hopefully, you wouldn’t let me do this to you, but if somehow I did manage to slam your hand down on the tack, you could articulate your hand in such a way that it tented up over the sharp end of the tack so as to lessen and potential injury from the tack. Your feet innately have this exact same capability when it comes to sharp objects on the ground. Hopefully, you use your eyeballs to scan for any potential danger and avoid stepping on them, but in case you miss it, or miscalculate how sharp the object is, reflexes in the foot should engage to protect you from most injuries.

The reflexes become extremely dulled by shoe wearing for most our lives, so at first going barefoot may be a painful experience to you. With time and patience though, your feet will ‘toughen up’ as your reflexes, range of motion, and muscle strength come back.

If it’s going to take some work, time patience and little pain to get your feet ready to go barefoot, why even bother??? I’m glad you asked. Here’s 5 reasons that going barefoot can help improve your health.

Improved balance. In senior citizens, the greatest health risk is falling, which is directly related to a lack of balance that seems to come with aging. You don’t have to lose your balance just because you are getting older though. We lose our balance because we don’t use it enough. If your feet are articulate enough to go barefoot regularly without pain, then you’ve trained those reflexes in your foot to a very high level, which means you will have much better balance. Better balance = less falls = less likely to break a bone. In fact, I would say that if your are worried about keeping healthy, strong bones as you age, but aren’t regularly working on your balance, you’re missing a huge opportunity to prevent broken bones.
Better posture. You might not wear ‘high heels’ but even most athletic sneakers have a positive heel. That means your heel is higher than your toes relative to flat, level ground. Structurally, even a few millimeters of height difference pitches your skeleton forward. You don’t fall forward though because your muscles along the back of your body- the calves, hamstrings, gluts and low back muscles- overly tense in order to keep you upright. If you walk around like this all the time, those muscles will eventually physically shorten by decreasing the number of sacromeres- the repeating contractile units that make up the muscles. Once they are shortened, they stay that way, unless you give them enough stimulus to lengthen again. Going barefoot puts you in a ‘zero drop’ or neutral foot position and allows your skeleton to achieve a balanced, “stacked” position over the feet without having to shorten your muscles.
Less foot/knee/hip/low back pain. As above, if your muscles have started to physically accommodate their length to keep you from falling over, they are probably very tight too. This means they are putting an increased amount of force on the bones to which they are attached and the joints which they cross. For example, the calf muscles attaches to the lower part of the femor (thigh bones) in the back and the hamstrings cross the back of the knee to attach to the lower leg bone, the tibia. If both of these muscles are short and tight, they are going to pull and compress the knee joint. How many people do you know who have “bone on bone” in their knees, or are losing the space (and therefore cartilage) in their knee joint? Do your knees grind, click or pop? Taking supplements to increase the synthesis of cartilage in the knee can be helpful, but if there is no space for that cartilage to grow because the joint is compressed, how effective will that be? Perhaps that real reason clinical trails fail to find a conclusive benefit from taking glucosamine, chondroitin and/or MSM. By walking around on a neutral foot, going barefoot can help correct these imbalances that lead to poor posture and increased compression forces on certain joints. Also, if you have bunions, let me correct a misconception right now. Bunions themselves are not hereditary. The tendency to wear shoes with a narrow toe box that squish the toes together, can be taught or even encouraged by family members, which is why it might seem to ‘run in the family.’ Also, the shape of your foot- how wide or narrow it is, may be under some genetic control. So if everyone in your family has wider-than-average feet, but all insist on cramming them into average width shoes, most people in the family will end up with foot malformations at some point in live.
Less foot odor/nail fungus. Fungi love dark, moist environments. So do most of the bacteria that lead to foot odor. If you want to clear up these conditions, you don’t need a lot of expensive creams, sprays or powders. You do need to let your feet air out and dry out though. Going barefoot around your house or yard more often can be a great way to do this. (Note: if you have an advanced case of nail fungus where most or all of your nails are thick brittle and yellow, please see a doctor for a medication. Once the fungus is cleared, going barefoot more often can help prevent it from coming back. Especially since some of that fungus is probably now living in your shoes….)
Earthing. When we walk with our barefeet directly on the earth, there is a measurable exchange of ions. Specifically, we discharge excess positive ions. Holistic health experts believe that a build up of these positive ions in our bodies can support inflammation and have negative health consequences. One clinician did a small experiment and found that just 15 minutes a day of walking barefoot on the ground helped her patients reduce inflammation. If their inflammatory load was already low, it helped them lose weight.

If you’re excited about and ready to start adding some barefoot time to your life- excellent! Stay tuned for next week’s post where I will give you some guidelines for incorporating this in your life safely and without injury! Can’t wait? Check out my favorite book on this topic by Katy Bowman.

Also, feel free to follow me on Instagram (@primaldoc) for some inspiration from my own barefoot adventures!

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Calcium supplementation: more harm than good?

October 21, 2015 by drchrista Leave a Comment

Are you taking a calcium supplement or has your doctor recommended one? You might be surprised to learn that the latest research suggests that calcium supplementation is useless at best, harmful at worst.

A study in the online British Medical Journal found that calcium supplementation in patients over 50 years old had no benefit. Neither did increasing calcium intake from dairy foods. This isn’t the case of a single, controversial, contrarian study either. Dr. Ian Ried of the University of New Zealand at Auckland and his team performed a meta-analysis, where they looked at results from all the high-quality studies they could find, and found the same thing.

The bigger problem though is that since this extra calcium intake is not ending up in the bone tissue, its accumulating in the arteries where it can lead to atherosclerosis and heart disease, or it ends up in kidneys where it may lead to the formation of kidney stones.

And yet, a very real problem remains. The National Osteoporosis Foundation estimates that 54 million Americans are at risk for developing the bone-thinning condition and half of American women over 50 suffer from a bone fracture because of osteoporosis.

So if calcium supplementation and dairy foods aren’t the answer to the osteoporosis epidemic, what is???

1.) Vitamin D. Among other things, Vitamin D helps increase absorption of calcium by the bone tissue. Its also vitally important to the regulation of the immune system. If you have any sort of chronic inflammatory condition, work indoors and wear sunscreen religiously, you are probably deficient in the crucial pro-hormone. Almost everyone I test for Vitamin D that is not already supplementing it, is at or below 30 ng/mL, the lower cut-off for “normal” Vitamin D levels.

2.) Magnesium. This mineral is necessary for over 400 different enzymatic reactions in the body, including the absorption of calcium. And yet, magnesium itself is blocked from being absorbed by calcium. So if you are relying on the magnesium from your Cal/Mg supplement to supply you magnesium needs, you probably aren’t getting enough magnesium. Magnesium glycinate is the best assimilated form of this nutrient.

3.) Vitamin K2. One of this vitamin’s main jobs is to determine where calcium should go- into the bone tissue or into soft tissue. When a person is deficient in K2, more calcium ends up in the soft tissue rather than the bone tissue. K2 is found almost exclusively in animal foods, in particular the butter from cows grazing on lush, green spring grasses. The more deep yellow or orange your butter is, the more nutrient-dense it is.

4.) Weight-bearing exercise. Walking, running and lifting weights are the best options. Bone tissue operates according to Wolf’s Law, which is basically that the tissue will respond to the magnitude of the loads placed on it. More loading = denser, stronger bone tissue. This is one of the bigger problems with space travel; the lack of gravity means there is not enough loading on the skeletal system and astronauts quickly develop osteoporosis. Given the lack of exercise and even just movement required by most people to function these days, this might be the biggest piece of the osteoporosis puzzle yet.

5.) Posture. Or maybe I should makes this 4B instead of 5. Its not just how much you load the bone tissue, but also the vectors of those loads. Imagine a stack of blocks and how much load they could take if we pressed straight down in the same line as gravity- a compression force. Now imagine if we could put a curve in the stack of blocks how much less compression force the curved column of blocks could handle. Now remember from above, more loading = denser, stronger bones. So proper alignment leads to stronger, denser bone tissue.

And if you have been taking calcium supplements? It might be wise to talk to your doctor about having a calcium score test done. This can tell how much calcium has accumulated in the soft tissue of your arteries and is a much better assessment of heart disease risk then looking at total cholesterol.

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Free Your Feet- and the rest will follow!

July 15, 2015 by drchrista 1 Comment

In my last post, I talked about how excited I was after reading Katy Bowman’s book Move Your DNA. She likens the understanding about the role of movement in health to an example of nutrition: we can understand that though an orange is healthy and contains important nutrients like Vitamin C, if you only ever ate oranges, you would become deficient in other important nutrient- things like protein, healthy fats and fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E, & K to name a few.

The same is true for the relationship of exercise and movement. Exercise is like the orange. Yes, its good for you, but if the only time you move is when you exercise, you are most likely missing out on all sorts of other movement ‘nutrients.’

I know, I know, it can get overwhelming. You’re already trying very hard to adjust your diet, to get your exercise in and then here I go telling you need all this daily movement to be healthy too!

Fear not, there are simple solutions! For one, please realize that you don’t have to carve out a separate time in your already busy schedule to get your ‘movement nutrients.’ That’s the best thing- they are optimal when you build them into your daily routine.

“Make movement a part of your every living.”

Walking more is a simple way. Are there errands you could run on foot instead of in the car? Can you walk to the post office instead of driving there? What about work? Can you park in the furthest spot from the door to your office and then walk from there? Can you send a print job to a printer on another floor so you have an excuse to take a flight of stairs and go for a little walk? I bet with a little creativity, you can come up with more ways to include movement in your regular daily schedule.

Another thing I have been doing more of lately is going barefoot!!! Did you know that there are over 33 joints in your foot alone??? And each of those joints has multiple ways in which it can move- provided its allowed to do so. And unfortunately, shoes block most of that motion- even the most supportive, orthopedic shoes. In fact, those are some of the worst offenders! They ‘outsource’ the work of supporting your foot to the shoes instead of letting the muscles of your foot do that job. When that happens, the muscles become weakened and then your foot increasingly relies on the shoe in order to support it. This can lead to pain anywhere between the foot and low back (and in some cases, even higher!)

By going barefoot more often, you get these joints working again while strengthen the muscles of your foot. It’s an easy way to get more movement in your day and all you had to do was take your shoes off! If you are new to going barefoot, its best to start out by doing this in your yard on the ground. The floors in our homes can be unnaturally hard with very little ‘give.’ These unnaturally hard surfaces can make foot pain worse, or cause pain when there was none before. The soft earth is a great, forgiving surface to get started on. There’s an added bonus too. Just like your shoes vastly limit the number of movement that the joints of your foot can do, walking all the time on flat, level surfaces does the same. When you walk on an uneven surface like the ground, your foot has to move in lots of novel ways. The provides tons more movement nutrient-density to the joints and muscles of your foot.

What if you live somewhere where you can’t easily go barefoot on the earth? (I highly doubt this- almost everyone has a near by park, but if this is really the case…) Or what if you love going barefoot so much that you don’t want to ever again put on ‘foot coffins’ and yet, you have to in order to go grocery shopping, or to the bank, or into most any reputable establishment or place of business (you can always come to my office barefoot though!)?

This summer my favorite ‘unshoe’ is hands-down the line from Earth Runners. These are my one ‘unshoe’ to do it- walk, trail run, work, wear anywhere my feet are taking me really. They are based on the design of the foot coverings the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico wear and run long distances over rugged terrain in. Even more than that, they have a copper insert that can conduct to the Earth’s energy through the laces to your foot. (Full disclosure- I have not done the research on the health positive and negatives of this conductive phenomenon known as ‘earthing’, though I have seen where the change in conductance was measured with a voltmeter. Currently it appears to me to be one of those things that is benign at worst, so you can only benefit from this. I primarily chose the Earth Runners because I have studied the benefits of improved biomechanics from going barefoot. The ‘earthing’ is just an added bonus!) I wore them on a recent local hike and I enjoyed them quite a lot. They provided enough protection from rocks and hard surfaces, yet didn’t mute the feeling of the ground underneath of my feet. And I think they look at least as cute as most strappy sandals you can get now a days.

If you’d like to start your own transition to more natural, minimal footwear, remember to go slow. You’ve been wearing shoes for decades of your life and your feet have adapted to that. It will take them more than overnight to adapt to the increased loads of a minimalist shoes. Start off walking before you try to run and of course, walk short distances in them at first and then work your way up to longer ones- slowly! Get out and walk on softer surfaces in nature as much as you can. It’s not only good for your body, but the spirit as well. (and you’ll get some Vitamin D from the sunshine!)

For more information, or to get your own Earth Runners, see their website at www.earthrunners.com.

Sitting is the new smoking and walking is the new superfood

June 27, 2015 by drchrista 4 Comments

I’ve been geeking out lately on all things natural movement. It started when I picked up Move Your DNA by Katy Bowman. Actually, I had ordered the book when it first came out, but just now got around to reading it. I’m sorry I’ve waited this long!!!

As a chiropractor trained extensively in the function and disorders of the musculoskeletal system, I’ve always taken a keen interest in Katy’s work. What I love most about it is that what Katy talks and writes about is functional movement. It’s to chiropractic what functional medicine is to the western medicine/sickcare model.

I help fix my patient’s musculoskeletal complaints in the short-term, but the reality is that most of those symptoms came to be because of long-standing patterns in how a person uses (or doesn’t use) their body. Take for instance, someone who has developed arthritis in their lumbar spine. They probably have lost disc height and maybe have begun to grow osteophytes off of their vertebrae. Osteophytes are bone spurs that begin to grow in areas where a tendon attaches to a bone. They don’t develop simply because you get older. They develop in response to abnormal forces/loads placed on that muscles/tendon/joint every minute of every day, day in and day out, for years.

With this in mind, the only way to truly ‘fix’ the problem is to begin to undo those patterns of movement that place the abnormal loads on the tissue in the first place. This involves diligence and commitment to maintain awareness about problematic movement patterns as well as consistency in executing restorative stretching and strengthening exercises (Note that I did not say that it involves getting adjusted three times a week for the next six months). The payoff for that hard work and consistency is similar to that to be gained from consistent commitment to eating a whole foods diet: significantly improved health and longevity!

Regaining functional movement and natural movement patterns isn’t just about being pain free; it’s also about health. Through a process known as mechnotransduction, the loads placed upon an individual cell can affect how the DNA of the cell is expressed. Whoa! Movement is another epigenetic factor!

One of my favorite points Katy makes in her book is about atherosclerosis. We’ve been indoctrinated to believe that this disease develops because your cholesterol is too high (because you’ve been eating those evil animal foods and saturated fats that humans have been eating since their evolutionary beginnings) and that statins will save you. This indoctrination is so complete, we in the alternative health movement are guilty of assuming that if our patients & clients simply eat better, they can reverse the disease and no longer need a statin drug. What Katy points out however, is that if atherosclerosis is primarily a biochemical problem, then we should see it develop in any and all arteries with equal frequency.

But that’s not what we see.

Atherosclerosis is most likely to develop in the abdominal aorta, iliac, femoral, popliteal, carotid and cerebral arteries. Basically, in areas where the arteries have to change angles. This changes the hemodynamics, or the way the blood flows through those arteries. Picture two rivers- one flowing fairly straight and another with lots of twists and bends. The one with all the twists and bends while have more eddies and rapids. When a similar change happens within a blood vessel though, we get localized areas of higher force, or loads on the cells of the artery wall. Over time, this may damage the arterial wall, leading to a need for cholesterol to act as the spackle to patch the ‘hole.’ Can you see now why taking a statin drug may lower your total cholesterol level but not actually protect you from cardiovascular disease or a heart attack???

Here’s what more- most of those arteries named above where atherosclerosis is most common are in the area of the hip and the knee. Which for most modern humans who are accustomed to sitting in chairs for hours a day for YEARS of their life, increases the loads on the arterial walls even more, because if the joints are constantly stuck in 90 degrees of flexion from chair sitting- so are the arteries. So what is really leading to the atherosclerosis- eating healthy animal foods in your diet or being stuck sitting in a chair all day? Can you see now why sitting is the new smoking?

At this point, you are hopefully itchy to get out of your seat and move somehow. So here’s a few practical tips to get you started moving more functionally.

1.) Stretch your calves. Get a towel, roll it up and place it on the floor. Put the toes & ball of one foot on it so that they are higher than the heel. Now stand with your feet hip width apart, toes even with each other. You should feel the stretch in the calf muscle on of the leg that is on the towel. Now notice the rest of your posture. Do you have to learn forward at the waist to maintain this position? Is your pelvis tucked under as you hold this position? With the foot not on the towel, try stepping forward a few inches. Do you have to break at the waist to accomplish this? Does you pelvis tuck to allow your foot to come forward? This is a great stretch to do through the day, every day. Since most of us have worn positive-heeled shoes for our entire lives, this stretch begins to combat the muscle length (& mass) changes most of us have in the lower leg that have developed as adaptations to shoe-wearing.

2.) Do anything but sit in a chair. It’s not that chairs and sitting are evil in and of themselves. It’s that we spend so much time in this one position that over a lifetime of chair sitting, our muscles adapt to chair sitting. So much so, that even when you stand up, your muscles maintain some of the length adaptations they have made to sitting. The fact is that there are many, many ways to sit that don’t involve sitting in a chair with the hips and knees flexed and the pelvis tucked under. The solution isn’t just to stand all day either. The key is to try lots of new and novel positions so your muscles & joints can experience loading in all different directions. Forget apples, kick your chair habit if you really want to keep the doctor away.

3.) Go barefoot. Of course, please be sensible here. If you’ve been wearing shoes all of your life, your foot muscles have atrophied, just like when you broke your arm as a kid and your arm was all little and wimpy when the cast came off. Start with walking around your house barefoot. Try taking it outside in your yard. If you want go next level, get a pair of super minimalist shoes and starting taking walks in them. Start slow and small with your barefoot walks and slowly work your way up.

4.) Speaking of walking… go walk!! Walking is one of the best things you can do for your musculoskeletal system. Think of walking as being on the same level as kale in your diet. You don’t have to go super fast; this isn’t about burning up the calories. Even better, make walking a useful, integrated part of your day. Walk to the post office or the mailbox. Walk to visit a neighbor or friend. Give your walking a purpose other than ‘exercise.’ And just as note here, walking indoors on a treadmill is not the same thing as walking outside. First of all, the biomechanics are totally different. In walking over ground, forward motion is created by hip extension (pushing backwards). On a treadmill, the backwards motion of the tread does that part for you, so all you have to do is flex the hip to swing the leg forward to met the tread in front of you. Especially if you are trying to counteract the musculoskeletal adaptations of chronic sitting, treadmill walking is not the way to go. Also, its messes with your optic flow. Ever notice how when you get off the treadmill you have those few seconds of feeling disoriented and maybe even dizzy? That’s because your brain was getting information that the body was moving, but the eyes were telling the brain ‘nope, same scenery. We’re not moving past or by anything.’ This information mismatch is what gives you that disoriented/dizzy feeling and the science indicates that this only gets worse as you get older. So, do me a favor and just walk outside, mmm’kay?

5.) And speaking of eyes and optic flow- LOOK UP. Look out a window. Focus on something really far away. Or go outside and focus on something far away. We are having an epidemic of near-sightedness because of all the screen time we log. The shape of your eye- and therefore, what you can focus on- is determined by the length and contraction of 6 different muscles around your eyes. And just like any of the other muscles of your body, they will adapt over time to the length at which they are used the most. So if you use them all the time to focus on things 12″-24″ in front of your face, that’s what they are going to be best at. Take ‘eye breaks’ throughout the day to train these muscles to retain their ability to see distances. You can also download a handy Time Out program for your computer to remind you take a screen break, get up and stretch or whatever.

Stay tuned for some more posts about functional movement. And on that note, I’m going to go take a short walk and get away from this computer screen for a bit!

Heal your gut with this simple (and simply amazing) food

September 25, 2014 by drchrista Leave a Comment

As the air turns crisper, we naturally start to crave warmer, moist foods. It’s a perfect time to make simple, nourishing bone broth.

Why bone broth?

For one, its a nutrient dense food. The minerals in the bones dissolve into the broth and are easily digested and absorbed. Bone broth is also rich in the amino acid glycine, which helps nourish and heal the gut. It’s also an extremely economical food. Grassfed beef bones can be bought for mere cents per pound and leftover veggies can be used to fill out the flavor profile. And if that’s not enough to convince you, bone broth will make you a rock star in the kitchen. Add it to soups and stews to make them more flavorful or braise meats in it. My homemade beef broth is what makes my pot roast a perennial crowd favorite. Don’t be surprised if people start asking where you got your mad skills in the kitchen!

You can make bone broth from both beef bones or chicken bones. I’ve found that you can buy the beef bones by themselves, but the best way to get chicken bones is to buy a whole, pastured chicken. Roast the whole chicken and serve it for dinner one evening. Pick the carcass clean and use those bits to make a chicken salad for lunch the next day. Then place the bones into the stockpot and cover with water (3 meals from one chicken makes the investment in a pastured chicken worth it! Also the broth will be more nourishing if you use a pastured chicken). Add 2-3 tablespoons of vinegar (1/2 cup for beef bones) to the water and let it sit for 30 minutes. For beef bones, I like to use a combinations of marrow bones and knuckle bones. The knuckles have more collagen in them, which will add more good nutrients and amino acids to your broth.

After the broth sits for 30 minutes, add some peeled cloves of garlic, a pinch or two of sea salt and some pepper if you’d like. Bring the water to a boil and skim off the foam that rises to the top, then turn the heat down and let it simmer, 24-36 hours for chicken bones, up to 48 hours for beef bones. This is a simple broth, but you can get fancier and add more flavor by adding onions, celery and carrots. Once your broth is done cooking, let it cool. You can skim off the fat that rises to the top, or not. Strain out the bones and vegetables, if used.

Once you have made your nourishing bone broth, enjoy it straight up for a super-nourishing meal or freeze the rest and use it as needed for a soup base, to make stews or to braise meats in. Drink daily for optimal gut health.

Ancestral Health

August 20, 2014 by drchrista Leave a Comment

We have more access to more information about health and disease than at any other period of human history and yet, we are arguably the most unhealthy we have ever been.

Here in the U.S., the sky-rocketing rates of obesity are a daily news story. Rates of chronic illness like heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and autoimmune disease are increasing at alarming rates. Diseases we thought only happened in aging adults are occurring in younger children.

Ironic isn’t?

If you’re old enough, you may remember a time when obesity was rare; when cancer was rare and only your rapidly aging grandpa has developed ‘diabeetus.’ So what happened? What has caused such a profound change in our health?

There are many answers to that question and as of yet, no proven smoking gun. Searching through the myriad of possibilities would take time we don’t have. What we need is a framework for understanding what effects health and gives us a blueprint to search for the place where we seem to have gone off the map.

The concept of ancestral health is that framework.

We think that cavemen lived ‘short, brutish’ lives, but archeology says that is not really the whole story. Sure, life expectancy was low, but that was a population average, mostly skewed because childbirth was such a dicey proposition. There were plenty of early humans who survived well into old age if they managed to survive disease epidemics, broken bones or becoming a meal for another creature. The point is, even if they made it to past all those hurdles, obesity heart disease and poor health weren’t destined for them simply by virtue of having reached that age.

From what archeology studies tell us, hunter-gatherers were lean, well-built with little tooth decay and no need for orthodontics. By studying modern hunter-gatherer tribes, we have inferred that they spent an average of 20 hours a week engaged in activities necessary for survival, spending the rest of their free time visiting relatives, creating art, or engaged in other leisure activities.

Can you imagine? All your needs met in the space of a part-time job? Very little stress and plenty of time to kick back, relax and enjoy life. No running yourself ragged, running in literal circles, going to gym to keep fit. No having to watch every last piece of food you ate in order to stay trim. No smartphone constantly ringing with requests from people who need something from you…right now! Growing old gracefully, with a strong, supple body. Getting plenty of restful sleep each and every night. Unburdened joy. Not sounding so bad, eh?

So how do this relate to health?

Well I’m glad you asked because you see, we have those same bodies. Bodies that want to be lean and fit and healthy and strong. It is our genetic potential and can be our genetic reality under the right circumstances. The problem is that we have changed the rules of the game much faster than our ancient bodies can keep up with and adapt sufficiently to. Since World War II, we have introduced 50,000 novel chemicals into our environment. We haven’t studied the long-term safety of most of these, let alone the combinations of them that we are exposed to daily. GMOs in our food supply, animals raised on grain instead of grass, pharmaceutical drugs, indoor lighting, smartphones, tablets and laptops, constant stress, automobiles- all are things that are completely new to humans beings in the last 100 or so years. All are interacting in ways that eroding our health.

The sad fact is that many of us don’t eat real food anymore. Many of us spend hours a day only exercising the tiny muscles in our hands while sitting on the biggest muscles of our hips and thighs. This is not how our bodies were designed to function and it is slowly killing us.

Using this framework, I make recommendations to my patients to get their current reality to be more congruent with their ancient genetics. Why? Because when these two are aligned, improved health is often the outcome. I may encourage patients to eat a more whole food diet, or to sleep in pattern that aligned with their brain’s ingrained circadian rhythms or to move and exercise in way that builds so-called ‘functional movement’ patterns. In doing so, we honor the innate wisdom of our bodies and their desire to be healthy.

More than just healthy bones

October 5, 2012 by drchrista Leave a Comment

We all know, or have heard by now, that the mineral calcium is essential for strong bones and teeth. Since we were little, we have been exhorted to “drink your milk” and eat plenty of dairy products in order to ensure plenty of calcium in our diet and to have strong bones for the future.

But what you may not know is the multitude of other functions calcium performs in the body. Too many to list here, an important one for you to know is that calcium is vital for proper muscle function. Your muscles need calcium in order to contract and relax. For that reason, calcium can be really helpful to take for muscle cramps or spasm.

I’ve successfully helped patients in my office get relief from painful muscle spasms with calcium supplementation. Calcium supplementation before, during and after athletic events can also prevent cramps and muscle soreness from the increased exertion. I’ve also read reports of alternative doctors successfully treating restless legs with calcium.

An important caveat though before you run to the store to buy some calcium, is that not all calcium supplements are created equal. For one, you absolutely need Vitamin D and Magnesium to absorb calcium. Second is that calcium is most effectively absorbed in an acidic environment. (That’s why trying to get your calcium from an antacid remedy is useless and a waste of money.) But most importantly, the form calcium is in can effect how much will be absorbed. Calcium carbonate is a very common form often made from crushed rocks or shells. It is very cheap to make, hence it is so common in most supplements. However, very little, if any, of this form is absorbed by the body. A highly absorbable form of calcium is calcium lactate.

You should also note that effective calcium absorption requires fatty acids (like omega-3s) and iodine. In fact, one of the risk factors for osteoporosis (brittle bones) is being thin! Not all, but alot of people who are too thin, do not have adequate amounts of fat in their diet. Without these vital nutrients, the bones suffer as well as many other tissues in the body.

I want to go back to that “drink you milk for strong bones” message really quickly. That was largely started by the dairy industry to keep people drinking milk, especially in a time where more and more people were starting to have intolerances to dairy. While milk and cheese do have calcium in them, cup-for-cup, dark leafy greens like spinach and kale have more calcium in them then milk. And the vegetable form of calcium is generally more absorbable. So, really, for strong bones and relaxed muscles, the message should be, “Make sure to eat your dark, leafy greens, and don’t forget a bit of butter or olive oil on top!”

This article is for information only and is not to be construed as medical advice. Please consult your healthcare provider before making any changes to your supplemental or pharmaceutical regime.