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You are here: Home / Archives for cortisol

Blue light, your brain and your health

March 22, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

Blue light is much more common in our environment than it ever has been. It’s affecting your eyes right now as you read this on your computer screen or device. I’m not going to tell you it’s all bad. In fact, sunshine has been providing our eyeballs and brain with a source of blue light since the very beginning of time.

The problem is that our brains are still very much attuned to natural rhythms of dark and light. When bright sunlight hits the backs of our retinas first thing in the morning, it actually helps us wake up. Melatonin production is turned off and cortisol production begins. Cortisol should be at its highest levels first thing in the morning.

blue light

blue light

Throughout the day, cortisol levels will gradually decline, with the lowest levels occurring just after dark. Since cortisol is antagonistic to melatonin, it is extremely important that this occurs. People who have trouble falling asleep at night, especially if they feel their minds are too ‘busy’ to fall asleep, often have cortisol levels that are too high in the evenings.

This often happens due to stress, but it also occurs because of all the stimulatory blue light we expose our eyes and brains to at night!

In the evenings and after dark, the bright, blue wavelength light fades away in favor of the orange wavelengths. Without the blue wavelengths stimulating the pineal gland and the rest of the mesencephalon (the top part of your brainstem), cortisol production decreases and melatonin production proceeds.

What’s interesting to note is that melatonin may do more than just help us sleep. There is research that suggests it has cancer-fighting properties; that one of the important things that happens while we sleep is immunosurveillance for precancerous and cancerous cells. In this study, women who worked at night had an elevated risk of breast cancer. Here, it was associated with an increase incidence of colorectal cancers (see citation 12-17 in this last article for physiological mechanisms of melatonin’s anti-cancer properties).

So we need to limit our exposure to blue light after sundown, but how? One of the biggest ways is to eliminate the use of electronic devices at night. Smartphones, tablets, and laptops have all become regular interlopers in our evening routines. For purposes of stress reduction as well as melatonin, it would be optimal to not use these device at all after sunset.

That may not be reality for most of us though. I use a free program on my laptop called f.lux that determines what time of day it is in my next of the woods and then automatically filters out the blue light from the screen. You have to jailbreak your phone or tablet to use it on those devices and I’m not just not up for doing that, so if I have to use one of those devices, I wear a pair of orange googles that filter the blue light. Rumor has it that the new iOS update (9.3) includes a native blue-light filter function , though my phone is not new enough for me to have tried this personally.

One thing I would like to note here-  though there are ways to mitigate the harmful effects of blue light exposure at night, that doesn’t mean you can continue using your device at night with impunity. The postures we tend to use when staring at a small screen, as well as the effects to the muscles of our eyes from focusing on a close up object for long periods of time, all take their toll on our bodies and our health as well. For some of us, the stress caused from social media interactions can be detrimental. For these reasons, it would be best not just to mitigate the harmful effects of blue light, but also to be more conscious and aware of our electronic usage in general. You’ll probably find more high quality, fulfilling interactions with the people next to you then the ones on the other side of the electrons.

Want to learn more about lifestyle factors may be eroding your health? Interested in working with doc that “gets it” and sees the bigger picture of health? Give my office a call today at 845-687-6387 and see how I can help you.

Or sign up for my email list with the link below to get my free report and to receive emails with important information for living your best, healthiest life!

Filed Under: Brain Tagged With: better sleep, blue light, cancer risk, cortisol, melatonin

Fat Loss Simplified!

December 28, 2015 by drchrista Leave a Comment

fat loss simplified

This time of year, many people aspire to lose weight and get in shape in the coming year. When they say “lose weight,” almost all of us mean fat loss. Unfortunately, there is so much conflicting and just plain wrong information out there, that most people will start a program, see little if any results, and give up before February rolls around. So how do you break the cycle and find a leaner, fitter you?

  1. Fat loss is 80% diet. If you’re killing yourself with an hour a day on the treadmill or elliptical, then coming home and diving into pile of junk food because ‘you earned it,’ then the point is being missed. You’ve probably seen the popular meme “you can’t out run a bad diet.” It’s true. You can drop 10 or 15 pounds and still have terrible blood lipid or sugar numbers because of what you are eating. Isn’t the whole point of doing all that exercise in the first place to be healthier?
  2. Instead of calories in, think about calories stored. This is a concept Mark Sisson talks about on his blog, Mark’s Daily Apple. Part of the problem with trying to increase your caloric expenditure (exercising) while simultaneously decreasing your caloric intake (dieting) is that this sends signals to the body that it is in danger. In the interest of your survival, several hormonal mechanisms are activated. First, cortisol is raised to increase your blood sugar levels. If you don’t immediately use this sugar for energy, it’s then stored as fat, under the influence of insulin. The hypothalamus, a control center in your brain, will send out signals to down-regulate (decrease) your metabolism, while simultaneously increasing your appetite in order to save energy and ensure your continued survival. So instead of trying to decrease your calories, to optimize for fat loss, focus on feeding your body high quality, nutrient dense foods like meat, fish, fowl, eggs, plenty of vegetables, a few fruits, nuts and seeds. (They contain fewer calories then processed foods anyway.) Also, make sure you get plenty of high quality fat in your diet. Fat DOES NOT make you fat! Repeat after me: FAT DOES NOT MAKE YOU FAT! Fat is the only macronutrient that does not provoke an insulin release when digested. Carbohydrates do (and proteins to a lesser extent) and the more processed the carbohydrates, the more insulin is secreted. Under the influence of insulin, any excess carbohydrates in the body are stored for later use as fat. This was a very handy adaptation when our species was evolving and living as hunter-gatherers. It helped us survive in times of famine and food scarcity. Unfortunately, these days, with food always being plentiful, we just keep eating- particularly carbs and processed foods- and never signal to our bodies to dip into those stored fats. So, if you are currently overweight and trying to lose fat, you will have better success by limiting carbohydrate intake to just vegetables and increasing your intake of high-quality dietary fats in order to encourage your body to use fat as its primary fuel source. (High quality fats include coconut oil, grass-fed butter and ghee, animal fats from pastured & grassfed animals, occasional use of pure extra virgin olive oil, avocado or walnut oils. Do NOT increase consumption of processed trans and polyunsaturated fats like corn, soybean, canola or vegetable oils. These introduce dangerous free radicals into the body that actually make atherosclerosis worse! Eliminate them at all costs!)
  3. Focus on aerobic exercise. During aerobic exercise, we are able to take in enough oxygen to preferentially burn fat for fuel, the holy grail for fat loss. This discovery is what lead to the ‘aerobics’ craze in the 80s. (Remember Jane Fonda and all that Lyrca?) The thing is, we’ve gotten so focused now on “burning off” all those offending calories that we’ve missed what constitutes ‘aerobic exercise.’ We think “no pain, no gain” (another terrible T-shirt from the 80s) and work harder. Except once you’re working at pace where you can no longer breath through your nose easily, you’ve exceeded this aerobic threshold. Said another way, you are no longer burning fat. Regular old walking is great aerobic exercise for fat loss. If you’re an endurance athlete, get a heart rate monitor and use the Maffetone method to calculate your aerobic threshold and then train only below that heart rate until you see fat loss.
  4. Strength train. The rate of your metabolism is primarily determined by the amount of lean muscle mass you have. More lean muscle tissue = a speeder metabolism. Also, we have some good data that shows that strength training and building muscle helps ‘partition’ your weight loss to make sure that it comes preferentially from fat tissue instead of muscle tissue. If you’ve experienced the pain of yo-yo dieting- where you lost the weight only to gain it back and again (and then some) this is your best strategy to prevent this from ever happening again! By strength training, you will keep your lean muscle tissue and therefore keep your metabolism revved up while getting rid of excess fat tissue. The best strength training to do is to lift heavy a couple of times a week in the big compound lifts like the squat, deadlift, press and pull-up. If you don’t know how to do these lifts safely, please seek qualified instruction from a certified and credential trainer or strength coach. For women, please do not worry about getting bulky from lifting heavy. If you lift heavy, for a short set of 4-6 reps and then give yourself a rest of 3-5 minutes between sets, you will signal increased strength without increased bulk (hypertrophy). Conversely, the best way to increase the size of the muscle is to do light weight and high reps. Also for the ladies, it is so empowering to lift heavy and see how strong and capable your body is! Strength training is a veritable fountain of youth for both men and women as its keeps joints strong and healthy while keeping metabolism high so as to prevent those extra pounds from creeping on each year.
  5. Exercise really hard on occasion. Once you’ve got all that down- eating an appropriate diet, walking or slow running (or whatever exercise method floats your boat) and strength training, then its time to add in a few bouts of sprinting. This only needs to be and should only be done 1-2 times a week and doesn’t have to be very long. One study found that women who sprinted hard on a bicycle for 8 seconds, followed by 12 seconds of rest for a total of 20 minutes, over 15 weeks, had lost 3 times as much body fat as their counterparts who cycled at a steady pace for 40 minutes. (Most of this fat was from their thighs and buttocks too!) Research shows that high intensity interval training has the ability to decrease insulin signaling (decrease fat storage), decrease blood glucose and increase fat oxidation- all in way less time than steady-state cardio. And it doesn’t take much. One or two, short high-intensity session as week is all you need.

So there you have it- 5 simple steps toward obtainable and sustainable fat loss that will also help you become healthier in the process. Sure, there are other ways to lose fat- like crash dieting or becoming a cardio junkie, but those methods ruin your hormone balance and/or increase your level of inflammation and chronic disease risk.  And if you’re just going to ruin your health in the end, what’s the point of doing all that hard work in the first place?

If you’d like to start a journey towards losing fat and getting healthier in the coming year, but are unsure about how to start or need help staying on track, you may want to check out the New Year, New You! whole-food based cleanse that I am offering starting in January. You can learn more about the program here. 

Filed Under: Weight loss Tagged With: calories in=calories out, carbohydrates, cortisol, cravings for sweets, fat loss, hormones, obesity, weight loss

6 “hidden” sources of stress

July 21, 2015 by drchrista Leave a Comment

Stress. It is ubiquitous in this modern age, so much so that most of us consider it inevitable. However, our relationship with stress over the last hundred years or so is vastly different from our relationship with it for the vast majority of our evolution as a species.

For most of our time on this Earth, stress was a punctuated, limited experience. The saber-tooth tiger chased us, we ran away and once safe in our cave, we could rest, relax and repair wounds, tissue damage and even metabolic damaged incurred on our getaway.

Unfortunately, nowadays that ‘rest, relax and repair’ phase never comes and so the damage builds and builds. Even if we don’t feel ‘stressed,’ our bodies may be experiencing stress. Though most of us associate ‘stress’ with psychoemotional stressors, we can experience ill effects from physical stressors too- and the body does not distinguish between physical and mental stresses.

So what are some ‘hidden’ sources of physical stress that might be contributing to your overall stress and slowly eroding away your health?

1. Food intolerances. Intolerances are different immunologically than a true food ‘allergy’ so the symptoms can be a lot more subtle. Headaches, fatigue, joint pain, skin rashes, and other chronic conditions can be symptoms of a gut being assaulted regularly by foods it doesn’t tolerate. Since the majority of the your immune system resides in your gut, this can create imbalances that can set the stage for autoimmune disease.

2. Poor sleep. Not just a lack of sleep, which most of us have experienced as a stress, but a lack of quality, restorative sleep. Sleep apnea is an all-to-common manifestations of this. If your body is not getting enough oxygen and alarms are constantly going off in your brain to wake up and breathe, you can be in bed ‘sleeping’ for 8-10 hours and still be tired and fatigued throughout the day. Another thing that can negatively impact your sleep quality is electromagnetic radiation from any electronics. Current evidence suggests that EMR disrupts the circadian rhythms that govern our sleep-wake cycles deep in a part of the brain called the pineal gland. Set your phone to ‘airplane mode,’ turn off the wireless router and unplug whatever electronics you can at night. They draw a small current even if plugged, but ‘off.’ Put all bedroom electronics on a power strip so you only have to unplug one thing to kill the electricity to them all at night.

3. Nutrient deficiencies. Most of us have moved away from eating nutrient-dense whole foods for most of our calorie intake. Modern farming practices can often deplete the soil of important minerals like magnesium and selenium and because of this, even organic produce may not be as nutrient dense as the food our grandparents ate. Additionally, in trying to digest process foods, our bodies are often depleted of more vitamins and minerals that we receive from the food itself. In dealing with increased stress, we use up our stores of B vitamins, Vitamin C and magnesium.

4. Blood sugar imbalances. Have you ever experienced the feeling of being ‘hangry,’ when you are so hungry your mood tanks and you get mad at everyone and everything until you get something to eat? Or have you ever had that afternoon ‘food coma’ where all you want to do about an hour after lunch is take a nap? These are symptoms that your blood sugar is unbalanced. One way that your body deals with low blood sugar is to secrete cortisol, our stress hormone, which mobilizes stored glucose from the liver in order to make it available to brain cells. Though this is a key survival adaptation, particularly in times where food is scarce, when this leads to elevated cortisol levels on a daily basis, it can suppress the immune system and lead to problems regulating our inflammatory response.

5. Sex hormone imbalances. Cortisol is made primarily from progesterone, but can be made from estrogen, testosterone and DHEA as well. Poor libido, changes in menstrual cycles, changes in PMS, infertility and erectile dysfunction may all have their route cause in stress that robs of us of our sex hormone balance.

6. Exercise. Bet you didn’t see that one coming? Exercise is a stress, usually a good one. But too much, too frequently, especially ‘cardio,’ can overtax the adrenals and result in overproduction of cortisol. In a healthy person, this is not problematic, in fact, it helps the body be better prepared for future stresses, but if you have a chronic health condition, or any one of the hidden sources of stress listed above, it may useful to reevaluate what kind of exercise you are doing and for how long. Strength training workouts are less ‘stressful’ to the adrenal glands then long steady-state cardio workouts. Additionally, short, high-intensity interval workouts appear to be less taxing on the adrenals glands than a steady-state cardio workout as well. If a patient is suffering from stress from too much of the wrong kind of exercise, I will also recommend moving more and exercising less. Focus on things like walking, playing outdoors, standing instead of sitting, gardening, etc.- activities that are fun, can be fit into your daily routine (as opposed to having to carve out extra time in an already hectic schedule to go to the gym) and move your body in new and novels ways, instead of the repetitive motion of most cardio exercises.

 

Filed Under: Functional Medicine Tagged With: autoimmune, B vitamin deficiency, B vitamins, better sleep, blood sugar imbalances, cortisol, energy, fatigue, food intolerances, hormones, inflammation, mineral absorption, nutrient deficiencies, poor sleep, sex hormone imbalances, sleep apnea, stress

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