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You are here: Home / Archives for heart disease

Your brain on Movement

August 3, 2015 by drchrista Leave a Comment

Our big, wonderful brains. Arguably what makes us distinct as humans. We like to think that our brains developed in order to give us the ability to think and to create- and therefore give us the advantage that allowed us to develop language, art and civilization.

But this is wrong.

Scientist Daniel Wolpert puts it best: “We have a brain for one reason only: to produce adaptable and complex movements.”

The largest amount of data coming into your brain at any given moment is coming from the musculoskeletal system and the smooth muscle of other organ systems like the digestive system. Mechanoreceptors in every joint, every muscle, every tendon of your body are constantly telling your brain about where your body, and each part of it, is in space, something we call ‘proprioception.”

This information comes in to the primary somatosensory cortex- a strip of the neocortex that runs roughly from the top of your ear to the apex of your skull on both sides. It is organized in a way that it reflects perfectly how the body itself is organized (the part that receives information from the hand is next to the part that receives information from the lower arm) and its weighted according to where we have the most nerve endings/receive the most sensory input (the areas receiving information from the hands, feet, lips and genitalia for example are much bigger than the areas receiving information from the low back or the buttocks.)

Directly in front of the primary somatosensory cortex is the primary motor cortex- it gets the information about where your body is in space from the primary somatosensory cortex and then uses that information to decide which motor pattern to use. In order to reach for a glass of water, your brain needs to first know where your hand, arm, elbow and shoulder are so that it can tell those muscles and joints exactly how much to move and in what directs in order to reach out and grasp that glass of water.

This all happens so quickly, so eloquently, so seamlessly that though we can create robots that can master the game of chess, they can’t move the pieces around the board as deftly as even a child can.

So what does this mean for our brains and brain health?

Well, to begin with, your brain works much like your muscles- if you use them, they get stronger. And if you don’t they get weaker and less useful. As we move, we get stronger (and smarter) because the movement of our bodies and the subsequent firing of neurons that that requires causes the release of a chemical called BDNF- brain derived neurotrophic factor, or as one author put it “Miracle-Gro for the brain.” Its whole purpose is to stimulate growth of brain cells- not just in the parts of the brain most concerned with movement- but throughout the entire organ.

In a formal literature review, researcher Frank W. Booth showed that lack of movement was a factor in over 20 different chronic diseases. But even more poignantly, he wrote in his review “[s]edentary lifestyle is associated with lower cognitive skills.” Further studies showed that cognitive skills do not decline simply because we get older, they decline because we move less.

Not only is movement a key piece of preventing and addressing dementia and Alzheimer’s, but it has also been shown to be as effective as SSRIs in treatment of depression, with longer lasting benefits and less side effects too.

In short, you need to move to have and keep a healthy, keen brain throughout your life.

Exercise is definitely part of this, but it is only a part. We generally think of exercise as any movement we do in order to stay healthy and fit. Movement is broader than this. Movement is anything that changes the loads on your cells and tissues. A simple changing of the load on your muscles will cause a change in the feedback an embedded mechanoreceptor will give the brain about where that muscle is in space. Therefore movement can be as simple as changing the focus of your eyes from near distance to far, getting goosebumps from a chill in the air, getting up from being seated on the floor, or even evacuating your bowels- there is a reason we call it a ‘bowel movement‘ and not a bowel exercise.

Movement should happen throughout that day, all day long, providing plenty of input to the brain and stimulus for new neuronal growth. In contrast, when we spend 8, 10 or 12 hours a day being sedentary, sitting in a chair, and then go to the gym for an hour, we may get enough exercise to keep our waistline from expanding, but we are not getting enough of the movement we really need keep our brains happy and healthy.

The best part about having a movement practice as opposed to ‘exercising’ is that it can be much easier to fit into what is probably already a busy life. Find errands you can do by walking instead of in the car. Growing a vegetable garden can provide more nourishment than than just from the food alone. Moving your positions through the day from standing to sitting on the floor and back again can provide plenty of novel movement and loads for your body. Working in the kitchen to cook can provide a nourishing meal and nourishing movement at the same time. Play with your kids on the playground instead of sitting on the bench and starring at your phone while they play. Walk the dog in the evenings instead of watching another hour of TV. Its not hard: walk, play, crawl, hike, lifting, bend, run, swing, hang- pretty much do anything but sit and watch TV or zone out in front of screen.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. But now, for the sake of your brain health, please get out there and move!

Your brain on Movement

 

 

Filed Under: Brain, Functional Movement Tagged With: Alzhiemer's, brain health, depression, fatigue, functional movement, heart disease, natural movement, obesity, weight loss, whole body movement

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!

Filed Under: Functional Movement Tagged With: barefoot, bones, cholesterol, eye breaks, functional movement, heart disease, muscle spasm, natural movement, osteoporosis, Paleo movements, statin drugs, stretching, walking, whole body movement

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.

Filed Under: Learn More Tagged With: better sleep, bones, fat loss, fatigue, heart disease, inflammation, obesity, Paleo diet

Up and at ’em with B vitamins

October 3, 2012 by drchrista Leave a Comment

Read below and see if any of these ring a bell:

heart disease
hypoglycemia (low blood sugar)
neuritis/neuralgia (nerve pain)
depression and/or anxiety
weakness & fatigue
exhaustion after eating a meal
poor or lack of appetite
cravings for sweets
headaches, noise sensitivity
insomnia
nervousness
forgetfulness
severe apprehension/uneasiness
unusual fear, rage, or hostility
hallucinations
a constant and almost debilitating fear that something terrible is going to happen

You may be asking what these things could possibly have in common. Well, I’ll tell you. They are all symptoms of B-complex deficiency syndrome (BCDS).

We take for granted that in our culture of abundance, people could suffer from such a seemingly archaic syndrome. Everything is fortified with B vitamins right??? But that is also the problem. B vitamins are co-factors (helpers) for many enzymes in the body. No B vitamins, no properly working enzymes. Highly processed foods often leave the body with a negative B vitamin balance because they require B vitamins to be digested, but then put nothing back in to your system. It’s like overdrawing your bank account. The chemically-synthesized versions that are added back into the food during the fortification process are not the same as the naturally occurring versions of these vitamins. In fact, some of the B vitamins, like B4, cannot be synthesized.

So if you ate a lot of junk food or drank a lot of alcohol this holiday season, that sluggish, anxious or depressed feeling you’re having may be more than just a case of the “Mondays.” That feeling may be your body’s way of saying “I need REAL food! I need REAL B vitamins- STAT!”

An interesting note here is the children are especially sensitive to insufficient amounts of B vitamins and it often shows up first as mental and emotional instability. If you have a teenager, you know this full well. So if your child starts to show symptoms like those above, good food and a quality B vitamin supplement, like that from Standard Process, may be warranted before a prescription for powerful psychoactive drugs.

The information in this article is intended for educational purposes only and is not meant to diagnose or treat any symptoms you may be having. Consult your physician before stopping or starting any medications or natural supplements.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, B vitamin deficiency, B vitamins, cravings for sweets, depression, fatigue, fearfulness, forgetfulness, heart disease, hypoglycemia, weakness

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