California Breakfast

Regular Chiropractic Care and Healthy Eating

Eating good, nutritious food is a primary component of long-term health and wellness. Healthy eating supports the growth and development of sound, strong bodies and is a key factor in cognitive functions such as creativity and effective decision making. In addition, a nutritious diet helps us obtain restful sleep and restore our capabilities in preparation for the new day. Although most of us hardly ever think about what's happening physiologically when we eat — what's under the hood, so to speak — we must digest our food properly and metabolize the nutrients efficiently in order to derive maximum benefit from our diet. But nerve interference can disrupt these critical processes. By correcting spinal misalignments and removing sources of nerve interference, regular chiropractic care helps ensure that our gastrointestinal, endocrine, and circulatory systems are functioning appropriately. Regular chiropractic care helps support optimal digestion and metabolism, thus enabling us to get the most out of the good foods we eat.

The mystery writer Raymond Chandler, author of "The Big Sleep" and "The Long Goodbye", famously extolled a "California breakfast" of orange juice and a cigarette. Of course, this was back in the bad old days when lighting up was part of most people's morning ritual. Today, although the orange juice might remain, a healthy breakfast consists of various nutritious replacements for the non-nourishing cigarette.

The importance of eating a good breakfast has been widely promoted in countless public health campaigns, yet many people persist in rushing past this critical meal, jumping right in to their daily work activities while bolting down an oat bran muffin or, worse, a toaster pastry. Such behavior does not support a healthy lifestyle and is especially deleterious for children and teenagers.

From the adult perspective, a lack of sufficient nutritional energy resources will negatively impact a person's work performance. In the absence of appropriate blood glucose levels, your body will seek out other energy sources such as stored fat. The metabolic demands of utilizing fat for energy are much greater than those of processes that use glucose. Over the course of a morning, such inefficient metabolism leads to tiredness, fatigue, and even a headache. Other body systems suffer, especially the digestive system and the nerve system.1,2 For example, the primary source of energy for your brain is glucose. If you've had a less-than-nutritious breakfast, the supply of glucose reaching your brain is substantially reduced. As a result, your thinking gets muddled. Creativity and decision-making processes degrade. Your overall effectiveness as a human being becomes markedly reduced.3 The negative consequences can only be imagined.

It may be fairly considered that young people depend even more on their brains than do adults. Their brains are responsible, in addition to everything else, for coordinating the growth and development of their entire bodies. The nerve system is the body's master system and the brain is the command and control center of the nerve system. Proper nutrition, critical for long-term health and well-being of all persons, is even more important for children and teenagers. Habitual lack of a healthy, nutritious breakfast leads to an unending list of problems for young people as they get older and become adults.

It is a truism that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Every meal is necessary and valuable, but a complete breakfast sets the tone for how things will go for the next 12 to 18 hours. Taking the time for breakfast is well worth the effort. When your energy stores have been replenished, you're ready for action. You might need to get out of bed 15 minutes earlier, but this change in routine will soon become a useful new habit. All of your family members will benefit by taking this time to take care of themselves.
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Riding the Brakes

Regular Exercise and Regular Chiropractic Care

Whether you run or walk, play tennis or play basketball, lift weights or work-out with medicine balls, regular chiropractic care is an essential component of your exercise method of choice. We exercise because we want to, because we want to be healthy and well for all the years of our lives. Importantly, regular chiropractic care helps us achieve these health and wellness goals. Regular exercise makes demands on many of our physiological systems, especially on the musculoskeletal, cardiorespiratory, and endocrine systems. In order for these systems to respond properly, your nerve system must be operating at peak efficiency. By detecting and correcting areas of spinal nerve interference, your chiropractor helps your nerve system — your body's master system — coordinate the activities of all your body's other systems. As a result, regular chiropractic care helps you get the most out of your exercise time and helps you obtain high levels of health and well being.

We're all familiar with the highway driving experience of being behind a person who is continually braking for no apparent reason. This is especially problematic if you're in the left-hand lane. You're zipping along at the posted speed limit and suddenly the brake lights of the car in front go on. You have to immediately react and hit your brakes. If this happens more than a couple of times, you look for the first opportunity to pass this unskilled driver. The person riding their brakes may thoughtlessly cause a serious traffic problem or worse. Metaphorically, you may be physiologically "riding the brakes" without knowing it, creating ongoing problems for your long-term wellness and well-being.
For example, many of us are not aware that lack of regular vigorous exercise results in a slowing down of our metabolism. Without such exercise, our daily metabolic processes simply do not operate at peak levels. In the absence of critical energy demands imposed by regular vigorous exercise, a low level steady state takes over. Fat cells accumulate, reflexes dull, and our overall sense of awareness deteriorates. But your body is a finely crafted machine and it is designed to fulfill very high performance metrics. The aphorism, "what you don't use, you lose" applies specifically to human physiological performance. Without regular vigorous exercise, you're riding your physiological brakes and your body systems will degrade accordingly.

The good news is that these entropic effects can be reversed. Our bodies are dynamic and remarkably adaptive. Beginning or renewing an exercise program will quickly result in noticeable benefits. Many people will begin observe such benefits within four to six weeks. The important health benefits derived from regular vigorous exercise include slowing of the heart rate, increased capacity of the heart to pump blood, increased capacity of the lungs to take in oxygen, accumulation of lean muscle mass, increased creative abilities, increased ability to focus and perform useful work, and improved restful sleep.

These benefits all derive from any basic exercise program that includes some form of strength training and some form of cardiovascular exercise. Thirty minutes per day, five days a week, is the recommended standard. A program that incorporates three days of cardiovascular exercise and two days of strength training, or three days of strength training and two days of cardiovascular exercise, will be sufficient to derive maximum results. Cardiovascular exercise includes walking, running, swimming, bicycling, cross-country skiing, and sports such as basketball and lacrosse. Strength training should comprise routines including exercises for the chest, back, shoulders, arms, and legs. Certain forms of exercise such as yoga simultaneously incorporate strength training and cardiovascular exercise.

Most important is the consistency of exercise. What works for one person may not work for another. Find the types of exercise that you like to do and want to do and keep going. There will be times when you need to take a break for a week or two. Trust your instincts and return to your exercise program as appropriate. Encourage your family members to participate so that everyone can achieve peak performance, health, and wellness.
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Health Statistics and You

Preventive Care is the Best Care

In health care, an ounce of prevention is worth very much more than a pound of cure. If you can prevent health problems from happening, you save a great deal of time, effort, and money. Also, by avoiding the frequently ongoing stress and anxiety associated with treatment of a chronic illness, you and your family conserve precious, irreplaceable personal resources such as peace of mind.A comprehensive preventive care program incorporates a healthy food plan, consistent regular exercise, and regular chiropractic care. Regular chiropractic care, focusing on the spinal column and targeting nerve interference, is a key resource in your health care program. Regular chiropractic care provides the framework so that your body can function at peak efficiency, thus helping ensure your long-term health and well-being.

We are awash in numbers, thanks in large part to the proliferation of personal mobile devices and the wrong-headed use of so-called big data.¹ But applying statistical tools to the same set of data can support competing theories and lead to contradictory results. Such conflicting outcomes, known as antinomies if you remember Philosophy 101, cannot logically co-exist, and the field of statistics gets a bad reputation as a result. But big data can provide substantial value for people as individual patients. The key is to set some ground rules and understand the limitations of statistical investigation.
First and foremost, it's important to gain some clarity regarding the concept of false positives in regards to health. This statistical construct is familiar to all of us, although we may not be aware of it. If one of your doctors sends you for a laboratory test and the results are "positive", you'll be sent for follow-up tests until a final determination is made. If the final test turns out "negative", then the earlier results represented a false positive. The test results said you had the condition or disease, but in fact you did not.
False positives create numerous serious problems, not the least of which is the emotional toll of stress, anxiety, and fear experienced by the patient and her family and close friends. This is especially true when the suspected disease is a malignancy or other serious, life-threatening condition. It's useful and empowering for people to learn that 5% of all test results are falsely positive right from the start. Medical tests are designed this way. The 5% false positive rate is a necessary part of statistical analysis. It's built-in to the statistical design. In other words, test values that represent "normal" are obtained by cutting off the bottom 2.5% and the top 2.5% of a large sample of results from people who are "normal" for the thing being tested, such as white blood cell count or hemoglobin level.
Thus, 5% of normal people automatically have false positive results. Another way of stating this outcome is to consider that if you undergo a panel of 20 blood tests, one result (5% of 20) will be positive no matter what.
The vast majority of patients are not familiar with the statistical concept of false positive results.² With a basic understanding of this construct and its implications, patients could ask their doctors meaningful questions such as, "What do the test results mean?,", "Have you considered the possibility of a false positive result?," and "How will the additional tests you're recommending affect decision-making in my case?"
Posing such questions is tremendously empowering for you, the patient, and helps reestablish equity in the doctor-patient relationship.³ As a health care consumer, a little knowledge goes a long way. Gaining more than a little knowledge by reading articles on diagnostic methods and health care decision-making will further strengthen your own process as a patient.
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¹Bates DW, et al: Big data in health care: using analytics to identify and manage high-risk and high-cost patients. Health Aff (Millwood) 33(7):1123-31, 2014
²Paddock SM: Statistical benchmarks for health care provider performance assessment: a comparison of standard approaches to a hierarchical Bayesian histogram-based method. Health Serv Res 49(3):1056-73, 2014
³Stacey D, et al: Decision aids for people facing health treatment or screening decisions. Cochane Database Syst Rev 28;1:CD001431, 2014

When the Cure Is Worse than the Disease

Regular Chiropractic Care and Chronic Disease

Regardless of the prescription medication you may or may not be taking, regular chiropractic care helps provide a strong platform for managing the effects of chronic disease. Although the ultimate causes of chronic diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes are largely unknown, nerve interference may be reasonably postulated as a key contributor to the development and maintenance of these conditions. If as a result of nerve interference, your body's cells, tissues, and organs are not receiving timely and accurate information from your brain, then a host of symptoms may develop. Over time, chronic disease may be the unwanted outcome. Regular chiropractic care helps eliminate nerve interference by detecting, analyzing, and correcting spinal misalignments that result from normal, everyday circumstances involving work and stress. By helping restore spinal function and reducing irritation to the nerve system, regular chiropractic care provides an environment in which chronic disease is less likely to flourish and your health and well-being can be maximized.

Chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes have increasingly high prevalence in world populations.¹ Such prevalence is rising despite extensive use of prescription medications. Problematically, many people have two or more concurrent chronic disorders and are taking multiple medications. But frequently the various physicians are not in contact and are not aware of the patient's complete list of current prescriptions. No single physician or nurse is managing the patient's array of medications. As a result, potentially harmful drug interactions are a common occurrence.^2,3 Mistakes are made and patients may suffer serious side effects. In such adverse circumstances, the cure in fact may be worse than the disease.
In today's health care systems, people as patients need to be good custodians of their own care. In many health systems, a patient is lucky if he or she is able to spend more than five uninterrupted minutes with their doctor. Physicians are rushed and harried by numerous responsibilities related to management of their offices, all of which take precious time away from patient interactions. In such an environment, patients need to be proactive to do their best to ensure that recommended treatment is actually going to be helpful, rather than potentially harmful. This is a very difficult task, as most people do not have backgrounds that will help facilitate understanding of such decision-making. But especially for those with a chronic disease, it's critically important to master at least a basic level of information regarding their condition and various types of treatment.
In addition to expanding one's knowledge base, an important long-term strategy is to begin to make lifestyle choices that will support good health. Appropriate and effective lifestyle choices include regular exercise, a healthy diet, and sufficient rest. All three of these key components of good health can be started right now. An exercise program should consist of five 30-minute sessions of vigorous exercise every week. A healthy diet consists of daily selections from all five major food groups: fruits, vegetables, grains, proteins, and dairy. A daily diet should include at least five servings of fresh fruit and vegetables every day. Regarding sufficient rest, 7-8 hours of sleep per night is a good average for most people. If you're not waking up feeling rested and refreshed, you're probably not getting enough sleep.
Ultimately, each of us is responsible for our own health and well-being. Prescription medication may be necessary, but of course such treatment is primarily directed toward the effects of a person's disease or disorder. Changes in lifestyle are required to address the underlying causes of such conditions. Beginning to institute and maintaining healthful lifestyle choices will provide long-term benefit for the welfare and well-being of our families and ourselves.
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¹Bauer UE, et al: Prevention of chronic disease in the 21st century: elimination of the leading preventable causes of premature death and disability in the USA. Lancet 384(9937):42-52, 2014
²Rotermann M, et al: Prescription medication use by Canadians aged 6 to 79. Health Rep 25(6):3-9, 2014
³Marengoni A, et al: Understanding adverse drug reactions in older adults through drug-drug interactions. Eur J Intern Med 2014 Oct 10. pii: S0953-6205(14)00282-9. doi: 10.1016/j.ejim.2014.10.001. [Epub ahead of print]