Keto cons

In a nutshell, the keto diet is broken down into 75% fats, 20% proteins, and 5% carbohydrates. By eating macronutrients in these percentages, instead of burning carbs and sugars, you burn your body’s own fat stores. This is called ketosis, which your body recognizes as a type of fasting. Your fat cells are where you store toxins you are unable to process and your body dilutes those toxins with water to keep them from poisoning you.

The first weight you lose on a ketogenic diet is water weight, which causes the toxins in your fat cells to concentrate, often giving you symptoms that have been coined the “keto flu.” These symptoms range from digestive upset and skin rashes to headaches and body aches, similar to the symptoms you get from toxicities.

At first, you feel good and the weight loss is a morale-booster. But after a while the fatigue sets in, often accompanied by anxiety, insomnia, and more. What’s causing these troubling symptoms? You see, while you’re losing that water weight and flushing those fat cells, the minerals you’ve accumulated are going along for the ride. At first, this can feel like a good thing if sodium retention has been causing you swelling. But, eventually the mineral loss is more than what your body needs and you begin showing te signs of the mineral imbalances resulting from severe carbohydrate restriction. Once mineral imbalances and deficiencies set in, it isn’t long before adrenal fatigue follows behind, and that’s when you start feeling tired from your carb restriction. 

As critical minerals are becoming imbalanced, stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are affected, and this leads to what we call adrenal fatigue. If you feel tired all the time and are experiencing anxiety and/or insomnia, I strongly suggest getting an HTMA (Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis) done as soon as possible to measure your mineral levels. We can do this right in the office. Using a small hair sample, the lab generates a detailed report of which minerals are too high or too low and gives recommendations to get them back in balance.

Free radicals

Oxidation is a part of a normal metabolism, but just like other aspects of life, it involves tradeoffs. Your body produces energy, but at the same time it produces oxidants, or “free radicals”.

Some free radicals are actually produced by normal metabolic processes, but many are externally sourced by cigarette smoking, air pollutants and industrial chemicals, and these, along with naturally occurring free radicals, are active agents in many conditions, including atherosclerosis, inflammatory conditions, certain cancers, and the overall process of aging.

Ready for a break?

We have learned in the last few months that nearly 5 decades of research on heath and nutrition were shaped and directed by the sugar industry. We now understand that fat was wrongly demonized for commercial gain and that sugar consumption–the real cause underlying the surge in type 2 diabetes, weight gain/obesity, heart disease, dementia, and some forms of cancer–was essentially allowed to balloon in the American diet. You can read about this on your own from one of these two articles.

From the New York Times

From the Journal of the American Medical Association

Ready for a break from sugar? I can help.

What’s the liver got to do with it?

All of your organs are very important. However, your liver is one of the hardest working organs in your body!

Here is what your liver does:

• conversion of thyroid hormone
• it stores blood
• creates proteins and fats for hormone production
• releases glucose when needed
• produces bile
• detoxifies the blood
• supports digestion
• and so much more!

Your liver partners together with your gallbladder, and when your liver is overworked, it adds additional work for the gallbladder. In traditional Chinese medicine, the liver correlates to anger, and the gallbladder to bitterness; an overworked liver can cease functioning optimally after you have cared for a loved one, or friend with a long illness.

Adding green non-starchy vegetables like spinach and kale is one way to support your liver and gall bladder. One of the top ways you can improve your overall health is to drink water from a pure source daily (half your body weight in ounces). BUT please don’t drink pH water! We have found that drinking alkaline water impacts the pH of your stomach while it’s diluting the acids and enzymes, which interrupts natural digestion.  

Headaches

Headaches affect just about everyone at some point and they can present themselves in many different ways.

Some people only experience pain in one part of their head or behind their eyes, some people experience a pounding sensation inside their whole head, and some people even experience nausea, while others do not. The pain itself may be dull or sharp and may last for anywhere from a few minutes to a few days.

Although headaches can be due to a wide variety of causes the majority of recurrent headaches are of two types: tension headaches (also called cervicogenic headaches) and migraine headaches. There is a third, less common, type of headaches called a cluster headache that is a cousin to the migraine.

**Chiropractic Care for Headaches**
———-
Numerous research studies have shown that chiropractic adjustments are very effective for treating tension headaches, especially headaches that originate in the neck.

A report released in 2001 by researchers at the Duke University Evidence-Based Practice Center in Durham, NC, found that “spinal manipulation resulted in almost immediate improvement for those headaches that originate in the neck, and had significantly fewer side effects and longer-lasting relief of tension-type headache than commonly prescribed medications.”

These findings support an earlier study published in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics that found spinal manipulative therapy to be very effective for treating tension headaches. This study also found that those who stopped chiropractic treatment after four weeks continued to experience a sustained benefit in contrast to those patients who received pain medication.

Each individual’s case is different and requires a thorough evaluation before a proper course of chiropractic care can be determined. However, in most cases of tension headaches, significant improvement is accomplished through manipulation of the upper two cervical vertebrae, coupled with adjustments to the junction between the cervical and thoracic spine. This is also helpful in most cases of migraine headaches, as long as food and lifestyle triggers are avoided as well.