Mental Health and Diet

In her new book “Unprocessed,” Kimberley Wilson, a clinical psychologist with a degree in nutrition, argues that your diet can play a huge role in your mental health. Whenever I ask a client on anti-anxiety medication if their doctor has addressed their diet, the answer is always no. By now, we know the answer to this… there is no monetary gain in asking people to stop eating processed food when there are huge profits to make in having a patient develop a lifelong dependency on a synthetic chemical. For those of you who are paying attention, medicine is fragmenting into different camps.  We have:

1. Nanotechnology hopes to fix all the damage we do to ourselves on a microscopic level.
2. Pharmaceutical-led interventions have co-opted most mainstream media to tell us that our problems are genetic and we can do nothing about them.

 For example, I recently read that obesity is considered a genetic disease just as the new obesity drug #Wegovy is approved by the FDA - no coincidence!

3. Lifestyle medicine, where doctors and patients are empowered to take action over their everyday activities to live healthfully.

Everybody would agree that a healthy lifestyle is the best form of medicine. Still, I can now see that when our evolutionary traits of expending the least amount of energy possible while seeking out high-calorie, high-salt foods. Combining all of this with a bit of marketing spin, most people will opt to sit on the couch, eat processed food and take a shot or a pill to prevent mental health problems or obesity. There are great leaps forward coming down the medical pipeline. I’m very optimistic about the future, but drugs that allow us not to exercise and eat crap are not part of the healthcare future I want to be part of.  #stayclean, think for yourself, and try to choose your health over convenience daily. Over time these daily healthy decisions will pay off.

Will You Be Ready For The Next One?

  Back at the beginning of the pandemic, our little Central American country felt like it was overrun with people from all over the world trying to find a safe place to see out the lockdowns. Each nationality brought with them their own stories about corruption, cover-ups and conspiracy theories. I listened with an open mind to all of them, the 5G linked to the nanobots in the nasal swabs was a personal favorite of mine, but some of them are panning out to be more fact than fiction.  There have been a series of articles in the UK paper “The Telegraph’ that shows how the Wuhan Virus leak was the most likely cause. The leaking of the “lockdown files” shows how the decision to mask children was mainly political. That the excess deaths that came from the lockdowns are way higher than expected and we now have more clarity on just how harmful it was to shut down schools and lock down countries.  Also, we are clearer on the virus, as Esther Mcvey articulates  “Moreover, we must not forget that the severity of the disease ended up being much lower than our politicians had made out. While Michael Gove told us in March 2020 that “we are all at risk”, Prof Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease expert, points out we knew that the virus was “highly discriminatory” as early as February 2020, with age and comorbidities being the crucial factors.” Of course, it’s easy to point fingers in retrospect but as the UK gears up for a Covid inquiry it looks like they will be focusing on the small details like whether or not lock down should have happened a week earlier rather than whether or not it should have happened at all. What can we learn from this?  Comorbidities were and are the biggest risk factors when it comes to succumbing to illness, whether it be COVID or as we are being prepped for..."the next one". What I learnt was that in most countries our access to healthcare is not guaranteed.  Our access to the outdoors, fresh air, and high-quality food isn’t guaranteed...Oh don't forget toilet roll -I remember you horders...I noted your names in my little black book.... But as the phrase goes, we should be ‘making hay while the sun shines’.

•  If you are overweight or obese now is the time to address it.
•  If you have high blood pressure now is the time to figure it out.
•  If you are underweight or have digestional issues, now is the time to address it.
•  If you are lacking strength and muscle mass (probably one of the biggest predictors of all-cause mortality...aka dying) now is the time to get strong. 
• If your blood work isn’t optimal (assuming you actually know) now is the time to make the lifestyle changes to correct it. 

I believe that “your lifestyle is your medicine”, and what you do today will set you up for success in the future. The hard work you put in now might just be the difference between you needing hospital care (when it’s not available) or thriving.         

Eating earlier for health

Have you ever wondered if you should eat so early or even so late? You may have heard other people swear by an ‘intermittent fasting’ lifestyle, but you might not know exactly what that means. In this short article, I will unpack a little of that and look at what some research suggests about when we should eat.  Some people swear that skipping breakfast is the elixir of youth. Others might tell you that an early supper is the way forward. But a new study in the journal of Cell Metabolism, eating earlier is linked with health benefits; by contrast, eating later is linked with poor health.  In this study, researchers divided 16 individuals into two groups. They both ate the same food, but one group ate late, and the other ate early. They found that eating later in the day made people hungrier during a 24-hour period, slowed their metabolism, and lowered their body temperature. Hence, they used fewer calories which led to increased fat tissue deposits. The authors concluded that these changes might increase the risk of obesity in certain individuals. Sure, the study was small, but we must remember the insidious effects of hunger; the study suggested that the hungrier people got, the more their cravings for calorie-dense, salty foods increased. Also, as most of us can attest to, our willpower to resist such temptation decreases the later in the day it is.  So what about this ‘window of eating’ you may have heard about? In another study on 137 firefighters in San Diego, CA, researchers compared two groups that ate the same Mediterranean-type diet. One group ate their meals in a 10-hour window, the other ate theirs in a 13-hour window. They found that eating meals within a 10-hour window decreased the size of bad cholesterol particles, which could reduce risk factors for heart disease. They also found that a 10-hour eating window improved blood pressure and blood sugar levels among those with health conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. By contrast, a smaller eating window might not be that beneficial. One of the study authors, Satchidananda Panda, Ph.D., told NBC News. "When we think about 6 or 8 hours, you might see a benefit, but people might not stick to it for a long time,". One possible mechanism for the increased health benefits of a shorter eating window might be the increased rest time of our internal organs, allowing them to shift focus from dealing with incoming food to elimination. This elimination of toxins and waste products is key to good health.  What works for you, shorter or longer eating windows? Earlier or later?  Sources:

1. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(22)00397-7?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1550413122003977%3Fshowall%3Dtrue#%20
2. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(22)00361-8
3. https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/123702-overview

 

Benefits of cold water exposure

I first heard of the benefits of cold water exposure about 20 years ago when I used to work with a national hockey team in the UK. After the games, we asked the guys to stand in large plastic tubs to reduce the swelling in their knees and legs. About 10 years ago, I started learning more about cold water's whole-body health benefits and decided to try it. Back then, I was living in Calgary, Canada, and almost no one outside the athletic community had heard about it or would even contemplate it. When I suggested getting a community of people together to do some cold water therapy, I had just 1 taker....that was after an email to 10,000 people! However, I went back last Christmas and wanted to see if the cold-water immersion attitude had changed. After a quick search on Facebook, I found a community of polar plunges and was instantly added to their WhatsApp group and asked to join their weekly winter plunge.  Why the change in attitudes? A lot of credit goes to the Dutch crazy man Wim Hof. This guy has held numerous world records for anything to do with ice and cold and continues to spread the word about the Wim Hof Method. A system of breathing coupled with cold water exposure has been proven to modulate the immune system. As science is ever-evolving, it seems that a month can't go by without more research being conducted into the health benefits of cold water. When it comes to research, there are many ways to do it, but for simplicity's sake, there are 2 broad categories to understand.  

1. Original research - this is the classic science experiment we all tried back at school. We have a hypothesis, run the experiment and publish the results. Some of these are better than others. For example, in human studies, the more people there are in the study means, the more reliable the results will be. With the significant variation in the quality of this type of research, we need another way of telling us what's worth paying attention to. This is where systematic reviews come in.
2. Systematic reviews. This is a form of research that brings together all the experiments and analyses them. They generally have inclusion and exclusion criteria that mean they are dealing with 'high quality' experiments so that when they publish their conclusions, they are pretty sure that what they say is scientific fact.

Recently a systematic review of 104 studies was conducted out of the UiT UiT The Arctic University of Norway and from the University Hospital of North Norway(1).  They published their findings in the Journal of Circumpolar Health and noticed that regular icy dips could promote the development of 'good' fat. This good fat is metabolically active, which means it burns calories and keeps us warm. The development of this type of fat, also known as brown fat, helps reduce insulin resistance and improve insulin sensitivity. This helps ward off diabetes and protects against cardiovascular, obesity, and other metabolic diseases. Not bad for something that is essentially free. All you need to do is turn the dial on the shower one way rather than the other. For me, though, I find that there are other benefits. I feel as though I have more energy and am mentally more precise and stronger in my immune system. So much so that I've converted a chest freezer solely for bathing in it; this has allowed me to become extremely regular with my dips and also introduce lots of friends to the benefits of a cold water dip. Let me know if you enjoy the benefits of cold water bathing! Source:

1. https://en.uit.no/news/article?p_document_id=789063