A Surprising Exercise for the Brain

As we get older, the concern for neurological issues often becomes heightened. You might feel a little brain fog creeping in or you start to feel like your reaction time is slower or delayed. Often we try to mitigate these changes by doing more puzzles or reading more books! While these aren’t bad ways to engage the brain, there are some more literal exercises that give the brain a surprising power boost. You might say, “Of course! We already know that running, swimming and almost all aerobics exercises are good for mental health.” But did you know about squats? Squats, the joint stabilizing, glute-building workout that’s been shown to help almost every area of the body is now thought to also aid in stretching the capabilities of the brain!

Squatting causes a sort of famine-and-plenty, back-and-forth effect on blood flow through the brain and this variance is responsible for a measurable improvement in functioning. While something like a brisk walk might increase blood flow and boost memory functions within the brain, squats actually cause the brain to release all the chemicals responsible for learning and growth. 

Research has shown that squatting is one of the best exercises for reducing your risk of Alzheimer and dementia and improving your overall cognitive health. The best part about this is that squats are an exercise that the majority of people can do! Every age group can build up the strength to do squats. Even if you aren’t as strong as you used to be or are recovering from an injury, there are a number of variations and even assisted versions of the squat to make it useful for a wide range of people!

Squats range from the basic squat to versions that incorporate jumps or kicks or props. The traditional squat where you stand with your legs about shoulder width apart, your toes pointed slightly outward and your arms either relaxed or clasped in front of you and dip down like you are about to sit in an invisible chair, is just the start. The key to the foundational squat is to keep your back in a neutral position (not exaggeratedly arched or anything) and you knees apart and squeeze those glutes on the way up. You can go all the way down almost into the “egg” yoga position or stop when your thighs are parallel to the ground. This is what you would call a bodyweight squat but you can add to the difficulty level by grabbing some weights, increasing the load on your limbs. You can find squats that are challenging for literally any level of fitness. Take it slow at first and have fun with it! Make sure you are warming up and stretching out. Always practice good form, even if you have to go very slowly and enjoy the brain boosting power of squats!

Resource: 

Types of Squats - Heathline

Can squatting boost your brain power? - BBC REEL

Do Squats Every Day And See What Happens To Your Body 9 Reasons why you need to do squats 

https://youtu.be/c8Q8AyFjWZM 

https://www.healthline.com/health/squat-variations#bodyweight-squats 

Douchebag: The Tool We Never Needed

Have you ever heard someone compare the smell of the reproductive parts of a woman to the ocean or a fish? If you are partnered with or are a woman, perhaps you’ve often thought that those two things smell nothing alike at least in your own experience. Have you ever wondered where that comparison and rather ugly trend came from? Well, it might come as no surprise that it was born of an advertising campaign meant to sell products geared towards making a woman “smell better.”  

There used to be a time when there was no market for special vagina soaps and creams or a particular type of wipe with fragrance using a “special Ph balance.” Women washed everything much the same way men did, if perhaps a bit more frequently.  Then in the early 1800s, several men hit upon an untapped market for a liquid contraceptive: The douche. The douche was commercialized in 1843 and anyone with a vagina was told they must have it to prevent pregnancies. Spoiler alert: Douching does not prevent pregnancy though it does raise your chances of serious and even life threatening complications. Women everywhere rushed to the market to pick up this miracle device to prevent unwanted babies and sales soared. The liquid used in the douche went through many variations including water with vinegar or baking soda or iodine but the device itself remains mechanically similar to this day. 

Finally, in the early 1900s, Lysol took a turn. Advertisements would say that a man wouldn’t love his wife unless she smelled sweet like fruit or flowers and their products were the only way to do it! Lysol described the proper way to practice hygiene and “protect your married happiness.” It was a germ-killing contraceptive that everyone needed. Women died but the douche survived. 

In the 1980s, the market for douches shifted as oral contraceptives made their way onto the scene. Even though douching as a form of contraception never completely died (at that time Coca-cola was making an appearance as the favored liquid used), the marketing scheme decided to lean more into the hygiene part of their douching claims. Again they needed to create more of a market for their product so ads began to circulate claiming that the way women’s bodies smelled naturally was unclean or unhygienic. Creams, soaps and, of course, douches again began to rise to meet the wave of inferiority marketers had created in women. 

Today, one in four women still practice douching on a regular basis despite the warnings of medical professionals and researchers. Studies have shown that douching increases the risk of an ectopic pregnancy by more than 70 percent! It does not protect a person from STIs or permanently alter the scent of one’s body. In fact, douching increases the harmful bacteria introduced into the vagina and reduces the body’s ability to clean it out effectively thus significantly increasing the chance of infection. Douching once a week can increase your risk of bacterial vaginosis by 5 times! The vagina is self cleaning! If you think you have something wrong, see a doctor but let’s shake this harmful trend of products pushed on women under the guise of hygiene. The best thing you can do for your body is to eat well, drink water and stay out of its way!

What’s the deal with Chromium 6?

Chromium 6 was highlighted as a carcinogenic compound found in most of America’s tap water in the 90’s by Erin Brockovich, an activist and consumer advocate who inspired a film by the same name in 2000. The film and her work highlighted a major gap in the drinking water contaminant standards for Hinkley, a southern California town. She went on to win one of the largest settlements ever claimed in a direct-action lawsuit at that time, a whopping $333 million, and leveraged that platform to shine the light on this national blindspot. With all of this press and later an Oscar winning film you’d think that this issue would have been resolved more than two decades later. Unfortunately, despite the wealth of research that has established Chromium 6 as a carcinogen, the EPA has dragged its feet on setting a Chromium 6 specific standard. They have a “total chromium” standard which includes chromium 3 but the safety levels for these two versions of chromium are wildly different. 

Chromium 3, for reference, is an element necessary for healthy functioning and most individuals get a suitable amount in their diet without needing to supplement. It is thought to be effective in the metabolism of protein, carbohydrates and lipids and promoting insulin action. It is considered an essential nutrient and is found in fruits, veggies and whole grains. A lack may even be linked to glucose intolerance and diabetes. Bottom line, Chromium 3 is good for you in the amounts you receive within a balanced diet. 

In contrast, Chromium 6 is an industrial by-product that is known to cause a variety of cancers, ulcers, convulsions, and sometimes death. Why then would the EPA insist on lumping both types of chromium together when setting national standards for our drinking water? Why, indeed. By doing this, the EPA is essentially raising the standard for our drinking water from a research based standard held by some forward thinking communities of 0.02ppb to 100ppb. They are allowing companies and counties to serve up water polluted with a known carcinogen at 500 times the research grounded standard for safety. It’s easy to understand that having to regulate the thousands of companies and counties that are currently out of compliance with the safer standard is a big job but it’s also important to understand that doing so is precisely the EPA’s responsibility and the point of having such an organization at the federal level in the first place. Last year, federal legislation was passed(INVEST), including an amendment requiring the EPA to set a Chromium 6 specific standard. Only time will tell whether or not the EPA will follow through on an actionable and responsible standard closer to the research based safe levels we need.

As always, we want to address what we, the consumers, should do about this gap in our march towards clean water. Like with PFAS, it isn’t enough to simply find the best filter for your home and move on. Clean water is a resource that should be available to all. Additionally, we are all (hopefully) eating vegetation that is being grown with water that is likely at an even higher level of contamination. No matter what you do for your own home, this is something that we should all be pushing for and supporting accountability for in our own communities, towns and ultimately national government. The EPA may establish a standard in the next two years but it is incredibly important that we are all paying attention to whether or not it is a legitimately safe one.

Resources: 

EPA Fact Sheet

EWG’s Tap Water Database

Chromium 3 Fact Sheet

Happy New Year! Cheers?

New Years’ Eve is here and with it we round out the holiday season and prepare for an evening of cheer and toasting. However, with flu season and corona looming in the background, it might make sense to consider what the last party of the year might do to our precious, and possibly taxed, immune system. 

We’ve talked about eating well but let’s briefly dive into one of our favorite party guests, alcohol. Alcohol is undoubtedly popular and we all know it isn’t the most healthy thing to put into one’s body, but is it really all that bad? 

Beyond the impairment and dangers of functioning under the influence, alcohol itself carries a pretty heavy toll on our body’s immune system. Put simply, in any quantity, big or small, frequent or rare, it weakens us. Just one drink can suppress the immune system for as long as 24 hours. If you’ve ever had heavy drinkers in your family, you probably already know that chronic drinking carries a significant risk of several different forms of cancer. The risk of esophageal cancer, especially for those who do not process alcohol well due to an enzyme deficiency, is significantly increased by consuming alcohol, along with colorectal cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, and various cancers located in the head and neck. This increase in risk is measurable even when someone only has one drink a day or occasionally binge drinks. It’s also important to not that binge drinking here doesn’t mean getting blackout drunk. Binge drinking means having 4 or 5 drinks at one time and yes, a shot counts as a drink. 

Cancer may seem like it is just a scare word sometimes and almost everything you engage with can give you some form of cancer but that’s not all alcohol is tied to. It’s also tied to the degradation of your liver, kidneys, lungs, and heart. It impacts the brain as you might assume and most notably for this COVID plagued time, it significantly impacts the lungs. 

The immune system is suppressed by alcohol consumption and is more susceptible to infection by bacteria, virus and even physical injury. Injuries heal slower and alcohol especially stifles the healing of burns, hemorrhagic shock and traumatic brain injuries. It disrupts the microbiome in our gut which is involved in everything from breaking down our food to regulating our hormones. The system of organisms cohabitating in our gut also supports our immune system and just one serving of alcohol can throw that system into complete disarray. Frankly, the list of things not impacted in some way by that one ingredient would probably be shorter.

So, this New Year’s make sure you are considering all the risks and weighing them appropriately and keeping the very best of company before you partake of this literal bomb to the body’s homeostasis. Cheers!

Resources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4590612/pdf/arcr-37-2-153.pdf

https://adf.org.au/insights/alcohol-immune-system-covid-19/ 

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohols-effects-body

Cadmium: A Toxic Relationship

Cadmium is one of four major heavy metal contaminants prevalent in our food market today. Mercury, Lead, and Arsenic are much more well known and are frequently discussed. Cadmium, however, we seem to talk and maybe understand less about.

Cadmium can be found in a variety of products but is most commonly used in batteries, electroplating and solder. Soldering, even as a hobby, is actually one of the most common ways someone might be exposed to cadmium in the amounts necessary for poisoning. Other occupational sources of exposure include solar cells, plastic stabilizers,  pigments and nuclear reactors! Workers who manufacture any of these products or collect waste from the manufacture of these products are at the top of the list of those at risk of high levels of cadmium exposure. Even those who just sell or transport these products will most likely have a higher than average amount of exposure. Cigarette smokers also run the risk of cadmium poisoning and the additional lung damage caused by cadmium is permanent and can be deadly. 

Cadmium is extremely poisonous and while these workers are probably experiencing chronic exposure over long periods of time, it really doesn’t take very much to have a significant impact on one’s health. OSHA outlines a number of medically evaluated thresholds for Cadmium exposure and just one indicator out of three being slightly elevated is equated with a significant increase the probability of permanent renal damage. These thresholds are evaluated through a variety of tests including blood work and a urinalysis.

Cadmium damages the lungs, the renal system which includes the kidneys and by extension the bones as the uptake of calcium is greatly reduced with kidney and liver damage. Emphysema, bronchitis, chronic rhinitis and an increased risk of lung cancer are just a few of the ways that damage to the lungs can present. Kidney damage can vary causing an increase in kidney stone development to all out kidney failure. While the extended and regular exposure to cadmium is usually the culprit in cadmium related kidney failure, even an acute exposure can reduce the proper function of the kidneys. In turn, even small changes can decrease the effectiveness of the renal system in the reuptake of necessary nutrients, notably calcium, causing a number of other health complications such as osteoporosis.

While cadmium inhalation is probably the culprit in most acute but very high cadmium exposures, cadmium ingestion is probably the main way that the rest of the population is going to be regularly exposed. While you might not have the symptoms of an acute poisoning like a worker who gets sick after welding without proper ventilation, you are still at risk for developing the issues of chronic, long term exposure. Ingesting cadmium may still result in renal damage and it doesn’t take very much. Small amounts over a number of years will be more than enough to cause renal damage. This is why it is so important that we monitor and test our foods! This is especially important for foods and supplements that we take everyday as cadmium builds up in the body. Learning and knowing where your food is coming from is the first step in preventing cadmium exposure. Testing the foods you can’t personally source is the second. As always, if you have a questions about a particular product or line of food and would like to test that product, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Resources:

Cadmium toxicity and treatment: An update: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5596182/

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/cadmium/Chronic-Effects.html# 

OSHA threshold guidelines for industrial workers : https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OSHA_3675.pdf 

Chocolate, Health & Healthy Chocolate

You’ve probably seen the jokes floating around that go something like, “I want a salad…but a salad that is mostly tomatoes and cheese, no lettuce, on a really, really big crouton. A pizza…I want a pizza.” Or, “chocolate comes from cocoa, which grows on trees so it’s basically a fruit. Chocolate is a fruit salad.” While these memes might stretch the truth a little bit, chocolate at least should not be relegated to the junk food pile just yet. 

Chocolate or more specifically the cocoa chocolate is made from, is linked to a reduction in heart disease and lower blood pressure. It contains many bioactive components like vitamins, minerals, polyphenols and fatty acids. It is also supportive of mental health and has been documented to improve the mental state of expecting mothers. One article stated that because there is a high level of flavanols in chocolate, it has antiallergic, anti-viral, anti inflammatory and anticancer properties. It even reduces the chance of a woman developing type 2 diabetes by reducing their insulin resistance. It would seem that the benefit of chocolate is more significant for people assigned female at birth, possibly because of their hormonal makeup or maybe some other feature we don‘t totally understand yet. 

Historically, chocolate was used in many cultures for its medicinal purposes and was even referred to as the “food of the gods”. With Nestle and the introduction of ingredients like condensed powdered milk and large amounts of sugar, chocolate’s common usage as a medicine started to see a significant decline. 

Polyphenols could have a discussion all their own but the presence of their flavanols subset in chocolate pushes chocolate into an almost superfood tier when it comes to cognitive function. In fact, one study made their entire purpose to figure out if chocolate consumption in a country resulted in a higher cognitive function on average for that country! They did this by taking the chocolate consumption for the country and examining it with regard to how many Nobel laureates there were in each country. The results supported the hypothesis that chocolate consumption enhances intelligence. 

As you might imagine, milk chocolate yields less of these beneficial characteristics and white chocolate isn’t really chocolate in the strictest sense. The addition of milk and sugar undercuts a lot of the benefits so if you are eating chocolate for your health as well as your enjoyment, dark chocolate, minimally processed, is the way to go.

Listen to this article:

Got Milk...Problems?

Got Milk…Problems? 

Whether you are a 13-year-old pug taking the world by storm or a young, human athlete trying to build a solid physiological foundation for success, everyone wants strong bones. If you grew up in the 90s, milk was touted to be the best way to strengthen bones as it contained high amounts of calcium. The iconic “Got Milk?” commercials were in their prime, presenting a spectrum of unlikely events hinging on the need and lack of milk! Many probably remember the fateful commercial where a mom in her two kids witness their older neighbor who never drinks milk comically losing both arms while lifting a heavy wheelbarrow. It was “common knowledge” that milk supported bone health and was necessary for healthy kids! Even now there are a number of experts that still believe milk is the fastest way to get a spectrum of nutrients, including calcium, quickly and easily. When research came out discussing how milk leaches some calcium from your bones, the pro-milk group claimed that while milk leaches some calcium from the body, it also adds significantly more, having an overall positive impact.  So, what does the research actually show about the consumption of milk?

Research shows that while excellent for baby cows, cow's milk is not particularly healthy or necessary for growing humans. It is, in fact, linked to vascular congestion and weight gain. Additionally, while human breast milk is an important part of human nutrition, cow’s milk is instead an integral part of the development of gastrointestinal issues. More than half of the global population is thought to have some level of lactose intolerance. It’s also been tied to several different types of acne and other types of dermatitis. 

What about bone health? Well, for one notable group, older women, research shows that there is no real link between milk and protection against osteoporosis. Additionally, in another study, drinking milk increased the frequency of broken bones (brittleness) in men by 9%! The research as a whole seems to agree that limiting milk is best for bone health. Even if one cup a day doesn’t hurt your bones significantly, more is shown to be measurably detrimental. Besides that, higher dairy consumption has been linked to several forms of cancer, including ovarian cancer, and is thought to be a possible trigger for Type 1 diabetes. It’s also known to raise cholesterol and increase a population's risk of multiple sclerosis. 

What about all that calcium? Not only does milk leach calcium from your bones but it isn’t the best form of calcium for the human body to absorb! There are many other better sources of calcium that don’t carry as many deleterious side effects. Leafy greens, tofu, plant-based milk or even a clean supplement might be a better source of the calcium you need. Additionally, as far as strong bones go, the research also found that more than taking calcium or drinking it, exercise is the best way to support strong bones! So maybe give that 2% a break and instead eat well and keep moving! 

Resources: 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190408-should-we-drink-milk-to-strengthen-bones

https://www.pcrm.org/news/blog/white-lies-five-myths-debunked

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/08/christopher-gardner-busts-myths-about-milk.html

Milk intake and risk of hip fracture in men and women: a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20949604/

Milk consumption during teenage years and risk of hip fractures in older adults https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24247817/

Got milk commercials https://youtu.be/0PAj5X4oYro 

Bacteria: The Unsung Hero

You might be tempted to think that all bacteria are bad bacteria but the truth is that we depend on a certain amount of bacteria for our bodies to function properly. Bacteria helps us break down food, fight infection, process vitamins and minerals and absorb nutrients. It also boosts our immune system and helps fight off infection. Some bacteria are harmful to the human body but ironically, we often use other types of bacteria to fight them and keep them under control. The human body is all about balance and the level of bacteria in our bodies is no different. 

Most people have had the need to take antibiotics at one point or another to combat an illness or infection. Sometimes, a doctor or nurse will tell you to eat yogurt after your pills. Why? It is because an antibiotic does not discriminate between the helpful bacteria in our bodies and the detrimental bateria. It wipes it all away as aggressively as possible. Then, you might feel nauseous or experience bloating afterwards for a week or more as your good bacteria slowly comes back. Yogurt, particularly greek yogurt, contains probiotics, a set of helpful bacteria, that may give you a push as your natural gut bacteria is recovering from the onslaught of antibiotics. Unfortunately, antibiotics are not the only things that can upset this balance of bacteria we need to thrive. Just consuming a poor diet can be detrimental to your microbiome, the combination of your beneficial bacteria and the other microorganisms that live symbiotically within the body. Not getting enough sleep, or experiencing too much stress can also have a negative impact. Smoking, daily or frequent alcohol consumption, and even a lack of physical activity can all contribute to an imbalance and lack of the bacterial support system we need to survive. 

While the best practice would be to fix some of these lifestyle issues in order to naturally balance and support your bacteria levels, supplemental probiotics are designed to give you an extra push when you need it. A probiotic supplement is often used when you know you will be under a lot of stress and want to support your body through it or when you are recovering from something like a two week round of antibiotics. There are refrigerated supplements as well as shelf-safe capsules and you might want to speak to your doctor to find out if either would be useful for you. Most importantly, you want to use a reputable company and test your probiotics to make sure you are getting what you paid for. A good supplement should come temperature protected if it needs to be refrigerated and all types should have a “best by” date guaranteeing their quality for a specified range of time. Probiotics should be live as their value is in what they “do” more than what they “are.” A dead probiotic cannot facilitate any of the beneficial processes we value them for so find a provider who protects their product and when in doubt, reach out! We would, as always, be happy to test a specific product for you. 

Resources:

Quick Facts about the Microbiome

Cleveland Clinic on Probiotics

A NIH “Need to Know” for Probiotics (Fantastic Resource for Continued Research)

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Water, Water, Everywhere and Still You Do Not Drink?

We see the necessity of water in the world around us daily. Trees and crops need water to grow. Rain replenishes the streams and streams feed the biggest and smallest creatures in our environment. We see what happens when there is a drought like what the west coast is currently experiencing. Less life, limited life, death. Why then do many of us imagine the case will be any different if we deprive our own bodies of water? 

Water is needed for nearly all the essential functions of the body. You’ve likely heard that over 60% of the body itself is made up of water. Did you also know that your blood is more than 90% water? Meaning the highway by which every system in your body receives nutrients and takes out the trash is, almost entirely, water. Imagine for a moment attempting to wash a dirty car without water. You could scrub away and even apply soap but without water, you’d still have a mess. Your body is essentially the same way. Your major organs, such as the kidneys, liver, colon and skin work pretty hard to get rid of trash whether it’s through defecation or sweating. Garbage that yields no nutrients to the body and could actually be quite harmful if it hung around is ejected through one mechanism or another and all of it requires a good deal of water. This built in detoxification system that runs on water is really the baseline of every gimmicky “detox” plan you might see. Before one spends a ton on a special pill or powder to cleanse one’s body of toxins, one might try simply increasing one’s daily water intake for a month instead. You might be surprised at the difference just that small change can make. There is no magic amount of water intake that everyone should drink but a good starting point is your weight in ounces divided by 2. So for example, if you weigh 150 lbs, that would be 150/2 = 75 ounces of water. It’s also important that a person pair an increase in water intake with a balanced diet so that they maintain the level of nutrients they need as they increase their body’s ability to use them. 

There are also a number of additional factors that could determine how much water you drink. Exercise requires more water as sweating, one of those very important toxin-flushing systems we mentioned, also dehydrates you. So, if you sweat for a while, you need to replace the water lost. The same is true of crying, bathroom use and even bleeding. Certain foods can also require more water to process or cause you to flush water from your system faster. American culture has readily incorporated a coffee habit into common, daily life. You may have heard that coffee is a diuretic, albeit a relatively mild one. That said, coffee, while a liquid, may actually increase your overall need to drink water as you excrete fluids more often. These dietary and lifestyle adjustments are usually pretty minimal but if you find them overwhelming, regularly consuming the recommended amount of water for the day is an excellent beginning! 

Below are a few links regarding the importance of water consumption if you’d like some additional reading. Later, we will talk about water quality here in the U.S. and if it’s still a relevant issue today!

Medical New Today Article

Additional Reading