A Fresh Coat of Paint

A Fresh Coat of Paint

Regular Chiropractic Care and a Plan for Good Health

Worldwide, the number of people with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer continues to increase. Despite the expenditure of well over $100 billion in pharmaceutical research and new drug development, the impact on global health in the area of chronic disease has not been significant. It is reasonable to conclude that solutions to these dire problems lie elsewhere. In fact, lifestyle has come to be recognized as the key factor in both causation and treatment of these life-threatening disorders. A healthy diet, regular vigorous exercise, and sufficient rest are the cornerstones of such meaningful lifestyle change. Regular chiropractic care is a critical supplement to these healthy lifestyle choices, as it provides necessary support to the functioning of the nerve system, your body's master system. With a healthy nerve system, your body is able to make the best use of the good things you're providing in terms of food, exercise, and rest. Adding regular chiropractic care to your lifestyle plan contributes substantially to your overall health and well-being.

As all real estate brokers know, a fresh coat of paint will make any property look good. Whether your home is a row house in Baltimore, a Paris atelier, or even a Winnebago, a new coat of paint will bring a shine to the interior and put a smile on the faces of both residents and guests. You may find that a similar smile will appear on your face and the faces of your friends and family members when you engage in activities that provide you with a metaphorical fresh coat of paint. Specifically, you'll obtain your "new look" by incorporating a healthy diet and regular, vigorous exercise in your daily routine.^1,2
But what exactly is "a healthy diet," and what is really meant by "regular, vigorous exercise"? A healthy diet consists in a daily practice of consuming food from all five food groups: fruits, vegetables, grains, proteins, and dairy. Importantly, a healthy diet includes at least five daily servings of fresh fruits and vegetables. Overall, the more colors on your plate, the better. If you're consistently eating yellow, green, red, blue, orange, and purple foods such as squash, corn, grapefruit, kale, broccoli, apples, peppers, blueberries, carrots, oranges, potatoes, and eggplant, you're well on your way toward a lifelong healthy diet.
The grains food group contains whole grains such as whole wheat, brown rice, bulgur, and barley. For those who require gluten-free whole grains, the numerous choices include amaranth, buckwheat, quinoa, brown rice, and teff. The protein food group includes beef, lamb, chicken, eggs, fish, beans and peas, and nuts and seeds. There are plenty of protein sources for vegetarians and others who don't eat meat or other foods derived from animals such as eggs and milk. The dairy group is included to provide sources of calcium.³ These foods include low-fat and fat-free choices such as milk, yoghurt, and cheese. If you're a vegetarian or have allergies to dairy products, other sources of calcium include kale, collard greens, spinach, salmon, sardines, blackstrap molasses, and beans. For men and women aged 19 to 50, the recommended daily requirement for calcium is 1000mg. For women over age 50 and men over age 70, the recommended daily requirement for calcium is 1200mg.
Regular, vigorous exercise means doing at least 30 minutes of exercise five days a week. Walking, running, bike riding, swimming, using an elliptical machine or treadmill, and weight training are all good choices. Lifting weights three times a week and doing some form of aerobic exercise two times a week is one example of such a program of vigorous daily exercise. For some people, walking five days a week for at least 30 minutes each day represents an optimal program. Find out what works best for you and do that consistently. Change your program every few months to keep both your mind and body challenged. Again, the specific form of exercise is not critical. What works for one person will not work for another. The key is consistency. Five days a week, at least 30 minutes a day.
Your fresh coat of paint is not merely metaphorical. Once your new lifestyle changes take effect, probably within three to six weeks, you'll begin to develop an inner glow and an outer glow that will be visible for all to see.
¹King DE, et al: Impact of healthy lifestyle on mortality in people with normal blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, and C-reactive protein. Eur J Prev Cardiol 20(1):73-79, 2013
²Lopresti AL, et al: A review of lifestyle factors that contribute to important pathways associated with major depression: diet, sleep and exercise. J Affect Disord 148(1):12-27, 2013
³Nachtigall MJ, et al: Osteoporosis risk factors and early life-style modifications to decrease disease burden in women. Clin Obstet Gynecol 56(4):650-653, 2013

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Herbal Supplements Don't Contain What They Claim | IFLScience

Herbal Supplements Don't Contain What They Claim | IFLScience

Exercise and Nutrition

Harness the Power of Hybrid Vigor

Regular Chiropractic Care, Wellness, and You

Just as combining strength training and cardiovascular exercise produces enhanced benefits in many areas of fitness, and food combining helps you get the most out of your daily nutrition, regular chiropractic care helps you achieve your goals of long-term health and well-being. Regular chiropractic care is the "x factor" in obtaining high levels of health and wellness. Adding regular chiropractic care to the other healthful things you're doing increases the benefits of those activities. By identifying and correcting areas of spinal misalignment and helping remove nerve interference, regular chiropractic care helps your musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, digestive, and hormonal systems do their jobs better. As a result, your body is optimized to obtain the greatest benefit from all your other health-promoting activities. The combination of exercise, nutrition, and regular chiropractic care makes all the difference.

Certain things in life just go together naturally. In the kitchen, peanut butter and jelly is a classic combination. Another such pairing is apple pie and ice cream.Other categories of life experience, such as human performance, prize the association of freedom and creativity. And in the field of health care, exercise and nutrition are two pillars of a solid foundation for long-term wellness and well-being.
The combination of exercise and nutrition makes intuitive sense, of course, but it's useful and informative to drill deeper into this relationship. Regarding exercise, almost any type of this activity is beneficial.¹ "Whatever works for you" is a time-honored principle in fitness. Swimming, running, bicycling, lifting weights, playing basketball, doing yoga, and walking all provide substantial benefit for people. What's best is to do the things you like to do. Hidden beneath the surface, however, is a very interesting fact. If you combine certain types of exercise, specifically, if you do both strength-training activities and cardiovascular exercises during the course of a week, you'll obtain enhanced results. Interestingly, both your strength and endurance will improve more rapidly compared to doing only one type of activity.
Beyond expedited improvement (and the great satisfaction many of us derive from lifting heavier weights in the gym and running faster on the track), improved strength and endurance are very closely linked to numerous important indicators of optimal health and well-being. It's the combination that makes the difference.^2,3
Similarly, good nutrition is not only a matter of making sure that every food group is represented in your daily diet. Choosing foods from the fruits, vegetables, proteins, grains, and dairy groups is the key first step in all nutritional programs that provide lasting value. But, again, there are hidden relationships. Combining proteins and carbohydrates at every meal causes improved digestion and improved absorption of all nutrients. By more efficiently breaking down the food you eat and more effectively absorbing valuable nutrients, you derive enhanced benefit from the calories you're consuming. You gain more energy to use throughout the day and are able to perform at a higher level. As a result, your sleep is more restful and you wake up refreshed, ready to engage with whatever challenges the new day brings.
The principle behind the power of these various combinations is that of hybrid vigor. The concept is derived from studies of genetics in the 19th century in which it was discovered that cross-breeding often produced hardier plants. We, too, can harness this principle to become hardier ourselves, enabling us to enjoy long-term health, wellness, and well-being.
¹Lackland DT, Voecks JH: Metabolic syndrome and hypertension: regular exercise as part of lifestyle management. Curr Hypertens Rep 2014 Nov;16(11):492. doi: 10.1007/s11906-014-0492-2
²Sigal RJ, el al: Effects of Aerobic Training, Resistance Training, or Both on Percentage Body Fat and Cardiometabolic Risk Markers in Obese Adolescents: The Healthy Eating Aerobic and Resistance Training in Youth Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Pediatr 2014 Sep 22. doi: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2014.1392. [Epub ahead of print]
³Ho SS, et al: The effect of 12 weeks of aerobic, resistance or combination exercise training on cardiovascular risk factors in the overweight and obese in a randomized trial. BMC Public Health 2012 Aug 28;12:704. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-12-704

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The Power of Cross Training

The Power of Cross-Training

Chiropractic Care Optimizes the Benefits of Exercise

Cross-training places numerous physiological demands on your cardiorespiratory and musculoskeletal systems, as well as on your digestive, hormonal, and immune systems. These demands are necessary for your ongoing health and well-being, following both the principle of "use it or lose it" and Wolff's Law (bone remodels along lines of physiological stress). But in order to maximize our cross-training gains, we want to make sure that our body's underlying structure is intact. Our various physiological systems must be able to communicate with each other efficiently, and each system must be able to receive and transmit information to the master system, the nerve system. Regular chiropractic care helps ensure these necessary interactions are taking place, consistently and over time. By detecting and correcting spinal misalignments and by removing nerve interference, regular chiropractic care helps optimize all physiological functioning and helps you get the most out of your cross-training activities.

Cross-training refers to a combination of different methods of exercise. Specifically, cross-training refers to the combination of strength training and cardiovascular training in your overall exercise program. Whether you're a 14-year-old just starting out on your first fitness program, or whether you're a 74-year-old who hasn't exercised in more than 40 years, cross-training will provide optimal results for the time and effort you spend on exercise.
In cross-training, it's not that you're doing aerobic and strength-training activities simultaneously. Rather, you're incorporating both methods in your weekly exercise regime. One week you might do three sessions of strength training and two sessions of cardiovascular activity. The next week you could do three sessions of aerobic exercise and two sessions of strength training. The result is that, overall, approximately half of your exercise time is devoted to each of these two methods.
The remarkable outcome of combining two distinctly different training modes is that both sets of results are enhanced.^1,2 Doing cardiovascular exercise on alternate days makes you stronger. In other words, your muscular strength and size are greater than they would be if strength training were your only form of exercise. Correspondingly, doing strength training on alternate days provides you with heightened cardiovascular gains. Specifically, your stroke volume (the amount of blood pumped on each contraction of your heart muscle) and vital capacity (the amount of air you can take in on each breath) are greater than the results you would have obtained by only doing aerobic exercise.
The benefits of cross-training are automatic. There's nothing you need to do intentionally to achieve these gains, other than engaging in your cross-training program five days a week. When you train your heart and lungs by doing cardiovascular (really, cardiorespiratory) exercise, your skeletal muscles automatically participate in your walking, running, biking, or swimming activity. When you do strength training, exercising your chest, back, shoulders, arms, and legs (on different split-training days, of course), your heart and lungs automatically participate, pumping the extra blood and breathing in the extra oxygen required for any vigorous physical activity.
The synergy created by the cross-training format potentiates the results obtained from each method.³ The improved performance of your heart and lungs, derived from aerobic training, enables greater strength training gains. A stronger musculoskeletal system, derived from training with weights, causes your heart and lungs to become more efficient to meet new demands. A positive feedback loop is established from which you obtain improved health and enhanced wellness and  well-being.
The best time to begin your new cross-training program is today. Start slowly, increase duration and intensity gradually, and evaluate your gains at 6- and 12-week intervals. Your chiropractor is experienced in exercise rehabilitation and will help you design a cross-training program that works for you.
¹Fournier SB, et al: Improved Arterial-Ventricular Coupling in Metabolic Syndrome after Exercise Training. Med Sci Sports Exerc  2014 May 27. [Epub ahead of print]
²Kolka C: Treating Diabetes with Exercise - Focus on the Microvasculature. J Diabetes Metab 4:308, 2013
³Dos Santos ES, et al: Acute and Chronic Cardiovascular Response to 16 Weeks of Combined Eccentric or Traditional Resistance and Aerobic Training in Elderly Hypertensive Women: A Randomized Controlled Trial. J Strength Cond Res 2014 May 19. [Epub ahead of print]

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