March 2015 - Fusion Health and Wellness

Overcoming Spring Allergies

Spring has come, and with it nice weather, lifted spirits, aaanndd… Allergies. Nothing like constant sneezing, a runny nose and itchy eyes to ruin this lovely season for you. Luckily there are some natural remedies so that you don’t have to suffer or use over-the-counter or prescription pills or shots.

The Digestive System, Inflammation and Allergies

Most people wouldn’t think to address the digestive system in order to fix a runny nose, but the truth is it’s the first thing you want to do. If you haven’t checked out my post on digestive health, do so now.

Why focus on the digestive system? Allergies are the immune system responding to irritants via inflammation, and your digestive tract is home to about 80% of your immune system. The digestive tract is also the site of the majority of inflammation Americans experience, due to gut irritants such as gluten, artificial colors and sweeteners, and foods such as soy and dairy.

The fix? Increasing fiber, dark leafy green veggies and doing a few fasts. The fiber helps to sweep out most of the undigested foodstuffs in the digestive tract that hang around and cause inflammation. Dark leafy greens are high in magnesium, which helps to relax the bowels, improving elimination. Fasting is the most powerful healing modality I know of, and is the quickest way to improve the digestive tract, especially when fresh vegetable juices are utilized. A fast helps to expel waste and gives the digestive tract a much need rest, as most people haven’t taken a break from eating since the day they were born. Read my post on digestive health for info on how to easily complete your first few fasts.

Consider supplementing with Omega 3s as well, as they’re highly anti-inflammatory and help to balance out our inordinate consumption of Omega 6 fatty acids, which increase inflammation.

Raw, Local Honey for Allergies

Raw local honey is another great option for allergies, especially after you’ve improved your digestive health. Raw local honey has small amounts of local pollen – these little bits of pollen get digested and interact with the immune system within the gut. The immune system then is given the chance to produce the necessary antibodies for the pollen, and when the pollen is encountered in the mucous membranes in the nose, antibodies will be released to manage the pollen.

You can also go straight to the source and buy local bee pollen as well – the bees go from flower to flower and pick up pollen from each one. This pollen is then collected into little pellets that can be consumed – not only do they improve your allergies, but they are one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet, being extremely high in easy-to-absorb protein, almost all of the B-Vitamins, and are chock full of enzymes and minerals. Bee pollen is a favorite amongst athletes for the energy boost it provides, and is also nature’s richest source of rutin, which has the unique ability of softening blood vessels, helping to protect against atherosclerosis.

Just go to your local co-op, farmers market or apiary and buy yourself some local, raw honey or bee pollen, and consume a few teaspoons per day. Give your body about a month to see the full effects of this remedy.

Reishi Mushroom

Reishi mushroom (Ganoderma Lucidum) is an ancient and revered medicinal fungus that grows wild in many parts of the world. It is the number one healing substance in all of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where it is affectionately known as the “Mushroom of Immortality”.

Reishi Mushroom

Reishi has numerous benefits – it’s anticancer, has powerful antioxidants, is liver-, heart-, lung-, brain- and kidney-protective, has immunoregulatory effects, is a powerful anti-inflammatory and even helps diabetes.

One study found that reishi exhibited powerful neutralizing effects on the allergies of guinea pigs – “These results suggest that GL [Ganoderma Lucidum] may be a useful therapeutic drug for treating patients with allergic rhinitis.” Allergic rhinitis is the technical term for common allergies.

Another found that the triterpenes in reishi mushroom are powerful natural anti-histamines, comparable to Claritin or Benadryl, common over the counter antihistamines.

When buying a reishi mushroom extract to combat allergies, it’s important to get one that has been extracted with alcohol, or that contains reishi spores – the triterpenes that are responsible for reishi’s antihistamine effects are only able to be extracted from the fibrous mushroom using alcohol, or can be obtained from reishi spores that have had their cell walls cracked to increase bioavailability.

Dragon Herbs has many nice reishi products – this is an excellent tincture made from wild reishi, which is naturally higher in healing phytochemicals than reishi grown in hothouses, where the majority of reishi supplements come from. This Jing Herbs product includes reishi spores and would make an excellent choice as well. While I personally buy almost exclusively from these two companies, I have no financial investment in them – I just recommend them most because frankly, they’re up to my high standards for quality.

Give these natural remedies a try! It’s a lot easier to just buy some local honey and a nice reishi extract than to always be reaching for more Claritin.

A Few Effective Hacks

I’ve mentioned in passing before that people use “bio-hacks” to stay ahead of the curve (or in my case, just stay on the curve). A bio-hack is anything that improves health and performance in a quick and easy, and often unconventional way. The term is adopted from the cyber community – just as a computer programer hacks into a computer program, we too can “hack” into our own biology. These practices range everywhere from using certain supplements, to brain training, either through games, devices or meditation, or even hooking yourself up to expensive technological devices to improve your cognitive performance.

Zapping your brain with a Transcranial Low Level Laser Therapy device..?

I must admit, some of these bio-hacks are a bit far out there, even for me. Between LLLT devices, which are said to improve the mitochondria in your brain by zapping them with infrared light, to tCDS, or transcranial direct stimulation devices, which literally apply electrical currents to your brain to strengthen neuronal connections, I currently neither have the funds nor the guts to try some of these, despite how effective the research makes them out to be. However, there are quite a few bio-hacks I do personally use, and while the cream of the crop are going to be saved for my one-on-one clients, I’m more than happy to share a few here with you.

Hack your focus with L-Theanine

L-Theanine is a rare amino-acid like compound found only in a few plants, most notably in green tea. Ever wonder why a cup of quality green tea has that wonderful calming and focusing effect? Yup, that’s L-Theanine at work.

L-Theanine reduces feelings of stress, boosts cognitive function, improves mood and even boosts brain levels of BDNF, a compound that helps protect and grow new brain cells. Further, researchers have yet to be able to determine a toxic dose (but please be reasonable).

L-Theanine has been proven to increase the brain’s alpha waves, which correlates to a state of relaxed alertness. This study states –

“L-theanine significantly increases activity in the alpha frequency band which indicates that it relaxes the mind without inducing drowsiness.” See? Told you so.

Further, L-Theanine and caffeine are a match made in heaven. Need to get some studying done? Need that brain focusing in peak condition, but also need to stay focused? Pairing L-Theanine with caffeine is the way to go – caffeine gives you the mental boost you need to plow through work, while L-Theanine negates the negative effects of caffeine, and increases your focus to keep you from constantly checking your Facebook and email. Most people recommend a 2:1 Theanine/Caffeine ratio, but I do better at a 1:1 ratio. Play around and see what works for you.

Start with just one of these pills per cup of coffee or whenever you’d like some relaxation, and play around until you find your sweet spot. You can also just drink green tea, with gyokuro and white tea being highest in L-Theanine.

Boost motivation and accelerate fat burning with Gynostemma and Green Tea

We all know what green tea is, and how it’s loaded with antioxidants, and you now know it’s got that lovely L-Theanine in it as well. But most people haven’t heard of Gynostemma Pentaphyllum, or jiaogulan in Chinese.

Gynostemma is a delicious adaptogenic tea hailing from southern China. Researchers stumbled upon it when they noticed a village that had an unusual amount of octogenarians who remained quite active and involved in the community. Upon further questioning the researchers discovered that almost everyone in the village regularly drinks a tea made from a plant they called “Miracle Grass”, or what we call Gynostemma.

Jiaogulan

Turns out Gynostemma is one hell of a plant. It has over 80 different saponins, the molecules that give it it’s adaptogenic properties, beating the previous record holder, ginseng, four times over. It’s immune-regulating, boosts energy, improves cellular function and delays fatigue.

But what I really like about it is that it improves your sensitivity to dopamine. Dopamine is that wonderful little neurotransmitter that everyone loves, released after a nice cup of coffee, during sex and when eating tasty food, the one involved in motivation and feelings of reward and pleasure. It’s important that you have ample amounts of dopamine and that your dopamine receptors are sensitive, or else you’ll be going through life unmotivated and without feeling much pleasure, a state known as anhedonia.

This is key in my eyes – if you want to be motivated enough to accomplish your goals, you need to have your dopaminergic system running in tip top shape. There’s a lot more to this topic than simply drinking gynostemma tea, so be on the lookout for upcoming posts or possibly even an ebook. I recommend Dragon Herbs’ Spring Dragon tea, or their Gynostemma capsules.

Gynostemma also improves insulin sensitivity, making it a great addition not only to diabetics but people in general, as improving insulin sensitivity also improves weight loss parameters. Green tea is also a fantastic choice for people looking to lose weight. Green tea is high in an antioxidant called EGCG. EGCG has a three-pronged effect on weight loss. First, it increases the rate at which stored body fat is released to be burned as energy. EGCG also sensitizes your muscles’ cells to insulin, while decreases your fat cell’s sensitivity to insulin. This means that the food you eat after a cup of green tea is more likely to be burned for energy in your muscles than stored away as fat. Finally, EGCG is actually able to destroy fat cells altogether. See, when a person loses weight, they don’t actually lose fat cells – those cells remain, they just release their stored fatty acids. If a person gains that weight back, those fat cells simply fill back up. EGCG is able to actually destroy those fat cells, something that is very rare in a natural compound.

If you want to maximize all these benefits, just combine gynostemma and green tea together and drink a few cups a day. You can also use a high quality matcha green tea, which contains significantly more EGCG than regular green teas.

Shade-grown, stone-ground, Theanine and EGCG rich Matcha

Hack your circadian rhythms with Melatonin and Full Spectrum Lights

Having a proper circadian rhythm is paramount to feeling and looking your best. Nothing is more rejuvenating than a full night’s rest, and it’s easy to see how much performance is affected when you either go to bed late or have to get up early. Nothing is as surefire to improve mood and energy levels as consistently as being well rested, so making sure you have this aspect of your life down is critical.

“Maintaining synchronized circadian rhythms is important to health and well-being,” says Dieter Kunz, director of the Sleep Research and Clinical Chronobiology Research Group at Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin. “A growing body of evidence suggests that a desynchronization of circadian rhythms may play a role in various tumoral diseases, diabetes, obesity, and depression.”

Eeesh.

Naturally, there are ways to hack your circadian rhythm to get more bang for your buck. Start by avoiding blue light 2-3 hours before bedtime. Blue light is emitted from phones, tablets, laptops, computers and tvs, and has been found to suppress the release of melatonin within the brain. Melatonin is the circadian rhythm entraining hormone in the body, and is the main hormone involved in you falling asleep. As the meta-study linked above states “The blue wavelength suppressed melatonin for about twice as long as the green.”

While some bio-hackers like to wear red-tinted glasses to completely block out blue light in the evenings, I simply make sure to avoid phone, tv and computer light exposure as much as possible after sunset – granted, sometimes this is a futile effort. You can also download a free program on your computer and smart phone called f.lux, which will automatically tint your screen more and more red as the sun sets, naturally blocking out the blue light emitted from your devices.

A few nights a week I like to hit the hay early. Not only does this make me feel like a million bucks the next day and improve everything from my metabolism to optimizing my hormone levels, it helps to keep my circadian rhythm in balance. A few times a month, when I’m going to bed early, I’ll take 1 to 1.5 milligrams of melatonin, to “entrain” my circadian rhythm to falling asleep at that hour, usually around 9 or 10. When I take melatonin early at night, I’m basically telling my body, “Now is when you should naturally be falling asleep. This is when you should start releasing melatonin.” Melatonin is also great for jet lag or adjusting to a new timezone – just take it the first few nights to entrain your circadian rhythm to the new timezone.

Quick note – I do not recommend taking melatonin every night, or using big doses. This is a hormone after all, and it’s not to be taken lightly. Just how bodybuilders produce very little testosterone after using steroids, using too much melatonin for too long can shut down your body’s natural production of the hormone. Please keep this in mind.

In the mornings when I wake up, especially in the winter time, I’ll throw on my Verilux HappyLight to signal to my body that the night has ended and it’s time to start producing all the hormones I need to naturally wake up. Photorecptors in our eyes send signals to our hypothalamus that help to wake us up in the presence of bright, full spectrum light, whether from the sun or from a full spectrum bright light. Let’s allow Wikipedia to get real nerdy for us –

“They [Intrinsically photosensitive Retinal Ganglion Cells] play a major role in synchronizing circadian rhythms to the 24-hour light/dark cycle, providing primarily length-of-day and length-of night information. They send light information via the retinohypothalamic tract directly to the circadian pacemaker of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus. The physiological properties of these ganglion cells match known properties of the daily light entrainment (synchronization) mechanism regulating circadian rhythms.”

Long story short, a nice dose of strong, full-spectrum light in the mornings sends all the right signals to your body to fill you with energy and wake you right up. It’s not critical to use a full-spectrum bright light, but if you’re the type that has a difficult time waking up in the mornings or experiences the winter-time blues, it’s a great investment. I’ve personally gotten great results from mine – more energy in the mornings and no winter-time moodiness.

Hack your hormones with Yoga

Be prepared for many posts to come in the following weeks and months on yoga, as I’m a huge fan and there is a lot to cover. One of the biggest benefits of yoga that is rarely touched upon is how yoga is the best way to naturally improve and regulate almost all the hormones your body produces. Proper hormone levels are vitally important to vibrant health, as hormones regulate your physiology and behavior. Throw even one hormone out of whack, and a chain event of disastrous consequences occurs.

All the twisting, bending and stretching of the postures in yoga have many beneficial effects, one of which is to squeeze and massage all of the endocrine glands within the body, the glands that produce and release your hormones. This squeezing and massaging pushes stale blood and toxins out of the glands, and when the twist or bend is released, fresh blood rushes in like water to a dry sponge. This revitalizes the glands and improves their functioning. Inverted postures, especially shirshashana, the headstand pose, improves the functioning of the pituitary, the “master gland” of the endocrine system, which has downstream effects on all your other endocrine glands and body systems.

As you can see, “bio-hacking” is actually a pretty easy and accessible concept, and we’ve barely just scratched the surface. Keep your eyes peeled for future posts on various bio-hacks, including how to use cold to burn more fat, how to use heat to build more muscle, make you smarter and recover faster from workouts, and multiple ways to improve cognition and even grow your brain. Contact me to find out more.

Keys to the Good Life – The Investor’s Mentality

There are a lot of great things that come out of adopting a healthy lifestyle, and many of those things come quickly. Change up your eating habits and exercise routine, and you start losing weight. Eat clean foods, manage stress and get enough sleep, and your mood and energy levels improve. Do a few fasts and cleanses, and your skin becomes clear and eyes more vibrant.

That’s all well and good and an excellent reason to start paying a bit more attention to your health and wellbeing, but you should also consider the benefits that come further down the road. It’s important to drop the consumers mentality and adopt an investor’s mentality, not just with money but with health as well. A consumer thinks, If I do x, y or z now, then I’ll be happy/rich/lose weight/fill in the blank. Investors have a very different thought process. An investor says to themselves, If I do x, y or z now, then in a few weeks/months/years, my efforts will be multiplied a hundred-fold. A consumer is a slave to instant gratification. An investor is in control of his or her desires, and plants a seed now so that he or she can have a field of rewards later.

If you instill healthy habits now, you can more or less coast on autopilot, making tiny adjustments along the way, adding things as needed, and remain healthy for the rest of your life. If you cut out junk food and focus on eating a whole foods, plant-based diet and make that your normal, think of all the problems that will be avoided down the road.

How much money will you save in hospital bills, doctors visits and insurance?

How much will your quality of life improve and remain elevated due to being fit, strong, happy, healthy, emotionally balanced and self-reliant?

How much will a little self-love go towards improving your relationships with others?

Problems in general and health issues in particular have a nasty habit of snowballing out of control. This is easily prevented by just putting a little bit of effort in now, while you’re ahead. Put a little effort into eating cleaner and expanding your pallet. Find a few forms of exercise you love and that don’t feel like work. A few times a week, go to bed early, by at least 10 pm, and make sure to have a few stress management techniques up your sleeve. These few things alone are powerful enough to keep you thriving well into your 90s and beyond. Even if health issues have already cropped up, it’s never too late to take charge and start to fix things.

I do one-on-one and group health coaching, so if you’re looking for specific solutions to your individual health problems, contact me. Adopt an investor’s mentality, and put time and effort into yourself now – you can thank me later.

The Highway to Health

Lemme be honest with you – if you want to be on the fast track to being healthy and feel absolutely fantastic, you need to improve your intestinal health. This should be your first priority, no ifs, ands or buts about it. Your intestinal health affects everything from your mood, your energy levels, cognitive function, and weight, all the way to your outer appearance, as the skin and gut are intimately connected.

How can all this happen just from the gut? Mainly due to inflammation. Controlling inflammation is the key that unlocks a more vibrant life, and the way to control inflammation is largely through improving intestinal health. Everything you consume affects your body’s level of inflammation, either positively or negatively. Think about it – all the stuff you cram down your gullet comes into contact with you via your intestines – all the irritants in food, all the artificial dyes and colorings, all the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, everything is in direct contact with the largest organ in your immune system, your intestines. It makes sense that if you’re eating crap, you’re going to feel like crap as well.

Further, the digestive system is your “second brain”. Called the enteric nervous system, this second brain not only has 100 million neurons, as many as your spinal cord, but also produces a bevy of neurotransmitters which have a huge effect on how you feel.

You want to have more energy, a better mood, less brain fog, lose weight and have better skin don’t you? Thought so.

Your Gut – What Went Wrong

In a perfect world, your gut would be in tip top shape – it would digest the food you put into it, absorb the nutrients and speedily discard the waste products. Sounds easy right?

It should be, but we’ve messed things up in the modern world. Rampant use of antibiotics have completely destroyed our beneficial intestinal flora, leading to overgrowth of bad bacteria like candida or contributing to SIBO, small intestine bacterial overgrowth. A lack of fiber further gunks things up, as fiber is the food for beneficial bacteria in the gut, and helps to sweep debris out of the intestines.

Intestinal hyper-permeability, or “leaky gut syndrome“, is another way intestinal health can go way wrong, as certain irritants, be it undigested food sitting in the intestines, candida or constant exposure to gluten, can actually cause the intestines to become more permeable than they should be. This allows microbes, undigested food particles and toxins to escape the digestive tract and enter the blood stream, where they further cause damage and feelings of malaise.

Lack of fiber, water and magnesium can cause constipation, something affecting some 63 million Americans. Artificial dyes, chemical pesticides, aluminum and plastics leached from cans and bottles.. All these things irritate the gut and affect your energy levels and moods.

The list goes on – Crohn’s disease, Celiac’s disease, lack of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, parasites… A lot can go wrong. The good news is, it’s easy to fix. Read on.

Healing Your Gut, Step 1 – Fasting

It doesn’t matter who you are or what your current health status is, everyone can benefit from periodic fasting. While intermittent fasting has it’s benefits, prolonged fasts are the type recommended for improving intestinal health.

Think about this – when was the last time you gave your digestive system a rest? Here you are, shoveling food into your face all day, every day, and demanding that your digestive system break all that food down, absorb the good stuff and eliminate the bad stuff before you start eating more food. Can’t a homie catch a break?

All joking aside, a 3-7 day juice fast is the most therapeutic technique I know of for boosting health. 24-36 hours after you cease consuming food, the body begins the process of autophagy, where it starts to clean out cellular junk, detoxify, and even destroy old, worn-down cells and replace them with shiny new ones. The intestines get a chance to purge built up waste products (lovely), and get some much needed rest. All the organs and glands in the body get revitalized and re-calibrated. After the initial discomfort of not eating, the body’s energy levels skyrocket as it is no longer expending massive amounts of energy breaking down, absorbing and excreting foodstuffs, and turns to stored body fat as energy.

Fasting is powerful stuff, and after my first couple of 3 day juice fasts, the rosacea on my face and the persistent rash on my chest cleared right up. Spring is the best time for a prolonged fast, as the weather is warm and it gives you a chance to clean out some of the junk stored up from winter, a time of year when most people eat heavier foods to stay warm. Spring is the time nature provides us with the most detoxifying foods as well – sprouts, grasses, dandelion and nettle greens are all very powerful and natural detoxifiers, and if you have access to them and a juicer, all the better.

Here’s how to succeed at your first fast – choose two days that you don’t have much to do, when you preferably aren’t working. On the first day, eat a larger breakfast and a larger lunch before noon. Then consume nothing but fresh juices, teas and water until noon the following day. This gives you a full 24 hours of fasting, and you’ll be sleeping through the worst part, when hunger and fatigue would be peaking. The following week, repeat the process above, but extend the fast until dinner time. The third time you fast, try to hold out a full 3 days – so if you start your fast at noon on Friday, you wouldn’t eat again until noon on Monday. Keep in mind that by halfway through the second day, any feelings of fatigue and aches should disappear and be replaced with mental clarity and energy, and you likely wont even be hungry. It’s important to break the fast with very light foods – fresh fruit, preferably soft ones like bananas and melons, and soft, steamed veggies are best.

If you’re like me and enjoy a cup of joe in the mornings, you can use Dandy Blend during a fast, a blend of roasted chicory, beet and other detoxifying herbs that tastes surprisingly good. Wheatgrass, beet, dandelion, celery and cucumber are excellent choices to juice while fasting, although you can get by using just a combination of apple and grape juices too. Make sure you’re not only consuming citrus juices, as they are too acidic to be the only juice on a fast.

I highly recommend using Healthforce’s Intestinal Drawing Formula during your first few fasts for a few reasons. First, it adds bulk to your stomach, helping to ease a bit of the hunger and encourage bowel movements. Second, it’s loaded with natural demulcents, or substances that gel up and help to heal and soothe the intestines. Finally, it has Zeolite clay, Activated Charcoal and Volcanic Bentonite clay – these natural substances bind to toxins and irritants and help draw them out of the body, very useful during your first few fasts as your body will be purging toxins left and right. I highly recommend using the pills, as the powder tastes like, well, clay.

After your first few fasts, the Intestinal Drawing Formula is optional, but it’s also a great thing to have on hand for anyone with a highly irritated digestive system, as the demulcents are quite soothing. You can always add in some Vitamineral Green for enhanced detoxification during a fast as well. Aim for 3-4 three day fasts per year, as a minimum.

Step 2 – Eliminating Irritants

Figuring out what your trigger foods are can take a bit of work, but it’s critical to find out if you have certain foods that irritate your digestive system. For many people it’s gluten. Next in line is unfermented soy products, and for millions of people it’s processed dairy. MSG and artificial sweeteners do a lot of damage as well.

The best way to suss out suspected food irritants is to do an elimination diet. For one whole month eliminate all gluten, processed soy and processed dairy from your diet. Not only are you likely to lose a few pounds, you’ll likely discover that you have more energy. After the month without the offenders, slowly add each one back into your diet and notice how it makes you feel. If you start getting brain fog, stomach aches or fatigue, you’ll know that it’s an irritant for you.

While I don’t have any food allergies or intestinal irritants per se, I do feel better the less gluten, unfermented soy and highly processed, non-organic milk products I use. If you’re following a whole foods, plant-based diet, these will naturally be minimized.

Step 3 – Smart Eating Strategies

Both Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine say all disease originates from a faulty digestive system. In Ayurveda, an energy known as Agni rules over the digestive functions. Agni is a type of “fire” that breaks food down into it’s smallest components, which are then absorbed and utilized by the body, getting turned into Prana (energy), Tejas (radiance, relating to metabolism) and Ojas (strength or vitality, the equivalent of TCM’s Jing). However, if Agni is depleted or malfunctioning, it can’t fully digest food and results in an accumulation of Ama, or toxins, which leads to disease. This is an amazingly accurate description of how the digestive system actually works, and how many diseases arise in the first place.

Personification of Agni

Ayurveda stresses the importance of doing all you can to keep the flames of Agni fully stoked, or put in modern terms, to keep all your digestive juices and enzymes fully stocked, and there are many ways to do so.

First and foremost, don’t over eat! This is the quickest way to accumulating Ama in Ayurveda and the quickest way to deplete Jing and shorten your lifespan in TCM. Following the Japanese idiom “Hari hachi bu”, or eating until 80% full, goes a long way here.

Preventing overeating can be difficult at first, but is easily corrected with a little practice. Focus on sloooowwiiiingg doowwnnnnn when you eat. There’s roughly a ten minute time delay between your stomach becoming full and your brain realizing that fact. Take a bite, set down your fork, chew thoroughly, and take a second to really taste the food. Many people recommend chewing each bite anywhere from 30 to 100 times – frankly I find this to be a bitch, but I do recommend chewing each bite of just one meal 30 times, not only to prove to yourself that you’ll feel full before the meal is done, but also to show how much more energy you’ll have when your food is properly chewed and ready for digestion.

Many yoga postures, through all the bending and twisting, improve the secretion of digestive juices and enzymes. A favorite method of mine to improve Agni is using digestive bitters. Using digestive bitters was a common practice throughout Europe, and many countries around the world still make it a habit to consume a very bitter/pungent substance prior to meals – think green chutney as a condiment with Indian food. Very bitter foods increase the amount of bile released, helping to digest fatty, heavier foods.

Salt is a simple and effective way to increase digestive powers. Salt is mainly comprised of sodium chloride – the chloride in salt helps to increase the hydrochloric acid of the stomach, the main acid involved in the dissolving of foods. Lightly salting your meals with a natural salt such as Himalayan salt or Celtic sea salt can go a long way.

Spicy, pungent foods also improves digestion – ginger, black pepper, red pepper, cinnamon, turmeric, cloves and many other spicy herbs increase the flow of digestive enzymes and gastric juices, as well as increasing peristalsis, the rhythmic movements of the intestines that expel waste. They also improve circulation, enhance detoxification and many boost the metabolism, so add some spices to your life.

Making lunch your biggest meal of the day is a great way to improve digestion as well. Your metabolism is naturally highest around 12-2 pm, making lunch a great time to digest your bigger, heavier meals. Breakfast should be just enough food to last you to lunch, while dinner should preferably be the lightest meal of the day, maybe just soup or a salad. It’s also important to have a light dinner before 7 so that your stomach is empty come bed time – if it isn’t, your liver won’t get the time it needs to detox as it’s busy processing food, and the insulin released from dinner will impair many a metabolism regulating hormone. To top it all off, your digestive powers are greatly weakened as you sleep.

Both Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine recommend not consuming cold foods, and not consuming too much liquid around meals. Cold foods are said to “shock” the digestive system – while I can’t find any hard facts on this topic, I have felt that I digest warm foods better. Avoiding liquids near meals makes perfect sense, however. Lets say you were trying to melt some object with a bunch of acid – would it melt better if you added just acid, or if you diluted the acid with water? Liquids dilute the digestive juices and enzymes that help to break down the food you eat, so try to limit liquids around meal times. However, a shot of espresso, glass of red wine or some kombucha all help to actually improve digestion, just don’t over do it.

Make sure to consume plenty of fiber as well. Not only is fiber the food for probiotics, but it helps to sweep out undigested bits of food from the digestive tract. Keep that colon clean!

Finally, if you’re consuming a very large meal, say at Thanksgiving, or consuming something you know you’ll have a hard time digesting, make use of digestive enzymes. These make a HUGE difference in how easily and quickly you digest and absorb food.

Step 4 – Pre- and Probiotics

I already touched on the importance of probiotics here – long story short, they improve digestion and assimilation, improve mood and decrease stress, improve immunity, and even create new nutrients for you, some that help you to even lose weight. No discussion of digestive health is complete without paying due to our little friends in our gut. I suggest this brand here for daily maintenance, as well as consuming a wide variety of fermented foods in order to get a variety of probiotics, foods such as yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kombucha, kimchi, miso, natto and fresh pickled veggies. It’s important to also provide prebiotics, the food for probiotics, in the form of fiber, or through supplementation.

You are a reflection of your digestive health. You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel after a few fasts, upping your fiber intake, using bitter and spicy herbs to improve digestion and after regular use of probiotics. Watch as your mood improves, your skin clears up and your energy levels skyrocket. And remember, this is an ongoing process! Don’t think just because you fasted once you don’t have to ever again, or that you don’t need any probiotics after your first bottle. Trust me when I say improving digestive health is key to feeling amazing, and it will be easy to keep at it.

Some Love for my Vegan and Vegetarian Friends, Part 2

A vegetarian and especially a vegan diet can leave some gaping holes in your nutrient consumption. Luckily in today’s world we can eschew animal foods completely while still being able to supplement those missing nutrients back in.

In case you missed Part 1 in this series, it’s here. It covers the most well-known and the most important nutrient deficiencies that can occur on a vegan or vegetarian diet, including

1. Vitamin B-12
2. Vitamin D3
3. Omega 3 fatty acids EPA and DHA
4. Pre-formed, true Vitamin A

But we still have a few more to go, and these nutrients can make a huge difference in how you feel.

Carni-nutrients – As the name implies, these are compounds that are only found in animal foods, namely creatine, taurine, carnosine and carnitine. The healthy body does synthesize these compounds in small amounts, but tissue levels tend to be lower in vegans and vegetarians than in omnivores.

Creatine – Creatine is an amino-acid like compound synthesized by the human body. It helps create and recycle ATP, the energy molecule used by our cells, and I think we all can agree more energy is a good thing.

One study states – “A battery of cognitive tests were performed by the women, both before and after the five days of study, with results showing that memory improved by about 40 percent in the vegetarians consuming the creatine supplements, compared with placebo.” 40% improvement in just 5 days of using creatine?

And another – “However, in vegetarians rather than in those who consume meat, creatine supplementation resulted in better memory.”

Because creatine supplementation didn’t seem to improve cognitive effects in omnivores as stated in the last study, it seems to show that vegans and vegetarians are experiencing a deficiency in the nutrient, as opposed to something like caffeine, which would show a boost in performance across the board. Most creatine supplements are vegan-friendly these days, and it’s dirt cheap and flavorless. Your dose need not be more than 3 grams a day, and no loading phase is necessary as some companies would have you believe. It’s also one of the few proven and safe athletic performance enhancers, so it will help all you athletes out there.

Taurine is another amino-acid like compound that is only found in animal foods, and one that is crucial for heart health. Here is a very in-depth article on taurine for anyone who’d like to do some further digging. Taken straight from the article – “Taurine promotes cardiovascular health, insulin sensitivity, electrolyte balance, hearing function, and immune modulation. In animal research, taurine protected against heart failure, reducing mortality by nearly 80%.” (bold and italics my addition) Yeah, 80%, that’s huge.

Taurine does not come from bull urine as some people believe, although it was first discovered in bull bile. Most all of the taurine on the market today is synthesized in labs and is therefore vegan. This is the product I use and it will last you quite a while, or you can save a few dollars by buying this product, which combines creatine and taurine as well as glutamine, an immune boosting, gut-healing amino acid.

Carnosine is a crucial nutrient that prevents glycation within the body. From the LEF website – “A fascinating paper recently published in the journal Mechanisms of Aging and Development presents an entirely new theory to explain why vegetarians do not live longer. It turns out that those who avoid eating beef suffer a deficiency of a nutrient (carnosine) that is critical to preventing lethal glycation reactions in the body.

For the benefit of new members, glycation can be defined as the toxic binding of glucose to the body’s proteins. Glycation alters the body’s proteins and renders them non-functional. While wrinkled skin is the first outward appearance of glycation, most degenerative diseases are affected in one way or another by pathological glycation reactions.” (bold my addition)

These Advanced Glycation End products, aptly called AGEs, are a major contributing factor to aging, disease states and yes, the dreaded wrinkly skin. Without nature’s most potent anti-glycation agent, carnosine, AGEs can potentially build up fast, especially if the diet is high in sugar or other fast digesting carbs, or in rancid vegetable oils. To increase your body’s levels of carnosine without consuming meat, you can supplement with Beta-alanine, which is a rate-limiting factor for the production of carnosine. Just 3 grams a day is plenty, although for fair warning, some people may notice a “flush”, where your skin gets tingly. I am one of those people, but usually I barely notice it. This is a normal side effect of consuming beta-alanine, known as parasthesia, and is in no way harmful.

Carnitine is yet another nutrient that is plentiful in animal foods that exerts beneficial effects in the human body. Carnitine is a key player in the breakdown and utilization of fat for energy, helping you to lose weight and increase energy levels; it is a powerful antioxidant, and improves bone and heart health. This study shows a reduction in fat and an increase in muscle mass, as well as a reduction in fatigue and increase in cognitive function through supplemental carnitine. Acetyl L-cartinine is a form that provides the biggest boost to your brain, improving memory, mood, and motivation, and is the kind I personally use, and it’s quite cheap; doses range from 500 to 2000 mg.

CoQ-10 is one more nutrient which may be lacking on a vegetarian and vegan diet. While some plants do contain Coenzyme Q-10, it is found much more abundantly in animal foods. In one study, a third of patients had CoQ-10 levels below what they should be, and this wasn’t even in vegan or vegetarians. CoQ-10 is used by every cell in your body to produce energy; it’s a potent antioxidant and boosts the immune system, but our bodies start producing less as we age. Our hearts contain the highest amount of CoQ-10 in our bodies and this should come as no surprise – the constant pumping of blood obviously requires a lot of energy, and CoQ-10 is vital for energy production. Further, anyone taking statins to lower their cholesterol should be required to take supplemental CoQ-10, as statins inhibit your body’s production of this essential nutrient. Pretty ironic, considering people are prescribed statins to protect their heart, while actually depriving their heart of this key nutrient. Here is a very well priced, vegan CoQ-10, using the form of this coenzyme that is most bioavailable. At 100 mg per pill, you wouldn’t have to take one each and every day – maybe twice a week for readers below 40, every other day for those over 40-50, and once daily for readers above 50, those on statins or anyone doing lots of marathon, triathlon, or Iron Man training, as these have been shown to have deleterious effects on the heart.

Finally, vegans and vegetarians may be deficient in zinc and other minerals as well. Whereas our bodies can produce the other nutrients listed in this post if given the right raw materials, minerals must be obtained from the diet. Plants are abundant in certain minerals like magnesium, while other minerals such as zinc are much better obtained from animal sources.

Another confounding factor is that many grains, nuts, seeds and beans, which can make up the majority of a vegan/vegetarian diet, contain antinutrients such as phytic acid, glucosinolates, lectin and oxalic acid, which actually inhibit the absorption of certain nutrients. Phytic acid in particular binds with minerals in your digestive system, rendering them unable to be absorbed. Maintaining proper mineral levels is beyond crucial for preventing disease states, achieving optimal health and feeling generally badass – the difference in how you feel when you get adequate magnesium and iodine, for example, is pretty profound.

These antinutrients can be reduced by soaking and sprouting your seeds, nuts and grains before consuming them, a process that does takes some time and foresight, but many companies are now selling pre-sprouted grain and nut products, eliminating the need to do so yourself. This product is a nice blend of minerals, and all of them are actually in highly absorbable forms, which is a rare find.

Sound like a lot to keep up with? It kind of is, but try some of these supplements and notice the difference in energy levels, immunity, improved mood and the improved quality of your hair, skin and nails. I don’t think every single vegetarian needs to use all of these supplements, but I wanted to provide this information for those who are interested or for those who may notice less energy after giving up animal products. These supplements are more important for vegans, who abstain from all animal based products, and for the aging or extreme exercising vegetarians.

These nutrients are so important that I supplement with all of them from time to time and I’m not even a vegan or vegetarian. You don’t have to break the bank all at once either; go buy some creatine, it’s dirt cheap, and play around with that for a while. Then try out carnitine and notice how your energy levels go up and cognition improves. Pay attention to how your mood gets lifted and stabilizes after using the Country Life Mineral Blend, and how your skin becomes clear and hair becomes lustrous after getting adequate Omega 3s.

The nutrients listed in the first post are likely more pressing, along with getting adequate minerals, so if you’re tight on cash and can only afford a few items, stick to those.

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