Treating Hypermobility Starts with the Foundation – The Nutrition and Lifestyle Strategies That Support Connective Tissue with Dr. Aaron Hartman | Hypermobility | E158

But the idea is that foods are processed. When you eat processed foods, they remove the nutrition and leave the calories. When you eat carbohydrates, sugars, refined things, you actually need more B vitamins, need more vitamin C, more magnesium, more potassium to actually process those calories. And what's happening in our population is because our foods are largely ultra-processed, we're inducing— by eating that food, yes, you're eating calories that you actually gain weight, but you're inducing cellular nutrient deficiencies. Welcome back once again. We'll be finishing up our discussion about hypermobility. Little housekeeping. Many of you that are following us on this and watching us actually are not subscribed. That could be super helpful for us. So if before you keep on going, hit the button below, that'd be super helpful just to help get the message and our information out there. With that, we're going to finish the final thing up with hypermobility and actually how can you actually move the needle on your health? Looking at things from a fascial connective tissue perspective. A couple of foundational things I want to talk about, nutritionally related, advanced therapies, and then some fascial or body-related therapies to help change your fascia in your body. So the first thing is nutrition stuff. One of the things we routinely see in people that are hypermobile, they have a higher need for protein, period. One of the things that's popping up in the last several years is in general, people, especially women, need for higher protein consumption. If you're hypermobile, increase that 20 to 30%. So typically if I'm seeing a patient, a female weighs about 150, I'm telling her she needs probably 90 to 120 grams of protein a day. If you're hypermobile, that probably needs to be 150 grams of protein a day. So this is a lot of protein consumption. You also need to have adequate amount of collagen or collagen peptide-like proteins. Bone broth is super helpful in this. And then certain protein sources like whey protein, which is a complete protein, can be really helpful. But the gist is you need more. Vitamin C is another nutrient that's super essential for connective tissue healing and repairing. One of the issues is many of these people have a functional vitamin C deficiency. It looks like easy bruising, easy bleeding, poor wound healing, poor healing in general, and then maybe some gummish, easy bleeding the gums, friable gums, and some dental issues, whether they— your teeth don't heal quite as well or you get cracked teeth easier, things like that. Vitamin C is super critical for this population of individuals. They probably need 500 to 1,000 milligrams at least once once a day, if not more. The other thing about it becomes is that when you're consuming vitamin C, you typically need to do it several times throughout the day because the half-life is about 6 hours. So if you have a dose of vitamin C in the morning, it won't be there later on. Other things to think about are other trace minerals, magnesium, potassium, rare earth minerals, ultra trace minerals, lots of different terms for these things. But there's things like barium, strontium, silica, things that you only get from consuming things that concentrate minerals. So if you look at like your sea salt, for example, your basic minerals will have sodium, potassium, maybe zinc, and there's nothing else on there yet. The vast majority of what is in sea salt minus the sodium chloride, you take that out, are all these rare earth minerals. The best source for this is actually either eating connective tissue, which is bone broth as an extract of that connective tissue, or organ meat. Don't have the best luck with getting people to do organ meat. It's really interesting to think before 1950, 1/3 of meat consumption in our country was actually organ meat. That's kind of interesting to study, think about. But people need more of these. And silicon is an interesting one. That is removed from, you know, a water supply or food supply that's needed for connective tissue and particularly bone health. And then general things to decrease inflammation in your diet, removing carbohydrates. This is— there's some interesting research. There's actually a book written by Dr. Launders called Dysautonomia, Thiamine Deficiency, and High-Calorie Malnutrition. And this is a pediatrician at the Cleveland Clinic. It was really interesting how many of these really super sick kids he was seeing that he called it high-calorie malnutrition. But the idea is that foods are processed and we eat processed foods. They remove the nutrition and leave the calories. When you eat carbohydrates, sugars, refined things, you actually need more B vitamins, need more vitamin C, more magnesium, more potassium to actually process those calories. And what's happening in our population is because our foods are largely ultra-processed, we're inducing— by eating that food, yes, you're eating calories that you actually gain weight, but you're inducing cellular nutrient deficiencies. So when you have a diet, you gotta remove that stuff because every time you eat a carbohydrate, You're increasing your body's demand for minerals, vitamin C, antioxidants, vitamin E. And if you aren't getting them, you're inducing particularly B vitamin deficiencies. Your body metabolizing carbohydrates specifically increases the need for B vitamins, especially thiamine. And these are a couple basic things, you know. The other thing about your diet is an anti-inflammatory diet. A lot of these individuals will develop low levels of mast cell activation syndrome or MCAS. So getting more anti-inflammatory things rich in polyphenols, which are colorful fruits and vegetables, lots of extra virgin olive oil, and it has to be extra virgin cold-pressed olive oil. And then for general gut health, things like glutamine, which is the primary amino acid to repair your gut, zinc carnosine, demulcents like slippery elm, aloe vera leaf extract, all these things can help calm down your gut, decrease inflammation, and ultimately help when you have connective issues. Those are the basic nutritional things that I do with patients. And when they work with me in the clinic, I'll do organic acid tests. After I've done blood testing for nutrient deficiencies. It's almost like, you know, if you, if you have deficiency in your, in your red blood cells or in your serum, you're 100% going to have it inside the cells. So I clear out the major deficiencies first, then take a deep dive, do an organic acid test. It's amazing. People can have high blood levels of B vitamins, high blood levels of stuff, but we do the intracellular testing, they're still deficient. Once that's all been cleaned up, then looking at the next level advanced therapies, which are things like BPC-157, thymosin beta-4, thymosin alpha-1, and depending on the person's age, particularly things like CJCipremirelin. I talked about these earlier on in one of our peptide discussions. So if you have questions about those, you can look at that. Eventually it'll turn into a blog on the website. So you can just look at that information on the website as well. One thing I've had really good results with is some of my sicker patients that come to see me who have horrible dysautonomia and some really horrible autoimmune issues is IV vitamin C. It allows you to, one, bypass the mouth so you can do higher levels of it. It's a super potent antioxidant, but also can meet the intracellular needs that many people have for vitamin C. And if you have a chronic infection like reactivation of herpes, Epstein-Barr, or even Lyme, the IV vitamin C can actually help improve your immune system against those intracellular infections. It's really interesting how vitamin C is super critical for anything that happens inside the cells, which are typically your tick-borne illnesses. New viral illnesses. Phosphatidylcholine is another one that's overlooked, just starting to be on people's radar. Phospholipids, particularly phosphatidylcholine, are super important for membrane structure and support. And with the low-fat craze hopefully being over, but the last 50 years we've had this low-fat craze, we've induced a deficiency in essential fatty acids in the majority of our population. And what that results is membrane dysfunction, fascial dysfunction, gut dysfunction. Phosphatidylcholine is super critical for this, whether it's oral or IV. And then you can do things like stem cells, exosomes, PRP, other regenerative therapies. But those are like the last thing I do. You don't have the nutrient stuff on board. If you don't have the right balances of fatty acids, nutritional stuff, there's some of those fancier things just don't— they may not even work and you spent a lot of money and haven't really got a whole lot out of it. The next thing that's misunderstood a lot and not utilized enough is bodywork. And this is not optional. These individuals with hypermobility, because of the loosey-gooseyness, their immune, their nervous systems get overactive and they tend to be a fight or flight style. Bodywork, whether it's fascial work, myofascial work, acupuncture, whether it's craniosacral work or other ways that actually affect or manipulate the nervous system through your body's tissues are super, super important. I've had a lot of patients who've had chronic pain related to the joint, the loosey-gooseyness and doing things like Pilates, Yoga with Tai Chi have actually helped tighten down their, their tissue and fascia and made the majority of all their pain go away, which again is a big issue. A lot of these individuals will also have migraines, crack headaches, and you really got to address these because that crack pain activates your nervous system. It can cause a lot of issues. So whether it's using CRGP type of migraine medications, which work great, or they have fascial issues, doing fascial work, trigger point injection, using procaine, lidocaine, and even cranial sacral and cervical therapy can actually help solidify that part of your brain which gets dysregulated in hypermobility. These are all super, super critical things that are really helpful. Visceral manipulation is another thing that can help us in the gut issues related to this. The point to remember is you need to work with someone typically who does more than one thing. Maybe somebody does dry needling and fascial work and craniosacral. But the people who do more of these integrative therapies have a better understanding of the limitations of each one and where the other ones kind of come into play. And even using certain types of Peripheral electrical stimulations, like whether it's QWELL neuromuscular stimulation, can be actually helpful. There's certain devices, even like Cefaly, which is a trigeminal nerve stimulating device, can actually help with some of the headache and downgrade some of the pain sensitization that occurs in these individuals. So how to think about it is you want to have the tier 1 foundational stuff, which is all the nutritional, gut, anti-inflammatory stuff. 2 is the more higher level active regeneration. Number 3, 3 doesn't mean it's less important, just You got to name them somehow. It's all the bodywork stuff. And ideally you'd be using these in combination or altogether to help your body improve and get better. Hope this information was helpful talking about hypermobility. Hopefully, you know, these, these 3 episodes we've addressed a lot of issues. It's impossible. It's taken me, I've been studying this for years and years. If you want a book, there's actually a great book. I usually have it sitting on my desk over there, but I don't see it right now. It's called Disjointed and it's actually written for patients and it actually talks about hypermobility. Ways to think about it. And it's actually on our reading list on the website, but that's actually a good read if you want to take a deeper dive. And you read that, you probably get 90, 89% of everything you need to know about hypermobility if you're someone dealing with it. So anyway, I hope this information is well. So you're not— you want individuals, majority of people not subscribed and following us, please do so below and let us know what you'd like to learn more about. We just love doing these little short breakout sessions. Ultimately, educating our patients, educating people will put you in control of your health. And that's really what we're trying to do is educate individuals, Become educated, encouraged, empowered, take control of your health and be the best version of you can be. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.