Daily Health Update for July 28 2021 by Toronto Chiropractor Dr. David Koivuranta in Davisville.

Hello everyone, it's Dr. Dave. Hope you're all doing well, enjoying your week, the middle of your week. I hope it's going well. Don't worry, the weekend is coming once again pretty soon. Coming at you on behalf of the Toronto Neck and Back Pain Clinic with your daily health update for Wednesday, July 28th, 2021. Gonna look at 6 areas of health and wellness news and information. Somewhere around this video you can read through all 6 areas, but if you'd like a copy, you can DM us on social, send us an email, give us a call here at the clinic. We're always happy to help you out, even if you have any questions. Don't don't hesitate to let us know. Not going to treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure any illness or disease with our time together today. However, we do promise to steer you in the right direction with your thoughts, decisions, and actions when it comes to your own health and wellness, perhaps the health and wellness of those around you, so you can keep taking care of that body of yours and living a good life to have those great experiences you're trying to have every day. It's well worth the effort indeed. So the Journal of American College of Cardiology, June 2021, talks about teen obesity and it increases the risk of diabetes later in life. Using data from a long-term study that monitored nearly 12,000 individuals for over 2 decades starting in their teen years, researchers found that those, uh, being obese during adolescence was associated with an increased risk for poor health, type 2 diabetes, and heart attack before middle age. The authors note that adolescence is an important time period to prevent future diabetes and heart attacks. Parents should encourage teenagers to develop healthy behaviors such as regular physical activity and balanced meals. Statistics show that children are the ones who get the most in terms of activity and movement for the guidelines. They're the ones closest to reaching and getting as much as they should every day. And then it drops quite a bit into the teenage years, especially with young females. And then it goes up again somewhat into the 20s for both groups, but then never really gets up as high as it needs to for most of us. Throughout our life. So the guideline is pretty low as an adult. It's about 150 minutes per week, and we should probably be aiming for at least that, if not about even 50% to 100% more than that. Valuable, so valuable is movement in the body. And then when you tie in some good decisions when it comes to nutrition, you're gonna make it a long way with less challenges, hopefully. All right, but that's how you stack the deck in your favor. And those habits, those patterns around the decisions we make every day. They do start early on in life and they become solidified by the teen years. And quite often we live our life based on what we know and what we do by the age of 20. So good by that stage to have set up some really good habits and patterns. BMC Public Health, June 2021, talks about many people's favorite beverage, good old coffee, and how it may protect the liver. An analysis of data concerning nearly 500,000 adults whom researchers monitored for over a decade revealed that drinking 3 to 4 cups of coffee a day is associated with a 20% reduced risk for chronic liver disease and 49% reduced risk of death from chronic liver disease. While ground coffee appears to offer the most benefit, the researchers note that decaffeinated and instant coffees also offer some protection to the liver. Now, be sure that those 3 to 4 cups do not interfere or affect you in a negative way. Depending on how you respond to coffee, uh, even a cup or two a day might not be a bad idea. Instead of aiming for 3 or 4. The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, July 2021, looks at core muscle strength and how it affects throwing velocity. Interestingly, in cricket players, they looked at 98 of them, and they observed that participating in a 6-week core strengthening program increased their throwing velocity. So a lot of things, even running, many, many different sports, but even our ability to engage something like a computer station, or if we use different, uh, objects during the day for either pleasure or work, then the stronger the core, there may be some carryover into how well we can manipulate the environment around us, including the tasks that we carry out every day, either in and around our homes or for our workplace. So the core strength does have some merit. I don't know that anyone necessarily has a weak core with— unless there's some significant pathology going on, but there may be some alterations in the patterns and some improvements that can occur in those patterns that would help a lot of people. So looking into that core activity and not necessarily strength, but learning to engage your core and use your core could carry over into some benefits, even with something as simple as the computer work many of us do every day. The journal Sleep, June 2021, looks at exercise and how it offers immediate benefits to mood. Patients with diagnosed depression experience a strong improvement in their mood following a single 30-minute session of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise with no adverse effects on sleep even if they exercise later in the day. There has been some research in the past that shows exercise outperforms many medications when it comes to improving mood among those people who do have or suffer from depression and performs better than placebo even. And placebo does actually better than many medications on the market as well for depression. However, do talk to your doctor, your healthcare provider, before making any changes, but the addition of some exercise or activity into your life should be okay in most instances and should have a positive result as well. The Journal of Rhinology, July 2021, looks at allergic rhinitis and how that can affect mental health. New research suggests that individuals with allergies to dust, pollen, mold, or pet dander may have an increased risk for both anxiety and depression. An interesting correlation there. So I don't know what the strategy would be going forward to help improve that, but of course you could see a paramedical provider with many of your lifestyle choices to help support your body's healthy immune response, even if it's an altered or exaggerated one to things in your environment. There may be ways to help improve that. So a naturopath would especially— might— it could be a good place to start and get some good information or help. Finally, the journal Peer J, May 2021, talks about back pain and school bags. Yes, it's coming soon, for some of us just over a month away perhaps. Assessments of over 11,000 school children revealed that 42% had experienced low back pain during the previous year. With respect to the weight of backpacks, the students who felt their book bag was too heavy were 1.44 times more likely to report back pain. Dr. David Koivuranta and many other manual therapists are trained to evaluate and treat children with low back pain, as well as give guidance on proper posture and use of backpacks. Although there may be some feedback, some kickback, some pushback on care for younger people, the reality is that all our parts need to sit and move properly at every stage of life. And there are different ways of caring for people, different stages of life, when it comes to either chiropractic, physiotherapy, massage therapy, osteopathy, acupuncture. So, uh, it is tailored to those individuals, and it is very safe and effective and sometimes has a very big need. In fact, About a decade ago, I had the pleasure of attending a Toronto District School Board elementary school, and I went from classroom to classroom talking to the various grades. We started at the highest grade and we worked our way down, and I was there for half a day. And we— the principal took me from room to room, and we did about 15 minutes with each class. And through the morning, I think we got from grade 8 down to about grade 3 or 2. Through their different classrooms, and we talked about posture and the spine and how to help it sit and move properly. But as an exchange for doing this for this school, as a favor perhaps, I requested that at the beginning I could do a survey of each of the classes and talk to the people, the children in the classes, and ask them a question, a series of questions. And it was interesting to note that from back pain, neck pain, headaches, and other aspects of their lifestyle. Over 50% in every single classroom had more than one side effect at some point throughout the school year, probably related to sedentary repetitive work as well as carrying those school bags. So very interesting that I got to see that play out in the real world instead of just research or in an article. So it is very valuable, and if your child does carry or need to take a lot of things each day because they're involved in a lot of stuff, then it's much better to try and roll than carry those heavy bags because they can contribute to problems which, if they don't notice then, may manifest later in life. Alright, so that's your daily health update for Wednesday. A great tidbit there for our youth, and as parents, good suggestions to to take care of them, as well as the rest of our daily health updates. Some good information there. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll catch you tomorrow, Thursday, with your next one. And, uh, until then, take care of yourself. Enjoy. Be well. We'll talk soon.