Weekly Health Update by Toronto Chiropractor Dr. David Koivuranta in Davisville.

Hello everyone, it's Dr. Dave. Hopefully you're all doing well, taking care of yourselves, taking care of each other and those around you, and you are looking forward to a wonderful end of 2021. It's coming up quickly. Coming at you today on behalf of the Toronto Neck and Back Pain Clinic with your weekly health update for the second full week of December 2021. They're in and about, depending on when we get this out to you. And not gonna treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure any illness or disease with our time together today. However, we promise to share with you some interesting, maybe entertaining, and hopefully valuable information to get you thinking about your own health and wellness, some of the actions, decisions, and choices you make every day to support your own health and wellness, sometimes geared towards improvement if we'd like it to get better, other times looking at sustaining and maintaining it so that we can have a good day every day for as long as possible. So we like to share, and we try to get this out to you weekly in that respect. So we hope you like it and we hope you tell others about it as well. So our question for today from the Journal of Happiness Studies, did you know there was such a thing? That's how valuable happiness is, should be a top priority in our life. Should never feel bad about wanting to do things to be and stay happy. In August 2021, they asked, if you want to feel happier, the researchers at University of Kent and University of Reading have found that engaging in regular exercise and increasing one's intake of fruit and vegetables is associated with improvements in subjective happiness. So sometimes we do eat to make ourselves feel better, and sometimes some of those foods that we eat taste so good and they make us happy in the moment, but because they're not so great for our body, it may not make us feel happier in the long run. However, the researchers have found that getting some good healthy foods in us, like fruits and vegetables, as well as partaking in some kind of exercise regularly, will help increase our level of happiness. So give it a try, and, um, hopefully it makes you feel a bit happier. Along those lines, in the Frontiers in Nutrition, September '21, they looked at reducing refined grain intake, which we're told to watch out for processed and refined foods. However, they find that sometimes, depending on the nature of someone's diet or nutritional intake, this could lead to a lack of some nutrients. So while dietary guidelines often recommend reducing one's intake of refined grains, a new study found that cutting back on such foods may lead to a failure to consume adequate amounts of nutrients like fiber, iron, and magnesium. Sometimes if we follow that recommended guideline and we get rid of some of those processed and refined foods, refined foods like carbohydrates or grains, we may not have other sources to make up for what those foods are a good source of, such as fiber, iron, and magnesium. So it is always a good idea if you're looking at, uh, taking a peek, getting validated on your nutritional approach to seeing exactly how good or bad it is, to talk with a qualified healthcare provider like a naturopath a holistic nutritionist or someone along those lines to make sure the strategy that you're employing in trying to be healthy is actually working for you. And nutrition can sometimes be— you're a living experiment sometimes, and it's very good to get that customized, individualized, and personalized to you. Some interesting thoughts about nutrients come from the journal Nature in September '21, and they say that eating too much fat may actually lead to hair loss. So scientists observed that a high-fat diet triggered inflammation that depleted hair follicle stem cells in mice, which can lead to hair thinning and loss. This suggests that diet may play a role in hair loss. So probably a blanket statement that if you're eating well and doing other positive lifestyle, uh, efforts, that you will probably have less negative health repercussions. And the more healthy things you employ in your lifestyle, you will probably be able to support some better health outcomes. Perhaps including the color and/or how long you have hair on your head. And so maybe it's not too surprising, but the specificity of the fat itself is kind of interesting. So that was an interesting share from the journal Nature. Exercise is good for us, and there's a journal called The Psychology of Sport and Exercise. And in November 2020, when they looked at exercise, especially as it pertains to children, and not just their heart and lungs and their fitness, but their cognitive skills, According to a recent study, school children with higher aerobic fitness scores perform better on cognitive assessments than their less fit peers. This finding adds to a large body of research associating fitness with better academic performance. Now, grades aren't everything, and although school is valuable in the sense that we can pick up some things that will support our journey through life, and as young people, that's where we go to try and create those great experiences we want when we're young, but also in preparation for the years to come. And the grades though may not be as important as understanding that fitness goes beyond just what we might see especially in social media. Someone can look good and someone can feel good and those are worthy goals in and of themselves. But fundamentally, exercise is really good at driving nutrients into your cells, clean air, water, and food, as well as getting waste out of those cells and tissues. So fitness plays a very fundamental and important role on the cellular level in our tissues. And that's why we want to engage in a variety of different kinds of exercise or fitness, because it has different effects on all our tissues, uh, not just our muscles but our heart, our lungs, and even our nervous system and brain. All right, so if you have children, make sure they're staying active. It will support their overall health and wellness, including their cognitive function. Exercise is also good for cardiovascular health and fitness, including high blood pressure. And in this case, in the journal Circulation, September 2011, they look specifically at treatment-resistant high blood pressure. Treatment-resistant high blood pressure is high blood pressure that doesn't respond when someone has been placed on 3 or more, uh, medications and is not going down. But even in those cases, they can reduce their systolic, uh, blood pressure, the first number in that blood pressure reading, by up to 12 points with the combination of aerobic exercise and dietary approaches to stop hypertension, which is called the DASH diet, D-A-S-H. But, uh, certainly any good healthy diet like the Mediterranean diet, along with that aerobic exercise, could see similar results. And if it can do it for treatment-resistant high blood pressure, certainly there is some benefit to keeping our blood pressure healthy. Otherwise, whether it's low, uh, regular, or, uh, too high and trying to get it lower, just fitness and diet are a good idea. And we know this, but sometimes we need encouragement even from the research and literature to remind us that it is true. And, uh, as much as it does take some effort, sometimes the payoff is there. A couple of interesting points when it comes to the spine, um, to end things off today. From the Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association, September 2021, they looked at mattresses and low back pain in young adults. So they had 366 young adults complete questionnaires, and it revealed that over half of them had low back pain, with an elevated risk that was observed in participants who've utilized either a hard or a foam mattress in excess of 3 years. And I guess by extrapolation, it seems that a hard or foam mattress may not have provided adequate or good enough support to the back, which may have contributed to the back pain. It'd probably be necessary to read that whole study to see those particular variables, but it just goes to show you how beneficial it is. Now, in practice, even though it is, yes, a good idea to have a good mattress and to sleep on something comfortable to give your body, and especially your supine— your spine and neck, good support, quite often it's not the mattress that's the problem when we lay down. It's still something in our spine that's not sitting or moving right that doesn't allow it to receive the benefit or comfort of what we're lying on. That's sometimes challenging for people to wrap their thoughts around because they wake up with pain in the morning, and because humans are very temporal and we're very cause and effect, especially when it comes to timing, they equate it to something that must have happened while they slept as the reason that they're waking up with discomfort. And that is not always the case, but it could be. So good mattress, uh, definitely a good idea. However, Whether you wake up with the back pain or have back pain or dysfunction otherwise, always try to have the cause or source of that assessed and treated to recover the function and structure of your spine as much as possible. And then perhaps what you're sleeping on will actually provide the support that you need. They all work together, I guess, is the bottom line. And not only working together, but how connected our body is from one area to the other, how the hand definitely knows what the foot is doing even though we're not consciously thinking about all the time. In this from the Journal of Manipulative Physiological Therapy in June 2021. They looked at adjusting or manipulating the mid-back, your thoracic spine, and how it affects Achilles tendinopathy, which is the heel— is the tendon, Achilles tendon, at the very bottom of your calf that joins to the back of your heel bone. So patients suffering with Achilles tendinopathy, they did a recent study and they found that the application of spinal manipulative therapy to the mid-back can result in improvements in oxygenation and testosterone-cortisol ratios in the calf muscle. While further research is advised, the findings suggest that treatment to improve function in the nerves that innervate the lower extremities may aid in the healing process of Achilles tendinopathy. Interesting, chiropractors have always looked to the low back and pelvis, and maybe the rest of the spine even, when it came to lower extremity dysfunction and problems. Now, sometimes in the tissues themselves, obviously in the muscles, the tendons, the ligaments, connective tissue there could be problems as well or dysfunction locally in those joints. But quite often, eh, through that chain because it's all connected, those problems may be originating higher up in the system. So good to get assessed, eh, if something, especially if it's chronic and you've done some things locally or some treatment or therapy to see how the whole system is sitting and moving to ensure that it's being supported and some harmony is restored to how that body should be working. You would be surprised what can improve when everything starts to go back to doing what it was designed joined and created or programmed to do. Things can simply heal and work better and maybe never bother you again, which would be cool. All right, certainly it happens on social media now quite a bit as well that people will ask a question and the answer ultimately at the end of the conversation involves an assessment without knowing exactly what the person is presenting with and how it looks and feels when someone gets their hands on it. There's a little more guesswork involved in trying to guide them into doing things to get it better, especially through self-therapy. Now, self-care is very valuable and should be part of a lot of treatment plans, but there may still be something there that benefits from a hands-on assessment and treatment. So if something persists, you've tried to correct it on your own, and you've also maybe sought out some help or care and have been advised as to what to do, and it's still not getting better, do not stop. Try something else, try someone or something different, and keep working on getting that body of yours feeling and working the way you want it to, because life is short and you deserve to feel good and get out there and do what you need and want to do every day. So, uh, definitely pursue all those available options and don't stop until you're at least content that you've given it your best to try and get those things resolved. All right. So that's your weekly health update for this week. Hope you enjoyed. Take care of yourselves and we're going to catch up with you next time. Take care.