Weekly Health Update by Toronto Chiropractor Dr. David Koivuranta in Davisville, December 6 2021.

Hello everyone, it's Dr. Dave. Hopefully you're all doing well, taking care of each other, yourself, and those around you. Coming at you on behalf of the Toronto Neck and Back Pain Clinic with your weekly health update for the first full week of December 2021. I'm going to share with you some of the latest and greatest from the research and literature that's happened recently that might just help support some of your own health and wellness goals, dreams, desires, and ambitions, and, uh, or just spark some of your own thinking, thoughts, and actions for your own health and wellness today. So thanks for tuning in. Not going to treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure any illness or disease with our time together today. However, you just never know what that body of yours is capable of when you start providing it a great environment and it does what it's designed to do to take care of you. All right, so for example, as we're working, we may want to be cautious about reducing work-related musculoskeletal disorders, things that might affect our muscles, bones, joints, and our general body function. This according to the Mount Sinai Health System, September 2021. Some of the tips they rely, uh, relate to us is to adjust your work area to reduce reaching and bending. So even though your body's designed to reach and bend, when done repetitively, especially without a reminder to do other activities, it can accumulate into a repetitive use disorder or problem. Avoid poor posture and bending in awkward positions that place pressure on the neck and back muscles, again, especially repeatedly, or if engaged in some kind of very physical effort, uh, depending on the type of work you do. Incorporate stretching in movement during your work. Always nice to take breaks and remind your body that it can do more than what you've been using it for throughout the day. Reduce your repetitive or prolonged activities. Take frequent breaks during the workday and use proper lifting techniques by bending at the knees if you find yourself going to pick up items and move them throughout the day. Doesn't have to be heavy, but again, even if it's repetitive, you might be able to do it with poor technique. Uh, however, that technique, when done poorly, over time becomes a habit, and then the one day you you want to do something that's a little more challenging, because of that poor technique that's been so ingrained by those habits and patterns, your body may fail. And that's why we often succumb to an injury in some of those situations. And it doesn't often have to be a heavy thing. Sometimes it's just putting on a sock or picking up a pencil. We have heard the stories. So that's why it's good to try to be cautious, pay attention to your— and be aware of your environment that you're working in, try to do things as best you can. So fitness can help with that sometimes, and the European Heart Journal says that more intense exercise is the most efficient way to improve your fitness. So they looked at data from a famous study, the Framingham Heart Study, and the researchers report that moderate to vigorous exercise is up to 3 times more efficient at improving fitness than walking and other low-intensity forms of physical activity. This conversation has actually come up recently, and even though intense activity should be part of our routine throughout the week, there's also benefit to more casual and especially longer duration activities. They will challenge your body and improve it in different ways, uh, from your strength in your cardiovascular, your heart rate variability, but then also just your endurance, your circulation, uh, your nervous system function. So having a variety and practicing those different things in moderation the best you can is going to help with your overall fitness the most. But doing include an intense component because it has its own benefits and you want to get those in there. Exercise, of course, good for our heart and hopefully for our blood vessels, as is eating walnuts when it comes to our bad cholesterol levels. So according to a study that included over 700 older adults, consuming a half a cup of walnuts a day for 2 years can reduce low-density lipoprotein, the bad cholesterol, and the particle size of those LDL molecules, potentially lowering the risk for your cardiovascular disease. Walnuts are also good for your brain, good for your noggin. So get those walnuts in your diet. Might be good even in your salads, which are also good for you. Get that vegetable count up every day. Excessive device use and pain is something we talk about with many patients here, whether they come in with back pain or neck pain. The Psychology, Health and Medicine report from July 2021 says that individuals often adopt a forward head posture when using electronic devices, and that can place stress on the soft tissues in the neck and mid-back, elevating one's risk for pain in the upper body. Many manual practitioners like chiropractors are trained in the use of specific exercise and manual therapies to improve cervical posture, or in other words, how your neck is sitting and moving. However, all the stretches and strengthening, all of the treatment in the world will be difficult to catch up with what you're doing all day if you may not be doing it so well. So when you are using that phone, and I have another one here, one filming with and one with, and it has kind of a neat case in there. It's kind of chiropractic specific with that skull. But this is what we want to avoid, is this down posture for long periods. Now our neck is designed to do that, but we don't want it to stay shaped like that after we're done doing that. So we can actually sometimes place our elbows in at our sides, use them as a little bit of a rest. And we don't have to be up here or strain our shoulders to get it that high, but we kind of want to be a little bit better. So maybe halfway, and we want to use our eyes to look at that phone a little bit more instead of using our neck and head. And you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be like a robot all day, um, but you want to get to the 51% side of that equation when you're using those devices, and that you are catching yourself. You do want to remind your body that it can also go the other way when using those devices so that it doesn't get detrained, uh, and then stuck in these bad positions. All right. So pain is one circumstance of that, but it does affect your overall body physiology from the function of your organs, glands, and blood vessels to even your mood. And there is research to support all that. So let's get those devices up and create some awareness around our posture. Along with your fitness, you may, uh, have heard about and the trend with getting enough steps each day. The Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open in September 2021 looked at getting those steps and how if you get them each day may prolong your life. New research suggests that taking 7,000 or more steps a day can lower an individual's risk for early death in the following decade by up to 70%. The lead study author says step counting devices can, you, can be useful tools for monitoring and promoting activity in the general public and for patient-clinician communication. Steps per day is a simple, easy-to-monitor metric, and getting more steps per day may be a good way to promote health. And I agree. Now, some of the research does debate whether or not those steps actually do matter and the quantity of those steps versus the quality. However, based on our earlier conversation talking about variation and moderation, there's some merit to the steps for sure. But you may want to change the nature of those steps. Some of them might be more intense, some of them may be a little more casual. However, over time, getting in them in every day is where the benefit lies. So get your body moving and stay active. Get steps, and in fact be an overachiever, try for 10,000 a day, uh, which I hear is, uh, a good number to shoot for instead of even 7. But 7 would be enough, uh, definitely better than zero, right? Some other interesting topics that we brushed on, uh, or what that we read that we're trying to keep up with in the research and literature, uh, we talked about delaying retirement and how that may postpone dementia, that if you stay engaged in, uh, your career and/or some type of work, that you may slow your cognitive decline by as much as 33%, which is amazing. That according to the SSM Population Health Study, September 2021. Some people will preventively see their doctor and get some blood tests, urine tests done, and they may find out that they're pre-diabetic and some have some concern with elevated blood sugar levels. So for those people, you want to start to cut down on those starchy vegetables, potatoes, those kinds of things. Um, consume more non-starchy vegetables instead. Snack on fruit, especially fruit that's very fibrous— apples, pears, berries. Bulk up on your whole grains, and of course, the more natural those grains are and the less processed and refined they are, the better. Eat more nuts and seeds. Eliminate sugary drinks and avoid processed foods and added sugars. That according to WebMD, September 21st. Always good to consult with a healthcare practitioner to ensure that you're headed in a good direction with that if you've had some concerns with some of your test results. But a conversation with a naturopath and/or a holistic nutritionist might be a good idea as well. So the journal Circulation, along these lines when it comes to blood sugar levels, in August 2021 said that cutting sugar from packaged foods could prevent disease in millions of people. They feel that if they reduce— if people, if society were able to reduce added sugars in packaged foods by 20% and beverages 40% that it could prevent almost 2.5 million cardiovascular disease events and 750,000 diabetes cases over the lifetime of the current population of adults over the age of 35. So if anyone ever told you or has hinted that maybe sugar is not as big a deal as it's been made out to be, um, the research may say otherwise, and you do want to keep close count. In fact, if I had to be concerned about those product labels and read anything on that package. I'm just trying to assess that what I'm about to tell you is true or not, although I do enjoy looking at everything that's on those product labels unless I'm gonna eat it anyway, then I don't look at the product label because sometimes you do want to enjoy yourself. That I do think I would want to know how much sugar is in each product because although the daily allowable I think is close to 100 grams, the actual health level that you'd want to shoot for is probably less than 40 grams of of sugar a day at most in all your foods combined, and that's natural as well as added sugars. So, um, anywhere in there though would probably be a good result. And when you do consume something that is sugary in nature or does turn to sugar in your body, you'd want to consume it with some kind of protein, fat, or fiber that helps negate the effects of that sugar on your blood sugar levels. Okay, so it'll work with your body to make sure there's no spike in glucose, um,, or a release of insulin that will allow a crash afterwards. We want to avoid those spikes. And then finally, just as a reminder that posture is important to reduce text neck, the journal Work, August 2021, came out with the same concerns regarding the neck, the upper back, and certain muscular imbalances and postural compensations that are happening, people. They say that it contributes to muscular overuse, fatigue, and eventually actually paying. To safely use electronic devices, experts recommend holding the device close to eye level, using a larger screen, and type with both hands. So I won't demonstrate again, you saw me earlier, but just try to be 51% on the, on the side of good versus 0% or not paying attention to how you're using those devices. All right, so that's your weekly health update for this week. I hope we shared some tips to make you think a little bit and help preserve or improve your health as needed or desired. We'll be back again next week at We're trying our best to get these weekly health tips out to you. Hope you enjoy them. Share them with your friends and families. Stay well, and we will catch you next time. Take care.