Nutrition from the Kitchen

Nutrition from the Kitchen

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Athlete's Corner

Hammock Time

The Importance of Sleep to your Health

We all know how bad we feel after a poor night's sleep and conversely how good we feel after sleeping well, but your sleep is not just about your energy. The quality of your sleep has a significant impact on your health and even your ability to maintain a healthy weight.

Think about all the effort you may have put in to diet and exercise to get healthy but all along if you have been ignoring your sleep most of your gains would be negated by the ramifications hormonal ramifications of poor sleep.

To learn more please click here: Make Sleep Your Weapon

4-7-8 Breathing

Without a doubt my favorite technique for reducing my stress response is the breathing technique 4-7-8. It is free, quick (45 secs-60 secs) and very effective when used daily over time. I personally do this breathing daily and teach many of my patients in the office this practice.

To demonstrate its effectiveness, I would often have my nurse take a patient's blood pressure when they were nervous and of course it would be high. After spending just a few minutes learning how to do the 4-7-8 breathing it was not uncommon for the systolic blood pressure to drop 20 pts sometimes into the normal range. There is no medicine I could have given to have the same effect yet the patient was able to fix themselves with a simple breathing practice.

Share this with your friends and remind each other to do your breathing so you can reap the health benefits in both the short and long term.

To watch the video on breathing please click here: 4-7-8 Breathing

How Stress Affects Your Health

Over the years of practicing medicine I have seen nothing more detrimental to my patients' health than stress. In fact it is estimated that at least 80% of the conditions a primary care doctor sees in his or her office is directly or indirectly related to stress.

If you can spend a few minutes learning how stress affects your body then you will be better prepared to learn the tools and concepts that can help you change how stressful situations affect your health.

After learning about stress I would suggest taking a few minutes to watch the video on 4-7-8 breathing to learn my favorite technique for "chasing away the tiger."

To watch the webinar on stress please click here: How Stress Affects your Health

Highlights of the Glycemic Index

From a nutritional standpoint, few things are as important as learning how to control your blood sugar. High blood sugar levels are not only responsible for the development of type 2 diabetes, but also weight gain, fatigue, anxiety, and poor sleep to name just of few of the many clinical side effects fluctuating sugar levels.

Over the years I have found, both personally and professionally, the glycemic index a good place to start when learning how a food will affect one's blood sugar. The following two webinars were created to help explain what the glycemic index is, what it's limitations are and how to use it to improve your health.

Once you have a good feel for the glycemic index I encourage you to try some of the recipes to see how easy it is to incorporate low glyecmic meals into your diet.

To watch the first webinar click here: Introduction to the Glycemic Index

To watch the second webinar in this series click here: How to Eat Using the Glycemic Index

Epigenetics: A New Perspective in the Nature vs. Nurture Debate

Many of us as kids were often told by our moms “we are what we eat.” However, in an ironic twist we are now learning from the study of epigenetics that to some degree we are what our mom ate when she was pregnant.

What is Epigenetics? 

To help you understand this further let me first briefly explain epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of how life experience cause changes within our genes. We are all born with the DNA that stays with us our entire life, but our life experiences, mental health, physical activity, even what we eat, can have a profound effect on our health throughout our life. It can even effect our children’s lives. Through epigenetics, we are learning the factors that contribute to these changes and attempting to forecast the impact – positive or negative – they have in our lives.

An Epigenetics Example 

Imagine a train starting out down a track and it gets to a “fork” in the tracks. Depending upon how the switch is thrown the train can go on three separate tracks in different directions. In this example what will determine how the switch is thrown is the environment the train is in at that time.
  •  If it’s raining, the program sends it on the left track; 
  •  If it’s snowing it goes on the middle track; 
  •  If it’s sunny it goes on the far right track. 
If each track was designed and built to be better suited for the specific weather condition then this program maximizes the safety of the train by pairing the best track per the weather for the train. Essentially this is what happens at a molecular level to our genes at certain critical times of our lives, some of them being early in development. 

What Does Epigeneics Mean in our Daily Life?

 I find the human body fascinating and complicated, but it makes sense that in order to enhance survival there would be a mechanism of how the expression of genes could be changed based upon environmental clues. There are certain “stressors” like poor nutrition, emotional stress, and chemical toxins that tell the body the environment is not optimal and in turn the body puts a sign on the DNA that causes genes to be read differently than they otherwise would. When the expression of a gene is changed the affect or strength of that gene is changed and as a result our body functions differently. What is interesting is that the change in how the gene is read is not short term, and has been found to last not only for the person’s lifetime but their children’s genes will also be expressed in a similar pattern changing how their body works as well. Consider the train example again: once the switch is thrown and you are on one of the three tracks, you have no choice but to stay on that track for a very long time. Specifically, the initial studies in epigenetics have shown that in critical developmental times like fetal development and early childhood, the stressors mentioned above have led to an increase in obesity, diabetes, and even heart disease in later adult life.

Epigenetics Gives you More Control Over Your “Life Track” 

Now I know this may seem like we have less control over our future health than we initially thought, but as I mentioned before, the human body is amazing and has many ways to adapt to its environment. Since we never know when our genetic train is going to come to a fork in the tracks, we need to make sure we are living healthy as often as possible to make sure that we stay on or are switched to the “healthy track.” In fact, I just attended a lecture on aging where it was suggested that the role our DNA has in determining our longevity may only be about 15% compared to 85% related to environmental factors affecting epigenetics. Shifting the pendulum from nature to nurture through epigenetics really gives us more control over our destiny and our family’s destiny. Certainly changing the family’s lifestyle is quicker and easier than waiting for a mutation in our DNA that will change our health. Epigenetics is one of just many concepts that we are learning about to understand how our body adapts to changes, but it is a great example of how important it is to treat our body well and even more important to make sure our children and expectant moms are living life as healthy as possible. I hope this motivates us all as a country to think about creating a culture of health for our families. If our school systems insist on feeding our kids fried foods and sweets let’s send them with a healthy lunch and work in our community to change the nutrition of the school lunches and breakfast. We are all connected and anyone’s poor health affects us all so let's work together to change the “healthculture” of our country so we can all be healthier and happier.

Immune Boosting Miso Soup


 As the weather gets colder everyone seems to start coming down with some type of upper respiratory infection. I believe food can be one of our best forms of medicine and prevention so I enjoy regularly making this version of miso soup. This is a lot more hearty than the typical miso soup. I pack lots of vegetables and whatever asian mushrooms I can find in the store. Asian mushrooms are known for their immune enhancing properties and when you add lots of vegetables to increase your vitamins and anti-oxidants you have a great combination. As you sit down at lunch to eat visualize you immune system getting stronger and your body becoming healthier. By the way this tastes great too!
  
This soup is very easy to make. For a quick demo go to: Dr. Lane's Kitchen

Ingredients

4 1⁄2 cups water
6 tablespoons Miso and Easy Paste 

String carrots, about 1/3 cup
3 green onions chopped
Pinch of turmeric and black pepper
2 -5 garlic gloves chopped
Handful of spinach
Handful or 2 of Asian mushrooms Package of hard tofu cut up in squares


Directions

Cook above ingredients, except the tofu. I often start with the carrots first as they take a little longer to soften. When all the vegetables are tender, add the tofu to warm and then enjoy.
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