EP. 05: Inflammation
"You are what you eat. Don't be fast, cheap, easy, or fake."
We're continuing the conversation about anti-aging and specifically focusing on inflammation and how it relates to what we consume. Like anything, the quality of what you put into your body is what you'll get out of your body.
We look a little closer at healthy fats, supplements, and herbs.
I also mention sugar addiction and a self-assessment you could perform if you want to know whether you're addicted to sugar.
We dig a little deeper on signs and symptoms of intolerances, inflammation, and deficiencies.
Show Notes
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0:00:00
Hi everyone, I hope that your week is going well.
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0:00:20
So I just wanted to continue talking about healthy aging, anti-inflammatory lifestyle, and kind of piggyback on our last podcast on just little tips and tricks that we can do for healthy aging, and of course just optimizing our health. So I want to integrate just a few studies that came out at the end of the year, and then just give you some ideas on, again, things to integrate. For our next podcast, I do want to do a grocery overhaul so kind of share my fridge with you give you some healthy options that we do at home and also go through the pantry as well it's funny because my family I don't want to say teases but
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0:01:05
they kind of tease me on just eating nuts and berries which I do eat more than nuts and berries and then the other half of my family teases because there's nothing in our pantry, right? There's no goldfish, there's no candy, there's no junk food, so to speak. So I just kind of want to share my perspective. And of course, as always, there's good, better, and best. So do I give my kids bunny grams that are organic?
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0:01:31
Absolutely, but I don't give them often. So you just kind of have to kind of settle in where you're comfortable. And then I'll give you good healthy options instead of Teddy Grahams, like the bunny grams that are organic, to do. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you guys at the next podcast.
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0:01:50
So just kind of going over, we ended the last podcast with artificial sweeteners and talking a little bit about gluten-free and watching the processed foods and glycophosphates. So I did want to touch on fat because fat kind of gets a bad rap as women. Well, I was born in the eighties and we kind of grew up in that fad of fat is bad, right? And even now, when I talk to patients, especially my ladies, they don't think that that will help you lose fat, but it really does.
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0:02:19
And we need fat to make all of our sex hormones. Cholesterol is actually a really good thing. We need cholesterol. So having really low cholesterol can affect libido, it can affect hormone synthesis, it can affect a lot of things. So just like anything, the quality that we put into our body affects what we get out of our body. Just like a car, right? What you put into the car depends on how it functions. So good fats. We want healthy, saturated fats, right? So we want grass fed butter, grass fed cream, pasteurized and pastured cheese.
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0:03:00
Coconut oil is a really good, healthy fat. And I'll even throw, not a lot of people think of those fats, but avocados. If you want an avocado a day, eat an avocado a day. It's not gonna raise your cholesterol. It's not gonna make you gain weight It's a very healthy fat guacamole Walnuts walnuts are the nuts with the highest omega-3 content and We'll talk a little bit later about nuts and there's a really good study that came out with nuts Like I said before you want to keep your nuts and your seeds in your fridge But walnuts because they look like a
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0:03:39
brain, when you look at a walnut it looks like a little brain, they're great for brain health because they have omega-3s in them, right? The classic one that we all think of with omega-3 fatty acid is salmon, right? Salmon is great. If you don't love salmon, the fish second highest with omega-3s? Shrimp, right? Just make sure that you know your sources of course. And then outside of that, flaxseed, chia seed, hemp hearts, again being fats you want to keep them in the fridge for oxidation, but those are all really good healthy fats to consume. Fats that we don't want. Let's talk about fat. So we know what we want, we know what we don't want, right? Trans fats, those are pretty much outlawed, so to speak,
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0:04:28
in the fast food industry, but you'll still see them in some cakes, fried foods, pastries, donuts, anything hydrogenated, partially hydrogenated. If it says that on the label, you want to avoid that. Any day of the week, give me something with butter, lard, tallow in it, versus something that's been processed,
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0:04:49
like hydrogenated oil or veggie oils or anything like that. Polyunsaturated fats. So there's kind of two types of good fats, so to speak, outside of healthy saturated fats, which used to get a bad rap for being a bad fat. With good fats, there's monounsaturated and then polyunsaturated. So polyunsaturated,
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0:05:15
we just call those guys PUFAs, um, polyunsaturated fatty acids. And so those are the oily fish that we've talked about. Um, nuts again, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pine nuts, um, wheat germ is another good one. And if, uh, your grandma used wheat germ in a lot of recipes, there's a reason for that, right? What you don't want to do,
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0:05:40
which is a polyunsaturated fatty acid, seed oils, you don't want those. There's some really good studies with seed oils increasing inflammation because again, they're not natural. We're not meant to consume corn oil, cottonseed oil, margarine isn't really a food. Those are polyunsaturated to avoid.
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0:06:01
Then monounsaturated fats are those things like avocados that I mentioned, egg yolks. Egg yolks are so healthy. They have lecithin in there. They're really good fat. Again, some nuts like pistachios, macadamia nuts, olives. Mediterranean diet, right? Olives are really good. Olive oil. But the of oil, but the monounsaturated fat that you want to avoid, canola. It's not natural. It's made from rapeseed and it's highly processed. So that kind of falls into that whole seed category where you want to avoid canola oil.
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0:06:42
So, as I said, there was a study that came out the end of December. So again, I like recent research and it showed, it was a pretty cool study, mixed nut consumption improves brain insulin sensitivity. And it was a randomized, single-blinded, controlled, crossover trial. This was done in older adults that were overweight or obese. However, if you're not overweight or obese, those results will still, I would assume, hold true. So what they looked at was longer term mixed nut consumption
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0:07:17
affected insulin action in brain regions involved in the modulation of metabolic and cognitive processes. Well, we can all use better improved cognitive processes, right? I mean, how often, and especially my moms, how often do you walk in a room and not remember why you walked into that room, right? Or you have a whole list of things
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0:07:40
that if you don't write it down, I do this all the time, if you don't write it down it doesn't get done. Or if you place a grocery order you forget items on your grocery list and you're like, oh why did I do that? So improved cognitive functioning is always a good thing. And what they looked at with this is 60 60 grams of nuts, which is the equivalent of half a cup, which we can all do, right? The mixed nuts was a combination of walnuts, pistachios, cashews, and hazelnuts.
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0:08:14
Now, just like with anything else, there's good, better, and best. I like to get my nuts from nuts.com because they're clean. They have gluten-free, they have organic, they have raw. Not all nuts are created equal. So yes, you can get some raw nuts from Meyer and Kroger and other grocery chains.
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0:08:35
For example, though, if you go to Meyer and get their dry roasted salted nuts, they have, and if you're not looking, start looking, right? They have peanuts, which is a good thing, we want peanuts in there primarily, sea salt, sugar, corn syrup, yeast, spices, paprika, and maltodextrin, and natural flavor. You just want to dry roasted nuts, right? So make sure that you look at the label. Again, I always like to get raw and or organic nuts, keep them in the fridge,
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0:09:15
but look at your labels with nuts especially, because some of the flavored ones, some of the prepackaged ones, some of the trail mix bags are not super, super healthy. But really cool study, right? So we've known this for years that nuts are good for you, but now we have even more reason about that. With healthy aging as well,
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0:09:38
what I wanted to talk, I talked a little bit about healthy sugar options, right? So molasses, raw honey or manuka honey, maple syrup, all wonderful, and real syrup, not the fake stuff. Sugar addiction, right? So there's a really good sugar addiction link that I can share with you.
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0:10:04
Unfortunately, most of us Americans do have a sugar problem. Starbucks is known for a lot of sugar in their drinks, and there's hidden sugar in a lot of things that we might not think about. So just a couple of thoughts. So you might be addicted to sugar if you have to have sweetened soft drinks every day,
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if you put a lot of sugar in your coffee or have donuts or sweet rolls for breakfast. If you can go more than an hour after waking without eating, that is a sign as well. So if you're starving when you wake up, and sometimes it's actually really interesting, if blood sugar drops too low, it'll wake you up usually between like 1 and 3 in the morning. Blood sugar levels will drop. So if you're starving when you wake up, if you're really hungry when you wake up,
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0:10:59
you might have a sugar addiction issue. So it's a good idea sometimes to help combat that to have a handful of nuts, protein, fat, right before bed to keep your blood sugar levels stable. If you can go three hours without eating and they're not having any shakes, fatigue, or a bad mood, you're good. If you can't, you might have a sugar addiction issue. Of course, having sweets in the house, if you can have them in the house and not eat them, not a problem. If you're like a few people that I know and it's Girl Scout season, if you get Girl Scout cookies and there's a whole sleeve missing and you're
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0:11:41
like where did it go? That might be a sugar addiction problem. So just kind of things to think about. If you crave sugar, coffee, chocolate, peanut butter, alcohol, those are all actually sugars as well. When we do the pantry overhaul, we'll talk about healthy peanut butter because again there's a lot of sugar that it shouldn't be in there with peanut butter. Chocolate cravings can be sugar, depending on what chocolate you're craving. If it's like a Reese's cup or a Snickers bar, that's pure sugar.
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0:12:12
But if you're craving 70% dark chocolate, I think you're okay. So those are just kind of things to think about. You might just do a self check-in and see where you're standing with sugar. It's always a good idea to keep a diet diary or you like use like my fitness pal or an other food app track just to kind of see see where you fall with your your macros and your sugar. And then the other one to think about is gluten right? So gluten has
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0:12:44
become when I started to go gluten-free gosh 20 years ago there weren't many products on the shelf, now there's so many options. So it's definitely grown in popularity and awareness, which is a beautiful thing, but still there's a lot of symptoms that show that you might be gluten sensitive that you might not think about. So for example, if you have frequent gas or bloating, if you've been diagnosed with acid reflux or IBS, that might be a symptom. Daily diarrhea or chronic constipation. Migraines, I see this a lot in practice. Headaches, migraines can be linked to gluten. Joint pain for me when I have gluten or too much gluten, it affects my joints. Brain fog. And then hormonal or immune symptoms. So depression, anxiety, fatigue, eczema,
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acne. Again, the skin kind of tells a story for the body, so if there's something awry, it'll present in the skin. So it's interesting with gluten, and again I'll talk about this a little bit more with the grocery overhaul next time, but if you do gluten-free, there's a lot of options. So there's almond flour, there's rice flour, there's true just gluten-free flour blends that you can get for like biscuits and pancakes and bread and they're great substitutions. I think those are really good as well. Those are great options.
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0:14:14
If like what we do in our family is we do imported wheat. So we do pasta from Italy. And the beauty with that is that it doesn't have the glycophosphates and the roundup that ours does in the States and it's a little bit more nutrient and just a cleaner source of wheat than the American wheat. So American wheat and the gluten content makes really good bagels. So if you've ever been in New York and you've had a really good piece of pizza or New York bagel, so good right? High, high gluten
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0:15:03
content. And you'll see a lot of bakeries use high gluten content in their baking because of that, right? So the majority of wheat grown in the US actually is more of a harder red wheat and that's high in protein and gluten is a form of protein. The majority of wheat grown in Europe is softer, lower proteins and therefore lower gluten content. So not only are you talking about the glycophosphate issue but you're talking about proteins, you're talking about just digestibility, you're talking about a lot of different things. American wheat is, like I said, sprayed with glycophosphates, which is Roundup. And of course we know, and this can be a whole other topic, we know that Roundup and glycophosphates affects our gut bacteria,
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it affects our gut motility, it affects absorption, it really wreaks havoc on our guts. Roundup is meant to kill, and it does that kind of to our gut as well. And the other difference, which I found is really interesting, American wheat, and that makes sense, right, is grown in sulfur deficient soils. So areas like Kansas and Washington and North Dakota, and the concentration of the sulfur in the soil regulates the amount of
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0:16:22
gliadin proteins, which keeps everything in check, right? So the two proteins are gluten and gliadin in wheat. So the more sulfur you have in the soil, the less gliadin in the gluten, which means that American gluten is higher in gliadin than normal and therefore it's more reactive. And we know that American soil especially is depleted in all of our trace minerals. So why would our wheat be any different? So I will share with you what kind of pasta and breads and crackers and all of that we use in our house and then I recommend to my patients as well. So just kind of things to think about and I'll post a link to both the sugar quiz and
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0:17:11
the gluten quiz that way if you want to kind of self-assess and check in you can always do that as well. So really just with healthy eating, anti-inflammatory, anti-aging, one of my favorite quotes is you are what you eat so don't be fast, cheap, easy, or fake, right? The foods that take a while to cook, the homemade foods are so much healthier, we know that fast food is not good, cheap food isn't very nutrient dense, and fake food our body doesn't know what to do with that. So that's just a nice little saying to kind of keep in mind. There's another study I wanted to share with you guys that was actually pretty surprising to me. It was done on protein intake.
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0:18:04
And they did this in midlife in relation to healthy aging. So this was actually a nurse's health study and this was released pretty recently, January. So what they found is that dietary protein, and they focused on plant protein, in midlife is associated with higher odds of healthy aging and several domains of positive health status in female nurses. That can be extrapolated for us as well. So they looked at animal protein, dairy protein,
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plant protein, and the links or the assessments really for healthy aging. They looked at 11 chronic diseases and you've heard me say these before. So type 2 diabetes, myocardial infarction, coronary artery bypass, congestive heart failure, stroke, kidney failure, COPD, Parkinson's, MS, and ALS. Right, so why wouldn't we want to decrease our chances of those? As we get older in general, and I always call it the tea and toast or coffee and toast or rice or just not a lot of protein. As we get older proteins harder to digest, we make less intrinsic factor, less digestive enzymes and so I think
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0:19:28
naturally we kind of gravitate away from that as Americans but it's really important to keep that protein intake and they're showing in midlife so I'm gonna say 30s to 50s, make sure that you get enough protein. And the recommendation in general is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. And so you're trying to do the math in your head now, one kilogram is the equivalent of 2.2 pounds. So in general, if you weigh 130 pounds. That's anywhere from 48 to 60 grams of protein depending on your activity level.
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0:20:07
Now if you're sedentary you want to aim at 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight a day. If you're active, you're working out, you're chasing kids, I would even say go up to a gram of protein or gram of protein per kilogram of body weight a day. So I thought that was a really good study. And then of course, no surprise, we talked a little bit about the blue zones last time and we talked about fasting and just being aware of how much food we consume using that Haribachi Boo approach, being 80% full and stop eating. There's a study showing a fasting mimicking diet lowered insulin resistance, liver fat, inflammation and other markers with aging. And what they did is the diet was based on
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consumption of foods. They controlled the macros on five days out of the month and then they ate normally for the rest. So a fasting like diet of course is not suitable for everybody. So if you're pregnant, if you're older, if you have some health conditions that you you need eat more frequently that might not be ideal but it's something easy to kind of check in and maybe integrate where you just limit how much you eat on one or of the month. And again, they showed that that can reverse biological aging by two and a half years. So as we get older, of course, quality is better than quantity. We don't want to live to be a hundred and not know who our family is. We want
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0:21:52
to be 80 chasing our grandkids, being active, and hopefully not being in a nursing home. So really good studies. And then also I want to talk a little bit in a future podcast just about toxins, right? We know that toxins and like the glycophosphates in the wheat can impact our aging process, our inflammation, and just really wreak havoc with our chronic disease and our genetics and affect the genetics of generations in the future. So what do we do about that, right? We can't completely avoid microplastics.
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0:22:33
We consume them, we wear them, they're everywhere, right? So I will talk in the future about ways to mitigate toxicity, maybe detoxification, and really trying to optimize health by minimizing those toxins. So I look forward to any questions that you guys have or any future suggestions for talks and then I will make sure I include the studies and looking forward to the grocery haul and will make sure I include the studies and looking forward to the grocery haul and pantry clean-out with you guys. Take care.
Transcribed with Cockatoo