Category: Wellness

The Good Side of Ghrelin

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Whoever named the hormone ghrelin seriously made it sound like some kind of evil elf monster.  Well it’s not.  I believe this hormone is largely misunderstood and we are missing the boat by working so hard to suppress it.  Maybe folks don’t realize how many benefits this hunger hormone has for our bodies.  Maybe folks making weight loss supplements have different priorities than we do.  By the time you’re through here you’ll be the village expert on the benefits of hunger and how to leverage it for yourself.  It may help you to think on the bright side when your table is yet to be served or you are skipping the snacks between meals and get the rumbly tummy.
Ghrelin is the hormone released in our stomachs that sends a signal to our brains telling us we’re hungry!  There are also small amounts of this hormone released from the brain itself, the small intestine and the pancreas.  There has been much popular press about ghrelin, teaching us how to suppress this hormone, blaming it for weight gain.  I do not believe our hormones are inherently good or evil, but that they are necessary messengers in our bodies.  Perhaps if we were eating the right amounts of the right things for our bodies and we were able to metabolize the carbs we were eating we wouldn’t be so eager to find someone to blame.
Ghrelin has been found to improve neuroplasticity, decrease the risk of Alzheimer’s and increase learning and memory by helping to build the hippocampus.  Yup.  Every time you are hungry you are actually building your brain power and improving your memory.  The addition of injected ghrelin has even been found to improve the conditions of many types of mammals who were already suffering from memory loss.  Could there be a biological need for us to be smarter when we’re hungry?  I think so.  Now if only we could use our brains when we’re eating….
Neuroplasticity is a big deal.  This is our ability to form new neural pathways, repair damage and learn new things.  Have you known someone who had a major head injury and then a new area of the brain developed to compensate for the change?  Neuroplasticity.  And ghrelin can help us with that.  Who knew?  Being hungry can help our brains.
So this is great until you reach the point where your blood sugar is so low that your body releases cortisol, damaging the hippocampus.  So be hungry.  Be hungry before each meal, wait a bit but not long enough to get into crisis and then you can reap the benefits without so much risk.
I love this.  I like compromises and moderation when we use our brains to come up with the solution in the first place.  There is a great deal of research on ghrelin’s ability to help the brain.  As you know I prefer studies on human beings for ethical and practical reasons but check out a summary of some of this research in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences HERE
Ghrelin signals the release of growth hormone all over the body.  This hormone (HGH) signals growth and repair, cell reproduction and regeneration, increases calcium retention and may help with bone density.  It also stimulates the immune system and helps to grow and repair our internal organs and helps the liver to stabilize our blood sugars.  Many of us have lower than optimal amounts of growth hormone in our systems because it is suppressed by insufficient sleep, stress and blood sugar dysregulation.
What if simply avoiding mid-morning snacks and allowing ourselves to become hungry could increase growth hormone in our bodies?  In fact it does.  In two different ways.  When our blood sugars and insulin are high we do not release growth hormone so we need enough time after meals for them to go back to baseline and the growth hormone to rise.  And for a double-awesomeness attack our hunger hormone ghrelin signals the release of even more of this powerful regenerating hormone.
Ghrelin has benefits for the digestive system too.  It builds the digestive mucosa.  This is a protective lining on the surface of our inner skin, our stomachs, small and large intestines.  We have mucosa in our lungs and kidneys/bladder too, all of those spaces that seem to be “inside” our bodies but are really on the outside, hollow spaces inside our bodies.  They need to be protected.  Some cases of extreme damage to the digestive mucosa include ulcerative colitis, where the mucosa and intestinal lining get damaged by our own immune systems.  Our mucosa can also be damaged by rough foods, by fasting, by bacterial imbalances or through nutrient deficiencies.
We are making and replenishing this mucosa constantly, every day.  This is why people enjoy taking slippery elm, marshmallow and aloe internally, they protect this important lining.  Our mucosa houses our digestive immunity, makes and stores enzymes to digest medium chain carbohydrates and releases other digestive hormones too.  It protects us from unwanted food and bacteria making their way into our bodies.  How great to know that when we are hungry within reason, when we allow ourselves to grumble a bit for food, we are actually signalling healing and protection for our small and large intestines!
Ghrelin has amazing benefits for our digestive tracts, our whole bodies and our brains.  The next time you’re hungry think to yourself:  I’m SO SMART right now and my body is healing itself 🙂  My body is a genius.

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Top 12 Coconut Questions Answered

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Coconut has gained and gained in popularity over the past several years with information about its benefits for weight management, brain health, hormones, blood sugar balancing and more. One quick google search will yield pages of articles titled “10 Benefits of Coconut Oil”.  I LOVE coconut and use this seed several times weekly but like any food, it isn’t a panacea and can’t actually do EVERYTHING. Seriously 😉

Is coconut oil a good moisturizer? Coconut oil is a good occlusive which means it creates a barrier that traps moisture in our skin, provided the moisture is already there. This means that coconut oil can help us be moisturized even though it’s not technically a moisturizer itself. Coconut has some great properties and I love to use it on my skin other than my face. It can be quite comedogenic (pore clogging) so I don’t love it on my face although some people can use it with few problems.  It is actually one of the most comedogenic oils available for use in natural beauty products so not a great choice if you have been prone to acne in the past, just good for off the face. (more…)

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10 Travel Food Tips for the Hard Core

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There is Always Something to Eat
Packing for this trip I kept thinking I had to bring absolutely everything that I could possibly want to eat in any given situation.  Why?  I’m used to “nobody having what I need”.  I’m used to picnics and dinners with friends coming up empty handed.  The difference is when I’m at home it’s not a big deal but for some reason when I feel I will be trapped in a car or plane I try to plan for every contingency.
Wait a minute…
Would there seriously be nowhere to get food between Vancouver, Canada and San Francisco?  Are you telling me that there is not one store with something that I can eat to prevent starvation?  Right.  Guess not.
It may not be epic, it may not be instagram-worthy but every single town has something I can eat.  It doesn’t need to provide a complete spectrum of amino acids and have every single nutrient yet discovered.  It’s just for a day.
So if you are going on a longer trip or a trip to somewhere you know you won’t be able to find what you need that is a different situation.  This article is written from the perspective of moving out of the fear of not having the right foods and being comfortable with the unknown around food while still maintaining a hard and fast boundary about not putting junk/allergens/inflammatory foods in.  More articles about packing for every contingency or longer trips are a good idea too.

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3 Ways Processed Foods Keep Us Up At Night

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exauted
I know.  You already avoid packaged foods as much as possible.  You already know that sleep is essential for health.  Sometimes it is just really good to reinforce what we already know but from a different perspective.  Processed or non-foods impact digestive flora which can offset the melatonin signalling as well as glucose regulation.  This is especially true if those foods are high in processed fats.  This can disrupt or prevent our sleep and make it less restorative when it does happen.
Why sleep?
I used to say “sleep is for the weak”.  Until I got sick.  In my former life as a musician the middle of the night was my best and most productive creative time when I could really connect to the muse, practice hardest and do my best work.  Now if I’m awake in the middle of the night I know my body is designed to be sleeping at that time but it is not always easy to follow the “should be sleeping” advice.
There are important metabolic processes that happen during sleep:
-The brain cleanses itself and refreshes its fluids, releasing toxic byproducts that have built up over the day
-Growth hormone peaks, allowing the body to repair and rebuild muscles
-Fat burns
-The digestive tract heals
Here are some of the things that happen when we don’t sleep:
-Temporarily reduced insulin sensitivity for 24-72 hours following (induced insulin resistance)
-Feeling brain dead
-More fat less muscle
-Increased cortisol
-Increased inflammation
The 1st way processed foods interfere with our sleep:
Hidden or delayed allergens.  I mention it first because, well, it’s not that exciting and gets glossed over and overlooked but we have to make sure that we’re on the same page here.  Don’t ignore the mundane or obvious, that is usually where the most valuable information is.  If a person reacts to lectins or phytates or really any “ingredients” in foods that are often hidden… this can raise their heart rate, raise their cortisol and up the inflammation and immune reaction.  Most food sensitivities and true allergies are to the proteins in foods or the peptides that make up the proteins.  This would be a sensitivity to a food itself.  These can all be difficult to trouble shoot.  This effects sleep pretty much in a way that feels like coffee.  There are often excitotoxins in foods that affect our dopamine metabolism and can actually damage our brains while keeping us up.  Think about how you would feel after coffee and this is just a really exaggerated picture of how you might feel “stimulated” after processed foods.
Some ingredients that excite and feed the night owl are:
gluten and non-gluten parts of wheat
corn
anything you’re personally allergic (IgE reaction) or sensitive (IgG reaction) to
beans and grains with lectins in them (not prepared thoroughly)
preservatives
chemicals
undisclosed ingredients like “harmless markers” and “generally recognized as safe”
anything hidden in the “natural flavours” category
artificially and naturally concentrated sources of MSG (soy sauces, hydrolyzed yeast extract, most things with the word “Umami”, fermented mushroom or garlic products…)
The packaging itself
The 2nd way processed foods interfere with our sleep:
Nutrient insufficiencies.  Again not that exciting at first but the struggle is real in getting nutrients from packaged foods.  They are made to be tasty, predictable and shelf stable, not to nourish our bodies.  Which nutrients are the most important for sleep?  Where can we get them?
B6 (spinach and cashews for example)
Potassium (apricots, avocados)
Magnesium (can be found in leafy greens)
Calcium (leafy greens, chia, broccoli)
Omega 3 (chia, walnut)
Tryptophan (hemp, collards, seaweed)
If you end up eating packaged food once every couple of days and the rest of your food is pretty nutrient dense maybe this won’t affect you, as long as you avoid sensitivities and excitotoxins.  BUT…
The top way processed foods interfere with sleep:
They mess up the circadian rhythm of our gut bacteria!!  Yup!  Our gut bacteria have a circadian rhythm.  Short chain fatty acid producing bacteria in the large intestine send signals to our nervous systems night and day.  Part of the role of these signals is to let us know when to be tired.  One of the most important factors in this is Butyrate, a short chain fatty acid produced in the large intestine.  The bacteria in a healthy colony produce a good amount of Butyrate which can help heal leaky gut and can help reset OUR circadian rhythms.  If there is too much fat or too many processed foods in the diet the balance of bacteria will change to be one with less butyrate-forming species’ and they will not send signals like they should.  What increases butyrate and helps those bacteria reset our circadian clocks?  Fresh fruits and veggies!  The butyrate bacteria literally need the spectrum of carbohydrates and phytonutrients that can ONLY come from vegetables and fruit in order to produce butyrate at all.  Too much fat in the diet and too much protein creates and environment where these bacteria cannot thrive and are in fact reduced in numbers, reducing our Butyrate and thus our digestive healing and hormone signalling including estrogen balance, insulin receptivity and melatonin (I know but it’s close enough to a hormone).  Look to Bifidobacteria to support a healthy balance of bacteria in the large intestine and to a diet as full of healthy fresh fruits and vegetables as possible.  Check out some further reading on this topic HERE 
So put down the chips (if you can), grab yourself a bunch of spinach or collard greens and find those “visions of sugar plums” with just plums.

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10 Antihistamine Strategies

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Here are ten strategies for seasonal allergies or indoor IgE reactions like dust mites etc.  Let’s talk about the plants, bacteria and other elements that can calm the mast cells or reduce histamine in the body.

Here are three antihistamine strategies that really don’t work for me:

1. Eating pollen. Not joking. Some folks recommended it and I tried it and I have to say um, no, not working.

2. Lemon, lavender and peppermint essential oils. Cleared my sinuses but no, kept sneezing.  Also peppermint and anything with menthol has been shown to just make it FEEL like we are breathing better (and smell good) but not actually increase oxygen or decrease congestion.

3. Acupuncture. I wish this worked but it just didn’t 🙁 I will keep trying!

 

OK now onto what DOES work.

We must go deeper to the root cause.

If you are having springtime or full-time environmental allergies it is important to figure out why. So before getting into ten easy strategies for allergies that are already taking place I want to talk about an overarching plan. Taking away as many distractions for the immune system and then balancing it and removing the offending allergen are really all that are needed.

Taking away immune distractions means dealing with gut infections, sinus infections, tooth infections. It may mean doing a liver cleanse or a water fast to help with detoxifying or reducing those foods that can distract the immune system. This step may mean dealing with yeasts in the body.  Even if you are a practitioner it can be very helpful to work with someone who can help you trouble shoot this systematically.

Balancing the immune system means communicating with the two main branches of immunity, the swat team and the pencil pushers as I like to call them, tH1 and tH2 immunity. These branches of the immune system usually come into balance after long term infections and irritants are resolved but if not then the careful use of some herbs can be helpful. For example mangosteen, cardamom, moringa, watercress, nettle and so on.

If allergies catch you by surprise here are ten useful strategies:

  1. Netipot – about five times daily. This may not be for everyone but lessens the symptoms to some degree. When I have the schedule to be extremely vigilant with this I feel better.
  2. Vitamin C – liposomal, 1 gram five times per day three days per week and then back down to 1 gram three times per day for the rest of the week (doing too much for too long is not helpful to the body for how it uses vitamin C)
  3. Quercetin – at least 500 mg daily, I like 500 mg 3x per day.  Did you know onion skins are a great source of quercetin?  You’d have to tincture them…
  4. Plant resins and essential oils as a throat spray – I have thyme, savory, black spruce and lemon mixed with black cumin oil in a spray bottle
  1. Nettle tincture – Click HERE for the Wild & Grounded Green Smoothie Recipe is good but you will be getting more of the antihistamine properties and less of the histamine itself if you are using a tincture of nettle instead. I take dropperfulls throughout the day in springtime.  This has to be nettle LEAF tincture and the amounts to take are actually quite substantial.
  2. Having someone else clean my house for me – I’ll admit this agrees with me on so many levels however I have yet to find a really positive way to sell the benefits of this to my family who should do the cleaning. If I stir up dust in the springtime it’s not pretty. The same goes for mowing the lawn…  I couldn’t afford to hire outright so I am doing a trade and it works for me.  Do whatever you need to do to keep yourself away from the dust/cat/grass that is bothering you.
  3. Bai Hua oil – a mixture of essential oils from China (literally means white flower) but I don’t know exactly what is in there. This is helpful to me when I rub it directly under my nose. It can be a bit stingy though so watch out.  Don’t put something on your face without first testing it to see if it irritates the eyes or skin.
  4. Hard core 100% raw foods diet – Honestly this was the only thing that ever completely stopped my allergies. I know it’s not for everyone but I have to admit I notice the difference even between mostly raw and totally raw in my seasonal allergies depending on what I am doing with my food.  It may be the lectins, fats or just the grains consumed otherwise.  If you can figure out what diet is the most anti-inflammatory for YOU then stick to it.  And you can’t know until you’ve tried them all.  You may feel good but not know that there is an opportunity to feel better.
  5. Watercress, moringa and lotus daily – These do seem to make a tangible difference to me
  6. Cleansing yeasts – Candida, Penicillium, Brewers’ Yeast and others. Yeasts are big producers and releasers of histamine so they can exacerbate if not directly cause this issue.

 

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