Tag Archives: health

Sugar Monsters

“Listen to your gut.”

We use phrases like this all the time. But it looks like we might actually be listening a lot more than we realize. Research suggests the bacteria within our gut biome actually influence our thinking. This takes the phrase ‘you are what you eat’ to a whole new level!

What we eat determines the makeup of our gut biome, and our gut biome sends messages to our brain. Our brains literally get craving messages from our gut, and just like a drug addiction, these signals can control our behaviour. One food that acts a lot like addictive drugs do is sugar.

I’m going to issue a challenge. I want you to go into your pantry and choose any 10 items that you enjoy eating. Include condiments, cereal, sauces, treats, and even a few things you consider healthy. Now look for the Sugar in the ingredients. How many of these items have sugar as one of the first four ingredients?

In case you didn’t know, ingredients on labels are ordered from largest to smallest amounts, so if sugar is one of the top 4 ingredients, that likely means there is a considerable amount of sugar in the product. Some labels will also have Nutritional Facts that show how many grams of sugar are in a single serving. And that single serving is likely smaller than what you serve yourself.

It’s almost impossible to avoid large doses of sugar in your diet. It takes effort. With high levels of sugar in so many things, if you aren’t intentionally thinking about it, you are literally creating sugar-hungry, mind-controlling monsters in your gut.

The next time you get a food craving, is it really your mind doing the craving or is it the bacteria in your gut taking control of you?

Vaping epidemic

It’s sad to me to know that nicotine use in teens has been going down for years, but with the growth of use of e-cigarettes and vaping, that statistic is now going up. And if it isn’t bad enough that vaping is increasing nicotine use, these little machines are heating up oils and vaporizing them into droplets that are inhaled into the lungs.

“Federal authorities consider the ingredients safe to consume as food. But our lungs are only equipped to inhale clean air.” Vaping heats up oils but “Our lungs are never meant to have fat in it.” This is “a chemical insult to the lungs,” according to What are vaping-associated illnesses and why are doctors concerned? – CBC News

Here is some interesting information, in infographic form, from The National Institute on Drug Abuse: Teens and E-cigarettes

The last time I went to the movie theatre there were two ads for vaping, one for a vaping product, the other to promote vaping marijuana. The legalization of marijuana has probably created a spike in teen use here as well. A few days ago, I read an interesting article on the teenage brain, and this was the section on smoking and pot smoking:

“Other studies have linked smoking in teens to alcohol abuse, which itself has a devastating effect on both memory and intelligence. And it turns out smoking pot may be far worse for the teen brain than previously thought. Recent studies have linked regular marijuana use in adolescence to smaller brain volume and more damage to white matter. Smoking daily before the age of 17 has been shown to reduce verbal IQ and increase the risk of depression.“

I think that things will get worse before they get better. More than ever, advertising deploys strategies of influence that we didn’t even understand a decade ago. And while advertising for cigarettes is banned, that’s not the case for vapes and now marijuana. Vaping flavours like cotton candy and cherry entice young kids to get used to vaping. Peer pressure doesn’t help. Add to that the fact that vapes are designed to be easily concealed, made to look more like USB drives rather than cigarettes, and you have the makings of a major problem.

Teen vaping is on the rise… so are the negative effects of inhaling oil droplets, nicotine, and marijuana into the young, developing lungs, brains, and bodies of our youth.

Vitamin D

About 3 years ago I dealt with 6 months of chronic fatigue. It was awful. It was caused by an extreme deficiency in Vitamin D. But in Canada, only a specialist can ask for a Vitamin D test as part of a blood test without it costing the patient money, and so it took 6 months before a specialist tested me.

Vitamin D is known as the sunshine pill. Sunlight provides your body with Vitamin D. But we don’t expose ourselves to enough sunlight in the northern hemisphere, and winter is approaching with shorter, darker days ahead. I take 5,000IU (International Units) of vitamin D3 daily. I call it my ‘sunshine in a pill’. That’s a higher dose than most people take, but it works for me.

40-50% of North Americans have a deficiency in Vitamin D. There are possible links to this deficiency and MS – (Multiple Sclerosis). Chronic fatigue does not actually have a significant correlation. My deficiency was at less than 5% of what it should have been and the specialist said that another person at that level might show it in completely different ways than me.

But here is my public service announcement: Winter is coming, you will be exposed to less sunlight. Get a little sunshine in pill form and start taking Vitamin D.

‘Watching’ you

Here is an interesting article I read a few months ago:

Apple CEO: Watch is saving lives – Business Insider

Apple COO Jeff Williams:

Apple has gotten “a ton of emails where people say the Watch actually saved their life,” he says.

“The only thing on the Apple Watch from a medical standpoint is the heart rate sensor,” he says.

And while anyone can talk their own wrist pulse anytime, “having the information readily available and passively tracked in the background has proved to be profound, in a way we didn’t anticipate,” he adds.

“We’ve gotten so many emails where people or their cardiologist have written us and said, ‘This person detected something on their Watch and came in and they had a life threatening situation. If we had not intervened, they probably would have died.”

So, continuous heart rate monitoring can be very valuable, and the article also mentions a Fitbit detecting a woman’s sleep apnea… What’s next?

I can remember my mom having a health issue and she had to carry around a heart monitor for several days. It was bulky, strapped on to her, and needed to be unplugged from her when she showered. It was an inconvenient interruption to her life, but it provided important information for her doctor.

Imagine a few years from now when you go to your doctor and say, I’ve noticed an issue where my heart starts racing even though I’m not exercising… and your doctor says, that’s interesting, will you please download your last month’s data onto my tablet? A couple clicks later your doctor knows when this happened, your step count for the day, the last time you exercised, your blood pressure, your heart rate, your sugar levels, the oxygen levels of your blood, and a whole host of other data that she has at her finger tips.

She won’t have to say, I think I need to run some tests, but rather she will have a plethora of historical data that actually extends beyond what she might have tested for. She might have advice to share that she would not have known to share if you hadn’t provided her with this data. Maybe she injects a small sensor under your skin so that your watch can provide her with more information. And then you can set your watch to ping your doctor the next time you have an issue.

And then the next time the health issue does happen, your phone actually warns you before you feel your heart racing. As the sensation hits you, you get a text message from your doctor saying, “Don’t worry, it will pass, set an appointment with me next week, we will work to settle this down”… or, “Are you with someone that can drive you to the hospital? I’ll meet you there.” This might be a bit scary, but not as scary as the text message not happening and you having a medical issue that is much better or far worse than you think.

Yes, there are some worrisome questions like ‘who owns this data’, and privacy is a concern, but this is really exciting and can become something that saves your life more than once. The issue of private data being shared is something we will all have to figure out. People are already working on this, listen to CBC Spark with Nora Young to learn more: How to empower patients with medical data.

On a lighter side, maybe this watch that you wear (or maybe it’s a cyborg-like addition to your body rather than something you wear) can actually help you maintain a better lifestyle. Maybe it knows you are on a diet and locks the fridge when you try to get into it after 8pm, or it beeps incessantly and annoyingly when you are eating something unhealthy. Or it reminds you that you have missed your scheduled workout and prompts you to set up a ‘make-up’ time.

We are entering an interesting time of wearable technology and some time soon, accessories like watches might be watching us far more than we are watching them!

Luke Skywalker's Hand - May The 4th Be With You! :)

Luke Skywalker’s Hand – May The 4th Be With You! 🙂