Education

You might feel that your mind is following a million threads as you flit between tasks without strong focus. Perhaps you toss and turn for hours before falling asleep, or stir after just a few hours of slumber and lie there exhausted but wide awake. Some call it monkey brain. Your legs twitch, you fidget and feel jittery. You’re wired but tired.

If you’ve tried yoga and meditation, but you’re still wound up, you might be interested to know that Busy Brain can be a result of physiological deficits, not just poor discipline.

Phosphatidylserine Relieves Busy Brain

Phosphatidylserine, abbreviated PS, is part amino acid and part fatty acid. It’s a substance used to build the membranes of all the cells in your body. It is especially important in brain function. Because it enhances glucose metabolism and orchestrates cortisol balance, it is your friend for stronger focus, better sleep, and downregulating impulsivity.

While your body can make PS, you depend largely on food to get the raw materials for its manufacture. If you don’t get enough Omega 3 in your diet, you will be compromised in creating this phospholipid that uses fatty acids for its structure. Additionally, the process of assembling PS requires lots of B vitamins. With all the stress you are faced with, and the sugar you eat to keep going when you’re ready to bonk during the day, your stores of B vitamins have been robbed already. If your gut health is compromised, the probiotics that create B vitamins in your digestive tract are likely diminished, leaving you even less able to furnish these critical vitamins.

Eat Fish and Sauerkraut

Supplementing with PS is a temporary solution. While it may address symptoms, it doesn’t really fix the root deficiencies. Of course, it’s imperative that you get a handle on your stress and bust your sugar habit so that the nutrients you need aren’t diverted to these unnecessary distractions. But there are some modifications you can make to your diet, too. The easiest way to get more Omega 3 into your diet is to eat fatty fish (salmon, herring, and halibut) and fish products several times per week, including the traditional remedy, cod liver oil.

Boosting B vitamins the traditional way involves eating probiotic foods. After all, which is more efficient in the long run: having a vitamin factory inside of you, or continually buying that B Stress Complex from now until you reside in an assisted living center?

Sauerkraut is one of the easiest fermented vegetables to make. Here’s a basic recipe:

Basic Kraut Ingredients

1 head of cabbage

1-2 Tb. Unrefined salt

1-2 cups optional ingredients: apples, carrots, beets

1-2 tsp. optional flavorings: crushed garlic, cumin seed, caraway seed, cilantro, red pepper flakes

Basic Kraut Instructions

Finely chop or grate the cabbage (and other optional ingredients) into a large stainless, glass, or plastic bowl. Sprinkle with salt and any additional flavorings. Toss well. Let rest at room temperature until juices are drawn from cabbage, about an hour. Stir vigorously, tamping the cabbage and releasing more juices..

Press firmly into a quart jar, until the cabbage is 2 inches from the top and covered with liquid. Pour any additional liquid from the bowl into the jar to finish filling the jar. It is important that the cabbage remain covered with juices during the fermenting process. Put the lid on, but not too tightly. You want gases to escape. Leave at room temperature for two weeks. Now tighten the lid and transfer to the refrigerator. Enjoy a portion every day. Stores 6 months.

Did you ever think that your low thyroid, plummeting libido, insulin resistance and estrogen dominance could be related to an overgrowth of “gut bugs”? It might seem like a stretch, but let’s follow the train back to the station.

Hormone Trouble Means Blood Sugar Instability

Hormones, of course, aren’t limited to testosterone and estrogen. You have hormones to stimulate or curb appetite, rev up or slow down metabolism, spark or curtail growth, ignite or dampen stress, and even wake you up or put you to sleep. Many of these hormones are fat-soluble. But even those that aren’t still need essential fatty acids for their construction. So a low-fat diet means trouble for hormones. The truth is that in almost every instance of hormone imbalance, the body is burning sugars not fats. Let me put that another way: if your hormones are bonkers, so are your blood sugars! When there’s a deficiency of essential fatty acids, there’s usually a surplus of sugars.

Blood Sugar Imbalance Can Indicate High Cortisol Levels

Sure, you could be eating too many carbs (dietary cause), or not digesting and absorbing the natural fats that you do eat (physiological cause). But in today’s world, there’s often a chemical cause of high blood sugars: stress! That’s right, your stress  hormone, cortisol, raises blood sugars! It was designed that way to give you the energy to fight or flee in an emergency. So, chances are that if your hormones are cock-eyed, you also have a fair amount of stress in your life driving blood sugars up on a consistent basis.

Not All Stress is Emotional

In the world of nutritional therapy, anything that throws your body out of kilter is a stress because it requires energy to re-establish equilibrium, or homeostasis – meaning stability of the body. Very common triggers in your gut for increased physiological stress and cortisol output are:

• food sensitivities.
• toxins.
• an overgrowth of yeast, bacteria, or parasites, or in other words, gut bugs.

Because the American diet is low on pre-biotic and probiotic foods, and because most of us have had several rounds of anti-biotics that kill beneficial microbes as well as the disease organism they’re targeting, and because we have so many emotional triggers that shut down blood flow and oxygen to the digestive system, it is almost universal to have a gut full of opportunistic pathogens, draining your energy and causing your body to respond in alarm as it tries to maintain homeostasis.

Treat the Cause

Suppose you have leptin resistance, meaning your cells don’t respond to the hormone to eat less and burn more. You could try to address the leptin sensitivity itself. But as long as your cortisol output is still high, any treatment you adopt is going to be short-lived. And if cortisol is high because your gut bugs are out of control, the only lasting solution is to address the bugs themselves.

It is wise to work with a nutritional therapist, who can follow clues to determine what is contributing to your blood sugar imbalance. A Nutritional Therapy Practitioner can test supplements against your body to find out which ones work and which ones don’t, so you avoid wasting money on treatments that aren’t helpful. Just remember that the hormone issue is really the tip of the iceberg. For true healing, you have to investigate underlying causes.

My Ex has brilliantly described you! “When you’re hungry, you’re not you!” You’re…

Mars got one thing right: that correlation between mood and hunger. It’s real and it’s a trap! The worse you feel, the more you feed the addiction and the deeper you go into blood sugar dysregulation. Your highs get higher and your lows get lower. Like physiological manic-depression, pretty soon you’re hypoglycemic and insulin resistant!

The Mars campaign, by the way, very accurately describes the tell-tale signs of hypoglycemia. But giving a hypoglycemic a sugar rush is like giving an alcoholic another drink just to avoid the eventual hang-over. Sooner or later, it’s gonna hit!

That’s why suggesting the candy bar as a practical solution is downright dangerous!

So I divorced Snickers. Ok, I admit, it was adoring and lustful love for years. But Snickers failed me. Now I’ve walked away. I’m never going back. I’m not sorry. I’ve never felt better!

Yes, I am sweet-talking you – er, rather sweet lecturing you. Your food has more impact on your well being that you realize. You could be diabetic and not even know it. Estimates are that one-third of our population is already pre-diabetic. Ninety percent of the pre-diabetics have no idea their health is at a crisis point.

And the solution is so easy! It takes no medications, no doctor visits, no surgery, no office procedures. It’s as simple as avoiding refined sugar and carbohydrates and eating a balanced diet. Here are some simple guidelines for you:

1. For every handful of carbohydrate that you eat, grab a thumb-size portion of natural fat, and eat a palm-size portion of protein.
2. Remember that fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, seeds and sweeteners are all carbohydrates. Carbohydrate goes far beyond bread, pasta, chips, and crackers.
3. Avoid processed, man-made fats, including soy, canola, cottonseed, and corn oils. Stick to the traditional fats that have been used for centuries.
4. Be picky about your protein. Avoid products treated with anti-biotics, growth hormones, and steroids. As much as possible, eat food that has been raised on its natural diet, not a commercialized product.
5. Consume more vegetables! Yes, they are carbohydrate, but they are so low in calories, high in fiber, rich in minerals and full of vitamins, that you can have an almost unlimited amount.

Your miraculous body has a built-in detector for the nutrients it needs. Your tongue is a sensitive instrument for discerning the variety of foods that each cell demands. By tuning in to the signals your tongue picks up,  you can satisfy your need for a wide array of nutrients.

From the time you were a tiny baby, you have been attuned to sweetness. When the tongue senses a sweet taste, the mind feels comforted and calm, no doubt associated in the infant brain with warm milk, parental contact, and sleep. Nature provided sweet receptors on the tongue for growth and to prevent tissues from drying out. Sweet foods are “builders” that add flesh. It is not bad to enjoy sweet unless the sensory input is unmitigated by other flavors. When a sweet palate over-rides the taste for other important foods, your moist mucus becomes a ready breeding ground for infection. Then sluggishness and weight gain set in.

The counterbalance to sweet is bitter. You may not appreciate the bite of bitter foods if you were not raised on them. But bitterness helps reduce stored weight, is tonic to the liver, stimulates the removal of toxins and waste through the production of bile, and supports digestion. In fact, literally hundreds of points in the gut are turned on when the tongue tastes bitterness, as if that organ were a gong, signalling the body that it’s time to secrete all the digestive fluids.

Most bitters are herbs and include dark leaves such as dandelion, arugula, watercress, and parsley. Some notable exceptions are extra dark chocolate, juniper berry, and caraway seed. When bitter herbs are served at the beginning of a meal, as salad, or at the end of a meal, as tea, they assure timely movement of the food through the large and small intestines.

Like bitter, the perception of sour is most useful to digestion. It, too, stimulates the stomach and liver. Additionally it can relieve gas and increase metabolism. Some of the most beneficial sour foods are the ferments – that class of foods with multiplied digestive enzyme capacity due to its probiotic activity. A true ferment has live cultures, and does NOT include heat-processed canned products, such as sauerkraut and pickles, but it does include fresh krauts, and cultured dairy products such as yogurt and kefir. Take care that these are not artificially sweetened, over-riding the positive effect of sourness.

The purpose of saltiness is to alert your body to mineral content, especially the necessary electrolytes, calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium. chloride, and phosphate. A little salt can stimulate the appetite, but over-used, leads to excessive water retention in your body. Instead of indulging in processed snack foods, like chips or pretzels, you can satisfy your cravings for the salty taste by sprinkling a dash of fish sauce or soy sauce on your food, using smoked meats, brining your meat before cooking, or putting a pinch of sea salt in your water.

A little-known but vital flavor is umami, which loosely interpreted means “meaty.” Your brilliant tongue discerns this flavor to help you identify protein foods – those rich in amino acids. Your pre-disposition for craving these building blocks of the body can lead you to indulge in man-made products that contain MSG, but no substantial protein component, such as condensed soups and soup mixes, or the myriad of potato chip varieties on the market.  Traditional societies gratified their protein detector with bone broth, crayfish, and fish sauce added to recipes.

Two other flavors of note are pungent (or spicy) and astringent, which tend to balance each other, the first warming the body, and the latter cooling it. Your tongue notices spicy foods to allure you to substances that will increase circulation, and trigger sweating for cleansing purposes. Pungent foods include peppers, horseradish, and wasabi.

When too much moisture exists from excessive sweet intake, the tongue can notify you of astringent foods that have drying properties. Some of the most notable astringent foods are cranberry, green apple, and pomegranate.

If your palate is unnaturally conditioned toward only sweet and salty, you may be lacking vital nutrients to keep your body balanced. Try experimenting with new foods that have strange and exciting flavors. Challenge yourself to include 4 or 5  of these 7 tastes in each meal. Ethnic food is an excellent way to broaden your palate, as most societies have a deep food culture that intuitively incorporates the full spectrum of flavors.

Sugar is a thief. It steals your nutrients, your energy, and your health. And it makes you anxious.

Here are just 3 of the many ways eating too many sweetened foods can upset your mental health:

It robs you of magnesium. It takes 28 molecules of magnesium to metabolize one molecule of sugar! Since magnesium is needed for relaxation, this puts your ability to calm yourself in jeopardy.

It upsets the balance of microbes in your gut. When pathogens outnumber probiotics, the nerve signals from the gut to the brain are ones of distress. Did you know that for every message the brain sends to the G.I. tract, the gut sends 6 signals back? And since pathogens feed on simple sugars, whereas probiotics eat complex carbs, it’s easy to get an overgrowth of harmful yeast or bacteria if you are loading up on sweets. These, in turn, send messages to your brain that something is not right.

It starts an adrenaline cycle. Not having a balanced plate and eating carb-heavy means your blood sugars are going to swing drastically up and down. When they drop, your brain becomes alarmed, for it must have constant fuel to direct your body’s activities. It recruits cortisol and adrenaline to increase blood sugars. These stress hormones increase your heart rate, quicken your breathing, and tighten your muscles. You become a walking candidate for an anxiety attack as soon as the next stressor comes along.

The solution to reducing anxiety starts with reducing the foods that spike an insuin release in your body.

Swap your refined carbs (pop, pasta, bread, chips, cookies, pastries, cake, tortillas, juices, condiments and sauces) for smart carbs (properly prepared whole grains and legumes, abundant vegetables, and whole fruits).

Second, watch food labels. Sugar is ubiquitous. It’s in so-called health foods like yogurt, protein bars, and even some flavored waters. Your intake of carbs in terms of grams should not be much higher than your intake of protein, so if an energy bar touting 8 grams of protein is 32 grams of carbohydrate, with 14 grams of sugar, it’s not a good choice. Learn to make foods from scratch. For example, spaghetti sauce can be quickly stirred together from tomato paste, bone broth, fresh garlic, and a few spices, avoiding the high fructose corn syrup often included in the canned version of this product.

Next, make sure you are getting adequate amounts of protein and healthy fat. Women should get a minimum of 50 grams of protein per day. Men need closer to 70 grams. Natural fats – everything from nuts and seeds to butter and coconut oil – help slow the absorption of carbohydrate into your blood stream, and give you a slow-burning fuel to maintain energy and stave off cravings throughout the day.

While sugar may give you a rush when your feel blue, in the long run you will be more optimistic and peaceful if you skip this sweet saboteur.

Your rough nights may be a sign that your blood sugars are skewed. Waking up a few hours after falling asleep, then struggling to get back to sleep is a classic red flag for low blood sugar. But when you lie in bed for hours and can’t even get to sleep in the first place, you may have high blood sugar.

True, you might have other considerations interfering with restful nights, such as a serotonin/melatonin imbalance or too much blue light exposure at bedtime. But most often, when people just like you talk to me about their disrupted sleep patterns, there is something crazy going on with their cortisol. Blood sugar fluctuations and cortisol output are kissing cousins.

Here’s what happens. (If you can’t stand explanations and just want a solution, skip to the last section.) Cortisol secretion is triggered when there is a perceived threat to the body, such as:

• emotional stress
• a physiological menace, perhaps toxins or food sensitivities
• plummeting blood sugars

Cortisol’s task is to mobililze you for action – to supply you with immediate energy to fight against the threat. It does so by signalling your muscle tissue to release amino acids and fatty acids that the liver can convert into glucose (blood sugar) in a process called gluconeogenesis. As these acids are switched into ready fuel, your breathing and heart rate speed up and your muscles engage for movement – a state incompatible with sleep.

When you find yourself rousing between 1 and 3 a.m., it’s highly likely that your blood sugars dipped. Falling blood sugars threaten your brain, which must maintain a steady stream of glucose for its function, so your body releases cortisol to keep you safe. That cortisol spike wakes you up.

On the other hand, when you go to bed then toss and turn for hours with sleep evading you, that’s a pretty good indication that emotional and physiological stressors have kept that cortisol pumping all day, not letting you wind down and slip into regenerative repose. And as long as cortisol is being released, blood sugars will stay high. You’ll feel restless, need to move, and have speeding thoughts. This is the classic “tired but wired.”

To achieve more restful sleep

1. “Bank your fire.” Eating a high-carb meal provides plenty of fuel, but like kindling, carbs burn hot and fast, then are gone in a flash. To keep an even burn for hours that runs slow and low, use plenty of natural fats along with complex carbohydrates in your meal. These will metabolize like a big log on a campfire and prevent you from crashing in the night.
2. Coax your body into a para-sympathetic state. It’s easy to get stuck in the task-and-deadline focused mode that drives most of your actions throughout the day. You can persuade your body to ease up by engaging in deep breathing exercises; drinking an herbal tea such as ashwagandha, rhodiola, or holy basil; humming; soaking in an epsom salt bath; journalling or sketching or coloring; diffusing essentials oils such as lavendar, ylang ylang, or chamomile; practicing yoga; listening to binaural beats;  or perhaps getting a massage.
3. Get checked out by an NTP (Nutritional Therapy Practitioner) who will be able to evaluate you for food sensitivities and toxin-producing gut dysbiosis that may be driving cortisol levels up round the clock. NTP’s can use an online assessment to graph your bio-individual profile. You can ask for your profile here.

Yes, baby, spinach and carrots and bananas and plums are all carbohydrates. Did you think they were proteins? They certainly aren’t fats!

I know it’s confusing at times. People say those leafy greens (you know, spinach and kale and collard) have a lot of protein. Well, compared to white cane sugar, they sure do! Sugar is pure carbohydrate, 100%. But nature’s foods aren’t so simple. Real foods come from plants and animals which are made up of cells. The building blocks of cells are proteins, so whole foods inevitably have some protein. Fats are present in the semi-permeable membrane surrounding the cell, allowing both water-soluble and fat-soluble nutrients to pass into the cell and wastes to be transferred out.

In reality, therefore, whole foods contain a tiny bit of all three macronutrients: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. When we assign a category to a food, it’s because that food has heaps more of one macronutrient than any other. Back to spinach. While it is primarily carb, 30% of its calories do come from protein. That’s a lot more than, say, a potato, which is only 7% protein, calorically.

But a whole cup of spinach is only about 7 calories – and only 2 of those calories come from protein. It would take literally mountains of spinach, baby, to make your hair and nails and muscles and skin and cartilage, and even your red blood cells and hormones. That’s why we can’t count it as a protein. It serves as carbohydrate because it is primarily a source of energy. When your tummy digests it, all those bright green leaves are converted into glucose to keep you crawling and cooing.

My point is that you can’t think of carbs as just pasta and potatoes. Yes, chips and crackers and croissants are carbohydrates, but so are all of the fruits and veggies and legumes and seeds. And remember Pooh Bear and his honey pot? Yeah, that’s how his belly got so round. Even milk is between 30 and 56% carbohydrate by calorie, depending on its fat content. That makes it taste sweet to you. (Only one-fifth of the calories in milk come from protein!)

So…I won’t EVER endorse a smoothie with skim milk and 3 or 4 fruits in it. It’s just too much of a sugar-rush for your precious body! I don’t care if you add spinach to make it healthy – it’s still an insulin tornado.  I only want you to be vibrant and have vitality! And don’t tell me you use almond milk – it’s worse! For every 16 grams of carbohydrate (64 calories), there is only 1 gram of protein (4 calories).*

The bottom line is you can be a carb-loader if you eat lots of fresh produce and never even touch refined sugar, or grains either, for that matter. When I say you need to balance your plate, please understand that I’m serious about adding healthy fats and animal proteins to your diet. Believe me, I’m trying to save you from insulin resistance before it’s too late. Here’s my rule of thumb: For every “handful” of carbohydrate, eat a thumb-size portion of natural, unrefined fat and a palm-size serving of protein. You have too much of life ahead of you to feel fatigued and fat, or to experience fitful sleep and flat moods.

If you’re already there, suffering from that 2 p.m. coma every day, I can help! Contact me.

*May vary from brand to brand.

I run into a lot of people who don’t believe they have a blood sugar problem. It comes as a shock when the doc tells them they are hypoglycemic, insulin resistant, or worse yet, diabetic. These are hard conditions to correct once they have actualized. But they are easy to prevent!

You can know your risk without having to schedule a doctor visit. Start with this quiz:

1. If I skip a meal:
   1. no big deal.
   2. I have a headache.
   3. I’m “HANGRY!”
2. I have to eat:
   1. 2-3 times a day.
   2. 3-4 times a day.
   3. 5-6 times a day.
3. My energy:
   1. is pretty consistent.
   2. varies from day to day.
   3. is like a roller coaster.
4. After meals, I experience:
   1. no change in energy.
   2. relief.
   3. sleepiness.
5. Between meals, I have:
   1. no specific cravings.
   2. afternoon cravings (for stimulants).
   3. LOTS of cravings!
6. I sleep:
   1. very well.
   2. poorly; I wake and can’t get back to sleep.
   3. with difficulty; I can’t fall asleep.
7. I awaken:
   1. refreshed.
   2. not feeling rested.
   3. in a fog; I can’t get going.
8. During endurance exercise:
   1. I have great stamina and reserves.
   2. I need a stimulant.
   3. I hit a wall and crash.

Circle your answers and total your score. The higher your result, the greater your risk of blood sugar diseases.

But suppose the “tire looks flat, but you need a tire gauge to be sure.” That’s easy, too. You can test your blood sugar levels at home and order a simple lab test to check your cumulative blood sugar levels over a 3-month period.

Home “finger-prick” glucose meters are available at local drug stores. Some popular brands of these glucose monitors are One Touch, ReliOn, Accu-Chek, FreeStyle and Contour Next. Just put a drop of blood on a test strip, and within seconds, you’ll have a reading. There is cause for concern if you are higher than 95 when fasting or higher than 120 two hours after a meal.

An A1C is a blood test that measures your blood-sugar levels over the past quarter rather than just at the current moment. You can order this test for less than the cost of a visit to the doctor’s office. Go to www.ultawellness.com and search A1C. Select a lab near you, print the requisition, and drop in at your convenience for the blood draw. The confidential results are emailed back to you within the week.

A score below 5.7 is considered safe; 5.7-6.4 is classified as pre-diabetic; anything over 6.4 indicates diabetes.

The nitty-gritty part is changing the numbers if they’re higher than they should be. Here are my “quick and dirty” recommendations:

• Eat more healthy fats. Always pair your carbohydrates with a good fat to slow the absorption of sugars into the bloodstream and to give your body a slow-burning fuel that will last for hours and hours without leaving you shaky and frantic. Unheated fish oils are the best source of essential Omega 3’s. Butter, tallow, and lard from pastured animals are safe saturated fats to use in cooking. Olive oil is a great mono-unsaturate to use for salad dressings and other cold applications. Coconut oil is a popular mid-chain fatty acid with many health benefits.
• Drink water. Many times, the body’s thirst signals are mistaken for hunger cues. Instead of grabbing a [sweet] snack, grab a water bottle. Since pop and juice fuel sugar cravings and are actually de-hydrating (they USE water from the body to dilute them), avoid drinking them. If it is difficult for you to enjoy pure water, try stimulating your desire for it by adding a splash of citrus, a few drops of trace minerals or a pinch of natural sea salt.
• Take a probiotic supplement and eat traditional cultured/fermented foods. Often, sugar cravings are driven by an overgrowth of pathological microbes in the gut. Using probiotics foods and capsules can help return the balance to your microbiome and lessen your cravings. You might try kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, or miso. Just make sure it has live cultures.
• Use a liquid amino-acid supplement between meals to stave off cravings. The body can convert amino acids into fuel in a process called gluconeogenesis. When your body needs instant energy and you’re tempted to grab sugar to supply glucose, try putting a couple drops of amino acid supplement on your tongue instead.
• Go cold-turkey. Read labels and cut all sugar completely out for 3 days. If you can do it for 72 hours, you can do it indefinitely, because the cravings subside after the first few days.
• Book a consultation with me to find out where the particular imbalances in your body lie.

Believe me, your body will thank you! If millenia of humans could survive without refined sugar, you can too!