posture and eyesight — some thoughts about natural vision and myopia

Some of you know that I wore glasses from around 7th grade to my early twenties.

Then I started reading up on natural vision, quit wearing glasses, and gradually my eyesight improved. I went from 20/180 in my worst eye to basically 20/20 or 20/40 today. (Range because I experience some degradation in vision acuity if I’m tired or have been inside/in front of screens too much.)

I posted about my natural vision journey several years ago.

I’ve learned a lot about vision and natural vision over the years, and wanted to share one particular insight, because it’s important, and it may help other people who want their eyes to operate as God intended – and don’t want to be dependent on corrective lenses.

Poor posture — the root of contemporary epidemic of vision problems?

This is based on observation, self-experimentation, and logic. Consult a medical professional please, as the disclaimers say.

When the head isn’t aligned, the eyes are forced to compensate.

Continue reading

Keto keto keto keto keto …

keto breakfast

So I’m resigned to the fact that I will never be able to take really pretty food pictures. But this is what a typical breakfast looks like–just pretend it is has starbursts and stuff.

No, I am not jumping on a fad.

I already jumped–a year ago!

And before I jumped, I already had a nice foundation in place: I’d been doing intermittent fasting for 3 or 4 years before that …

Okay. Being a writer, I could spin out 6000 words on this topic without drawing a breath, so I’ll try to keep it short.

Here’s what happened.

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s I used low carb to slim back down after having a baby. But I thought of it, back then, as a way to lose weight, not as a way to improve other health markers. So after a few months I went back to eating the way I had before.

“The way I’d been eating before” wasn’t the so-called SAD (Standard American Diet) diet fwiw. I haven’t eaten that way since high school. I got on a “whole foods” kick in my early 20s and have been refining it ever since. But it did include quite a few carbs: grains with every meal, desserts (organic ice cream, that sort of thing). Lots of fruit.

But four or five years ago something happened that raised a red flag for me.

It was a busy Saturday. I was out running errands. I hadn’t eaten in several hours–one of those days when eating takes a back seat to other priorities.

I stopped at a Starbucks and ordered a mocha coffee–i.e. sugar laden high carb treat.

And a couple hours later, I crashed. Shaky, nauseous, weak, light-headed–I felt horribly sick.

It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. I’d been a “grazer” for a long time, with good reason: I couldn’t go more than 3 or 4 hours without eating, or I’d start to feel those symptoms.

But the intensity of the experience shook me up.

I wasn’t obese. I was working out (weight training) twice a week. But I was carrying probably 10 or 15 extra pounds. That, combined with my sugar crash, was a wake-up call. If I was having this kind of a reaction to sugar now, what was I facing in 5 years, or 10, or 15? Were the extra pounds I had put on as I aged affecting me in ways that were slowly undermining my health? Was my diet really the best diet for me?

I’m a regular reader of the “primal living” health blog at Mark’s Daily Apple, so by then I’d come across a term Mark Sisson coined: “fat-burning beast.” The basic idea is one that keto fans will find familiar. You can train your body to burn fat for energy instead of glucose, and when you do, you break your dependency on carbs. You won’t experience sugar crashes any more. You won’t have to eat all the time any more.

This was before Keto diets were all the rage, but I knew that day that I needed to become a fat-burning beast.

I started intermittent fasting.

There are a lot of different ways to do intermittent fasting. The approach I picked was to fast for 24 hours, breakfast to breakfast, twice a week.

It was really hard at first. More than once I’d hit a wall about 2 in the after noon. My body temp would drop, my energy levels would plummet. I’d have to crawl into bed under the covers to warm up and sleep just to get through it. (Working from home helps!)

But after a few months, my body adapted and holy smokes, what a revelation.

I was no longer dependent on food!

Guys, you know I’m a golfer. I used to have to pack food with me when I golfed so that I could get through a 4-5 hour round without wanting to pass out. Now, all of a sudden, it didn’t matter. I could go out in the morning without eating breakfast and play a round without the slightest discomfort.

And needless to say, no more sugar crashes. And I lost a few pounds which felt good.

Then came the Keto thing. Sisson started blogging about it. He announced he had a book coming out.

I didn’t hesitate. I pre-ordered the book and as soon as it arrived started planning a 6-week Keto clean-out.

That was a year ago. This week, my sweetheart and I are doing the 6-week thing for the second time :)

To me, Keto delivers the same effects as fasting. Energy levels that are both high and steady; clear mind; body gets that lovely, compact feeling (versus the bloated feeling I get when I’ve been eating too many carbs).

We also found that the effects of a six-week Keto clean-out last–really for the whole rest of the year. I still fast from time to time but it’s more of a touch-point now. Being “keto-adapted,” I don’t ever need to eat (freedom!!!) Going 24 or even 48 hours without eating doesn’t faze me. I energizer bunny right through :)

It also kind of pulled our diet in a keto direction even though we didn’t bother staying in “strict keto” once the six weeks was up. If I was at a restaurant and they put out fresh Italian bread with olive oil, I’d eat a slice and enjoy it. OTOH if I was hungry for a burger I’d order it without a bun. I.e. I didn’t seek out carbs, but I didn’t shun them.

Keto is definitely a fad today, with all the hoopla you get with diet fads. People denouncing it as dangerous, blah blah blah. Or defining keto erroneously (“you eat pounds of meat every day! and no veggies!” yeah right…) and then clapping themselves on the back for knocking their straw man over.

Silly. Not even going to bother engaging on that stuff. Go read Sisson if you want thoughtful, in-depth, science-based considerations of dietary arguments.

What I also see a lot of is people who–let me put this nicely–need a bit of help understanding how to do it.

So at the risk of turning this post into an all-Sisson read: I really recommend Sisson’s book, The Keto Reset Diet: Reboot Your Metabolism in 21 Days and Burn Fat Forever (affiliate link).

Actually, let me amend that: if you are thinking about doing keto for the first time, just go buy the book.

Because it’s about preparing yourself for keto. And you owe it to yourself to build a foundation if you’re new to keto–and especially if you are like I was: the sort of person who needs to eat every couple of hours to keep your energy levels steady.

Going keto “cold turkey” can make you feel like crap. Just like I felt that day years ago when I sugar crashed from my mocha coffee.

But if you prepare your body, things will be easier. And if you have a framework–a little bit of the science–you’ll understand what you’re doing and how to do it right.

Plus the book has a bunch of recipes and we found most of them to be absolutely delicious. So there’s that, too–you can plan your menus without having to hunt for ideas.

Happy ketoing!

Going full Keto

After 6 weeks of Keto, we’ve made our decision.

We’ll keep going. We feel too good.

Personally, I can’t believe the level of mental energy I have. My brain is lit up. Not in a frenetic way. It’s a nice, steady, “always on” thing — from when I jump out of bed in the morning til I start feeling sleepy at night.

Maybe this won’t last. I’ve heard tell that people burn out. But for as long as I feel like this, I am All In.

In which I lose my mind possibly? and start fermenting vegetables :D

Fermenting vegetables. On the left: shredded beets with grated ginger and cayenne pepper. On the right: sliced sweet potato, celery, and chipotle pepper.

On the left: shredded beets with grated ginger and cayenne pepper. On the right: sliced sweet potato, celery, and chipotle pepper.

It started when I became interested in so-called “Resistant Starch” — a class of starches that are not digested in the small intestine, but instead pass through to the colon, where they become food for gut flora, including critters that are implicated in everything from weight loss/control to cooling inflammation.

I blogged about RS here. Also recommend Free the Animal, where Richard Nikoley has been rounding up info on RS and is writing a book on it with a couple other RS hero peeps. Details at his blog including his RS primer here.

From incorporating RS into my diet, I’ve now moved to two other refinements. First is adding other prebiotics, for example inulin, which I get by munching on things like raw sliced Jerusalem artichoke.

The second is more probiotics. Continue reading

Body, together

tree branchesSo it’s been a long time since I did a post on health-related stuff.

Partly owing to the evolution (de-evolution?) of the blog. When I first started blogging in whenever it was — 2006 I think? — I threw up posts on whatever was on my mind. Personal stuff, health-related stuff, politics, local news, etc. Today, I’m more active on Facebook than here. It’s easier to carry on conversations there — I’m not sure what FB the company thinks it is, but to me it’s an enormous open platform blog. I can post to my website and maybe somebody will chime in with a response. I post to FB and it can trigger a conversation among dozens of people. I like that :-)

There are two downsides. One, of course, is that the stuff I post on FB isn’t visible if you don’t have a FB account or aren’t my FB friend. The other — closely related actually — is that FB posts go down the rabbit hole. Whereas with my blog, once Google indexes a post, it will show up in the search results for-evah. Assuming it’s a decent post.

Which brings me to health-related stuff. Some of my blog pages on specific health-related topics get fairly regular hits from visitors, which I assume means they’re finding what I post helpful.

So I thought I’d update on my personal experience: here are the things I do today that I think have the most positive effects on my health.

DISCLOSURE: I am NOT a medical professional and this is NOT medical advice. It’s me blogging about my personal experience. Be smart and consider getting a professional opinion before you try anything you read about on the interwebs.

Iodine

Still taking it. Iodine is the only thing I’ve ever supplemented that had a huge, immediate, tangible effect on my health. Here’s my most comprehensive blog posts about it.

You do need to exercise some caution if you start exploring iodine supplementation, particularly if you have health issues. Educate yourself. The links at my old post are a good starting point. Another terrific resource is The Iodine Crisis: What You Don’t Know About Iodine Can Wreck Your Life, by Lynne Farrow.

Next up: Fluoride, Migraines, Resistant Starch, and my fave go-to alt-health blogs . . . Continue reading

Trigger Points

So this has been something of a revelation.

I’ve come across the term “trigger point” more times than I could hope to count, over the years. I’ve had massage therapists mention them. I’ve read about them on websites. I’ve noticed them in my muscles — spots where even a little bit of pressure is hugely painful.

I never looked into them very much.

The fact is, there is so much alt-health information out there, and 95 percent of it is either garbage or irrelevant. It’s hard to sort through it all. It takes time.

But in the past few years my hands have been giving me trouble. My fingers seemed stiff a lot. My knuckles have been sore. I’ve noticed that my forearms have developed numerous tender spots as well.

This started a year or so after I took up golf — but golfing itself never hurt or seemed to tire my hands, and resting from golf didn’t seem to have an effect.

That puzzled me.

My fear, of course, was that it might be arthritis, but none of the alt-health things I tried for that seemed to help. (My doctor concurred it could be arthritis, and suggested I use Ibuprofen. Fine for alleviating symptoms, of course, but I wanted a cure.)

Then a week ago I ordered a copy of The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Second Edition — this being Clair Davies’ classic trigger point book.

It turned out to be an eye-opener.

First of all, I had no idea how much science there is behind the trigger point-based pain model.

I also didn’t realize that the right kind of massage can get rid of trigger points. I thought massaging trigger points was itself a way to alleviate symptoms. I didn’t realize that you can heal trigger points, and by so doing eliminate referred pain at its source.

Anyway, for the last few days I’ve been attacking some of my most troublesome trigger points, and I’m amazed at the results.

Most notably, the pain and stiffness in my hands has resolved probably about 90 percent — and I’m only getting started.

I also have a strong hunch that I finally — FINALLY — have a way to get rid of my headaches.

And I’m gaining a new understanding of the source of specific little aches and pains. For years, I’ve had a problem, on and off, with a dull ache under my right shoulder blade. Who could have known that the source was a muscle in the front of my neck? Yet when I massage the right trigger point, it hurts in that spot inside my shoulder — the exact same kind of hurt, in the exact spot.

I bought the book hoping to make my hands feel better.

I entertain larger ambitions now!

I’m not only going fix my hands. I’m going to get rid of my tendency to headaches. And I’m to systematically hunt down and extinguish trigger points in ever muscle in my body.

Wish me luck — I’ll post updates here as I go.

Thank you, Thermos

After my recent BPA-in-a-can upset I made a big pot of homemade soup for my daughter’s lunches.

Then it occurred to me: what if her Thermos food jar is BPA lined?

Phew! My FUNtainer Thermos food jar is BPA free.

Phew! My FUNtainer Thermos food jar is BPA free.

Good news: it’s not. I just got an email from a Thermos spokesperson I found on their website stating “Our FUNtainer line of food jars and beverage bottles has always been BPA-free, and continues to be as well.”

I’m so glad!

Now I just need to perfect my soup recipe. I’m trying to copy my daughter’s favorite choice from the now-on-my-boycott-list Hain line of Imagine soups: tomato-based broth, meatballs, navy beans, orzo.

My first attempt bears some similarities, she says, but that’s about as far as she was willing to go. Tough customer.

Back to the ol’ cutting board . . .

Seen the latest Rochester Healthy Living?

I have an piece in the August issue: Much to do About Migraine.

After more than 2 decades of living with migraine, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can nearly always head them off. The article describes the tricks I use. (My fave standby? Tincture of cayenne =-O)

I’ll post a link to the article once it’s been transferred to RHL’s website, but in the meantime, if you’re in the Rochester, NY area, look for a print copy in your local supermarkets, healthfood stores, athletic clubs, etc.

Pick up a copy. It’s free :-)

Iodine and heart disease

Several blogs, including Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, and JustOneMinute have picked up Nicholas Kristof’s Dec. 4 piece in the NY Times that calls attention to the problem of iodine deficiency in third world countries, such as Pakistan.

I’ve just been reading a 2006 paper by Stephen A. Hoption Cann, PhD, published by the American College of Nutrition, Hypothesis: Dietary Iodine Intake in the Etiology of Cardiovascular Disease which states that the “proportion of the US population with moderate to severe iodine deficiency (<50 µg iodine/L in urine) has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years.”

That’s right here at home, people.

I posted in August about my own experimentation with iodine supplementation. Today I typically take 25 mgs/day — thousands of times the RDA — and the results have been incredible. Now that winter’s here, for instance, I’ve noticed I don’t get cold as easily, and my skin doesn’t feel dry and itchy like always has in past winters. And of course, the fibrocystic breast tissue that was with me since my 20s is completely gone.

I’m a believer. I’ll never stop taking the stuff.

I just hope other people catch on & start taking it too.

What I find most fascinating about the whole subject is that iodine is so critical to so many of the human body’s biochemical systems that you have to wonder: how pervasive is the impact of our epidemic of iodine deficiency?

Obesity is an obvious candidate for thought. It began taking off in the United States during during the late 1980s. That corresponds pretty closely to the 20-year timeframe cited in Cann’s paper.

Some of that is probably because we no longer get any iodine from bread. The FDA “explicitly approved bromate for . . . use in bread through the standards for bread and rolls promulgated in May of 1952.” One of the flour conditioners potassium bromate displaced, with the FDA’s blessing, was potassium iodate.

Another likely factor is that we’ve been instructed to reduce salt intake. When we’re urged to cut back on salt (which the National Research Council was doing as far back as 1989, and probably further — I remember my grandfather being told not to eat salt in the 1970s) then we’re not necessarily eating enough iodized salt per day to get even the RDA for iodine.

Then there’s this: does the salt you sprinkle on your pommes frites provide as much iodine as it’s supposed to? See this e.g. (translated I think from French — but you’ll get the gist) (Update: Link no longer works, sorry):

Iodine content of reference iodized salt was 38.53?6.92 on June 1997. After the salt was stored at room temperature with a relative humidity of 30 % -45% and in sealed paper bags for three years, iodine content changed to 18.25 ??4.72. Thus 52.63 % of was lost in approximately 3.5
years. This means that standing time and storage conditions is very effective storage of iodine in food.

Cooking conditions is very effective on the stabilization of iodine. In the case of oxidants in diet loss of iodine is more effective, 82% of iodine may lost during the high temperature cooking oxidized medium. So it is advised to consume iodide to put the food not before the cooking after the cooking. On the other hand, if consuming of iodide not advised to people who have problems with their thyroid, long term treatment at oven with an mild oxidant may loss 81% of iodine and 55% of iodine without an oxidants.

Less obvious is iodine’s role in other bodily systems that aren’t obviously linked to the thyroid.

Like heart disease, for instance.

That Cann paper I linked up top explores the correlation between low iodine levels and cardiovascular disease. Talks about selenium as well, another nutrient that’s deficient in our diets.

Here’s a taste:

Uotila et al. [18] made the observation that subjects who died from coronary sclerosis often had goitre. In order to further examine this phenomenon, 250 Finnish subjects who had died from coronary heart disease were age and sex-matched to controls who died from other causes [19]. The risk of death from coronary heart disease was found to be significantly higher in individuals with goiter (odds ratio (OR) = 3.53, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.43–4.99). It was noted that the average thyroid weight was higher in those dying from coronary disease. Moreover, among the coronary disease cases with goiter, there was a lower average age of death and a higher average heart weight. Due to the low iodine content of foods and lack of an iodization program at the time, endemic goiter was common in Finland, particularly in the east.

Well worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Good Sunday eve reading ;-)

The point Kristof tries to make in his NY Times article is that nutrient supplementation makes for boring public policy. He is referring to foreign aid/humanitarian policy, but the same is true right here at home. We’re happy to pour billions of dollars into breast cancer research, for instance (the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation alone has spent $1 billion over 25 years). And there’s nothing wrong with that. But where’s the enthusiasm for using iodine supplementation to prevent breast cancer? It’s not there — not on anything like the pink-ribbons-everywhere scale of mainstream breast cancer campaigns — because it’s such a prosaic and unpatentable approach.

But think about it.

Iodine supplementation may well be an very inexpensive way to address a whole range of very costly health issues that are faced by a huge majority of Americans.

What would become of the “healthcare crisis” if that proved to be the case?

When your doc is stumped

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at The Enterprise Institute, has written an article about a new study on the placebo effect.

The study, by the National Institutes of Health, surveyed practicing U.S. internists and rheumatologists about whether they prescribe placebos. It was published in the British Medical Journal. Half of the MDs surveyed say they prescribe placebos. More than two-thirds say they think prescribing placebos is an acceptable thing to do.

One way to “read” the study, of course, is that MDs are leading patients down the proverbial path. Prescribing sugar pills. But as Satel points out, the reality is a bit more complex:

[O]nly a handful of the almost 700 physicians who completed the survey claimed to use inert substances such as sugar pills or saline. The vast majority offered innocuous over-the-counter products, sometimes called “impure” placebos, such as vitamins or Tylenol, though 13% used antibiotics and another 13% used sedatives. By offering an actual pharmaceutical, doctors stand on firmer ground in telling patients that what they are prescribing is a medication whereas describing a sugar pill as medication is much harder, perhaps impossible, for most to justify as a matter of conscience.

The other important factor is that the research “targeted” internists and rheumatologists — whose patients, in Satel’s words, typically suffer from “chronic illnesses, such as fibromyalgia, that are notoriously refractory to care.”

In other words, these are docs who are unable to help a significant percentage of their patients.

So they’re “prescribing” vitamins or Tylenol or sedatives.

Satel then goes on to discuss the psychological implications of placebos: that even sugar pills bring short term relief if patients believe they’re therapeutic.

But (she notes) there’s a risk as well. If patients begin to feel they’ve been duped, their trust in their physicians, and in the medical profession itself, will be lost.

What Satel doesn’t say is that the loss of trust has already happened. Or is, at least, in the process of happening. Which is why so many people gravitate to alt medicine.

To tease it out a bit more, the most important element at play, here, is the doctor’s fallibility.

Imagine what it must be like to be an MD facing a patient you do not believe you can help.

This person wants to trust you; this person believes you are his only hope; he needs you to stop the hurting, to ward off Death, to restore him to the full and happy life he’s watched slip away.

And you can do nothing. You know you cannot help; you are stumped. There is no drug, no therapy that has shown to reliably erase this condition. Any that have shown promise, you’ve already tried, and they’ve failed. You are stumped. You know it, even if you don’t quite dare let that thought form in your mind as you sit there in the exam room, facing the poor wretch. There is nothing in your bag that will make things better, no wand you can wave.

But you can’t say it. If you say it, everything crumbles. Saying it means you admit your fallibility, it means you admit how tiny and precarious your understanding is, how close to you is the drop-off into the pitch-black gulf of your ignorance. To say it is to let your patient fall off into that gulf, both of you helpless to save him.

So instead you — the MD — reach for what is, in fact, your OWN placebo. In the lingo of the study, you reach for “[A] medicine not typically used for [your patient’s] condition, but [that] might benefit.”

The placebo makes YOU, the doctor, feel better. It gives you the illusion that you do have some control, some authority; it relieves you of having to speak aloud the unmentionable.

Most likely you can also discern at least some relief in your patient. The tension in that exam room is eased.

Your relationship with your patient, and your profession, is intact.

You can continue to practice, because you have proven again that you always have at least some answer. And it might help. It might relieve the symptoms, it might make the patient feel better, and who knows. The patient might even get better, maybe for reasons out of your control, but in the meantime, you’ve done something.

The patient, meanwhile, has gained a slightly better grip on hope. It might not last very long. Maybe only until the physician leaves the room. Or until the symptoms worsen again, and it becomes clear that this “medicine not typically used for your condition” isn’t really helping you at all.

Of course, this isn’t an ideal situation, by any stretch. Our study into the mechanics, and then the biomechanics of the human body have improved our ability to patch it together — and a godsend that is in many cases. But there’s still so much we cannot do.

There’s still so much we don’t understand. By some estimates, the human body comprises 10 trillion cells; each cell comprises trillions of molecules (for instance, there are 10,000 different proteins in a single human liver cell, and millions of molecules of each of those proteins). And each cell is perpetually busy, moving molecules about, assembling them, cutting them up, generating signals for other cells, reacting to signals it receives. All this at speeds we would call “lightening” if we could perceive it.

It’s unimaginably complex. Throw out those drawings you made in high school biology — the circle with the nucleus in the center and maybe a mitochondria or some other “organelle” alongside. That was a cartoon. It wasn’t even close.

The best minds in alt medicine (many of whom are not practitioners, but lay people with an aptitude for chemistry or who have used their own “incurable” illnesses as a catalyst for studying biochemistry) have grasped the implications of this complexity, and are humbled by it. They realize what mainstream practitioners dare not admit: that the drugs we purchase from pharmacies are crude instruments at best. Big, foreign molecules that blunder about in our cells, changing things, yes, which sometimes does bring relief from our symptoms, yes — but also knocking about like the proverbial bull and inevitably, at times, disrupting cellular processes that are better left alone. Causing “side effects.”

Alt medicine, at its best, looks instead to juice the body’s own inherent healing processes. It’s such a simple and logical concept that it amazes me that people dismiss it, but they do. They do. People laugh at the notion, for example, of “detoxification.” Quackwatch, the smarmy online bastion of mainstream medical fanaticism (run, btw, by a man who is himself a quack in the truest sense of the word), calls detoxification “an elaborate, manipulative hoax,” for instance.

But who can argue that the body’s cells know how to eliminate “waste” — molecules which are of no use, and which if retained would be dead weight at best? Of course cells “know” how to do that. They do it all the time. So the question becomes, what processes do cells use to eliminate waste molecules, and are there ways to support those processes, so that cells become in effect cleaner and better able to function?

You can argue that there are effective ways to support given cellular processes, and ineffective ways, but the basic premise is unassailable. As is the premise that nutrients — those molecules our cells have used, for billions of years, as their natural building blocks — are the basis for fundamental health. Cells need nutrients to survive. Not just calories. Much more than just calories. Nutrients — all those oddball molecules that do things like make an tomato red or a piece of salmon savory. Those are the things our cells reach for when they need to patch something up or build an enzyme or produce a secretion.

Meanwhile, mainstream medicine hopes our understanding of biochemistry will eventually become so sophisticated that we’ll be able to craft molecules that deliver “cures” — meaning, molecules that alter certain cellular processes without disrupting others. So one day, a pharmaceutical sales rep will stroll into our MD’s office, open his briefcase, and hand out samples of the pill that cures fibromyalgia.

When that happens, the placebo can be tossed away for good.

And so our mainstream practitioners mark time, and wait.

And roll their eyes when people lose faith in them, leave their offices, log onto the Internet, and type “alternative cure” in the google keyword search.