Category: Refined Sugar

Reading Between The Lines

2/13/2020

Nutrition is one of the five elements of health, and one of the most important ones that can guarantee a healthy and happy life. One of the best places to start is paying attention to what's inside your food before you eat it! Where can you start to find this information? The nutrition labels!

Hi everybody, it's Dr. Bob Salamon here with Lowcountry Chiropractic. You know, we talk about the five factors of health quite often. Those five factors are nutrition, exercise, rest and relaxation, positive mental attitude, and chiropractic care. This blog is going to be dedicated to factor number one, nutrition! I am going to be working my way through a nutrition label found on the side of a cereal box to guide us through this blog and to talk about what you should be looking for in your foods and what you should be avoiding. The FDA requires companies to put these labels on their food products to let the consumer know what's inside the food they're buying. It's the best way to determine if what you're eating is healthy or not.

The cereal box I am looking at is a knock off brand of cereal called "Multigrain Tasteeos". This cereal isn't too bad when it comes to nutrition, but it's not as healthy as it could be. Let's dig in!

Calories The first line on my cereal box is calories. Now, I'm not too concerned with that number. I believe there are more important components inside your food than worrying about those numbers.
Fat Content The next line on my cereal box is the total fat content, which is very important. In my cereal, the total fat content is only 1 gram, and none of it is saturated fat. That's good! When looking at a product, in terms of the fat content, you want to make sure the majority of the fat is unsaturated. You don't want a lot of saturated fat or trans fats in your foods. In food processing, there is a term called hydrogenation. This process changes the chemical bond of a certain product into a trans fat configuration, which is a very unhealthy product. This process is banned in some countries because the product it creates is so unhealthy. Naturally occurring fats, like those in avocados, are good for your body and its functions. When picking out a product and looking at its fat content, you need to make sure that the saturated fat content is as low as possible and the unsaturated fat is as high as possible. If the label mentions that it has been hydrogenated, remember that means something inside the food has been chemically altered, making the product a trans fat. Trans fats are bad because our bodies cannot break them down or digest them properly. When that happens, you can form clogged arteries and all kinds of other issues.
Cholesterol The next line down on the cereal box's nutrition label is cholesterol. There is no cholesterol in my cereal, but cholesterol is something you don't want too much of. Cholesterol is a building block for the cell membranes around your heart and organs. It is pretty important to have. But, your liver produces plenty of it and you don't need to add any more to your body.
Sodium The next line down on the label is sodium. This product has 120 milligrams of sodium, which is not bad. Some of your more processed foods, if you look at frozen dinners and such, advertise that they are low in fat or no fat, which is great. But, a lot of the time these products have a lot of sodium and refined sugars in them. So you need to be very careful there.
Carbohydrates The next line down on the nutrition label is carbohydrates. Proteins, fats, and carbohydrates are building blocks in our bodies and we need to be eating the right portions of each to keep our bodies happy and healthy. But, in my cereal, there are 23 grams of carbs. 3 of these grams are made up of fiber, and 6 of them are composed of sugars (most probably refined sugars), and the rest are other carbohydrates. So, what you want to do, especially if you're buying cereal, is to pay attention to the sugar content. Most cereals have a lot of sugars put in them, sometimes between 20-25 grams worth which is far too much. Cereals like Special K have a much safer and healthier lever of sugar. Why is sugar and refined sugar so bad for you? The primary reason is that it increases inflammation in your body. Inflammation on your brain, organs, and joints is never good!
Protein At the bottom of the nutrition label, is protein. In this cereal, there are 2 grams of protein, which is not a lot but we do need to get our proteins any way we can. We can get them in animal products like meats or fish, and nuts or beans.
The Fine Print Below the list of ingredients, it lists all the vitamins and such that are found inside this particular cereal. The last thing that I always look at on a label is the list of ingredients. Here is the rule of thumb when looking at this list. The shorter the list of ingredients, the healthier the product will be. In the longer lists are your additives and dyes, hydrogenated products, and a lot of other things you don't want in your diet. You want a purely natural product. The next time you're at the grocery store, look at the labels of regular bread versus an organic loaf of bread. The regular loaf will have a lot more ingredients. You might find enriched wheat, which you don't want to eat, along with other additives that are bad for you. A lot of the time the stuff you can't pronounce in the ingredient list are the bad things you don't want to be eating. If you can't pronounce it, try not to eat it or buy products with these things inside them!

This is how I look at and read labels. You want to get into the habit of reading your labels and paying attention to what is inside the food you're eating. The front of your food products can say anything that makes you think it's a healthy product. But until you read those nutrition labels, you don't know for sure. So why does this all matter? Nutrition is one of the five factors of health, and so is chiropractic care. How does chiropractic care help with your nutrition? Your digestive organs are getting nerve supply from your spine. If this supply is being impeded in some way due to a subluxation or a bone out of alignment, then the nerve supply into that organ (your stomach, intestines, colon) won't be working as efficiently as possible. Your organs won't be extracting the maximum amount of nutrients from your food as it could be and it is just letting it pass through your system. Chiropractic care can help you get the most out of your nutrition, especially if you're eating healthy products. Chiropractic care will help your digestive system work as it's supposed to.

I hope that helps and I hope these little nuggets of information help you on your nutritional journey. If you feel like your nutrition is not where you'd like it, I would love to talk to you about it. Reach out to us and we will get you in to discuss the next best steps for you and your nutrition. Until then, I'm Dr. Bob and I've got your back covered. Take care!

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How Chiropractic Care Can Help Arthritis

1/2/2020

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One of the most common forms of pain, arthritis, haunts millions of Americans every year. Could chiropractic care be one of the best routes to avoid this pain and help alleviate the pain for those already suffering?
Hey everybody! Dr. Bob Salamon here at Lowcountry Chiropractic. For this blog, we are going to be discussing arthritis. Arthritis affects about 54 million Americans every year. We are going to be focusing on osteoarthritis, which is the most common type. There are many other types of arthritis like rheumatoid, ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic, and infectious arthritis, but not as many people suffer from these types of arthritis compared to the number of people who suffer from osteoarthritis.
Another common term for osteoarthritis is ‘degenerative joint disease’. This condition will get worse if you don't take care of it. It will slowly break down your joints. Which joints does this exactly affect? Almost any of them. It can affect your spinal bones, your knees, your ankles, your wrists, and your shoulder joints. Any of your body's articulation points can suffer from arthritis.
What is arthritis? Medical experts don't have a cause for it, but we will get to that shortly. At its base, arthritis is an inflammatory condition of the joints that can cause swelling, lack of range of motion, pain, and discomfort. Medications are one way to treat arthritis, but anti-inflammatory drugs just cover up the pain you're experiencing. Medications aren't addressing the issue or cause of your pain. Therefore you might not feel the pain as much when you use anti-inflammatories, but they can make the problem worse.
There are three steps you can take that can naturally help you treat and deal with the pain of arthritis without medications. They are simple, and ones that are worth taking the time to do. Let's talk about each of them.

Your Diet
- Nutrition impacts arthritis in a big way. You need to be eating foods with little or no refined sugars. We discussed this in our last blog when I mentioned "going green" and "refining your life". Sugars are inflammatory agents. They cause inflammation in your body. If you can eliminate processed foods like desserts, pasta, bread, and other foods that have refined sugars in them, you're going to start feeling so much better.
- You need to consider consuming less saturated fats, fried foods, and anything that has hydrogenated oils in them. These foods will affect arthritic conditions too. They are also inflammatory agents.
- Eating better means adding more fruits, vegetables, and nuts to your diet.
- You need to be drinking plenty of water. Water will help flush out some of the inflammation found in your joints.
Staying Active
- The next step in helping your arthritis is to exercise. Your joints need to be moving. If you have a doctor that tells you "Oh, your back is bothering you, go lay in bed for a week", that's NOT the answer. That is going to make things worse. Your body and the receptors in your body need movement. They need to stay moving to remain healthy.
Chiropractic Care
- The third step is to get chiropractic care. Why is chiropractic care helpful for arthritis? I'll give you a little analogy. If you're driving your car and your front end is out of alignment, what's going to happen when you're driving on the highway? If you take your hands off of the wheel, you're going to find that the car is going to pull to either the right or the left. If it pulls to the right, the tires, breaks, and everything on that side are going to wear down a lot more quickly than they are on the left side. The same is true in your body. If your joints are not moving symmetrically, the weak side will wear out more quickly, and your body will lay down extra calcium on the weak side, this creating spurring and inflammation. You need to keep both your car and body in alignment. If you don't, that tire or arthritic spot is going to continue to get worse.
- The same situation is found in chiropractic. Maybe you've had a fall, you had some trauma, and something got out of alignment. Your body will be fighting to restore homeostasis and symmetry, but it won't be able to. What it does then is put down that extra calcium to protect that weak area, thus causing more problems.
- What I do as a chiropractor is determine what areas of your body are out of alignment. I adjust or correct those areas and get the body working symmetrically again. Effective chiropractic care can stop arthritic degeneration. In some cases, it can even reverse it. It depends on the severity and age of the arthritic condition.

So, that's how nutrition, exercise, and chiropractic can help with arthritis. It is very important to do all of these steps. I tell all of my patients that you have to keep your spine aligned and keep your body symmetrical to keep that arthritis out of your body. If any of you are suffering from arthritis or think you might have it, it's not a death sentence. It can be managed and helped. You can see results with less pain and inflammation. Please, if you're suffering, contact us. We would love to have you come in and do a thorough exam and x-rays. Having an x-ray taken is the most cost effective way to know if you have any arthritis. If you have arthritic conditions, we will be able to help you!
That's it for today. I look forward to seeing you soon!

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New Years Resolutions You Can Stick To!

12/15/2019

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It's always so easy to start the New Year off on the right foot and make an amazing list of resolutions, but how long do you usually stick with them? Dr. Bob is here to give you some of the best resolutions that you can keep not only for the New Year but for the rest of your life!

Hey everybody! Dr. Bob Salamon here at Lowcountry Chiropractic. This blog is going to be all about health resolutions that you can make for the New Year. Quite honestly, these are things that you can do any time of the year. If you do these things, I guarantee you will get healthier and stay that way! Most of these tips and choices have to do with you and having the discipline to achieve this new level of health and wellness. Then there are one or two things that are my responsibility as your chiropractor. Let's get started!

Number One!
Go green! What do I mean by that? We all need to eat healthier. Delicious, green, leafy vegetables are a great place to start. To be honest, if you use the guide of "eating the colors of the rainbow", that's a wonderful place to start. Eat colorful things like oranges, apples, purple eggplants, and things like that. These are great foods for you! They are great phytonutrients, antioxidants, and they are very alkaline. This is very important because cancer cells hate alkaline environments. If you eat more alkaline foods you are going to defend yourself a lot better against cancer. Green, leafy vegetables and fruits are the way to go, and that's the trend to follow. Most people don't eat this way. Most people eat processed foods, red meats, fried foods, and pasta. I would encourage you to shift your focus into going green.

Number Two!
Refine your life. This is a big one: Refined sugar is in a ton of products found on supermarket shelves. These products are bad for you! Why? These products create inflammation in your body. Inflammation is a haven for opportunistic diseases. Inflammation is also the cause of most pain in the body, especially for arthritic conditions. Along the lines of eating and going green, you need to eliminate refined sugars. Refined sugars can be found in desserts, chips, pasta, bread, and other foods like that. If you shift over to eating green and avoid refined sugars, you'll refine your life!

Number Three!
Don't be a couch potato! We need to exercise and a lot of people don't. They just go about their daily lives without giving time to exercise and activity. Why is exercise so important? There are a couple of key reasons.

If you have toned muscles, they burn more calories! At rest, a person who works out is going to burn more calories compared to someone who doesn't.
It's great for your cardiovascular health.
It's great for sleeping. The more you exercise, the better you'll sleep.
It is great for focus and getting efficient at what you do.

What kinds of exercises do you need to do? I like a variety of activities. I do things that offer a multitude of variety like Crossfit, running, biking, and things like that. The goal is to confuse your body so that it doesn't get lazy. If you do the same type of workout all the time, your body gets lazy and you're not going to get much out of the workout. If you vary your workout and mix it up with cross-training, you will get the best results. Try this and make sure you're doing at least 20 to 30 minutes of sustained activity at least three times a week, if not more!

Number Four!
Don't worry, be happy! This has to do with our mental attitude. Having a positive mental attitude will go a long way towards you staying healthy because it reduces stress. 99% of the things we worry about in life we don't need to worry about because a) these things won't actually happen or b) if they do happen, they turn out to be not as bad as we thought they were going to be! Find ways to have joy in your life, laugh a lot, smile a lot, help a lot of people, do good work for people, and be happy. You will find that you will be a much healthier person!

Number Five!
Rest and relax. Most of us don't get enough sleep at night. Sleep is so crucial to our health because when we sleep, we go through a rapid eye period of sleep. This is the only time that our body has time to repair and regenerate our protein bridges, muscles, organs, and the covering of our organs, and everything in our body. Our bodies need this break so it can heal. If we're not getting our 7 to 8 hours of sleep at night, slowly bit by bit our bodies get broken down. What happens then? We get sick more often, we get more tired, we lose focus, we lose energy, and lose our health very quickly. I challenge you to try to get that extra half hour to hour of sleep at night. I challenge you to do this for a week and you will see how much better you'll feel at the end of that week. That alone will be a great incentive to keep going.

Number Six!
Get connected. What does this mean? Go see your chiropractor. The chiropractor is the only person who is specifically trained to relieve nerve interference in your body. We are the only ones who are trained to adjust vertebrae that have misaligned and are irritating nerves and causing your health to suffer. All the systems of your body are controlled by the nervous system. This includes the immune, endocrine, respiratory, reproductive, and digestive systems, among others. All of these systems are dependent upon a good nerve supply. This is because the brain sends all the messages down your spine, through the nerves, to all of your body parts. Those nerves then take all those messages back to the brain. If those messages aren't getting communicated to your body, your functions are going to suffer and you will break down. Chiropractic care will ensure that the flow of information is happening over those lines of communication, thus allowing your body to get and stay optimally healthy.

Those are my six top New Years' resolutions and all year round resolutions to help you optimize your health. Go green, refine your life, don't be a couch potato, don't worry, be happy, rest and relax, and get connected. I hope this helps. If you do these things well, I guarantee you're going to be healthier in the future and more healthy than you are right now.

Again this is Dr. Bob and I hope to see you next time and in the new year. From my family and everyone at Lowcountry Chiropractic, happy holidays!

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Reading Between The Lines

How Chiropractic Care Can Help Arthritis

New Years Resolutions You Can Stick To!

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