Got Breast Cancer?

I’ve been a proponent of drinking other substances than milk for a LONG time!  People still think that this idea is crazy, but I’m sticking to it.  Check out this ARTICLE from The Huffington Post on the female children in China growing breasts after being introduced to cow’s milk and other dangers.

“The U.S. dairy industry assures us that this is not a problem. But there is a very real problem, and its name is Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1). Monsanto’s own studies, as well as those of Eli Lilly & Co., have found a 10-fold increase in IGF-1 levels in the milk of cows who have been injected with bovine growth hormone (BGH).
Why is that a problem? A report by the European Commission’s authoritative international 16-member scientific committee not only confirmed that excessive levels of IGF-1 are always found in the milk of cows injected with BGH. It also concluded that excess levels of IGF-1 pose serious risks of breast, colon and prostate cancer.
How serious is the increased risk? According to an article in the May 9, 1998 issue of the medical journal The Lancet, women with even a relatively small increase in blood levels of IGF-1 are up to seven times more likely to develop breast cancer than women with lower levels.”

7 times more likely to develop breast cancer…hmmm….that might be something to think about before pouring your next glass.

The Paleo Pyramid

I wanted to share this article from the New York Times not only as someone who personally subscribes to a low carb diet (while training 7-9 times per week), but also as a coach that has witnessed firsthand the positive effects of eating in this fashion on both bodyweight and more importantly, on performance.   

This article raises a lot of great questions that many of us have been asking for years.  If “fat” is what is making Americans fat, than how come with so many “low fat” options in our foods, the collective American waist line keeps growing? 

“These researchers point out that there are plenty of reasons to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now effectively failed the test of time. In particular, that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980’s, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma. (Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, also rose significantly through this period.) They say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected. ”That is very disconcerting,” Willett says. ”It suggests that something else bad is happening.”

Enjoy the rest of the Article.  Have questions?  Post them to the comments section and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Master herbalist Cormac Ferguson

Never stop learning.  Two weeks ago I begrudgingly walked back into Yo-San University, my Traditional Chinese Medicine Alma Mater for a CEU class on herbal remedies for musculoskeletal injuries.  I say begrudgingly because after 4 straight years of sitting in a classroom in that building, I’ve still had enough!

That beings said, as soon as my instructor, the great Cormac Ferguson began lecturing I became filled with energy.  My bread and butter is treating pain and injuries, I see them every day.  I would actually be bold enough to call myself an “expert” in the area of orthopedic injuries and pain.  However, I now recall the words of many wise teachers who had said that the real learning doesn’t begin until school is finished! 

Being a student is a gift that we should all look forward to and an opportunity not to be missed.  So whatever your subject is, whatever your area of “expertise” may be in, stay educated.  Take classes, take CEU courses, seek out other experts in your field and learn from them.  Once we stop learning we become stagnant and our skillset begins to decline.

Thank you Cormac Ferguson for turning a day in the classroom into a magnificent experience.

I just finished reading the book “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Hansson and highly recommend it for those of you with your own businesses or to those of you that are thinking about starting your own business.  One of the chapters that caught my eye was the following:

Inspiration is Perishable

“We all have ideas.  Ideas are immortal.  They last forever.  What doesn’t last forever is inspiration.  Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk:  It has an expiration date.

If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now.  You can’t put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it.  You can’t just say you’ll do it later.  Later, you won’t be pumped up about it anymore.

If you’re inspired on a Friday, swear off the weekend and dive into the project.  When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work done in twenty-four hours.  Inspiration is a time machine in that way.

Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator.  But it won’t wait for you.  Inspiration is a now thing.  If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work.”

What does this have to do directly with dropping your blood pressure or cholesterol numbers you ask?  Probably not a damn thing.  What it does have to do with however, is your overall happiness as a human being and coincidentally what we’re far more interested in here at WPC than simply your lab scores is – your life, fully expressed. 

It is my firm belief that more you live your life in a fully expressed fashion, the happier you will be and the happier you are, the healthier you are.  The healthier you are – physically, emotionally and any other way – the lower your blood pressure will be and the lower your cholesterol will be. 

How could this possibly be true – you ask?  Well, to be honest, I care very little about the biochemistry and physiological aspects of self-actualization and happiness.  Leave that to people who wear lab coats all day and drink Mountain Dew.  That being said, when you are under stress (if you’re not feeling stressed, please watch 20 minutes of CNN just for the experience) your body releases cortisol, growth hormone and norephinephrine into your blood stream.  Cortisol is believed to affect the metabolic system and norepinephrine is believed to play a role in ADHD as well as depression and hypertension.  Flooding your body with these hormones all day long is a surefire way to end up overweight, sick, with attention deficit and high blood pressure!

What’s the best way to remove stress from your body?  Do what you love, all day long.  (If you’re going to argue that you “can’t” do what you love, stay tuned for the next post)

So if something inspires you, run with it.  Run as far and fast as you can and then welcome into your life the peace that seems to have eluded you in your cubicle – and the health that magically comes with it.

I’m fortunate enough to be in Osaka Japan at the moment and being here has inspired this next post.  For those of you that have not had the opportunity to visit this country, I highly encourage coming here and exploring for a bit.  This morning, with a touch of jetlag, I got up with the sun and decided to go for a run through the streets as a way of getting back in touch with the sounds, smells and sights of Japan.  My legs spent 12 hours on an airplane yesterday and were begging to be used so I figured I could kill two birds with one stone -  working out while taking in the lay of the land around the hotel from which I’ll be working for the next few days.

While running, I was pleasantly re-surprised at just how immaculately clean the streets are here.  With the exception of the occasional cigarette butt (90% of the males smoke here, yet there is far less cigarette trash here than in NYC and LA…go figure), there is literally no garbage here on the streets – no Big Mac wrappers, no beer bottles, nothing at all.  How is this and more importantly you ask, what does this have to do with wellness?  Great question, here we go.

When I was ten years old and on the verge of moving to Tokyo with my family, my dad took me aside and told me that when we got to Japan he wanted me to take a good look around and watch the people.  He said, “If you see someone sweeping the street watch them.  Their goal is to be the best street sweeper that they can be.  They take pride in their jobs, no matter what that job is and they take personal responsibility for the work that they do.”  Now at the age of 10, I thought that is was not nearly as interesting as  my Hot Wheels, however as an adult, and especially as a health practitioner I realize that what he told me was of profound importance.

“They take personal responsibility for the work that they do.” – what a statement!  Can you imagine a country as great as ours, only with everyone in it taking personal responsibility for their health?  Can you imagine a more empowered group of people than health conscious Americans?!  I cannot and you should not. 

Vow today to take complete responsibility for your health and wellness.  Take pride when you go six months or a year without a cold. Feel pride when you look into your medicine cabinet and don’t find anything that hasn’t been extracted from nature.  Take pride in your weight, your body composition, your diet, your exercise routine, your spiritual life and your relationships.  Take tremendous pride when your health is good and be equally as responsible when it is not.  Are you getting frequent colds?  How come?  Is your weight not where it should be?  What actual steps have you taken to change it – have you begun a workout program or altered your eating habits?  Is your mind cluttered?  Are you meditating? If the answer is no, then why not?   

Your health is most important asset, more important than money, success, and all things material as without it you can enjoy none of the things that you ignore it in order to acquire.  We’re all going to end up in the same place folks, how smooth the ride is and what shape we show up in is entirely up to us.  Entirely.  Vow today, right this very moment to take complete and total responsibility for your health and wellness.

Thank you to everyone that came last Thursday night to Wellness Night at Alki!

What is the fastest way to mastery?  Be it a physical skill such as playing the piano or learning to surf, the fastest way to get from where you are to where you want to be is through the use of a coach.  What happens to a group of children that shows up for their first Little League practice?  Are they left to their own devices to figure the rules of the game out, let alone the nuances of being a great pitcher, catcher or hitter?  It would most likely end up in disorganized chaos if that were the case.
Why is it then as adults, we’ll decide on mastering an area of our lives, be it finances, health, or running and forge out on our own?  My old boss Gavin de Becker used to say that he suffered from “expert-itis” meaning that because he was an expert in one area he had to remind himself that that didn’t immediately carry over and turn him into an expert in every other area!  Personally I have been “learning to play the guitar” for years on my own.  How good of a guitar player am I?  Let’s just say that every time that I take my guitar out, I have to blow the dust off of it and my neighbors quickly shut their windows.  I am an awful guitar player and have yet to listen to my own best advice in this area.
Some of the best advice I have ever been given is to find people that play at what you consider to be work.  If you want to become a better guitar player, find someone that loves to play the guitar.  If you want better health, find someone that stays up late thinking about nothing more than wellness.  If your finances aren’t what you want them to be, get yourself a financial coach. 
A coach will not only keep you motivated, provide accountability to you but will also use the lifetime of experience that they’ve gathered and apply it to you and your particular situation.  I have personally been a client of Joy Pecchia (www.joypecchia.com) for a number of years now.
When I started with Joy, my life was very chaotic.  I had a loose idea of what I wanted to do with my time and energy but kept running into the same situation – I’d get only so far on my own and then fail to see things all the way through because a new and more exciting idea would pop into my head.  Through working with Joy I was able to hone in on what I really wanted to do with my time and energy and was able to focus only on the most important aspect of creating exactly what it was that I was after.  Allowing the ideas that didn’t support my end vision to fall by the wayside freed up a lot of mental space giving me more energy to fulfill my goal.
If your health is not up to the level that you want it to be at, find yourself a Wellness Coach.  Be it one from WPC or another company, a Wellness Coach will get you on track and most importantly keep you on track!  There are people out there (and everyone of my coaches is like this) that eat, sleep and drink health and wellness – all day long.  Take control of your health and the world is your oyster, let it fall and the world owns you.

Healthy deliciousness!

Here’s another great recipe from the lovely ladies of Sweet Cheeks HQ!! Thank you to Alyssa and Shirley for keeping us supplied with quick, healthy and delicious ways to eat. Please click on the logo on the right to check out Sweet Cheeks HQ for more!

Rosemary trout with spinach

12 ounces of spinach
1 1/2 pounds trout, head and tail removed, cut in half with skin still on ( I found this trout in Trader Joes)
2 tablespoon olive oil
3 2-inch pieces of fresh rosemary
1 teaspoon crushed garlic
2 tablespoons slivered almonds
2 tbsp raisins
2 fresh lemons
Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
Place tin foil on a cooking sheet. Place trout skin side down on foil. Drizzle trout with 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil and season to taste with sea salt and pepper. Place the rosemary on one half of the trout and put the other piece on top with the skin side facing out. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes until the trout is flaky.

While the fish cooks, heat 1 1/2 tablespoon olive oil over medium low heat in a large skillet. Add garlic and then half the spinach. Add almonds and raisins and gently mix everything. Continue to mix while the spinach cooks until it is wilted. Add the remaining spinach and mix and cook until this is wilted too. Season to taste with sea salt and pepper.

Open up the cooked trout and discard the rosemary. Cut the lemons in half and squeeze the juice out over the fish. Serve with the spinach on the side.

Enjoy!

Save the date folks!  Next Thursday, April 22nd I am pleased to be joining Marc and Karen Grandle for a night of refreshments and good ole fashion Wellness discussion.  Marc and Karen will be sharing their insights on Chiropractic and Myotherapy with regards to day-to-day health and I will be speaking on the relationship between the 5- Elements and health.
Fire, Earth, Metal, Water and Wood make up the 5 – Elements and their relationship with each other in our daily lives is immeasurable.  Would you like to better understand your spouse, your co-worker and of course,  your own health?  This talk will serve as an opener to the deep interweaving of all of the elements in our daily lives with regard to our innate personalities, human relationships as well as the health opportunities and challenges that each element brings with it.
The night starts at 6:30 and will go for about an hour.  Healthy foods and good people will be in abundance.  See you all there!

Here’s an interest video via CNN on some of the trouble that Americans are having with prescription pills.  The prescribing and dispensing of narcotics legally is a multi billion dollar per year business yet we hear very little about the addictive properties of these drugs.  We hear almost nothing of the lives that get ruined, the families that get torn apart, etc. 

Fortunately for us though here in America, we have the War on Drugs going strong and what a war it is! 

Prescription drugs are the second most commonly abused category of drugs, behind marijuana and AHEAD of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs. The National Institutes of Health estimates that nearly 20 percent of people in the United States have used prescription drugs for non-medical reasons. 

In 2000, about 43 percent of hospital emergency admissions for drug overdoses (nearly 500,000 people) happened because of misused prescription drugs. This type of drug abuse is increasing partially because of the availability of drugs, including online pharmacies that make it easier to get the drugs without a prescription, even for minors.

Hospital stays from an unintentional overdose of opioids (such as Vicodin and Percocet) and sedatives (such as Valium and Ativan) jumped 37 percent between 1999 and 2006, a study by the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found. Intentional overdoses of these drugs skyrocketed by 130 percent in that time.

“The biggest and fastest-growing part of America’s drug problem is prescription drug abuse,” says Robert DuPont, a former White House drug czar and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “The statistics are unmistakable.” 

About 120,000 Americans a year go to the emergency room after overdosing on opioid painkillers, says Laxmaiah Manchikanti, chief executive officer and board chairman for the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians. 

So here we have drugs that are abused more often than cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines yet they can be obtained by simply stating that you have back pain.  That is all.  No tests, no oversight, no background check into doctor shopping, not even a simple check to a neighboring pharmacy to see if this prescription has been picked up already. 

My question is where are the taskforces?  Where are the men in black kicking in doors of doctor’s offices with guns blazing?  Where is the outrage?  If 120,000 people had to go to the emergency room per year after Chiropractic visits, would the public be as calm, cool and collected over the state of Chiropractic?  I highly doubt it.  If 120,000 people overdosed on a Traditional Chinese Herb, would it still be on the market?  Ephedrine and the outcry over a dead baseball player gave us the answer to that question (fortunately the pharmaceutical equivalent, psuedoephedrine, is still readily available). 

The point of this post is again not only to point out the highly addictive properties of pain killers and the fact that there is real damage being done to real people by their prescription.  The point is to ask the question, “Why are we allowing this to happen?”

While pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars selling these products, where is their investment in treatment centers for the people that become addicted to them?  Where is the responsibility that we so often enforce on companies in areas outside of the health arena?  Should Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, one of the most addictive pharmaceuticals on the planet be held in some form responsible for the product that it makes?  Or does the company’s responsibility end once the consumer is addicted?

Or do we simply blame the addict?  Does the responsibility lie with the user of the product to make sure that they don’t become addicted?  Do tell.