February is Heart Health Month. How healthy do you think your heart and cardiovascular system is? Every 7 minutes in Canada, someone dies from heart disease or stroke (Statistics Canada, 2011c). Heart disease and stroke are two of the three leading causes of death in Canada. These statistics are based on 2008 data.

In 2008 cardiovascular disease accounted for (Statistics Canada, 2011c):

• 29% of all deaths in Canada (69,703 deaths – or more than 69,500)
• 28% of all male deaths
• 29.7% of all female deaths

In 2008, of all cardiovascular deaths (Statistics Canada, 2011c):

• 54% were due to ischemic heart disease
• 20% to stroke
• 23% to heart attack
  

How Can I Tell Someone Is Having a Heart Attack?
Common Symptoms

• Pain in the chest/ arm, often the left arm. For women, a more common symptom is jaw/neck pain.
• Stomach pain, can feel similar to heartburn
• Shortness of breath
• Anxiety. Some people actually describe feeling ‘an impending sense of doom’.
• Lightheadedness
• Sweating
• Nausea and vomiting
  

Decreasing Overall Risk Factors:

-       Obesity
-       Diabetes
-       High cholesterol
-       High blood pressure

Healing Plants:
- Hawthorn
- Motherwort
- Garlic

Diet and Supplementation:
- Magneisum
- CoQ10
- Carnitine

Lifestyle Factors:
-       Helping you mitigate the stress in your life
-       Gaining control of other contributing risk factors (eg. insomnia)
-       Identifying the right kind of exercise options for you

Is that when you drink something really gross tasting or don’t eat x,y,z for 7, 10, or 30 days? A Detox program or diet is some sort of activity or way of eating that requires you to do something in order to ‘detox’. However, at it’s very basic level detox simply means detoxification, and your body does it all on its own everyday without any assistance from you in an active way.

We are living in a Toxic world
We are exposed to all kinds of toxins every day of our lives. From the moment we are conceived, we are exposed to toxins through our mother.  At present, there are over 80,000 chemicals registered by the Environmental Protection Agency.  3,800 are ‘high-use’ chemicals and less than ½ have been assessed for toxic effects in humans.  Less than 9% of these chemicals have been assessed for toxic effects on children.

Your Personal ‘Bucket Load’
 
To better understand what toxicity looks like in the body, the analogy I like to use is a bucket.
 
Personal toxicity = ‘bucket load’
 
We all have different buckets, some are short and fill very quickly, or have a spout that doesn’t drain effectively, or perhaps an average size bucket with a decently emptying spout. However your bucket functions, determines how quickly it will fill (accumulate toxins) or empty (eliminate toxins). Unfortunately, those of us with shorter buckets/poorly draining spouts are more likely to build up toxins quickly and/or not eliminate them quickly enough to avoid symptoms of toxicity.

I know what you’re thinking. You know how I know what you’re thinking? It’s because I’m thinking the same thing, or should I say I have in the past. You’re thinking it’s almost the holidays, the New Year is around the corner, I’ll start doing ‘x’ then. X can be anything. The changes to your diet you’ve been thinking about but never actually tried, the exercise you keep telling yourself you’ll get to one day, getting your hormones on track and quitting smoking once and for all. Trust me, I’ve pretty well heard it all.

For example, if your goal has been to work out or get more active and you’ve gotten into exercising a few times but then fallen off track time and time again, then simply start with walking more. That can be anything small like parking at the back of the lot so you have further to walk to get into the store, or taking the stairs at work instead of the elevator, or even walking up and down the stairs at home for a minute or two. Anything that doesn’t really require you to do too much thinking.

Let’s look at the same person in a different way. Let’s call this person Andy. Andy wants to get in better shape, and decided to make this his new years resolution. He’s going to wait for the good deals to get a membership in January for the gym, but he wants to do something to get started now. He used to be pretty active in his teens and twenties, but has been more sedentary since he got a desk job, got married and started a family. At work he has about 3-4 flights of stairs to his office, but he usually takes the elevator. He notices that Bob, a close friend and colleague usually takes the stairs. Andy thinks, well I can certainly take the stairs if Bob can, he’s a good 10 years older than me. Andy starts walking the stairs to and from his office.

He’s feeling pretty good, and happens to be talking to Sally one day about his stair climbing and she mentions how she does the same thing by parking at the back of the lot so she has a longer walk to the building. Andy starts thinking, ‘hey I could do that’, so he starts parking at the end of the lot to walk to the building and up the stairs. At first it’s a bit of challenge adding it to the stairs, but again in about a week he’s feeling good and another week or so and he’s not even noticing the difference.
Can you see where I am going with this? Success breads success. When we have small wins or successes, then it spurs us on to find new success. We are a reward driven type of people, and the more often we can reinforce ourselves with positive results or success then the more likely we are to continue with that behavior. Therefore, giving yourself small steps that you can feel good about in a short amount of time encourages you to look around and say what else can I do, instead of being defeated before you even start.

Do you feel that in order to have a 'good diet' or 'eat well' that it requires a lot of sacrifice and hard work on your part? Well, I won't lie to you and tell you that it doesn't require any work, but I will tell you some simply changes you can make to increase your nutritious eating without becoming a gourmet chef!

Many of my patients will tell me something along these lines: "I eat pretty well most of the time, except for the weekends" or "I try to eat healthy, but I am so busy I just don't have time to cook". There are plenty of variations on that that I hear on a regular basis, but let's call them what they are, EXCUSES! Now believe me I get it, at different times in my own life I have been the queen of excuses for eating less than healthy. However if you continue to make excuses for yourself, instead of changes to your lifestyle, you won't like the outcome 10-20 years down the road.

Tip #1 Eat A Healthy Breakfast
Remember how many times you've heard it said that breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Well it really is. I have seen in my practice, and again the research supports it, when we eat a healthy breakfast we are more likely to feel full and satisfied, make better food choices throughout the day, and we start our metabolism and blood sugar levels off right. If you're the type of person who really likes to have a bowl of cereal with milk for breakfast or skip breakfast altogether just start by adding some protein or healthy fat into your meal. Some great choices are: eggs, avocado, cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese, nuts and seeds, nut butter, and lean meats. Smoothies are also a great way to pack in lots of nutrition, which are quick and easy to make as well as portable for the one the go individual! 

Tip # 2 Prepare meals ahead of time
Have a meal or two prepared ahead of when you need it is a great way to avoid making poor food choices and eating take out food too often. There are lots of ways to do this. Utilize your slow cooker (or get one if you don't have one yet), there are so many recipes out there in books and online for making great slow cooked meals. Many you can even prep the night before then just dump in the pot before you leave in the morning for work, then you can come home to nice warm meal already prepared for you. Another strategy is to cook 1-2 meals that make lots of portions on the weekend. My current favourite is frittatas. I will make a batch or two on Saturday or Sunday afternoon and maybe another meal and there's breakfast/snacks for the week done. Often you can also make things and freeze them in anticipation of a day you don't feel like cooking, or don't have time to cook. Trust me, cooking is not my favourite activity to do, but by batch cooking I only need to 'cook' 2-3 times a week and I'm well set for eating well all week.

Tip #3 Source your food well
Where our food comes from and how it's prepared makes a big difference for our health. Unfortunately, the ways we changed farming and growing food in the last several decades has left us with food products that are severely depleted of nutrients. Whereas our grandparents and great grandparents were able to eat plenty of nutritious foods and get their daily vitamins and minerals without the help of supplements, and eating organic, we do.  One step we can take is to buy organic when possible. I understand that many of us cannot afford to eat organic all the time, I don't buy 100% organic everything either. However, by using things like the Clean 15 and Dirty Dozen List put out by the Environmental Working Group each year we can eat organic when it really matters and significantly decrease our exposure to pesticides.  This year's update of EWG's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce™ reports that USDA tests found a total 146 different pesticides on thousands of fruit and vegetable samples examined in 2014. Another great thing to do is source your food from farmer's markets or directly from farmers that you trust. You can often get good deals on buying bulk from the farmers and then you're buying local as well!

Trick or treat! Give me something sugary to eat!
 
Halloween is just around the corner, which means the annual influx of extra treats into the house that are laden with sugar! Now I am not saying we need to do away with sugar altogether. In fact, if we had no sugar at all we would have some serious problems on our hands. However, we aren’t lacking sugar, we are drowning in it.

The rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and various other serious health problems are on the rise. Stats Canada has estimated about two thirds of Canadian adults and one third of children are overweight or obese.  A major contributor to these health issues is poor eating habits, especially excess sugar. To further compound the problem, even when people are trying to make healthy choices it isn’t easy to do so. Presently, there are 56 different names for sugar, and manufacturers are not required to group them together on nutrition labels.

This is fine when we have a good balance of fuel coming in, but what happens if there’s too much?  When we have too much sugar in our blood, it needs to be stored away for when it’s needed, so the body converts the sugar into glycogen. However, like any storage unit we can only put so much away.  So what happens with the excess that doesn’t fit? This is where problems can start. An important hormone that helps keep sugar in balance is insulin. Whenever sugar is detected by specialized cells in the pancreas, insulin is released. Think of insulin like a key to a door, in order for sugar to enter into most cells they need the key (insulin) to unlock the front door and let them in. Insulin is vital to making sure that we do not become hyperglycemic (too much sugar) or hypoglycemic (too low sugar).  Conditions like Type II diabetes result from the cells becoming insensitive to insulin. Think of a toddler who keeps asking for the same thing over and over again, eventually you get tired of hearing them so you start to tune them out or stop responding to them altogether. Diabetes is probably the most well known to be affected by blood sugar levels, but it’s not the only one. Other conditions that are affected by blood glucose levels include: PCOS, ADD/ADHD, Autism, certain cancers, and so on. We don’t have time to go into all these conditions today, the point I want to make by mentioning them is that the correct balance of blood sugar is very important to our overall health and influencing various health conditions.

Exercise
Two, is exercise! We’ve all heard time and time again how important exercise is for our health and this is no exception. Even a short 20-30 min moderate pace walk most days of the week can make a big difference. For many other reasons, it’s good to balance out cardio and resistance training accordingly, but I want to just touch on why walking is enough to do a lot of good. There are receptors in our muscles call Glut 4 receptors and they are seriously hungry for sugars. Think of turning on the vacuum, and how that powerful vortex just sucks up all the dirt in site in no time, but if it’s switched off and in the corner it’s doing you no good. When Glut 4 receptors are activated, they suck up sugars much like the vacuum, but only when activated. The quads, these big muscles on the front of your legs, house a lot of Glut 4 receptors. Research shows even just 30 secs of squats will significantly activate Glut 4 receptors in the quads and can drop glucose levels by almost a full point on the glucose monitor.

Stress Less!
Finally, get your stress under control as best as you can. As many of us know, too much stress isn’t good for our health, and stress is very integral to blood sugar levels. If we have heightened stress, then our body is preparing for fight or flight mode. If you decided to run, you’re going to need fuel on the ready to help you run away from that threat. That’s fine if we were still running away from saber-tooth tiger, or a tiger in general, but the problem is most situations that cause us stress these days, we can’t simply run away from. Use meditation, use exercise, use whatever strategies necessary to moderate your stress, because all that free sugar floating around in your bloodstream not being used is going to eventually lead to problems.