3 important nutrients to help fight inflammation

Sarah is 35, lives in Northern Ontario, and has come to see me for a nagging persistent back pain.  She has tried physiotherapy in her hometown but without much relief. She also lists on her her intake that she is troubled by fatigue, insomnia and irritable bowel syndrome. When I palpate and test her muscles they tight or hypo-tonic which, in my experience,  is a sign of low grade inflammation in her body.

Inflammation in our bodies is a normal response of our body's immune system. For example, if you sprain your ankle it will often become swollen. In this case, the swelling is caused by your immune system sending molecules to the area to begin repairs. Once their job is done the molecules leave and the inflammation subsides, a sign that your immune system is behaving properly. On the flip side, as in Sarah's case, where there is general body inflammation which has been there for a while, is a sign that her immune system is behaving badly or dysregulated.

If your immune system is behaving badly it often a sign that it has been overworked. If you imagine that your immune system is an army who's main job is to defend your body. When it comes under attack the immune soldiers respond, deal with the threat and then go back to their barracks. If however the attack is more like a siege where your immune soldiers are having to defend your body over a prolonged period at some point they are going to become disheartened, fatigued and less likely to follow orders.

In today's polluted world, this situation is very much the norm with our bodies having to deal with any number of invading hostile elements in our food we eat, the water we drink and wash in, and in the air we breath.

It is no wonder our immune system gets overwhelmed!

In any siege, the defenders are protected behind walls which in our bodies case is our skin, the lining of our intestinal tract and lungs. Like the defending soldiers, after sustained attack these protective barriers will become weakened and holes will appear through which the attackers can enter. In our bodies the intestinal lining can become weakened, among many things, by medication such as antibiotics or birth control, and eating gluten. In medical terms this weakening of your intestines is called intestinal permeability or leaky gut.

Just by hearing Sarah's symptoms I can see that her barriers have been breached, a battle is raging inside her body and her defending immune system is starting to behave badly.

When a your immune system behaves badly 3 negative things begin to happen. 

1. The defenders become over zealous and fire continuously.
2. The defenders begin to see anything that comes into the body as hostile - how multiple food sensitivities develop.
3. The defenders begin to see parts of your body as potential threats and begin attacking them - how autoimmune diseases begin.

To help her out of control and overwhelmed immune system Sarah needs to step in and help out. she can do this by:

1. Identifying and limiting the number of hostile invaders her body has to deal with.
2. Stop weakening her barriers and find ways to rebuild them.
3. Ensure that her immune system is strong enough to sustain some form of siege without losing the plot.

To strengthen her immune system and make it less likely to go rogue, the body needs to have sufficient supplies of three essential nutrients:

1. Vitamin D
2. EPA and DHA from Fish Oils
3. Glutathione

Ensuring her body has access to foods high in these nutrients and or taking supplements where her supplies are very low will be crucial if she is to keep her immune system in order. 

Finally

I hope you found this information useful. More importantly, I hope you do something with it.
 
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

I don't have a problem with my digestion

Just because you don't have any obvious digestive symptoms does not mean digestion is a ok.

One startling statistic that highlights this point, is that 1 in 8 people who are diagnosed with Celiac disease do not have any digestive symptoms. In my practice I would also apply this to people who are non-celiac gluten sensitive. These people just like the celiacs can have a plethora of non-digestive symptoms such as:

• Anxiety
• Asthma
• Autoimmune Disease
• Brain Fog
• Canker Sores
• Cold Intolerance
• Depression
• Dry Skin
• Joint Pain
• Menstrual problems
• Neck and Back Pain
• Tiredness

However despite the lack their lack of digestive symptoms I know that gluten is giving their digestive tract all number of issues including:

• Intestinal Permeability or Leaky Gut
• Intestinal Dysbiosis or Bacterial Imbalance
• Poor nutritional absorption

And it does not stop there..

You may not be aware that upto 85% of your immune system can be found in your small intestine. If that is the case then if you have any problem with your health then there is a very high probability that your digestion is in trouble.

And is not only gluten that is giving your digestion the run around...

There are many other factors that can be effecting your digestion including:

• Chlorine
• Foods which cross react with gluten
• Genetically modified Foods
• Molds
• Pesticides
• Prescription medication

All these factors could be silently damaging your gut and immune system.

Finally

I hope you found these ideas useful. More importantly, I hope you do something with them.

Learn everything you need to know about preventing and reversing autoimmune disease

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• Jeffrey Smith, GMOs and Their Role in Leaky Gut, Inflammation, and Autoimmunity
• Sarah Ballantyne, PhD, The Problem with Grains and Legumes in Those with Autoimmunity
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Muscle pain - An early sign of Autoimmune Disease?

Do you have constant or intermittent episodes of chronic pain?

Do you need regular visits to your local osteopath, chiropractor, physio or massage therapist to help keep these pains at a manageable level?

If the answer is yes, then you could possibly have the early signs of autoimmune disease.

An autoimmune disease occurs when your body's immune system has destroyed part of itself. A familiar autoimmune disease is  Rheumatoid Arthritis, where where your immune system destroys the lining of your joints. Another example is Hashimoto's Disease where your thyroid gland is destroyed.

I recently wrote a blog titled "Shoulder pain, your thyroid and soya". After reading this article, a friend of mine in the UK commented to me on Facebook that he had been diagnosed with Hashimoto's and was now on medication. Previous to the diagnosis he had suffered from a recurrent shoulder problem for many years which since he has been treated for his thyroid has disappeared.

There are three main factors that lead to the development of an autoimmune disease:

1. Genetic predisposition - whether your family suffered from an autoimmune disease.
2. Triggers - food sensitivities, heavy metals, chemical toxins.
3. Intestinal Permeability - "A leaky gut".

One of the main food sensitivity triggers for autoimmune disease is wheat gluten or gliadin. The second most common autoimmune disease triggered by gluten is Hashimotos disease.

The concept of helping peoples chronic pain issues by taking them off gluten or gluten cross reactive foods, such as soya, is not unfamiliar to me. I have helped hundreds of people this way but have not really understood the true mechanism.

As a guide in my diagnosis of clients I use Applied Kinesiology or muscle function testing. With AK I can detect weaknesses in individual muscle groups. I also use it to test for food sensitivities. In AK each muscle in the body is linked to a specific gland or organ. I can therefore test how the muscle for the thyroid which is the Teres Minor and see if it weakens when the person is in contact with a particular food or any other trigger such as gluten. This is just a guide for me that this person needs further lab investigations for the foods I find that weaken that muscle.

Studies have shown that antibodies for autoimmune diseases can be found in the blood 9 years before the person starts exhibits signs and symptoms of the disease. Up until that point it can the person could be happily unaware that anything was happening in their body that was sinister. Chronic persistent muscle problems could be your bodies early warning system like the red light on your dashboard.

There are tests available through Cyrex Labs which can tell you whether you have these autoimmune antibodies in your system.

There are of course many many other mechanisms that could be causing muscle pain but this makes sense to me. I welcome any questions or comments.

Shoulder pain, your Thyroid and Soya

The food we eat has an enormous effect on our bodies. I see this in virtually every patient that walks into my office. I have recently been treating two clients for chronic shoulder pain. Shoulder problems are, speaking from my own experience, notoriously difficult to treat. The same was true for these two clients. In both cases, their pain had started without any particular reason. Treating them using massage and osteopathic manipulation had seen only minor improvements.

There had to be a deeper root cause.

When problems don't respond to physical treatment then if I am looking deeper the first place I look is the persons diet. There are certain foods that I know from experience have caused clients issues in the past. On questioning both these clients both were eating large amounts of soya. The man was having soya based protein powder shakes every morning and the woman had been consuming soya milk as she was intolerant to cows milk.

There is a lot of misinformation about the health benefits of soya.

The main benefit is that it has a positive effect on the incidence of breast cancer in the far east. It is true that there is less breast cancer in far eastern countries like Japan where they eat large amounts of soya, but they eat soya sauce. This is totally different in nature to the highly processed products that we see in the western world which is made primarily from highly toxic genetically modified soya beans.

So how is soya bad?

Soy contains a number of substances that are harmful to your body and in particular the thyroid. The thyroid is the gland found in the base of your neck that controls the rate at which you burn food. One of these substances is soya gluten which is similar in structure to the gluten we find in wheat. Wheat gluten has been shown in research to be linked to the thyroid autoimmune disease, Hashimoto's. This disease occurs when your body mistakes the proteins in your thyroid for the gluten protein and attacks it. Because soy gluten is similar in structure to wheat gluten so the same problem can arise if you eat too much soya.

With your thyroid under attack so this obviously has a negative effect on how well it works.

The medical term for a reduction in the function of your thyroid is hypothyroidism. The typical symptoms for someone with an under active thyroid include fatigue, weight gain, sensitivity to cold, numbness in the fingers, constipation, depression and muscle and aches and pains. Not all these symptoms need to present but the last one on the list is the most relevant for my two clients.

The exact mechanism as to why a person's shoulder should be effected can not be explained using western science.

However there is a connection when you look at at it from the practice of Chinese Acupuncture and Applied Kinesiology which connects different organs and glands to particular muscles. Your thyroid is associated to the Teres Minor muscle in your shoulder. So when the function of thyroid is reduced to this effects the strength of the muscle and so your shoulder is likely to develop a problem.

A simple answer to a chronic problem.

Suffice to say I duly advised both clients to remove soy and a few weeks later their shoulder pain was gone!

If you have been suffering from chronic pain which has been unresponsive to physical treatment then looking at your diet could be the next best step to finding an answer. Let me know if you have any questions or comments below.