I am a Naturopath - This is What I Eat in a Typical Day

I am a naturopath and acupuncturist, have 2 children whom I am involved in chauffeuring around and a devoted wife.  To fit everything I do in a day, I make sure I feed my body with the right fuel.

In my current regime, I start off my day with some lemon or apple cider vinegar in warm water. I will put 2 eggs to soft boil and make some vegetable juice which I add Shape Up Protein Powder to or make a protein smoothie with berries, nuts and seeds.  What I have changes according to the seasons and what I need.   I would have my supplements with breakfast.  My current program includes O-Clear & P-Lift (to keep my hormones in balance), Hemagenics, MetaPure fish oil, thyroid supplements and Vitamin D.

At lunch, I often have leftover stewed/ roasted or stirfried chicken or fish or meat with some lightly steamed vegetables unless I decided to stirfry extra vegetables from dinner last night.

I typically have dinner before 7 p.m. Tonight’s menu is:

Panfried salmon served with seaweed

Steamed broccoli with maple walnuts and toasted sesame seeds

½ cup of brown basmati rice.

This meal is easy to prepare and tastes delicious.  As a busy working mum, I typically only have 30-45 mins each day to prepare meals, and it needs to be nourishing and tastes good, or else my children won’t eat much of it.

Here’s how I make my maple walnuts:

In a pan on low heat, put in raw walnuts (500g), a pinch of Himalayan salt, drop in a dollop of butter or coconut oil and 4 tablespoons of maple syrup.  Stir it well until it is mixed.  Spread coated walnuts onto a baking tray and put into oven at 50C for 20 minutes or until walnuts look dry.  Cool and store in an airtight container.

Toasted sesame seeds are simply just dry roasted on a pan on low heat.  It turns golden very quickly and needs to be removed from the pan.

Just before bed, I take my supplements for a good night’s sleep.

The Root Causes of Low Libido

Hormones play a big role in determining our sex drive, energy and mood.  Other confounding factors include communication, intimacy and emotional states.  Some research attribute 70% of hormonal imbalance to the food we consume.  Nutrition is a small hinge the swings big doors.

The hormones typically involved in libido are your thyroid hormones, adrenal hormones, as well as sex hormones estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. In Chinese Medicine, your kidney energy governs your libido and ability to maintain an erection. 

If you have sore breasts, are irritable, and having irregular cycles or more frequent cycles, your libido could drop.  These symptoms often indicate low progesterone.  Progesterone is the “connectivity” hormone.  Closeness with a partner has been shown to increase salivary progesterone levels.  Also getting good doses of vitamin C will help build this hormone.

Caffeine – whilst it gives you a boost to your short term energy production, is a stimulant that jolts your cortisol (stress hormone).  Some studies have shown caffeine to block progesterone from binding to its receptors.  Whilst it does not lower progesterone, it reduces the ability of the hormone to do its job by not being able to bind to the receptors.  Good substitutes for coffee are roasted dandelion root tea (which will also cleanse your liver), green tea or rooibos tea.

Alcohol consumption causes oxidative stress to the testicular leydig cells and leads to lower testosterone levels and it also increases estrogen levels, making a male more feminine.  In a man, high stress levels and poor eating habits can dampen kidney energy, hence causing an inability to maintain an erection.  Men need more zinc than women, so check those levels, and using herbs like damiana can also help with male libido. Using high antioxidant compounds like berries and herbs can help reduce oxidative stress.

Healthy communication, clean, good eating, de-stressing through prayers, meditation or yoga and regular exercise can be the answer to your low libido and bring you more fulfilling relationships.  Practising forgiveness and gratitude can only do you good.

2016 Environmental Working Group Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has published the produce with the most pesticides on them (also termed the Dirty Dozen) and the produce with the least pesticide residues on them (also known as the Clean Fifteen).  The lists are as follows:




Dirty Dozen:

1. Strawberries
2. Apples
3. Nectarines
4. Peaches
5. Celery
6. Grapes
7. Cherries
8. Spinach
9. Tomatoes
10. Sweet bell peppers
11. Cherry tomatoes
12. Cucumbers

Clean Fifteen:

1. Avocado
2. Corn
3. Pineapple
4. Cabbage
5. Sweet Peas
6. Onions
7. Asparagus
8. Mangoes
9. Papaya
10. Kiwifruit
11. Eggplant
12. Honeydew
13. Grapefruit
14. Cantaloupe
15. Cauliflower

Buy organic produce in the Dirty Dozen to minimise pesticide intake to get the biggest bang for your money. Conventionally grown produce for the clean fifteen should be fine.

Cranberry Pistachio Flourless Biscotti

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups almond meal

1 egg, beaten

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup maple syrup

3 tbsp almond milk

1/4 cup pistachios, shell removed

¼ cup dried cranberries

Grated rind of ½ orange

Method:

1.         Preheat oven to 170 degrees C.

2.         In a large mixing bowl whisk together the almond flour, egg, baking soda and salt.

3.         Add the maple syrup and almond milk. Mix together with a wooden spoon until ingredients are well combined.

4.         Fold in the pistachios, cranberries and orange rind.

5.         Line a baking tray with baking paper.

6.         Using your hands pour the dough out of the bowl and onto the baking paper. Use your hands to form the dough into a sort of flat log. It should be about 1 inch high, 8 inches long and 2 inches wide.

7.         Place the baking sheet in the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, until it begins to brown. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool for at least 1 hour.

8.         Once the dough is cool use a knife to cut the log into about 15 strips. I prefer to make diagonal cuts because this gives you longer biscotti.

9.         Place the biscotti on their side.

10.      Bake in a 130 degree oven for 10 minutes to dry the biscotti out. Flip the biscotti over and bake for an additional 10 minutes on the other side. If they are still very moist you may need to flip again and put back in the oven for an additional 5-10 minutes. Be careful not to overcook.

Breast Cancer Prevention

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancer diagnosed in women in New Zealand and around the world.  In New Zealand, 1 in 9 women have a breast cancer diagnosis.
We have been told that mammograms are your best detection method.  I would argue that mammogram is a passive surveillance method to detect if you have breast cancer.  What are you doing to prevent or reduce your risk of breast cancer?

We need to commit to proactive prevention.  It is very important for us to take a look at our food.  Sugar is a potent toxin.  Sugar increases our blood sugar hence increasing the production of insulin, which is a growth hormone.  The Harvard Medical School conducted a six year study of over 32,000 nurses found that increased levels of insulin growth factor-1 (IGF-1) contributed to the increased growth of tumours, including breast cancers. 

It is well known that fibre is important to maintain good health.  The excessive intake of antibiotics or increased infection in the gut will weaken the immune system and increase your susceptibility to cancer.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the liver meridian travels through the breasts and the growth of cancer tumours show stagnation in liver energy.  A poor liver detoxification profile combined with poor dietary intake with increased sugar and processed food will increase the risk of breast cancer.  The presence of bad estrogens is commonly implicated in breast cancer.  It is therefore important to reduce intake of xenoestrogens, which are endocrine disruptors and behave like estrogen in the body.  Xenoestrogens are present in plastics, flame retardants, cosmetics, pesticides and food colouring.

To engage in active surveillance, you should avoid increasing your intake of xenoestrogens:

1. Do not heat food up in any plastic containers in the microwave, in fact, do not use the microwave.  Heat it up on the stove or the oven. 
2. Do not refill plastic drinking bottles, leave them in the sun or freeze water in plastic bottles.  Avoid plastic bottles, use stainless steel or glass bottles.
3. Avoid using plastic wrap when storing or heating food.
4. Avoid non-stick Teflon cookware.  When overheated, Teflon will leach into the food and disrupt the estrogen balance in the body.
5. Avoid pesticides.  Eat organic where possible.
6. Consume hormone free meats.
7. Choose cosmetics and skin care products that are as natural as possible without names too long to pronounce and numbers you cannot decipher.  A common estrogenic ingredient found in cosmetics is paraben.

Increasing physical activity, increase intake of detoxifying foods and antioxidants with adequate protein can help reduce the risk of breast cancer.  Cruciferous vegetables, tumeric, rosemary and garlic are great to help detoxify estrogen.  Tumeric is synergistically absorbed with black pepper, so if you are marinating your food with tumeric, add some black pepper too!  If you are overweight, your risk of breast cancer increases.  Lose excess weight.  Being overweight by 7kgs increases your cancer risk as much as smoking!

Get enough Vitamin D, in the summer, do activities in the sun without sunscreen before 11 a.m. until the skin turns pink.  Do not burn.  In the winter, supplement!  Vitamin D acts as a vitamin and a hormone and is a very important vitamin for healthy breasts.

Reducing intake of alcohol to less than 3 glasses a week will help reduce the risk of breast cancer.  Keeping the bowels regular with adequate fibre, prebiotics, probiotics and greens is important to prevent breast cancer.  Your liver and bowels are really important to help reduce your risk of breast cancer, hence keeping liver toxins low and keeping your bowels healthy will help prevent breast cancer.  

Metabolic syndrome may be the cause of your fatigue, diabetes or weight gain

Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of signs that can drive many serious diseases in our society.  Some of the indicators of metabolic syndrome include:

• Waist circumference over 80cm for women and over 94cm for men
• High blood pressure
• Diabetes or prediabetes or poor control of blood sugar
• Carrying extra weight around the waist – beer belly
• Increase triglycerides in your blood lipids test
  
  

Metabolic syndrome increases your risk of serious diseases such as diabetes, stroke, cancer and Alzheimer’s.  We live in an age of plenty, where our genomics are designed to cater for survival against scarcity.  Average calories per day have increased from 2100 to 2800 over the past 60 years, and energy expenditure from physical activity has reduced by 46% over the same period.  Excess adipose (fat) tissues lead to systemic inflammation.

Every cell is equipped with its own energy sensing mechanism.  Like a fuel gauge, cells can sense states of high or low energy (ATP) and activate the adaptive mechanism accordingly.  When ATP is low, our cells activate an adaptive response to boost cellular energy which stimulates glucose and fat burning and reduce oxidative stress and inflammation.  This also activates the mitochondria (energy production powerhouse in the cell). This is called the AMPK response.  However, if there are large fluctuations with insulin induced from the diet, AMPK levels will be low and there will be less down regulation of inflammation, hence more pain, increase in fatigue and subsequent development of insulin resistance.

The more carbohydrate rich food we eat, the more insulin needs to be secreted. The more processed a carbohydrate food is, e.g. pastries compared to kumara (sweet potatoes), the more insulin is secreted to deal with larger blood sugar fluctuations. Insulin promotes glucose, protein and fat storage, inhibits fat burning and promotes growth of tissues.  Some insulin is essential, some growth of tissues are crucial for cell functioning, repair, growth and muscle building.  With excess carbohydrate intake in modern societies, insulin levels are higher, which by nature of the anabolic function of insulin, is associated with common health problems like acne, polycystic ovarian syndrome, atherosclerosis, hypertension and cancer.

So if you are having issues of weight gain, increasing waist circumference, fatigue, sweet cravings, imbalance in blood sugar levels, diabetes or prediabetes, I highly recommend that you address these problems before it turns into more serious diseases.  Consume foods that increase your satiety, with good fats and protein, rather than carbohydrates.  I can help you with dietary, nutritional and physical activity strategies to reverse your problems and run appropriate tests to monitor your progress over time.

Managing Cold & Flu Symptoms

This winter has been unusually cold.  Despite your best efforts at preventing infection through diet, exercise and supplementation, you may succumb to a cold or flu at some stage this winter. This can occur particularly if stress or life events get in the way of maintaining the healthy habits that help keep your immune system strong.  Should you find yourself ‘under the weather’, the good news is that there are natural remedies you can take to help you get back on your feet.

Both the common cold and influenza (flu) are caused by viruses, most commonly the rhinovirus. What many people may not realise is that antibiotics only target bacteria and are not able to kill the viruses responsible for colds and flu. Fortunately, there are herbs and nutrients that can help manage these viral infections and keep your immune defences strong.

A number of traditional herbs have been clinically shown to improve immune function and reduce symptoms of the common cold and flu, for example:

-         andrographis can reduce both the severity and duration of cold and flu symptoms;

-         picorrhiza can help maintain a healthy immune system, and it is now understood that this herb has both anti-inflammatory and immune-stimulating actions;

-         elderberry, a mainstay of traditional Western herbalism for its anti-catarrhal and fever-reducing activity can help relieve acute cold symptoms as well as recurrent coughs.

If you are unwell with a respiratory virus, a herbal formula that contains the above immune-supporting herbs can help you cope with your symptoms.

Medicinal mushrooms have a long history of use in Asian cultures and are now known to have potent antiviral activity. In particular, the immune-boosting potential of reishi, shiitake, cordyceps and coriolus mushrooms has been extensively studied.  Not only can they help reduce the length and severity of an acute cold, they can also help prevent future recurrences.  A concentrated extract of these mushrooms can help reduce the symptoms and severity of your cold.

Mucus and phlegm are signs that your immune system is hard at work, but the resulting congestion can lead to blocked sinuses and breathing difficulty. The decongestant, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial essential oils of eucalyptus, thyme, lavender and peppermint may help to reduce the nasal and sinus congestion that accompanies upper respiratory tract infections. Mucus congestion can also cause irritating or chesty coughs.  Liquorice is recognised in Western herbal medicine for its soothing, anti-inflammatory and expectorant properties. An extract of liquorice root can reduce irritation of the respiratory mucous membranes, helping to soothe dry coughs and relieve mild bronchitis. The Ayurvedic herb adhatoda is a helpful bronchodilator also with expectorant properties. By encouraging the clearing of congestion-causing phlegm, your airway becomes more open and that irritating wheeze reduces. If you are coughing or your sinuses are blocked, an appropriate formula containing these mucus-busting herbs and essential oils may help.

In this modern world, we seem to have lost the “art of convalescence”. We always feel obliged to ‘soldier on’ despite coughing, sneezing and operating at less than optimal capacity.   Taking the time to rest and recuperate can help you to recover sooner.  So, the lifestyle prescription when you are unwell is sleep, sleep and more sleep! Resist the temptation to check your work emails. Instead, focus your efforts on restoring your energy levels with warm, nourishing foods such as soups; drink plenty of fluids to replace those lost from blowing your nose repeatedly; and avoid mucus-promoting, inflammatory foods such as dairy and processed foods.

If a cold or flu finds its way to you this winter and is stopping you from performing at your best, don’t despair.  There are herbal or nutritional formula with antiviral, anti-inflammatory, decongestant and immune-boosting power to support your convalescence and help get you back in the game again.