Let's Stop Sleep Shaming

“Get out of bed! Its 10 a.m.!” Something that I, like many teenagers heard on many Saturdays. The common stereotype of teenagers being lazy and sleeping for way too long is well known. But why is it the case? Is it just that teenagers have a natural phase of being lazy or is there more to it? On another rather odd note, I often hear people bragging about just how little sleep they get by on. Is that a good thing I mean more hours awake in a day means more hours to get things done. Well, the reality is perhaps not what many teenagers or their parents want to hear.

The reality is that sleep is essential to the body and not in the ways that many of us think. Yes, it is absolutely important to sleep so our bodies have time to rest, but it’s also the time when your body cleans out the garbage and when it builds! In fact, one of the most important things that your body does when it sleeps is to build. The vast majority of Human Growth Hormone is released at night between 10 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. and the hormone is what helps your body build! In the younger population, this is essential! Building muscles requires a lot of energy all on its own. Now throw in new brain connections and bone growth and the average child is a full-blown construction site. This is one of the reasons why sleep is so important for adolescence and why babies sleep so much. Now, before all the teenagers go running to their parents about how making them get up early is unjust and their parents are stunting their growth, there are several things that they might not be doing as well as they think. The first is that not all sleep is equal. Research has shown that getting to bed early, having consistent bedtimes and avoiding screen time right before bed will vastly improve a person’s sleep. Your body likes to know what’s coming and having an early, consistent bedtime means your body’s internal clock is getting prepped for the night’s work as the bedtime approaches. The second problem that many teenagers (and older adults) have is using their cellphones or watching tv right before bed. The main issue is that the bright light tricks the brain into thinking that its actually day time. Your body stops its sleep preparation and instead starts getting revved up for what it thinks is another day. This leads to a hard time falling asleep and poorer sleep once you actually do fall asleep. 

The bottom line is that sleep is essential for everyone and when a body is under a lot of strain its going to need even more. Trying to get by on as little sleep as possible is like trying to drive your car for as long as possible with no oil changes and bad gas. You can do it and it might be beneficial in the short term, but you will end up paying for it down the road. Everyone (especially our younger population) could use a little more QUALITY sleep will no cell phones, or T.V.s and preferably before midnight.

To Run or Not to Run?

I don’t want to run too often because I don’t want to ruin my knees. I don’t want to lift weights because I don’t want to wear out my joints. I have arthritis and I don't want to make it worse. These are things I hear in clinic very often. At first glance it makes sense,. want to keep healthy knees? Don’t pound the pavement by running. Save my shoulders? Don’t stress them by lifting heavy weights. However, if we dive a little deeper into how the body works and what the research says, we find something quite different.

One of the first things is to realize that the body is very reactive in everything that it does. What I mean by that, is that your body is constantly responding to your environment. When any part of the body is strained, it adapts!  It does this to make the strain easier to handle the next time you have to deal with it. The body uses this in every function. When you study for a test or try to memorize something, the strain and repetition in the brain makes new connections. The more you practice, the better you get at something. The same goes for our muscles. The more we work a muscle the bigger and stronger it gets. The more we do cardio exercise, the stronger our heart becomes. This is a wonderful ability that the body has and allows us to learn and get better at dealing with our environment. However, there is another side to the bodies ability to adapt and that is what's known as Efficiency! Your body is constantly monitoring where energy is being spent and where it thinks it can cut energy cost. For the vast majority of human history food was not always readily available. Because of this, our bodies were designed to be able to survive on a very small number of calories when needed. This means that the body is always looking for ways to get rid of wasteful energy use. It’s why muscles shrink when you stop working out, and why you get rusty at the piano when you stop practicing (The brain is an energy hog and uses around 20% of the calories we consume!). Every muscle fiber and every nerve connection requires energy to maintain. Once the body notices that a tissue is no longer being used, it will degrade that tissue to preserve energy and remain efficient. While it might be great to have a near perfect memory and walk around looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger because you never lost muscle mass, the energy requirements and stress on the body would be so large we wouldn’t have lasted long as a species. 

These two modes of building and tearing down work together to make us the versatile beings we are. But modern society has presented an extreme problem that our bodies were never designed to deal with. That thing is probably best described as a cubicle and Mcdonalds. We now have an excess of highly dense processed calories and a total lack of strain on our bodies. As we move through life, our body chugs along still thinking that the current meal might be the last in a while, so it better store those calories from this large meal. It also seems that we aren't using our muscles that often so no need to maintain those. Because remember to your body, less muscles means more energy can be stored! This goes for the brain, and bones as well. If we aren’t learning new things and engaging in social activity our brains will lose connections and we become less sharp as we age. Lastly our bones will not maintain their integrity because they are never put under enough stress that the body feels the need to maintain them.

The long short of it is that we are victims of our own efficiency. We must realize that we are not designed for modern life. We need movement, we need to exercise. We need to have times of rest and we need to remember our bodies are designed to bank calories for a time it still assumes is coming where it will be without food for a while. Give your body something to work towards and it will continue to work for you.

Its All in The Hips

Modern life presents itself with a multitude of new stressors. In past columns I talked about dealing with our fight or flight response, poor diet and missing essential nutrients. For this column I wanted to focus on something a little more mechanical, and there are few muscles in the human body that cause as many problems as the hip flexors.

Before we can jump into the problems that the hip flexors cause we should know more about them. First off, the hip flexors are actually a complex of 3 muscles known as the psoas major, psoas minor, and the iliacus, or the iliopsoas when referring to all three. These three muscles are anchored to several parts of the low back and pelvis before attaching to the thigh bone. The main thing these muscles do is lift your thighs as you walk and stabilize the spine when you sit. The iliopsoas muscles are some of the largest in the body and have plenty of important things running around and even through them. 

Now there are many different things that can start to cause issues with the iliopsoas muscles, but I will stick to the most common ones. The first, and probably the most common cause of iliopsoas dysfunction is lack of activity and sitting. When we sit, the muscles are in a shortened state and after a long period of time the muscles tighten. When we finally stand up, the muscles remain tight and cause dysfunction. A second cause is frequent exercise without proper stretching, runners run into iliopsoas problems because of the nature of running. When a person runs, the legs go through the same motion over and over again often thousands of times a day. If the runner doesn’t properly stretch out after the run, the iliopsoas will tighten into the rather limited range used to run. The third and perhaps less looked at cause is stress, yes going back to that fight or flight response. If we are stressed, our bodies go into fight or flight and this tightens our iliopsoas muscles up in preparation for running from that bear, or in a more modern circumstance, meeting with our new boss.

When there is dysfunction in the iliopsoas muscles, various symptoms will arise. The tightening of the muscle will actually cause  a rotation of the pelvis forward, this leads to low back pain and changes in the natural spinal curvature right through the neck. Tight iliopsoas muscles also affect the surrounding nerves, this can lead to pain going into various parts of the legs, buttocks and groin area. The last and most controversial is the effect on the digestive system. Our intestines are extremely dense in nerve endings and a vast number of those nerves pass directly by the iliopsoas muscles, it is theorized that when these muscles are tight and irritated it will lead to digestive dysfunction.

So what do you do about tight iliopsoas muscles? Several things actually. The first is to stretch, stretch, stretch! Whether you spend your day sitting at a desk, or running marathons, stretching will help to calm the muscles and prevent rotation of the pelvis. The second thing is to strengthen the opposing muscles, these muscles consist of the gluteus muscles and the abdominal muscles. When the muscle strength is properly balanced the iliopsoas muscles will be forced to stay in a more lengthened state. The last thing is to bring your body out of that stressful state. Whether it be through meditation, mindful breathing or yoga, when you relax your mind, your body will follow suit.

So What's the Deal With Probiotics?

Many of us have heard about probiotics and we know that we should probably have some because they are apparently good for us. We hear it from the latest trendy health news article or perhaps on the label of a yogurt. More often than not though, we really don't know why we should actually be consuming a probiotic or even what it is. My goal is to give you a basic low down on what a probiotic is and why you should be on one.

To start, we should define what exactly a probiotic is. A probiotic is a live culture of organisms and are essential in maintaining proper gut health. From the time we are born, we are in contact with bacteria and a huge population of those bacteria live within our gut (around 100 trillion) that’s somewhere around 3 times as many cells as we have in our own bodies! These trillions of gut bacteria maintain what is known as a symbiotic relationship with their host (you) and make up our gut flora. What this means is that we help each other out. As we ingest food the bacteria in our gut are able to survive and in turn, provide us with life sustaining benefits. BUT! We have a problem, as modern diets have changed and we have become an excessively sterile society, our gut bacteria fails to be properly restored through ingesting new bacteria. This is further complicated by the overuse of antibiotics both from prescriptions and ones that are fed to the meat we eat. Antibiotics are largely indiscriminate in what bacteria they kill and will wreak havoc on your guts natural and required bacteria. Obviously this is not to advocate against the use of antibiotics, they are often necessary and life saving against bacteria that are much less friendly. It is however, important to remember that antibiotics can cause some collateral damage. When this damage occurs it is of the utmost importance that we replace the lost good bacteria as quickly as possible.

So what exactly is so important about this good gut bacteria? Well there are several extremely important things that only your gut bacteria can do. One of those is the break down and fermentation of starches and fatty acids in the food that you eat. This breakdown is something that our bodies are incapable of doing on their own. If the bacteria is not present is sufficient amounts irritation and inflammation of the gut will follow. Further, a dysfunctional gut flora (the gut bacteria) has also been associated with systemic inflammation and hormone dysregulation. Poor gut flora is further associated with increased susceptibility to autoimmune diseases and nervous system disorders including depression, autism, and OCD. For these reasons among many others, the need for a healthy gut flora cannot be overstated. By consuming a good probiotic we are supporting and keeping our gut bacteria healthy, we are making sure that they keep our guts out of inflammation and working optimally.