Back Clinic Functional Medicine Team. Functional medicine is an evolution in the practice of medicine that better addresses the healthcare needs of the 21st century. By shifting the traditional disease-centered focus of medical practice to a more patient-centered approach, functional medicine addresses the whole person, not just an isolated set of symptoms.
Practitioners spend time with their patients, listening to their histories and looking at the interactions among genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health and complex, chronic disease. In this way, functional medicine supports the unique expression of health and vitality for each individual.
By changing the disease-centered focus of medical practice to this patient-centered approach, our physicians are able to support the healing process by viewing health and illness as part of a cycle in which all components of the human biological system interact dynamically with the environment. This process helps to seek and identify genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors that may shift a person’s health from illness to well-being.
In today’s podcast, Dr. Alex Jimenez, health coach Kenna Vaughn, chief editor Astrid Ornelas discuss about metabolic syndrome from a different point of view as well as, different nutraceuticals to combat inflammation.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Welcome, guys, welcome to the podcast for Dr. Jimenez and crew. We’re discussing today’s metabolic syndrome, and we’re going to be discussing it from a different point of view. We will give you excellent, useful tips that can make sense and are easily doable at home. Metabolic syndrome is a very vast concept. It contains five major issues. It has high blood glucose, it has belly fat measurements, it has triglycerides, it has HDL issues, and it pretty much has a whole conglomeration of dynamics that have to be measured in the whole reason we discuss metabolic syndrome because it affects our community very much. So, we’re going to be discussing these particular issues and how we can fix them. And give you the ability to adapt your lifestyle so that you don’t end up having. It’s one of the most important disorders affecting modern medicine today, let alone once we understand it. Everywhere you go, you’re going to see a lot of people having metabolic syndrome. And it’s part of a society, and that’s something you see in Europe as much. But in America, because we do have a lot of foods and our plates are usually bigger, we have the ability to adapt our bodies differently by just what we eat. No disorder will change so quickly and fast as a good mechanism and a good protocol to help you with metabolic disorders and metabolic syndrome. So having said that, today, we have a group of individuals. We have Astrid Ornelas and Kenna Vaughn, who will discuss and add information to help us through the process. Now, Kenna Vaughn is our health coach. She’s the one who works in our office; when I’m a practicing physician on physical medicine and when I’m working with people one on one, we have other people working with dietary issues and dietary needs. My team here is very, very good. We also have our top clinical researcher and the individual who curates much of our technology and is at the cutting edge of what we do and our sciences. It’s Mrs. Ornelas. Mrs. Ornelas or Astrid, as we call her, she’s ghetto with the knowledge. She gets nasty with science. And it’s really, really where we are. Today, we live in a world where research is coming and spitting out of the NCBI, which is the repository or PubMed, which people can see we use this information and we use what works and what does it. Not all information is accurate in PubMed because you have different points of view, but it’s almost like a finger on a pulse when we have our finger in. We can see the things that affect it. With certain keywords and certain alerts, we get notified of changes for, let’s say, dietary sugar issues or triglyceride issues with fat issues, anything about metabolic disorders. We can kind of come up with a treatment protocol that is live adapted from doctors and researchers and PhDs around the world almost instantaneously, literally even before they’re published. For example, today happens to be February 1st. It’s not, but we’ll be getting results and studies presented by the National Journal of Cardiology that will come out in March if that makes sense. So that information is early hot off the press, and Astrid helps us figure these things out and sees, “Hey, you know, we found something really hot and something to help our patients” and brings the N equals one, which is patient-doctor equals one. A patient and therapist equal one that we don’t do specific protocols for everyone in general. We do specific protocols for each person as we go through the process. So as we do this, the journey of understanding metabolic syndrome is very dynamic and very deep. We can start from just looking at someone to the bloodwork, all the way to dietary changes, to metabolic changes, all the way down to the cellular activity that it’s actively working. We measure issues with BIAs and BMI, which we have done with previous podcasts. But we can also get into the level, the genomics and the changing of the chromosomes and the telomeres in the chromosomes, which we can affect by our diet. OK. All roads lead to diets. And what I say in some weird way, all roads lead to smoothies, OK, smoothies. Because when we look at smoothies, we look at the components of smoothies and come up with dynamics that are abilities to change now. What I look for is when I look for treatments, I look at things that make people’s lives better, and how can we do this? And for all those mothers, they understand that they may not realize that they do this, but a mom doesn’t wake up saying, I’m going to give my kid food. No, she’s kind of doing a mental lavage of bringing the whole kitchen because she wants to infuse the best nutrition for their child and offer their best kind of options for their baby to go through the world or daycare or elementary school, through middle school, through high school so that the child can develop well. Nobody goes out thinking that I’m going to give my kid just junk and. And if that’s the case, well, that’s probably not good parenting. But we won’t talk about that well; we will talk about good nutrition and adapting those things. So I’d like to introduce Kenna right now. And she’s going to be discussing a little bit of what we do when we see someone with metabolic disorders and our approach to it. So as she goes through that, she’s going to be able to understand how we evaluate and assess a patient and bring it in so that we can start getting a little bit of control for that individual. Kenna, it’s all yours.
Kenna Vaughn: All right. So first, I just want to talk about the smoothies a little bit more. I am a mom, so in the morning time, things get crazy. You never have as much time as you think you do, but you need those nutrient nutrients and so do your kids. So I love smoothies. They’re super fast. You get everything you need. And most people think that when you’re eating, you’re eating to fill your stomach, but you’re eating to fill your cells. Your cells are what need those nutrients. That’s what carries you on with the energy, the metabolism, all of that. So those smoothies are a super great option, which we give our patients. We even have a book with 150 smoothie recipes that are great for anti-aging, helping diabetes, lowering cholesterol, controlling inflammation, and things like that. So it’s one resource we give to our patients. But we do have multiple other options for the patients who come in with metabolic disease.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Before you go in there, Kenna. Let me just kind of add that what I’ve learned is that we have to make it simple. We got to take homes or takeaways. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to give you the tools that can help you in that process. And we’re going to take you to the kitchen. We’re going to grab you by the ear, so to speak, and we’re going to show you the areas where we need to look at. So Kenna is about to give us the information in terms of smoothies that will assist us with dietary changes that we can provide our families and change its metabolic disaster that affects so many people called metabolic syndrome. Go ahead.
Kenna Vaughn: OK, so like he was saying with those smoothies. One thing that you should add to your smoothie is, which what I love to add in mine is spinach. Spinach is an excellent choice because it gives your body more nutrients. You are getting an extra serving of vegetables, but you can’t taste it, especially when it gets covered up by the natural sweetness that you find in fruits. So that’s a great option when it comes to the smoothies. But another thing that Dr. Jiménez was mentioning is other things in the kitchen. So there are other substitutes that we’re kind of wanting our patients to use and implement. You can start small, and it’ll make a huge difference just by switching out the oils you’re cooking with. And you’ll begin to see an improvement in your joints, your kids, and everyone will just improve immensely. So one thing we want to get our patients into using is those oils, such as avocado oil, coconut oil, and… Olive oil? Olive oil. Yes, thank you, Astrid.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: That was olive oil. That was Astrid in the background. We’re getting the facts out excellent and continue.
Kenna Vaughn: When you switch those out, your body breaks things down differently with those unsaturated fats. So that’s just another option that you have in that kitchen besides making those smoothies. But like I said before, I’m all about quick, easy, simple. It’s way easier to change your lifestyle when you have a whole team around you. And when it’s easy, you don’t. You don’t want to go out and make everything super difficult because the chances of you sticking to it aren’t very high. So one thing we want to do is make sure that everything that we’re giving our patients is easy to do and it’s attainable for everyday life.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I’m very visual. So when I go to the kitchen, I like making my kitchen look like the cocina or whatever they call it in Italy, the cucina and I have three bottles there, and I have an avocado oil one. I have the coconut oil one, and I have the olive oil right there. There are big bottles there. They make them pretty, and they look Tuscan. And, you know, I don’t care if it’s an egg, I don’t care. Sometimes, even when I’m having my coffee, I grab the coconut oil one, and I pour that one in and make myself a java with coconut oil in it. So, yeah, go ahead.
Kenna Vaughn: I was going to say that’s a great option too. So I drink green tea, and I also add coconut oil in that green tea to help boost everything and give my body another dose of those fatty acids that we want.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I got a question for you when you have your coffee like that; when you have the oil in it, does it kind of lubricate your lips.
Kenna Vaughn: It does a little bit. So it’s also like chapstick.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yeah, it does. It’s like, Oh, I love it. OK, go ahead.
Kenna Vaughn: Yeah, I also have to stir a little bit more just to make sure everything gets it right. Yeah. And then another thing just talking about something our patients can do when it comes to at home, there are tons of different options with eating fish. Increasing your good fish intake throughout the week, that’s going to help also. And just because fish provides so many great things like omegas, I know Astrid also has some more information on omegas.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I got a question before Astrid gets in there. You know, look, when we talk about carbohydrates, people, is it what a carbohydrate is? Oh, people say an apple, banana, candy bars, and all kinds of stuff people can rattle off carbohydrates or proteins. Chicken, beef, whatever they can rile up. But one of the things I found that people have a difficult time with is what good fats are? I want five. Give me ten good fats for a million dollars. Give me ten good fats like lard, like meat. No, this is what we’re talking about. Because the simple fact that we use and we’re going to add more to it relative bad is going to be avocado oil. Olive oil. Is it coconut oil? We can use things like butter oils, different types of margins, and not margins, but kinds of butter that are from, you know, grass-fed cows. We basically can run out of creamers, you know, non-nondairy creams, very specific creamers, those we run out of it, right? Real fast. So it’s like, what else is fat, right? And then we search for it. So one of the best ways to do it is that we’re not going to always put creamer on top or our butter on top, which by the way, some coffees they have, they put butter in it and blend it, and they make a fantastic little java hit. And everyone comes with their little ginger and oils and their coffee and makes espresso from heaven, right? So what else can we do?
Kenna Vaughn: We can, like I said, adding those fish in, which is going to help to give our bodies more of those omegas. And then we can also do more purple vegetables, and those are going to provide your body with more antioxidants. So that’s a good option when it comes to the grocery store. A rule of thumb that I love and heard a long time ago is to not shop in the aisles is to try to shop on the edges because the edges are where you’re going to find all that fresh produce and all those lean meats. It’s when you start to get into those aisles, and that’s where you’re going to start finding, you know, the cereal, those bad carbohydrates, those simple carbohydrates that the American diet has come to love but does not necessarily need. The Oreos?
Kenna Vaughn: Yes.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: The candy aisle that every kid knows. OK, yes.
Kenna Vaughn: So that’s just another great point there. So when you come into our office, if you’re suffering from metabolic syndrome or just anything in general, we make your plans super personalized and give you so many tips. We listen to your lifestyle because what works for one person might not work for another. So we make sure that we provide you with information that we know you’ll be successful with and provide education because that’s another huge part of it.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: All roads lead to the kitchen, huh? Right? Yes, they do. OK, so let’s zoom on precisely for the fat and the nutraceuticals. I want to give you an idea as to what type of nutraceuticals are appropriate for us because we want to bust down these five issues affecting metabolic syndrome that we discussed. What are the five guys? Let’s go ahead and start them up. It’s high blood sugar, right?
Kenna Vaughn: High blood glucose, low HDLs, which will be that good cholesterol everyone needs. Yes. And it’s going to be the high blood pressure, which is not considered high from a doctor’s standard, but it is deemed to be elevated. So that’s another thing; we want to ensure that this is metabolic syndrome, not a metabolic disease. So if you go to the doctor and your blood pressure is 130 over eighty-five, that’s an indicator. But yet your provider might not necessarily say your blood pressure is super high.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: None of these disorders here by themselves are clinical states, and, individually, they’re pretty much just things. But if you combine all these five, you have metabolic syndrome and feel like not too good, right?
Astrid Ornelas: Yeah, yeah.
Kenna Vaughn: Another one is going to be the excess weight around the belly and the higher triglycerides.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Easy to see. You can see when someone has a belly that’s hanging over like a fountain, right? So we can see that you can go to it sometimes Italian restaurants and see the great cook. And he sometimes I got to tell you, sometimes it’s just, you know, we talked to Chef Boyardee wasn’t a thin guy. I think that Chef Boyardee, you know what? And the Pillsbury guy, right? Well, it wasn’t very healthy, right? Both of them suffer from metabolic syndrome just from the outset. So that’s an easy one to see. So these are the things we’re going to be reflecting on. Astrid will go over some nutraceuticals, vitamins, and some foods that we can improve things. So here’s Astrid, and here’s our science curator. But here’s Astrid, go ahead.
Astrid Ornelas: Yeah, I guess before we get into the nutraceuticals, I want to make something clear. Like we were talking about metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is not a, and I guess per se, a disease or a health issue itself. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions that can increase the risk of developing other health issues like diabetes, stroke, and heart disease. Because metabolic syndrome is not, you know, an actual health issue itself, it’s more so this group, this collection of other conditions, of other problems that can develop into much worse health issues. Just because of that fact, metabolic syndrome has no apparent symptoms itself. But of course, like we were talking about, five risk factors are pretty much the ones we discussed: excess waist fat, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides, low HDL, and according to health care professionals. To doctors and researchers, you know you have metabolic syndrome if you have three out of these five risk factors.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yes. Three. Now, that doesn’t mean that if you have it, you have symptoms. As I see it was evident on. But I got to tell you in my experience when someone has more than three or three. They’re starting to feel crummy. They don’t feel right. They just feel like, you know, life’s not good. They have just an overall. They don’t look it right. So and I don’t know them, maybe. But their family knows that they don’t look good. Like mom doesn’t look good. Dad does look good.
Astrid Ornelas: Yeah, yeah. And metabolic syndrome, as I said, it has no apparent symptoms. But you know, I was kind of going with one of the risk factors with waist fat, and this is where you will see people with what you call the apple or pear-shaped body, so they have excess fat around their abdomen. And although that’s not technically considered a symptom, it is a factor that can; I guess it can give an idea to doctors or other health care professionals that this person who is, you know, they have prediabetes or have diabetes. And, you know, they have excess weight and obesity. They could have an increased risk of metabolic syndrome and therefore developing, you know, if it’s left untreated, developing other health issues like heart disease and stroke. I guess with that being said; then we’ll get into the nutraceutical.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I love this, I love this. We’re getting some good stuff, and we’re getting some information.
Astrid Ornelas: And I guess with that being said, we’ll get into the nutraceuticals. Kind of like, how Kenna was talking about what’s the takeaway? You know, we’re here talking about these health issues, and we’re here talking about metabolic syndrome today. But what’s the takeaway? What can we tell people? What can they take home about our talk? What can they do at home? So here we have several nutraceuticals, which I’ve written several articles in our blog and looked at.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You think, Astrid? If you look at 100 articles written in El Paso, at least in our area, they were all curated by somebody. Yes. All right.
Astrid Ornelas: Yes. So we have several nutraceuticals here that have been researched. Researchers have read all these research studies and found that they can help in some way and some form improve, you know, metabolic syndrome and these associated diseases. So the first one I want to discuss is the B vitamins. So what are the B vitamins? These are the ones that you can usually find them together. You can find them in the store. You’ll see them as B-complex vitamins. You’ll see like a little jar, and then it comes with several of the B vitamins. Now, why do I bring up B vitamins for metabolic syndrome? So one of the reasons like researchers has found that one of them, I guess, one of the causes of metabolic syndrome could be stress. So with that being said, we need to have B vitamins because when we get stressed when we have a hard day at work when we have, I guess a lot of you know, a lot of stressful things at home or with family, our nervous system will use these B vitamins to support our nerve function. So when we have a lot of stress, we will use up these vitamins, which increases stress; you know, our body will produce cortisol. You know, which serves a function. But we all know that too much cortisol, too much stress can actually. It can be harmful to us. It can increase our risk of heart disease.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, as I remember when we did this, all roads lead to the kitchen in terms of getting the food back in your body. All roads lead to the mitochondria when it comes to the area of the breakdown. The world of ATP energy production is surrounded and wrapped around with nicotinamide, NADH, HDP, ATPS, ADP. All these things have a connection with vitamin B of all sorts. So the vitamin B’s are at the engine in the turbine of the things that help us. So it makes sense that this was the top of the vitamin and the most important one. And then she’s got some other endpoints here on niacin. What is with niacin? What have you noticed there?
Astrid Ornelas: Well, niacin is another B vitamin, you know, there are several B vitamins. That’s why I have it there under its plural and niacin or vitamin B3, as it’s more well known. A lot of several are so clever. Many research studies have found that taking vitamin B3 can help lower LDL or bad cholesterol, help lower triglycerides, and increase HDL. And several research studies have found that niacin, specifically vitamin B3, can help increase HDL by 30 percent.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Incredible. When you look at NADP and NADH, These are the N is the niacin, the nicotinamide. So in the biochemical compound, niacin is the one that people have known that when you take it the good one or the one that’s supposed to be, you get this flushing feeling and it makes you scratch all your part of your body, and it feels good when you scratch because it makes you feel that way. Right, so lovely. And this huge.
Astrid Ornelas: Yes. Yes, and also, I just want to highlight a point about B vitamins. B vitamins are essential because they can help support our metabolism when we eat, you know, carbohydrates and fats, good fats, of course, and proteins. When the body goes through the metabolism process, it converts these carbohydrates, fats, and protein. The proteins turn into energy, and B vitamins are the main components in charge of doing that.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Latinos, in our general population, know that we have always heard of the nurse or the person who gives vitamin B injection. So you heard of those things. Right. Because you’re depressed, you’re sad, what would they do? Well, you know what would inject them with B12, right? Which are the B vitamins, right? And the person would come out like, Yeah, and they’d be excited, right? So we’ve known this, and this is the elixir of the past. Those traveling salesmen, who had the potions and lotions, made a living off of giving B vitamin complex. The first energy drinks were first designed with a B complex, you know, packing of them. Now here’s the deal. Now that we’ve learned that energy drinks cause so many issues, that we’re heading back to the B complexes to help people better. So the following vitamin we have there is that one that we have the D, we have the vitamin D.
Astrid Ornelas: Yeah, the next one I wanted to talk about is vitamin D. So there are several research studies on vitamin D and the benefits, the benefits of vitamin D for metabolic syndrome, and just how I discussed how B vitamins are beneficial for our metabolism. Vitamin D is also helpful for our metabolism, and it can help regulate our blood sugar, essentially our glucose. And that in itself is very important because, like one of the predisposing factors of metabolic syndrome, high blood sugar. And you know, if you have uncontrolled high blood sugar, it can lead to, you know, it can lead to prediabetes. And if that is left untreated, it can lead to diabetes. So research studies have also found that vitamin D itself can also improve insulin resistance, which is pretty much one that can lead to diabetes.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, I just wanted to put out the vitamin D is not even a vitamin; it’s a hormone. It was discovered after C by Linus Pauling. When they found it, they just kept on naming the following letter. OK, so since it is a hormone, you just have to look at it. This particular vitamin D or this hormone tocopherol. It basically can change so many metabolism issues in your body. I’m talking about literally four to five hundred different processes that we’re finding. Last year was 400. We’re now almost 500 other biochemical processes that are affected directly. Well, it makes kind of sense. Look, our most significant organ in the body is our skin, and most of the time, we ran around in some sort of skimpy clothes, and we were in the sun a lot. Well, we didn’t stand to reason that that particular organ can produce a tremendous amount of healing energies, and vitamin D does that. It is produced by the sunlight and activated. But today’s world, whether we’re Armenian, Iranian, different cultures in the north, like Chicago, people don’t get as much light. So depending on cultural changes and closed people living and working in these fluorescent lights, we lose the essence of vitamin D and get very sick. The person who takes vitamin D is much healthier, and our goal is to raise the vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin and one that embeds itself by it and is saved in the liver along with the fat in the body. So you can raise it slowly as you take it, and it’s tough to get toxic levels, but those are at about one hundred twenty-five nanograms per deciliter that are too high. But most of us run around with 10 to 20, which is low. So, in essence, by raising that, you’re going to see that the blood sugar changes are going to happen that Astrid is speaking about. What are some of the things that we notice about, particularly vitamin D? Anything?
Astrid Ornelas: I mean, I’ll get back to vitamin D in a bit; I want to discuss some of the other nutraceuticals first. OK. But pretty much vitamin D is beneficial because it helps improve your metabolism, and it helps improve your insulin resistance, at least towards metabolic syndrome.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: How about calcium?
Astrid Ornelas: So calcium goes hand-in-hand with vitamin D, and the thing that I wanted to talk about with vitamin D and calcium together. We often think about these five factors that we mentioned before that could cause a metabolic syndrome. Still, there’s, you know, if you want to think about it, like what are the underlying causes for a lot of these risk factors? And like, you know, obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, people who don’t engage in an exercise or physical activity. One of the things that can predispose a person or increase their risk of metabolic syndrome. Let me put the scenario. What if a person has a chronic pain disease? What if they have something like fibromyalgia? They’re constantly in pain. They don’t want to move, so they don’t want to exercise. They don’t want to aggravate these symptoms. Sometimes, some people have chronic pain or things like fibromyalgia. Let’s go a little bit more basic. Some people just have chronic back pain, and you don’t want to work out. So just you’re not choosing like some of these people aren’t choosing to be inactive because they want to. Some of these people are legitimately in pain, and there are several research studies, and this is what I was going to tie in vitamin D and calcium with that vitamin D and calcium. You know, we can you can take them together. They can help improve chronic pain in some people.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Incredible. And we all know that calcium is one of the causes of muscle spasms and relaxers. Tons of reasons. We’re going to go into each one of these. We’re going to have a podcast on just vitamin D and the issues in calcium because we can go deep. We’re going to go deep, and we’re going to go all the way to the genome. The genome is genomics, which is the science of understanding how nutrition and the genes dance together. So we’re going to go there, but we’re kind of like we’re penetrating slowly in this process because we have to take the story slowly. What’s up next?
Astrid Ornelas: So next, we have omega 3s, and I want to specifically highlight that we’re talking about omega 3s with EPA, not DHA. So these are EPA, which is the one that’s listed up there, and DHA. They are two essential types of omega 3s. Essentially, they’re both very important, but several research studies and I’ve done articles on this as well have found that I guess taking omega 3s specifically with EPA, it’s just more superior in its benefits than DHA. And when we talk about the omega 3s, these can be found in fish. Most of the time, you want to take omega 3s; you see them in the form of fish oils. And this is going back to what Kenna discussed before, like following a Mediterranean diet, which mainly focuses on eating a lot of fish. This is where you get your intake of omega 3s, and research studies have found that omega 3s themselves can help promote heart health, and they can help lower bad cholesterol to your LDL. And these can also improve our metabolism, just like vitamin D.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Want to go ahead and blanket all these things under the fact that we’re also looking, and when we’re dealing with metabolic syndrome, we’re dealing with inflammation. Inflammation and omegas have been known. So what we need to do is to bring out the fact that omegas have been in the American diet, even in a grandma’s diet. And then, like again, we hear back in the day when grandma or great-grandma would give you cod liver oil. Well, the highest omega-carrying fish is the herring, which is at about 800 milligrams per serving. The cod is next when it’s around 600. But because of the availability, the card’s much more available in certain cultures. So everybody would have cod liver oil, and they’d make you close your nose and drink it, and they knew that it correlated. They would think it’s a good lubricant. Still, it was an anti-inflammatory specifically with people, and usually, grandmothers who knew about this right helps with the intestines, helps the inflammation, helps with the joints. They knew the whole story behind that. So we’ll go deep into the Omegas in our later podcast. We have another one that’s here. It’s called berberine, right? What’s the story on berberine?
Astrid Ornelas: Well, pretty much the next set of nutraceuticals that are listed here, berberine, glucosamine, chondroitin, acetyl L-carnitine, alpha-lipoic acid, ashwagandha, pretty much all of these have been tied into what I talked before about chronic pain and all of these health issues. I listed them up here because I’ve done several articles. I’ve read various research studies that have covered these in different trials and across multiple research studies with numerous participants. And these have pretty much found, you know, this group of nutraceuticals here that are listed; these have also been tied in to help reduce chronic pain. You know, and as I discussed before, like chronic pain, you know, people who have fibromyalgia or even like, you know, let’s go a little bit simpler people who have back pain, you know, these inactive people who have sedentary lifestyles simply because of their pain and they can be at risk of metabolic syndrome. A lot of these research studies have found these nutraceuticals themselves can also help reduce chronic pain.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I think the new one is called alpha-lipoic acid. I see acetyl L-carnitine. We’re going to have our resident biochemist on the following podcast to go deep into these. Ashwagandha is a fascinating name. Ashwagandha. Say it. Repeat it. Kenna, can you tell me a bit about ashwagandha and what we’ve been able to discover about ashwagandha? Because it is a unique name and a component that we look at, we will talk about it more. We’re going to get back to Astrid in a second, but I’m going to give her a little break and kind of like, let Kenna tell me a bit of ashwagandha.
Kenna Vaughn: I was going to add in something about that berberine.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Oh, well, let’s go back to berberine. These are berberine and ashwagandha.
Kenna Vaughn: OK, so that berberine has also been shown to help decrease the HB A1C in patients with blood sugar dysregulation, which will come back to the whole prediabetes and type two diabetes situations that can occur in the body. So that one is also has been shown to decrease that number to stabilize the blood sugar.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: There’s a whole thing we’re going to have on berberine. But one of the things that we did in terms of metabolic syndrome definitely made the top list here for the process. So there’s ashwagandha and berberine. So tell us all about ashwagandha. Also, ashwagandha is the one. So in terms of blood sugar, the A1C is the blood sugar calculation that tells you exactly what the blood sugar does over about three months. The glycosylation of the hemoglobin can be measured by the molecular changes that happen within the hemoglobin. That’s why the Hemoglobin A1C is our marker to determine. So when ashwagandha and berberine come together and use those things, we can alter the A1C, which is the three-month kind of like the historical background of what is going on. We’ve seen changes on that. And that’s one of the things that we do now in terms of the dosages and what we do. We’re going to go over that, but not today because that’s a little bit more complex. Soluble fibers have also been a component of things. So now, when we deal with soluble fibers, why are we talking about soluble fibers? First of all, it is food for our bugs, so we have to remember that the probiotic world is something we cannot forget. People need to understand that, though, that probiotics, whether it’s the Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium strains, whether it’s a small intestine, large intestine, early on the small intestine, there are different bacteria to the very end to see come to the back end. So let’s call that the place that things come out. There are bacteria everywhere at different levels, and each one has a purpose of discovering that. There’s vitamin E and green tea. So tell me, Astrid, about these dynamics in terms of green tea. What do we notice as it pertains to metabolic syndrome?
Astrid Ornelas: OK. So green tea has a lot of benefits, you know? But, you know, some people don’t like tea, and some are more into coffee, you know? But if you want to get into drinking tea, you know, definitely because of its health benefits. Green tea is an excellent place to start and in terms of metabolic syndrome. Green tea has been demonstrated to help improve heart health, and it can help lower these risk factors that pertain to metabolic syndrome. It can help, you know, several research studies that have found that green tea can help lower cholesterol, bad cholesterol, LDLs.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Does green tea help us with our belly fat?
Astrid Ornelas: Yeah. There’s one of the benefits of green tea that I’ve read about. Pretty much one of the ones that probably that it’s most well known for is that green tea can help with weight loss.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Oh my gosh. So basically water and green tea. That’s it, guys. That’s all. We limit our lives that are also, I mean, we forgot even the most powerful thing. It takes care of those ROSs, which are reactive oxygen species, our antioxidants, or oxidants in our blood. So it just basically squelch them and takes them out and cools their cool and prevents even the normal deterioration that happens or the excessive deterioration that occurs in the breakdown of normal metabolism, which is a byproduct which is ROS, reactive oxygen species are wild, crazy oxidants, which we have a neat name for the things that squashes them and calms them and puts them in the order they call antioxidants. So the vitamins that are antioxidants are A, E, and C are antioxidants, too. So those are potent tools that we deal with as we lower body weight. We free up a lot of toxins. And as the green tea goes into squirt, squelch them, cools them, and gets them out of gear. Guess where the other organ that helps with the whole insulin production is, which is the kidneys. The kidneys are flushed out with green tea and then also helps. I notice that one thing that you haven’t done, Astrid, is done articles on turmeric, right?
Astrid Ornelas: Oh, I’ve done a lot of articles on turmeric. I know because, from the list that’s up there, turmeric and curcumin are probably like one of my favorite nutraceuticals to talk about.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yeah, she’s like gnawing on a root and a couple of times.
Astrid Ornelas: Yeah, I have some in my fridge right now.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yeah, you touch that turmeric, and you can lose a finger. What happened to my finger? Did you get near my turmeric? The root, right? So. So tell us a bit about the properties of turmeric and curcumin in terms of metabolic syndrome.
Astrid Ornelas: OK. I’ve done several, you know, a lot of articles on turmeric and curcumin. And we’ve also discussed that before, and several of our past podcasts and turmeric is that it’s that yellow yellowish could look orange to some people, but it’s usually referred to as a yellow root. And it’s very popular in Indian cuisine. It’s what it’s one of the main ingredients that you’ll find in curry. And curcumin, pretty sure some of you people have heard of curcumin or turmeric, you know? What’s the difference? Well, turmeric is the flowering plant, and it’s the root. We eat the root of turmeric, and curcumin is just the active ingredient in turmeric that gives it a yellow color.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Guys, I will not let anything but the top type of curcumin and turmeric products be available to their patients because there’s a difference. Certain ones are produced with literally, I mean, we got solvents, and with the way we get things out and of curcumin and turmeric or even stuff like cocaine, you have to use a distillate. OK? And whether it’s water, acetone, benzene, OK, or some sort of a byproduct, we know today that benzene is used to process many types of supplements, and certain companies use benzene to get the best out of turmeric. The problem is benzene is cancer-producing. So we’ve got to be very careful which companies we use. Acetone, imagine that. So there are processes that are in place to extract the turmeric properly and that are beneficial. So finding suitable turmeric, all turmerics are not the same. And that’s one of the things that we have to assess since it has so many products in the world is running real crazy to try to process turmeric and precisely, even if it’s the last thing that we’re discussing today on our subject matter. But it’s one of the most important things today. We don’t even understand aspirin. We know it works, but the total magnitude of it is yet to be told. However, turmeric is in the same boat. We’re learning so much about it that every day, every month, studies are being produced on the value of turmeric into the natural diet, so Astris is in tune in on the target on that. So I’m sure she’s going to bring more of that to us, right?
Astrid Ornelas: Yes, of course.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: So I think what we can do today is when we look at this, I’d like to ask Kenna, when we look at a metabolic syndrome from the presentations of symptoms or even from laboratory studies. The confidence of knowing that N equals one is one of the essential components that we have now in functional medicine and functional wellness practices that a lot of physical medicine doctors are doing in their scope of practice. Because in metabolic issues, you can’t take metabolic away from the body. Does the metabolism happen in a back problem? We notice a correlation with back injuries, back pain, back issues, chronic knee disorders, chronic joint musculoskeletal disorders, and metabolic syndrome. So we can’t tease it. So tell us a bit, Kenna, as we close out today a bit of what a patient can expect when they come to our office, and they get kind of put in the “Oops, you got metabolic syndrome.” So boom, how do we handle it?
Kenna Vaughn: We want to know their background because, as you said, everything is connected; everything is in-depth. There are details we want to get to know all so we can make that personalized plan. So one of the first things we do is a very lengthy questionnaire by Living Matrix, and it’s a great tool. It does take a little while, but it gives us so much insight into the patient, which is great because it allows us to, like I said, dig deep and figure out, you know, traumas that might have happened that are leading to inflammation, which how Astrid was saying then leads that sedentary lifestyle, which then leads to this metabolic syndrome or just kind of down that road. So one of the first things we do is do that lengthy questionnaire, and then we sit down and talk to you one on one. We build a team and make you part of our family because this stuff isn’t easy to go through alone, so the most success is when you have that close-knit family, and you have that support, and we try to be that for you.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: We have taken this information and realized it was very complex five years ago. It was challenging. 300 300-page questionnaire. Today we have software that we can figure out. It is backed by the IFM, the Institute of Functional Medicine. The Institute of Functional Medicine had its origin over the last decade and became very popular, understanding the whole person as an individual. You can’t separate an eyeball from kind of the body as you can’t separate the metabolism from all effects that it has. Once that that body and that food, that nutraceutical that nutrient enters our body. On the other side of our mouth is these little weighting things called chromosomes. They’re spinning, and they’re churning, and they’re creating enzymes and proteins based on what we feed them. To find out what’s going on, we have to do an elaborate questionnaire about mental body spirituality. It brings in the mechanics of normal digestion, how the entanglement works, and how the overall living experience happens in the individual. So when we take into consideration Astrid and Kenna together, we kind of figure out the best approach, and we have a tailor-made process for each person. We call it the IFM one, two, and three, which are complex questions that allow us to give you a detailed assessment and an accurate breakdown of where the cause can be and the nutraceuticals the nutrient nutrients that we focus on. We push you right direction to the place where it matters into the kitchen. We end up teaching you and your family members how to feed so that you can be good to those genetic genomes, which you’re, as I always say, ontogeny, recapitulates phylogeny. We are who we are from the past to the people, and those people have a thread between us and my past, and everyone here’s past. And that is our genetics, and our genetics responds to the environment. So whether it goes in the south fast or exposed or predisposed, we’re going to discuss those, and we’re going to enter the world of genomics soon in this process as we go deeper into the metabolic syndrome process. So I thank you all for listening in on us and know that we can be contacted here, and they’re going to leave you the number. But we have Astrid here that’s doing research. We have a team established by many individuals who can give you the best information that applies to you; N equals one. We got Kenna here that there’s always available and we’re here taking care of people in our beautiful little town of El Paso. So thank you again, and look forward to the following podcast, which will probably be within the next couple of hours. Just kidding. All right, bye, guys.
In today’s podcast, Dr. Alex Jimenez, health coach Kenna Vaughn, Astrid Ornelas, Truide Torres, and biochemist Alexander Isaiah Jimenez discuss what is metabolic syndrome and the steps to fix it.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: All right, guys, we’ve come to another podcast, and welcome to Dr. Jimenez and Crew podcast. Welcome, and you have a family here. We’re going to go over metabolic syndrome today. Metabolic syndrome is a disorder that ultimately affects a whole lot of people. And what happens is, is it affects one of the largest populations in affecting El Paso, pretty much in this region. And what we have is it’s not a disease, OK? First of all, it’s a combination of presentations that medical doctors and the World Health Organization have determined high-risk factors to have a stroke, kidney disorders, and even problems with dementia. But overall, it’s pretty much if you have metabolic syndrome, you feel crummy. So today, what are we going to do is we’re going to discuss the issues, and we’d like to at least present it to you so that it becomes useful for you and the information provided by us is going to be helpful for you or a family member. So if you have the opportunity and something that you enjoy, please go ahead and at the bottom area. There’s a little bell to subscribe to. And a little belt in markets so that you could be the very first person to get information in the future when we ever posted. And also allows you to present or ask us for things that are important to you in the health-related realm. Now, what are we going to do today? My name is Dr. Alex Jimenez. I have my entire staff here. We’re going to go, and we’re going to present each one of them in different moments. And we’re going to do some fascinating dynamics. We will also have our resident biochemist at the National University of Health Science, who’s going to chime in and give us a little bit of foundational biochemistry. This information is going to be helpful. We’re going to try to make it as simple but as useful as possible. Now, bear in mind everything that we’re going to be talking about in and today revolves around the metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is what the health care organizations have determined, and the cardiac departments have five major symptoms. Now you have to have three of them, at least to be classified as metabolic syndrome. OK, now the first thing is to ask… What do you feel? Pretty much you feel like crap, OK? And it’s not a good feeling to feel this way, but you’ll see that if you have of these presentations, you’re going to notice that your doctor may give you a diagnosis of metabolic syndrome. Now, the first thing that happens is you usually have a bit about belly fat. Now, the belly fat that people have, people measure it. For men, it’s a belly kind of like the lonja, the belly that hangs over, and it’s about a good, I’d say, about 40 inches or greater in the male. In women is 35 inches or more. Now that’s one of the first presentations. Now the other presentation is high blood pressure. Now that high blood pressure that they use is 135 milligrams over deciliter. Sorry, yeah. Miller Mercury’s millimeters of mercury over these leaders to determine exactly on the diastolic and the systolic. So the diastolic is going to the systolic is going to be 135, the diastolic is going to be over 85. Now that doesn’t happen again; you’re going to notice something. These aren’t extreme ranges from OK. Metabolic syndrome has high triglycerides. Now the high triglycerides are going to be noted in the blood. OK, now one of the things that can be determined early on is high blood pressure, which is also so associated with metabolic syndrome. So the other final one is the elevation of or decrease actually of HDL. HDL or the good fragments of cholesterol. Alexander will be a resident biochemist and talk to us more about that in the latter part of the show. Now, bear in mind, I’ve given five things a. the fat, b. the high blood pressure, c. the blood glucose levels, and also the triglycerides, along with the lowering of the HDLs. The question is, how are we going to be able to control this now? I’m going to give you some real good basic ways that you can control metabolic syndrome. And by the time we’re done today, we’re going to be able to assess the situation. And even if you have it, you basically will be able to control it. There are rare diseases that you can be disordered. And again, this is not a disease; it’s a combination of syndromes or symptoms to be called a syndrome collectively. So metabolic syndrome can be construed. Now you’ll notice that the blood glucose level will be elevated, usually over 100; these are relatively average numbers people have. But if they’re higher than that, they do create issues now. Also, when you have the belly fat 40, and it’s not that much, many people have it. People also have blood glucose levels that are higher than 5.6 on their blood glucose A1C. These numbers and the 150 mg per deciliter of triglycerides are all normal but in combination. Together, they do ultimately create a scenario that is not favorable to cardiac issues. Cardiovascular issues do present as a result. So what we’re going to try to do is try to bring down and control these issues. Now, what are the things that cause metabolic syndrome? One of the things is stress, smoking, a sedentary lifestyle, and even sleep problems and disturbances. We can be elaborating on each of these we can we’re going to be elaborating on in the future podcasts. Still, we’re going to be able to tell exactly what’s going on in a better way. We also have issues with inflammation and processed foods. At the core metabolic syndrome, the main issue is insulin sensitivity issues and high blood pressure issues, and inflammation. So what are we going to do to control that? I want you to know that every single one of these five issues, whether it’s blood glucose, high triglycerides, low HDL counts, or blood glucose, they’re all relatable to one disorder. It’s insulin sensitivity. Insulin sensitivity controls every one of these factors from raising high blood pressure. The kidneys are controlled by insulin, causing an increase in blood pressure, and we’ll discuss that issue and its correlation. So if we can control the blood glucose, we ultimately have the fastest and the surest way to provide the fastest route to heal and fix an individual with metabolic syndrome. So let’s go ahead about the issues that are going to result from that. Now, as I’ve got this, we’re going to notice that if over some time you continue to have a lifestyle that has high levels of these particular five factors, you’re going to notice that you’re going to tend to have high cardiac risks. Now we have a team here, and I want to introduce each one. We have Kenna Vaughn, who is our health coach. Our health coach is the one that’s going to be the one that explains to our patients what is going on. I’ll bring her in. We also have the clinical liaison, which is Trudy. Trudy is the individual who will be able to bring out the questions and determine what kind of issues are appropriate for you. So we’ll be discussing those. And we have our resident chief editor, Astrid Ornelas, who will be the one that explains the studies on it. From Illinois, we also have Alexander, which we have right in the back where you can’t see him, but he’s presenting and say, Hello, Alex, can you get them there? Hello. All right. So he’s out there, and he’s going to discuss the issues and the biochemistry side of things, and we’re looking forward to explaining those issues. Now, one of the things we have to do is go back to the issue of insulin sensitivity. Insulin sensitivity is at the root of all these issues. So what we’re going to do is discuss exactly how insulin can be controlled. But what we’ve learned through these studies, and I’m going to bring in Mrs. Ornelas, is here to discuss the studies on how to control blood glucose and blood sensitivity. Astrid, what did you find out recently that shows the proof and presents the easiest way to control blood insulin and elevate HDL?
Astrid Ornelas: OK, well, first of all, just as you know, as you mentioned, metabolic syndrome, it’s a collection of health issues that can increase the risk of developing heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. It’s basically like, you know, it can affect our overall health and wellness. And I’ve done quite some research, and I’ve found them through the National Center of Biotechnology Information, the NCBI. A variety of research states that metabolic syndrome or people with metabolic syndrome, one of the easiest, you know, quote-unquote easiest or one of the best ways out there that can be used to help… Restore? Yeah, to help restore or reverse all metabolic syndrome would be through the ketogenic diet. So the ketogenic diet or the keto diet is a low carbohydrate, high-fat diet, which, according to research studies, offers many benefits towards people with metabolic syndrome. It can help improve or promote weight loss, and it can help reduce diabetes.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, I want to mention right there, I have found nothing faster to lower the blood glucose and reverse triglycerides issues and HDL issues than the ketogenic diet. So, in essence, if you want to do it fast, it’s incredible the speed at which it restores the body to what it is. What else is there?
Astrid Ornelas: Yeah. So, like the human body, usually, we use glucose or sugar. It is supposed to be our primary source of fuel, our main source of energy. But of course, for people who have metabolic syndrome, people who have obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, or the increased risk of diabetes. The ketogenic diet can be very beneficial because it is a low carbohydrate diet, carbohydrates essentially turn into sugar or glucose, and we don’t want that. Like if people have metabolic syndrome, they have, you know, diabetes and insulin resistance. You don’t want sugar in your body because they produce too much of it. They have too much blood sugar. And but by increasing your height, by increasing the number of fats that you eat, and decreasing the number of carbohydrates, you keep a low amount. You keep insulin low, and you, by eating more fats, basically what you would do is make the body go into a state of ketosis.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know what? Let me ask you something. I’m going to feed this over right now to Kenna, and I’m going to ask Kenna in your experiences with the blood sugar issues. How is it that we contain and we learn to be able to manage someone’s blood sugar? The quick is the fastest. What is it that you do in terms of coaching individuals, helping them back?
Kenna Vaughn: For coaching individuals. I always evaluate their diet, and the main thing I like to focus on is education because so many people are not educated about, as Astrid was saying, carbs and how they fuel your body. A Big Mac might have 54 carbs, and a sweet potato might have 30 carbs, and people don’t realize that they’re that different, and they only see 20 points or something like that. But the way that the carbohydrate breaks down in the body is enormous. And that’s why the ketogenic diet works so well because you’re using those good whole carbs that are going actually to contain protein as well. And so it’s going to help to break it down slower versus a Big Mac, which is just going to spike your insulin way up.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: And what part of the Big Mac is the thing that spikes the sugar? I mean, in terms of that?
Kenna Vaughn: Right. So the bread, the carbs in the bread, actually breaks down differently in your body than a sweet potato would. And so that’s what’s going to give you that high glucose level. And then after that, you’re going to have the fall of the glucose level, which is your blood sugar going up and down does not feel great. So it’s something you want to avoid.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I have a question for you. For the sugars. When you asked the types of sugars you have, you just mentioned that the variety of carbohydrates matters. Yes. Tell me a bit of that.
Kenna Vaughn: The quality, like I was saying, sweet potatoes, avocados, things like that. They’re going to have the carbohydrates that are better for you, meaning you break them down differently than you would. Faster sugars like sucrose and things like that.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: So simple sugars are out, basically, which is why, first of all, metabolic syndrome did not even exist before the advent of refined foods. So refined sugars have caused this problem. So what we want to do is sugar leads to inflammation. Sugar leads to triglyceride issues. Sugar or insulin sensitivity issues are the things that are the basis of this process. All roads lead to insulin sensitivity in this process. And the organ that provides us with insulin, the most significant amount is is the pancreas. The pancreas is nonstop. And depending on how the pancreas responds to this blood sugar drama, it determines the fate of the individual. It will alter the triglycerides. It will transform the blood pressure by directly holding sodium in the kidneys, the kidneys the body prepares. It retains the sodium, and by the nature of sodium, the blood pressure soars. So the fastest way to lower your blood pressure is a ketogenic diet. And this is amazing because it is simple. It’s not that complex. We can go extreme. And I know that Astrid had an excellent research document on that. Tell me a bit of what you noticed.
Astrid Ornelas: Yeah, basically, like, what Kenna was saying. Before, many people didn’t know the difference between what type of carbohydrates they want to eat, like, for example, as you said, you know, a lot of people will eat a Big Mac, and they’ll eat that sweet potato, and they don’t know the difference between a good carbohydrate; basically, we want to eat what you call complex carbohydrates, which is it’s more like we want to eat like whole wheat or we want to eat like like good starches because those there break in the body breaks them down into glucose, into sugar. But they’re used much more slowly to where it won’t. The body won’t directly use them. And then you’ll get that crash, that sugar crash.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Because of the insulin spike, right? It controls the insulin spike. You know what? I want to bring in our resident biochemist here. OK, so our brilliant biochemist is Alexander. He’s got a presentation here, actually, if I can see it there and see if I pop up here. And there he is. Alex, can you tell us a bit about what you’re trying to explain here on the biochemistry side of things?
Alexander Isaiah: As you guys mentioned, just in general, glucose is the primary energy source in the way that we use it for the breakdown. Its breakdown on energy consumption is called glycolysis. So without getting too much into it, our end goal here is pyruvate, which then goes into the citric acid cycle to be turned into acetylcholine. In normal conditions, this is good to have a carbohydrate meal, but when in excess, do you produce too much acetylcholine? When is too much acetylcholine used? You end up inducing fatty acid synthesis, which is induced by significant levels of insulin. So by doing so, you have acetylcholine, which ends up turning into palmitate. And one thing that Kenna mentioned is that not all foods are of equal quality. So here, we can see all the different types of fatty acids. So without going too much into biochemistry, but just giving you an idea of what’s going on here? These numbers on the left side represent the number of carbons in a row, and then the numbers to the right of the semicolon are the number of double bonds. And usually, double bonds don’t play a significant role until you get into digestion and the way the body uses these. So by having more double bonds, it’s more fluid. So you notice the difference between a piece of lard and olive oil. What’s the difference? The only difference is the number of carbons and the number of double bonds. So here we have oleic acid, olive oil, and then we have some saturated fat. We can see that the difference is prominent in the number of carbons and double bonds. Double bonds allow for a lower melting point. That’s why olive oil is a liquid at room temperature versus fatty acids, and this plays a significant role in how the body uses these types of things.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Alex, are you saying that? We all know that the excellent work of olive oil, avocado oil, and coconut oil is the best thing is, this is why this happens.
Alexander Isaiah: Exactly. So the more double bonds they have, the more fluid it will be within the body and allow the body to use those fats on time versus clogging up artery arteries and creating plaques within those arteries.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Excellent. You know what? One of the things that insulin does, it pack away carbohydrates in energy in the cell. If you do that, what happens with this blood sugar? Eventually, insulin spikes it and puts it in the cells. Finally, the cell grows, hence the belly fat. Ultimately, The belly starts green and gains the fat cells, and they start getting bigger, bigger, bigger because they get injected in there. That stuff starts seeping out, and once it can’t go in anymore, it ends up in the places like the pancreas. It ends up in the places like the liver. It ends up in the intramuscular into the muscular tissue. And that’s why we have the accumulation. And when you have a big belly, that’s what tips off the doctor, not only with the triglycerides in the blood glucose levels but also the belly fat. And that’s one of the things we have to kind of assess. So are these now these fatty acids? What are fatty acids used for, typically, Alexander?
Alexander Isaiah: Fatty acids are used almost for everything within the body, especially for energy consumption. It’s like saying, would you rather be able to go five miles or 10 miles? You always want to go 10 miles, right? So gram for gram fat as an energy source is much more fuel-efficient than glucose or carbs. So carbs provide our four grams of four calories per gram and fats are around nine. So it’s almost it’s more than double the amount of energy that you’re producing from these fatty acids. The tricky part is just knowing which ones are good. So going into the good fatty acids, which will be the ones with the double bonds. So I mean, any plant oils, animal fats, depending on which ones, we tend to want to stay away from large amounts of wretched ionic acid, as they tend to cause inflammation responses through the inflammation pathway. But the rest of these are good, especially EPA and DHEA. So DHEA is used within the nervous system. It’s turned into neurotic acid and EPA as well. So getting these marine oils is going to be suitable for your system just in general.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know what, as I understand these processes and start realizing the biochemistry behind it, bringing it home to this process down to the cellular component it honors. It shows appreciation in terms of what creates the fatty acid excess. Now again, what happens due to too much of these fatty acids or carbohydrates in the bloodstream? The body tries to store it. It tries to store in the form of fat, and it’s shoved into the pancreas. So you get this fat inside the pancreas. If it can’t do it there, it eventually puts it in the liver. And like we mentioned, it gets it in the stomach, or that’s when we see it as a final thing. So then I like to take the explanation and break apart one other point, the high blood pressure component. Insulin has a direct effect on the kidneys. Insulin tells the kidneys, Look, we need to pack this stuff into the fat. And without getting beyond too much of the chemistry dynamics, you can see that what’s going to occur is that the kidneys will be commanded to hold more sodium. In chemistry, biochemistry, and clinical science, we learned that the more sodium you retain, the blood pressure rises. In essence, that’s how quick the blood pressure goes. So you do that for some time, and then you force the collection of atherosclerotic plaques because that fat is in there, and it can’t go anywhere. You’re going to have a problem in the long term, in the long term future. So speaking about the oils, as Alexander just did, one of the things we ask is, Well, what oils cannot we should know? We use canola oil, corn oil, sesame seed oil. I love sesame seeds. But the problem is that sesame seed oil causes inflammation, as Alex said, with arachidonic acids. So what we have to do is figure out precisely what types of oils we can do and avocados, as Kenna had mentioned, are a great source of fats that we can use and make things more processed. Our bodies and the old pyramid of diet are really bad because it’s heavy on carbohydrates. So one of the things that we look at is maintaining all those components. So we talked about triglycerides, the belly fat, how it’s put together. And each one of these, I want to point this out again. The high blood pressure, which is 135 high blood pressure, is not considered at 135. Usually, it’s at 140. OK. So if so, why are we using triglycerides at 150 are not regarded as excessive. You know, HDL is lower than 50 is not considered horrible, but in combination together, if you have one at all, these three of these components are the five. That’s what leads to a pre-position of of of being sick and feeling crummy, let alone any prolonged period of this will end up leading to metabolic disorders, heart problems, stroke problems, dementias that occur as a result of protracted metabolic syndrome states that are within the individual. I want to ask Alexander. He’s got some fascinating dynamics, as I want to present right now, and we’re going to show his screen right here because he’s got some exciting components on what also affects metabolic syndrome. Alexander.
Alexander Isaiah: So kind of going into what it is, I guess ketosis, because everyone wonders what goes on. So I kind of got this diagram here that I drew out for you guys. We’re ignoring the ephedrine pathway over here, but just in general. So what’s going to happen first is you’re going to deplete any glucose that you have. So the body typically stores around 100 grams of glucose in the liver and around 400 grams within the muscle components of the entire body. So if you times 500 times for, that’s about 2000 calories, which is your daily limit, so you’ve got almost a day’s worth of glucose always stored within your body. But once you deplete that, your body’s going to start looking for other things. In the meantime, it takes a few days for your body to switch over from burning sugar, which is glucose, to burning ketone bodies from fat. So what’s going to happen? Your, first of all, your adrenals are going to start releasing epinephrine, its precursors, norepinephrine. And this is because of a couple of different things. You’re going to get a bit jittery first, and you’re going to feel bad for the first couple of days, but then your body and starts switching over as your brain starts to begin using these ketone bodies as an energy source. So as you’re producing norepinephrine, these are just like, this is the cell surface here. These are just different precursor markers. So we have B1, B2, B3, and A2. Doing these will mark and signal to the gas protein, which will allow aminoglycosides to activate ATP into cyclic AMP. Now, cyclic AMP is an essential component of the degradation of fatty acids. The cool part is it’s inhibited by phosphodiesterase. So when people come in and say, why is caffeine a good fat burner? The main reason why is because caffeine inhibits phosphodiesterase to a certain extent. You don’t want to go too crazy with the caffeine and start doing lots of cups of coffee.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Should I have eight glasses of coffee, or how many cups?
Alexander Isaiah: I think one glass of coffee is more than enough. So by having cyclic amp be more active, you activate the thing called protein kinase A, which activates ATP, and then it starts a hormone-sensitive life base. Once hormone-sensitive lipase is activated, it begins to degrade. It begins to break down fatty acids. Once these fatty acids enter and are broken down, they then enter into the mitochondria, and the mitochondria will then produce heat from this. So that’s why people who are ketosis are always really warm. So what do I recommend when people are starting to do a ketosis diet? Water? Keto diet, definitely water and as well as, I would say, L-carnitine. So as we’re looking at L-carnitine here, we could see that during fatty acid degradation, you use L-carnitine as the primary transporter between the outer mitochondrial membrane and the inner mitochondrial membrane. So by using fatty acids, here’s fatty asceloca; after we’ve broken down these fatty acids, it’s going to enter CPT one, which is carnitine, a seal translocated want or poly transferase one. It’s going to enter and interact with carnitine, and then it’s going to turn into seal carnitine. Once seal carnitine turns into it, it can enter the inner mitochondrial membrane through these two enzymes translocation and CPT two to be broken down back into a seal code, which does the same byproduct as glucose eventually. Also, then, your mitochondria can use these in beta-oxidation. One thing to know is you have to drink a lot of water because people going through ketosis will be upregulating the urea cycle. So you need to make sure that you pull a lot of water or drink a lot of water throughout the day. Anyone doing a keto diet today has a minimum of a gallon of water throughout the day, not all at once, but throughout the day.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: It’s incredible, Alex, that you put that together because that makes perfect sense to me and also explains why people do say when we put them on the ketogenic diet, that they do increase body temperature and the water helps you kind of keep the whole system pumping because that’s what we’re pretty much made of. And also, the pathways that you indicated the hydrogen in the water are necessary for the process to occur.
Alexander Isaiah: Yes. Certain aspects within each of these fuel each other; it’s all an interconnected pathway. But you will upregulate the urea cycle during ketosis much more than when you’re not. For example, everyone’s notorious or cats are notoriously known for having a rotten urine smell. And we have to take a look at that from the reason why right? So general in humans there, urea content in the urine is three percent. In cats, on the other hand, it’s anywhere between six to nine percent. So you have to think about it. What is the only mammal on the planet that is a carnivorous animal that only eats meat? Since they only eat meat, the feline family upregulates their urea cycled, thus having more urea in their urine. So if you’re only a meat-eater, you’re going to have more urea. Therefore you need to drink more water to flush it out through your kidneys.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: That’s amazing because it explains why we make sure that everybody drinks a lot of water, and then they feel better. And I guess if we don’t monitor it correctly, if we don’t do it right, we get that thing called the ketogenic flu, right? And then the body feels kind of crummy until it restores and it stabilizes the blood glucose through ketones. Now, the body can use ketones for sugar, as it’s known. So one of the things that we do is teach the people exactly how to go through the process. And I know we got some research articles here, and Astrid wants to discuss a bit of that.
Astrid Ornelas: So basically, like, as Alex mentioned, when people start going, they start following the ketogenic diet, we do want to, you know, as he said, we want to make sure that they stay hydrated, but more so than that. I guess another thing that we want to educate people on is that not many people know, you know, we need to store up the body with good fats so that as the body adjusts, it starts burning fat as a fuel than sugar or glucose. So we want to teach people, what are the good fats that we want them to like to eat, you know, because like, we need to store up in these fats of that the body can go into ketosis and we can go through the whole process that Alex just explains.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know what? I would like to bring Trudy here because she’s the one that connects with the patients at the moment. We do assess someone to have metabolic syndrome. In terms of the resources, how do you go through the process of presenting? Hello, Trudy. Trudy, what are we going to do there? I’m going to ask you, how do you bring that? Because she’s our clinical liaison, our wellness liaison, and she’s the one that basically will give us the information that helps the patient in the right direction.
Trudy Torres: Well, hello. And I, you know, this is all excellent information, which is fantastic that we can provide this to the public. And I know this can be very overwhelming for people that are not don’t have this information. So that’s where I come in when people come, you know, either call us or come in inquiring about their different symptoms. They don’t necessarily know that they’re experiencing the metabolic syndrome. But you know, one of their main concerns is they’re waking. Based on their concerns, I connect them to our primary is with Kenna, and they go ahead and say, OK, well, what are the steps that we have to take and Kenna certainly educate them as far as, OK, this is the lab work that you’re going to have to take. We connect them with Dr. Jimenez after we know exactly their primary concern, and we’re going to start peeling things apart like an onion to get to the bottom of things and get them feeling better. They’re not only going to walk away with the specific results, but they’re also going to walk away with, like Astrid said, what are the good fats to have? What should I be eating? So they’re going to be walking away with a lot of information, but also structure. Another thing that we’re offering is that Kenna is always going to be there, you know, to answer any questions and also Dr. Jimenez, so they don’t have to feel overwhelmed with the process as they’re going through a better, healthy lifestyle.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, that one of the things is there’s a lot of confusion out there, and I’ve got to be honest with you. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. This misinformation can be categorized as intentional or old, or it’s just not up to date, with these five elements and an individual having three of them. It’s essential to repeat precisely how to fix this issue with the individual and change their lives because there’s nothing quicker to change the body than the ketogenic diet. We also have to monitor the individuals and monitor them through the process. Now we have Kenna Vaughn that she’s got some methods that we employ in the office and are helpful to her. Doctors do this around the country, but it’s beneficial in helping guide and allow for interaction and communication between us, the providers, and the patient. What kind of things do we offer, Kenna?
Kenna Vaughn: We have one-on-one coaching, which is great for when you’re just starting something out. Like they were talking about the ketogenic diet. You might be confused, and there is misinformation. So with this one-on-one coaching, it’s great because we can connect through an app that we have, and you pull out your phone. You can send a quick text message; hey, I saw one website said that I could eat this, but another said, this, can I have this? Things like that. We can clear up that confusion fast, which can keep you on track rather than doing that guessing game. We also have scales that connect to this app, which allows us to monitor the water weight they have and the fat that they have. And we can also monitor their activity through a wristband to constantly track the steps they’re taking. Ensure that they’re doing exercise because exercise is also great to help lower that blood glucose level.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, you mentioned that about the monitoring. We do that in the office along where we send the patients home with actual scales that are the mini BIAs and their hands and wrist. We can do pretty much for patients who want to connect with our office. We can directly get the information downloaded, and we can see their BIAs changing. We also use the in-body system, in which we do a deep analysis of the baseline basal metabolic rate, along with other factors that we’ve discussed prior podcast. This allows us to put together a quantifiable method to assess how the body is changing and rapidly restoring the body to or away from a metabolic syndrome episode. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling it really can. There’s nothing that destroys the body in these combinations of issues at one time. However, it’s easy to see that the body does everything quickly. It fixes a ketogenic diet, removes body weight, decreases the fat in the liver, decreases the intramuscular fat, restores blood sugar. It gets the mind working better. It helps the HDLs through some studies, and I know that Astrid knows there’s a study out there that pulls the information upon how the HDL are elevated with and with a ketogenic diet. We have a study here. You can put it on the screen right there that I think you found that shows the HDLs. Am I correct? And the apolipoprotein, the lipid part of the HDL, also is raised and activates the genetic component. Tell me about that.
Astrid Ornelas: So basically something that a lot of researchers, many health care professionals out there, doctors, they often say, is that when people have high cholesterol, you know, and we’re usually talking about the bad cholesterol. According to several research articles, it’s generally associated with a genetic predisposition when they have bad high cholesterol or the LDL fragment. If your parents, if your grandparents had high cholesterol, there is also an increased risk of you having a genetic predisposition to already having high cholesterol plus like add that like your diet. And if you follow a sedentary lifestyle and you know you don’t do enough exercise or physical activity, you have an increased risk of having higher bad cholesterol.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, I’m going to pull the information from I’ve noticed that Alexander’s pulling something information up here on the screen. He’s presenting the monitor where you can see his blood glucose and the screens that he’s going ahead and putting that up there for him. There you go. Alex, tell me what you’re talking about right there because I see that you’re talking about the apolipoprotein, the lipoproteins, and the HDL fragments there.
Alexander Isaiah: So kind of going into a little bit of everything here. So what happens when you eat something that is going to cause an increase in cholesterol? So first of all, you have these genes called Callum microns within the intestinal lumen or your GI tract, and they have apolipoprotein B 48. They have a B 48 because it’s 48 percent of apolipoprotein B 100, so it’s just a little different variation. These microns will bring these through the body and transfer them into the capillaries using apolipoprotein C and apolipoprotein E. Once they enter the capillaries, they’re going to degrade and allow for different aspects of the body to use them. So I have three tissues. We have adipose tissue, cardiac tissue, and skeletal muscle. So cardiac tissue has the lowest KM, and adipose tissue has the highest KM. So what is KM? KM is just a measurement of the way that the enzymes are used. So a low KM means a high specificity for binding to these fatty acids, and a high Km means low specificity for them. So what are the three parts of the body? They use the most energy. It’s the brain, the heart, and the kidneys. Those are the most caloric consumption parts of the body to stay alive. So, first of all, the heart relies large amounts on these fatty acids here, and transferring them to the heart uses mostly fatty acids. I think it’s about 80 percent; 70 to 80 percent of its fuel comes from fatty acids. And to deliver these, your body uses these Callum microns. So once the Callum microns exit the capillaries, it’s already an LDL. It has two choices: the LDL, It can be taken back to the liver or can switch its contents with HDL, and the seals can deliver them correctly to the proper places. So that’s why HDL is so important because they deliver them to the appropriate places if these Callum microns or these LDLs aren’t transferred correctly back to the liver. So why is LDL so detrimental to the system of our body? So here’s a couple of reasons why. So as LDL scavenges throughout the body, they are seen as a foreign object by our macrophages, and our macrophages are our cells used for immune response. So the macrophages end up engulfing these LDLs, and they turn into these things called foam cells. Foam cells become atherosclerotic plaque eventually. But what they do is they embed themselves within or under the surface of the epithelial lining, causing a buildup of these foam cells here and eventually blocking the pathways, causing a plaque. So by eating better fats, having a higher amount of HDL, you can avoid these plaques and avoid atherosclerotic plaques, which clog up your arteries.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know what, actually, the link between atherosclerotic plaques and metabolic syndrome you’ve made very, very clear at this point, and that is the reason why prolonged states of the metabolic syndrome do create these disorders. I want to take a moment to thank the entire crew here because what we’re doing is we’re bringing in a lot of information and a lot of teams. And if someone has an issue, I want them to meet the face they’re going to see when they walk into the office. So, Trudy, tell them how we greet them and what we do with them when they walk in if they feel they may be a victim of metabolic syndrome.
Trudy Torres: Well, we’re very blessed to have a very exciting and energized office. You’re always going to feel at home. If we don’t have the correct answer at that moment, we’re certainly going to research. We’re not going to toss your side. We’re always going to get back to you. Everybody gets treated as an individual. You know, each vessel that we have, it’s unique in its way. So we certainly don’t create a cookie-cutter approach. We’re always going to make sure that, as I said, you walk away with the most and valuable, informed option for yourself. We’re just a phone call away. We’re just a click away. And, you know, don’t ever feel that there’s not a reasonable question. We always want to make sure that all the questions and concerns you have always get the best answer possible.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Guys, I want to tell you, thank you. And I want to also share with you that we happen to be in the fantastic facilities when we do; there’s exercise involved with returning the body to a normal state. We function out of the PUSH Fitness Center. We’re doing the podcast from the fitness center. And you can see the information herewith Danny Alvarado. And he’s the one that or Daniel Alvarado, the director of Push Fitness who we work with a bunch of therapies and physical therapists to help you restore your body to where it should be. We look forward to coming back, and as I said, if you appreciate, are you like what we have here, reach down on the little bottom, hit the little button, and hit subscribe. And then make sure you hit the bell so you can be the first to hear what we got to go on. OK, thank you, guys, and we welcome you again. And God bless. Have a good one.
In today’s podcast, Dr. Alex Jimenez, health coach Kenna Vaughn, Truide Torres, biochemist Alexander Jimenez, and Astrid Ornelas, discuss how chiropractic care can ultimately help treat sciatica or sciatic nerve pain.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Hey, guys, we’re live today. We’re going to be discussing the scourge of the back, the scourge of the back for myself. I’m a chiropractor practicing out here in El Paso, Texas. We usually have a disorder that’s typically there isn’t a day that we don’t see it, and it affects so many people. But there’s a lot of confusion with, and I call it, the scourge of the low back. It’s called sciatica. Sciatica is a disorder that has many, many reasons and many, many causes. One of the most important things is first to assess the reason and cause of sciatica. But most importantly, when it first hits an individual, it strikes them, usually with a shocking misunderstanding as to what’s going on in their legs. They feel pain in the low back. They sometimes feel pain in the leg. Different areas depend on where the issue lies, so a little bit of its anatomy breakdown and explanation of what it is. First of all, it’s a syndrome. It’s a syndrome that has many reasons and many causes. The issues that come about and are that that make sciatica arise are vast. I would venture to say that there are a million people that come in with sciatica. There are a million reasons that have presented each one of those patients. There is a majority of problems in and a subset of issues. We’re going to go over that. Today, our goal is to bring out the awareness that it is a problem, just like the present anemia. And there are many reasons why a person would have anemia. Many people are familiar with anemia, and they say that’s low blood, but you’re going to find out where the blood issue is to determine exactly what the causes of anemia are. Well, the same thing with sciatica. There’s a lot of reasons why the sciatic presentation occurs. So we’re here to kind of begin the process of explaining that. So we’re going to get real deep and down and nasty with the science of it. We’re going to try to give you some tools that you can look at and assess. So your provider can give you a better explanation, or you can ask better questions in terms of where your sciatica originates. So the first thing is to understand the anatomy, and I’ll go through the anatomy in a very visual way. But I want to first kind of take you to a visual, and my visuals are very three-dimensional and offered through complete anatomy. Complete anatomy has given us the ability to use this and show, and it is something that many medical students use. So in today’s modern-day, we don’t have to use some visceral or some sort of human anatomy. We can use these tools to help us present to the patients and to teach. So it’s probably one of the most used anatomical structured systems, and we use it to teach people in our patients every day, given the dynamics of sciatica. Here we have a picture of a sciatica HDMI, so we can see a presentation of what the sciatica nerve looks like when we can see it. The interesting dynamics here is that when you look at the interesting presentation, you can see as I go away how vast and how large it is. Now the first thing is I rotate this individual. You got to see that it comes from a large glute plexus in the lumbar spine to the sacral nerve roots. So anywhere down the line that anything is touching this thing, this beautiful, powerful nerve, you’re going to find that there is pain radiating down. So we’re going to discuss those issues. And as we kind of go over that, we want to understand that so away from HDMI. So what we’re looking at are the issues that present with us when we discuss it. So what are the causes, and what is sciatica? Sciatica is inflammation of the sciatic nerve, and as it presents what happens many times, it is the largest nerve in the body, and it’s how most people know it, and it travels from the lumbar plexus to the leg. So, anywhere that that thing is touched, it’s going to radiate pain. Now, what are the causes? Well, they could be from vascular. They could be compressive. They could be lymphatic. There could be a space-occupying lesion, such as a tumor causing the issues. Now, a good clinician will do a lot of different tests and a lot of different assessments to determine where it is having the problem. So when I have a patient, they come in when the first thing we have to do is a history we have to assess and find out what’s going on. So finding the history of something that suddenly someone starts sitting or they become active, or they get hit in the back, and they start having sciatica, it boats to a well, dynamics. So what happens is, what we need to do is we need to discuss the dynamics of where it begins and what goes on. So in terms of our direction, I would like first to take you to the physical assessment. When you explain to your doctor what’s going on, you need to tell him exactly when you started having it. That’s very important. The history is very like when these issues are? Do you have a sedentary life? So these are the types of issues that present most of the time a person comes into the office with having a severe presentation that they’re shocked? They didn’t expect this and what occurs in this particular area is that you can see where the nerve root comes in. So over here, you’ve got to figure out where it came from. As you notice, a lot of the reasons that many of these individuals have is because it’s a little bit of atrophy and muscular issues that arise. As you can see right here, there’s a lot of areas where the nerve can keep becoming trapped, and this is the main reason that most people have this issue now as they go through this and they present a symptom. I got to figure out, and we have to figure out where the problem originated with our team. So as I go through that, I want to give you a different dynamics here in what I’m going to explain. I’m going to present my team to you so that they’re all going to. Each one of them is going to explain a little different aspect of what goes on. Today, we will discuss how a coach, such as an individual helping the doctor, can assess the situation. We are going to talk to our coach Kenna. We’re going to talk to Astrid, who’s going to bring some science knowledge here. We will bring a patient in, discuss the experience with her, and bring in our top guy from the university at the biochemical level. He will teach us a little bit about some nutraceuticals and some applicational processes that we can do to help an individual with sciatica. So at first light to tell, I like to ask a question to Kenna. So Kenna, what I want to do is I want to ask you exactly what it is that you notice when a patient presents with sciatica and what kind of things we can do in the office and what’s our approach specifically more like the metabolic issues and the disorders that present that way? So when we’re looking at here, let me go ahead and head into this area, tell me a little bit about how we present a patient and what we deal with when we’re talking to an assessment or doing an assessment.
Kenna Vaughn: So one thing that many patients with sciatica have is the pain they’re feeling, of course and that low back. But another thing is they don’t have a lot of movement due to that pain, and movement is essential. It’s what life revolves around. So we take that movement, and we look at how we can help this patient decompress that sciatic nerve with the adjustments that Dr. Jimenez does, but also how can I benefit from my side of things for this patient? So we do have a lot of great resources available to us. We send our patients to Push, which is a gym here that helps them get that calibration in their muscles that they need to build up those stronger muscles all around that sciatic nerve so that this nerve doesn’t get pinched frequently or as often. And another thing we have available to us is an app called Dr. J. Today. And what that does is it syncs with the bracelet that our patients wear, which allows us to track their movement. So we want to focus on that movement as part of it. And another thing we can do is nutraceuticals in supplements. So what are nutraceuticals and supplements? One of the main ones we focus on that almost every individual should be taking is vitamin D3, and we like it coupled with vitamin K. This will help your bones and circulation. And it’s going to help to decrease that glucose by increasing your insulin sensitivity. And this is where it comes into play with sciatica.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I had a question for you in terms of that. When you’re discussing that we’re dealing with and sciatica as a pain in the hips, we’re correlating, and we’re tying together, I guess, a disorder that many people have as metabolic syndrome and many times are overweight. And that was one of the presentations that many of the patients with sciatica, not that everyone is overweight, with sciatica. Still, many people who become sedentary and don’t move as much do suffer from metabolic syndrome. So to get that under order, one of the things is to bring the insulin under control. And once we do that, we start losing weight and getting more active with the exercise protocols. She mentioned Push because we began to calibrate the hips. Now, as you can tell from our picture here, there’s a whole lot of muscles in this region, OK? So as I kind of use the application, you can see a little bit more of the muscle tissue that is involved. So as we look at the muscle tissue, we can see that calibrating and these muscles that control the hip actually propel the creature, so propel humans, so to speak, right? So what happens is as this happens, if this becomes deconditioned through a sedentary lifestyle. Well, the thing that’s lying underneath also stops working, and the muscles stop working as effectively. So one of the ways that we treat people is through a coach to assess their body mechanics and put them through the Push Fitness protocols that can help them get a calibration of the structures. One of the things that we also do in this process is we look at the sitting issues and tell me a bit of what you do, Kenna, in terms of helping people adjust their lifestyle or modify their mobility issues.
Kenna Vaughn: So what their mobility, as I said, we use the app, and we also use Push Fitness, and the supplements have a lot that comes into play because like I said, with that increasing the insulin sensitivity, what we’re going to want to do it, that is it’s going to help to control the blood sugars. And you might not necessarily relate blood sugars to sciatica just yet, but as I said, everything is connected. So when we put our patients on a protocol and have them control these blood sugars, it also helps maintain their inflammation because sugars and chemicals cause that inflammation in the blood. And that’s also it’s going then to cause nerve damage to our body and our system. And then, once we have that nerve damage going, we’ll see many more patients sitting down, which relates to that lack of motion. And then we see a lot of patients coming in with sciatica.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Sciatica. So basically, we’re going back to the same monster, which is called inflammation. Right. So inflammation is the deal. People that have sciatica will often tell the story of how it kind of looms with them. It’s like having this untrustworthy nerve back there that if they have stress or go through emotional dynamics, it affects sciatica. So this threshold that activates the sciatica presentation could have even an emotional component to it. So we want to bring that to light, too, because many people have normal lives, but they don’t have the presentation under normal situations. Suddenly, bam, they get an emotional, financial issue, family things, and sciatica just flares. Where is that even logical, right? The key is inflammation, inflammatory response, stress responses. And those issues do create an almost perfect storm to create a predisposition for inflammation. So that’s why we bring in the dietary components and the food to start eating better to prevent inflammation again. Those are some of the things. So she also mentioned the issue of Push. Push is our fitness center, where we actually put people through exercise protocols, and when we start putting people through exercise protocols, it’s there to calibrate. Now, what’s the biggest muscle in the body? Well, not too far from the anatomy to an anatomical structure. You can see the muscles in this particular area, and everybody knows that the glutes are the big muscles. So when you see this powerful muscle, if this muscle becomes decalibrated from a sedentary lifestyle, you’re going to notice that you’re going to have a lot of predisposition. So it’s like a car with flat tires. So if the car has flat tires, it starts swaying and moving to the wrong side. Well, if it’s swing, you can imagine that it affects the axis and the axles, and all that kind of stuff starts happening. Things like these happen, but in our human structure, there’s a finely calibrated system here. One of the things that many people don’t know and don’t think about is the lymphatic structure. Now, if you can see here, you can see the lymphatic. Now those guys ride directly next to the venous and arterial structures, and you can see it here. So as you can see that for progressing, you also look at the arteries. So if someone doesn’t have an arterial system that is working well and sitting on this, you can see congestion occurring around the structures, around the nerves. Now there’s a lot of nerves in here. So when you start looking at these dynamics, you start seeing that a person who is not using their muscles has an increased congestion level. So as I remove these muscles here, you can see this picture, and I’m going to remove every one of them. You start seeing the noticeable dynamics of how complex their nervous system is. So over here, you can see the complexity of how those nerves function. It’s amazing to see all the structures in here. So when you look at this, you can see the amount of influence that lack of movement would cause. It’s almost like a traffic jam. Imagine sitting on this thing all day long, OK, let alone be inactive. So one of the things we want to do is to assess exactly what it is. And one of the things that we do is to calibrate the system. So going back to removing these picked areas, you want to go ahead and work on the big systems. OK, well, as you can see, these muscles bring a huge component into helping sciatica. Now, where are the sciatic issues coming from? Now let’s go ahead and start discussing those particular issues as we can kind of go through this. And I want to take you through a little anatomy lesson here because it does require a little bit. As I remove these things, we’re going to see all of the structures that come in, and actually, but you can see if I can get the nervous system only out to the minimal component of it, the big ones. And as you can see here, you can look over this way and see anywhere down the line right here by where the nerves are. Them out where the disk comes out in this particular area as it penetrates forward, it goes this what we call the sacral notch, which is this guy right here. This hole is a sacral notch where it comes out, and you can see that it can be bumped into the bone and the actual femur here. So there’s a lot of areas that we can see that directly affect the sciatica regions. But having gone through that, I’m going to go into that in a little bit deeper. But I want to go ahead and get a little personal story right now. I want to ask an individual now what sits in here, and most women, you know, this is where they contain babies, right? So in a situation where you have an individual that is going through a lot of changes, such as an individual who’s having a child, you can see where the hips actually change and right down there, if you can see down there, this is where the sacrum has to open up to allow for the birthing canal. You see that big hole right there. A baby’s got to go through there, and if it can’t go through there, which it probably won’t until probably the ninth month where this area starts expanding, guess who’s going to go by, then kick in on the way down? OK, that would be a child. OK, so let’s talk about that. I’d like to present Trudy here because she has a story of how it affected her.
Trudy Torres: Well, I guess, you know, as a woman, you know, it’s an extremely joyful situation when you find out that you’re going to be a mom. If it’s your first-time baby, you’re in for a roller coaster. You know, like you guys were mentioning, there’s a lot of different scenarios that you go through emotionally, physically. So when you’re pregnant, you’re the perfect storm for something like this to come up. You know, you are just balanced from you’re so, so tired the first trimester. I’ve always worked out. So for me, I have never experienced sciatic pain before, and for me being so active, I went from being 100 percent active to just being so tired. I had to be super careful about spending my energy, especially in the first trimester. So on top of that, if you add, you know, everything else that’s going on physiologically with me and then my life became so sedentary. On top of that, you know, I have a desk job. So sitting at a desk and then not compensating, moving all of a sudden, that pain is so excruciating. I did not experience this with my first baby. I experienced this with my second child. And, of course, I gained more weight with my second child. So once again, you know, you’re adding problem over the problem. And just because you’re pregnant, that doesn’t mean you’re eating for two, because unfortunately, some of us, you know, have that misconception, and that’s when your weight tends to get a little bit out of control. So you’re adding a lot of different factors that create the perfect storm and are just super, super hard. One of the things that Kenna mentioned that helped me was becoming active and being exposed to Push. I had someone here that was able to work out specifically with me being pregnant. Obviously, my limitations as you start gaining more weight, it’s not the same thing that you can do when you’re not having a baby. So I was able to continue to work out later on in and, you know, after I was exposed to chiropractic and implementing exercise.
Kenna Vaughn: So the main symptoms you had when you had sciatica, and you were pregnant, was it mainly just pain, or did you also get that tingling feeling because there is more than one symptom of sciatica?
Trudy Torres: No. Unfortunately, it was just not pain. It was pain. It was burning all down my leg. I did not know what was going on. As I said, this was not with my first pregnancy, and every pregnancy is different with my first child. I watched more what I ate. I was still active, so I believe it was a combination of things, you know, that I felt like I was eating for two. I gained more weight than I should have.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I got a question: Was it when you rapidly gained weight during the final trimester?
Trudy Torres: I think everything kind of started happening a little at a time. I wasn’t that active in the first trimester, so I began having flare-ups not as bad as once I gained the weight. But, you know, once I gained more weight, that’s when I started having more severe symptoms, as I said, the burning, the lower pain. It was just excruciating, and it’s something that I don’t wish upon my worst enemy.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Now, did you ever have a recurrence after you had your baby?
Trudy Torres: Yes, I did. I did, and unfortunately, I did, but one of the things has helped me keep that under control. It’s been being active, continue to watch my weight. My supplements were one thing that I would ask Coach or Dr. Jiménez when you’re pregnant. I know we were talking about the different supplements. What do you still recommend for pregnant women to get on the different vitamin D and K supplements?
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: That’s an excellent question, and one that I’ll answer very clearly as a wide disclaimer; you need to make sure that your doctor knows what you’re experiencing. Obstetricians, which are OB-GYN doctors. They’re very well astute as to what type of supplements. So in the world of supplementation, it is wise to have a doctor assess that, and many of them will make sure that you have good supplementation. The area where it’s the accurate assessment is you have to have supplementation. Your body’s trying to produce an enormous amount of cellular activity as it creates life. It draws upon a particular area that inflammation goes crazy, the body goes into dynamic changes. So nutrition becomes an essential thing from intestinal nutrition through metabolic nutrition. So one of the things is that you have to have a doctor, typically today’s individual who is in there as young childbearing age, they have a doctor evaluating. So yes, one of the essential things is from folic acid to vitamin E, D. These are a whole, complete gamut of vitamins that are assessed and given by their doctors. So most women will know that if they take some medication, they have to put it clearly by their doctor. That’s the most important thing. And the second thing is on the supplementation side; once your doctor knows, he’s probably going to give you something of a basic level of supplementation and nutritional assessment. So in terms of that, a dietitian can evaluate you and assess you and determine what’s going on in terms of the aggressive approaches where an individual is not pregnant; there’s a lot of things that can be done. But let me ask you this. I know that you do a little bit of a CrossFit, and you do that kind of stuff. And you mentioned that you had sciatica after. I want to go to the point that many people who have sciatica lead a predisposed life to sciatica now, meaning that once you get it, it’s not that your terminal is that you always have the potential of having it, so whether your body dynamics have changed. Typically, you’re not 18, and now you’re 40. What happens is your body is warning you that it’s not working as it should be. And suddenly, the nerve starts becoming flared up, either the compression through atrophy of muscle or imbalance of muscles. So all those things are essential; I notice that you mentioned something that you did. It also affected you after. Did you do some competitions later, and did it affect you?
Trudy Torres: I did do competitions after. What helped me keep it under control was that its different factors to keep it under control. You know that keeping moving makes sure that you’re taking the right supplements in chiropractic care. I’m a firm believer, you know, of a holistic approach, and I believe that a combination of all it has helped me keep it under control. I have not had flare-ups, but I believe it’s because I’ve had all these different combinations. As I said, you know, I kept active. I have, you know, been in average weight. I have also implemented chiropractic, you know, as maintenance.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, I would like to give people a kind of insight as to what happens when you first go to a doctor, and they assess you; there are many ways to figure it out. One of the ways that it’s an easy way if there’s degenerative and there are bone changes is an x-ray. And that’s what we typically look at, and we first start all assessments. But the definitive assessor who gives the vast amount of information is looking for some compression. And at that point, sometimes we have to look at the arterial-venous circulation. But the number one way to determine if someone has sciatica due to a disc injury or some compression or space-occupying lesions like a tumor or some arthritis or some sort of imbalance in the muscle is genuinely the MRI. The MRI is an excellent tool. Now, if there is bone involved, a CAT scan is used. The EMG is used to determine the muscular tone and the muscle’s ability to react and see which tone levels. But you don’t need to be a rocket scientist and put someone through that. They already know that their muscles are tight, and there is an issue. The ability to determine how the nerve functions is a nerve conduction velocity test that tells you how fast and slow the nerves could work. Now in the situation where we do a bone scan, we’re trying to look for any metabolic issues outside, and there could be a tumor or some problem. But that’s rare, and that’s not typical, but the number one way to assess an issue is through an MRI and an X-ray. Those will give you the most significant, broadest areas. Now I want to go ahead and talk a bit about nutraceuticals and specifically nutraceuticals. We’re going to go ahead in this about the treatments for it. And as we go through that, I’d like to go ahead and discuss certain areas and specific supplements. Now Astrid is our resident nutraceutical information gathering. We also have a biochemist in the background who will bring some insight to a different level. But what kind of things do we typically offer patients when they need it as a metabolic, a leaving protocol?
Astrid Ornelas: OK, well, first of all, I want to bring in an interesting statistic. According to researchers, approximately 80 percent of the population suffer from some type of back pain. Included in that are low back pain and sciatica. So with that being said, of course, it becomes a priority to know what is it and what can we do to assess this common problem? And like, Kenna and Dr. Jimenez, like you and Trudy have said, exercise is essential. And together with exercise, we want to bring in a diet. We want to eat foods and supplements. And because obesity or excess weight is one of the problems is one of the leading causes or one of the most common, commonly well-known causes of sciatica. We want to, you know, all together with exercise and following like a good, a good diet. We want to follow these things so that we can. If we lose weight, it can help improve sciatica. So with that in mind, there are several of them. I guess natural remedies, natural nutraceuticals, if you will, can help reduce or improve sciatica symptoms and, therefore, lose weight. So one of the ones that I want to talk about is that we have it here: turmeric or curcumin. So turmeric is a plant, it’s a flowering plant, and it’s related to ginger. And we eat the root. That’s what we know it. This yellow kind of orange-looking root is very commonly used in Asian foods and most commonly in curry and curcumin. You’ll hear turmeric and curcumin used a lot interchangeably together, and curcumin is the active ingredient that’s found in turmeric. So one of the things that I wanted to bring up with turmeric and curcumin is the benefits that many people can take, and they can either eat turmeric or take turmeric supplements. It can help to reduce sciatica or sciatic nerve pain. So turmeric has a lot of anti-inflammatory properties, which can help reduce pain and swelling, which is probably one of the most common symptoms of sciatica. There’s a lot of research studies that have found that turmeric or curcumin can reduce neural inflammation, which is inflammation in the nerves, which, as some of us here, know if your sciatica is caused by a disc herniation or a herniated disc, sometimes the substances or the chemicals that are inside of your disc, they can irritate the nerves. So taking turmeric and curcumin can help reduce the inflammation caused by these irritating compounds. It is also a powerful antioxidant that can help reduce oxidative stress, which can cause inflammation. And probably one of the highlights of taking turmeric or curcumin is that it can improve metabolic syndrome, as we previously discussed in a past podcast. Research studies have found that turmeric can help regulate body fat by reducing inflammation. It can also help lower bad cholesterol. It can lower triglycerides. It can improve blood sugar levels. And it has antibacterial properties as well.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Let me ask you. We’re talking about the potential of someone having sciatica; since some people have sciatica, that kind of looms on them. Well, we’re trying to do with turmeric, and we’re trying to prevent it from kicking off. So it’s basically like prophylactic prevention. I like to go a little deeper, and we have our resident scientist here, Alexander, and he is right with us right now, and he’s got some points of view on some of those supplementations. Tell us a bit of what you learned in terms of supplementation and your point of view on how we can assist sciatica from a biochemical point of view.
Alexander Isaiah: Well, there are a couple of different ways of taking different perspectives and avoiding the whole. An inflammation response is a good way of saying it. Let me see. Can you guys see my screen here?
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yes, we see you, we see you right now. So I saw your screen. Yes, I do. We see the screen entirely.
Alexander Isaiah: Awesome. So I’m going to go into a little bit of the biomechanics of what’s going on with sciatica. Then we’re going to break down a little bit of the muscles, and then we’ll go into the supplementation aspect of what we can do to have either prevention or active treatment during treating sciatica. So here we could see we have three individuals from left to right. The first one is an individual who has a neutral spine. And you can see that as we draw a line down the middle there. External auditory Matis, the ear, is in line with their deltoid and is in line with the median part of the sacrum. In the second person, we can see that they have a little bit of dysfunction in terms of their physical aspect. So here we have an individual whose sacral promontory, which is the anterior side of the sacrum, is tilted superior, and their posterior area is tilted, posterior, inferior. I’m sorry. And what this is called, this is called a counter mutation. So by having that sacrum pointed up, you’re putting more stress on the thoracic region and causing the areas to be more inclined to different stresses. And most of the time, this is caused by tight hamstrings. So these hamstrings are pulling down, forcing the anterior side to come up and stretching these quadriceps. So it can either be done from an imbalance of over-powerful hamstrings or tight hamstrings and weak quads. In the third individual as we draw the same line down the middle. We can see that they are almost in line, but on an individual like this, we could see that their sacral promontory, the front side of the sacrum, is tilted anteriorly, which is called mutations. So we have a counter mutation over here. It’s going to go counter. And then mutation over here on the right side, so an easy way to remember this. They’ll stick forever is that this is pretty much if you think plumber’s butt, this is what it looks like. This is what J-Lo looks like. Oh, so you’ll never forget it that way. But the difference is here is that here the pressure is on the thoracic spine. But in an individual with notated hips, the pressure is in the lower back. So let’s say someone is pregnant and developing another child in this area. They’re going to be putting more pressure on the lower back versus someone who has pressure on their thoracic area. They’re going to be more pressure there. So going into a little bit more of the anatomy. We can see that we have all the different muscles here, and we could see the piriformis, which is this muscle right here. I’m going to give you different colors for you guys, so that you can see better. It is muscle right here. And then we could see the superior gemellus is right under that. So sandwiched between the two is the sciatic nerve. And if we have someone who is mutated, they’re going to be stretching these muscles more and putting more compression on that sciatic nerve, causing that area to be more inflamed. More of those neuropathies are occurring, shooting down the leg. And then in other instances, when we have the piriformis, which is split in half and the sciatic nerve is running between them, and that’s 10 percent of the population that that usually happens. And so and these people have always had sciatic problems. So by strengthening and working on those conditions and going over those nutraceuticals, we’re about to go into, we can treat and alleviate some of those symptoms. So the first one I kind of want to go into is a little bit of niacin. So niacin, we all see it as the store brand as something popping up like that. And most of the time, it’s either in 250 mg or 500 mg of capsules or tablets. I always recommend getting the tablets just because you can take half of the tablets. And I tell people this is because most of the time, nicotinic acid is the main thing is, vitamin B3 causes a little bit of a flush effect, but that’s just the way it works. So we’re going into it here. We can see that nicotinic acid, as it’s going through its chemical pathway, actually produces lots of NAD+, and NAD+ is essential in the cellular metabolism of many tissues. So going into brief biology, we all know that the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cells we were all beaten to death growing up in basic biology. But as we take a look more in-depth at the structure of the mitochondria, we could see that it has an outer membrane, an inner membrane, and then an interim membrane space. So we’re going to look mainly at this little section here that’s folded in between, which are called the cristae. And we could see that the first complex, known as complex one or all the known as any dehydrogenase, is responsible for using NADH, converting it and using its protons, and moving it across the gradient to make ATP. But we could see that more NAD+ is produced here, right? So that’s where niacin comes into effect. We supplement more with NAD+ to cause a reduction reaction between NADH and some other electrons, forcing it into NADH. So what does this all mean? Pretty much what we’re doing is we’re creating a boulder downhill effect, so we’re making more NAD, and we’re forcing it to go to product. And how does this happen? Just easy thermodynamics is you put a lot of it up the hill. The enzymes are going to force the work to go down the hill and make more energy. In doing so, and you have a more healthy metabolism of cells. And this does not only correlate to neuropathies, but it also helps with circulatory function, cardiovascular health; the main multi nucleotide muscle in the body is the heart, so you’re not only making sure that you’re neuropathies are covered, but as well as you’re making sure that you’re keeping a healthy heart just by supplementing with vitamin B3. Another great one, saying that you have more ATP produced and more functioning and healthy tissues, is green tea. I chose to use green tea because it has a very similar pathway to curcumin in the sense of anti-inflammatory effects. So the main ingredient in green tea in case you either have green tea in your house or curcumin available, whichever one’s easiest for you, they mostly have the same chemical pathways in that they inhibit either inflammation or cell proliferation neural damage. So the main chemical in green teas is called catechins, and catechins are similar to catecholamines, like epinephrine and norepinephrine, which is just adrenaline. And the main one is EGCG. The cool part about EGCG is that it inhibited NF Kappa B and ROS. ROS is just a reactive oxygen species, which is just free radicals, which can cause havoc and wreak havoc throughout your body, which is why it’s an antioxidant. So in doing so, it prevents NF Kappa B from producing any proliferating effects from cells or inflammation or neural damage. Now, if we go more into biochemistry, I can just break it down a little bit here. So EGCG will upregulate AMP. High levels of AMP will down-regulate this enzyme, called glycolysis, and allow for ATP to be converted to CATP. This is important because not only does the CATP break down things, but it mainly breaks down any adipose tissue and helps kill any cells that are proliferating too quickly, such as cancer cells. And it also keeps cells functioning properly, such as neural cells. So as we’re coming here, another cool part about green tea is it has small amounts of caffeine. If you are pregnant, we don’t recommend that you do any caffeine or stimulatory effects. Always consult with your doctor before taking any of these things. Specifically, something that does have caffeine and that we just doesn’t want to mix anything, especially during pregnancy. But if you are trying to make sure that you help your sciatica or your metabolic syndrome. Green tea has another effect. Using caffeine, which inhibits phosphodiesterase and phosphodiesterase diseases, is responsible for turning off CATP, so it’s a double whammy effect. Not only are you burning fat and shutting down glucose storage, but you’re also allowing for this catabolic or this structure that breaks down things to keep going. Here’s a little bit of an overview of the different things that green tea does and how it helps. And just kind of going into another cool part about green tea is that it binds to other very toxic things, such as iron. We know that we have iron in every red blood cell, but people who have hemochromatosis have too much iron in their blood, and they have to give blood about once a week. Someone who has hemochromatosis can take supplementation of green tea and reduce their iron levels, preventing any toxicity from those iron.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, when you’re talking about those pathway patterns, you remind me very clearly that many of the times, the whole idea behind our show is to try to give you natural ways. However, there are potent medications that work with these pathways, one of which is gabapentin, used for neuropathic pain. Many people don’t want to do that because of the side effects and the critical issues that it causes. We were looking at this in a natural format in a natural way. Going back to the metabolic, what are the things that we notice in the metabolic areas you have seen? What are the other supplements? Do you notice that I have been able to assist people in recovering from because Astrid mentioned turmeric, and that’s the line we’re using. We’re using the anti-inflammatory. They’re limiting, limiting the reactive oxygen species or the ROSs to prevent the inflammation from occurring. Is that correct?
Alexander Isaiah: Yes. OK. The main thing is to inhibit the production of NF kappaB, which both curcumin, other known as turmeric, both have the same name. They’re interchangeable and green tea, and both inhibit these inflammatory pathways and cancer pathways.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yes. So let me ask you, Astrid, in terms of those inflammatory comments. Tell me a few of your thoughts on this particular matter.
Astrid Ornelas: Well, I wanted to add another compound that can benefit sciatica or sciatic nerve pain. And that is called alpha-lipoic acid or ALA. And so ALA is an organic compound, and it is produced naturally in the body, but of course, in smaller amounts. Or it can be found in foods such as red meat or organic meats or in plant foods such as broccoli, spinach, Brussel sprouts, and tomatoes. Or it can also be taken as a dietary supplement. And I wanted to discuss the effects or the benefits of alpha-lipoic acid. Because just like green tea and turmeric or curcumin, ALA is also a powerful antioxidant, and it helps reduce inflammation, according to several research studies. And it can also have a lot of benefits for people with metabolic syndrome because it can help lower blood sugar or blood glucose levels. It can improve insulin resistance, which is, you know, an effect, or it’s something that they can that can ultimately cause diabetes. And several research studies have also found that alpha-lipoic acid can also improve nerve function, which, you know, people with sciatica or sciatic nerve pain, especially caused by neuroinflammation. ALA can also help improve nerve function in these people.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: OK. That’s an essential point of view. As you can see here on our list, we have quite a few different presentations and areas such as vitamin C, vitamin D, calcium, fish oils, omega 3s with EPA, berberine, glucosamine, chondroitin, alpha-lipoic acid, acetyl-l-carnitine, ashwagandha, soluble fibers, vitamin E, green tea, and turmeric. As you can tell, there’s a lot of things that we can do to stop the inflammatory cascade. We’re going to be going into all those because sciatica is so complex and diverse that we have to find the best for the patient from the millions of presentations that it has. So throughout the anatomy, as we discussed, and I’ll show you back the anatomy in a second here, you can see that there’s a lot of physiological and as Alex presented biomechanical imbalances that, if not taken into consideration, we will end up with issues in the future as a result of these predisposing dynamics. Now, as we recover these dynamics, we’re going to discuss many different topics. So I wanted to at least give a little more on the side of the things that we do now in terms of differential diagnosis. Many other issues can cause these presentations and from, you know, the dynamics of just a compressive nerve through space-occupying dynamics. We have other areas that come in and affect the patients. So what we’re going to do is in the following seminars, we’re going to go over specific types of things we can do, but let’s give you some guided ideas in terms of the treatment protocols that are out there. We have chiropractic care, which is a form of chiropractic. Chiropractic means mobilizing joints and moving the body, and there are thousands of ways we can do it. A lot of people think that it’s just manipulation or adjusting the spinal. We have to take a lot of things into consideration. We work on the bones; we work in the muscles; we work on the counter muscles. We have to formulate many dynamics to figure out what’s best in line to assist each patient. Once we find out the cause and find out what we call etiology or the pathology and the problem. We can go and use different methods. We use acupuncture, nutraceuticals. We work hand in hand with different providers to provide medications. We also do the goal ultimately in sciatica is to eliminate any chance of surgery if there is a surgical need or that needs to be done. But that’s such a small dynamic that we don’t want to go there unless we have to. We have different other protocols in different methods of treatment, like dry needling. We do aggressive rehabilitation. Now, why are we doing rehabilitation? Because as you saw in the picture earlier, the muscles we have were extremely involved in calibrating the hips. We want to make sure that we, we determine now over here, we got some basic care. We also got some aggressive care. Now, as you know, some basic care will be like ice-cold ultrasound, tens units, spinal adjustments, lifestyle changes, which is pretty much the biggest one because most people end up in a chiropractic office because their lifetime lifestyles change. Now, what do I have? I have a person who was an athlete at one point that suddenly got a desk job and now doesn’t move as much. Well, that’s easy. We can start getting that person back into yoga, pilates, tai chi, getting their bodies to align pelvically, and their whole body structure to get back to where it should be. Here’s the deal as soon as you can get past the inflammation and prevent that, and we can get you to move your body in a way that you did when you were a child, kind of like moving, dancing, and walking. That’s the way to calibrate the glutes. This is a powerful muscle, and as we’ve learned through technology and science, immediate atrophy occurs with the muscles not used. So imagine what happens when you start getting a job, and you used to be an athlete, and now you sit down eight hours a day, that’s going to give some great dynamic. So one of the crazy components is that as I look at this, I give you an idea of the types of exercises we can do. We can go into the extreme kind of CrossFit environment. And if we look at that, you just don’t look at the crazy structures, but you see people moving dynamically. A lot is going on here, and you can see that we can come up with our rehab centers. We have extreme athletes, too, even the people that are, you know, able to move just a little bit. But the point is that as we do this process, we can help someone with the treatments and protocols occurring, as you can see in this particular area. We can see Trudy and me. This is one of the things that the reason I was alluding to. But we can see when you were doing some self-treatment here. Tell me a little bit about what you were doing and what you were experiencing at that point.
Trudy Torres: That was, I believe, if I recall correctly, that was after my competition. I did compete for CrossFit. And, you know, it’s hard, after for a couple of hours. It takes a toll on your body. So I was kind of stretching my hip and stretching, you know, the rest of my glute area to avoid that flare up again. That’s something that once you experience it once and you have to go through the treatment, it stays in the back of your head because you certainly don’t experience pain again. That’s why you have to pay attention to all the different preventive areas and approaches to avoid ever having a flare-up.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Well, I got to tell you that I led you there because I know you had a lot of experience with sciatica. Alex, let me ask you this. You know, you were an aggressive competitor in the world that you did things. Tell me a bit of the thing that you did that you noticed when you were working. Let’s say an as a collegiate athlete, did you ever have hip issues?
Alexander Isaiah: Only when I didn’t stretch or when I didn’t work on my core muscles, or when I wasn’t making sure that I was anatomically in line, I did have some issues either with joint pain or just lower back problems or even upper back problems that all just tied into either flexibility or I just wasn’t paying attention to either my diet as strictly as I should, especially at that level. So, yes, I did.
Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yeah. You know what? There’s a lot to be covered here, and we’re going to be discussing a lot of issues. Did anyone want to add something else before we kind of closeout? I want to thank my crew for what we’ve done here. We are going to continue with this. Because we’re going to go real deep, this story of sciatica is going to get nasty with information. This is the beginning of touching on the subject matter. Thank you, Alex, for bringing the information because extremely, very deep in terms. I want to thank Astrid for giving us insights into biochemistry. My true patient, Trudy, and my coach over here, Kenna, and the supporting staff. So I want also to go if you guys want to find us. We’re here, and we’re here in this area where we are available. If we can help you and you can contact us at any given time. I want to thank you all, and I appreciate it. We’re going to be hitting sciatica relentlessly because it was relentlessly the scourge. It is ripping apart a lot of people at their works. They just quietly suffer. They don’t sleep, they stress out, and it causes a disruption. And it happens in mommy’s world, and it disrupts the whole family directly because a happy mommy is a happy family. So the entire thing is what we want to do is to assess what’s going on here. Find out the treatment protocols and give you the best options possible. Thank you guys very much, and God bless.
In today’s podcast, Dr. Alex Jimenez DC, Health Coaches Adriana Caceres and Faith Arciniega, Massage Therapist Amparo Armendáriz-Pérez, and Clinical Nutritionist Ana Paola Rodriguez Arciniega discuss today what they do and offer with Functional Medicine.
Discussion
Dr. Alex Jimenez introduces his guests.
[01:00:11] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Welcome, guys. We’re here talking today about what we do. Today is a special day. It’s my father’s birthday, Alberto Jimenez. Alberto Augusto Jimenez. He is an immigrant from Colombia who gave me my knowledge. My amazing father. So happy birthday, dad. We’re going to be talking today is we’re going to be talking about what we do. We have a group of wonderful individuals here. We have five individuals. We have a whole lot more people in the background. So what we’re doing today is we’re beginning a process of notifying ourselves of a change that is going on. We’re going to be talking about nutrition, wellness, exercise, what we do in the office, how we do a little bit different techniques within the office, and how we compare and contrast to other services and let people understand what we do as we do change. So today, we’re in a new podcast room where we left the Push Fitness Center, which is now going to be another big, fantastic thing. So as they do the construction, we moved our podcast here. So you’re going to notice that we’re going to be communicating from this particular podcast. Still, we’re so connected to our Push counterparts and our Push Fitness centers and Daniel Alvarado, and we’ll be making that happen as it starts coming up. So today, we’re going to be talking about nutrition. I have Ana Paola Rodriguiez Arciniega here, so say hello there. We have Faith Arciniega. We have Adriana Caceres, and we have Amparo Armendáriz-Pérez as a massage therapist there. So we are going to be talking about different things. So each one of us has different specialties. So I’m going to start with some of the unique things we’re doing in our office, such as the types of treatments we do. We deal with a lot of inflammation, many injuries, a lot of trauma, and many soft tissue injuries. But you can’t get away from soft tissue injuries without discussing inflammation. So at the basis of inflammation, what we do is we associate, collaborate, find out the coincidence of inflammation to injuries, and we deal with the true causation of inflammation and come up with treating protocols and health care plans that affect people and their disorders. So many people come to us with a back injury or a neck injury after, let’s say, a motor vehicle accident, a car accident, or a work-related accident. But they may also have, you know, subclinical issues of inflammation that are just looming and then aggravate the direct trauma that’s going on. So what we’re going to do is introduce our team here one at a time so we can see what’s going on. And we’re going to start with Ana Paola Rodriguez Arciniega. Ana, how are you doing?
[01:02:57] Ana Paola: I am doing fine, and how are you doing?
[01:03:00] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Good, can you hear us OK over there?
[01:03:02] Ana Paola: Yes, I can hear you, OK.
[01:03:04] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Excellent. Tell us a bit of what you do, and we actually because you work hand-in-hand with us all here, and you are our virtual eye in the sky for nutrition at this point. But the nutrition that you deal with works a little bit with functional medicine. Tell us what you do and how we integrate that particular type of practice in our office.
Ana Paola Rodriguez Arciniega
Clinical Nutritionist Ana Paola Rodriguez Arciniega introduces herself and talks about what she does.
[01:03:23] Ana Paola: OK, so I am the head nutritionist, and basically, what I do is I take care of their nutritional assessment. But as you said before, we try to look for the root causes, and this allows us to create a more integral treatment plan for our patients, so that is focusing a little bit more on finding what is the root cause of the inflammation because it is related to injuries, accident, and stress, and to maybe delay the recovery part of our patients. So this is what we are trying to do to get like a fast track recovery for our patients for nutrition because it has to do with that.
[01:04:09] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yes. And then? Don’t worry.
[01:04:17] Ana Paola: OK, I’m here.
[01:04:18] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: It’s all technology. Just keep on going and telling me. We’ll figure it out as we go.
[01:04:22] Ana Paola: So what we always start doing is very simple. I try to focus on what is going on with my patient physically, which has a lot to do with the body composition of my patient. So I find that that is the principle, not the principle, but the first step could do it that way. So we try to integrate this body composition analysis with the Inbody 770 machine that we use. And that way, we can correlate all the body composition, either a fat mass percentage or BMI or muscle mass or lean body mass, that our patient has and try to associate with injuries or correlated with inflammation. And it is often, very often, or all of the time, that we find a direct correlation with inflammation or this type of injury. Specifically, talking about intracellular and extracellular water is one of the most exciting starting with my patients. But the thing about nutritional assessment is that even if it’s like separated into different parts, it kind of overlaps within each other, and that is like the thing that has in common with functional medicine, functional nutrition, then trying to treat your patient as a holistic, like a whole person and try to integrate the nutritional part of it, the fast recovery of an injury, the massage therapist and of course, all the wellness part of their recovery that has to do with our health coaches. So mostly, what I think that I do right here is that I perform for that. I am part of a team that integrates like a holistic care plan for patients.
Adriana Caceres
Health Coach Adriana Caceres introduces herself and explains what she does.
[01:06:28] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Well said. That is very, very good. I have to tell you there is no separating inflammation, nutrition, and injuries that there’s no way. So as we deal with it, we can learn about it. It’s almost like saying exercising and not talking nutrition. We have to deal with nutritional components. Now, specifically that we are talking about exercise. Adrianna, here, she’s our specialist and our expert on exercise physiology. She works with nutrition. She has extensive experience of working with clients online and in video as well as in your home. So she gets in there and exercises with you as she does her thing. Adriana, tell us a bit of your experience and what you do and what you offer these particular dynamics with our team here.
[01:07:14] Adriana Caceres: Sure. Well, my name is Adriana Caceres, and I’m your health coach, fitness trainer, and of course, exercise specialist. And as Ana was saying, nutrition and exercise go hand in hand. Nutrition is the base, but exercise gives you the mobility and gives you that range of mobility that you need to live a proper and, well, life until you know when you age. So definitely, it’s the base for a lot of recovery for injuries. The stretching is super important, and we use that a lot here to stretch our patients and make them do their small stretching so they can grow their range of mobility and have a better life in their daily life, their daily style. Right now, I work online a lot. So since COVID started, we started working out online with our patients and clients, and it’s different. But at the same time is super fun. The difference between going to an in-person exercise session and doing an online session is that you don’t have the time. We always hear excuses like; I can’t make it. I don’t have the time. I’m too busy. I know that I’m in pain, but I just think it’s too far. So the online cuts all those excuses. I mean, you’re doing that from the comfort of your home. You are just opening your TV or your computer, laptop, or tablet and connecting to a session. It’s on your time. So that helps a lot. The second excuse we always hear is if we are parents who watch our kids, what will I do? There’s no daycare, and this is just the same thing. It’s at your home, so you can even involve your family in this new and different lifestyle. Usually, when we have somebody who is overweight, it is a family. It’s the household. Because of course, it’s the same poor nutrition that they have or bad nutrition that they have and the same habits. So starting with the workouts online helps you realize, or your household realize that it’s a group thing, it’s a whole lifestyle, and you want to be the role model for your kids. You always want the best for your kids, so you want to be the role model for them. Normally they will. If you’re overweight or have a little extra pounds on, your kids usually will have the same habits. And of course, we’ll tend to be with the same kind of overweight that you have. So this helps them see a life change experience and get involved in this new experience.
[01:10:12] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, now that you mention that, you know, it’s essential to be the change that you expect in the world. I think Gandhi or something that says, might that be the change you want to see? Right. So the thing is, when you go purchase foods or exercise in front of your kids and see what you do, this is who they will become and what do we want for our children? We want the best. Our legacy is our family sometimes or our friends. And when you have family, they’re watching you. They learn they observe and appreciate mom, you know, wiggling around the living room and dealing with it. Everyone’s got memories of their parents exercising or doing something. And then, you know what happens, later on, we end up becoming our parents? Right. So if we have good habits, we eventually will become habits. I have become my father, and it’s the truth. The reality is in my son, and I listen to him. He doesn’t realize it, but he says everything I used to say. So it’s a continuous change. So if you’ve got nutrition and exercise, which seems to be one of the most extraordinary kinds of collaborative associative and treatment protocols, you can’t separate exercise from recovery. So Parkinson’s… exercise, Alzheimer’s… exercise, diabetes… exercise, brain disorder… exercise, health issues… exercise is such an essential component of fitness that by not doing it and not being part of it, you’re going to minimize the ability to return to an optimal configuration. Now, whether you like it or not, exercising mobility is one of the most important key factors. I realize that when you start working on so many patients over the years, you kind of start kind of seeing the intent of God. Right. So the intent of God is mobility, and he gives you tons of joints. I mean, why does he give you so many joints so we can wiggle, OK? To move, right? So using that and integrating the brain and the function of the brain with your body moving and pumping, and blood does heal a lot of issues and should be part of most treatment protocols. Even if exercise doesn’t look like, let’s say, a Zumba class, maybe it’s just wiggling around in a chair or doing certain things. We can do it for a lot of people. People think that I’ve seen from, you know, a nine-month literally about to have a baby, women doing CrossFit, and the baby is born fine. The body is designed to handle certain things too. Older adults about 100 years old, exercising. And children, they love to exercise. So it’s an essential component. So yes, that is what you do, Adriana, and we integrate that in the office, and we look or minimize the excuses to do that, so that’s very important. So do you also do nutrition a little bit?
[01:13:06] Adriana Caceres: Yes, I do. I’m a nutrition consultant, so I do help a lot with that part. As I said, it goes hand in hand, definitely to have a higher health span. You want to have a healthy habit, so one thing is lifespan, and one thing is healthspan, and lifespan comes out of years we’re going to live. Yes, eventually, we’ll die, and then our health span is how we want to live them. Are we going to leave them healthy our last ten years? Are we going to be able to walk? Are we going to able to say, are we going to be able to get out of a bathtub? So that’s what you want to have, and that’s what we don’t think about when we say, Oh, you know what? I know what I’m doing, and I don’t think exercising is for me. Everybody has a fitness level, and everybody has a way. And the trick for this is to find what you want to do. And what we do here is a lot of that we build up people and save injury, save from injuries and, you know, prolong their life and prolong how they live, their life, their daily activities.
Amparo Armendáriz-Pérez
Massage Therapist Amparo Armendáriz-Pérez introduces herself and talks about what she does.
[01:14:15] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, it’s excellent that approach. Now we also have a young lady named Amparo Armendáriz-Pérez. So for Amparo, she does our massage. And what she does is she works on individuals with a deep level of knowledge of fitness. Now, she comes to us with a vast amount of personal experience working with people and her desire for health care. So I would like her to tell us. Welcome. And tell us about what you do in terms of massage as a component within this group.
[01:14:55] Amparo Armendáriz-Pérez: Thank you. Being here as a part of this family, this community of servers, because that’s what we do. We serve those that come to us. We’re all about education. So we’re listening to, you know, nutritional education, physical education on how to help them to make better choices for themselves. What I do is I discuss with our patients what I’m going to do for them, what’s happening as I put my hands on their muscles. What I feel, and they even ask me questions, Well, what is that? Why do I feel so restricted? What’s happening? So I enjoy helping them understand their own body with all my heart because they’re in their own body. We exist in our body, and we know we have hands and feet and all these components. But sometimes, when they’re not operating correctly, we don’t know why, and that’s very frustrating. And so, I enjoy discussing with the patients. OK, well, this is what I’m feeling, and how do you feel as I’m, you know, applying pressure here as we’re moving and grooving here? And the feedback is what helps them to accelerate. They want to learn more. They want to know; well, what else can I do? You know, when I go home, how do I prolong this feeling of feeling like I’m standing up straight now? Like I feel more empowered? You know, I didn’t realize my feet felt that way. I didn’t know my arm felt that way. And I understand where they’re coming from because massage therapy was one of my avenues of healing when I went through a healing process. So it’s just a fantastic tool to reach out to the patients and allow them to know that this is another way that we support them is not just OK; we’re going to do this one two three. No, it goes further than that. These are your muscles, and this is how you can assist yourself, and this is what we’re going to do for you. And you can take it a step further and understand that you have the power to help these muscles become more pliable through nutrition, exercise, movement, and anyway, shape or form. And you can put your hand on yourself and feel like, you know, that’s tight today. I think I can kind of touch that a little and massage that, and you don’t need a license to touch your arm. And I think that that’s what’s beautiful about what we do. We empower our patients, and that’s important.
[01:17:16] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, when you were saying that in your approach, because I see that when you work on the patients, sometimes there are areas in the body that hurt. However, the human dynamics is that the body was designed with duality, such as one muscle affects another. The tricep, you know, pushes the bicep disengages. There’s a constant synergy with the muscular structure. Sometimes the pain or discomfort in those areas is remote or not, even in the area where you had, you know, you were initially told where the person’s issues were. Tell us a bit of that, Amparo. How you kind of tracked down the discomfort in, let’s say, an area over a problem that you’ve treated in the past.
[01:18:07] Amparo Armendáriz-Pérez: One of the most common areas I’ve experienced with many patients is when they discuss low back pain or sometimes even sciatic pain. And they tell me, you know, this is restricting me from sitting up straight. It’s restricting me from just going in the grocery store and walking to and from and not having to feel like I need to sit. And so, OK, I understand. And then they get on the table, and as I’m working on their back, I’m listening to what they’re saying. I also married together, what my hands are saying, and basically, my hands are just interpreting what their muscles are saying because sometimes, we can say something. I know in and out ourselves, OK, I feel this pain right here. However, the muscle is saying, well, something else is happening, and it’s extending, so they’ll tell me my pain is in the lower back while I follow the connection from that low back. And as I’m feeling alongside the side of their leg, I feel how tight it is, and it’s like, that’s got to be very restrictive down to the knee. And I’m like, OK, so let’s release that. And then as I’m working on that, it’s very powerful to hear the patient say, Wow, I can feel that, but you’re on my knee, and I’m like, It all goes together because the knee attachments go straight into the low back or into the hip area. And it was beautiful. Is that when they love to, everybody loves to learn about themselves? Why wouldn’t you want to know about yourself? It helps you become a better you. And so when I love to explain that to them, they’re like, Wow, so if I do this, I can feel better doing this. Absolutely. You know, ma’am or sir, right in here is where I’m touching. I’m massaging, and I’m applying compressions. It’s straightforward. It’s even over your clothes. I’m just playing some pressure right there, gently releasing, and they’re like, Wow, the movement is a lot better. And it’s interesting that just to the right around the knee, in the back and the front even, and it helps to release that low back pain.
[01:20:05] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, you mentioned just like the referral pain patterns, it’s incredible. How the body adapts is like that gecko, you know, when it’s hot and lifts its left leg and throws up on a different leg; that’s what the human body works. So if you have a lower back problem, it will affect the mid-back. It will affect your knees. The knees and lower back are directly and indirectly related. So as we look at those dynamic changes. One of the things we look at as we track down the problem. OK, it’s not just so easy to treat a low back problem for what it is. We have to find out the problem for every person and every person’s design, and we can track it down quickly after a couple of minutes of working in your body. We got the suspect in, and it’s not so apparent many times that it’s just a low back problem. You mentioned sciatica. Sciatica is one of these things where it isn’t a disorder. It’s a group of syndrome disorders that creates a lot of drama, and it almost has its mind. It’s like, it’s like you’ve got stress or sciatica flares up. You got, you know, you get upset about financial worries, sciatica flares up. It’s like it sits there looming, and it bites you, and it causes a whole array of problems and hinders a lot of people, which we don’t want to do surgically. And sometimes, there are issues where it does require surgical intervention. We have diagnostic procedures to determine the differences over a thousand reasons, and I would venture to say there are even more than a thousand reasons for causing sciatica. So we got to get to the root cause of it. And does nutrition play? Yes. Will exercise play? Yes, we have to look at all these components. Now we have another individual here, that is Faith Arciniega. So Faith comes to us with a lot of great experiences. She’s going to be an incredible doctor, nurse practitioner. That’s the goal right now. She’s in the process of going through that, but she also does our health coach integration. So she does many different things from, you know, body compositions, as Ana mentioned, all the way to in laboratory tests and X-rays are integrated with Ana. So we facilitate the ability to communicate the issues, treat the problems, and develop an appropriate care plan. So Faith, tell us a bit of what you do here in this particular group of people?
Faith Arciniega
Health Coach Faith Arciniega introduces herself and explains what she does.
[01:22:27] Faith Arciniega: Absolutely. So as Dr. Jimenez mentioned, my name is Faith Arciniega. I bridged the gap between Ana and Adriana, and Amparo. We all work very closely together to ensure the patients leave here to understand better how their bodies should operate and function. So if the doctor goes in and finds out they’re having issues with their sciatica, I will go in before that gather together their medical history, see what’s going on, and see if they have problems with the gut. Depression, anxiety. And then, I would then communicate with Ana about those issues, and we can work together to find supplements or with the correct diet for them. So I work together with Ana and Adriana to ensure that the patient leads healthier and better understands their body because a car wouldn’t operate correctly. If we fill it with water, the human body will not function if we don’t fuel it correctly, so we teach them. How they should eat, what supplements they should take, and how they should exercise so that they’re moving and operating as they should be like the body was created to.
[01:23:26] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: You know, as like you, as you kind of work with patients, we mean right before we have this little unified meeting together. We noticed that we had a patient that had, you know, chronic inflammation and pain everywhere. And it’s crazy. But you know, the problem comes as a low back problem and leads to ankle issues. But we could see that there was a dietary issue, and it was almost like inflammation. No injury; keeps on inflaming. Then we find out that there’s a lot of sugar, many processed foods, a lot of meat. Well, to say that those are bad, it’s not just that easy, but we have to figure out the cause for that particular individual. We assess food sensitivities, and we do laboratory diagnostics. We figure out what it is the root cause. Not everything is a surgical procedure; as a matter of fact, most things are non-surgical. So what we try to do is is allow the intelligence of the body wants to figure it out, using the knowledge that we have and the expertise that we have in functional wellness and functional nutrition to be able to come up with a treatment plan that’s appropriate with exercise and the protocols that we use. So we have a lot going on here. So we wanted to do this as a beginning because we will be doing quite a few different presentations. But as we do changes, we haven’t been communicating well. So now what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be coming back at different presentations, discussing particular topics. If you have a specific topic that you want us to discuss, particularly about an injury, inflammation, and a disorder that falls into the world of functional wellness and even functional medicine, we commonly associate and look for corporations related to the musculoskeletal system. So what we want to do is to be able to assess and determine the true causes because once we fix you, we want to improve you, right? We want to give you the tools to go on and live an extraordinary life because everyone here knows that I touted as much as possible. And man, if we’re designed to live 100 years and probably more, according to even the statisticians out there, if you take care of everything, the heart will continue to pump years after it’s removed from the body. So our body doesn’t get clogged with some atherosclerotic plaques or inflammatory disorders or some diseases or cancers; if we can keep it healthy, we will live a good life. God willing, God wants you to take you now. OK, so we all know that. So the focus of today was to present a little bit of a review. So Ana, thank you very much for helping us out. You know, a little bit of information there. You know, Faith, you’re out there. You’ve got the calm, soothing voice, and she’s cool with her voice there; you’ve got Amparo, which is our therapist that finds and tracks down. We got everyone here. We have many massage therapists that track down the issues. She’s just the one that has been able to formulate the ability to communicate the intention of the human body, which is and also the results, and that takes years to do. You can’t just go ahead and present yourself. Doctors worldwide will tell you a doctor that graduates, whether it’s in any clinical practice on his first day, is not the same doctor ten years later. And they’re like wine. They get better each time, and most of the time, you’ll find that doctors, the wiser they become, the more they rely on the wisdom of the body to manipulate and facilitate the healing process. So for Adriana, she’s our exercise, and she’ll have you dancing and doing the Zumba and seeing, you know, what’s best for you. And by the way, if you feel ugly that day, you can put the screen off, so you don’t have to be showing your body. You just know that she’s there, and you just tell her you’re doing the exercise. It’s pretty funny. Someone probably has the video off and is sitting there, you know, eating something. Yeah, I’m exercising, but we do have tools for that, like a cardio thing. They’ll tell us what your heart rate’s at; we will know if you are fibbing, but it doesn’t happen anyway. But anyway, it was a tremendous little connection today. It was the first, and we looked forward to more. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much, and does anyone have anything else to say. Faith, anything good, anything you want to add.
Conclusion
Dr. Alex Jimenez and crew recap on Functional Medicine.
[01:27:40] Faith Arciniega: No, just super excited for you all to come in here so that we can work together to find the best treatment plan for you. We’re all very passionate about patient care, and we’re excited to work with you.
[01:27:49] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: All right, Amparo?
[01:27:50] Amparo Armendáriz-Pérez: Just like, she said. We’re ready to help you be empowered. Understand that you are the boss of you.
[01:27:58] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I’m the boss of me. I tell my wife that you know what she says all the time; you think you’re the boss of you, right?
[01:28:02] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: And like I’m saying, OK. Anyways.
[01:28:05] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Ana, anything you have to say.
[01:28:10] Ana Paola: We’re so excited to work with all our patients, and we try to follow through and listen to all of the symptoms you’re having. So I guess that from our part, you will always have ears to follow through.
[01:28:32] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Thank you so much. Adriana, anything?
[01:28:34] Adriana Caceres: Well, we are here waiting for all of you, and we have a great team, all very passionate, as you see. And we are just here waiting for you to come in, and we will help you resolve.
[01:28:47] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: We’re going to tear it up, guys. We’re going to tear it up. We’re going to make it. We’re going to happen. OK, so this is called Cobra Kai Chiropractic Center. OK, so if you think you’re going to come in here and just have a little talk? We’re going to get it on. We’re going to get it on with your body, and we’re going to take it to the next level. And yeah, we got to go, OK, we’re going to make the body what it should be, OK. And we’re going to release it without in pain, and it’s going to be a very comfortable dynamic. So thank you, guys, and we look forward to being connected the next one. So God bless you guys. Have a good one.
The previous article talked about how photobiomodulation or low laser therapy can help improve the gut microbiome. Today’s article gives an in-depth look at how photobiomics can provide the therapeutic potential to the gut. When it comes to the gut, an individual must take care of it. Supplying it with wholesome, nutritional food feeding the good bacteria will provide outstanding results like more energy throughout the day, the feeling of being full, weight loss, and healthy brain function. By eating these nutritional foods, the body can feel good; however, when harmful bacteria come into play and starts attacking the gut, it causes the gut microbiome to have all sorts of problems that can turn into chronic pain. Some of the ailments can be leaky gut, IBS, and inflammation, to name a few. When these harmful pathogens affect the gut, it can cause the body not to function correctly and dampen a person’s ability to go about their everyday life.
Photobiomodulation Works With The Gut
So how does photobiomodulation work with the gut microbiota? Research studies show that when photobiomics are being applied to the gut, the low laser wavelength can help rebalance what is happening to the gut and maintain diversity in the gut microbiota. It can sustain a healthy production of vital metabolites, and the diversity can help the gut from getting many harmful bacteria from causing too much trouble in the gut. Not only that, but photobiomodulation therapy affecting the gut, directly and indirectly, gives it a mimicry of the circadian clock from the brain. Since the brain and gut are connected with the brain giving signals to the gut microbiota to regulate and produce the bacterial metabolites.
The Brain-Gut Connection
The brain and gut connection is more of consistent bidirectional communication between the brain and gut. Studies show that the gut and brain connection ensures the proper maintenance of gastrointestinal homeostasis and has multiple effects on motivation and cognitive functions in the body. When inflammation comes to play in the gut; however, it can affect the gut to not work properly and disrupt the signals it is receiving from the brain and vice versa. When there is a disruption in the bacterial diversity in the gut, it can decrease the brain’s circadian rhythm. The disruption of the bacterial diversity of the gut can even reduce vitamin D absorption in the gastrointestinal tract, causing inflammation and heightening the effects of autoimmune properties that the body is experiencing.
Vitamin D and Photobiomics
Studies have shown that vitamin D plays an essential role in bone health and regulating gastrointestinal inflammation. This is huge since vitamin D has anti-inflammatory properties and can dampen the effects of Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and IBD or inflammatory bowel diseases. Vitamin D has many beneficial properties since it can help improve the body’s immune system and has anti-inflammatory properties. Anyone who takes vitamin D in supplement form or food form as part of their daily ritual will notice that they have more energy in their system and feel good overall. That is because vitamin D can modify the integrity of the epithelial cell in the gut and increase the composition and immune response to the gut microbiome. When vitamin D and photobiomics are combined, it can restore the vitamin D receptors in the gut and cause improvements to body immunity and bone health and dampen the inflammatory effects that were causing harm to the body.
The Vagus Nerve
Another unique fact that photobiomodulation can help is that it can improve low vagus nerves in the brain. Since the brain and gut are connected, it shows that photobiomics can help the brain by decreasing the inflammation receptors that are disrupting the brain-gut connection and causing problems to the body. The vagus nerve is a part of this connection since it sends the information back and forth from the brain to the gut. Studies show that the vagus nerve is represented as the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system. This means that the vagus nerve can oversee many crucial bodily functions, including sending information between the brain and gut. Not only that, but the vagus nerve represents an essential link to neurological and inflammatory responses to the body. When inflammation affects the gut and the vagus nerves, it can disrupt the signals to the brain, causing the inflammation to become worse and hurting the body. Treatments like photobiomodulation can target the vagus nerve and help increase the vagal tone in the body and inhibit cytokine productions.
The 4 R’s
When the body is being affected by inflammation, treatments can help the body feel a bit better and start recovering. With photobiomodulation therapy and natural foods that are beneficial to the gut can bring the balance of a healthy lifestyle back to a person. For a better gut, doctors have recommended the 4’s for gut health.
The First R: Remove
REMOVE– Removing foods that a person has a food sensitivity or allergic reaction to can help dampen the effects of inflammation to the gut. These can be common foods like dairy and wheat or processed food containing high fats and added sugars.
The Second R: Replace
REPLACE– By replacing processed food with wholesome, nutritional food that is chalked up with the necessary vitamins and minerals can give the body more energy and put the person in a good mood. Thus, helping the gut produce more enzymes to digest the nutritional foods.
The Third R: Reinoculate
REINOCULATE– Adding prebiotics and probiotics into your recovery process can help improve the beneficial bacteria in the gut. Fermented food is a great way to get the necessary probiotics and prebiotics into the gut.
The Fourth R: Repair
REPAIR– Eating certain food that can help repair the gut lining in the gut microbiota ensures that inflammation won’t flare up due to gut stress. Adding fermented foods, butyric acid, L-glutamine, and aloe vera into a person’s diet is excellent in gut repair.
Conclusion
Overall, gut health is essential to the human body as it helps the body function properly. With the help of photobiomodulation, it can help the recovery process. Since photobiomics are still providing excellent results to treat patients with inflammation, it is necessary to combine whole, nutritional foods and the proper supplements into the everyday lifestyle so the body doesn’t have specific ailments like inflammation. This new combination has opened the doors to many new avenues of effective treatments for inflammation and improving overall body health and wellness.
References:
Breit, Sigrid, et al. “Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain-Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, Frontiers Media S.A., 13 Mar. 2018, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5859128/.
Carabotti, Marilia, et al. “The Gut-Brain Axis: Interactions between Enteric Microbiota, Central and Enteric Nervous Systems.” Annals of Gastroenterology, Hellenic Society of Gastroenterology, 2015, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4367209/.
Silverman, Robert G. “Photobiomics: A Look to the Future of Combined Laser and Nutrition Therapy.” Chiropractic Economics, 5 Oct. 2021, www.chiroeco.com/photobiomics/.
Tabatabaeizadeh, Seyed-Amir, et al. “Vitamin D, the Gut Microbiome and Inflammatory Bowel Disease.” Journal of Research in Medical Sciences: The Official Journal of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Medknow Publications & Media Pvt Ltd, 23 Aug. 2018, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6116667/.
The body has a variety of functions that work simultaneously to make sure that it’s working correctly. From the musculoskeletal system all the way to the endocrine system, the body has good bacteria that cause each system to work as it should be. However, sometimes an injury or autoimmune factor comes to play when it affects the body, causing a person to feel pain or not function properly. Many remedies and treatments can help the body by dampening the harmful effects that trigger various problems like inflammation, IBS, leaky gut, and much more. One of the treatments that physicians have used to help patients is photobiomodulation or low laser therapy.
Photobiomodulation Explained
Low laser therapy or photobiomodulation is when the body is exposed to a cold laser in the affected area. The laser wavelength targets the area through the skin to the mitochondrial. Studies have shown that photobiomodulation mechanics can help the body at the molecular, cellular, and tissue-based level causing therapeutic relief. When exposed through treatment, the laser wavelength can help give the injured area of the body relief that can last for hours to months with regular treatment.
Photobiomodulation Benefits
Another study found that photobiomodulation can heal and stimulate body tissue, thus relieving pain and inflammation, causing the microbiome to alter in the body. The study also mentions that photobiomics can indirectly affect the microbiome and cause harmful bacteria or inflammation to halt, causing the body to boot its immune system. One study has even found that even though photobiomodulation has been widely accepted to treat low-back pain, it can be highly effective when modulating the gut microbiome. This means that when photobiomodulation and nutritional therapy are combined, they can help treat gut issues, low vagal tone, and autoimmunity in the body.
The Gut System
The gut microbiome is one of the important biomes in the body that plays a huge role. The gut microbiota can help the body internally by regulating its metabolism and protecting itself from harmful pathogens; thus, a healthy gut flora is mainly responsible for an individual’s overall health. Studies have shown that the gut microbiota comprises two significant phyla, which are Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. The study also mentions that a normal gut microbiome can help maintain the structural integrity of the gut mucosal barrier, immunomodulation, and metabolize xenobiotics.
The Microbiome of the Gut
Since the gut microbiome makes sure that the body is healthy, sometimes unwanted pathogens can affect the gut, disrupting the body. Studies show that the gut microbiota can ensure homeostasis while recognizing bacterial epitopes in intestinal epithelial and the mucosal immune cells. But when harmful bacterias invade the gut, either by food sensitivity or autoimmune factors, the gut takes a heavy toll, causing the body to feel unwell. These factors can cause body inflammation, leaky gut, or IBS, thus making the individual feel pain if it’s not treated, causing more problems.
Conclusion
Overall, doctors using photobiomodulation on the gut is beneficial in the overall wellness of the body. The photobiomics have proven extraordinary therapeutic effects by targeting the inflamed area and improving the area by raising the antibodies to combat the inflammation and reducing gastrointestinal wall damage. By utilizing photobiomodulation and natural food therapy together, the body can recover quickly and achieve overall wellness.
References:
Hamblin, Michael R. “Photobiomodulation or Low-Level Laser Therapy.” Journal of Biophotonics, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Dec. 2016, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5215795/.
Jandhyala, Sai Manasa, et al. “Role of the Normal Gut Microbiota.” World Journal of Gastroenterology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 7 Aug. 2015, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26269668/.
Liebert, Ann, et al. “‘Photobiomics’: Can Light, Including Photobiomodulation, Alter the Microbiome?” Photobiomodulation, Photomedicine, and Laser Surgery, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., Publishers, Nov. 2019, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6859693/.
Sekirov, Inna, et al. “Gut Microbiota in Health and Disease.” Physiological Reviews, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 9 July 2010, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20664075/.
Silverman, Robert G. “Photobiomics: A Look to the Future of Combined Laser and Nutrition Therapy.” Chiropractic Economics, 5 Oct. 2021, www.chiroeco.com/photobiomics/.
All of these can deplete the body of nutrients and drain the body’s energy. As a result, individuals can be distracted throughout the day, unable to leave the house, and unable to accomplish regular tasks. Gastrointestinal stress can be caused by a variety of factors, including:
Unhealthy diet
Interrupted sleep patterns
Work/school changes
Headaches
Medications
Fibromyalgia
Digestive issues are commonly associated with poor nutrition, but there could be an underlying cause in the spine and nervous system. Chiropractic can help manage gastrointestinal stress and stomach problems.
Spinal Subluxation and Gastrointestinal Stress
The nervous system controls every function that the body performs, including digestion. The spine communicates with the stomach directly. The thoracic mid-back and lumbar low-back regions of the spine are responsible for regulating the rate of how food is physically broken down and digested. A subluxation or spinal misalignment can interfere with vital information transmissions from the brain to the digestive tract compromising digestive function.
Subluxation
Subluxation refers to a misalignment of the vertebrae that can cause health issues with the nerves in the spine, directly affecting digestion. If the vertebrae are out of alignment, this causes a misfire in the signals being sent to the nerves of the digestive system. This can cause problems for the body absorbing nutrients, vitamins, and minerals from food. Because of this, no matter how healthy the diet is, individuals can still suffer from digestive issues.
Chiropractic
Many individuals deal with stress through meditation, breathing exercises, physical activity/exercise, and diet adjustments.
Lifestyle adjustments help counter the effects of stress, but if the nervous system is blocked from spinal misalignment, disrupting vital nerve flow through the body, specifically the digestive tract, gastrointestinal stress will continue to cause damage and malfunction. Individuals with:
Have experienced how chiropractic treatment corrects and helps manage symptoms.
Body Composition
Viscous and Nonviscous Fiber
Another way of classifying fiber is by its viscosity or thickness. Certain types of soluble fiber are thicker and are more likely to form firmer, stickier gels when mixed with water. When digesting food that consists of thick fiber it increases the thickness of the gel substance that passes through the gut. As a result, it reduces appetite because it makes the body feel fuller longer. Viscous fibers include:
Angus, Katherine et al. “What effect does chiropractic treatment have on gastrointestinal (GI) disorders: a narrative review of the literature.” The Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association vol. 59,2 (2015): 122-33.
Qu, Liuxin et al. “Irritable bowel syndrome treated by traditional Chinese spinal orthopedic manipulation.” Journal of traditional Chinese medicine = Chung i tsa chih ying wen pan vol. 32,4 (2012): 565-70. doi:10.1016/s0254-6272(13)60072-2
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