Chronic Metabolic Disease

It is now imperative that we recognize metabolic disease as a pandemic and urgently prioritize preventive measures to halt its expansion.

Chronic Metabolic Disease is a cluster of conditions that can include hypertension, high blood sugar, a large waistline, and together increase your risk of heart disease, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes.

Wellness Academy USA has developed an intervention and behavioral prevention program and treatment modalities to mediate, and possible reverse Chronic Metabolic Disease through in-person and remote board-certified health & wellness coaching.

The five factors of metabolic syndrome: hypertension; low levels of HDL, i.e., “good cholesterol,” elevated triglycerides, high blood sugar, and a large waistline. Metabolic syndrome is defined as having at least three of these conditions.

We absolutely can help people through Wellness Academy USA four 4 pathways – diet, (whole foods), physical activity, (steps), restorative sleep, (7-8 hours), and positive mindset, (happiness, gratitude, positive affirmations, mindfulness, set simple Smart goals), and our unique treatment modalities.

A common misconception is that metabolic health is determined by a person’s weight or body mass index (BMI). Many individuals can have metabolic disease even at a healthy body weigh and then there are people who are overweight who may maintain excellent metabolic health if they engage in healthy lifestyle habits and self-care.

When your metabolism is imbalanced, it can lead to many health problems including metabolic syndrome, increasing the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and even neurodegenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Being proactive to prevent and or improve your metabolic conditions involves a little time every day for self-care, regular monitoring of your health and making lifestyle adjustments that nature intended like eating non-processed whole foods, walking daily, sound sleep and being positive and optimistic about life with a little smile for dessert!

Nature Got It Right Wellness Academy USA – San Diego Miami Health Coach – Coconut Grove, Miami

Self-Care

Self-care refers to activities and practices that we can engage in on a regular basis to improve health, which includes better nutrition, more physical activity, restorative sleep strategies, and a more positive mindset to reduce stress, all enhance short and longer-term well-being.

The concept of self-care remains unprecise due to the difficulty integrating the diverse definitions developed over time across disciplines.

Never has the concept of self-care been more relevant than in the context of an escalation of chronic and communicable diseases, with a massive impact on healthcare systems worldwide.

It is crucial to formulate the defining attributes, antecedents, and consequences of self-care to provide clinicians, researchers, and patients with the ability to communicate clearly with one another and establish well-defined lines of responsibility.

The ability to care for oneself through awareness, self-control, and self-reliance in order to achieve, maintain, or promote optimal health and well-being. Chronic disease patients ultimately spend more time managing their conditions and providing self-care than they spend with their providers.

Legitimizing this realization as an equal aspect of medical care within the context of chronic disease reinforces the importance of disseminating this information to both professional and lay audiences. Self-care is an active decision-making process that enables people to effectively engage in their care.

References

1.McCormack D. An examination of the self-care concept uncovers a new direction for healthcare reform. Nurs Leader. 2003;16(4):48–62. doi: 10.12927/cjnl.2003.16342.

2.Self-care: A concept analysis, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8488814/

Bone Health

Bone is one of the strongest materials found in nature. Ounce for ounce, bone is stronger than steel since a bar of steel of comparable size would weigh four or five times as much.

Researchers discovered that the arms and legs of recent modern humans are lightly built compared to modern humans from before the Holocene Epoch, which began about 12,500 years ago. Rather than shifting gradually over time, bone density remained high throughout the history of modern human evolution, until the Neolithic revolution when bone density decreased dramatically.

In other-words, modern human skeletons have a substantially lower density in joints throughout the skeleton than compared to our predecessors, which suggests that this change may have been linked to a reduction in long distance activities, and food habits due to a shift from a hunting and foraging lifestyle, to a sedentary one.

These insights help us understand modern conditions such as osteoporosis, a bone-weakening disorder that may be more prevalent in contemporary populations, due partly to low levels of daily distance walking activity, not enough activities that strengthen muscles, and the modern Western American diet that robs our bodies of vital nutrition.

Activities that put stress on bones can nudge bone-forming cells into action from hanging, pulling, holding, tugging, and pushing on bone that occurs during strength training, as well as weight-bearing aerobic exercises like walking or running. The results are stronger, denser bones and the best part is that most, if not all these strength activities, can be done indoors and outdoors without exercise equipment.

Understanding our skeletal health today points to the importance of daily physical activities, whole food nutrition, sustain sleep, and developing a positive mindset to embrace an active lifestyle.

Nature Got It Right

Miami Wellness Academy
Miami HealthCoach

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerald-j-joseph-b-s-m-ed-bb80775b/

What Is Disease

As we look to define “What is Disease,” evolutionary medicine most certainly cannot offer new or better cures for chronic degenerative diseases of the western world, at least in the short term, without understanding that humankind is no longer consuming foods that he/she coevolved to consume, and no longer moving with speed and distance daily stimulating humankind to thrive, free of chronic manmade disease.

By understanding the biological basis of disease, and that our species now lives and consumes foods in an environment that he did not evolve to live in, we can now begin to understand how Nature Got It Right.

By returning to a lifestyle that our spices evolved in, i.e., organic foods, daily long-distance physical activities, sustain sleep from sunrise to sunset, and a motivated, I can do positive mindset, we can use this to our advantage to prevent chronic disease from catching hold of us.

Miami Wellness Academy
Mimai HealthCoach

Nature Got It Right

Positive Mindset

I Think Therefore I Am

Positive thinking means that you approach unpleasantness in a more positive, productive and motivated way. Being positive means the best is going to happen, not the worst.

Positive thinking often starts with self-talk and imagery of something positive, in my case, its looking at pictures of my beautiful parents. Self-talk is the endless stream of unspoken thoughts that run through your head that says, I can, and I will improve my lifestyle –

Wellness Academy Pathways:

Diet – Physical Activity – Restorative Sleep – Positive Mindset

Evolution of Fruits

There is some evidence that some of the fruits we enjoy eating today have been around for tens of thousands of years, in much the same form. For example, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of 780,000-year-old figs at a site in Northern Israel, as well as olives, plums, and pears from the paleolithic era.

But most likely, if someone handed you a fruit from 10,000 years ago, you might be surprised how small and sour the fruit you were tasting was, it would hardly resemble the plump, juicy fruit we enjoy today.

Bananas are believed to have originated up to 10,000 years ago and some scientists believe they may have been one of the world’s first fruit mankind began to manipulate and use for human nutrition. The first bananas are thought to have grown in the region that includes the Malaya Peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines, and New Guinea.

In Kazakhstan from 30,000 years ago; figs, olives, plums, and pears, many of the fruits of the Paleolithic era were similar in form, but much small and not as sweet to the ones we eat today.

Less than 10% of most Western populations consume adequate levels of whole fruits and dietary fiber. Evidence of the beneficial health effects of consuming adequate levels of whole fruits has been steadily growing, especially regarding their bioactive fiber prebiotic effects, high antioxidant and mineral content which can help improve weight, blood pressure, heart & cognitive health and slow down the aging process.

Nature Got It Right

Grounding & Earthing

Grounding or Earthing is a wellness practice which involves connecting with the earth by being in nature, walking barefoot on natural surfaces like grass, sand, or dirt, and even breathing in the air from forests, and the ocean. The idea is that this connection with the earth can help to reduce inflammation and promote healing.

Multi-disciplinary research has revealed that electrically conductive contact of the human body with the surface of the Earth (grounding or earthing) produces intriguing effects on physiology and health.

Scientific research over more than a decade indicates that your body can be protected and helped when you electrically reconnect to the Earth. That is, when you are grounded. Here are three examples of potential benefits that have been reported:

1). Decreased levels of inflammation and pain, 2). At the ocean, breathing in fresh air encourages respiratory health and can reduce the symptoms of asthma, promote respiratory health, improve allergies, and skin problems, and stimulate the immune system, and 3). research has just started looking at benefits of grounding daily on improve mood, depression, and the development of a positive mindset.

Nature Got It Right

Miami Wellness Academy
Miami HealthCoach

Biologically Younger’ People Who Defy Their Real Age Often Have 5 Things In Common

Dan Buettner, the man who popularized the idea that there are five “Blue Zones” around the world where people live some of the longest, healthiest, happiest lives, says people living in those zones all share five common traits.

“It is this interconnected web of characteristics that keep people doing the right things for long enough, and avoiding the wrong things,” Buettner said.

Blue Zone residents, whether they’re home in Loma Linda, California; Ikaria, Greece; Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; or Nicoya, Costa Rica, all eat very little meat. Instead, they subsist on a largely plant-based diet filled with beans, nuts, and cruciferous vegetables, which Buettner has written about in a new cookbook.

But that diet, which bears some resemblances to a Mediterranean diet (named the best diet for 2020 by US News and World Report) is only about 50% of the Blue Zones longevity equation.

“It’s the scaffolding, this collagen,” Buettner told Insider. “That keeps people eating the right way for long enough.”

Here are the other four core principles that sustain life in the Blue Zones.

Move regularly, about every 20 minutes – Going to the gym is not a Blue Zones tradition.

“They don’t exercise,” Buettner said. Instead, people in Blue Zones are “nudged” into movement in little bursts throughout the day, by force of habit and, also, necessity.

“They’re walking, or they’re in their garden, or they’re doing things by hand,” he said.

In Buettner’s home state of Minnesota, he credits shoveling the walks in winter, digging, weeding, and watering a garden in the summer with keeping him spry.

“I don’t have a garage-door opener — I open it by hand,” he said. “To the extent that I can, I use hand-operated tools.”

He’s turned the inside of his house into a little mini Blue Zone, too, where he’s getting up and moving all year round.

“I put the TV room on the third floor,” Buettner told me, “So every time if I want a snack, I’d go up and down stairs.”

The technique is one he’s honed by studying life in the Blue Zones.

“It’s being mindful of how to engineer little bursts of physical activity,” he said.

Research has shown that such little energetic busts throughout the day can do a lot for overall fitness. One study published last January showed that even 20-second, vigorous stair-climbing exercise “snacks” spread out over the course of a day could improve fitness.

“It’s a reminder to people that small bouts of activity can be effective,” the lead study author Martin Gibala told Insider when his team’s research came out. “They add up over time.”

In Japan they call it “ikigai,” and in Costa Rica it’s a “plan de vida.” The words literally translate to “reason to live,” and “life plan,” respectively, and both concepts help residents of the Blue Zones feel there’s a reason to get up and do what needs to get done each morning.

Studies also suggest that a sense of purpose in life is associated with fewer strokes and less frequent heart attacks among people with
heart disease
, as well as more use of preventive care.

One 2017 investigation from researchers at Harvard concluded that a sense of purpose in life is associated with better “physical function among older adults,” including better grip strength and faster walking.

Good health and happiness can be contagious, and obesity can too.

In Japan’s Blue Zone, people form social groups called “moai” to help them get through life.

“Parents cluster their children in groups of five, and send them through life together,” as Buettner explained in a recent video. “They support each other, and share life’s fortunes and woes.”

The trend is not unique to the Japanese. In Loma Linda, California, Blue Zoners (many of whom are Seventh-day Adventists) are more likely to share vegetarian potluck meals than meet one another over a Chipotle burrito or McDonald’s fries.

Buettner has created Blue Zones “Projects” across the US, where cities and towns enact policies that change the entire environment people live in.

“We’re genetically hardwired to crave sugar, crave fat, crave salt, take rest whenever we can,” Buettner said. “We’ve just engineered this environment where you don’t have to move. You’re constantly cooled down or heated up … and you cannot escape chips and sodas and pizzas and burgers and fries.”

In cities from Minnesota to Texas, he’s helped create healthier communities where policies favor fruits and vegetables over junk food, people form walking groups to move around town and shed pounds together, and many quit smoking, too.

All of this, he said, adds up to troupes of “biologically younger” people, who not only weigh less but suffer fewer health issues as they age.

GUT HEALTH

Gerald J. Joseph, B.S., M.Ed HealthCoach 

Chronic Gastrointestinal Inflammation:

Chronic disease syndromes like heart disease, type II diabetes and obesity are preventable and in most cases reversible by modifying lifestyle changes and increasing activity such as by walking. Stabilizing blood sugar through nutritional changes is the first step to improve your gastrointestinal track, immune system and brain health.

We do this by reducing refined sugar, all grains, reducing and eliminating altered animal/dairy/fowl proteins intake which feeds opertuneitsc “bad” bacteria that increase gut inflammation.

Gut Health

70-80% of your immune tissue can be found in our digestive system? This means that proper immune system functioning relies heavily on a healthy gut flora. According to the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, the gut microbiota (bacteria) found in our gut is critical for regulating our immune systems. They also explain that if there is an disruption to this bacteria, this can cause immune dysregulation which could lead to autoimmune disorders!

My co-evolutionary nutrition recommendations are designed as an anti-inflammatory, fatty acid diet and is not considered a restrictive diet, to Ketogenic diet and both the immune and digestive systems send signals through the blood system, which directly affects brain health.

Synthetic Chemicals

By reducing industrial synthetic chemicals found in food sources such as pesticides, eliminating hormones such as estrogens, testosterone (DES, rBGH) found in livestock consumed, eliminating all highly processed foods with added sugars, sodium,  trans-fats (including partially hydrogenated vegetable oils),  and alcohol, is the first step to reducing gastrointestinal inflammation, stabilizing blood sugar, improving the immune system and feeling fantastic.

Grains

The first step to improving gut health includes increasing water intake, and eliminating grains from the diet because of the inflammatory nature of grains and because of their ability to increase blood sugar. Grains today have been hybridized, crossbred and genetically modified making them raise blood sugar at an alarming rate. Grains also were only introduced into man diet about 15,000 years ago, far to short a time for man to have co-evolved with the grain.

Gastrointestinal inflammation

Gastrointestinal inflammation-can include esophagitis, gastritis, colitis – all GI inflammatory diagnoses are named for different parts of the digestive tract that involved area,  and large numbers of white blood cells which are present to counter a perceived threat to the body.

Gastrointestinal inflammation can cause swelling, redness, tenderness, and irritation, while extreme inflammation can form lesions, which may bleed. Individuals with gastrointestinal inflammation may notice symptoms like mucus and blood in the stool, loss of appetite, and abdominal discomfort.

A study published in the 2007 edition of Nature Immunology concluded that allergic and inflammatory diseases may actually trigger autoimmune diseases caused by self-reactive antibodies produced by B cells.

Gastrointestinal inflammation is a symptom of a body in distress triggered by years of consuming high amounts of sugar, grain and animal protein foods which may also contain heavy in metals like mercury, and not consuming enough live plant-based foods which essentially causes you to become malnourished even though you are consuming large amounts of calories.

The Good News 

The good news is that gut health can be improved very rapidly by simple increasing the consumption of clean sources of water, increasing a variety of high plant-based fibrous foods such as vegetables, root vegetables, legumes, whole fruits, bulbs, nuts and seeds, you must eliminate grains, dairy, animal proteins, and by rotating foods. Deep sea water omega-3 fatty acid fish and organic farm fresh whole eggs including the yolk are also excellent gut and brain food.

The good news is really good news because if you make these simple nutrition lifestyle changes and walk a few measured miles a day consistently, (at least 5000 steps a day) you will in no time at all start losing weight, stabilizing blood sugar, the increased fiber will add amazing pre-biotic bacteria into you gut along with no sugar, grain and alcohol, your tummy and life will change for the better.

Unfortunately even advanced centers of medicine fail to draw the connection to the facts that foods can harm the body and yes they can heal the body too.