Top Health Tips For You
Hey guys, so we recently attended thePaleo f(x) conference in Austin, Texas for the second year in a row and far frombeing at just a paleo conference it's more of an ancestral health conferencethat brings together some of the top neurologists, cardiologists, MD's, andresearchers to talk about everything from nutrition to sleep management todealing with stress to optimal movement patterns. I mean really everything fromstem-cell treatment to genetic testing. And so why would a pedorthic clinic beinterested in this kind of a conference? Well, we find it's really important for aspecialist's role to include a holistic look at the cause of the injury or theillness and the sweet spot is that if we can use our specialist tools to getsomeone better faster, but then take that broader picture look as well, it almostalways leads to better long-term outcomes.
So we just wanted to summarizesome of the key points from the conference - we will have specific videos foreach topic later, but here are some of our key takeaways. So the first realoverriding theme was the importance of a good diet. And whether or not you'repaleo, you're primal, you're vegetarian, you're vegan, a good nutrition plan is soimportant in terms of treating and preventing illness and injury. And soanytime we do physical activity there's a little bit of wear and tear. Thatshouldn't be a big deal - it turns into a chronic inflammatory state when the gutand our general system is inflamed from poor dietary choices. So being runnersand active ourselves, this next one has been a bit of a hard lesson for us to learn overtime but it's just so important that your exercise intensity matches up withyour health goals. We see so many patients coming through where injury andillness that they're suffering from can a lot of times be related back to training errors.
So either, in a lot of cases, training a little bit too hard whenyou're supposed to be going easy, or not maybe training hard enough when you'resupposed to be training hard. I mean I think the first rule oftraining is the reason you're doing this is to get stronger, not to go out andtrain every day. And one of the problems with endurance athletes is this 'more isbetter' mentality that the more miles you put in the faster you will be, the moreefficient you will be in your running economy, the better you'll burn fat andit doesn't exactly work that way. Sooo many great new products out there these days.Metrics and supplements to help optimize our health and we'll have a specificvideo in the coming weeks diving into some of the specifics but an overridingmessage from a lot of the speakers on these bio hackswas that really 95% of good health can be achieved through good diet,good sleep patterns, and managing stress. And then really using these tools, thesemetrics and these supplements to get that extra 5%. Now that being said, acommon metric that a lot of the speakers talked about was the value of heart ratevariability which we've talked about in the past.
Really one of the onlythings that I measure every day especially when I get out of bed orbefore I get out of bed in the morning for about five minutes this heart ratevariability or HRV. It allows me to look at my sympathetic nervous system myparasympathetic nervous system and make a call on the fly about how beat up mybody is. So I'm sure that many of you heard about this next one but you knowwhen our bodies become inflamed for whatever reason it can really affect ourbody's ability to be able to recover from injury and from illness. Researchover the past several years has shown that systemic inflammation which can becaused by things like poor diet, not getting enough sleep, not enough exerciseor too much exercise, poor gut health from things like antibiotics, not eatingenough fermented food or fermentable fiber.
All of these things end upproducing inflammation systemically and that systemic inflammation cansignificantly worsen any musculoskeletal problem that we have. So another one thatwe've heard a lot of the speakers talking about was the value of highquality bone broth for not only protecting our gut and optimizing ourgut health but also helping to protect our joints. You know most of us today,most of the amino acids and proteins were getting they're more for musclebuilding, they're not for joint ligament building and that's why we need collagen.Collagen is the main compound in bone broth that makes it so beneficial.Genetic testing and genomics was another really interesting topic that theytalked about a fair bit and it's quite surprising how inexpensive it can be these days to map out our entire genome to guide our lifestyle choices based onpredispositions that we may have. Now a takeaway here though was that - which isgood news - is that we can control how our genes are expressed. Now we may not beable to control what we get from our mom and dad, but we can control throughdiet, through sleep, and stress how they're expressed.
So that old debate ofnature versus nurture it really looks like nurture is winning that battle. Wellit's about taking an individual looking at their genomic blueprint and actuallycreating a health and lifestyle plan around that individual rather thantaking this larger concept and saying 'this is a perfect diet for everybody'. Itdoesn't work that way.
So we just wanted to summarizesome of the key points from the conference - we will have specific videos foreach topic later, but here are some of our key takeaways. So the first realoverriding theme was the importance of a good diet. And whether or not you'repaleo, you're primal, you're vegetarian, you're vegan, a good nutrition plan is soimportant in terms of treating and preventing illness and injury. And soanytime we do physical activity there's a little bit of wear and tear. Thatshouldn't be a big deal - it turns into a chronic inflammatory state when the gutand our general system is inflamed from poor dietary choices. So being runnersand active ourselves, this next one has been a bit of a hard lesson for us to learn overtime but it's just so important that your exercise intensity matches up withyour health goals. We see so many patients coming through where injury andillness that they're suffering from can a lot of times be related back to training errors.
So either, in a lot of cases, training a little bit too hard whenyou're supposed to be going easy, or not maybe training hard enough when you'resupposed to be training hard. I mean I think the first rule oftraining is the reason you're doing this is to get stronger, not to go out andtrain every day. And one of the problems with endurance athletes is this 'more isbetter' mentality that the more miles you put in the faster you will be, the moreefficient you will be in your running economy, the better you'll burn fat andit doesn't exactly work that way. Sooo many great new products out there these days.Metrics and supplements to help optimize our health and we'll have a specificvideo in the coming weeks diving into some of the specifics but an overridingmessage from a lot of the speakers on these bio hackswas that really 95% of good health can be achieved through good diet,good sleep patterns, and managing stress. And then really using these tools, thesemetrics and these supplements to get that extra 5%. Now that being said, acommon metric that a lot of the speakers talked about was the value of heart ratevariability which we've talked about in the past.
Really one of the onlythings that I measure every day especially when I get out of bed orbefore I get out of bed in the morning for about five minutes this heart ratevariability or HRV. It allows me to look at my sympathetic nervous system myparasympathetic nervous system and make a call on the fly about how beat up mybody is. So I'm sure that many of you heard about this next one but you knowwhen our bodies become inflamed for whatever reason it can really affect ourbody's ability to be able to recover from injury and from illness. Researchover the past several years has shown that systemic inflammation which can becaused by things like poor diet, not getting enough sleep, not enough exerciseor too much exercise, poor gut health from things like antibiotics, not eatingenough fermented food or fermentable fiber.
All of these things end upproducing inflammation systemically and that systemic inflammation cansignificantly worsen any musculoskeletal problem that we have. So another one thatwe've heard a lot of the speakers talking about was the value of highquality bone broth for not only protecting our gut and optimizing ourgut health but also helping to protect our joints. You know most of us today,most of the amino acids and proteins were getting they're more for musclebuilding, they're not for joint ligament building and that's why we need collagen.Collagen is the main compound in bone broth that makes it so beneficial.Genetic testing and genomics was another really interesting topic that theytalked about a fair bit and it's quite surprising how inexpensive it can be these days to map out our entire genome to guide our lifestyle choices based onpredispositions that we may have. Now a takeaway here though was that - which isgood news - is that we can control how our genes are expressed. Now we may not beable to control what we get from our mom and dad, but we can control throughdiet, through sleep, and stress how they're expressed.
So that old debate ofnature versus nurture it really looks like nurture is winning that battle. Wellit's about taking an individual looking at their genomic blueprint and actuallycreating a health and lifestyle plan around that individual rather thantaking this larger concept and saying 'this is a perfect diet for everybody'. Itdoesn't work that way.
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