Compass Chiropractic

A recent report says that your vitamins are worthless, but take a closer look before  you give up on your one-a-days.  The most recent report comes from the Women’s Health Initiative study, which followed more than 160,000 older women over eight years.

Here is my issue with the study

This is one study. Let us not forget the numbers of studies that have shown the benefits obtained from multivitamins.  The study was undoubtedly large enough and the subjects where monitored over a significant period of time, but there were only a small number of health benefits of measured.  The study looked at whether women who take multivitamins where more protected from heart disease and certain types of cancer. The study did not look at the hundreds of other conditions that may be helped or prevented by taking a multivitamin.  For example, we know that women who take folic acid are less likely to have children with birth defects, but that wasn’t addressed in this study for obvious reasons.  There is no way that a study could measure the effects that multivitamins have on all the conditions that people suffer from.

Diet is best

The study does state that eating a balanced diet is the best way to obtain the necessary vitamins and minerals and I couldn’t agree more, but the how many people eat a balanced diet?  The Standard American Diet or SAD is just that, it is sad.  When was the last time that you had 6 servings of vegetables?  Multivitamins are meant to fill in the gaps where you might have deficiencies; they are not intended to be a replacement for a healthy diet.

My concern about studies like this…

These are big studies that get a lot of press, today this study was on the front page of the health section in the New York Times, which means that a lot of people are going to here the message, “multivitamins are worthless,” which is not what the study showed. The study showed that older women who take multivitamins did not have lower rates of heart disease and some cancers, nothing more.  There is still a lot more that we don’t know about the protective nature of taking vitamins and I still feel that spending a couple bucks each month on a multivitamin is worth it even if we someday find out that it has all been a waste.

Vitamin D is known as the sunshine vitamin for good reason.  Our bodies produce vitamin D when our skin is exposed to the sun, but using sun block may prevent this reaction.  There have been a few studies recently that have shown the decrease in vitamin D to be significant and can be as high as ten fold when using sunscreen.

How much vitamin D do we need?

Some experts are recommended as much at 5000mgs of vitamin D each day, but the actual amount is still up for discussion.  What is known is that most of us don’t get enough exposure to the sun, which limits our vitamin D production.  The National Institutes of Health state that it takes only 20 min of sunlight exposure per day without sunscreen to produce the amount of vitamin D that you need each day.  Getting your20 minutes in the summer might not be an issue, but the winter months are a different story.  In the winter month here in the Midwest we cover our bodies from head to toe and run from our heated house to our heated car to our heated work with little or no exposure to the sun.

How can we get more Vitamin D?

In the colder months most of us don’t want to spend more time outside to boost our vitamin D, but there are other ways to get more through supplementation and diet.  Vitamin D can be purchased in a number of health food stores and vitamin shops.  It usually comes in 1000 IU tablets.  You can also obtain it from vitamin D rich foods such as salmon, milk or orange juice.

Is getting more Vitamin D worth it?

There have been some very promising studies of the health benefits of vitamin D and there is currently a Harvard study underway that is looking at the health benefits of Vitamin D.  I expect that we will see much  more about the sunshine vitamin in the near future.

Your kitchen sponge can contain 10,000 bacteria per inch, which might include pathogens such at E. coli and salmonella.  We use these sponges to clean the surfaces that we eat off of and it is important to keep them as clean as possible. In this post I will be looking at the different options for disinfecting and their effectiveness.

1. Soak in lemon juice – Didn’t have an effect on bacteria, mold and yeast.

2. Soak in a bleach solution -  More effective thank lemon juice on  bacteria, but little to no effect on yeast and mold

3. Run your sponge through the dishwasher - This is almost as as effective as the most effective technique which is ……..

4. Nuke your sponge - This was the most effective way to kill the bugs that reside on your sponge according to a study in the Journal of Environmental Health.

So through your sponge in with your load of dishes, which is easier to remember than sticking it in the microwave.

If our stomach had eyes we might look at things differently.

What would a bowl of cereal look like to our stomach?  Depends on the cereal, but for the most part it would look like a large pile of sugar.  This is because, for the most part, it is a large pile of sugar.  Even the healthier cereals have a ton of carbohydrates.

Why do we crave sweets through out the day?

We start our day with a large bowl of cereal which has tons of sugar, subsequently our blood sugar rises for a period of time and then crashes below the level it was previously.  This causes our body to freak out and demand sugar in the form of cravings.  So we grab a snack which starts the entire process all over again.

All is not lost for cereal.

The reason that cereal starts you off on the wrong foot is that it is unbalanced, meaning that it is mostly sugar and nothing else.  If there was something to balance the sugar in the cereal, our blood sugar would not rise as dramatically.  Fat and protein are great for slowing down the absorption of sugar and therefore preventing the spike in blood sugar.

Adding toppings to cereal can balance sugar content.

There are a lot of options for adding protein and fat to cereal.  One of them is TVP or textured vegetable protein to cereal.  TVP is a soy based protein that is crunchy much like grape nuts, but has very little flavor.  It can be put on cereal as a topping or mixed in with oatmeal before it is cooked.  Another good option is flax seeds, these little seeds provide the all important omega-3′s and also help to balance the sugar in the cereal.