Flexibility

 Flexibility and mobility are related. Flexibility describes the ability of your muscles to lengthen, or stretch, and mobility refers to the ability of your joints to move through their full range of motion. Maintaining optimal range of motion in your joints is associated with good balance, strength, and walking speed. You can test your flexibility with five stretches:

Back, hips, and hamstrings: With your legs straight, bend over and touch your toes.

Neck: Sit in a chair or on the floor and turn your head to one side. You should be able to get your chin almost in line with your shoulder—about 90 degrees.

Thoracic spine: Start on your side with your legs and feet together, knees bent. Straighten both arms in front of you and rotate your top arm open, keeping your lower arm, pelvis and legs still (top photo, below). If you can “open the book,” or touch your top arm to the floor behind you without moving your legs, you have adequate flexibility in your upper back (bottom photo, below).

Calves and ankles: Face a wall with your toes touching the wall. Step one foot back slightly and keep the other foot planted. Drop down onto your knee with the back foot, then let your front knee come forward to touch the wall. If your heel pops up on the front foot, move away from the wall and keep going. If you can move you front foot back four inches and still touch your knee to the wall, you have good flexibility in your calf and ankle.

Hips: Start by lying on your back with your right foot on the ground, knee bent. Bring the left ankle to the top of your right knee, and, using your hands, lift your right leg off the ground. Reach for your hamstring or shin as you bring your right leg closer to your chest. Repeat on the other side.

You can improve your flexibility by performing these stretches as best you can several times a week, holding each for 30 seconds. Because I’ve been doing yoga for 25 years, I can do all of these stretches, although I have to modify the calf and ankle stretch because of my knee replacements.

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Misguided fear of gluten

People with celiac disease (one percent of people worldwide) need to avoid gluten—the protein found in wheat, rye, and barley that makes dough cohesive. People with “non-celiac wheat sensitivity” and wheat allergies should also avoid it. For most of us, however, gluten is no problem. Nevertheless, 46 percent of people surveyed in 2017 said they purchased gluten-free groceries because they thought that gluten-free products were healthier and more natural. Not true.

As a professor of nutritional medicine at the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University Medical Center states, “typically, the gluten-free products are higher in fat, higher in sugar, higher in salt, and lower in fiber and your B vitamins and iron.” Manufacturers of gluten-free bread often add sugar, fat and salt to their products to make them taste better. Because gluten-free breads tend to contain more water, fat, and refined starch than wheat-based breads, they spoil and become stale more quickly. They're also more expensive than ordinary bread.

Making bread without gluten is tricky, so manufacturers tend to rely on ingredients like refined rice, potato, or tapioca flours, which contain much less protein and fiber than wheat flours. Moreover, gluten-free breads do not contain folic acid, niacin, riboflavin and thiamin or iron.

Apparently, gluten-free breads are improving. But you need to check the labels. If the first ingredients are water and tapioca starch, forget it.

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Don’t trust U.S. Dietary Guidelines

 In 1957, Ancel Keys, a charismatic and influential physiologist, launched the Seven Countries Study to confirm his hypothesis that saturated fat causes cardiovascular disease (the “diet-heart” hypothesis). To make sure his study confirmed his hypothesis, he “cherry picked” countries and participants most likely to support his idea. The results of his study were widely accepted, thanks, in part, to Dr. Paul Dudley White, an influential cardiologist and personal doctor for President Eisenhower, and later by the American Heart Association. Keys also influenced the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which in turn influenced the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, as shown in the food pyramid from 1992. 

The base of that pyramid shows starchy foods along with instructions to eat 6-ll servings of “bread, cereal, rice and pasta”. The guidelines have not changed significantly.

In adhering to the high-carbohydrate, low-fat recommendations, we’ve increased our yearly consumption of grain by almost sixty pounds per person and our consumption of sweeteners, such as high-fructose corn syrup, by thirty pounds per person. We now drink twice as much soda as milk (milk contains saturated fat!). (I was horrified to see schools and parents switch from giving kids milk for their main beverage to giving them juice.)

Over the past 12 years, rigorous research has concluded that saturated fats have no effect on “major cardiovascular outcomes,” including heart attacks, strokes or mortality. As the American College of Cardiology states, "The recommendation to limit dietary saturated fatty acid intake has persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary." Nevertheless, the now-discredited “diet-heart hypothesis” continues to influence nutrition policy—with disastrous results. Beginning in the early eighties, the incidence of obesity started rising sharply, along with Type 2 diabetes. For example, the number of young people under the age of 20 with Type 2 diabetes grew by 95% from 2001 to 2017. A third of all people over 65 are diabetic. (Carbohydrates spike blood sugar.)

One of the biggest studies on people with Type 2 diabetes, conducted at the University of Indiana, found that after one year on a low carb diet, 62% reversed their diabetes (were no longer diagnosed as diabetic), and 94% reduced or entirely eliminated reliance on insulin. 

The U.S. Dietary Guidelines for America governs our nation’s top nutrition policy, which affects  food manufacture, labelling, food programs within schools and hospitals, as well as recommendations by doctors and dieticians. Guidelines are produced every five years, beginning in 1980. The Guidelines Committee are working on new guidelines, which so far do not appear to be significantly different from earlier guidelines. Maybe this is why: a number of research organizations, such as Public Health Nutrition, have revealed that 95% of the members on the expert committee for the 2020 U.S. Dietary Guidelines had conflicts of interest with food or pharmaceutical companies, including Kellogg, Abbot, Kraft, Mead Johnson, General Mills, and Dannon.

A stalwart group of people, The Nutrition Coalition, have been working hard to influence the Guidelines Committee, a tough job, but a worthy one. I trust them. In February of this year they reported that, at the kickoff meeting of the Guidelines Committee, a USDA official acknowledged that the Guidelines do NOT apply to people with obesity, diabetes or any other diet-related condition. Huh? That would be the majority of Americans.

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Your vagus nerve and you

 Your vagus nerve is the main nerve of the parasympathetic nervous system. It helps us rest, digest, and calm down. It consists of thousands of fibers organized into two bundles that run from your brain stem down through each side of your neck and into your torso, branching outward to your internal organs. It’s a two-way communication system, picking up information about your organs and sending information from your brain stem back to them, helping to control digestion, heart rate, voice, mood and immune system functions. Because of these functions, the vagus nerve is the target of various therapies.

Researchers are using a treatment called vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), which uses electrical impulses to stimulate centers in the brain that regulate mood, sleep, appetite, and motivation. The treatment has been used to help with epilepsy, diabetes, depression, PTSD, and inflammatory autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. A battery-operated, computer-controlled device is implanted in the chest. Wires attach the device to the left vagus nerve. When stimulated, the nerve sends signals up to the brain. Studies have shown that VNS therapy significantly helps around 30% of patients who have been treated for chronic depression or type two bipolar affective disorder. The therapeutic effects appear to accumulate over time.

As you can imagine, entrepreneurs have taken advantage of the research to create products for stimulating the vagus nerve. For example, in searching the Internet I found a “non-invasive” hand-held “nerve stimulation device,” now on sale for $299.00. You can also get vagus massage oil, vibrating bracelets, and pillow mists. TikTok videos with the hashtag “#vagusnerve” have been viewed more than 64 million times. Tips for “resetting” or “toning” the vagus nerve include plunging your face into ice water baths or lying on your back with ice packs on our chest.

Or, as neurosurgeon Dr. Kevin J. Tracey says, “For wellness, try to maintain high vagus nerve activity through mindfulness, exercise and paced breathing.” Beats plunging your face into ice water.

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Excess excess mortality

 Because of Covid, we’ve had excess mortality—more deaths than should be expected in normal times (about 1.1 million Americans have officially died from it). However, more than 300,000 additional Americans have died from other causes—deaths during the pandemic that were not identified as the direct result of infection. In other words, an excess of the excess. Epidemiologists, demographers, and the like have suggested a number of reasons for the excess excess:

Delayed care: postponing treatment for other illness, such as cancer.

Social isolation, anxiety, and unemployment: worsening of a wide range of conditions that can lead to suicide, homicide, car accidents, and overdoses.

Damage to the body by Covid-19: lingering disturbances to the function of various organ systems, particularly the cardiovascular system.

Reinfection: contributing to the death from causes other than classic Covid pneumonia.

Immune function damage: long-lasting dysfunction in the ability to fight disease.

None of these theories quite explain the excess deaths. For example, while suicides and overdoses have been elevated, they represent less than five percent of the excess mortality. Excess deaths from cancer—the delayed care theory—has been miniscule. If long-Covid, reinfection, or immune system dysfunction were responsible, you’d expect to see the share of non-Covid excess mortality growing over time, but while there were more infections in 2022 than in either of the previous two years, the excess was smaller in 2022 than in 2020. The simplest explanation is that the excess excess is the result of deaths that occurred at home and were not properly recorded or registered as Covid deaths.

The thing is, more Americans are still dying than should be expected. It would be nice to know why.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.