Built to last..

Connective Tissue – Use It or Lose It

What's so good about regular exercise? Apart from the well-known and significant cardiovascular benefits, regular exercise helps you maintain, strengthen, and continually upgrade your store and supply of connective tissue - muscle and bone.

Weight-bearing exercise is the key. One of the primary structural purposes of bone is load-bearing. Your long bones are designed to support the weight of your body and carry that weight around in three-dimensional space. Your skeletal muscles (voluntary muscle) support the functions of bone. Muscles are the tissues that move bones and joints. The bones passively bear the loads and the muscles actively move around those weight-bearing loads.

But your body is very smart. If you're not doing enough physical work your body will begin to break down muscle and bone tissue and use those biochemical components elsewhere, where the need is greater. In order to maintain the optimal health of your muscles and bones, you need to do sufficient exercise - regularly and ongoingly.

Just like the well-known, best-selling American truck, your body is built to last. But if it's built to last, why do so many people have serious problems with their bodies? If a human body is built to last, why does it seem to break down so easily?
The pharmaceutical industry earns billions of dollars each year, profiting from the tendency of so many people to suffer from debilitating disease. For example, osteoporosis affects more than 10 million women in the United States. The disorder involves loss of bone mass and may lead to fractures of the hip and lumbar vertebras, both of which may have severe consequences. In June 2010 a new drug was approved by the FDA to help prevent such fractures in postmenopausal women.

It is estimated that 55% of all Americans older than age 50 either have low bone mass or have lost sufficient bone mass to have received a diagnosis of osteoporosis.1 But if our bodies are built to last, why is the prevalence of osteoporosis so high? It doesn't make sense that our internal systems are simply designed to fail.

It is much more likely that our bodies are designed to withstand a tremendous amount of wear and tear. Human bodies, representing the outcome of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of evolution, are self-healing, self-renewing, and self-replicating machines. A human cell's most basic survival systems are based on deep complexity. Yet once a woman reaches menopause she joins a group of individuals at risk for losing a significant amount of bone mass and developing osteoporosis. What is wrong with this picture?

The hidden factors, revealed only upon close analysis and understanding, relate to lifestyle - what it is that we're doing with our bodies. If your driving style consists of flooring the accelerator and alternately slamming on the brakes, you'll quickly burn out the brake lines and ruin the tires of your fine built-to-last truck. If you rarely change the oil and oil filter your truck's performance will seriously degrade. If you ignore traffic signals and highway signs you'll probably crash your vehicle.

Defective care and maintenance and dangerous driving will drastically shorten the useful lifespan of your truck. The truck may be built-to-last but you've effectively voided the warranty. The day will quickly come, much sooner than anticipated, that you'll be forced to junk your truck.

This extended metaphor is exactly analogous to how we live our lives. Much recent research demonstrates that lifestyle is responsible for a large proportion of all cases of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. For example, 82% of coronary deaths in women may be related to individual health behaviors.2 The main strategy to prevent loss of bone mass and osteoporosis is to engage in regular vigorous, weight-bearing exercise.3

From a broader perspective, the main strategy to preventing disease in general is to eat a healthy, diverse diet, do vigorous exercise regularly, get sufficient rest, and ongoingly engage in rewarding, fulfilling activities with family and friends. Our bodies are built to last. How long they last, to a large extent, is up to us.

1National Osteoporosis Foundation - http://www.nof.org/advocacy/prevalence/
2Aldana SC: The Culprit and the Cure. Mapleton, UT, Maple Mountain Press, 2005, p 52
3Dionyssiotis Y, et al: Association of physical exercise and calcium intake with bone mass measured by quantitative ultrasound. BMC Women's Health 7:10-12, 2010


Please sign up to our member wellness area which is separate from our newsletter. You will have acess to exercises and stretches for your spine. Please consult me prior beginning any exercise routine. Thanks and have a great day!!

Dr. Pete

Your Inner Ecology

Water Balance - Essential for Life

Every gardener knows that her plot of land needs sufficient water to enable the flourishing of the plants, flowers, fruits, and vegetables under her care. Likewise, the human body needs sufficient daily watering so that health and well-being can continue to flourish. Most authoritative sources recommend daily consumption of eight glasses of water per day.

But most people don't come close to approaching the recommended minimum. Some don't even drink one daily glass of water. The result of failing to maintain proper water balance is a toxic internal environment. Biochemical processes break down and chronic disorders such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, asthma and allergies, and arthritis develop.

Drinking water is a simple and very cheap method of helping maintain good health. If you don't usually drink water, start with two glasses a day. From there build up to four glasses and then eight glasses per day. You may notice some surprising and very gratifying results, including more restful sleep, reduced levels of stress, and a healthier glow to your skin.

In April 2010 the BP Deep Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a catastrophic offshore oil spill. Millions of barrels of oil have spilled into the Gulf since the explosion, representing an unprecedented environmental disaster. Many complex ecosystems are affected by the oil spill, ranging from the Louisiana bayous and associated wetlands to as-yet-unexplored deep ocean ecologies.

The Deep Horizon explosion has focused public attention on ocean, gulf, and wetlands ecologies. The grave threats posed to these environmental ecosystems can also focus attention on our own internal ecosystems.
We tend not to think of our human physiology in terms of ecosystems. But in fact the analogy is a close one. For example, water comprises approximately 70% of the earth's surface. The amount of water in the adult human body is estimated at between 60 and 70%. This is a startlingly similar correspondence. Water is the basis for human physiology, as it is the basis for the existence of life on earth. Our physiologic water is subject to the same ecologic stresses as is the water in our external environment.

Human blood is composed of approximately 90% water by volume. Your body attempts to control certain characteristics of blood very closely. For example, the acid-base balance of blood is maintained within a very tight range - a pH between 7.35 and 7.45. Blood levels of calcium are also tightly controlled, within a range of 8.5 to 10.5 milligrams for every 100 milliliters of blood. Lower calcium levels will cause calcium to be leeched out of bone to restore blood levels to within the normal range.
Just as oil has been washing up on the shores of the Louisiana coastline for many months during 2010, your body's internal coastlines can be similarly breached. Prolonged elevated blood levels of cholesterol, for example, will cause cholesterol to "wash up" on the surfaces of cells lining the walls of small blood vessels. These endothelial cells normally constitute an effective barrier, protecting the structures of arterioles and capillaries. But these cardiovascular coastlines can be damaged by cholesterol "spills", resulting in formation of arteriosclerotic plaque and narrowing of small blood vessels.1

Similarly, high levels of blood glucose (as in diabetes) can cause these simple sugars to wash up on the shores of small blood vessels in the kidney, retina, and nerves. Serious damage to kidneys, the eyes, and nerves can result.2,3

Failure to take appropriate precautions and heed warning signs is the likely cause of the Deep Horizon explosion. In order for us to ongoingly maintain a healthy inner ecology, we need to do what was not done in this oil-drilling operation. Making proactive lifestyle choices is a key to creating and supporting an inner ecology that will reward us with long-term health and well-being.

Engaging in regular chiropractic care is a one such lifestyle choice that helps support a healthy inner ecology.
1Gooding HC, de Ferranti SD: Cardiovascular risk assessment and cholesterol management in adolescents: getting to the heart of the matter. Curr Opini Pediatr May 17 2010 (ahead of print)
2Shogbon AO, Levy SB: Intensive glucose control in the management of diabetes mellitus and inpatient hyperglycemia. Am J Health Syst Pharm 67(10):798-805, 2010
3Stolar MW, et al: Managing type 2 diabetes: going beyond glycemic control. J Manag Care Pharm 14(5 Suppl B):S2-S19, 2008


Please sign up to our member wellness area which is separate from our newsletter. You will have acess to exercises and stretches for your spine. Please consult me prior beginning any exercise routine. Thanks and have a great day!!

Dr. Pete