September Newsletter
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fall as the season of preparation takes on new meaning this year. I feel now is the time to double down on our efforts for immune system support especially through lifestyle. Healthy food, daily exercise, adequate sleep and monitoring your stress are more important now than ever. The change of the season though can sometimes present some difficulties with staying the course. Sometimes as the weather shifts our immune system triggers flare, our sleep with changing of light / dark cycles can become disrupted and our mood can start to spiral. All of this can compound to result in decreased motivation for self-care. I would like to remind you of the resources and tools at your disposal for the heavy lifting and preparations for the winter season to come.
Help with the Heavy Lifting
”We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit”
- Aristotle
The heavy lifting in my mind refers to the day to day decisions and actions you take in service of the health outcome you desire. Our daily habits are critical to excellent health. We spend time together at our office visit identifying health goals and figuring out steps toward those goals. What sometimes is missing is the critical step of linking the desired health outcome (what we want) to the motivation (why we want it) to the decisions and steps to get there (how to get it). Sometimes there is not the instant gratification of a result while performing the heavy lifting. This requires you to have faith in the process, trusting in the health of your body and the knowledge that consistency over time produces results. Your job is to make the connection between what you want and why you want it, it is my job in collaboration with you to figure how we get there.
A simple exercise to do if you feel a lack of motivation and “stuck” on your health journey is to ask- what is my “carrot” and what is my “stick” – your incentive and consequence. What do you want, what is meaningful to you – that is your carrot. What do you get when you are successful in your health goal? “I want to age without the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s”. “I want to run a sub 5-hour marathon.” “I want to prevent a re-occurance of breast cancer and live cancer free”. Then think about your “stick” – what happens if I fail? How will I feel with a negative health-outcome? How will I feel if the negative outcome happens but knowing I did everything I could to prevent it vs not doing anything proactively? Even when incentives and consequences are clear, sometimes we need added support with the heavy lifting. I am bringing on more tools at Sparkle to give that leg up because I realize that knowing is not always doing and sometimes well, the path of least resistance beckons.
Functional Nutrition and Health Coaching and Herbal Support
Kate Swords is available to help you with the heavy lifting. She provides coaching, accountability and insight if needed for those lifestyle factors that make a huge difference in outcome. Please utilize her, you are not alone. This is especially true if you are struggling with the heavy lifting or identifying what and why you want your optimal health. You cannot supplement your way out of a poor lifestyle – no matter if it is stress, nutrition, movement or sleep.
Massage Therapy
Gina Toce will soon be available for massage therapy. Sometimes the goal of this is a simple act of self-care and relaxation, sometimes it is to boost lymphatics and detoxification, sometimes it is augment treatments for chronic and acute pain. I think about stagnant lymphatic flow and healing sometimes and in cases of chronic issues and in the prevention of future issues. I feel this will nicely augment the personalized treatment protocols that we are working on together.
Nutritional IV Therapy
We are welcoming Andrea Vallario, RN, RYT, for personalized nutritional IV therapy. This is only open to active / current members and after a discussion of the goals and treatment protocols which of course are personalized. This is prescription only and will require laboratory screening. I am working closely with Andrea to be able to offer this by next month.
Spotlight on Vitamin C
Vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin that is essential to human life. Vitamin C’s claim to fame came when deficiencies were linked to scurvy which was treated with citrus fruits in sailors at sea for long periods of time. Vitamin C is a cofactor in at least 11 biochemical reactions in the body, some of which are involved with energy production as well as collagen formation, and iron absorption. Deficiency in its severe form, which fortunately is rare these days, can result in skin breakdown, depression, lack of motivation in early phases and progress to more severe manifestations and ultimately death. Vitamin C can be helpful for detoxification, and Immune system support.
A recent fact that blew my mind is that when there is an infection going on or some other immune system stressor (autoimmunity, toxicity) our body uses up vitamin C which is a powerful anti-oxidant. This vitamin then becomes depleted when there is an infection. This simple fact led me to some “ah ha” moments recently as I have been studying it extensively before we start to offer it intravenously at Sparkle.
When I see vitamin C deficiency on micronutrient testing my index of suspicion for a chronic infection in the gut or elsewhere in the body should be raised. Often my patients are taking vitamin C – yet, they are deficient sometimes and I usually attribute this to absorption but maybe we should be thinking about a bigger picture cause.
When there is an active infection or when we are actively detoxifying, we should be dosing with higher doses to keep up with demand and that may allow for a quicker and better outcome. Even if we are doing so orally, the side effects (diarrhea) are less likely when the body is sucking up the vitamin C it so needs to combat the oxidative stress of the infection. Often higher tissue doses are only achievable through IV administration given the gut will only absorb to a point. Luckily this has been a well-studied therapeutic intervention that is very safe.
At lower doses, vitamin C is functioning more as an anti-oxidant, it also mildly chelates metals. It is supportive of the immune response in this way by reducing “collateral damage from immune activation. It helps reduce inflammation in blood vessels and is actively being studied in cardiovascular prevention and treatment. May also help with collagen and skin health. Interestingly at higher doses, there is the formation hydrogen peroxides which Is selectively toxic to cancer cells so it is used adjunctively in cancer treatments.
I know a lot of people favor super high doses of oral vitamin C. When you look at the absorption, and test dose dependent serum levels, at high doses orally there is less absorption. This of course will vary genetically amongst individuals and will vary with what is going on. I tend to keep the dose at 500 mg – 1000 mg as a basic support but will increase that dosing if I feel the biological need is higher to bowel tolerance. I became interested in the use of IV vitamin C proactively as well as reactively in cases of autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue and cancers all of which have immune system implications. It is very difficult to achieve tissue and blood doses with oral supplementation. Over the next few months, I will be trialing this myself and will start to offer it to select patients when it makes sense in their clinical picture. More on this to come, if you have questions about this please reach out.
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