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Extra time in gym class does not appear to do anything to reduce child obesity. So, what can you do to help an overweight child? Or yourself, for that matter, if this is a concern for you?

This news from the Canadian Pediatric Society conference held in Victoria, British Columbia, at first glance may seem surprising. Exercise helps one lose weight, right? Well according to this analysis of studies of school activity interventions done on 10,000 children in BC comparing Body Mass Index (BMI) before and after the intervention, there was no change in BMI, even in the studies where the activity interventions lasted three years. The studies analysis did show improvements in health measures like blood pressure, bone density, aerobic fitness and range of motion, but none of the studies showed a drop in bodyweight. This follows on the heels of another study done on 900 teens in grades 10 to 12 in the Vancouver area studied by researchers at University of British Columbia and McGill University in Montreal, who found “… there appeared to be no link between body mass index (BMI) values and levels of physical activity”

Body Mass Index is a simple measure used to compare one’s height to one’s weight (Weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared). A healthy BMI is considered to be between 18.5 and 25, overweight between 25 and 30, and obese, over 30. This measure is frequently used in studies, and is well understood by health professionals. I think the number can be very misleading, however. For example, a very muscular male can weigh a great deal (muscle weighs more than fat), and still be very lean, but may have a BMI over 30. I find waist/hip ratio or even simply a waist measurement to be far more useful for before and after measurements.

The study results are a blow to those who are advocating for daily quality physical education in the schools, as it may be harder to convince officials to take children away from reading, writing and arithmetic if physical activity does nothing to stem the obesity tide. I hope those officials see the big picture, however. I think the goals of a physical education program should be to help children learn to love moving their bodies, so that they continue to do so when they are adults.  And the health benefits of reduced blood pressure, increased bone density, improved aerobic capacity, improved range of motion about joints, not to mention improved mental concentration are worth the time spent on daily physical education. There is no question about the increased health benefits gained from better physical fitness.

So, if your child is overweight (and if you or someone you know is overweight), what are some strategies that may work to lower body fat?

1. Control blood sugar and insulin levels, in order to reduce fat storage and encourage fat burning by:
   1. Reducing or eliminating sugar as much as possible – soda pop, juice, fruit drinks, candies, cookies, cake, puddings, sweetened yogurts etc.
      1. replacing with fresh fruit (not dried or canned) if something sweet is needed
      2. Encouraging water and raw milk (if tolerated) from grass-fed cows as the beverages of choice
      3. de-emphasizing desserts
      4. Using an activity as a treat rather than sweets
   2. Eliminating junk food – chips, cheesies, crackers, boxed breakfast cereals, pop tarts, boxed waffles, pre-mixed sauces, dressings etc. – anything that comes from a factory.
   3. Limiting the starches like white bread, pasta, white rice etc.
   4. Reading labels and avoiding artificial sweeteners – the liver stores toxins in fat tissue.  Use stevia to sweeten if needed.
   5. Choosing REAL food snacks, like a generous piece of raw cheese with some carrot sticks or an apple, a chicken leg, a hard-boiled egg, veggie sticks with a home-made full-fat yogurt dip or unsweetened nut butters.
      1. Quality fats are nourishing, not particularly fattening, and they decrease hunger.  If not sensitive, give even obese children some full-fat dairy like whole milk, raw cheese, butter, ghee etc. Girls do especially well when quality fats are included in their diet, according to this article on children's nutrition by Dr. Tom Cowan. Quality fats are needed for neurological, immune and hormone system development.
      2. Protein foods like meat, poultry and fish help children grow, decrease hunger, and are especially important for boys according to this article on children's nutrition by Dr. Tom Cowan.
      3. Vegetables are often not liked by children, so mixing with real cheese (broccoli/cauliflower and cheese sauce) or cream (creamed spinach) may help. Broccoli and cheese sauce is a MUCH better choice than macaroni and cheese sauce.
   6. Reading labels on medications/multi-vitamins – they often contain sugar or sweeteners
2. Ensure bedrooms are completely dark – night-time light messes withhormones, and hormones determine bodyweight.
3. Reduce screen time (TV and computers), and get them out of the bedroom. Not only does TV watching often go hand in hand with munching, but also advertisers market directly to kids, changing their food preferences for poorer quality food. I don't think I have ever seen a TV commercial for broccoli!
4. Do physical activity as a family (bike riding, walks, hiking etc.) to encourage life-long activity, and also to stop the lounging on the sofa watching TV syndrome. Teens that have reached their adult height can incorporate weight training into their life, which will increase insulin sensitivity.
5. Reduce or eliminate food products and skin products that have a long list of chemical ingredients. The liver stores toxins as fats, so ahigh toxic load may prevent the body from losing fat.
6. Drinking a big glass of water before meals may help by filling the stomach, reducing hunger.
7. Give your child a quality probiotic to improve the gut bacteria. There are many studies now indicating that the wrong bacteria in the gut can be a risk factor for obesity. There are probiotics made for kids available.

If you want to learn how and what to feed your children from infancy through the teenage years, I cannot recommend highly enough this article called "Feeding our Children". Children fed this way will be healthy, vibrant, and will learn and appreciate how to nourish themselves as adults.

If you want to search for other posts by title or by topic, go to www.wellnesstips.ca.

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Here is a story I hear ALL the time. “I have a back problem. I stopped my exercise program and my back pain went away. But every time I begin my exercise program again, within days, or sometimes a week, my pain comes back and I have to quit again. I’m so frustrated because I’m out of shape and gaining weight, and I don’t know what to do about it.” After I assess them, I frequently tell them I think I can help them. There is a very good reason this happens, and there is definitely something you can do about it to get back on track.

We essentially have two muscle systems in the body – the muscles that move us (movers ), which are the muscles we tend to exercise in the gym, and the muscles that hold our joints (stabilizers), maintaining proper axis of rotation during movement at the joint. These muscle systems are quite different in how they work.

Mover muscles

• tend to be larger
• tend to be further away from the joint (closer to the outside of the body)
• greater leverage
• can exert higher forces
• they move bones (body parts like arms, legs, the trunk, the head etc.)
• Act more like the gas pedal – you want to move, they move you
• they turn on when we need them, and turn off when we don't.
• turn on quickly (more fast twitch fibres)

Stabilizer muscles

• tend to be quite small
• very close to the joint so they are in an ideal position to be able to
  stabilize a joint
• very little leverage
• smaller forces (just enough to do the job)
• they control the joint motion
• act more like brakes to prevent excessive joint movement, rather than
  actually move bones
• they anticipate movement, so they turn on before we move
• tend to stay on at low levels most of the time
• turn on slowly (slow twitch fibres)
• Pain may result when there is an imbalance in the stabilizer function
  around a particular joint, resulting in the resting bone position being
  altered, or the bone movement pattern at the joint being dysfunctional

An easy example to understand is the rotator cuff of the shoulder. The job of those small muscles is not to rotate the arm, but rather to hold the arm bone (humerus) into the socket, and make sure your humerus is maintaining the proper axis of rotation in the socket while your larger muscles throw that ball.

If the rotator cuff were not there, at best your arm would have slipped in the joint, and at worst your arm would have followed the ball! If there is an imbalance in the function and/or strength of the muscles that form rotator cuff, the humerus may not sit in the socket correctly, and when one moves the arm, pain may result.

The spine and pelvis is another location where imbalances side to side in the stability muscles can result in resting position of a vertebrae, or perhaps the sacrum being altered, creating pain, often one-sided. If the stability muscles on one side if the bone or joint are not working, the bone will be pulled towards the stronger side, outside its optimal functional position.

One can go to the gym and work the mover muscles all we want, but it probably won't resolve the pain unless the underlying dysfunction in the stabilizer muscle is also addressed. And working the movers in this scenario may make the painful condition worse, as the dysfunctional stabilizer won't be able to do anything to stop the excess movement at the joint. Movers may then go into spasm trying to stabilize the area, but because they are not in the right location to do the job, frequently more pain results.

So, do you have back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, pelvic pain? If you live in the Vancouver please don't hesitate to contact me by using the contact page on my website if you would like one-on-one help. www.wellnesstips.ca. We would be happy to assist you.

If you live elsewhere, see a good physiotherapist or CHEK Practitioner who can assess you, figure out which stabilizers are not functioning optimally, and teach you what to do about it.

If you want to search for other posts by title or by topic, go to www.wellnesstips.ca.

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High Density Lipoproteins (HDL) and Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL) are PROTEINS, not forms of cholesterol, contrary to popular belief. Cholesterol is cholesterol. There are NOT different forms of the cholesterol molecule.

Is it logical to think that our bodies would manufacture a substance in order to give us a disease? Of course not. Yet many of us are worried about our cholesterol levels, something our body manufactures regularly.

Cholesterol is a waxy substance that is the precursor to many of our hormones, including testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, cortisol, pregnenalone and DHEA.

Cholesterol is an antioxidant, sopping up free radicals, and is also a very important part of cell membranes, so as our cells die (blood cells, skin cells, bone cells, muscle cells etc.), cholesterol is needed to make the membranes of the replacement cells.

Considering we replace about 2 million blood cells each second, it becomes obvious that cholesterol is vitally important, and we would not survive without it. If tissue is damaged, more cholesterol is needed to repair and replace the damaged cells with healthy ones.

No wonder it is so important that our liver can easily manufacture cholesterol.

So, if LDL and HDL are not cholesterol, what are they? They are proteins that act as transportation vehicles that carry the cholesterol to the various locations in the body, just like a bus carries people to wherever they want to go.

Cholesterol is fatty, and needs to travel in a watery medium (blood), so protein carriers are necessary to make the cholesterol water soluble. The passenger is the same (cholesterol), but the bus (protein) is different, depending on the direction the cholesterol is travelling.

Would we call Harry and John "bad people" when they happened to be travelling away from the bus depot, and "good people" when they happened to be travelling toward the bus depot? The idea is absurd. Yet, this is what we do to cholesterol.

LDL proteins (so called “bad cholesterol”) carry the cholesterol from the liver out to the tissues, and HDL proteins (so called “good cholesterol”) carry the cholesterol from the tissues back to the liver. Contrary to popular belief, HDL proteins do not rid the body of the cholesterol at all – they simply return it to the liver for recycling, so it can make its next trip out on the LDL bus.

The difference between High Density Lipoproteins (HDL) and Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL) is the size and density of the molecule, with HDL molecules being larger. The smaller the molecule, the more likely it will get stuck or caught in the gap junctions between arterial cells etc., where they then oxidize, causing inflammation, which begins the artery-narrowing process.

Our bodies also make VLDL (Very Low Density Lipoproteins) which also carry cholesterol but in lesser amounts per molecule due to the much much smaller size, and these molecules are far more likely to get caught along the walls of the arteries than LDL.

If the LDL molecules are of normal size, they don’t get stuck. They just do their job as they should. People are rarely tested for their VLDL levels, yet this along with triglyceride levels are much more predictive of cardiovascular disease than total cholesterol. So, it is not the cholesterol that is the problem, but the size of the protein carrier.

Can you do anything to control the size of the protein carrier? Yes. Diet is very important. And do you think it is lowering saturated fat and cholesterol intake that will make the difference? No.

As it turns out, the higher the easily digestible carbohydrate intake (sugar, flour, processed grains – no, rice cakes are NOT healthy!), the more the VLDL proteins made (the smaller ones that are more likely to get stuck) which greatly increase one's risk of cardiovascular disease.

Sugar and flour products also increase glycation and Advanced Glycation Endproducts (AGEs), which causes arterial inflammation, also known to increase cardiovascular disease risk, and sugar and flour increase insulin secretion, which increases sympathetic load, increasing blood pressure, another risk factor for heart disease.

There is simply nothing healthy at all about quickly digested carbohydrates like processed sugar, flour and processed grains (puffed wheat etc.), and until we stop eating them, the scourge of modern degenerative diseases won't abate.

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To gain a better understanding of how to lower your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity, take my nutrition course

To see posts by category and title, go to www.wellnesstips.ca