Wedding Yay!
I took last week off as I was attending my friend Merlyn's wedding in Colorado. It was a wonderful trip, but I did miss a few classes and had to play some catch up upon return. However I am happy to report that I did well on my first two quizzes, and now have 5 more staring me down for next week. Despite the stress of trying to cram everything quickly into my brain, as well as working and trying to maintain a small semblance of a social life, I am still feeling really good about school, and thinking I made the right decision in coming here. The more that I begin to delve into the theory of this medicine, as well as the history of it, I realize how much it really does have baring here in the west. Many of the basic principles apply when thinking of Homeopathic medicine as well as Naturpathic medicine. As I have said before, I do believe that people in the west are beginning to have a stronger urge to pursue more holistic forms of health care, as it is becoming increasingly more clear that our current strategies for health care are not fixing the problems with the degenerative diseases of aging and of course the obesity problem as well.
Basic Nutrition from the Anatomy and Physiology Lecture
On the topic of obesity, we did talk a bit about nutrition, here are some things we spoke of in the anatomy and phsyiology lecture yesterday.
Lipids: Fat, important for vitamin absorbtion, and brain function. We as humans can only synthesize 5 of the 10 must have fats that we need in life. Anything that is listed as an essential fat, or essential fatty acids are those of which we must consume to acquire. This means eat avocados and nuts and fish. This does not mean eat fried food etc. and or starve your body of fat altogether. Learn about what are good fats and eat those, don't be afraid of them, and moderate the "bad" fats. As you all know I am a waitress, I had a woman the other day chomping on fried calamari who asked me to hold the avocado from her salad as she thought it was too fattening. That is a perfect example of nutrition ignorance, and I found it sad. So here is my educational plug on fats :)
Carbohydrates: Important because they are the bodies #1 preferred method of energy. If your body does not have this energy source, it will pull energy from protein, however protein has other functions it needs to be doing in and building in your body, if you are using up all your protein as energy, your body will be deficient in other ways. However, if you eat too many carbs, they will indeed be stored as fat. So, eat carbs, they are good. Eat sustainable carbs such as brown rice and wheat bread. Avoid white refined and processed carbs. Also, try to do at least 20 minutes of aerobic exercise a day, and you will use up those excess carbs and they will not be stored as fat. In other words, go for a run, it's good for you :)
Protein: essential for life, however not in the quantities that we as Americans are eating it. We now eat protein in major excess of what our forefathers did. Protein gets broken down and distributed by the liver and Kidneys. We never store protein in our body, all the protein we ingest either goes to some use in our body, or gets expelled in our urine. If we have excess protein our kidneys have to work over time to process and expel extra. This is why kidney failure patients can't eat protein and are on very low protein diets. You can actually cause your body to go into a state of ketosis or ketoacidosis, (acid kidney) which leads to kidney failure and death by eating too much protein (ie. atkins diet is bad). So eat protein, but not too much, and try to eat forms that don't have a crap ton of antibiotics and hormones in them (ie. stay away from factory farmed meat).
So that was my nutritional plug. This is all from my western medicine anatomy and physiology class for those of you who that means something to. Hope you enjoyed it. Stay tuned next week :)
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