General Wellness

Hello everyone,

I’ve been focusing my “off-time” on doing 5 minute spots on a weekly Ukrainian radio show. I try to make a recording every 2 weeks or so on various health-related topics. Obviously, my focus is on healthy living and good lifestyle habits. I have been posting the transcripts of the show on my blog also.

This is not one of the recordings, just a regular post.

Infectious disease update!

COVID-19

Covid continues to decline worldwide, including here in North America, with the latest numbers in the US approximating 500 deaths a week, the lowest since the pandemic started. Hospitalizations also continue to decline. We no longer have any detailed community information and no one seems to even be testing anymore so who knows what is going on out there. I am seeing a lot of sick people though! Not necessarily Covid, just lots of viral infections.

Even though Covid deaths are dropping, 500 a week still translates into 26,000 deaths a year so it is certainly not irrelevant. 

Remember that this is an airborne disease, meaning that it can be spread by simply breathing. Just like smoke. You don’t have to cough or sneeze. Our CDC is failing the community by recently introducing confusing definitions of how this disease spreads. 

The most dominant new variant is KP2 and it is still unclear what will happen this summer. 

I just got my latest booster this week. My arm is a little sore, but that’s it. I think it’s my 7th one. Vaccination and responsible careful behavior is still your best bet against contracting this disease. Remember that there is still an 8% long covid rate.

MONKEYPOX.

There is a new, more aggressive monkeypox variant popping up in the Congo. It spreads from primates to people, either by direct contact or by consuming infected meat from monkeys, referred to locally as bushmeat. Once a person is infected, it spreads from person to person sexually or body fluids. The last outbreak spread to the US so this one easily could as well, especially given the increased world travel. There is a vaccine for the last version, but it’s not clear if it is effective against this newer strain.

H5N1 BIRD FLU

The latest concern is how the H5N1 bird flu virus has become widespread in the dairy/cow herds. We know for sure that it was identified in at least 9 states. This is the same number I mentioned on my last post about H5N1 but the problem is that most dairy/beef farms are not cooperating with testing and reporting for fear of losing money so we don’t have a good handle on how many more herds and states are affected. Since the known infected herds have many herds between them, it is a guarantee that there is a lot more H5N1 in cattle than we appreciate.

The CDC has now resorted to testing wastewater downstream from cattle farms to look for the virus.

Dairy farmers are also not cooperating with employee testing requirements. For one, they do not want their undocumented workers to be identified and potentially deported and secondly, if more disease is identified, they lose money since less milk is gathered and cows are destroyed. As of now, there has still only been one documented case of H5N1 conjunctivitis in a farm worker but around 300 are being monitored. There are many more who are likely exposed and potentially infected. The reason that one worker got it in his eyes is that humans have receptors for this strain of H5N1 in the conjunctiva of the eyes but not in the lungs. At least not yet!

This indifferent attitude by the cattle industry is similar to what happened during the Mad Cow outbreak many years ago. This disease, technically called Jakob Creutzfeldt Disease, is 100% lethal and is caused by protein particles called prions, which are indestructible. They slowly eat away at brain tissue until a person dies. At that time, there was a “Shoot, Shovel and Shut Up” policy promoted by the industry, supporting the practice of killing “down” cows, likely infected with the disease, burying them and being quiet about it so no one finds out so the farm stays open. Pretty sad. Although the numbers of humans who died after contracting this disease by eating contaminated meat was not great (only a few hundred), Britain was particularly affected.

Today, more than 20% of pasteurized milk samples in grocery stores are contaminated with H5N1. Despite the government mandating that sick cows not be milked, most dairy farmers are ignoring this rule and the government is turning a blind eye.

This is a disease which is a direct result of overcrowding on farms and intermixing of various animal species. These conditions allow viruses to mutate and then spread from one species to another very rapidly. It is thought that the actual source of infection of the cow herds is feces (poop) from chickens. Chickens are the main infected animal species with over 90 millions birds estimated to be infected. Their bedding is often collected and then fed to livestock!

This virus is primarily found in bird populations, but now has jumped to cattle and various other species like deer and even some cats. As yet, pigs have not yet been involved with H5N1 as they were with H1N1, but if that were to happen, we’re next since the transmission receptors for the virus are the same in humans and pigs.

These animals on factory farms live miserable and tortured lives. There is no “humane” killing. All this just to satisfy humans’ craving for meat. 90 BILLION land animals are killed annually and that does not count the TRILLIONS of fish we kill annually. 

Eating fewer animal products and more plants not only is healthier for you, it is more compassionate for the animals and is the best and fastest way to reverse climate change. 

Have a great weekend.

Stay safe and be well.

AC

Hello everyone,

Dr. Chuma here and today I wanted to talk about another lifestyle habit which significantly improves health and longevity and that is movement and exercise.

The human race evolved moving constantly. The concept of sitting at a desk all day staring at a screen, sitting in meetings, watching TV or traveling in vehicles is a very modern one and has wreaked havoc on our health. Sitting is considered the new smoking.

I mentioned in an earlier segment about how most Americans, including children, spend less than 7 minutes a day outside. We can all remember when we were kids, we would spend hours playing outdoors, riding our bikes, playing in the yard and constantly moving. Those days seem to be gone and even schools have eliminated gym requirements and have shortened recess playtime.

When you look at the Blue Zones, places in the world where people live long and healthy lives, one of the universal attributes is that they are either constantly moving, or they exercise regularly. 

Movement and exercise don’t just improve your heart health and help you lose weight. They also:

• Improve sleep quality and reduce snoring
• Lower blood sugar
• Reduce inflammation
• Improve mood and they even
• Raise the number of cancer fighting cells in your blood

Here are just a few scientific points.

When you exercise, your brain produces a compound known as Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor or BDNF. This compound grows new and improves established neuronal connections in the brain. It also stimulates production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain which is responsible for memory consolidation, directly reversing age-related memory loss and early dementia.

Exercise has the immediate effect of lowering blood pressure and reducing the stress hormone cortisol. At the same time, it increases levels of serotonin, the “happy” neurotransmitter in the brain and the gut.

It stresses the muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones and is far superior to the complication-ridden medications often prescribed for osteoporosis. If you’re on one, educate yourself and read the side effects and stop them immediately! I’m amazed at how often I have conversations with women taking drugs like Fosamax who are completely unaware of their risks. Ironically, over time, they actually increase fracture risk!

15-20 minutes of walking after a meal has a significant impact on reducing blood sugar spikes. This is one of the useful strategies to deal with blood sugar, and MOST Americans have blood sugar issues whether they know it or not. 

Exercise lengthens telomeres, the caps on the ends of our chromosomes which are responsible for aging. The more you exercise, the greater the impact on your telomeres. 

But you don’t have to run a marathon or become a bodybuilder to benefit from exercise. Even a little bit of movement has benefits, and quickly. In fact, the less active you are, the more benefit you get from starting an exercise regimen. The more you exercise, the more the benefit, but only up to a point. 

There can be too much exercise. Just looking at runners, overall, regular runners are dramatically healthier than those who don’t exercise, however, regular marathoners do a little worse than those who regularly run half marathoners, who do a little worse than those who regularly run 10ks. The benefits of aerobic exercise plateau at about 45 minutes.

There are 2 traditional forms of exercise. Aerobic, or “cardio”, which exercises your cardiovascular system. This includes things like brisk walking, running, biking, stair stepping and swimming. And then there are resistance type exercises, which place a load on your body. Although weight lifting has traditionally been the go to resistance exercise, anything which places a load on your joints, bones ligaments and tendons creates resistance. Dancing, body weight movements, and even gentler movements like yoga are examples.

Both types are important to incorporate into your regimen. I hate lifting weights but do it because I know it’s good for me. I like to run because it stresses both my cardiovascular system and puts some strain and impact on my bones and muscles. We need all kinds of exercise to thrive. From an aerobic standpoint, shoot for 20-30 minutes of exercise exerting an effort which makes you just a little short of breath. 

But don’t poopoo simple walking or even just passive arm or leg movement. Even just sitting in a chair and marching in place improves cognitive function and cardiometabolic parameters in nursing home patients. Taking the stairs rather than the elevator or parking farther away from the door of the store to get a few more steps in sound simple and more of a nuisance, but they are all little additions to the daily movement which will keep you healthy.

The list of excuses why people don’t exercise is long. But most of them all boil down to not wanting to put in the effort. You must prioritize it as a “must-do” in your daily regimen. We are hard-wired to preserve energy, to make through the next famine so additional movement is not something we evolved to do. But our modern lives provide us with way too many calories to worry about starvation and we store all the excess as fat. That’s why 75% of us are overweight or obese, starting in childhood. 

There is no question that daily exercise also helps but 

1) you can’t out exercise your mouth so prioritize a whole food, plant based diet and 

2) you can’t undo an entire day of sitting on your butt with a 45 minute gym session so take lots of breaks and move during your day.

You burn as many calories climbing 25 flights of stairs as you do eating just one Oreo cookie. It takes 30 miles of running to lose a pound. 1 soda or ½ a Big Mac is equivalent to 10,000 steps.

So you should not approach exercise as a way to burn calories. It’s a way to improve your health overall in the long run. 

Lifestyle improvements may have very rapid results, but it’s the long game you should be looking at. And the daily little things matter.

Stay well.

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