I am always looking for healthy breakfast options, and this is a great one. Courtesy of the Homegrown Gourmet, this is a light and tasty gluten-free, lentil-based breakfast pancake. Feel free to add more veggies, cilantro or scallions. I hope you enjoy it!
Heritage Acupuncture serves the Durham Chapel Hill RTP area and offers acupuncture, Chinese herbalism and Asian skin care services. Janet Lee, L.Ac., specializes in orthopedics and internal medicine.
The benefits of yoga for physical health are well-known. But yoga is also a powerful ally to keep your spirits up — and an important component of any treatment for mental health.
Yoga for Anxiety and Depression – Harvard Health Publications
Click on the link below to read a very informative article about Gluten Intolerance. Many patients ask me if this is a real problem. I believe it is, and this article provides a very thorough explanation:
Warming and nourishing soup is considered a health food in Chinese medical nutrition. When you add bones and bone marrow to your soup broth, the health factor increases exponentially. This is because bone and marrow relate to the kidney in Chinese medicine terms, and the kidneys influence growth, reproduction and longevity.
The kidneys represent the foundation of life itself in Chinese medicine. One inherits essential qi — known as “jing” — from parents. Lifestyle and environment are important factors in preserving jing. Aside from marrow, other foods that augment our essential qi include royal jelly, fish eggs, sesame seeds, almonds and microalgae.
The nutritional value of jing-strengthening bone marrow gets high marks from a Western nutritional point of view as well. As the soup simmers, vitamins, minerals, collagen and proteins from the ingredients infuse throughout the pot. This means you get more bang with your buck as a small amount of marrow enriches the entire dish. Bone marrow soup nourishes not only your hair and nails, but also all the body’s connective tissue — including cartilage, ligaments, tendons and even bone.
The key to extracting the important marrow and minerals from bone is a long cooking time. Adding a splash of vinegar helps draw minerals from the bone into the broth. Here’s a basic recipe that you can tailor to your taste:
Basic Bone Broth Recipe
Depending upon your preference, take the carcass of a chicken or purchase the marrow bones of beef or lamb.Femur bones work well, as do knuckle bones and ox tail. Stick to organic meats with no added hormones or antibiotics. Trim the fat and most of the meat from the bones. If possible use kitchen scissors to break the bones into 2-3 inch pieces. This creates more surface area for the bone marrow to contact the water.
Place the bones in a pot (crockpots also work well) and cover with water. Add a couple tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice per quart of water to assure minerals extract from the bones. According to taste, you may add garlic, shallots, onions, ginger, celery, carrot, parsley or other herbs. Other tasty additions include whole peppercorns and goji berries.
Gradually bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer. For chicken, cook for 12 to 24 hours; for beef or lamb, 24 to 72 hours. If you’re using a crockpot, cook for at least 24 hours on low.
Feel free to add other vegetables in the last 1 to 2 hours of cooking for taste and nutritional value. When cooking is complete, remove the bones and veggies and strain the broth through a colander. You may strain a second time through a fine sieve or cheese cloth for a clear broth. Allow the broth to cool at room temperature and skim off the fat that rises to the top.
The broth will keep for about five days in the fridge or for months in the freezer. Enjoy it as a hot snack, soup or stew base or the water portion of rice or any cooked grain.
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Heritage Acupuncture serves the Durham Chapel Hill RTP area and offers acupuncture, Chinese herbalism and Asian skin care services. Janet Lee, L.Ac., specializes in orthopedics and internal medicine.
Looking for a seasonal winter fruit? Persimmons, in season from October through February, have a solid place at the table of Chinese dietary therapy.
Known as “shi zi,” this brilliant orange fruit has been used traditionally to clear heat, supplement fluids and nourish the lungs. Thirst-quenching persimmons benefit the complexion, especially for those with hyperpigmentation.
The jelly-like pulp of the persimmon fruit also is considered helpful to maintain arterial health by reducing clots and lowering blood pressure. As they’re a cold-natured fruit, persimmons are best for those who run warm.
In Western nutrition terms, the fiber-rich persimmon contains a healthy dose of Vitamins A, C and B6, along with manganese and potassium.
Although there are many varieties, fuyu persimmons are the most plentiful on the market. To enjoy the winter persimmon bounty, peel, slice and remove any remaining seeds before eating.
Photo credit: Kanko by Flickr
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Heritage Acupuncture serves the Durham Chapel Hill RTP area and offers acupuncture, Chinese herbalism and Asian skin care services. Janet Lee, L.Ac., specializes in orthopedics and internal medicine.
When you walk into an acupuncturist’s office, your practitioner starts diagnosing you with just a glance. Your skin tone, body weight and temperament all provide valuable information that can inform an acupuncturist about your body’s innate strengths and weaknesses. The first conclusion an acupuncturist often reaches about a patient regards their elemental type.
The elemental types relates to the five basic elements in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) – fire, earth, metal, water and wood. All matter and phenomena are categorized under one of these types. The color green, for example, relates to wood, an element representing the liver and gallbladder. The direction south, for example, relates to the fire element. The emotion of grief relates to metal.
In terms of human beings, certain physical traits, health tendencies and personality types define each element .The metal element, for example relates to the lung and large Intestine. Allergies, asthma and constipation are thus metal problems. Knowing your elemental type not only gives you insight into your character, it also alerts you to natural strengths and weaknesses. It’s easier to safeguard your health and utilize your gifts if you know what they are.
Read on to discover your own unique elemental constitution:
Fire: Fire people are hard to miss. They’re vibrant, passionate and energetic. The magnetic fire type is a natural salesperson and leader. Their strength lies in the blood vessels. Soft and moist skin is the mark of a balanced fire person with strong circulation. If imbalanced, the fire type may have a flushed face, overheat easily, suffer from high or low blood pressure and experience insomnia. Although social interaction comes naturally to fire people, maintaining balance for them means embracing quiet time and avoiding overexertion.
Earth: Earth-dominant constitutions are the peacemakers in their families and social groups. These loyal and predictable people crave security. They tend to have strong muscles and sturdy body types. The people-pleasing earth person loves relationship harmony and companionship. In the extreme, earth types can be worriers and even obsessive. The earth element in TCM is associated with digestive organs. These organs also have an important role in fluid metabolism. Earth types, therefore, are prone to water retention and weight gain. Achieving emotional balance for the sociable earth type means cultivating independence and making peace with solitude.
Metal: Are you meticulous and well-organized? Do your friends and colleagues consider you a person of high principals? Are you strong-willed with a strong voice? Have people sometimes considered you distant or too formal? As the metal element is associated with the lung, sinuses and skin in TCM, metal people typically have strong lungs and smooth skin. With imbalance, they’re prone to dry coughs, dehydrated skin and nasal polyps. Balancing their meticulousness with passion and their self-control with spontaneity is good therapy for a metal person.
Water: Water types are more rounded in appearance than the angular wood types. They have strong physiques and intellects. They’re original thinkers and don’t mind being unconventional or independent. Water people are naturally introspective and lovers of ideas. The kidney and bladder corresponds to the water element in TCM terms. A balanced water person exhibits a steady strength, strong bones and efficient water metabolism. A tune-up is in order if a water type has fragile bones or edema. Water people may be perceived as distant or even tough. The self-contained water personality benefits from reaching out and making emotional connections with others.
Wood: Confident and ambitious wood types are hard workers. Wood people can be bold, direct and work well under pressure. When wood types are out of balance, they can be testy, confrontational or erratic. In TCM terms, the wood element corresponds to the liver, which is in charge of maintaining tendons and muscle tissue. A healthy wood person is slender, with strong muscles and erect posture. When they’re out of balance, wood types may have chronic muscle tension and unstable joints. Wood people, who are comfortable with power and exertion, can preserve their health by staying flexible and softening their intensity.
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Heritage Acupuncture serves the Durham Chapel Hill RTP area and offers acupuncture, Chinese herbalism and Asian skin care services. Janet Lee, L.Ac., specializes in orthopedics and internal medicine.
As a health care provider, I have seen for myself the increasingly common diagnosis of autoimmune disorders. Personally, I don’t think this is just because diagnosis is now more astute. My feeling is that this loss of self-regulation is on the rise. There are many theories behind this, but the New York Times makes an interesting connection between autoimmunity, autism and, well, parasites! The idea that our environment is overly sterile and therefore disturbs our immune system is intriguing.
An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism
By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF
IN recent years, scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the causes of autism, now estimated to afflict 1 in 88 children. But remarkably little of this understanding has percolated into popular awareness, which often remains fixated on vaccines.
Eleanor Davis
So here’s the short of it: At least a subset of autism — perhaps one-third, and very likely more — looks like a type of inflammatory disease. And it begins in the womb.
It starts with what scientists call immune dysregulation. Ideally, your immune system should operate like an enlightened action hero, meting out inflammation precisely, accurately and with deadly force when necessary, but then quickly returning to a Zen-like calm. Doing so requires an optimal balance of pro- and anti-inflammatory muscle.
In autistic individuals, the immune system fails at this balancing act. Inflammatory signals dominate. Anti-inflammatory ones are inadequate. A state of chronic activation prevails. And the more skewed toward inflammation, the more acute the autistic symptoms.
Nowhere are the consequences of this dysregulation more evident than in the autistic brain. Spidery cells that help maintain neurons — called astroglia and microglia — are enlarged from chronic activation. Pro-inflammatory signaling molecules abound. Genes involved in inflammation are switched on.
These findings are important for many reasons, but perhaps the most noteworthy is that they provide evidence of an abnormal, continuing biological process. That means that there is finally a therapeutic target for a disorder defined by behavioral criteria like social impairments, difficulty communicating and repetitive behaviors.
pregnancy increases the risk of autism in the child. Hospitalization for a viral infection, like the flu, during the first trimester of pregnancy triples the odds. Bacterial infection, including of the urinary tract, during the second trimester increases chances by 40 percent.
The lesson here isn’t necessarily that viruses and bacteria directly damage the fetus. Rather, the mother’s attempt to repel invaders — her inflammatory response — seems at fault. Research by Paul Patterson, an expert in neuroimmunity at Caltech, demonstrates this important principle. Inflaming pregnant mice artificially — without a living infective agent — prompts behavioral problems in the young. In this model, autism results from collateral damage. It’s an unintended consequence of self-defense during pregnancy.
Yet to blame infections for the autism epidemic is folly. First, in the broadest sense, the epidemiology doesn’t jibe. Leo Kanner first described infantile autism in 1943. Diagnoses have increased tenfold, although a careful assessment suggests that the true increase in incidences is less than half that. But in that same period, viral and bacterial infections have generally declined. By many measures, we’re more infection-free than ever before in human history.
Better clues to the causes of the autism phenomenon come from parallel “epidemics.” The prevalence of inflammatory diseases in general has increased significantly in the past 60 years. As a group, they include asthma, now estimated to affect 1 in 10 children — at least double the prevalence of 1980 — and autoimmune disorders, which afflict 1 in 20.
Both are linked to autism, especially in the mother. One large Danish study, which included nearly 700,000 births over a decade, found that a mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease of the joints, elevated a child’s risk of autism by 80 percent. Her celiac disease, an inflammatory disease prompted by proteins in wheat and other grains, increased it 350 percent. Genetic studies tell a similar tale. Gene variants associated with autoimmune disease — genes of the immune system — also increase the risk of autism, especially when they occur in the mother.
In some cases, scientists even see a misguided immune response in action. Mothers of autistic children often have unique antibodies that bind to fetal brain proteins. A few years back, scientists at the MIND Institute, a research center for neurodevelopmental disorders at the University of California, Davis, injected these antibodies into pregnant macaques. (Control animals got antibodies from mothers of typical children.) Animals whose mothers received “autistic” antibodies displayed repetitive behavior. They had trouble socializing with others in the troop. In this model, autism results from an attack on the developing fetus.
But there are still other paths to the disorder. A mother’s diagnosis of asthma or allergies during the second trimester of pregnancy increases her child’s risk of autism.
So does metabolic syndrome, a disorder associated with insulin resistance, obesity and, crucially, low-grade inflammation. The theme here is maternal immune dysregulation. Earlier this year, scientists presented direct evidence of this prenatal imbalance. Amniotic fluid collected from Danish newborns who later developed autism looked mildly inflamed.
Debate swirls around the reality of the autism phenomenon, and rightly so. Diagnostic criteria have changed repeatedly, and awareness has increased. How much — if any — of the “autism epidemic” is real, how much artifact?
YET when you consider that, as a whole, diseases of immune dysregulation have increased in the past 60 years — and that these disorders are linked to autism — the question seems a little moot. The better question is: Why are we so prone to inflammatory disorders? What has happened to the modern immune system?
There’s a good evolutionary answer to that query, it turns out. Scientists have repeatedly observed that people living in environments that resemble our evolutionary past, full of microbes and parasites, don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as frequently as we do.
Generally speaking, autism also follows this pattern. It seems to be less prevalent in the developing world. Usually, epidemiologists fault lack of diagnosis for the apparent absence. A dearth of expertise in the disorder, the argument goes, gives a false impression of scarcity. Yet at least one Western doctor who specializes in autism has explicitly noted that, in a Cambodian population rife with parasites and acute infections, autism was nearly nonexistent.
For autoimmune and allergic diseases linked to autism, meanwhile, the evidence is compelling. In environments that resemble the world of yore, the immune system is much less prone to diseases of dysregulation.
Generally, the scientists working on autism and inflammation aren’t aware of this — or if they are, they don’t let on. But Kevin Becker, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, has pointed out that asthma and autism follow similar epidemiological patterns. They’re both more common in urban areas than rural; firstborns seem to be at greater risk; they disproportionately afflict young boys.
In the context of allergic disease, the hygiene hypothesis — that we suffer from microbial deprivation — has long been invoked to explain these patterns. Dr. Becker argues that it should apply to autism as well. (Why the male bias? Male fetuses, it turns out, are more sensitive to Mom’s inflammation than females.)
More recently, William Parker at Duke University has chimed in. He’s not, by training, an autism expert. But his work focuses on the immune system and its role in biology and disease, so he’s particularly qualified to point out the following: the immune system we consider normal is actually an evolutionary aberration.
Some years back, he began comparing wild sewer rats with clean lab rats. They were, in his words, “completely different organisms.” Wild rats tightly controlled inflammation. Not so the lab rats. Why? The wild rodents were rife with parasites. Parasites are famous for limiting inflammation.
Humans also evolved with plenty of parasites. Dr. Parker and many others think that we’re biologically dependent on the immune suppression provided by these hangers-on and that their removal has left us prone to inflammation. “We were willing to put up with hay fever, even some autoimmune disease,” he told me recently. “But autism? That’s it! You’ve got to stop this insanity.”
What does stopping the insanity entail? Fix the maternal dysregulation, and you’ve most likely prevented autism. That’s the lesson from rodent experiments. In one, Swiss scientists created a lineage of mice with a genetically reinforced anti-inflammatory signal. Then the scientists inflamed the pregnant mice. The babies emerged fine — no behavioral problems. The take-away: Control inflammation during pregnancy, and it won’t interfere with fetal brain development.
For people, a drug that’s safe for use during pregnancy may help. A probiotic, many of which have anti-inflammatory properties, may also be of benefit. Not coincidentally, asthma researchers are arriving at similar conclusions; prevention of the lung disease will begin with the pregnant woman. Dr. Parker has more radical ideas: pre-emptive restoration of “domesticated” parasites in everybody — worms developed solely for the purpose of correcting the wayward, postmodern immune system.
Practically speaking, this seems beyond improbable. And yet, a trial is under way at the Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine testing a medicalized parasite called Trichuris suis in autistic adults.
First used medically to treat inflammatory bowel disease, the whipworm, which is native to pigs, has anecdotally shown benefit in autistic children.
And really, if you spend enough time wading through the science, Dr. Parker’s idea — an ecosystem restoration project, essentially — not only fails to seem outrageous, but also seems inevitable.
Since time immemorial, a very specific community of organisms — microbes, parasites, some viruses — has aggregated to form the human superorganism. Mounds of evidence suggest that our immune system anticipates these inputs and that, when they go missing, the organism comes unhinged.
Future doctors will need to correct the postmodern tendency toward immune dysregulation. Evolution has provided us with a road map: the original accretion pattern of the superorganism. Preventive medicine will need, by strange necessity, to emulate the patterns from deep in our past.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff is the author of “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.”
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Heritage Acupuncture serves the Durham Chapel Hill RTP area and offers acupuncture, Chinese herbalism and Asian skin care services. Janet Lee, L.Ac., specializes in orthopedics and internal medicine.
Tea has been called “The Heavenly Herb” in China. For those trying to enhance their health, there is no better beverage. Just like Chinese herbalism in general, tea drinking can be customized for your health needs. For example, if you run warm, cooling green tea is a good choice. If you’re frequently chilly, brew up some ginger tea. Those with high cholesterol can make Pu-erh tea part of their lifestyle approach to treatment.
Of course, tea is not only healthy but also delicious. Consider trying premium teas from vendors that import directly from tea groves in China, Taiwan and other tea countries. For fascinating tea information and quality tea resources, check out The Tea Enthusiast’s Handbook by Mary Lou and Robert J. Heiss.
Here’s an article I wrote for Yoga International on the vast topic of tea:
Heritage Acupuncture serves the Durham Chapel Hill RTP area and offers acupuncture, Chinese herbalism and Asian skin care services. Janet Lee, L.Ac., specializes in orthopedics and internal medicine.
